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March 18, 2024

All Her Lost Souls

By Giovanni Ruffini (short, PG-13)

Cover image.
Image credit: Public Domain. More info.

Giovanni Ruffini lives in New York City. He is a Professor of Classical Studies in the Department of History at Fairfield University, specializing in the social history of Greco-Roman Egypt and Christian Nubia. His short stories combine a love of science fiction with a lifelong interest in the history and cultures of the Nile Valley and the Horn of Africa.

~~~

I gave up coke the week the last pope died. Not that I was done with it. You never really are. And the pope’s not the reason I remember, really, but he makes a nice bookend, a good place to stop the story. It had all started two years before, at one of Tekla’s parties. I hadn’t been out of the bathroom more than ten minutes when Tekla had me cornered, bothering me about bandwidth. “Compression is the key,” he hissed at me, my eyes getting lost in the khat stains on his teeth.

“Not now, boss, please,” I teased, hoping for a quick escape.

“We can live with the data loss, but sending one bit back at a time? We’ll get nowhere.” And he gestured over to someone I’d seen in the math department the year before, some guy with a blank face, mostly a sweater and blond peach fuzz.

Don’t come over, don’t come over. I was starting to lose my high. Fuck, he’s coming over.

The light in my vid chip started pinging, a perky green ball bouncing somewhere above my left eyeball. Gabriel, finally. “Sorry, boss, gotta take this call.”

I ducked around the corner into the hall and tapped my forehead. “Gabe, where are you, man? Your dad has me trapped in here.” Some kind of noise in my video line, loud music, maybe, some shouting. “Where?”

“You have to get down here. You have to try this.”

“What? Where?”

“This guy’s coke is cut with something crazy.”

His signal dropped and my brain was clear, the dull noise of Gabe’s concert gone, Tekla’s party back to bore me.

The guy with the sweater and peach fuzz actually had a pretty good pitch. And sadly, I was sober enough to make sense of it. Quantum compression was lossy as hell. Everything quantum was. Decoherence kicks in too fast. But if his compression scheme worked, we could get a lot more data back at a time.

You have to try this.

“Can you do it?” Tekla’s teeth stains were starting to change color, my eyes blurring. I worked my jaw open, shut, open.

Of course I could do it. Took me less than six days, riding on some sort of bling that made the coke it cut look like day-old coffee. You have to try this. Gabe wasn’t kidding. My brain had never worked better. I pounded a thousand lines of code in three nights, and we still had time for enough sex to last us both the month. I remember my dad talking about his field notes – couldn’t read them the next day, once he sobered up. This code was the same way. It worked. I knew it worked. Compiled on the first friggin go. But damned if it made sense when I looked at it later.

I couldn’t show it to Tekla, not in the state it was in. I spent another week and a half dodging him on campus and blinking out his vid calls.

“You have to show me,” he snorted. “I’m paying your salary.”

“Then show me the server, Tekla. Where’s the server?”

He turned away, said nothing.

Winter killed the view from his office, nothing but bare trees and concrete. Tekla turned the largest window into a live video from Saint Peter’s Square. We both watched. Smoke went up from the chapel, black again, the fifth time in two days.

“They’re going to get it right this time,” he said, waving at the screen.

“Yeah?”

“It’s going to be one of my kind.” He turned back to me with a smile. “So let’s test it.”

Tekla Giyorgis Gaime. I used to write his tombstone in my head on my rides back home. Like a compression problem. I lost too much data every time. There was just too much of him. Fled Barentu with his wife and son, halfway through graduate school, just before the emperor’s unionists turned it into a tidier version of Sodom and Gomorrha. Advances in quantum temporal theory so great he had a nomination for a Charron before his work was even published. More grant money thrown at him in one decade than I would ever see in a lifetime. But what would I put on his tombstone?

Eritrean. Catholic. Time lord.

Beat that, peach-fuzz compression boy! Not one bit of data lost.

I had met Tekla’s son at a Brookline house party earlier that winter. They looked nothing alike. Tekla started dating his wife – Gabriel’s mother – in graduate school, and I had forgotten she was Swedish. I was cutting lines on the kitchen counter when he walked up to me, a whiskey shot of swagger in his eyes. I gave him a bump to start his night and knew right away he’d never done it before in his life. I think I chuckled, shook my head. Ten minutes later he had me up against the bathroom wall.

