My alarm goes off, but I just let it play. The persistent beeping is almost
pleasant to me now. It reminds me that I’m still alive, despite everything.
I don’t even know how old I am now. I should know, and I would if I were
younger, and I will once I’m younger again, but my mind is too hazy. That’s
when I know, though. That’s when I know it’s time to go back and start over.
My counterpart—the one you would be forgiven for calling the real Paige
Turner—is immortal too, but in a different way. She upgraded her substrate
with technology. Nanites repair damages, organs regrow themselves, or can
simply be replaced with no rejection problems. She can interface with other
technology, and even download information into her brain. I thought about
doing this, but it comes at a cost.
I was born a human, but when I was a child, I accidentally stepped through a
portal, and was accidentally granted special time powers by my soon-to-be
adoptive father. I learned that I could travel anywhere in time, as long as
I could see it, usually with a photograph. It has to be real; I couldn’t
simply ask someone to paint me a picture of what they think the year 40,000
might look like, and then jump into it. I can teleport by line-of-sight too,
but I find myself not doing that very often. I don’t really know why. The
point is that when my other self upgraded herself, she lost this power. It
made her immortal, yeah, but it also forced her to live through linear time,
unless she finds someone to take her to some other point in time. I couldn’t
live like that. I had a job to do, and it required the ability to go back
and forth between Earth and where I live now, Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This
is a beautiful world, though saying that is a bit self-aggrandizing, because
I am responsible for people’s ability to experience it. Nearly everything on
this planet was toxic to humans when I arrived. I spent decades modifying
the genetic structure of every living creature, so that would no longer be
the case. But in order to do this, I needed my own form of immortality.
During my travels, I came across a special object with temporal properties
of its own. It’s not the only way to stay youthful, or live forever, but
it’s the way I chose, and today is the day I go through it all again. If
something goes wrong, however, I have to make sure my partner is prepared to
move on without me. “Stop alarm.” I slide my legs across the bed, and let
them fall to the floor. I make a lot more noises when I move now; yet
another indicator that it’s time to use the stone. I struggle to get my
nightgown out from under my ass, and pull it off. Then I stand up and walk
over to the closet. My robe isn’t there. Did Ellie take it? Why would she do
that? I step into my slippers, and shuffle outside, down the hallway, and
into Ellie’s workspace. Man, why did I build this place so damn large? Oh,
that’s right, it’s designed for young whippersnappers.
“You have forgotten your clothes, Lady Trinity.” Ellie chose a different way
to stay young. She’s not completely immortal, like Paige is. She only drank
Youth water, so if someone goes after her with a spear, or something, she’s
in trouble. She started calling me Lady Trinity once I got old enough, and
says she’ll stop once I reyoungify myself.
“Did you take my robe?”
“Oh.” She grows solemn, even though it’s not a bad day. “Is it happening?”
“I’m not dying, Ellie. I just need my robe. It’ll be fine.”
“You switched rooms years ago, remember? You left some stuff in the old
one.”
“That’s right.” I remember now. I start shuffling that direction.
“Do you want help?”
I stop, and look over at the tank. I know she asked me a question, and I
even know what it was, but my mind is too degraded for me to reliably carry
on a continuous conversation. “He looks ready.”
Ellie walks over and gently caresses the tank. “I’m not sure how old he was
when he died, but yes, it’s about time for him to be reborn. We’ll do it
today, right after you get back. You’ll have the same birthday.”
I giggle. That’s not really how it works. The body in the tank is in a
completely different situation than me. He doesn’t need to be reyoungified.
In fact, the reason why it’s taken us forty years to bring him back is
because we wanted him to be older, just as he was when he was murdered. It
is indeed time to finally end the process, though. “Start the preparations.
I’ll only be gone a couple minutes. That’s how long it’ll take me to get to
my old room.”
“You have the stone?” she asks.
I open my hand, and show her.
“Be careful.”
“As always.” I get moving again, back to where I used to sleep. I don’t
recall why I switched rooms. I think it had something to do with our
associate. He’s not a good guy, and I was sick of living so close to him. Or
maybe he had nothing to do with it, and I just needed a change in scenery.
The automated cleaning systems have kept it in perfect condition, like I
never left. “Hey Thistle, open the closet, please.” I would normally just do
it manually, but I’m anxious to confirm my robe is in there. I could just
print a new one; it’s not a big deal, but every time I decide to reyoungify
myself, I’m worried something will kill me at the last second. It’s this
last day each time that stresses me out the most.
“Can I come with you?” I didn’t realize she was in here. She doesn’t like
her father any more than I do, so I shouldn’t be surprised this is one of
the places she likes to go to get away from him.
I sigh. “Go home, Abby.”
She stands up. “Please. I want to see it. I want to know what you look like
when you’re young.”
“And you’ll see me when I get back.”
“Can I at least be in the photo you take?”
