Chapter 6: November 20, 2004

Tyrone rubbed his forehead, the careful attention to detail on his Mallett CTC Decoupler starting to give him a headache. He felt like he was so close to a breakthrough, some way of detecting the theoretical chronitons that he knew had to be there.

He looked at the clock. Two in the afternoon. None of his colleagues were around for the weekend, but he was still toiling away in the lab, glad that they let him continue his research at all hours. He didn’t have much else to do, and had never been the sort of person to collect a lot of friends or go drinking.

Some fresh air would do him good. He left the lab to go take a walk.

Megan tried to act relatively nonchalant while her roommate got ready to go out. There was apparently some sorority event happening in the afternoon, and was getting herself decked out entirely for it, silver eyeshadow and everything.

Megan was mostly just extremely horny and wanted the time alone for once. The slew of homework and tests over the previous week had kept both of them in their room almost all the time—and too tired to alleviate her need.

“I’ll probably be back late,” her roommate said, sliding a small purse across her body. “Don’t blow the universe up or anything while I’m gone.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Megan grumbled, clicking through another fanfic Livejournal.

“Mwah,” her roommate said, miming a kiss, and then was gone.

She counted to one hundred—just in case—and then started unbuttoning her pants.

Megan felt the disorienting lurch of being unstuck, and looked around. Afternoon. Chilly, warmer than when she came from. Tree leaves turning colors: autumn. Lots of them on the ground: later autumn. On campus. No surprise there—she’d been walking across it in the middle of February in 2012.

There was a pretty normal hustle-bustle of students; none of them seemed to notice her sudden appearance. She continued walking, turning around to make her way to her house, hoping Rory would be there.

She’d gotten to the next cross-sidewalk and taken a right when she recognized the form coming towards her. Doctor Williams—Tyrone, she reminded herself—though looking significantly younger.

“Hey,” she said with a wave, smiling at him as he got close. Goddess, so young, compared to the conversation they’d had just the night before!

“Hey Megan,” he replied, slowing down.

“What’s the date?” she asked.

“November 2004. You?”

Oh shit. “The full date?”

He thought a moment. “The twentieth, I think. Thursday before Thanksgiving.”

So, it was then. “Wherever you’re going, I’m following you,” she said, trying to keep calm.

He looked at her, confused. “I was just heading back to the lab, not—”

“Perfect. Trust me on this. A sphere inverted is a sunburst.”

The phrase made him snap to attention. “Okay. I’m listening.”

“What’s the current time?”

He looked even more confused, but consulted his watch. “Two thirty-five in the afternoon. Why?”

“Let’s walk; we don’t have much time.”

In her dorm room, Megan was taking her sweet time warming up her body. She was horny as hell, yes, but she had the afternoon to herself, and wanted to just bask in her own pleasure.

Her nipples were hard little diamonds in her fingers, and she rocked her hips, begging herself for her own fingers.

Succumbing to her own desire, a hand snaked down and began to lightly trace her labia.

Tyrone was certainly confused; so far, every time Megan had showed up, it was to go bang Rory as soon as she could, maybe with some cuddling in there. Except the first time, when she invoked the Sphere Protocol.

And here, when she again invoked the Sphere Protocol.

They were silent on the way back to the lab, and he unlocked it calmly. She nodded, looking around. “More bare than I thought.” She pointed at the Chroniton Detector. “That’s the uh ... hell, I don’t know the name. The device you’re doing research on, right? Trying to detect chronitons?”

He nodded. “Yes. Your suggestion of aluminum was very helpful in handling the photosensitive aspects of the problem.”

She frowned, and he realized this Megan probably was younger than the one who had made the suggestion. “That was June of this year—sorry, of 2004.”

“Noted.” She stepped forward, putting her hand on the metal frame of the device. “I’ll need a chair of some sort to sit in.”

“Excuse me?”

She turned to look at him. “You’re going to turn this on, and I’m going to be sitting in it.”

“It’s nowhere near ready!” That wasn’t strictly true, but he had no confidence in its ability not to overload and overheat whatever it was scanning at the time. He’d wanted to do some tests with objects first—especially if he could get one from her to test the difference in time—but the idea of actually doing a real, live person? That was madness!

She rubbed her forehead. “Fuck. Okay. There was something you told me about this moment. Uh, shit, what was it?”

“I don’t know, but why is this so important?”

“You’re going to produce some readings out of this machine,” she tapped it with a hand. “Which you will print out, and I’m going to take back to the future with me. One of the few times we do that intentionally with a physical thing. Your future self—Doctor Williams, to me—asked me for that printout, because of research you’re doing in the future. I can’t tell you much more than that, unfortunately.”

