Fervor: Swingin’ on the Flippity-flop (Part VII)

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I’m about to get myself as far from the temple as I can when I remember that I never did send that time pigeon to my past self. I’m meant to summon one to me using a special phrase, spoken over a podium, and surely this place has one. I sneak in the building, fearful that a mormon is about to catch me. I’m not worried they’ll kick me out for trespassing; I’m worried they’ll try to convert me. I saw the Book of Mormon, I know how this works. I see several people walking the halls as I’m slinking around, and a few of them notice me, but none of them bothers me, which is a great relief. I make my way to the sanctuary, or whatever it is they call their worship space. Thank Lord Xenu no one’s in here, because I’m about to do something strange.

I stand at the podium, but take a moment to recall the words that Laura taught me. I take one more look around, before repeating the line, “if he or she does their schoolwork seriously; does well, takes school.” A pigeon appears literally out of nowhere, and waits patiently for me on the podium. I remove the coffee receipt from my pocket, and prepare to write a note to myself. I can’t remember exactly what I read before, but that’s probably for the best. It’ll be more natural if I just write what I feel. Paige, take a photo of the wall outside of the cell. There, that’s both cryptic and clear. I tie the note to the pigeon’s leg, and shove it into the air. It disappears through a portal.

I hear the sound of papers falling to the floor, and look over to see a man wearing a white button-up shirt and black tie, staring at me in awe. He falls to his knees. “It’s a miracle,” he exclaims. “You have returned as proof.”

I walk down the steps, and approach him, and he bows his head. “Stand, my child.”

He stands up, and regards me with reverence and admiration. “Are you a new prophet?”

“Let me see your phone.”

“My phone?”

“Yes, your phone.” I’m using a gliding voice to impersonate this holy creature he believes I am. “Did you take any photographs earlier today?”

“I...I did. You know this.”

Closed time loops are confusing and dangerous things, but if the man says he’s seen me, then I better go prove him right. I have him open his camera roll, and show me the latest one. “Why did you take a picture of a stump?”

“The workers were meant to remove the whole tree,” he answers. “I was planning to send it as proof that they did not complete the job.”

I make my eyes burn, and travel into the photograph, back in time a few hours. I’m standing on the trunk, arms outstretched like a welcoming messiah. The man from the future drops his arms down in shock. “How did you do that?”

“You will drive me downtown,” I order him.

He has so many questions for me, but I just tell him that he will understand everything when he is ready. I make him buy me a burner phone, then take me back to J.U. Mithra Labs, which has not yet slid back to the 15th century. Someone’s left a window on the second floor in full view, and if I were more like this guy, I would pray that no one was in that room. “You’ve been trained how to spread the good word?” I ask him as I take a quick photo of the window.

He stutters a bit. “Uh...yes, I’ve memorized thirty percent—”

“I don’t care about that. Just go in there and try to get whoever you see to accept Jesus Christ into their hearts, or whatever. Be as loud as you can. We want the whole building coming down to hear what you have to say.”

“Yes, prophet, he says. Then he eagerly leaves the car, not even asking what I’m going to do.

I take one last look at the window, only to see myself up there, giving me a salute. “This is going to have to take some getting used to. First order of business once this is all finished is finding a way to store in one place every single photo that has ever been taken, or will be taken, in the history of mankind, so I can go when and wherever I want withing running into myself. Shouldn’t be too hard.

As the mormon—which I think he probably doesn’t want me to call him—is providing a nice distraction, I lean against the wall, and jump through the photo I took moments ago. I then step over to the window, and give Past!Me a salute. Then I hide out there for the rest of day. Just before the building goes back in time, I take one last photo of a strip of shops in the distance.

I’m about to go down and free my friends from the basement hock, but then I remember that this did not happen in the original history. I have to preserve the timeline as much as possible. In fact, I may not be able to change the past at all, no matter what I do. Maybe my life has all been written, and I’m just fulfilling my destiny, with free will being nothing more than an illusion. Armed with these deep existential ponderances, I wait out there for another couple hours, surprised with every passing minute that I go unnoticed. But then someone comes in.

It’s a security guard, but not the same one. He sizes me up real quick, then hands me his electroprojectile gun.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Protect yourself,” he says, as if I should already know.

“Why would you help me?”

He takes a mobile device from his pocket, and shows it to me. “This is live security feed from the basement. There are your friends, and here you are on the outside of the bars. Don’t worry, I’ll erase this, but you might want to get back down and free them soon. I’ll escort you down there.”