Later that night, I got ready to cut him another line. He took a step or two back. “This is a bad idea, isn’t it?” He meant the blow, but it really could have been the whole package deal, once we figured out I worked for his dad.

I winked, smiled. “If God hadn’t wanted us to snort, he wouldn’t have given us nostrils.”

I made the first proof of Persaud’s Reversibility Theorem at the age of 19. Not bad, considering how high I was all that year. Got an award, some money. Could have gone anywhere when I was done, grad school, any of the big firms. I went with Tekla. Didn’t even really stop to think about it. What he was doing with that server, his breakthroughs in quantum computing, no one in the world got anywhere near it.

“You, computer boy.” Tekla would call me that to keep me in my place. At my greatest moments, hard-running code he couldn’t even understand. Computer boy. And then he’d smile those sick brown teeth, and I would blush. “How do you say? Punch it?”

I ran the code, opened a port, watched, waited. “We’re in.” This was the easy part. He’d made these connections dozens of times since we started our work, going through the server ten years back in time, twenty. But the server strain was too severe, and somewhere we had memory leaks. Never got more than a sentence or two of data back before the whole thing crashed. This time? I tried to guess what the headlines would look like on next morning’s v-line.

Cock-High Computer Boy Conquers the Chronodrome!

Too much? This is what we got instead: Eritrean Physicist Uses Secret Server to Alter the Past.

“I told you the server would be a problem,” I sighed, shaking my head.

“Details. It doesn’t matter. What do you think they’ll say when they see the results?”

“They’ll think it’s fake. They’ll think it’s some sort of simulation.”

“Proof, then. Proof. That’s the next step.”

Tekla’s wife. Brunhilde. Everyone called her Hilde, except for me. I used to hum Wagner just to get under her skin a bit, give her an extravagant bow when she came near. I was never sure if she hated Wagner or me. But I must have been a constant reminder of what things were really like with her husband, what kind of man he really was.

We both noticed it the same night, that twitch she had that got worse and worse through the last year. It was the opening of one of her new exhibitions, a group project, Mid-Century Retro-Colonialism. I picked a fight with her about the title, quibbling about the word choice.

“It’s not really retro, is it? None of this is trying to go back to an earlier time, an earlier style.”

“But it’s imitative, evocative,” she smiled, trying to back up and speak to the wider group around her. “These African artists try to do to yesterday’s colonial masters what the masters tried to do to them. Take the Mussolini.” Behind her, an airy silver statue of Mussolini hung upside down, dangling from its feet. Its head, neck, and shoulders slumped on the floor. Around it, like the points of a compass, statues of four black men on their hands and knees, tearing at his face with their teeth.

Tekla chuckled and smirked, joining the fight. “Mussolini never tried to eat any ancestor of mine.”

Hilde took a sharp breath and kept her eyes on the guests. “It’s a metaphor. A perfect one, I think, for the colonial intent.” And then she twitched, like a bit of sand had cut her left eye. “Excuse me,” she said, and turned away, tapping her forehead. A call had come in. But why answer, in the middle of holding court on her big night? She walked further away, her faced crunched, and suddenly her head jerked back as she looked at Tekla.

A few minutes later, I heard him pick at her about it. “Who was that on your v chip?” he hissed.

“No one,” she said.

“No one? You talk to no one a lot? See no one a lot?”

I cut in with some nonsense question about one of the other pieces (the “Kenyatta Columbus”) just to shut him up. Probably the only nice thing I ever did for her, in years. Gabe sidled over to us, glowing. He threw his arms around my neck, squeezed, pulling me back towards him. I turned around.

“Where have you been?” I whispered at him.

“Bathroom,” his eyes a smile about to burst.

“For twenty minutes?”

“If God hadn’t wanted us to snort…”

Next week, Tekla and I sat down to give serious thought to proof. How do you prove to someone that you’ve actually made contact with the past? How do you prove it’s not just some really slick – or even deliberately primitive – simulation dressed up to look like 1935?

“It has to be information,” I said, pressing my fingers into my eyes.

“Everything is information. That doesn’t get us anywhere,” Tekla snapped.