“Spoilers,” he said, rolling his eyes. He sometimes thought she used that excuse when she just didn’t feel like answering a question and instead wanted to seem mysterious. “Okay, but why the urgency?”

She sighed, looking at him. “Alright, I think this is the time to level with you about all this.”

He frowned; had she been lying? Obviously not—the Sphere Protocol of course indicated that there was time travel. The changes in her body he’d been witness to were proof. But the idea that there was a big secret she was hiding? That made sense. Probably was the right thing to do. But why?

“So, we’ve talked a lot in the future, and you’ve done a lot of research not only into my condition, but the condition of the space-time continuum itself, as localized against Earth. There’s a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo there that I don’t really understand—though I still like the term frame-dragging—but the crux of it is this: you have told me that there are four pivotal moments that the entirety of the space-time continuum hinges on. Pivot Points, as it were. If those things do not happen, then everything is wiped out.” She shook her head. “But otherwise? I believe the explanation you said to me was that tau is not constant.”

He frowned. His entire theory was predicated on immutability, on a constant tau. Everything needed to be fixed. But if that wasn’t true—if the tau constant wasn’t actually constant...

She continued. “Not that we know how dynamic it is. Maybe there’s a little more pushing and pulling we can do, but it will still snap into place. Like memory foam.”

“So dynamic, but ultimately static.” She nodded, and he scratched his chin in thought before adding, “Do I in the future have any idea what happens if we do attempt to make a change?”

“I don’t think you ever mentioned it. But you made it clear that these four events are more important—if any of them were to change, it would bring the whole thing crashing down. Think of a tent: it can flap around in the breeze, you can push and pull the fabric and it bounces back into shape, but if you take down any of the tent poles, the whole thing collapses.”

“And I have identified—will identify—damn it, let’s just use present tense!—and I identify those tent poles. Those Pivots.”

She nodded. “Mmhmm. And you tell them to me, eventually. Mostly, I think, so that I can tell you now. I’m from February 2012; that’s all I can tell you there.”

“Wait, though. If things do bounce back into shape, then you should be able to tell me the exact date; possibly even the exact words. It wouldn’t matter if I changed them.”

“It’s possible the timeline would compensate,” she agreed with a nod. “But what does that mean? Would my memories change? Your memories? We don’t know—but it’s likely it would actually be fine, because that moment is not a Pivot.”

“Then why the abundance of caution, if it would be fine?”

“Do you really want to take that chance? Tents have big poles, yes—but they also have other tethers and pegs. We can’t identify all of those, and who knows what could happen if we change them. That could have disastrous consequences—that could erase entire people from the timeline. You. Me. Your children. My children. And who knows if we’d remember it?”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “How do we know we haven’t done it already?”

“I asked you that same question when you told me about this,” she said. “And the answer is: we don’t. We don’t know if memories would shift, or just the timeline around us. Would it change everyone but me? We have no idea how rewritable time is, or what that even means. Quite possibly, we already have changed it, and never knew the difference, continuing on our merry way.”

“Terrifying.” A shiver ran up his spine.

“Isn’t it?” Her smile did not reduce the shiver.

“So, okay,” he said, leaning forward, his mind still turning on making the tau factor dynamic. “What are the Pivots? Present tense, please.”

“The first is when I am twelve years old,” she said, her eyes dropping to the floor. “I receive a letter from a complete stranger that both predicts a key event in my future that I have no control over—so I know it comes from authority of knowledge—and the key phrase that will indicate that I need to listen to the person saying it. My own version of the Sphere Protocol, as it were.”

“Mmm,” he nodded. Twelve? He wondered when she had gotten unstuck; it was a detail she’d always been extremely coy about. Had she been like that for a long time? If so, why was every instance of her that had dropped by been from the future?

“The second is the day I get infected with time mites.”

“When is that?” he asked without thinking.

“I ... I can’t tell you.” A note of emotion hit her voice. There was something more there. “Just that it might be the most important Pivot. The big pole. If I don’t get the time mites, then they can’t interact with the chroniton flux, and I never get unstuck, and the entire thing falls apart.”

“Okay,” he said, motioning for her to continue.

“The third is right now, or at least very shortly from now. You are going to turn this machine on, along with the other machines you have here as part of this whole apparatus, and that is what will disrupt the chroniton field and put it into flux, thus making me unstuck as I’m caught in the eddies, because of those time mites.”

“I’m surprised that’s not the most important, if it’s what causes you to become unstuck.”