The Future They Made Us Forget, chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen: It's Safe, Right? My Future Self Told Me So

[????? Reestablish scene, maybe mention more details here]

She continued in that same, dead-tired voice.

“You need to get to the time machine as soon as you can. Once you go back, you can send this video to yourselves, so it turns into a stable time loop. Don’t think about how that works right now, you’ll have plenty of time to think about it once you’re back at 3 AM. Right now, you have to worry about getting there.

“The time machine is on the lower basement floor. You can take the stairs at the end of the north wing, they’re safe because no one uses them all day. But even so, you want to spend as little time in the halls as possible, so you won’t get in the way of any of your future selves. And while you’re walking there, don’t look at anything if you can help it! Keep your head down, don’t look in any of the rooms you go past, definitely don’t look at other places on the security cameras –”

“– but leave them on!” croaked a voice – my voice, Marvin’s voice, speaking for the first time since the video started. It was breathy and breaking, the voice of someone who has been crying for hours, who is only forcing themselves to speak because of a sudden need. “Leave the cameras on! No one ch–” he gasped, before his throat failed him again, lapsing into voiceless breaths.

“– no one checks them until the meeting at 4 PM,” video-Kayla finished for him. “He’s right – leave them on, but don’t look at them. That’ll save you a lot of the trouble we had to deal with. But right now, you need to… uh…” she looked to Marvin again. “Damn it, Marv, you know I’ll say it wrong if I have to tell them the computer stuff…”

But once you’ve forced out the first few words, the rest of the words come easier. Marvin lifted his head halfway out of his hands, not quite daring to look directly at the camera. “We – we’re going to put this video in a zip file, with – with some other documents. You’ll need to copy the whole zip file onto a USB stick so you can bring it back with you. I – I guess you should start copying it now, don’t wait for the video to finish, it might take a little while. And then – we – we’ll make some instructions for you to print out – so I guess you should start printing those, next, after you start the copy. And then, uh, you’ll need to know how to use the time machine…” He kept rambling, feebly going through the motions of telling us what we needed, not really believing in it.

But the Kayla crouching next to me – gaunt, strung tight with terror – had no choice but to believe in it. “Why aren’t you doing what he said?” she hissed at me.

Her words knocked me out of my trance. I fumbled through Marvin’s instructions, digging a USB drive out of a drawer in my desk, then finding the file to print – 02_print_this_out.png. It was definitely me who had chosen these filenames – practical names, telling me what I needed to know, using two digits out of habit even though the files only went up to ????? “09”. It was eerie, seeing my own handiwork on something I had no memory of creating.

“– in fact, uh, why don’t we just cut to the video of us using it, so you’ll see what you need to do.

[????? Probably summary-language stating that there was a video showing them how to use the time machine, an overhead view of yet another Marvin and Kayla, with voiceover, so that they could quickly go in and out (“you might need to use the time machine a lot of times, and you don’t want to run into yourselves”).]

?????

There are few things as maddening as being told that you must not look at something, when the thing is all around you. This was supposed to be the easy part: the part where we just walked down the hallway to get where we were going. But video-Kayla’s instructions – keep your head down, don’t look in any of the rooms – made it a living hell. I couldn’t stop myself wanting to look over my shoulder, wondering what was behind every door we passed, in the endless clinical white walls.

To keep my mind off it, I focused on the printout I was holding. The instructions were clear, at least. It started with a map of our route, with little photos of each door we needed to go through, so we couldn’t miss them. And again, the note: Don’t look around. You don’t want to see your future selves, if they’re nearby.

“What do you think happens if we see our future selves?” I said nervously.

“I don’t know, but it’s bad! They said it was bad, and they knew how it works, right?”

An eerie silence descended over us, no sound but our own footsteps. Kayla lurched along, adrenaline stretching the limits of her strength. In the back of my mind, I was itching to make her hurry – terrified that one of the scientists might come up behind us, catch up to us while she was still struggling. But I knew she was going as fast as she could. We had to trust in the video, the promise that no one would come this way today.

“I feel like we’re being followed,” I muttered.

I shouldn’t have said it in front of Kayla. She whipped around, staring back down the corridor, her eyes drilling into every nook and cranny of the white walls.

I couldn’t help it – I followed her gaze. But of course, there was nothing there. I shivered. “I-it’s just nerves,” I said shakily.

“Unless it isn’t,” she croaked, still looking.

“What?! There’s nothing there, you can see there’s nothing there! We can’t be worrying about every empty hallway, we have to keep moving!”

When Kayla finally tore her eyes away, it was only reluctantly – not satisfied, but forced to admit she couldn’t find what she was looking for. The “we have to keep moving” was the part that had convinced her. She faced forwards again, eyes locked on to the exit sign ahead of us.

The stairs weren’t any easier. I held the door for Kayla at the top, putting her in front of me on the narrow staircase; I had to wait while she lowered herself, and force myself not to fill the time by looking out the windows. But at last, we got to the bottom – to the steel security door, locking away the basement floors.

Even [in the terrifying situation], I can’t deny that I still had a bit of childlike excitement. This steel door had intrigued me for weeks; I was finally getting to sneak into somewhere I truly, absolutely, wasn’t supposed to be. And indeed, we could enter now. It had already been unlocked for us, remotely, by the same Marvin who’d sent us the video.

