I walked onto the smooth, damp rock of the interface and knelt, pressing my fingers to stone. I was surrounded by a ring of six tappers, connected to each other by wide, flat cables. A tech behind a row of humming CRT monitors typed a few commands, and the tapper closest to me started to pound out a pattern. Its felt-muffled mallets beat the ground like a bass drum, and then another tapper started, its rhythm complementing the first. A third joined with staccato bursts. Now I could feel the vibrations in my body, and the water rising up my arms and legs. But when the wormhole opened, nothing went the way it was supposed to.
I had a shocking, vivid sense of sliding down water-slick stone in the dark. Then I materialized in a dark, shallow cave, its mouth a perfect rectangle of sunlight. Where the hell was I? This wasn’t Flin Flon, nor anywhere I recognized. Terrified, I stumbled toward the cave entrance, which sucked me back into the wormhole’s familiar nothingness. When I emerged, I was cold and slimy and staring at a tech whose bendable tablet told me I’d reached the Flin Flon Time Travel Facility in 2022.
“You’re the second one to do that this week.” She looked startled.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re completely covered in… is that algae? Are you okay?”
I touched the gooey blobs on my shirt, shivering. Then I flashed back to the cave. “Was there anything else unusual when I came through?”
She checked her tablet for readings. “Nothing that jumps out here.”
“I think I… It seemed like I fell out of the wormhole on my way here. Into a cave. Is there a way for me to get today’s sensor logs?”
“You can, yeah—the Machine sensors have a Slack channel where they output readings.” The tech jotted some notes, then looked up and cracked a grin. “It’s not totally unusual to see or feel strange things in the wormhole, but it’s impossible to fall out.”
“But this…” I gestured at a streak of bright green slime on my arm.
“Yeah, that’s definitely strange, but we’re seeing it once in a while. It doesn’t mean you left the wormhole. I’m going to take some samples.”
We scraped as much as we could into sterile vials, and then I desperately needed a shower. Good thing I’d left a change of clothes in a locker along with my mobile. That was months ago, but only a few hours had elapsed in local time.
I spent most of the flight back to L.A. distracted, staring out the window at wildfire plumes whose white fingers stretched across Saskatchewan and British Columbia. What had happened to me in the Machine? It was like I’d jumped in space as well as time. Could it be that the Machine was treating me differently because I’d changed the timeline? Geoscientists knew the Machines had some way to track the behavior of individual travelers, which is how they prevented us from going back to times we’d burned—or forward to futures we hadn’t yet lived through. Was there some specific reason I’d been rerouted to that cave?
Maybe my edits had altered something fundamental. I bought thirty minutes of slow airline internet and poked around in UCLA’s legal databases, looking for changes to the Comstock Laws. Nothing obvious. Abortion was still illegal, and doctors were barred from providing information about birth control in most states. I checked Nexis for 1990s news stories. Everybody who had been dead the last time I was in 2022 was still dead.
Was I suffering early effects of merging conflict dementia, caused by my meetings with Beth? A terrifying possibility. But then something more disturbing occurred to me. Maybe the Comstockers were making progress in their efforts to disable the Machines. My visit to the cave might have been a cosmic bug, the result of their sabotage. I needed to talk to the Daughters right away.
Wandering through the Space Age glory of LAX, I texted Anita. Want to grab a drink? I’m here for a few days then it’s back to the nineteenth century.
Hell yes. Hipster gin bar tonight?
Neither of us could remember the actual name of the gin bar, partly because we’d insisted on calling it “hipster gin bar,” and partly because it was in one of those old buildings with preserved historic signs that advertised defunct newspapers. The place was quiet on weeknights, and we met up at a cozy table in the corner whose fake Victorian chairs were far more comfortable than the real thing. The gin was better too.
I drank a shot and enjoyed the brief hot tingle in my fingers and nose. “I think those Comstockers are affecting the behavior of the Machine.”
Anita raised her eyebrows. “What happened?”
I told her about the cave and the algae.
She looked puzzled. “I’ve definitely had some strange visions in transit, but usually they’re sort of abstract colors or smells or sensations.”
“Sure—I have too. But never anything that left a physical trace, like the algae. We need to get more data from the Machine facilities, to see if it’s a widespread phenomenon.”
“Yeah, we should call a meeting.”
A flurry of texts, and we were set to meet tomorrow in one of the more battered conference rooms in the geology building. By then I’d have some preliminary results on the algae question, too.
Anita and I spent the rest of the evening catching up on news about the latest horrible memes on Instagram. It turned out some billionaire had paid hundreds of operatives to run a conspiracy campaign proving that women who’d had abortions were now giving birth to fish because “they had ruined the bodies God gave them.” Gory, doctored pictures of naked women surrounded by dead fish were spreading fast. Some flak at Instagram said it was impossible for their algorithm to eradicate it, but the company was working on “making social media safe for everybody again.” Venting about politics with Anita was making me feel normal. Things were terrible, but at least I was trying to do something about it.
The algae turned out to be cyanobacteria, one of the oldest life forms on the planet, and also one of the most common. It would have filled the oceans at the time the Canadian shield was forming, over half a billion years ago. The techs in Slack had a preliminary hypothesis about it. Given that the five known Machines were all built into shield rock that formed beneath the primordial seas, they thought it made sense that the Machine might sometimes spit up cyano along with water. At this point, they said, six other travelers had emerged from the wormhole covered in ancient ocean microorganisms, all in the past week.
I turned this over in my mind, wondering whether people up and down the timeline were experiencing similar anomalies.
We’d called this Daughters meeting to talk about my news, but that went out the window when Enid told us what she remembered. Berenice had been deleted from the timeline, but Enid reverted it. She held Berenice’s hand tightly as she described the would-be killer, a man with a mark that put his home time hundreds of years in the future. I noticed Enid carefully avoided explaining how exactly she’d saved her future girlfriend. In my bloodthirsty frame of mind, it was easy to fill in the gaps.
“Tess, you were the only one who remembered Berenice.” Enid reached out to squeeze my arm tearfully.
I shook my head, wondering at the lost memory, a spray of neurochemicals from an undone time. This was how historical revision worked; only travelers present at the time of the edit would remember the previous version. Now I recalled nothing but the timeline with Enid’s revert. Still, something about the scenario seemed off. I had to say something.
“Berenice was killed around the same time I saw those Comstockers at the Grape Ape show. Otherwise I couldn’t have remembered her.” I was thinking out loud, and Berenice nodded for me to continue, red hair flopping in her eyes. “That doesn’t seem like a coincidence anymore. We may be dealing with travelers from the twenty-fourth century, doing coordinated edits in 1893 and 1992.”