Participants:
| Scene Title | The Arrow of Time |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Following a meeting with Secretary Hesser, Elisabeth reunites with Chel and Wright for a clandestine meeting. |
| Date | July 16, 2021 |
It’s been a long week.
Elisabeth’s trip to Washington KC should have ended with a flight out this morning. But so much has happened in the last few days that a little delay back east—back to everything that is blowing up her phone—can wait one more day. The city already caught fire, everything else can rest.
It’s what’s brought Elisabeth back to the Department of the Exterior offices, to the secure conference room that Wright Tracy spends most of her time in. Elisabeth’s meeting isn’t on an official agenda, but her guest badge won’t be deactivated until tonight. Enough time to discreetly badge in at the front with a warm smile and briskly make her way upstairs to meet Wright and Michelle.
The DOE offices are quiet for a Tuesday morning. The hallways are mostly empty on the upper floors where the OEI is maintaining the remote operation in another timeline. The central conference room door is shut and locked, red in session light on above it. But that’s going according to plan.
Just as Elisabeth knocks four times on the door, she spots Michelle rounding the corner with a notebook tucked under her arm and a coffee in her other hand. There’s a look of relief on her face.
She’s not late.
The Department of the Exterior
415 E 12th Street
Washington KC
July 16th
8:12 am Local Time
For Wright Tracy, it’s been a complicated morning. There’s been no sign of Rianna Cardinal since their parting of ways from Gates’ office the night before. That Elisabeth wanted to set up a wrap-up meeting with all of the information they’d learned is helping focus away from the cognitohazard that Ria is, but only just.
Chel doesn’t seem to have noticed anything amiss when Wright lets her and Elisabeth into the conference room. She exchanges pleasantries and a tired smile without acting like she experienced any sort of missing time. Odds are she doesn’t even realize what happened the night before. Nor does she seem like she’s planning to talk about how it ended.
“I’ve barely slept.” Chel admits, setting down her notebook. “Wright and I reviewed some interesting information last night, and I spent the rest of the evening going over my notes and information that’s been passed around in my presence to get a better idea of the, uh, anomalous things going on.”
The page Chel’s notebook is open to has dozens of large, black circles drawn on it in roughly scrawled pencil, along with dates, names, and quick math. With the door to the soundproof room shut, she feels comfortable speaking plainly about it all. “To catch you up,” she says to Elisabeth, “Wright brought up some intriguing information about a potential shift in how time-travel functions outside of our previous understanding.”
Chel doesn’t stay by her notebook, but instead wheels over her whiteboard and pulls a purple marker out of her jacket pocket. Realizing she’s just leaping into it, Chel hesitates and offers a nervous smile back to the others. “Good morning, by the way.”
Wright has Elliot's nearly overpowering desire to grab the dry erase marker and draw their understanding of the timelines on it to finally have somebody tell them if they're way off target. They contain the impulse for now.
“Good morning,” they say, gesturing with their mug of intoxicatingly aromatic coffee at the stolen coffee maker hooked up to the battery pack that powers the stolen TV and DVD player. “Welcome to the boredom oubliette.” This is remarked with bitterness that doesn't match the smile and wave of greeting they give Liz.
Uncertain of the full scope of this meeting, Elisabeth is nevertheless glad that it's been called. Her text to Wright the other day to see if anyone on the away team knew the name 'Quentin Frady' was a risk – one that she's not entirely sure was worth taking. And yet it niggles at her. She has too many times had the missing time experience with Sera and now the night with Ria not to be significantly concerned that there is something more concerning afoot. Michelle's comment about how time travel presumably works brings her weary blue eyes to her mother-in-law and then to Wright. She doesn't look like she's sleeping well either, more tired now than when she saw both of these women two days ago.
"Okay… that's actually good, because I had some interesting – in potentially the Chinese curse kind of definition of that word – information come my way too. So… good morning," she smiles at Michelle because she appreciates the woman's attempts to not just jump feet first into the pool. "And hit me with it." She pauses and looks around the room, pursing her lips. "I'm assuming you've swept the room?" Because well… she has serious Trust Issues. "And Wright, yes it does tie into that name I asked you to check with Elliot and Richard and the others over."
But she gestures for Chel to take the floor as she moves to a chair and lowers herself into it, letting her breath out in a long sigh while absently rubbing her forehead as if she's expecting a headache any second.
Chel, silent during Elisabeth and Wright’s exchange, furrows her brow and hesitates with marker in hand. “Any further data will be of eminent usefulness to this, uh, collaboration.” She explains, glancing to her notebook that looks like someone got bored and really liked circles.
“Please,” Chel says with a motion to Elisabeth with the purple marker, “fill us in.”
Glancing between the two, Elisabeth bites her lower lip thoughtfully. "As we've always understood it – and to quote my husband's mantra – time is not a line. As an example, the kids from 2040 came back to stop Zeke. But doing so did not change their present in 2040. In point of fact, I'm reasonably sure it created a whole new offshoot of the Wasteland timeline, which I'm almost certain is the one that Magnes and I visited." She pauses.
