The third rule of time t.., p.3
The Third Rule of Time Travel, page 3
“Good morning, Beth,” the man to the far right says.
“Good morning,” she replies. She takes a moment to steady her breath, force herself to relax. The man who spoke, a youngish, roguishly handsome psychologist named Jonathan Greer, is the only one of the three she knows well, but she’s had direct experience with each of them over the years, to varying degrees.
Jonathan is a clinical psychologist (a fancy way of saying therapist), one she’s forced to speak with weekly, at a prescribed time and for a predetermined duration. At first, both she and Colson found the arrangement disarming, uncomfortable. For Beth, it was almost… confrontational. After all, Greer has all the power. If he decides to indicate that the mental health of a Langan employee is not, as he likes to put it, “fit for service,” then said employee is immediately suspended until further notice. Likewise, Terry Adams, an ancient-looking man sitting in the middle of the three, is Langan Corp.’s private in-house MD. Health checkups for all employees are monthly (instead of weekly, thank God), and over time Beth has found it harder to be annoyed by them, especially during her pregnancy, when she almost welcomed the reassurance of a second opinion that her baby was doing fine. Besides, it’s free medical care, and if she were to ever show signs of a long-term sickness or disease, one of the monthly checkups would catch it early on.
Of course, Adams also has the power to shut down a project, or an employee, if he determines they aren’t physically fit or able to perform. Still, she likes the old man. He’s never been anything but kind in the years since she arrived.
The woman to the far left is Abigail Lee, the program director. Lee is technically—at least according to some corporate flowchart somewhere—Beth’s direct supervisor. Of course, Abigail has only been in the lab itself a handful of times and, as far as Beth knows, has absolutely no idea how the technology (or any technology, for that matter) works. She’s certainly never shown an interest in their work, at least not to Beth, or to Colson when he was alive. Beth thinks they are fairly close in age but cannot imagine two more disparate personalities. Still, Lee is always there for an annual review, and her signature miraculously appears on all finance requests for the day-to-day operational needs of the lab. Beth sees her more as a babysitter than a boss, one who doesn’t say a peep unless called upon, for which Beth is grateful.
It’s Abigail who leans forward, cautiously addressing the microphone before her, as if it were a cup of tea she was worried might be too hot. When she speaks, however, her normally reedy voice is loud and clear. Perfect for recording. “Dr. Darlow, are you ready to begin the redundant question session, matching to date of travel March 17, 2044?”
Beth nods. “I am.”
There’s a beat of silence, then the program director taps a few keys on a console hidden from Beth’s view. The room fills with the soft sound of static—the chamber’s surrounding speakers, hidden in the dark-paneled walls, coming alive. A man’s sonorous voice fills the room, as if coming from everywhere and nowhere.
Please state your name and today’s date.
Beth clears her throat, makes a point to enunciate clearly.
“Beth Darlow. March 18, 2044.”
Who is the president of the United States?
“James Whitmore.”
Describe your marital status.
Beth’s words hitch in her throat for a fraction of a second, then she sighs softly and answers. She does not lower her eyes. “Widowed.”
In one word, describe your childhood.
For Beth, this question has been—from the first time she heard it—a complicated one. Going through this process early on, she made the mistake of overthinking the questions, as if it were an exam, or a study of her life, rather than scientific variables. She could literally give any answer she wanted, as long as those answers were consistent. During the questions, consistency is everything.
Still, easier to stick with the truth.
“Happy.”
Name two members of your immediate family.
Another puzzler. She’s never fully understood why they created a question that offered so many variables, and it was Colson who came up with the idea that, in addition to consistency for comparison’s sake, they must also be using the answers, in some respects, as evaluators of some kind. A psychological test weaved in with scientific variables. Beth had asked Jonathan about it in one of their sessions and he’d refused to answer. Which was an answer in itself, she supposed.
In the beginning, Beth had answered the question using her husband’s name, and then her uncle, Brett, since both of her parents and her only sibling were long dead. Further, when she first traveled, Isabella hadn’t even been born.
And now, death had changed things once more.
“My uncle, Brett Hawkins. My daughter, Isabella Darlow.”
If you could change one moment in your life, what would it be?
This is the question that always hurts the most, no matter how many times she’s heard it. Still, it’s an easy one. There is only one moment in her timeline, were fate allowing do-overs, she’d want to change. That she’d have the power to change.
“I would stop my husband from leaving on the day he was killed.”
The speakers continue their live-wire humming, the hair-raising sound of electricity filling the air. But the questions, she knows, are over.
There are only six. And they never change.
The program director clears her throat, tilts her head toward the mic. “End of questions recorded for transmission.” Everyone remains silent until a soft, low-pitched tone emanates from the speakers, followed by a click as the speakers turn off. The room is plunged into a deep, heavy silence. “Thank you, Beth. Do you need a moment before playback?”
Beth shakes her head. “I’m fine.”
“Very well,” Abigail says, leaning once more toward the mic. “Begin playback of original travel questions, dated March 17, 2044, Dr. Beth Darlow.”
