It’s a Friday night and it’s after a couple of store-bought beers that Zhivov crushes his empty can and suddenly looks like a man who has something to tell me.
“Would you say TMA does a good job?” he asks. Okay, a weird question that did not follow-on from the topic of noisy geese. “How many green lights would you say we get a day?”
“Up to twenty. At least where I’m from. Here, a couple a day maybe, at most.”
“And do you think we’re detecting all acceleration events?”
I nod. “That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Zhivov pops another beer.
“Say you wanted to mask an event, conceal it from detection, how would you do it?”
“I guess I’d try to confine the tachyon blast–attenuate the tachyon emission beyond the inner blast radius.” Zhivov nods.
“How?”
“Reflectors. Absorbers. But who the hell would know how to configure that? You’d need to be TMA. A tackychemist, and a pretty good one. Hands-on type.”
“Maybe,” says Zhivov. “So, do you think that TMA is airtight enough that that would never happen? That it hasn’t happened? Maybe deliberately. Maybe through technology leakage? And that the green lights on the map don’t account for every acceleration?”
“You’re saying it could be going on and we can’t see it?”
“I’m saying it is going on.” I cut short a gulp and stare at Zhivov.
“Who? Why?”
“Why? Isn’t it obvious, Toad?” This had become Zhivov’s name for me during our growing detente. I still called him Boris, not having been able to think of anything funnier. If there’s any silver lining to my situation it’s being able to insult the man who will one day hold such power over me.
“Who’s insane enough to think they could profit from screwing around with acceleration when outcomes are completely uncontrollable?”
“Well, that brings us to the other factor.” Zhivov says. “Sheer craziness. Someone who wants to violently shake up everything just for the sake of doing it. Time vandals.” Time vandals! “Assholes,” Zhivov clarifies.
“Kasper Asmus is an asshole,” I say. “His headshot is in the dictionary under ‘asshole’. Is he a time vandal? Is that what’s going on?” I shake my head. “No, that’s too insane. Someone who’s a time vandal is running the risk of destroying themselves, no?”
“That’s why ‘asshole’ doesn’t come close. They generally just don’t care. The power is the thing. Don’t get me wrong, Toad, TMA does a good job. But TMA is all about prevention–stopping acceleration before it can get started–and you know what they say about an ounce of prevention. The reality is, we still need to have a cure.”
“Cure?”
“Yes. Human acceleration does happen without TMA detecting it. That’s just a fact. Then the cure is whatever it takes to undo whatever our vandal does. Mend the damage.”
“How?”
“You know how. We need to accelerate, too,” Zhivov says in a whisper.
“But–”
“But that would break our own rules?” Zhivov says. I nod. “The rules handed down to us by the temporal logicians? By the way, I think you’re too hard on those guys, Toad. They were just following orders.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning once we knew that masked accelerations were happening, we needed to shut down acceleration technology. Ban the whole fucking thing. And the logicians came in handy. Dumb as rocks, I know, but they were useful. The reality is, we had to improve acceleration technology to administer the cure.”
“TMA did?”
“Well, yes and no,” Zhivov says. “Not TMA. At least not all of it. Not officially.”
I shake my head. “Not all of it? Then ... who?”
“A few of us.”
“A few of you.” I digest this. The few among the few. And whatever happened in 2021 is something we need to cure?”
“Damn right we do.”
“You know I had a plan,” I say. “I traveled back to give my own cure a shot: warning the site staff and preventing it all from happening in the first place. But my piece of shit accelerator–”
“We know that, Toad. You were trying to cut it off at the pass so it never even happened. But we’ve discovered a few things. Some things just won’t work.”
“And mine won’t?”
“Yours didn’t. What we know is that you need to follow the timeline, not prevent it. That’s where the cure lies.”
“Follow it?”
“Yes, recover from what’s been done.”
“And how do we recover from what’s been done?”
“We find your team and we rescue them.”
“Rescue them? Rescue them from what?”
Zhivov pulls something from his pocket and hands it to me. It’s a round, silver-framed photograph about the size of a drinks coaster. I look closer, and under cracked glass it’s a black silhouette on white of a woman with long eyelashes, receding chin and stacked hair. Marge Simpson is what I think. “Found it. Beautiful isn’t it?” he says. “Shame it’s damaged. When would you date that to?”
“I don’t know. The days of yore,” I reply. “What is it?” Zhivov shrugs and then shuts down as suddenly as he had opened up. It’s then I realize that every word he’d uttered had more to do with Prasad than with the beer.
SIXTEEN
Tonight I have the dream again. It’s one of those dreams that you know is a dream. And in it, every time, I remember that I’ve been having this dream all my life. How could I have forgotten it? Its familiarity is overwhelming, as if it’s more my world than anything I’ve experienced awake - as if leaving the dream is always just an excursion,