"That said… I've become aware of someone with the ability to sense temporal distortions. And that person is having a very bad few months here, with their ability giving them… I'm not sure if seizures is the right word. But effects. And they've specifically stated that things are changing and no one seems to know it but them." Her blue eyes flicker to Wright. "It's why I asked if any of the folks on the team knew a guy called Frady – the person with the ability says that Frady vanished, like his whole existence since the Civil War has changed. Time travel doesn't work that way. Except—"
She grimaces. "Sometimes with Juliette Luis it kind of does? Not with disappearing people, but…"
Wright hides a rage-induced cringe about Juliette's ability use by turning toward the coffee maker. Neither of the women in the room claiming to be tired seem interested in getting their own coffee, so they shrug and go to fill two more silent cups for the others. It's good coffee and it would be a crime to waste it. They fill two stolen mugs that Kenneth has recommended they stop referring to as stolen but it's more fun this way.
“Still asking around, sorry,” they admit while the coffee makes the pleasantly hot sound of burbling into the mugs. “Looking for Silas as we speak.”
The anonymous perceiver of temporal alterations sounds very useful, though Liz’s withholding of their identity is interesting. “Any chance we can ask this mystery ability user for their assistance?” they ask as they fill the second mug.
“If not, I can simplify the what if by saying that somebody from the future who has access to a functional time machine is the one who told us the rules have changed,” they admit. “What you're describing with the Frady guy lines up perfectly with the new rules as described to us by the chrononaut.” They smile as they hold the mugs out nearly at arm’s length toward the others.
“And this room is bug-free,” they add confidently. “But I very sincerely recommend that what I tell you about any of this does not leave this room under any circumstance. I'll get to the why but Chel’s face is doing something.”
“It is not.” Chel mutters. It is, though. Rather than looking at the others, Chel is staring at the blank whiteboard with an intense expression. She’s plucked the cap off her marker and is jotting down some keywords on the whiteboard:
Temporal Sense?
Timeline Revisions
Non-Branching Causality
“Chrononaut”
The last one is underlined several times.
“I’ve said this before,” Chel musters with as much patience as she can manage, “but the laws of physics don’t just upend themselves on a Tuesday.” It sounds more like desperation than anything else. “If—if revisions like this are happening, then it’s not a change from the model we knew, but a change in our understanding of it. Something that has always been there that we never noticed.” Of that, she’s certain. But neither Elisabeth nor Wright can tell if that certainty is backed by fact or faith. Or a blind hope to cling to something stable in this world.
It so is, Chel. Elisabeth chooses not to chide her mother-in-law, though, because Wright's words bring her head around sharply. "Richard was right? They were from the future?" The one and only time she's spoken with her husband in person, as it were, he had told her that he had those concerns. That the Confessor might be from the future.
And then her brain parses the word chrononaut. "They are sending more people through time??" It's a barely contained screech. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, did we teach them nothing about how bad an idea that is? Every single fucking time?!" Elisabeth drags both hands through her hair and pops up out of her chair to pace in agitation. "They're doing it often enough that they have a name for the people doing it. Jesus H. Roosevelt fucking Christ!"
It's clear that her blood pressure is wildly out of control right now, given the deep flush on her face and the way she's trying to now slow her breathing down. There's a low hum of not-quite-sound just beneath the human hearing threshold, and she puts both hands out in a 'stop' motion. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to screech at you. But time travel. God!" Turning to point at Wright, she answers the other question in a tight tone that says she doesn't yet have control of her reaction, "And no… we cannot have access to this person. They are a minor, and honestly? Whatever the fuck is going on is tearing them apart mentally. Now tell me what the fuck is even going on right now?" She is trying to calm herself down. That many f-bombs in one breath should have some calming effect, right?
Wright is surprised at the outburst, but doesn't react beyond setting the coffee that nobody wants on the conference table that they've pushed up against the wall. “I understand,” they say. “At least the room is soundproof. Hopefully we’ll getting a better understanding of what the fuck as we hash it out.” There’s more they can say as to what the fuck, but there’s a lot of it and they figuring dolling it out slowly might help with Liz’s anger.
“Also I only called them ‘chrononauts’ because I think I'm funny,” they explain. “I also call the people who went through the mirror ‘catoptrinauts’ for the same reason. Love a good ‘naut.”
They settle back into their chair near the whiteboard, retrieving and sipping from their own coffee. “But it's my barely informed understanding you're right, Chel; that we can only ever learn new things about immutable physics,” they say. “Obviously I'm not a physicist, but I'm wondering how the electromagnetic anomalies are affecting the presentation of the laws as we know them. As they encroach from perpendicular space, they could theoretically… hold on, Silas speaking.”
"Frady… Frady… no, don't think I ever met anyone by that… wait. Quentin Frady… the radio guy? Never met him — or if I did, I didn't know it — but I remember his radio show. Not exactly a routine listener, but I stumbled across it a few times; he had some, uh… interesting positions, if I'm remembering correctly.”
