ELEVEN
There’s some fascination with me around the cubicles and there are guarded attempts to draw me into the ambient, amicable banter. Of all the differences between the now now and the future now, it’s the easy and cordial chitter-chatter. What sullen, arrogant, and suspicious shits we had become. But why? I find myself irritated by the banter, the good-humored ribbing, and the general friendliness of it all. A few of them try to wheedle from me facts about the future, about their future. Galois and Zhivov deflect most of them with mild admonitions. I assure one happy and garrulous woman that all charges against her were ultimately dropped. Her face falls and I give her a nah, kidding look.
The rest of the afternoon is technical talk. Not necessarily about the problem at hand, but general chemo-tachyonics. There are things I know that they don’t, but not that many. After all, by 2021 we were standing on the shoulders of giants, but with the rising influence of the temporal logicians and the restrictions they were handing down, future TMAers wouldn’t be so much standing on the shoulders of giants as being trapped under the feet of hobbits.
Of all the shift staff I recognize no more than two as younger versions of the team I know, three if you count Zhivov. Physics, especially on the theoretical side, is a young person’s sport and TMA staff turnover is high, yet I still would have expected to see more familiar but rejuvenated faces. Retirement from TMA is a tricky matter. We enter the job with exhilaration and pride and then exit our short careers having been battered down by the monstrous responsibility of keeping the one second per second rule while not really understanding the apocalyptic price of failure. Then getting out is as grueling as getting in, when it’s made clear that if a word of your old job is leaked, then woe betide you and all things dear to you. When you retire, you sign a piece of paper and then TMA wields its shady power to get you placed in a new job suitable for the husk of a TMAer. And this is the career that chose me, except that my career has placed me in a temporal quagmire and I’ve responded to it by breaking most of the rules I can remember.
I look around until exhaustion hits me. Onsite accommodations are perfunctory: army cot, stocked fridge, filled food cupboard, microwave oven, a Formica-surfaced table and a school chair. These rooms are still used in my time, set up for anyone who needs to pull an all-nighter and in need of a power nap. My head touches the pillow and it’s morning.
TWELVE
“And it came to pass that the awaited one appeared.” The voice is male, but it’s soft and in a high register. This is a more Messianic start to a day than I’d expected. Galois had escorted me back into the meeting room which now contains Zhivov and a man I haven’t met. I sit.
“This is Ram Prasad,” Galois says. I do a double take but try to disguise it with a stretch of my neck. Give me a break is what I’m thinking. Today’s shocks to the system have already begun. Ram Prasad is/was the stuff of legend–Einstein-league–except that only the inner sanctum would have heard of him. But within TMA, Ramesh Prasad was Einstein and Edison rolled into one: unparalleled theoretician, but also brilliant practician and inventor. Not many physicists have ticked either of those boxes, and a vanishingly small number have ticked both: Isaac Newton, Enrico Fermi, then Ram Prasad is the list I’d make. I look at Galois who is smiling back.
“An honor to meet you,” I say feebly. “I’m Joad Bevan.” I hold out my hand and Prasad looks at me, as if wondering why I’d think the occasion called for that, but he obliges me with a brief, limp grasp.
“I know who you are,” he says. “So tell me what you’ve learned.” What have I learned? When? From whom? I look to Galois and Zhivov but they offer no help.
“Are you asking me how I got here?” I say. There’s impatience in Prasad’s face.
“I know how you got here.” He points to the sheets of paper in front of him. “I’m asking what you’ve learned. You’ve just gone through something you’ve never been through before. What did you learn from it?” This is the sort of question that usually gets a smartass answer from me, but Prasad’s ass is much smarter than mine and I make an exception.
“I don’t know what you’re asking me,” I say. Prasad sighs. Galois and Zhivov remain no help and seem embarrassed on my behalf. Prasad consults the notes in front of him. He gives me a look that says, okay, then I’ll spoon feed you my questions if that’s what I have to do.
“You noted that in 2021 you found yourself in a park where you expected there to be a shopping mall: where there had been a shopping mall that very morning.” Prasad is reading through the glasses perched on the end of his nose and then looks up above them, directly at me. I nod. “Must have come as a surprise.”
“To put it mildly,” I say. You have a powerful grasp on the obvious is what my reply to anyone else would have been.
“Any observations about that?” Prasad looks as if he’s rooting for me to give the right
