Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (11 page)

I hear the pop and fizz of a soda open and my mouth waters.

When Anders looks up, he’s obviously wondering why I’m grinning. “I already explained this to the Board. The Supreme Court ruled that persons who are not alive during the initialization of a TJV event do not have recourse against the initializing in the present day justice system. How difficult is that to grasp?”

I shudder, thinking about the ruling, but Anders is too narcissistic to notice. He’s pacing again. The students behind us have stopped chatting. My guess is that they’re listening. Everyone is curious about temporal events.

Except me. Events are just points I can count, one, two, three.

Five years ago

“This one here—” The pretty but severe doctor taps along the side of my abs, over the new webbing she implanted under my skin. Her hand moves in the particular way the Germans on base always move. “—and this one—” She taps her finger on the other side of my belly. “Will grow. You will feel discomfort for approximately two weeks as the filaments extend and connect.”

I watch her hand for a second, realizing German fingers bother me.

She holds up an e-paper, her pincer grip perfect. “When it is done, it will appear as so.” Across the page, an animation of a soldier twists as a honeycomb of gray wires encases his midsection and grows into a full girdle. I will be wearing some crazy lady’s underwear under my skin.

It already itches.

“Do not scratch it. We will give you a cream.” She sets the e-paper down on the stainless steel tray next to the exam table and wags one of her straight and tapered digits at my nose. We are in an operating room, but not a real operating room, because there’s a window. Outside, the trees rustle in full summer glory. Inside, I’m looking at the face of a woman twice my age wondering if she’s married. I suspect the cognitive dissonance of liking and not liking her fingers makes me pay extra attention to her moves and sways.

“The web is your oxygen carrier. Once it is in place, we will connect it to the webbing around your lungs.” She taps my breastbone, oblivious to me as anything other than meat. All of a sudden, she isn’t pretty anymore.

“We will need to sedate you.”

I nod. Full implantation takes six months and I use the time to finish my final year of undergraduate coursework. Once the implants are in, I won’t be on the front lines anymore. I’ll become subversive. So if I want an education, I need to do it now.

She frowns like she knows what I’m thinking. “The implants do not make you special, young man.”

They put the exact same implants into every soldier valuable enough to armor up. The implants aren’t for TJV travel per se, but an internal envirosuit to keep a soldier alive through the worst hellish shit.

The doctor shakes her head and taps my scalp. “It is what is in here—” Her finger returns to my abs. “—and not what I put in here, that will get you what you want.”

I nod again, knowing enough to always agree with doctors.

She steps back, her eyes narrow, and crosses her arms. “Always remember that.”

Three years ago

Mom sits on the other side of the table from me again, in the same arch of sunshine, at the same time of day. She won’t take her meds but she has figured out that the institution takes care of her. In her e-mails, she calls this place her “hotel” and spends exactly three paragraphs detailing the bad service. Food, house cleaning, the neighbors. One, two, three.

She holds a different rosary. The nurse told me the other one broke but when they restrung it, a bead had gone missing. Mom had a meltdown. Dad refused to come in.

I can’t blame him. She’s no longer the woman who raised me. She began refusing haircuts when I enlisted, and refuses to brush her now waist-length hair. When she leans forward, it flops onto the table, a semi-matted mess of gray and brown.

Her finger flits between the beads and the sunbeam. “You were accepted?”

“All five schools. I have my pick. Full rides. With my GI benefits I won’t have to teach or grade.” I will have my PhD in three years.

She nods, thinking things through. On this, at least, she can concentrate. “I wish you had picked something useful.”

Staying in the military would have been useful, at least to them. As would working toward a hard science degree. I watch Mom finger the rosary. Her nails click over the beads
click
,
click
,
click
.

My mother is the underlying reason I’m in CogPsy. Denying it would be as lacking in insight as my mother’s own understanding of her condition.

“I am not sick,” she says. “I have never been sick a day in my life. I am concerned, that’s all. Concerned about what the government is doing to my son. Concerned about what they’re doing to the numbers. The universe.” But she never tried to leave the clinic. Never ran away.

Dad filed for a divorce last year. He didn’t want to be alone anymore.

My mother’s finger taps and taps. She will dance down the hall after I leave, her loose sweats twisting around her waist as she hums to herself.

My mother is never alone. She has her numbers.

Now

When you jump, the space inside the TJV takes with it not only you, but every pebble stuck in the heel of your shoe. Every cell of your body and every fiber of clothing you think might protect you from whatever unknown moment waits at the other end of your jump. Every eyelash and dust mote and every single molecule of modern air both in and out of your lungs.

The space jumps, not the person. We are ticks latched onto this particular patch of the universe and we must hold on no matter how hard it tries to pull us off.

Jeffrey scans my implants, frowning in concentration. He grips his controller—he traded his e-paper for rigid tablet so he can process my data in real time. I wonder if he gives his kids the same look he is giving the computer right now.

“Locked.” He steps back and nods, satisfied but still intense.

Once the jump starts, my onboard quantum systems—the microdot computer above my left ear and between my scalp and skull—will decouple from the universe, or so the physicists say. Baselines will alter.

Problems begin when you return to the present. What was once entangled is no longer entangled. Data recordings become randomized, though we still do them. So I am to provide a back-up: tried and true written observations.

In the past, the time traveler is the one walking around the square, muttering to himself and scribbling in a notepad. The irony isn’t lost on me, but I don’t say anything. Jeffrey and Tina wouldn’t understand.

Jeffrey points at my chest. “Your implants are at optimal.”

Nothing you take with you stays in the past, either. Nor does anything you take into your body while in the past come home with you, which means, when you jump back, every inhale of atmosphere infused into your blood stays where it is supposed to be.