Wright’s eyes lose focus for a moment as they relay Silas’ message word for word. “Well there you have it,” they say. “If he went back to the flooded world a few years ago, that means that at some point in time after his crossing, a deployment into the past altered events. If mine and Elliot's own experiences are any indication.” They're very unsure but excited to talk about it, which is one of the reasons they are rambling. The other reason is that Wright used to ramble and they're pretending they're still Wright.
Unphased by—or perhaps disassociating from Elisabeth’s outburst—Chel adds a new term to the whiteboard with a squeak of her purple marker:
Memory Erasure?
“Silas.” Chel says quietly, thinking back to the last time she saw Silas Mackenzie. “If what he’s saying is accurate, it implies that we lost all recollection of Quentin Frady due to some heretofore unknown event. I remember Silas, and…” she pauses to consider the whiteboard. “What’s curious to me is this, ah, minor,” she says with a gesture toward Elisabeth. “While I understand the precautions, clearer data would help fill in some of our perceptual gaps.”
Chel counts on her fingers. “When did these episodes start? Was it centered around this Frady individual? If not, when did other episodes occur? What do we know about the scope and range of their ability? Can we concretely verify these things are connected?” And she’s run out of fingers on that hand.
“The anomalies could be components of this phenomenon.” Chel continues, pacing in front of the board. “The first recorded appearance was in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in August of 2019. But that point of data could be misleading, as we don’t know if there were other, unrecorded anomalies sooner.”
Chel taps of the back of the marker to her chin, “Based on the OEI’s research they shared with us on the Janus platform, we know the anomalies are electromagnetic in nature, pierce all known timelines, dilate time the closer one gets to it, and… they grow.”
Gates looks over his shoulder. “Because it was growing. When we found it, the epicenter was the size of an avocado and the distortion radius roughly fifteen feet across. It grew to this large over the course of a few months. God knows what would have happened if we hadn’t stopped it before it reached a populated area.”
“While we used one anomaly to bootstrap the team through the Looking Glass in Virginia,” Chel continues, “it appears as though it is an ongoing source of investigation to the OEI.” She hesitates, then looks at Elisabeth and Elliot. “Do you know any more about what could have happened to set off this minor? Something in another timeline? Another form of time travel?”
Suddenly, it all clicks with Elisabeth.
April.
Requests for surveillance footage take forever and there’s only a few hotspots in the entire city. Tom’s neighbors talked about his routine, very predictable, always came home with groceries on pay-day Fridays. Closest grocery store to his apartment was the Red Hook Market.
The market has surveillance, had it installed after the incident where the rats stole all the food. Rats? How the fuck did that ever resolve? No, a distraction.
The surveillance camera footage from the front gates of the market are voluminous. Between actual work it takes two weeks to review it all. But that’s when she finds him. Tom, and that’s when she sees the familiar faces he’s with.
Then she sees the date on the file: April 16th. She knows that date.
There’s a file on her desk about a bus accident: a dump-truck driver crashes into a passenger bus, more than a dozen fatalities. Demsky was on scene until the case was plucked away by SESA. Nobody was returning emails about the investigation.
But there it is. Plain as day. Delilah, Elaine, Walter, Odette, Matthew, and Tom getting on the bus at the same stop. There’s a horrific crash, the aftermath. But—
Delilah had been absent for weeks. But there was no funeral, no announcement she’d died, no body recovered. Someone would have known. Someone would have—
Elisabeth rewinds the footage. She re-examines everyone in the scene.
That’s when it hits her: Walter.
Walter Trafford.
April 16th. The day Walter, Delilah, Matthew, and Tom vanished from a bus accident. The same month that Leah Hesser began experiencing her disruptions in time.
What had they done?
As she listens to Chel think out loud, Elisabeth paces back and forth a few times, bouncing on the balls of her feet to try to dissipate her stress. "Uhm… not just Frady-related," she says, "based on what the kid put in a journal. I don't know the range now, but I know in adulthood it will be massive. Maybe global. The episodes started three months ago, according to the parent." She finally picks up the mug of coffee that Wright so kindly prepared and set out with a lift of the mug to the other woman in thanks and takes in a deep breath to calm her racing heart. She's just taken a sip when her mind starts racing over that last question. It's a good thing she swallowed that mouthful before it hit her. Elisabeth goes sheet-white and drops her mug on the floor, grabbing for the back of a chair. She looks vaguely sick. "Oh God," she whispers.
She walks back over to the chair she originally sat in and lowers herself back into it. She looks positively aghast and drags both hands down her face before looking up at Chel and Wright. "It started about three months ago. I … think I have a guess on what caused it." Why is her pulse thundering in her ears like that? She still has no color in her face and a subtle vibrational effect is beginning to rattle the loose items in the room. Saying any more comes down to one basic question – does she trust the women in this room?