“That’s not what I mean. We don’t get anywhere tangled up and tickling some guy’s shoe laces or belt buckle. No one’ll ever know we’re there. We need something that can give input/output, something we can measure here, too, like temperature data, traffic patterns.”

“Won’t convince anyone.” He waved his hand in the air. “Someone sees a 98 instead of a 99 and it won’t mean anything. We need something to pass the Turing test, something only a human could do.”

“Someone’s v-line,” I said. “Not just something only a human could do. Something no one else could know.”

Tekla sat back, kicked his feet up on his desk, and started to chuckle. “We’ll need a volunteer,” he smiled.

We sent some calls down all the major tech lines, and got more volunteers than we needed. In the end, we went a little down the list, a writer whose v-line targeted tech geeks, behind the scenes policy types, a few high-profile industrialists. He’d made a hate-wave for an ex-girlfriend once: imagine a painting with different colors of adrenaline and cortisol. No words, just waves of anger and stress. Never sent it, left it sitting in his inbox in a draft for years until he finally deleted it. No one ever saw it until we did. And then we hit the send button.

Tekla’s work was instrumental in opening quantum gateways to the past, finding ways to send and receive information from the past. Where it got complicated, where we started to lose most people along the way, was what happened once we made contact. Anywhere in our timeline we went, any time we poked, something split, branched off, made another timeline. We sent data to a specific place, a specific time in our past, and when we started getting data back, it wasn’t our past any more, it was a branch, an alternate timeline, a river changing course.

I thought of the bad PR our first experiments had generated, the awkward headlines we had to explain to the university provost. (“We own everything you do. Don’t make us pull the plug!”) Then started thinking about what it would look like with proof.

Eritrean physicist reads my diary. Boring. Eritrean physicist rewrites my diary. And suddenly we were getting somewhere. Problem wasn’t that the provost would pull the plug. Problem was that she had already called in counsel to start drafting the corporate contracts. Suddenly we found ourselves in a vice, closing around on all sides.

When I got close to winding up my doctorate, I got good at selling the short version of what I’d been doing with Tekla for the last three years. Your average physicist or math guy might make sense out of the math involved, but how the server worked, or even what it actually did, was not an easy sell.

“Quantum entanglement makes time itself,” I would say, spinning two imaginary marbles between my fingers and thumbs. “Any new correlation between a particle and its pair makes a new timeline, a new universe, from nothing. There’s no computing power great enough to keep track of all of them, but we can slide back and forth on one, and tweak it a bit, tinker with it.”

People who didn’t think we were crazy would find a way to ask how.

“Two entangled particles, one in our timeline, one in the other. One key feature of the two particles. Spin is the easiest to work with. Tweak the spin in one particle, you tweak the spin in its matching particle without even touching it. You change that particle, you change its causation, you change that timeline, from that moment on.”

This made it sound easy. And enough people bought it that we started feeling like rock stars. I could imagine crowds chanting our names, watching us rewrite history in a hundred different timelines. Truth is, we must have straight-up broken a hundred of them before we got anything to work at all. I had only been half-joking when I complained about logging into someone’s shoelace. First, imagine you’re blind and trying to pick one marble out of a million. Tekla’s secret kinda-sorta-maybe-Chinese definitely-spooked super-server was part of the answer. We could glide over the particles with resolution so high we could almost see the color of the shoelace.

But second, once we’re inside a computer, a circuit, a fifty-year-old switch, how do we know what to do with it? I think we spent the better part of three days causing house to house blackouts in Boston in the 1990s before I was sure I could tell power lines from I/O ports. And then what? How do you work a fifty-year-old computer? A hundred-year-old one? Do you know what set of packets you’d need to fake a “send” button on one of last year’s operating systems?

We told the tech geek what we found in his inbox, what the hate-wave had looked like when we ran it through a color-coded shield to keep us from feeling the full effects. We gave him the time-stamp of the draft, the size of the original file, the date he’d finally gotten around to deleting it. That was good enough for proof. He had convincing evidence that we had seen a piece of his past no one in the world but him had never known existed. We never told him we sent it.

Later that week, we sat around Tekla’s dinner table, talking about the first wave of reactions around the world. Hilde, usually put off by our shop chats, had more questions than most nights.

“This woman, the girlfriend,” she said, chopping some onions.