Kayla didn’t wait for me to help her; she grabbed the handle herself. But her gesture seemed unusual, even for her weakened state. She gripped the handle underhanded and pulled upwards from the shoulder, leaning backwards, struggling to pull the weight.

I caught the edge of the door to help her. “Is your arm okay?” I asked.

She replied in an irritable singsong – “Polyneuropathy, not-otherwise-specified.” It was the voice of someone who has had to explain the same thing over and over, and is sick of it. “My arms are weak. I get phantom pains. No one knows why.”

“Is that – er, is it okay if I ask, uh –” I stumbled over my words.

“I hate when people coddle me!” she snapped. “Ask your question already!”

“Er. Okay. Is that something they did to you? When they experimented on you?”

Evidently, that wasn’t the question she expected, because her anger subsided a little. “No,” she said. “I’ve always had this. It’s got nothing to do with them, except they’re using it as an excuse. Fuller told my parents this was the ‘best chance to solve her problem’ with all his ‘cutting-edge neuroscience’. I don’t think he even knew what my problem was before he said he could solve it.”

The time machine room was huge. The walls and floors had been torn out to make room for the construction, leaving a two-story workspace broken up only by bare steel columns and beams, with bare concrete underneath our feet. The only light came from a set of minimal, glaring work lights high above, casting all the machinery in bright highlights and sharp shadows. The whole place smelled like a machine shop; the sound of our footsteps was eerily absorbed by the huge airspace.

And in the center, on a pedestal of its own… the time machine itself.

We had already seen it in our future selves’ instructional video, so its appearance wasn’t surprising. But it was one thing to see it on camera, from a distance – and quite another to experience it in person. Its central structure was an 8-foot-tall, gleaming egg of steel, towering above us. It had clearly been built in several pieces, and then bolted together here; bulky steel plates stuck out of the surface where the join-lines were. Electrical cords snaked up and down the egg on all sides, mismatched orange and white, powering components whose purpose I couldn’t begin to guess.

It was just sitting there, deceptively inactive. Given what it could do, I would have expected it to look like something from a sci-fi movie, all glowing panels and holograms – not like a bulky antique from the Industrial Revolution. But maybe I should have been more scared by something from the Industrial Revolution. A new invention, nowhere near perfected, but already able to radically alter the world as we knew it… and maybe not for the better. Even the Marvin from the video, sobbing in terror of what would happen to him, hadn’t begun to understand the danger we were in.

But we didn’t have time to think about that. Our role, for the moment, was to get in and out quickly. The procedure, summarized on the printout, was as follows:

First, I had to approach the folding table beside the time machine, and open the laptop there. This device, the only 21st-century-looking thing in the whole room, was what actually controlled the time machine; a series of thin signal wires ran from the laptop to the egg, concerningly flimsy-looking for how important they were. Be careful not to yank the wires, said the printout. Just run this program on the laptop, and answer the prompts:

$ full_process.py
1. Enter mass:

Second, we had to weigh ourselves. We would have to tell the laptop the exact amount of matter to send into the past. The notes weren’t too specific about what would happen to that matter – our flesh – if the number was wrong.

For this, there was another device, standing 10 feet away from the giant egg. It was a massive industrial scale – a metallic platform wide enough for both of us to stand on, with a label boasting that it could measure up to 500 kg, to a precision of a single gram. Weigh yourselves on the scale, together, said the printout. It should be around 130 kg. If it’s around 140 kg, get off and then weigh yourselves again. There’s a glitch where it’s sometimes off by 11.2 kg.

When we did this, it got the right answer the first time. Even so, Kayla glared at the scale. “How can it be accurate to the nearest gram if it’s sometimes off by eleven kilograms?!”

But when you’re a programmer like me, you get used to weird glitches; it would have been more surprising if it did work every time. So I just shrugged and followed the instructions. If I had known the real reason for the extra 11.2 kg, I wouldn’t have made it through the day. I would have had a complete breakdown.

2. Enter interval:

This meant how far back in time to go. I dutifully entered “0”, which meant “go back as far as possible”; in our case, that meant going back to 3:06 AM.

3. Enter delay:

On one side of the egg, there was a hatch that could open – a place where the egg could be swung open by mechanical arms – and a stepladder to help climb up to it. Once we entered the three “jump parameters” and pressed the button to start the “[jump]”, that hatch would open, and we could crawl inside.

But when the time came for us to climb into the egg, [there was a problem] that we hadn’t been warned about.

In the first timeline, [Kayla had climbed in first, impatient with Marvin being nervous about it.] But in this timeline, I had been reassured enough by the words of my future self, and my sense of responsibility for Kayla overruled. So I resolutely/carefully climbed up the stepladder, poked my head into the narrow, worryingly dark entrance, like climbing into a cave. The inside was spherical, so there was nowhere to stand; I awkwardly stood slightly off-center, leaning against the side]

When you’re surrounded by a sphere of steel, any sound reflects back to you from every direction, multiplied and distorted by the resonant frequency of the chamber you’re in. Kayla’s scream [blasted my ears from all sides]. Just as quickly, it was cut short, leaving only metallic echoes and Kayla’s short breaths as she controlled herself.

“Oh my God, are you okay –”

“It’s fine, it’s just my neuropathy, just don’t touch my shoulders –”

And then the hatch closed behind us, swung into a place by a mechanical arm, shutting us into total darkness.

“God, I’m so sorry –”

“It’s only pain,” she growled.