Swallowing hard, Elisabeth starts talking. "Walter Trafford has a time travel ability. A lot of us have known since he was very small. Adult Walter brought the children of the Ferry back from 2040, then he took one of his friends back home to 2040. Nothing there had changed, despite all that they changed here trying to stop the Wasteland's war. But on his way back to our time a second time, he got thrown off course and landed in Flood a couple years before me and Magnes." She looks at Chel. "In Flood, Walter didn't have his power. We talked about that, he said it felt like… a brain sprain, and he described similar problems to what I had when I nearly burned mine out. He came with us to the ark and into the portal, but he never made it out."
A glance is cast at Wright, because she knows Walter Trafford. Ames hangs out in the same group of kids. "The child Walter, here at home, hadn't manifested yet. In April, he trauma-manifested. There was an accident in Red Hook, and he pulled the entire group of people around him that would have otherwise died back in time with him. I know… they landed in about 1977, maybe a couple years earlier." Depending on how long they'd been there when that picture was taken. She looks at Chel again. "Which, I have no idea if it's relevant, is also about when Samson Gray killed Ezekiel's original body and he became a brain in a jar, I think."
Oh shit. A second epiphany hits her too. "One of the other people that got yanked is Magnes's daughter." Elisabeth looks between them. "And assuming she manifests the same power that another version of her did… she's a gravity manipulator. Not Magnes-level gravity, like black-hole gravity. At least as far as I know…" Now she feels like she better find Adel fast and ask some questions. But given Magnes's role in punching through timelines last time….
Wright sees Liz's hesitation, and understands it as the woman outs Walter’s ability. “We had already been made aware of Walter's ability,” they say. They don't explain that it was Richard who let it slip, or feel the need to point out that they haven't tried kidnapping the boy since learning about it. “1977,” they mutter. “Here's hoping they don't step on the butterfly leading to my birth. But shit, a wormhole would be pretty useful for getting the team back home.”
They savor the good and expensive coffee while looking over Chel’s board. They need a timeline. They have a timeline, but it's highly theoretical and based on severely incomplete knowledge gained from OEI materials and interviews with people adjacent to or involved in temporal activity. “Elliot made a timeline chart,” they offer. “It could come in handy though obviously he's not an expert. More of a special interest. People haven't exactly been forthcoming with details and most of what he was told was contradictory or secondhand.”
“One of the areas of temporal mechanics most directly impacted by these new presentations is the alteration elasticity threshold,” they say. They're aware the terminology is probably not what anybody else uses, but coining new terminology is useful to them. “The pebble in a river versus a boulder analogy. Where there used to be a large amount of alteration before timeline divergence occurred, every alteration now ripples forward to alter established events. Minor changes, Elliot was told, used to not meaningfully impact future events. This ties alteration elasticity to temporal convergence, or what he's heard called temporal inertia.”
“Anyway,” they continue, “and hypothetically, if the change in presentation of physics has affected anything, it's the elasticity. Now the small corrections to events following minor changes are significantly empowered, carrying more drastic changes forward without diverging. This also allows for things that appear to be paradoxes, but only because we are incapable of remembering earlier iterations of events that set up the seeming paradox. I can expound on that but I'll probably need Elliot to explain it better and just copy what he says.”
“Basically,” they finish, “I'd need some kind of 3D projector to really outline the timelines and how they've functionally changed. Or to just link you in and share his understanding directly, but unfortunately Elliot is the only one who can create network links.” It's true in that only their Elliot-body has the ability.
To Chel, hearing the boulder theory and temporal inertia feels like having her own thesis work parroted back at her. But she knows that isn’t the case, it’s that she had the same inspirations her son did. Edward Ray. It was her, Edward, and Schwenkman that had built the original Looking Glass with the intention to look backwards or forwards in time. But they had managed something so much more disastrous. To see, now, the unfolding revelations of temporal mechanics feels like time travel in its own way. Just as nostalgia is.
All the while, Chel has been notating Wright’s (and by proxy Elliot’s) theories on her whiteboard. “So, what we’re looking at is a potential increase in this elasticity. If—” Chel’s mind gets ahead of her mouth and she flips the whiteboard over to its blank side. “Hold on.”
Feverishly, Chel draws a straight line on the whiteboard with two large dots on either end, like a barbell. “For simplicity’s sake, a line of events from a normal person’s perspective. A and B.” She labels the ends of the barbell accordingly. “Straight line.” She underlines the barbell.
“Now,” Chel continues, drawing a spiral in the middle of the barbell’s straight line, “we add one of these anomalies. An electromagnetic anomaly that causes time dilation through some imperceptible gravitational effect.” She then tries to draw a line through the barbell and circles the spiral several times before continuing onward. “We have the Lense-Thirring effect in play, where these gravitational forces are pinching and twisting spacetime around them like a fork in pasta.”
Chel then extends the ends of the barbell before A and after B to the edges of the board. “Let’s—make a massive leap that would upset anyone with a doctorate in physics. Let’s assume spacetime is finite and the edges of the observable universe represent the fringes of spacetime, like the edges of a tablecloth.”