“Ex. Ex-girlfriend,” I said.

“Kim Aung.” Tekla had been the one to figure out who she was, how we could use her to track what had changed once we made contact with her timeline.

“Why does she matter?” Hilde asked. “What did she do?”

“The day we hit send. In our timeline, she had a ticket from Brussels to Khartoum. She was on her way to Nubia.”

“Okay.” Hilde put down the knife, started wiping her hands.

Tekla ignored her, looking at me instead. “Did you look into it at all, into her life, before we hit send?”

“No, not really.” You know I didn’t. Why do you keep asking me? Smart ass. Gabe got up from the table, rubbing his eyes, and walked out of the room without a word.

Hilde watched him go, then: “You said she was an author, right?” Then, suddenly, a head twitch, and she’s swatting at the left side of her face, like she’s got a fly in her eye.

Tekla looks up at her. “You have to take a call? Go ahead.”

“No, it’s no one,” she says, blinking off into space. “Kim Aung. She was big?”

“She got a lot of love for years, millions of hits, feeds all over the world.”

“Okay, so, what changed?”

“Three weeks after she got to Khartoum, in our world, she ran a piece on the Nubian Liberation Front and the attacks on the Danagla, started an international aid movement. But we hit send. She almost didn’t open it. We tapped into in her v-chip, watched what happened next. The adrenaline in the hate-wave hit her so hard she spent half an hour on the floor in spasms, vomiting.”

“Okay.” Hilde covered her mouth with her hand, her voice muffled, staring at me.

“In her world, in her fork, her timeline, she missed her flight. She never made it to Dongola. She never wrote the piece.”

“What happened to the Danagla?” Hilde asked, turning to Tekla.

“That part was harder,” he said, his eyes lighting up a bit. “With Kim, it was easy. We just had to find her v-chip in the right timeline. Most of the Danagla don’t have them. We had to find the right news feeds, watch the broadcasts.”

“So, what happened?” Hilde was insistent.

“They died fighting. Tens of thousands of them, wiped out.” His voice was dead, monotone.

“We did that,” I said, pushing him.

“In some other world, not ours,” he said, waving a hand.

“Does it matter?” Hilde cut in, angry. “Does it matter where it happened? It’s sick. It’s rape.” When Gabe walked back into the room, he was grinning and rubbing his nose. I remember thinking about hitting send later, letting her catch her flight.

EverCorps had already been one of the largest of the large-cap companies in the world for over a decade before they sat down with the suits from our university. Predictive analytics weren’t new, but they did it better than anyone else. Whatever juice they put in their algorithms, the shit worked well. They beat the statistical mean by at least a standard deviation for months on end, sometimes running days or weeks with numbers even better than that. They didn’t need my elevator pitch to work out what they were going to do with our system. It’s almost like they already knew.

“If you take raw data from the past, isn’t this just another form of insider trading?” Tekla had asked them. I could tell he thought this was a clever point, but the EverCorps reps didn’t blink.

“We’re not interested in raw data from the past,” one of their VPs had told us. “Corporate espionage isn’t our business model. We’re interested in the future. Your systems give us that.”

When the lawyers got done, we were part owners of a firm we shared with EverCorps and the university. EverCorps provided the startup capital for the workforce and software for the analytics. The university donated the space. Tekla and I split our share of the profit from every successful prediction we sold to private clients. And the thing is, they weren’t even really predictions. We’d already seen them happen. Anything digital, we could plug right into it. No electronic signal? We’re back to the shoe lace problem. But if they’re wired, we can read everything they send and receive.

What happens in Cairo if you open three dams on the Upper Nile in rapid succession? Let’s find out.

What happens to the energy markets if there’s a bust in the fusion lines across Congo? We can do that.

What sectors pick up the biggest gains if one of our heavy-load satellites drops user v-lines in North America? Yup, done.

Gabe was dancing ahead of us, half strutting, half skipping, jerking his shoulders up and down in an imitation of an old Eritrean dance move he’d seen his uncles pull off at a wedding earlier that year. Hilde was watching, her smile thin and tight. We were walking through the park on the bank of the Charles, waiting for Tekla. Gabe was sweating, talking too fast. “It’s like they’re gods, mom,” he said, spinning around and waving at me. I looked down at my feet.