“Again, why are you helping me?” I ask him as I’m following.

“I had a partner once; Kolby Morse. He went to work for the good guys, and I chose the bad guys.”

“It sounds like you regret it,” I say once we’ve reached the bottom of the stairs.

He shakes his head, and points to a door on the other side of the hallway. “I don’t at all. I’m deep undercover.”

People keep helping me, as if they have foreknowledge of my future. The mormon, I guess, actually did have such knowledge, but who is this guy? And who was the man who gave me the telescope picture? I don’t have much time to think about it. I hear the first guard shout, “hey!” to a past version of me. As I’m opening the door, I see myself fall drop my phone, and crumple to the floor. Then I pixelate and disappear, on my way back to 1972. The guard is staring at me in shock, so before he has time to figure out what to do, I raise the gun, and shoot him in the chest, to give him a taste of his own medicine. I then notice a tiny little screen on the back of the weapon, and discover that there are two kinds of projectiles. I switch it to the tranquilizer darts, so I can put him down without him causing any more problems for awhile.

“It’s been ages for me,” I say to my friends as I’m removing keys from the guard’s belt. You’ll never guess where I’ve been.”

“Well, we’ve just been here,” Laura says, “swingin’ on the flippity-flop.”

“Doing what on the what?” I ask.

“Never mind.”

I unlock the gate for them after only a few tries. Why are they still using physical keys when everyone has a perfectly good phone? “Come on. I took a picture of the future, so we can all get out of here.” I open the photo of downtown Independence, and hold it up in front of us, like I’m taking a selfie.

“Wait,” Laura stops me. “This might not work for us.”

“Yeah,” Samwise agrees. “The powers that be have a plan, and they may not let us out of our time period, until it’s...time.”

“You have to promise,” Laura says out of concern. “Promise that you won’t come back for us if it doesn’t work. We belong here.”

“It’ll work, so we won’t have to worry about it,” I say dismissively, and raise my arm again.

“Just promise,” Samwise insisted.

“I promise. Now let’s go before they send someone else.”

They were totally right. Despite the fact that Laura and Samwise were between me and Hilde, the latter is the only one who manages to come through with me. I wasn’t even touching her at the time. The evil group of unseen overseers have too much control over time and space. After we take of this Jesimula Utkin problem, I intend to go after them next.

“You’re back,” the mormon boy declares. Goddamn, is this guy in every one of my pictures, or what? “Did I do well?”

“You did it perfectly,” I say in my prophet voice. “Now do one more thing for me.”

“Anything, mistress,” the creeper says.

“Take off that outfit...not literally” I cry as he immediately starts trying to remove his clothes.

“I just mean stop being a mormon, because the religion is total garbage.”

“What should I believe instead?”

“There’s only one real higher power in the whole universe,” I announce, starting to drop my persona.

“And what is that?” he asks.

“Yeah, what is it?” Hilde asks.

I snap a pic of the empty lot in the distance where the laboratory once stood. “Time.” Hilde and I look at the photo, and teleport back to the parking lot, where our friends are standing around. They look lost and confused. “It’s a long story,” I say to them. “But we’re back, and we have some pretty good intel.”

“Story?” Leona asks.

“Intel?” Slipstream asks.

“Who are you people?” Hogarth asks.

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Microstory 910: Croissants and Mandarin Oranges

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This is a funny one, because we all have our favorite foods, but we don’t all have the same ones. Up until now, my entries have been conceptually applicable to anyone, or everyone. Even my Stargate story was about how important fiction is to me, and every nonsociopath has something like that. This one is just about my favorite foods, and how my tastes have changed over time. I was eating a croissant sandwich a couple weeks ago when I realized it’s probably my favorite food of all. I like most types of bread, but this one is the best. That same sandwich made me sick yesterday, yet I had one at a different place for lunch not two hours prior to writing this. I also have to consider mandarin oranges as my favorite fruit. It’s less sour than other citrus, and softer, so it’s easier to eat. I guess that’s a big thing for me. I tend to stay away from difficult foods, because no food is good enough to be worth exerting the calories you gain from consuming it. Aside from these two things, I’m also known for being a huge fan of chocolate. I keep a lot of protein bars in my diet, and nearly all of them include some form of chocolate. I’m also a famous chicken-eater, but that won’t always be the case, because I will, at some point in the future, become vegetarian. Further in the future, we’ll synthesize food in 3D printers, and we’ll eat bars packed with every daily nutrient the average human being requires, accompanied by little tabs that you place on your tongue to alter flavor as desired. Further in the future, though, the majority of us will likely be nonorganic; at least I will. We will accumulate energy from our environment, like solar and wind power, and more exotic forms of energy generation and storage, that we can’t even begin to explain nowadays. I look forward to this future, because as much as I love the sensation of eating croissants and mandarin oranges, nothing compares to the satisfaction of being able to subsist without them. Satisfunction; a new word for your personal dictionary. Excuse me while I take a break from writing to put mandarin oranges back on my monthly grocery list.