Chel taps the edges of the barbell past A and B. “If there was, say, one anomaly it would be pulling in the edges of spacetime toward its center, theoretically collapsing the maximum size of the observable universe by some specific amount. An amount that is meaningless to us at an astronomical level. But that isn’t our situation.” Chel draws a second spiral anomaly on the A dot of the barbell. “Now we have two anomalies. Two spirals. Two people with forks in the same plate of pasta. Swirling it up. Now imagine we have three. Four. Five anomalies.”
Tapping her marker at the point between the two anomalies, Chel looks pointedly at Elisabeth and Wright. “All that to say, there’s not enough pasta or tablecloth or—whatever metaphor makes sense—to go around. What is finite spacetime when it’s stretched thin? What does that do to our perception of the world around us?”
Chel doesn’t know, but the look in her eyes says we’re finding out.
Elisabeth's blue eyes simply blink at the physicist. She understands just enough of this – mostly from years of Richard talking about temporal inertia and such things – to understand just how deep in the weeds we really are. And it's terrifying. Very slowly, feeling her way through the thought, she finally puts forward the thought that has kept her awake nights since she first laid out the idea in front of Wright and put some dots together that she hadn't seen before. "So … after we talked the other day, Wright, some things sort of fell into place as it were… and I'm going to lay out what hit me. You guys decide if it's useful." She pauses and tries to formulate the thoughts into the fewest words possible.
"I have known two time travelers in my life. Hiro had us bouncing all over hell and creation in the early 2000s chasing down teams of time-traveling assassins sent back through time to try to kill a number of us." She looks at them. "I had to do some digging in Richard's strings and files to find the guy's name, if it's important – it was Sullivan. He used another time traveler I couldn't find the name of in the time I had. Sullivan had some crazy notion that the time traveler he had could send people back in time to change Sullivan's past and make things better. Sound familiar?" Her tone is a little bitter. "So his team was all about going back in time to kill a bunch of us for… reasons I can't even remember right this moment, except… I think it could have had to do with stopping the Institute. Because he is the reason that all the kids from 2040 undertook the attempt to time travel to 2010 to do exactly the same thing – Stop the Institute from becoming. Walter's abilities were key to getting them all here. Zeke…"
It's tangled. "Zeke was sent backward from 2040 by Walter's power to somewhere in the '60s. Now Walter's power has sent a half-dozen people back in time to the 1970s. And something created a rift – not the one Looking Glass tore open in Kansas in the '80s but a different one torn open above the Deveaux building somewhere in that same decade if I remember right – when they fought the Entity the first time and trapped it between." She looks between them. "And meantime, we have Juliette Luis jumping about acausally throughout the 1970s and 1980s – or at least the 1980s, because she inhabited Odessa's mother's body and gave birth – right on through to now." It occurs to her to wonder if Juliette even knows when she started doing this… and to realize she's not sure which Juliette is actually the one jumping bodies. Odessa Woods believed that it was her own mother from the Bright timeline.
She completes her other thought before she potentially mentions that, listing, "Plus what Magnes did when we hurtled sideways – I'm assuming somewhere in those years I was gone, Richard was monitoring Natazhat… right?" She looks at Wright. As in check on that!
"But Chel, would all of these instances, put together, be enough to yank on the fabric of spacetime to do what you're theorizing, to… thin or something because it's too many small changes adding up? Hypothetically."
Elliot is very busy filling objects in the kitchen of the House in Tulsa with all of this information. Wright can feel the pulls to newly indexed memories, and has enough of a feel for it to not have to check their own work in this regard. They trust themself to do that while they do this.
“I'll need to add all of that to my timeline somehow to figure out if any of those past events have modern starting points,” they say, relishing the warmth of the coffee but suddenly feeling peckish. They realize that's their other body and don't go digging for snacks. “My current theory is that this change in presentation starts after the last known divergence. I mean, it seems like it would have to. I'm curious if Juliette’s interactions in earlier time periods are an effect of this phenomena and are, from an iteration standpoint, more recent than 2011. Assuming there was some weird, explosive, hammer-themed time machine event in 2011 that I can blame for all this.” They don't seem at all phased by talking about Zeke, having gotten past a lot of it and stomping the rest into the BLACK BLACK BLACK.
“On your theory though… Mrs? Cardinal?” Wright asks, suddenly realizing they've never directly addressed her before and don't want to appear too familiar. “Is it possible that this rotini effect is causing comparatively local overlays of different time periods within the string that could cause slippage from one point in time on the string to another in a terrifyingly unpredictable fashion? It would suck if one of the old-school famous assholes no-clipped through a brick wall and ended up here and now.”
Once again, Chel is left staring at the whiteboard. This time she puts the cap on her marker, rather than adding anything to the board. She grips it tightly, cradling it near her chest like a person of faith would rosary in the face of the devil. To Michelle, the spider’s web of causality unraveling on this whiteboard is devil enough.