Again the speakers click on, and the same emotionless, mechanical voice fills the room.
This time, Beth doesn’t speak, but only listens to the questions, along with her prerecorded answers, the ones she gave yesterday morning prior to traveling.
Please state your name and today’s date.
Beth Darlow. March 17, 2044.
Who is the president of the United States?
James Whitmore.
Describe your marital status.
Widowed.
In one word, describe your childhood.
Happy.
Name two members of your immediate family.
My uncle, Brett Hawkins. My daughter, Isabella Darlow.
If you could change one moment in your life, what would it be?
I would stop my husband from leaving on the day he was killed.
No one speaks until the recording terminates, the invisible speakers once more going silent with a click.
After a moment, the program director looks to the other two members of the panel, who both nod in confirmation. She leans in, voice softer now that she’s only addressing Beth, versus posterity. “Let the record show there are no discrepancies. We will now continue with the debrief.” She turns toward Jonathan. “Mr. Greer, do you want to begin?”
Jonathan nods. “Director, could we put video for the travel session of Beth Darlow, dated March 17, 2044, on the screen, please? Hold playback.”
The program director nods, types another command into her keypad. A large, clear-tech screen lowers to Beth’s right. A still-frame image appears on the screen, bathing Beth in a dull white glow.
She turns her head to stare at a lightly distorted full-color image of the Cessna interior. The view is from her perspective, the image slightly skewed by mild tunnel vision. Seen clearly, however, is the swath of blue sky through the windshield, and her soon-to-be-dead parents sitting side by side in the tight cockpit.
Beth unconsciously rests the fingers of her right hand across her left forearm. The same place Mary’s fingers nervously clutched her before their plane went down and her sister’s teenage body was torn to pieces.
Seeing it like this, shown as a video broadcast instead of her private memory, does nothing to lessen the sense of association her feelings have toward the event. Rather, the image throws open a locked door inside her head, and she steels herself against the fresh flood of pain that comes surging through at the sight of this moment of time snatched from her life.
The arrival point of her travel.
FOUR
Can you describe this for us, Beth?”
Beth stares at the frozen image, willing it not to play.
She can’t relive it again. Not here. Not with them judging her every intake of breath, every nervous twitch of her lips. Her own memory—her present memory—overlaps uncomfortably with the ninety seconds her consciousness spent on that plane yesterday, as if her brain can’t separate the decades-old trauma with yesterday’s experience. Beth knows it’s the psychological equivalent of tearing open an old scar, never fully healed, to let it bleed out all over again.
She wills her emotions to flatline, her mind to focus. She forces herself to stare at the image with the detachment of a scientist, of an impartial observer.
Part of Beth wishes she had been in the mind, the body, of her sister instead. The clinical part of her very much wants to see the expression on young Beth’s face, to observe her reactions.
Specifically, her eyes.
Beth knows that if she could somehow go back to that moment, choose a different perspective, and look into her twelve-year-old eyes, they’d be flickering, like the rapid clicking of a camera shutter, between her natural eye color—an aquamarine blue—and pure white. That flickering is the only way to know if someone is traveling inside a past version of themselves.
Watching. Recording. Reliving.
She’d seen it herself once. Just once.
In the eyes of her husband.
The two of them had been sharing an anniversary meal over plates of steak and glasses of Cabernet at their favorite restaurant, their go-to for celebration meals since the prices were insane but the food totally worth every gratuitous penny. Across the table, halfway through a conversation about what to name their unborn baby—Isabella for a girl, Brett for a boy—his eyes had begun to… shutter.
It was so subtle that she first thought it was nothing but a trick of the light, the flicker of the tabletop candle reflecting in his irises. It wasn’t until two years later, after he had documented travel to that exact moment, that she realized what she’d been seeing:
His future consciousness had been inside his mind, watching her.
A spy sent from the future to observe.
When she first told him about the strange tell, he refused to believe it. But future traveling revealed it to be true.
They never came up with a sound reason for the bizarre physical effect. The soundest theory was that it was the body’s response to the stress of an invading consciousness—aggressively dilating the pupil, which in turn would (theoretically) spread the pigment of the iris to such an extent that it created a strange flickering in the eyes.
The other theory—one that Beth kept to herself—was that the two consciousnesses were sharing the same brain, causing the eyes to bounce between one and the other with such speed that it created a physical response in the iris muscle.
Regardless, it wasn’t a huge priority for them to understand, just another lingering mystery, something to shelve for future analysis when their funding was ramped up and more investigative help could be brought in.
But after they’d discussed it, and Beth realized what she’d seen at that long-ago anniversary dinner, she’d found herself watching her husband’s eyes more closely. Nearly every moment they were together, she’d be looking for that strange flutter, an indicator that a second consciousness—a future him—was observing her.
The memory of that dinner—of those eyes—still gave her chills.
Shaking free of the past, Beth turns her gaze away from the frozen image on the screen and focuses instead on the three faces watching her, half-hidden in shadow, from across the room. Since it was Jonathan who’d asked the question, she addresses him directly.
