Chapter 7

Thursday, June 3, 3109, 11:12 a.m. The Hall of the Gate stood empty. Slightly nauseated and holding her stomach, Rebecca hurried around the dais to the passageway beyond, half-expecting to hear Leda chastising Iris in the distance. She neither saw, nor heard, anyone. Stepping onto the dais, she approached the control panel and extended her right hand toward the central globe. She still had the list in her hand, she discovered. Curious despite her sense of urgency, she unfolded the paper and glanced at Leda’s neatly lettered handwriting. It was a very strange list.

Rather than technical manuals, modern electronics, or weapons as might be expected, Leda had populated the list with items of such an esoteric nature as to leave Rebecca baffled. Shaking her head, she stuffed the list into her cardigan pocket and waved her hand over the spot on the left of the panel that contained the view-screen. Nothing happened. Squatting, she glanced into the recess beneath the 12” thick panel, looking for a bottom-mounted switch. What she discovered instead was her ball cap.

“There you are!” she cried triumphantly, laughing.

Leda had stored the cap safely away after finding it on the floor. Rebecca put it on, pulling her hair through the hole in the back into a ponytail. Still needing to activate the controls, she dropped to a knee, and spotted a small, leather-bound notebook on the shelf. Her ball cap had covered it before. Instructions, she wondered.

The journal contained page upon page of hand-written notes. Each page consisted of 3 neat columns, the leftmost in plain English, the center column bearing some type of phonetic symbols, and the third column, words in a foreign language. It took a long moment for Rebecca to understand that what she held in her hands was a lexicon: a leather-bound Rosetta Stone. She recognized the handwriting as Leda’s.

“Wow. How long did it take you to do this?”

The ink on the earliest pages was faded, the pages well-thumbed. Leda had used different pens to compose her list over time: the earliest entries made in her neat, block lettering was blue. Flipping through, Rebecca discovered black ink, also green and red. The most recent entries were entered in blue again.

This could be useful, she thought, if for no other reason, blackmail. Slipping Leda’s shopping list between the pages for safekeeping, she pocketed the book.

On her third try, Rebecca located a button on the control panel’s bottom and hesitantly depressed it with her middle finger, grimacing as she did so. She noted a deep thrumming in the panel, which dissipated immediately, but nothing else. A sweep of her left hand activated the view-screen this time, and she sighed in relief.

The view was her empty bedroom. Cautiously, she nudged the green globe slightly to the right: with a blur of motion, the gate exited her bedroom and showed a view of the Olson’s house across the street. “Whoa,” she complained, experiencing vertigo from the sudden movement. An equal movement in the opposite direction returned the portal to her bedroom.

Experimenting with the red, blue, and green globes, she became minimally proficient positioning the gate--within the confines of her bedroom, at least. The thought of exceeding the bedroom’s bounds was daunting.

“What am I doing?” Checking her cell phone revealed the time in 2014 to be 10:59 p.m. She hadn’t messed with the temporal globe, so theoretically, time stood still on the 2014 end at 10:45 p.m. Too late to even consider getting anything constructive done tonight. And she was dressed for bed, not adventuring. She laughed softly, thinking she sounded like Dora the Explorer.

Dora the Explorer?

Blinking and stepping away from the console she muttered: “What are you thinking, Rebecca?”

What she needed to do was return to 2014, go to bed and forget all this nonsense. What did she care about 3109? About Iris returning as Twin Sister? She’d been Twin Sister and now she was just Rebecca again, here and now and safe. Go home, stupid!

She turned and rushed toward the portal and stopped. What good did returning to 2014 do if the portal remained in her bedroom, hanging in midair? Eventually, Leda would move it (probably), but the longer it remained, the more chance Mom or Dad would find it.

Move it outside? Into the backyard? Then she’d need to explain how she’d gotten outside in her pajamas and slippers without triggering the alarm. The basement was possible, she guessed, but unless Leda recalled the gate quickly, it might still be found. And if she didn’t recall it all because she expected Rebecca to complete her asinine mission?

“Fuck!” she muttered, exasperated.

Moving to stand before the gate, she circled it again with her arms crossed over her chest, muttering irritably. After a moment she returned to the console and stared down at the controls. If Leda expected her to complete the mission, maybe she should. If for no other reason, than to rid herself of the confounded gate. But why wasn’t Leda here now? Why was the gate-hall frigging empty? It wasn’t the middle of the night, for God’s sake—it was like 11:30 a.m.!

OK, she thought angrily, do it! Complete the damned mission and decide what to do then. “Yeah,” she muttered peevishly. “Complete the fucking mission and screw the bitch.”

What she needed was the library. This required a return trip to her bedroom to change, and a temporal realignment to daylight hours. “Tomorrow, or earlier today, she wondered uneasily. Intuition suggested that earlier today was the safer bet, though she couldn’t have explained why, if asked. Somehow, it just felt right.

She had another problem though: Rebecca was pretty sure that Mom would be at her bedroom door within seconds of venturing back to 2014, and that wouldn’t do at all. A solution, she thought, was to pop into her bedroom half an hour earlier, with her younger self safely ensconced in the bathroom and Mom downstairs, watching Grey’s Anatomy. She needed to test her skill on the white globe at some point, anyway. It seemed like a good time to try.

Biting her lower lip (on the side opposite the bruising), Rebecca gingerly placed her fingertips atop the white globe, and nudged it counterclockwise 1/16”. She breathed out explosively when the date and time popped up at the top of the screen in bright white numerals, counting the time back 5 minutes. “You bitch!” she hissed indignantly. “You kept this from me intentionally didn’t you, dammit!”

The readout winked off after 10 seconds, which Rebecca considered a serious design flaw. Nudging the globe left reactivated the readout, and she released it when the numerals reached 10:10:27 p.m. She was shaving her legs just about then, she thought, or rinsing her hair. Counting to 10, she watched the readout vanish again.

Other than the slightly unnerving presence of her cardigan on the pole by the door, her bedroom appeared as it had at 10:45 p.m. Checking her pockets for the leather-bound journal and her cell phone and tapping the bill of her ball cap for good luck, she stepped down from the dais. Five seconds later, she stood in her empty bedroom again.

-------//-------

Quietly as possible, nauseated worse than before, she gathered clean clothing, including her black leather boots, and her spare parka and gloves. Her new parka hung in the downstairs foyer closet, along with her scarf; her gloves were stuffed in the pockets. Rather than jeans, she chose black cords this time, and a red and blue flannel shirt. She’d worn it to school on Monday, but who cared. She’d wait to dress in 3109, out of earshot of Mom.

Eyeing the gate, she wondered if it could be turned off, or otherwise made to disappear. Using it anywhere other than her bedroom in daylight just begged discovery. Far as she knew, anyone could step through the portal into the 32nd Century.