“I don’t know,” is Chel’s hushed answer to every question lobbed at her. Therein lies the devil: the unknown. “I… genuinely don’t know. Any of that—all of that—could be correct or incorrect. There’s so many new variables right now, so many points of data. I…” As Chel trails off, she turns toward Wright and Elisabeth. “I can’t solve this with just the three of us in this room.”
Michelle glances back to the board, to the arrow of time caught in an ever-tightening spiral. She pockets her marker, and slowly turns to Wright. “I’m going to need a copy of Elliot’s temporal map.”
“Nice,” Elliot says, eyes unfocused as they look at the string wall in the House in Tulsa.
Blowing out a breath, Elisabeth takes the time to just be in this moment. Finally she says in a quiet voice, "You and Schwenkman and Edward all worked together on the Looking Glass the first time. I assume Schwenkman is probably around in this fucking mess somewhere because of that. Edward Ray is not available here. Richard's going to laugh his ass off to hear me say these words… We need an Edward of our own, unless he's compromised. I've never met anyone else who could wade through all these variables and come up with a halfway decent path forward. Edward is the one who taught Richard string maps – they're causality maps, relationship maps. Is the version of Edward in the Bright timeline already working with the OEI?" Whether she's supposed to know that Bright is where the OEI comes from, Liz has no idea – she knows, though.
Everyone’s a player, Liz, on a long enough timetable. Goddamn it, Marcus.
She looks between the other two women and tells them something her husband may not have divulged. "The trouble is… if he's already in on this, we're kinda fucked. Richard believed we're basically fighting our own Edward on this – that even in a coma, someone is using what Edward can do to try and aim us all in a direction. And if Bright Edward is already involved, he'd be likely to take his own alternate's plan and carry it out." Elisabeth shrugs and breathes out a sigh, looking at both of them. "I can send you Richard's maps if they'll help you."
“I can attempt to contact that Edward,” Wright admits little elaboration, “though carrying on a conversation would be difficult and transferring raw data would be impossible.” They wonder what it would be like to link in both Chel and Edward.
“Elliot’s map is all up here at the moment,” Wright says, tapping their temple. What had been on the wall of the office in the townhouse had been destroyed with the rest of the wall to prevent tactile telepathy from reading any of the notes. “He didn’t even know Richard has one and he talked to Richard about trying to understand the timelines.”
“I can give you a quick outline on the board,” they offer. “But I need to stress again that it is extremely important that this information not be relayed to anyone. With elasticity drastically empowered, any deviation from current events could destroy the future’s functional time machine—as it hasn’t been built yet—and we lose our chance to communicate and get employable future-knowledge to prevent the apocalypse. Because I do think we can communicate with the people in the future without refactoring it. Because they have a mothman’s eye view.”
“Just need like,” they admit, “a really smart person to build something for me. If you happen to know a really smart person.”
Chel has been regarding Wright through the fringe of her lashes for some time now, and her eyes only narrow further when a really smart person is called for. Not in a suspicious or negative way, but in a self-satisfied way a cat might narrow their eyes when considering something to pounce on.
Wright smiles, innocently and insincerely.
“Richard,” Chel says, then clarifies, “Schwenkman is dead in my home timeline. And this timeline. There, he died in the flood. Here, he was killed at the Plum Island detention center during a prison break. I… I don’t know if he’s alive anywhere else, and if he was I wouldn’t have any way to contact him if he was. But—he was brilliant. One of my closest friends.”
Chel takes a moment to steady herself in the memory of a close friend dead twice over. “Edward on the other hand… I heard he died here, a long time ago? But maybe, given how death sometimes has a non-stick coating, that isn’t as sure a thing as I’d thought. My Edward isn’t Evolved—er, Expressive. I still haven’t figured that one out, but I know he’s with Elliot and Richard right now.” Chel begins to pace again, her thoughts working into new configurations based on queries and statements, categorizing them into an ordered pile of operations. Now, and later operations. An idea crosses Chel’s mind, one potent enough to have her attention snap to Wright as if she were going to ask a question, but she thinks better of it. Not now. The feline stare intensifies.
“Wright, we’ll transcribe a copy of whatever Elliot’s map is as a starting point. I also want to hear more about your communication idea once the map is complete, so we can determine if it is feasible and how best to deploy it.” Chel says, snapping into action. “Discreetly,” is added just a beat later. “Elisabeth, whatever information you can get on this time-sensitive adolescent, how her ability works, effective range, anything. We not only—unfortunately—need her help, but we’ll also need to ensure she survives what’s to come if we can’t avert it.” Then, with a sigh. “We’re also going to get caught, eventually. With the resources at the OEI’s disposal it’s only a matter of time before one of the three of us is compromised. We need to start determining who we can trust and bringing them into this because—and I cannot stress this obvious point enough—all our lives depend on it.”