Microstory 909: The Benefits of Sleep

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I actually don’t like sleep, and I already talked about the importance of it for my Stepwisdom series, so I’m not going to go over all that again. I’m just going to say that I have a newfound appreciation for a good night’s rest. I recently got a puppy. Her name is Daisy Quake. She’s an English Coonhound, and a little rascal. We picked her up when she was only six weeks old, which may have been a bit too young. She immediately took to her new family, and didn’t seem too upset about leaving her mother and siblings. She did have trouble sleeping, though. I was told that she would need to go out to do her business as often as every hour. This wasn’t going to be great, but I could have handled it. Unfortunately, it was a lot more complicated than that. She would cry as soon as we put her in her kennel, which was, admittedly, too large for her. Wild canines live in dens, not mansions. She needed something large enough for her to turn around, but no larger. There was no way of knowing why she was crying. She could have needed to go out, she could have already made a mess, or she could have just wanted lovies. The only thing I could do was put her in the bed with me, even though I never thought I would be that kind of person, because animals are dirty. Those first few weeks felt like hell. As much as I loved her, she was a massive handful, no more so than when I was trying to sleep. Now that she’s a few weeks older, she can usually make it through the night— far sooner than the websites predicted she would. I’m still losing sleep, though, because she’s too young and small to survive outside alone, what with the foxes and coyotes, and she sometimes drinks too much before bed. I’m also worried about her, which makes it hard to fall asleep, which is a problem any source of stress can cause. It’s good for me, nonetheless. At FedEx, I’d spend hours alone in the tower; my only hope of a bathroom break coming if I so conspicuously announced it on the radio. Just as that taught me to hold my own bladder, my dog’s inability to do so has taught me to survive on less sleep. Of course, I’ve been sleep deprived before, but not like this. This is chronic, and as unhealthy as it is, I think it’s making me a more flexible person.

Microstory 908: Educational YouTube Videos

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The internet is a wonderful place, and video sharing sites are some of the best examples of this. And by sites, I really just mean the one site, because if it’s not on YouTube, then does it even exist? I suppose Twitch is the one exception to this rule. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook don’t count, because they’re designed to be watched as they’re posted, then quickly forgotten about, and not searched for later. While the internet in general has done more for public education than a thousand Horace Manns stacked on top of each other, there are three major sources of knowledge. Two of them are owned by Google, and people often access the third through a generic Google search. YouTube has allowed people to share memories and art with each other. It has supported short films, memorable clips, and an entirely new form of performance art. While they would obviously not exist without their precursors, nothing in the history of entertainment resembles the kind of videos YouTubers make. Not everything on the site is good (e.g. racist propaganda, kissing pranks, and Logan Paul), but I wanted to talk about something amazing. You can learn nearly anything from a good YouTube video. For every prank show clone, there’s a channel dedicated to education and enrichment. You can prop your tablet on the sink, and follow a tutorial for how to unclog the drain. You can study evolutionary biology on a whim. You can try your feet at dancing without embarrassing yourself in front of others. I follow a few good channels myself, like It’s Okay to Be Smart, and Crash Course. There are others that I find myself watching, like Vox, and Seeker. No longer is education limited to the elite, or geographically fortunate. You don’t have to have hardly any money to become an expert in your chosen field, relegating formal degrees to nothing more than tangible proof for employers. There are still some things that don’t work well with this format; specifically anything that requires a lot of hands-on work, like medicine, or aircraft operation. But you can still get an introduction to these concept with a few ten-minute videos, and I consider that a phenomenal achievement in human innovation. If you’ve ever wanted to learn something, but never thought you had the resources or time to, try YouTube. I’m working off a whole list.

