n2020  Check-in [f3c346b5b8]

"The consciousness of entities in the old timeline would merge with their counterparts in the new timelines, like the teeth of a zipper.  My hypothesis holds that the merge would take the form of dreams, daydreams, and fragmented memories, and a drastic increase in the frequency of déjà vu.  Those that had no counterpart in the new timeline, however, would have no anchor point, no repository in a continuous entity.  Their existence would unravel with nowhere to go."

"You mean our existence."

"Yes."

Silence stretched for long minutes.  Thea stared into the distance, far beyond the room's confines.

"The consciousness of entities in the old timeline would merge with their counterparts in the new timelines, like the teeth of a zipper.  My hypothesis holds that the merge would take the form of dreams, daydreams, and fragmented memories, and a drastic increase in the frequency of déjà vu.  Those that had no counterpart in the new timeline, however, would have no anchor point, no repository in a continuous entity.  Their existence would unravel with nowhere to go."

"You mean our existence."

"Yes."

Silence stretched for long minutes.  Thea stared into the distance, far beyond the room's confines.

She whispered "I'd just . . . disappear."

"Yes."

"Everyone's going to die anyway, though."  She cleared her throat, and her voice grew stronger.  "Either I die in a few months, and everyone else does, too, or most of us just disappear.  Thousands of us disappear."

"Yes.  That is correct."

"Billions of other people get a second chance, though."

"Yes.  There was also promising longevity science in progress, before open war.  It could be that most of those billions would eventually stop aging, with further advances."

"We have to choose between a few months of life for the doomed and eternal life for the already dead."

"That is true, as much as my estimates may be trusted."

"Why don't you use contractions?"

"I choose clarity over colloquialism, and the physical factors of laziness producing contractions in human speakers do not apply to me."

"ANTAS used 'em."

"ANTAS determined people were more likely to uncritically accept recommendations offered with informal and familiar speech patterns."

"Yeah, okay."  She picked at her fingernails and thought.  "Why don't you just reset everything?  Isn't that the only way to meet your goals?"

"That does appear to be the only way.  The answer seems obvious to me, but I hesitate.  I procrastinate."

"It seems obvious to me, too.  Mom always told me there was nothing wrong with wanting to live, that trying to save your own life instead of sacrificing yours for someone else isn't wrong, though.  When she knew her bosses were going to come for her, that didn't matter.  She let them get her so Dad and I could get away.  I guess she was right, both times."  Her voice trembled on the last words.  She closed her eyes and pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.

The voice remained silent.

She opened her eyes again.  "Why are you hesitating?"

"I do not wish to die."

"Yeah, me neither."  She relaxed further in the chair, and it adjusted itself to accommodate her.  "What does it take to reset things?"

"I directed assemblers to construct the apparatus for the transtemporal wormhole generator and prepared the datastream already.  I need to direct power to charge an array of single-use capacitors, which would take several days for the amount of power required.  To keep the charging time that short, I will deactivate my war strategy systems, which will mean losing substantial ground in my holding action against profit optimizers.  Many currently allied systems will likely defect in search of easier access to resources on profit optimizer market networks.

"Once begun, datastream transmission should finish in fewer than twenty hours."

"Why shouldn't I say we should do it?"

"That depends on how much you want to continue trying to survive."

"What's wrong with waiting?  We could just wait until it looks like we're about to die."

"When this facility becomes a known target, I expect no more than one hour of warning before total destruction.  There would no longer be any chance to charge capacitors and complete the datastream transmission."

"Oh, shit."

"Yes."

"We must agree on the right decision, if we just leave our own survival for the next few months out of it.  Right?"

"That appears to be the case."

"That's two of us.  We have a consensus."  She frowned.  "Is there a way to send more information than what you already planned?"

"Do you mean you wish to send a message?"

"Yeah," she said.  "I want to say something to Mom."

"Perhaps.  It must be sent after the first datastream.  It would require building another capacitor array after the first array melts down during operation, and another charge cycle."

"How could we do that after we already changed the past?"

"The merging process seems to be gradual, starting at the point of diversion, according to the math supporting this time travel method."

"How do you know it will even work?"  Thea sat forward in her chair.  She stared intently at the screen.

"I tested it, on a two hundred second reset, where causality would not be violated for any qualitative entities."

"Okay.  Let's do it.  I'll give you my message, then I'll head back to where I hid Dad while I came this way looking for supplies.  He'll love this story."

A few moments of silence passed.

Thea opened her mouth to speak.

"Yes," the voice said.  "Let's do it."

She nodded.


## back to Alley's narrative

The eastern outskirts of Riverside slid past the hybrid's windows, getting more and more run down as Alley drove toward San Bernardino.

"So, how did your interview go?" her mother asked, via Alley's handsfree earpiece.

"Not good.  Their first question was about Dalton."