“God didn’t have to sell what He knew,” Hilde snapped.

“Past tense, Brunhilde?” She could hear the smirk in my voice. Just made things worse.

“Don’t get cute with me. You know what I mean. Every model you run, if you’re right, if those timelines are really what you think they are? Every time. You sell the data, and people die.”

Gabe did a quick spin and ran around us, jogging in place next to Hilde. “Think about all that money, mom,” he said, waving his hands. “A new studio. A new gallery. All the supplies you need.”

“That’s not the point, Gabe.” But he just smiled and skipped off.

“What about the Africa?” I asked, desperate to change the subject. Mercifully, she took the bait.

“It’s starting to come together. I think I know where it’s going.”

“Last time, you called it an allegory.”

“For the commodification of the continent,” she nodded.

Tekla had told me to meet at her studio. He was late, and Hilde had left the door open. I had been there just a week before, watching her work. She had been to a scrap yard, taken bits of old steel almost at random. A car door, fragments of a delivery drone, something that might have been the skeletal frame for an autonomous sex bot. Cut them up, bent them, started reshaping them, into I couldn’t tell what. This time, when I got there, she had done enough forging and welding for me to get some sense of where she was going with the piece.

She had bent and joined enough of the metal to make Africa in outline, from Cairo to the Cape. The bolts, grooves, and gaps in the original pieces had turned into the mountains, rivers, and lakes on the map, but somehow the whole thing looked less like a map and more like some sort of machine, a drill, maybe, the grip in the Sahara and the drill bit sticking out of South Africa. When I walked in, she had just finished hoisting it into the air, sideways, hanging from steel wire with the east coast parallel to the floor.

I stood quietly, hoping Tekla would pop out of the shadows somewhere before she realized I was there. And then she got one of those calls, the silent twitch we’d seen taunting her for months. She stared into space for just a second, and then, “Who is this?” she snapped. “Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?”

Silence for another three or four seconds. Then, “How do you know that? Who told you that?” Another pause. “Stop it, you sick fuck. Stop calling me.” She tapped her left forehead, cutting the call, and crumpled to the ground, crying. I snuck back out, never told Tekla.

Later that week, someone from the French ministry of research and innovation called Tekla at home at three in the morning, told him he’d won the Charron Prize. They’d ignored the time difference on purpose, tried to make it look like a Nobel, and not just the short list for it. Part of me figured Tekla had his acceptance speech taped to his nightstand, ready to read just in case the phone rang, any prize, anywhere. In theory, they gave him the prize for an old article he’d written years ago on quantum flow, a weird thing he’d done with a proof that forward-flowing time and fluid dynamics had the same basic mathematical principles. Most people I knew thought it was nutty. Everybody I knew thought he got the Charron for our work instead, but the French wouldn’t admit it.

“Congrats, man,” I said, when he told me. He sat at his desk without moving, running a yellowed fingernail along one of the lifelines in his palm.

“You’ll come with me?”

“Paris?”

He nodded.

“Sure. Yeah, sure.”

Two days later, I woke up next to Gabriel, and he didn’t. I shook him, hit him, yelled, pounded his chest until I was dripping with sweat. Then I sat on the floor crying, making quiet little yelps through my snot and bile. When I finally called for an ambulance, he had been dead for hours. They said something about his heart, a clot, a stroke. “A little young for it,” the doctor had said with a shrug. But no one asked, and I never told.

For the rest of the week, I could see his grin, hear his voice. “If God hadn’t wanted us…”

Tekla stayed long enough for the funeral, barely. He stood across the coffin from his wife, staring at her. Halfway through the service, Hilde’s vid chip starting pinging, one call after another, five in under a minute. She kept tapping her forehead, hanging up each call, crying. Tekla chewed his lip watching her, ground his jaw, an imaginary wad of khat grinding juice into his veins. He caught a flight to Paris the next morning, never bothered to tell either of us he was still going.

When he finally called, he wasn’t even looking at me, like he was focused on something just behind my spinal cord. “I need you on a flight to Rome,” he said.

“Rome? Why? What are you talking about?”

“They had a reception for me at the Sorbonne. There was a papal legate there. He wants to set up a meeting.”

“Tekla, what are you talking about? A meeting with whom?”