Microstory 907: Stargate Franchise

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Circa 2006, I went to one of my illegal television streaming websites, which I was just getting into, and tried to start watching Stargate SG-1. Well, the premiere bored be too much, and I gave up halfway through. Four years later, as I was ending my tenure at the University of Kansas, I noticed that Hulu had every episode up for free. Now for you kiddos out there, this was before Hulu was a subscription service. The point of it was to provide a single source for recent primetime television series, from three of the four major networks. For free. It was only later that content providers started expecting people to pay hundreds of dollars for cable, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. Anyway, in 2010, I had but 42 days before all 214 episodes Stargate SG-1 were to expire from the old Hulu. I tried the first episode again, and liked it so much that I watched the next episode right away. Then I opened up my Google Calendar, and made up a schedule for how quickly I would need to watch them in order to catch each one before I lost them all. I surpassed my quota, and finished every episode with more than a enough time. Hulu later decided to extend their deal with MGM, which would have been nice to know ahead of time. After that was done, I moved on to Stargate: Atlantis, and—armed with a three-month Netflix subscription as a graduation present from my sister—I was able to watch the first half of the first season of the third series, SGU Stargate Universe, on DVD. I was then able to watch a season and a half of SGU in realtime before it too was cancelled, and we were all left Stargateless. As I recently explained, I don’t read as much as you would expect from a writer. What I do is watch a lot of TV and movies, and that is where I get my inspiration. I don’t need a books to tell me how form sentence or congratulate a verb. I just need to know how to tell a good story, and any good story gets me that. Hell, bad stories give me that too; they teach me what not to do, which is just as important. I remember thinking Battlestar Galactica was the best space opera in existence, until I discovered the Stargate franchise. Whenever I feel down, I can throw on an episode of Stargate. It has opened me up to so many ideas about physics, astrophysics, engineering, anthropology, sociology, psychology, technology, and more. I’m a better writer for having watched the series, and this website wouldn’t exist without it, because my view of the world was so limited before. Now they’re talking about a fourth show to reboot the canon (Infinity and Origins don’t count) and I am all for it. Here’s hoping it becomes more than just talk. Get to the gate.

Microstory 906: Vertical Farming

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Something that some people may not know is that farming is one of the most destructive forces against nature. It requires a massive amount of land just to feed a few consumers. We tend to think of deforestation being caused by evil corporations forcing their way into rainforests for logging. And to be sure, that’s true, but what many don’t realize is how many trees, and how much wildlife has to be cleared out for agriculture. While it allowed our ancestors to settle down, and start building civilization, agriculture has also destroyed animals’ homes, and harmed the ecosystem, almost irreparably. People love to talk about these new age food ideas. They think organic foods are better, not knowing that there is no legal definition for the word, and anyone can use it as they wish. They promote almond milk over dairy, but almonds require an astonishing amount of water to grow. Don’t believe me? Look it up. A single almonds requires more than four litres. They hate genetically modified organisms, despite the fact that the majority of them don’t actually know what that means. They’ve just been indoctrinated into distrusting anything that goes by an acronym. So what’s the answer to all these problems? GMOs, for one. Done right, GMOs are safer, healthier, and environmentally friendly. Non-nutritious components can be removed, and more nutrients can be added. They can be modified to grow on less water and less sunlight, all the while being more resistant to pests. Doesn’t that sound better? Besides that, though, there’s also always the title of this microstory: vertical farming. A high volume of produce can be cultivated in only a few square meters of land. Hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponics, and related methods have the potential to feed billions of people. They do so with less water, limited fertilizer, and zero pesticides. Here’s the thing, plants need light to survive, but they don’t much care where that light is coming from. Yes, grow lights require electricity, but that’s just one more reason for us to invest in renewable energy sources. Vertical Farming is capable of literally solving world hunger. Virtually any crop can be grown in any environment, because everything will be done inside. There are some limitations, of course. Rooted vegetables, like carrots and potatoes, don’t grow well using these techniques, because they need to dig deep. But just because we can’t use vertical farming to grow everything, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it to grow anything. That rewilding I told you we will do in the future is made possible by this, along with clean meat, which I’ll discuss further in a few weeks. That’s reason enough to support the effort. But if nothing else, recognize that vertical farming allows everyone to enjoy fresh locally grown food, regardless of where they live.