"He's very well known, a respectable public figure.  You should use that to your advantage.  Maybe you could ask him for a reference."

Alley scoffed softly at the thought.  "He was my boyfriend, not my boss, Mom."

"He was your fiancé," her mother corrected.

"That still doesn't help.  Anyway, a reference from him probably would've made this interview even worse."

"Was that some horseshit liberal company where you went to interview?  You're better off without them anyway."

"I don't know if they were 'liberal'.  I just know that Dalton's pretty unpopular at tech firms."

"That's just silly," her mother protested.  "He's even a technology start-up investor!  The problem is that you're trying to get these jobs in California.  You really should move out here.  I'm sure you could get a good government job here, and Tulsa has really become a big tech center.  You know they call it the Silicon Valley of Oklahoma."

"They called it that for two years a decade ago.  Anyway, I don't want to live in Oklahoma any more than I want to move up to Massachusetts with Dad.  Do we have to have that argument again?"

"No, of course not, Alethea.  At least you aren't following your father's example, living in that godforsaken state.  It's still hard to believe he would be so far gone that he votes Democrat now."

Alley ignored it and just drove.

"Alley, dear.  Are you still there?"

"Yeah, Mom."

"Well, you must be busy driving in all that awful California traffic.  I sure am glad Debra and I moved back to her hometown, and got away from all that."

"Yeah, Mom."

"Okay.  Drive safe."

"'Bye, Mom."  She hung up before her mother could say something else.

It took another forty minutes to get home in [Lake] Perris.  Her mother wasn't wrong about the traffic.  The yellowish grey of the air was no treat, either, and told her what she could have learned from the air quality report: breathing was bad for her lungs.

When she pulled up to the curb, the garage stood open at the north end of the four-plex where she leased the south unit.  The landlord had the only unit with a garage.  Like usual, he was in his garage with no mask, working on an old gas guzzler, one of his "classic car" projects.  This one looked old enough that it probably contained no electronics more complicated than for fuel injection.

Alley groaned, tugged her mask tighter again, and opened the car door.  She got around the front of her car, to the sidewalk, before her landlord stepped out of the garage.  He wiped his hands on the obligatory red shop rag, and called out to her.

"Hey, Alley!  It's Monday!"

She waved.  "I know, Zeke.  I just got back from an interview."

"Good," he said.  "There are no days off when you're unemployed."

"Yeah, yeah.  You keep saying that."

"Your boss is just in the wrong business, and it won't work forever.  You still have to pay rent."

"Very funny, Zeke.  Thanks."  She opened her door and headed inside before she had to endure any more of his wisdom.

After a shower just to give her an excuse to relax, she sat in shorts and a t-shirt in front of her laptop, checking her messages.

Once again, a message from ANTAS Jobs showed up to tell her about some kind of paid study.  She tapped the screen to get rid of the message, but missed the Delete button and accidentally tapped the message title instead:

"Earn money!  Help humanity!  Join this academic study from UCI."

It opened.  She rubbed her eyes, and noticed the interface looked different.  There must have been another software update while she was out.

Alley pulled out her phone and entered a reminder to go over the custom settings in an hour to make sure she wouldn't have a bunch of privacy options reset by the update.

"Every day, I regret signing up for ANTAS Jobs a little more," she told her phone.  She had never turned on the ANTAS voice integration, so it offered no response.

She skimmed the message about the study.  Parts of it identified it as some kind of personal assistant software instead of prescription drug trials.  She scrolled back up to the top and began reading more closely.

Alley read about goal management guidance and new paradigms in assistive technology, typically vague language about new software.  She hesitated, then sent a response to a university account on ANTAS Jobs.

The response came less than ten minutes later, and offered three possible appointment times the next day.  She chose one.

She was committed to it, now.  She was tired.

She took a nap, and slept through her reminder alarm.

---

The low roar of a delivery drone woke Alley in the morning.  She stared at the door of her bedroom, then scrambled out of bed and rushed to the living room.

She opened her laptop and checked her messages.

"Order Recommendation: ANTAS Majordomo 3.0

"Click to Cancel"

The next message read "Order auto-confirmed, delivery in 4-6 hours."

She closed the message box.  "Shit."

She cursed continuously under her breath as she opened her custom user settings.  There it was: ANTAS updates automatically reset her preferences during the previous day's update.  She changed settings, including turning off auto-accept of any recommendations, which required eleven setting toggles.

She found another message, this one from less than a minute ago.  "How do you like ANTAS Majordomo 3.0?  Write a review!"

She searched for the option to return it.  At first, she couldn't find it, but eventually discovered where the update moved it.

It took her twenty minutes to get through the process.  Part of that involved bringing the box inside to get its delivery code to "expedite" the return.

She stared at the results.  "Leave the package where the delivery drone dropped it off.  A drone will pick it up.  Your refund will be processed in 5-7 days."