Elisabeth eyes Wright for a long moment and then speaks quietly. "If you know someone who can pass messages quietly, pass one to FBI Deputy Director Ivanov – presuming he hasn't been promoted or left the Bureau – in their world. I'll give you a codephrase to let him know we got home safe and the message is coming from me… and tell him to start looking in the archives that he and I found in Bright to see if any of that information pertains to what's happening now. Without a history course in the Bright world since I left it, I don't know what – if anything – he has released. But we found an entire coffin full of documents dating from the '40's on through about projects the Company had their fingers in. It's entirely possible that something useful exists. Felix is as trustworthy as they come and he'll keep his own counsel on what to say to whom and when."
Turning her gaze back to her mother-in-law, she replies, "Edward's death here wasn't… exaggerated so much as he's near-death in a coma, as I understand what Richard said. He literally felt that whatever we're stuck in with their machinations, we were working from an Edward playbook. Edward in your world was not Expressive?" That makes her consider her thoughts. It puzzles her, just as it did when she realized her mother's situation. "Here in this world, my mother was not Expressive – that we knew – but my mother from Flood is. I'm never sure why the divergence there," she muses, "but it might be a data point to toss in the pot."
She pulls in a long breath and purses her lips. Keep the confidentiality or tell Chel who the girl is in the hopes that she may be able to get to Leah without drawing attention. "She will survive, one way or the other – I spoke with her father two days ago to offer his family quarters on the Raytech level if they were not already in the list of people to go." Elisabeth grimaces. "I'm tired enough that I blundered my way into that conversation assuming the man already knew about the solar flare. He didn't, but he was more concerned with what I knew about his daughter than with what I was talking about in terms of offering quarters. She's the 12-year-old daughter of the Secretary of the Interior, Hesser. Her power is erupting, violently. I can only tell you what was in Richard's notes that I found after he left – if he has more information than he jotted down, have Elliot ask him," she tells Wright. "You probably should have him in on this meeting anyway. He and Chel brainstorming is truly a sight." Now that she says that, actually, she wonders why they don't.
Letting out a sigh, she finishes, "His notes said her ability in the future – about 2040 – was listed as Time Sense. She can detect where and when a temporal disturbance has occurred. He didn't mark an exact range in his notes but said potentially global." Elisabeth grimaces. "He took what information he had from the first iteration of the Wasteland when he visited 2040 from the year 2011. So that's all he had available. Right now, her parents and even the doctors dealing with her have no idea what her ability is, so they will be of no help there." She hesitates. "I have her notebook, though. Hesser handed it to me to look at and I left his office with it before I realized I still had it."
Wright nods to Chel, the woman's instruction is sensible enough. Getting ahold of the time distortion detector could be of paramount importance to humanity. The ability seems very useful and interesting, though they've already learned what it's like to feel changes in the timeline. They don't envy the kid their apparently more extreme version.
They have the very strong feeling that they should not have trusted Liz with this critical information; her current information security plan appears to be ‘assume everybody already knows everything and tell them all the bad stuff just in case they don't.’ If anybody is going to get them all in trouble with the OEI, their money is on Liz.
“I'll see what I can do about the long distance call,” they tell Liz, “but with the same constraints I mentioned above. Until then, I assume we all agree it's time for above-average information security moving forward.”
“That being said,” they add, “Richard isn't in this meeting because he appears to have abandoned the mission. He chose Silas as the new team leader and stayed behind in a settlement. He's been AWOL for over a week.”
Whatever else Chel might have wanted to say about divergences, manifestation ages, and security is all lost when Wright jingles a particular set of conversational keys she cannot ignore. Color and humor drains from Michelle’s face and for a moment she just stares in Wright’s general direction. Not eye contact, not even a steady stare. Post-traumatic stress rears its head in many ways, and both Elisabeth and Wright are fairly certain they’re witnessing freeze.
“What.” Chel whispers, as if not sure she heard Wright correctly. “Did—what?” She leaves the whiteboard forgotten, closes the distance while still keeping the conference table between them.
“Where is my son?” Chel demands in an anger she immediately regrets directing at Wright. She looks away, frustration and shame mixing in her expression.
"He what?" Elisabeth breathes out in a stunned whisper, all the half-understood physics and talk of abilities escaping her mind as she feels like she got hit in the stomach. For a long moment she can't breathe. Chel is not the only one with PTSD running around. There is a moment where there is this feel to the air, a pressure that's almost a hum. And then it's gone. Elisabeth wavers in her seat for a second, her vision tunneling until she sucks in a breath that she literally forgot to take.
…sometimes you just need to take the scissors to your mental string map and just make the straightest line you can from point A to point B. Throws the assholes off every time, because you're not playing their games. Now? He chooses now to listen to her?!
Swallowing hard, her gaze flickers up to Wright and Elisabeth is unable to completely hide the utter devastation mixed with rage, the mix of emotions making her sick. "Your son is taking a page out of my playbook – he's upending the chess board instead of playing the game," she says to Michelle in a soft, icy tone. "He thinks they're predicting his actions – predicting that he'd stay with the team and protect his people – because Edward knew him well and I'm sure at least some of them know how much he trusts Edward. Our people are everything; that's always been what's important to us. And he believes they're lying to all of you about what the plan really is, what they're really going after in Alaska. So… he's decided to try to do the unexpected. Thinks striking off on his own will change something." She drags both of her hands down her face and groans in exasperation.