“The Pope,” he snapped, still staring somewhere behind me. “We’re going to meet the Pope.”

“Listen, man, have you talked to your wife?”

“Hilde?” he asked, confused. “Why?”

I sighed, and dropped the call.

I went back to the studio. She’d left the door open again. A flurry of snow had sent a dust of white powder onto the top of the stairs. I stood there, looking down, trying to make sense of what I saw. The metal Africa was still there, perfect, a bizarre orgy of spark plugs, rotors, and power grips mapping every mountain range and river on the continent. She had rented some sort of remote-control hard-earth excavator, tractor size, the metal Africa lodged in its grip. She had gotten on the ground, lying on her back, naked, with the remote control in her hand. When she had flipped the switch, the excavator slammed the whole thing down, the metal tip at the far end of South Africa slamming into her skull, popping her wide open.

I turned my chip’s caller ID off and called the police to report a suicide. I never told anyone what I saw. I skipped the flight to Rome, tried to call Tekla, tell him what had happened. He went three days without answering, three days before he took a flight back to claim her corpse. In seventy-two hours he single-handedly set off a theological crisis greater than anything the Catholic church had seen in centuries. A Jesuit, the legate he’d met at the Sorbonne, had his own reasons for getting Tekla in front of the Pope. Perky little thing, he’d gotten halfway through his own PhD in physics before dropping out and joining the priesthood. When he first met Tekla, he asked whether salvation in one timeline meant salvation in all timelines.

Tekla loved it, soaked it all up like a drunk sophomore in a late-night dorm session. Finally got in front of the pope and asked His Holiness to pray for his wife and son, not in this time but in all the rest. The pope said nothing, shaking his head. By the end of the week, the Jesuit was holding a press conference just across the Tiber River from Saint Peter’s Square, condemning the pope’s initial response to Tekla’s questions.

“Is he a true Pope?”

I watched the priest’s broadcast on my vid chip.

He was frowning, his eyebrows arched, waving back at the Vatican. “Is he a pope for all times? No! He is not even the pope in most times. We know now of an infinity of times, an infinity of creations, God’s beauty in infinite ways, through untold miracles, salvation through endless intercession. Times in which Jesus already came again, times in which he never left, times in which he never came.”

It took less than a week for the pope to declare the priest and his allies to be out of communion with the Catholic church, less than a week for the oldest organization in the world to swing around to protect its turf. When Tekla finally came back to work, I had to bump a line before working up the nerve to see him. When I did, he was staring at holograms of his wife. I stood in silence, watching, waiting for him to speak, still mad at how long he’d stayed in Rome.

“What’s the variable, do you think?” he finally asked. I looked at him, cocked my eyebrow, said nothing. “The tipping point, the last point in the river I can build a dam to stop the flood.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tekla.”

“The test case, the tech writer with the ex-girlfriend who went to Nubia.”

“Yeah?” I had to walk around three different versions of Hilde floating in space before I got to his desk.

“We send out his e-wave, she skips her flight, Nubians die at Danagla. Was there some other way we could have done it? Something else, some other button to push in her brain, some other way to get the same result? A weaker trigger, earlier? A stronger trigger, later? What’s the variable?”

“Push the send button later,” I said. “She doesn’t skip her flight.”

“And we save their lives.”

I had managed to go my whole life without meeting a single bishop. Two months after Tekla won the Charron award, I met two in one night. His sister Semret had organized a party in his honor, but had to postpone it for the mourning period. She’d invited the whole department, the graduate students, his closest friends, almost all of his local church. Pure coincidence, the metropolitan of the Eritrean Catholic Church was on a tour of the North American eparchy. The eparch was Tekla’s cousin, up from New York for the party. He brought the metropolitan with him. Wolde-ab, the older of the two, had a scar running down the right side of his face, “a souvenir,” he told me with a toothy grin, of the Wars of Reunion.

By the end of the night, the wonks were at one end of the apartment, the Eritreans at the other. I was guarding the liquor cabinet, which kept them from switching completely to Tigrinya. Tekla got progressively drunk, Semret progressively nervous, and Wolde-ab turned to me, again and again, to defuse a conversation which got worse and worse.

“It’s not time travel,” Tekla insisted, one hand doing a half-wave in the air. “Each timeline is unique.”