In the past. Not in you.

I’ve seen the consequences. I’ve seen the dead people with the pits in their skins. Men and women with collapsed lungs and exploded eyeballs.

Some memories are best left in the past, with the military.

My implants, the micro web of twisting tubes and spurts and pumps under my skin, carry about twelve hours of home oxygen. The solid casing over my corneas controls oxygen exchange in my eyes. I also carry a nutrient drip and a sealed water system.

I tap my belly and give Jeffrey a thumbs-up. He sees no oddness in the data slithering along his tablet’s screen. I am “weapons grade.” But I learned a long time ago that “weapons grade” doesn’t mean a damned thing when the tools involved are armor instead of bombs.

My implants do what they need to do, and nothing more.

Jeffrey slaps my shoulder. “Let’s find answers, my friend.”

I smile. Long ago, I stopped shivering when the itch crawled across my soul. I don’t shiver now, as I think about what I am about to do. The itch is a reminder of what this means. It’s a signal I need to decode. That’s all.

Tina gives me an envelope along with my note pad and pencil. She stares at it and not my face. “Open it after you appear,” she says.

I nod. Part of this experiment’s double-blind is that I am to be ignorant of my goal before I jump. It’s to ensure clean readings for Jeffrey and Tina.

The envelope is made of rip-proof material, and I feel something inside. A key, I suspect. I stuff it and the pad into the inside pocket of my jacket.

The Institutional Review Board wanted a treatise on the ethical dilemmas associated with collecting data in the past without permission from the human subjects. We laid it all out—they’re all dead in the present, so permission is not necessary. The Supreme Court blew open that door a few years ago.

Tina pats the pocket under my coat where I carry her instructions. “Ready?”

“Always.” My dress is fairly current—black jeans and a dark jacket over a non-descript t-shirt—so I suspect I’m not going back far, which is fine with me. I don’t like not understanding the local language. Makes me agitated.

Jeffrey almost bounces where he stands, and for the moment, reminds me of his toddler. Tina drops her hand to her belly, as if unconsciously shielding her baby from what I am about to do.

The entrance to the TJV looks like a secure vault from the movies, with a circular metal door with bolts and conduits covering its surface. The door hisses as it opens, its hydraulics easing its weight, but it still takes Jeffrey and me to pull it open. The door, like the tunnel it opens into, holds no electronics. The quantum decoupling occasionally affects the home systems. The TJVs are old school because of it, masses of twisting pipes and dirty gloom.

Time travel is, by necessity, an ancient thing.

The tunnel runs downward at a steep angle to about a hundred yards below campus. No mechanical elevator. No electricity. You walk it, both down and up when you return, with only chemical glow sticks to light your way.

My experimental team pats my back, real hands bouncing off real muscle. Jeffrey snaps three sticks and hands them to me. I curl my fingers around the tubes, holding tight to the green haze. The speakers click and Anders’s voice pops out. It’s time to go. After the necessary hugs, I cross the threshold.

The door closes behind me, hissing and whining. It doesn’t want to move, I think, because it understands. It’s the barrier between the body of the world and that snooping little tick about to burrow into its skin. I’m about to suck some universe blood.

My eyes adjust to the glow sticks and the smooth interior of the tunnel shimmers with chemical faerie light. The tunnel is curved, I suspect, to ease the psychological stress of seeing straight down a hundred yard ramp into the bowels of the Earth. No one wants a stressed jumper.

The steps are more an unending series of long landings than a stairway. I fall into my tunnel rhythm, altering my walking to take the path step, stride, step. My breathing slows to match, and I float downward, taking this moment to ready myself.

In the tunnel I breath the cleanest air on the planet—no dust or floating bacteria or pollen. It smells of anti-smell, of invisibility. I could be moving though a vacuum and not know it, with only my implants protecting me.

When I reach the second door, the one into the vehicle, my implants kick on. I stop breathing for a second as the systems spin up. A flash of panic screams through my vision and the green of the glow sticks turns white-hot. I suffocate in my own body so it can keep itself alive.

My diaphragm starts again. I need to look like I’m breathing, even if I’m not, when facing the past. People get concerned.

The white-hot drops back to dancing supernatural green and I step across the second threshold, into the space that is not-space.

Three quick fake-breaths even though I’m not breathing, and I drop the sticks outside the door. At the same moment, I close my eyes.

The vehicle is a coffin and I’m underground and I need to close the lid after I step inside. I don’t think anyone would blame me for not looking.

Almost two hundred lifetime jumps and I’ve never looked at the inside of a TJV.

Fields of force whirl, but nothing hisses. Nothing makes a sound. I hear only my own heart and feel only the texture of my clothing. I’m in a not-place manufactured by tools cut from centuries of science, all fueled by mechanisms from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It should be noisy. It should smell and spit. But it doesn’t, and I’m alone.

There’s no countdown or the soothing, supportive voices of Control, because nothing here is electronic. I slam the lid, hoping for at least some reverb. Again, nothing.

When I open my eyes, I wonder if this is how angels see the world—it’s there, but I’m not. Movement registers. Edges delineate but in reverse contrast, as if I’m looking at an afterimage. Smells, too, are reversed: Living, green grass smells like dead, black death. Dust smells like oranges and the wind blows into you, instead of around.

No wonder angels hate humans. Why would they think us worthy when we live in an afterimage?

Theoretically, the displacement adjustment lag—the cayenne taste of the past and the glare of a not-right sun—has nothing to do with the decoupling and everything to do with the jumper’s psychology. I make a note for Jeffrey, counting out loud the time it takes for perception to click back on, so I can write it down.