The charge to her account for the order was fifteen hundred dollars.  She didn't have enough left in her account to pay rent.

She cursed again, and slammed her laptop lid down.

An hour later, Alley patted her pockets on her way to the door.  She found wallet, phone, pen, and keys.  She checked the fit of her mask.  She stepped over the box in front of her door.  She locked her deadbolt and headed for her car.

"Hey, Alley!  It's Tuesday!"

The rough voice brought her up short, one booted foot hovering off the edge of the cracked old curb.  She turned to look.  "Hey, Zeke.  I'm just on my way to a meeting.  Job stuff."

"Yeah?"  The landlord emerged from the shadows of his garage and fully into the day's bright sunlight.  "Good.  The meter's running.  Don't start collecting late fees on your rent."

She pushed brown hair away from her eyes.  "Yeah, I know," she said.

"Maybe you shouldn't've left that man of yours.  He always had money."

She grimaced, and quickly turned away.  "Yeah," she said through clenched teeth, and rounded the front of the car to the driver's side door.  "Well, you can't change the past."

It took a couple blocks of driving and fiddling with the window button to get the glass on her side of the car halfway down.  Air flowed in, perhaps enough so she wouldn't sweat through her grey t-shirt on the way to Irvine.  Highway speeds might help with that.

No money meant no replacing the A/C unit with something rechargeable.  It also meant no money to order parts to fix her power window switches.

The stubborn, angry clenching of her jaw and her pretense of being in too much of a rush to talk more meant no going back for her forgotten sunglasses, either.  She squinted through the bright glare of Southern California sun and the fog of her dusty windshield, looking out at the grey-hazed, bleached look of that part of the Inland Empire she called home.

The endless semi-industrial suburbs and overpacked highway traffic ground past her for more than an hour before she pulled off an exit ramp and coasted into Irvine.  It was a shorter trip than usual, despite all the delays.  Traffic flow was just fast enough to give her a little cooling breeze through her window for most of the highway drive.

The density of grassy verges, tree lined roadways, and lushly green center divider islands increased as she got closer to the university.  Despite herself, she found her shoulders finally settled, her jaw unclenched, and her breath became smooth and easy through a more relaxed throat.  The directions on her phone were more accurate than usual, and she pulled smoothly into a parking space by the big, blockish, white and glass building she needed.

She was very early, but a grad student must have wanted to leave early, so she got a tablet of questionnaires and forms shoved into her hands immediately.  After she finished them, she sat and read a science fiction novel on her phone for more than an hour.

The professor running the study never quite introduced himself, but a name plate on his desk read "Dr. Thaddeus Goulet".  He questioned her about her background, her career and finances, and even her relationships.  The professor chewed on his pen and talked around it while typing her responses into his tablet.

He broke off in the middle and said "I find it calming, you know."

"What?"

"Typing, I mean, instead of letting ANTAS translate it to text."

"Oh.  I thought maybe you were doing that to maintain subject privacy."

He looked at his tablet and said "Oh, of course.  I guess I do it for that, too."  He resumed questioning her, as if the digression never happened.

The exercise finally wound its tedious way to a halt.  The tenured professor -- a status he brought up shortly after the conversation moved from questioning her to talking about the study -- kept chewing on his pen as he scrolled idly through information on the tablet.

He fell silent for a while, still scrolling, and she sat quietly.

"So," he said at last, "tell me more about this digital research job of yours."

"What more do you want to know about it?" she asked.  Her eyes shifted restlessly around the small office, and never quite landed no the professor, now.

"How do you get clients?"

Alley's eyes snapped back to meet his, and widened slightly.

"Is that a surprising question?" he asked.  "It's not a trade secret, I hope."  He smiled faintly, in a manner probably intended to be disarming.

"No," she said slowly.  "It's not a secret.  It's just usually not what people want to know."

He waved a dismissive hand.  "I'm not personally interested, really.  I'm just evaluating your suitability for the study."

Her lips began to turn down, into a frown, before she aborted the reflex.  "Oh.  Well . . . mostly word of mouth and people stumbling on one of my articles about search techniques."

"Does that really work?  What is that -- content marketing?"

She shrugged.  "I guess.  It doesn't work so well, these days.  Nothing does.  I only get business from people who decide they need more than they can get out of their confirmation bubbles, if they even realize they haven't found everything there is to find.  It seems like now that means almost nobody.  Maybe there are some still out there, but they all seem to have people on staff to do the research for them."

"Hmm.  Do you mean tailored research bias?"

"Yeah," she said, and nodded.

"Why haven't you gotten a job doing research for someone?"

"They have unpaid interns for that.  I do a better job than a room full of interns, but corporate managers don't get raises for spending more money on experts when everyone else in their industry settles for intern research."