I sigh again. “If you must.”
“Here. I’ll help you put that on.” She comes over, and places the robe over
my head. Then she tugs at it to make sure it’s set right. “So ominous. Why
do you do it again? I mean, it’s not like you don’t know who the people in
the other robes are.”
“A wink, or a twitch, or a scar under my eye,” I start to explain to her.
“It could give something away. I don’t want to know what my future looks
like. It’s best if we just stay robed up. Besides...” I pull the hood over
my head. “I have to wear the robe, because one thing I do know about my
future is that every version of me always does.”
I forgot my photo device, so Abigail lets me use hers. I’ll literally only
be gone a few seconds, from her perspective. “Say homestone!”
I hold up the camera, and smile. Then I snap the photo, squeeze the stone in
my hand, and disappear.
The portal my now-fathers brought me through was at Stonehenge on October 8,
1971. The homestone has allowed me to travel back to that very moment, and
in doing so, it also returned me to the age I was at the time. I’m back to
being a twelve-year-old girl, which means I’m smaller, and the robe doesn’t
fit as well. But that’s exactly what I want, because it obscures my face.
Several other people are standing around in identical robes. But they’re not
really other people. They’re me. They’re all me. I’ve done this many times
already, and I will do it again in another seventy years or so. I can see a
few of them from under my hood, but I don’t want to be able to count them.
There aren’t millions of us here, so I know I’m not destined to live
hundreds of millions of years. At some point, I give up my pursuit of
everlasting life. That could mean I will upgrade my substrate, just like
Paige!One. Or it could mean I manage to get my hands on immortality water.
But the most likely explanation is that I eventually die, and the cycle
finally ends.
This is the sixth time I’ve used the homestone. I don’t always let myself
get as old as I did this time. One time, I was poisoned by a turtle-like
animal on Bida, and had to jump back, even though I was only in my thirties.
In all those times, I have not yet become the version of myself who’s over
there, talking to The Delegator. Stonehenge is like his office. He’s
responsible for giving a certain type of time traveler called salmon their
assignments. I don’t come here on purpose. The homestone will always bring
me back to the last place I was before I traveled through time for the first
time. So I don’t know why this other Trinity feels the need to converse with
him, and I definitely don’t know what they’re talking about. Presumably,
none of the others do either. We’re watching them, even though we know the
whole point of the robes is to avoid altering the timeline by knowing too
much about it. One by one, they all look at their photo devices, and
disappear back to their future. I need to follow suit, and go back to 2300,
where I belong. I take one last glance at the talkative Trinity, then gaze
at the photograph Abigail and I took together. Just before I jump into it, I
see something that I have never been here long enough to notice. One of the
other Trinitys attacks the talkative one. I have no clue why, and I’m gone
before I can find out.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” Abigail says to me.
“I have? Oh my God! How long?”
“I’m kidding!” she assures me. “It’s been two seconds.”
“Don’t scare me like that. Jesus.” I pull the robe off, much quicker than I
could before, because I’m strong and youthful again. This makes her a little
uncomfortable. A naked old woman isn’t the most appealing thing to see, but
it’s a whole lot less problematic than the body I’m sporting now. “Sorry. I
should have prepared another set of clothes.” I grab the first outfit I
find, and throw it on. It’s a dress. I’m wearing a dress. I’m wearing a
dress that’s three sizes too big for me, and I’m about to go back to the
lab. I hate being quite this young. I’m always at my best when I’m in my
twenties. But the homestone wasn’t invented to make people immortal, and I’m
never given a choice of how old I become when I use it. It was designed to
let people go back to the beginning. Perhaps time travel screwed up their
lives, and this is the next best thing to an actual reset button. It doesn’t
let them undo everything that happened to them up until that point, but it
does give them a second chance to lead a better life, starting right where
they were when it all went wrong. In some cases, their loved ones won’t even
know they were gone, since no time will have passed for them. The
reyoungification feature is only there to help facilitate this ruse. I found
another use for it, though.
Abigail and I leave the room, and head back to the lab. Ellie is there,
running a diagnostics check on the machine. She’s further in the process
than she should be already.
“Ah, Turtle Toes, you’re here.” This is what Ellie calls Abigail. “Did it go
okay?” she asks me.
“Perfectly,” I answer. I choose not to tell her about the Trinity fight. If
I could forget it myself, I would. “I’m a little young for this mission,
though. Maybe we should wait.”
“His body will be too old by that time, and people will notice. I can do it
myself.”
“No, that wasn’t the plan. I was just an old woman, and I was too
cognitively impaired to think this through. This is wrong. We have to
extract him together.”
Ellie smiles at me, and leans down to get on my level, which I just kind of
find insulting, because I’m not really only twelve. “There’s something I
never told you.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“I’m, like, nine hundred years older than you.” She converts the smile into
a smirk, activates the time chamber, and disappears into it before I can
stop her.
