All eyes are on the map. “Confirm echo?” Joe Alvarez asks without looking back.
“Affirmative to echo,” Jenn says. Here I’m used to feeling nothing. You’d expect at least a tremor, a rumble or a crack of lightning given the scale of what just happened, but no. Nothing. The only evidence of something having happened is that the green light in Korea turns red.
“Completed,” Alvarez says.
“Completed confirmed,” someone calls. Another disaster averted. We get about a dozen of these a day. Zero on a good day, twenty on a bad one. But we deal with each of them. One second per second is how it should be and we do our job making sure that that’s what happens, always, everywhere. For a team that barely knows what we’re doing, we do pretty well. So that one’s over for us, but in the other Washington the paperwork is just gearing-up. There will be investigations, government-to-government dialogs, voluminous findings, and action plans.
Jenn is staring at that new red light to make sure it stays red. It’s never routine and that’s not a chair I want to sit in. I look back through the glass wall of the control room and Kasper Asmus has his nose up against it. Now there’s someone who does want to sit in that chair. We lock eyes and he blinks first.
TWO
The greatest scientific challenge of our age had never been to invent a machine that enables time travel; it was to invent one that prevents it.
Some think that the universe was designed. If it was, I’m guessing that whoever did that job doesn’t include it on their resume. It’d be too much of an embarrassment, and so they’d have a 14 billion year gap that would need to be explained at their next job interview. That the universe is indifferent and disinterested is a truth with which most of us are reconciled. But we had thought that at least the world made some sense–that what we see and experience is some rough approximation of the way the universe actually is. How could my heroes have had any way of knowing how untrue that is? Of knowing that nature’s most basic building block, its most fundamental ingredient–time itself–is in reality a bit of an imbecile and in dire need of adult supervision. What I do is manage time.
One second per second is the perfect pace for time. It’s dead center of the Goldilocks zone–just right and not open to improvement. It was good enough to evolve life on Earth; just fine to produce great ideas like democracy, human rights and cheese, and even a universe of galaxies, stars and worlds came into being at that comfortable pace. It all happened at one second per second. Fifty years per second hurtling into the future, or negative millennia per second plummeting into the past are the stuff of chaos. And yet the universe, it turns out, is just fine with it and its consequences. Time travel, once figured out, is embarrassingly easy. Nature puts no barriers to it in place, and even makes it hard to avoid. If there is any kind of cosmic plan, it’s one in which time is chaos, and people, civilizations and realities its playthings. My day job is to confound that plan.
THREE
There may be tumbleweed but there are also grapes. I drive by uncountable rows of neatly-trained vines into a Red Mountain sunset. The Dog Star Winery is a modest garage-like box compared to the faux-chateaux structures further up the vine-covered slope. Its parking lot is crowded with cars and guests who have overflowed from the tasting room. The Release Party for the newest Dog Star Cabernet is an invitation-only affair and I recognize some of the revelers that I circumnavigate or push through to get to the winery entrance. Inside, guests have formed huddles and as always, the biggest huddle is centered on Bess. I grab a glass of red from the bar and look around for someone I might know. I’m not one for breaking into an ongoing conversation so I wait and sip.
Bess always told me you need two things to be a successful winemaker. Making okay wine is one of them but the second one is more important. It’s having a good backstory. Bess’s business partner has the okay wine covered but Bess is the one with the backstory. Astrophysicist turned winemaker: eyes lowered from the heavens to the earth. Nonsense of course, but how many other wineries can claim an astrophysicist? Bess sees me and breaks out from her huddle of admirers.
“I know, sorry,” I say quickly. I’m late.
“Fuck, Joad. I’ve got eighty people milling around, getting drunk and wondering if there really is a new release,” she says smiling, but not for me.
“You didn’t have to–” I begin, then her face creases into a yet wider smile as a passing admirer puts a hand on her arm.
“None of this matters to you, I know–”
“It does matter,” I say. She shakes her head, smile still intact. “I don’t have a job where I can just take off an apron and head home.”
“I know. You have a very important job, Joad.” Unlike me is left unsaid and the smile slips.
“This? Now?” How ever she was about to reply, and her big, brown, crazed eyes foreshadowed something savage, it is put on hold as her business partner calls her over. I nod a thankful greeting at him. In fairness, the treatment I can look forward to is deserved because Bess had reminded me not to be late at least three times over breakfast. I return to the bar for a second glass. Den, the partner, is Byronic with heavy, overly-tended eyebrows which alone announce a supercilious arrogance. He and Bess are