The Advancement of Leona Matic: September 15, 2192

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As instructed, they didn’t approach any of the people giving each other butterfly signals in 2191. First of all, they didn’t know what it meant. It seemed shady, but it could also be some strange new form of greeting that they weren’t privy to since they only existed one day out of the year. They couldn’t even be sure if the people were trying to say butterfly at all. To communicate the word in sign language, one was meant to wave their hands, as the flapping of wings, which none of them was doing. Vitalie, of course, was entirely convinced that this was some underground resistance movement, presently working against the Arianrhod occupation. They should have done better at keeping themselves informed about the events they missed during their interim years, on the arc, and elsewhere. If any rebels attempted to fight back sometime in the past, they definitely lost, and Ulinthra would have buried it. Now they had too little intelligence to go on. That night, they got together to discuss how they were going to proceed, ultimately deciding to wait until the next year, so they could have a fresh start.

“All right,” Leona began near the end of their latest breakfast meetings. “Brooke, you’re sure these heart trackers aren’t also listening devices.”

“I’m certain,” Brooke answered with a formal nod.

“Then on to Vitalie.”

“On to me?”

“I know your power doesn’t work with Ulinthra, and we think she has some time power blocker, but we’ve not until now had reason to use it elsewhere.”

“We should have tested it at some point,” Ecrin said.

“I’ve tested it,” Vitalie said, as if it were obvious. “I can go anywhere on Earth. It’s not easy, because I think that blocker she uses has minimal effect on me no matter what, but like you said, there was nothing to see.”

“In that case, you think you could stomach a trip to one of the common areas, like a shopping mall, or restaurant?” Leona asked.

“I could,” Vitalie said.

“Do you think you could take one of us with you?”

“I could take both,” Vitalie answered. She looked at Brooke with guilt. “Sorry, I don’t think I could take you.”

“I’m used to it,” Brooke said, not feeling left out.

“Then let’s go back,” Leona said, “and find someone giving what we think is a butterfly sign—”

They were suddenly in the marketplace.

“I didn’t mean right away,” Leona said.

Vitalie shrugged. “No use in waiting.” She took off her shirt, and started swinging it around like a lasso. “We’re invisible, by the way!” she shouted.

“Are our bodies just slumped in our chairs, back at the unit?” Ecrin questioned.

Vitalie pointed at her. “Uh, you fell to the floor. Don’t worry, you’re not hurt, and Brooke is carrying you to the couch.”

“Do you maintain a presence in both locations simultaneously?” Leona asked out of scientific curiosity.

“It’s like I’m wearing bifocals. I just adjust my focus to one or the other. It takes less than a second, and I can always kind of see both at the same time. I don’t think you can do that, though.”

Leona nodded understandingly. “Let’s walk around while we’re invisible. Keep your shirts on, though.”

“They’re not real shirts, Leona,” Vitalie needlessly reminded her.

“Look for a butterfly,” Leona continued. “Call out when you see it.”

It was a half hour before Ecrin saw two people give each other the secret sign. They seemed to be doing it a lot less than they did yesterday. A lot can happen in a year, and there was no way of knowing what these people had been through. Vitalie allowed the man and woman to see them, but no one else, so they could have a secret conversation.

“What does it mean when you do that?” Leona asked of them, trying to be careful about broaching the subject.

“When I do what?” the man asked.

Leona mimicked the movement. “When you interlock your thumbs like that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tried to leave, but Vitalie teleported Ecrin’s image right in front of them. “How did you do that?”

“You first,” Ecrin said.

He looked around in paranoia. “Not here.”

Ecrin swept her hand downwards, like a model at a game show. “Lead the way.”

“What are you?” the man asked after leading them to an empty storage room.

“We can’t be here physically,” Vitalie explained. “Ulinthra planted tracking devices on our hearts, so we have astrally project to have this conversation.”

Someone in the early 21st century would have needed that term explained to them, but enough science fiction had become science fact since then. While astral projection was not something other people could do, it was a concept that audiences these days would find easier to grasp. “Who is Ulinthra?”

“That’s Arianrhod’s real name,” Leona said.

His and the woman’s eyes widened as they looked at each other. “How do you know this? Do you use your...ghost powers to spy on her?”

“We go way back,” Leona replied. She looked to the other two, hesitating. But the cat was out of the bag, and they needed allies. “We’re time travelers, and so is she. If you’ve ever tried to do something against her, there’s a reason she always wins. She’s already been through it.”

He lifted his chin to think this over, not sure if he believed it, but wanting to entertain the possibility. “Then we have to be unpredictable.”

Vitalie shook her head. “She’s already lived through this day. Every time you try to be unpredictable, you could just be making the same unpredictable choice you did in the first timeline.” She surrounded the word in airquotes.

“I assume you don’t use real names,” Ecrin said, briefly changing the subject, and recalling her time in the IAC, where everyone had a callsign. “What are your designations?”