"Shit."
Wright isn't bothered by Chel's rage; it's understandable. They remember the reaction as clearly as they can, just in case the woman goes back to displaying her usual amount of emotion regarding her son if he ever returns. Their last attempt to get the woman to relay a message to her son resulted in being told, essentially, that Richard is a big boy who can look after himself. Despite their current desire to break his fucking kneecaps, he deserves to know she cares.
They are however surprised to learn that Liz is psychic. “That is Elliot's largely baseless theory,” they admit. “Not that he got any instructions, he found out that Richard didn't leave the city hours later.” It still hurts to have been left behind by two people who learned some of their deepest truths on the same day.
“It makes sense tactically,” they continue, “but only if you don't care that flipping the table causes the game to stop existing in the future. I'm confident that major disturbances to this iteration could cause wildly unpredictable alterations to established future events. Elliot warned Richard that they should play it as close to standard as possible, but apparently something happened in that location that he still can't get a good description of. Something happened and Richard changed the rules without consulting the team.” It's actually infuriating, if they really think about it. Some of it even shows on their face.
“So,” they continue, turning their attention back to Chel and trying to soften their demeanor, “if we had to guess, he's on a solo mission into the wilderness to be unpredictable without backup. I wish I had better news, but it would be impossible to avoid bringing this up if we continue doing this.” They gesture around the room and at the board.
“That fucking idiot.” Chel hisses under her breath. Elisabeth and Wright both witness an immediate demeanor change in Chel as she half-heartedly steps away from the whiteboard. Her body catches up to her thoughts a moment later when she abruptly pivots to Wright while bumping into a chair. “He’s just like this father—thinks whenever something goes even a little wrong it’s all his fault and he has to fix it himself, fuck the consequences.”
Above the door, the green light flashes three times. Indicating someone outside is checking to see if they can come in. Likely Wright’s handler. This off-the-books meeting has already gone on for too long.
Chel briefly closes her eyes and exhales a frustrated sigh. “Wright,” she says, recentering herself. “I need you to check with Elliot, see if there’s anything Richard might have seen or heard that spooked him. No matter how small the detail. Whatever it is. If we can’t get his plan from him…” Chel looks at Elisabeth, then Wright. “There might be someone here we can consult if we pull together enough details.”
“Someone I trust.” Chel adds, leaning in to offer in conspiratorial tone.
The green light flashes three times.
“Someone Elisabeth can secure a meeting with.”
Meanwhile
NYC Safe Zone
Jackson Heights
10:45 pm Local Time
There’s an undeveloped neighborhood in Jackson Heights dubbed the “International District” by local residents, thanks in part to the proliferation of multicultural settlers coming to this portion of the city following the Civil War. The neighborhood only spans a four block area, but it is flush with businesses that cater to a variety of cultural traditions outside of the typical Americana fare.
The tenement building rising up from Broadway is one such locale; a run down but operational building. At the ground floor level there is a small bodega with barred windows and a neon sign showing that it is open. Signage in the windows indicates Checks Cashed and We Accept Gold & Gas. The five floors above the bodega are all apartments. Construction noise from a few blocks away echoes out this far, but otherwise this stretch of road and this building is unremarkable.
The building at 25-04 Broadway has a fire escape up its right side and a tenement lobby entrance adjacent to to the bodega’s doors. There is no listed address for one of its residents in any Safe Zone registry. Not the residential lottery for settler housing, not any public works division for bill processing, not even at the DMV.
The apartment looks like a storage locker. There’s stacks of newspapers piled up on furniture, cardboard boxes awkwardly stacked on top of one-another. A table by the door mostly covered with old issues of PAUSE magazine, more newspapers, and stacks of VHS cassettes. There’s a ratty old couch facing a wall where a mirror hangs, but no television. A radio plays soft, quiet music in the adjacent kitchen.
The apartment's resident drinks coffee out of a terra-cotta red mug with a print of the Wheel of Fortune tarot card on the side. Her attention is focused beyond the coffee mug, to the walls of a spare bedroom-come-conspiracy den. Cork boards on every wall pinned with newspaper clippings. On one wall is a massive map of the Safe Zone made from several sheets of copy paper taped together. There’s colored pins all across the map and different colored threads. A basket of hobby supplies sits on the floor by the door full of spools of yarn, scissors, glitter paint, and some of those glow in the dark stars kids used to put on the ceiling of their bedroom.
Walking over to the clippings, she scans them with a brush of her fingertips like someone dowsing for water. Her fingertips stop on the island of Manhattan, outlined in red colored pencil with the words "Exclusion Zone" written beside it.
Her fingertip stops on an intersection: Thomas at Church. Her stomach churns.
"What have we here?"