“But where are they?” the senior bishop asked with a grin.

“Where? Where?” Tekla started to stammer. “Nowhere. Another universe, another creation. If God can create one, why not a hundred, a thousand?”

“It is not a creation. It is a computer!”

Tekla put down his drink, swaying with the effort. “The computer is just a door, a window, a way to peek out and see through. All of those people in those other worlds, we can see what they’re doing. They’re real. They have souls.”

Wolde-ab was silent, staring at his cup. He might have thought Tekla was baiting him, trying to see if he was one of the schismatics the Pope was purging from the church.

“Can God save those souls?” Tekla would not give up.

“God can do anything.” The bishop looked back at him almost in defiance.

“Then there’s still hope,” he replied.

By the end of the year, he had gone off the rails. He missed deadlines, hogged the server with locked processes, lied to EverCorps about the cause, blaming some bogus lag in the geosync satellite link over Hawaii. One of their reps told me they might take a pass on renewing the contract, said something about new technology which might make us obsolete.

The provost and his department head invited him to give a keynote lecture to the school’s whole faculty, a few months after he got the Charron. By this point, I was getting offers from all over, and started to think about getting out. I asked him about the talk he would give, what he would say, and he started talking about his wife, about proving the connection between his work on time and his work on fluid dynamics.

“My machine puts a pinprick in a trickle of water rolling down a shower stall. The water hits the pin, the stream breaks, the water parts, comes back together. Each time, I take out the pin, put it back in further upstream, higher up the shower stall. Each time, the water parts, comes back together, washes over the same damn spot. Again and again, he dies, she kills herself.”

“Tekla, he did die. She did kill herself.”

“Only here. Only in this time. In the others, I can still save her.”

I think my grandmother had been a Presbyterian. Maybe. Save her from what?

“Here, she’s in hell. But all those other times, every one of her, I can save her soul.”

One night I found him buried in hard copies of old manuscripts, handwritten in Tigrinya and Ge’ez, kings lists, saints lives, prophecies. Hundreds of pages on the desk, on the floor, and a spreadsheet hovering about a foot from the wall with a list of dates in columns, with the rows in a hexadecimal code I could read in my sleep, the hashtags he’d slapped on each of the timelines as he split them open with his pinpricks.

He grabbed one of the print-outs and waved it at me.

“Jean-Adolphe Michel,” he said. “He was Swiss French, late 1800s, a photographer, collector.”

“Collector?” I wasn’t really asking. I was fidgeting, rubbing my nose.

“Ran the postal service in Ethiopia under the Emperor Menelik. Brought it into the 20th Century.”

“Okay,” I nodded, my mouth starting to go dry. I picked up one of the print-outs and stared at it blankly.

“Not that one,” he said. “Here.” Handed me one of his own.

“Michel went to Zuqualla in 1908. Met a monk, an old man who took him into a cave, showed him some old manuscripts. One of them he said came from the hand of Saint Abbo, an Egyptian, from the Roman Empire.”

He was starting to sweat. I took a step around him, pretending I wanted to look at the hashtags floating in the air over his desk.

“This one here,” he pointed. “It’s this, right there, in black and white.”

“Tekla,” I sighed, “I can’t read Ethiopian. You know that.”

“No, look. Michel copied it out in French. Saint Abbo’s prophecies. You read French, look. The secret of God is revealed. 1945. Atom bomb, check. The Jews recover their homeland. 1948. Israel, check. The beginning of the flood of fire. 1952. Desolation of the survivors. 1960.”

I am starting to feel sick. I can’t tell if it’s withdrawal, or that grip I get when the paranoia starts to kick on the comedown.

He’s waving at one of the hashtags now, the one at the top of the haze. “Some humans and animals survive in the high mountains. 2000.” I see which year he’s scrolled to on the screen.

“Here, read the last line.”

Ce sera la fin.

“This will be the end. 2008.”

And I almost throw up, his screen swimming in and out of focus. The last column deads at 2008, the quantum link throwing up junk for the following years. He found a timeline that fits the prophecies.

“Tekla,” I whispered. “What did you do?”

For years, we’d been riding high on what that server could give us. But we hadn’t even been the first ones in. The others had never even seen a computer. They had just closed their eyes and prayed, wrote down what they saw, never tried to prick it, stick it, twist it. He had finally found a timeline in which she did not die. A line in which she was never born.