“Not sure what there is to describe, as I think it’s fairly obvious. It’s the day my family was killed,” she says, focusing all her energy on keeping her voice level, her emotions stilled. “My father was a pilot, although both my parents were licensed to fly, and often did. My parents were scientists, albeit in two unrelated fields, my father an epidemiologist, my mother an ethnobotanist. Given the nature of their research, it was important for them to have a plane at their disposal, and the ability to fly it anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice. This particular trip was a rarity, since the destination was of interest to both of them, their respective fields intersecting. They were eager to study a certain flora said to be used within a small aboriginal community. The Inuit who have settled in the boreal forest region were rumored to be using the flora extract as a medicine for a particular strain of flu virus. The plan had been to land just past the border and refuel, restock. My sister and I, not in school at the time, were just along for the ride.”
Beth shrugs, smiles crookedly. “A scientist’s version of a family vacation, I guess. Anyway, as you saw in the video, we lost an engine…”
Beth pauses, swallows, and once more forces her mind to separate from the memory, as if she were a surgeon performing heart surgery on a loved one. “We crashed in Jasper National Park, near Chungo Creek. About twenty minutes from Edmonton’s airport.” Beth intertwines her fingers on the podium. “I was the only survivor.”
Dr. Adams, his face a mask of empathy, leans forward. “My God, Beth. How old were you?”
Beth shifts her eyes to the physician. “I was twelve at the time. My sister was fifteen.”
Now Jonathan also leans forward intently, as does the program director, who is growing noticeably uncomfortable.
Poor Abigail, Beth thinks, although not unkindly. Forced into empathy.
“Well…” the program director says meekly, the strength of her voice during the question session now diminished. “Why don’t we…?” She looks to Jonathan, who nods and takes over.
“Beth, reliving this trauma must have been gut-wrenching. Horrible…” He shakes his head sadly. “Hell, I don’t even know what the right word is. But being forced to relive, reexperience, what I imagine is the worst moment of your life, an impossible tragedy… How in the world are you dealing with it?”
Beth feels her lower lip quiver and, below the edge of the podium, tightens her intertwined fingers until the knuckles turn white. “I’m fine.”
Jonathan mumbles something to the old physician, who turns and mumbles something to the program director. Finally, Jonathan returns to the microphone, the sidebar apparently over. “I’m requesting a full psychological examination before you’re allowed to travel again.”
Beth’s worming feelings of sorrow evaporate in a rush of hot anger. Her jaw drops, then she clamps it shut, twisting her lips into a mocking smile, her tired eyes suddenly blazing. “I’m sorry, allowed? That’s not your decision.”
“I’d also like a full exam,” the physician chimes in, as if Beth hasn’t spoken. “If Dr. Darlow shows any signs of physical trauma, it will be noteworthy as to how straining the consciousness can impact the body.”
“Director, this is ridiculous. May I speak?”
Abigail holds up a finger, then covers her microphone.
Beth’s anger, and impatience, grows.
“Excuse me…”
Beth glares at Jonathan as the other two whisper between themselves. She does her best to stare daggers, but his eyes don’t flinch away. If anything, they study her more closely.
“Excuse me, Abigail… Dr. Adams…”
The program director and the doctor continue to ignore Beth, who raises her eyebrows at Jonathan, looking for help, but he only reclines in his chair, hands folded below his chin, as if he were almost enjoying himself.
Righteous prick.
“Hey!” Beth yells, enjoying the sight of Jonathan’s eyes widening in surprise. The two others stop their rushed conversation and turn to focus on Beth. The program director scoots back into her spot, leans into the mic.
“No need to shout, Beth.”
Beth scoffs. “Look, I appreciate your concern. The bottom line is that the travel was successful. Data is being compiled now that will give us more information on the arrival point and how that point was determined by the machine.” She points to the screen, to the endless blue sky outside a doomed cockpit. “This is research. My husband had similar experiences when traveling, and I don’t recall a rush for brain scans or demands for colonoscopies being thrown around.” She looks at each of them in turn, eyes wide with indignation, fingers no longer intertwined but clenched into tight fists. “So allow me to repeat: I’m fine.”
For a long moment, no one speaks, the soundproofed room deadly silent.
Not waiting for permission, Beth turns and walks out.
FIVE
Beth! Wait a second…”
But Beth doesn’t wait. She’s already halfway down the long hallway, heading toward the elevator that will take her to her lab, where she can, ironically, stop feeling like a test subject, a guinea pig, and start feeling like the scientist she is.
Jonathan followed her from the Forum at a near jog after she stormed out at the end of the queries. She knows that being overly emotional or reactionary—or God forbid, angry—isn’t helping her case as a competent leader, but sometimes she just can’t help it.
The decision to keep her from traveling until she’s been cleared both mentally and physically after the incident with the airplane is infuriating. Not because she wants to travel again anytime soon (she doesn’t) but because they are taking the choice out of her hands. They are controlling her, and she doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like being handled.