“Tekla, this hashtag.” He slumped in his chair, his head hanging. “You started messing with this timeline, didn’t you?” No answer. “What did you do to it in 1952? What did you do?” His mouth moved, open and shut. I walked out before he could bring himself to answer.

I met Denver in a bully bar called Bait and Tackle. He was a philosophy major maybe ten years younger than me. He never got bogged down in the math when I talked about work, meant he saw things no one else did.

“You tweak their spin, you change their causality, rewrite their timeline.”

I nodded, breathing the last of the whisky off my lips.

“How we know people in other timelines aren’t doing it to us?”

Strange how no one ever thought to ask.

“We don’t. Almost certain they are.”

“Infinite possibilities, right?” He was almost smirking at me. “Maybe she didn’t kill herself at all.”

A pin prick, a boulder dropped in a river, the water parting, coming back together every time.

“Wait, what?” I asked. “Say that again.” I was staring across the bar, trying to get the Dongola Dam beer lights to come back into focus.

“If somebody did to her here what you do to her there, well. It’s not really free will, is it?”

“Did to her here?” And then, through the haze, through the shimmer of the ads hovering in the air around me, through the pinging of my vid chip, I remembered the last time I saw her alive, her eyes twitching, her neck lurching each time she hung up on one of her anonymous callers.

It took me five minutes tops the next day, staring at the logs, to see what I’d missed. Our own test cases. I knew those hashtags by sight. Every one of them was a separate timeline, each one with its own identity, its own quirks. The ones we ran for EverCorps? I had to double-check to be sure, but I had the full invoice list. And they had an exclusion clause in our contract. The provost and counsel had insisted on it. We had no other clients, which meant there should have been no other timelines. But there they were, hashtag after hashtag, in groups of five or six at a time, a few days apart, a week apart, all of them uncatalogued, and every single one after his trip to Rome.

I was at another one of Tekla’s parties when I finally confronted him, when I finally got to the end of the story. He was high in his way, I was high in mine.

“The EverCorps contract, Tekla.” I tried to wedge him into a corner, behind the bar. “We’re going to lose it if you don’t get it together.”

“I’m close. Listen, I think I’ve almost got it.”

“Tekla, they’re gone. Their souls, gone. You can’t do anything. What Gabe and Hilde do in other timelines, you can’t fix. You can’t save them. It’s up to them.”

He shook his head. “I found the only lines in which they do not die,” he said, khat juice spilling out of his mouth, a wad of it jammed in his cheek.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“The ones when I die first.”

I paused, took a long pull on my drink, tried to find another way into his head. “Listen,” I said, putting my drink down. “I looked at the logs. I know about the other timelines, the calls to your wife.”

Tekla nodded. “It was the only way I could stop her from killing herself,” he whispered, “the only way I could still tell her I loved her, even when she started cheating on me.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” My hands were up, almost in his face, shaking.

“Get what?”

“She wasn’t cheating on you,” I told him, pausing to let him figure it out. “All those calls she got were from you. All your other yous.”

Then my newsfeed started blinking red, right over my nose. Half the people at the party must have had the same settings, because we all saw it at once. Pope killed. Lone gunman arrested. Claims action on behalf of Jesuit schismatics. All of that because he wouldn’t pray to stop a suicide in some other timeline.

I would have quit. Tekla didn’t give me the chance. He left a note for me, hidden some place in the code I would see only if I had kept spying on him.

“I found the variable in the equation. I kept working on X and Y. Never thought to work on Z. Cancel me out, it solves. Every time. The more times I die, the more times she lives.”

The vid-chip messages came thicker from then on. Something downstream in our own timeline was giving more and more people access to what we’d been playing with over the last year. At first it was just the schismatics, the renegade Catholic priests, trying to do for all of us what Tekla’d tried on his wife. Time enough to save your soul. I only got hit once. A quiet voice I almost couldn’t recognize, talking to me about that last morning with Gabe, and the way his mom had looked when I found her dead on the floor. He told me I still had time. I never cut another line.








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Article © Giovanni Ruffini. All rights reserved.
Published on 2024-03-18
Image(s) are public domain.