“I’m Gatekeeper,” the man said.

“Holly Blue,” the woman finally spoke.

“Are those butterflies?” Vitalie asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We always suspected Arianrhod to be a fake name,” the woman now said enough for it to be clear she had an Irish accent. “It’s the name of a Celtic goddess, and means silver wheel. Who breaks the butterfly upon the wheel?”

“No one,” Leona understood. “Not if the butterflies fight back.”

“Assuming we believe you about the time travel thing,” Gatekeeper tried to begin, but was stopped when Vitalie walked right through the wall, and soon thereafter appeared through the other wall. “Okay, that’s pretty convincing, unless we’re having the same delusion.” He looked to Holly Blue, who indicated that she had seen it too. “You mean to tell me Arianrhod can go back in time, but only one day?”

“It’s not that she can do it,” Leona explained. “It’s that she has to. She experiences every day twice. And only twice. She can’t control it.”

“Well, what hope would we have?”

Vitalie then started in on the explanation of what they were doing with the penny; how their only hope of changing the timeline was by using Ulinthra.

The two revolutionaries understood the logic, and recognized the flaws. “What did you flip today?” they asked.

“We didn’t flip today,” Leona replied. “Our biggest problem now is that we don’t know what we can do against her. And we’re afraid of what she’ll do in retaliation. Whatever move we make, it has to be a final blow, because the consequences last time were too great.”

“But you said that was reversed?”

“They’re not gonna reverse the next one,” Ecrin said.

“We may be able to get something done,” Vitalie started, “if we work together. Now that we know about you, we stand a chance. How many are there in your group?”

Holly Blue and Gatekeeper looked at each other again. “Three,” he finally said.

The two of us, and one other,” Holly Blue added.

“How is that possible?” Leona asked. “Only three of you signed up?”

“Lots signed up,” Gatekeeper said. “They’re all dead now.”

“You act like you already know each other. Why the hand signal?”

“It’s not just to prove we’re rebels. We also use it to indicate that we need to talk, and that the coast is clear to do so.”

“Where’s the last one right now?”

“Monarch is our designated survivor,” Gatekeeper explained. “No one knows who they are. He or she stays out of sight until something goes wrong. If we all die, it’s up to them to start it back up again, which they’ll probably soon have to do. You seem like lovely people, but you’re still just three recruits.

“Barely recruits,” Holly Blue noted.

“Isn’t there something else you can do?” Gatekeeper asked. “Someone you can talk to? You said there are other time travelers. Can they help? Can you contact them?”

Leona knew a few people with potential. Unfortunately, Ulinthra never let her touch land, so she couldn’t dig a grave for Mr. Halifax. The Forger might be willing to help? Ecrin probably knew many choosers, so this was a good question for her to answer. She looked at her inquisitively, completely forgetting that Ecrin hadn’t been involved in her own personal thought process.

“What?” Ecrin asked.

“Do you know someone? Maybe you know someone that we don’t? Maybe someone that Ulinthra doesn’t know?”

“Ulinthra has the memory of countless versions of herself, from indefinite timelines. I don’t know who she knows. There may be someone, though. You’re not gonna like it, but he may be our best chance. There’s one thing we’ve not yet discussed, but I think we all know it needs to be on the table.”

“You’re talking about killing her,” Vitalie realized.

“I’m not killing anyone,” Leona said. “Not again.”

“That’s what I’m saying. You wouldn’t have to. When I was working for the coalition, there was a team we came across. They were deadly travelers, and we spent a lot of resources trying to catch them. I stepped into the field myself to work on it, even though I was mostly in administration.”

“Who is it?” Vitalie was intrigued.

“The leader is called The Maverick; his team, The Mavericks. Not very original.”

Leona nodded her head solemnly. “I met one of them once. Darrell, or something. He helped Gilbert go back into the extraction mirror, for his death.”

“Darrow,” Ecrin corrected. “We would probably want to deal with him only, since he can be reasoned with. The other two can be rather..insufferable. But we all have to agree to it, including Viceroy.”

“Viceroy?” Leona didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Yeah, the other one in our group...since we’re using butterfly codenames?”

She meant Brooke. “Right. Viceroy, yes. We’ll ask her, but I don’t see her taking issue with it. I suppose I always knew it would have to end like this. If the powers that be don’t step in, we may have no way of getting her to Beaver Haven.”

Vitalie was totally on board, as were Holly Blue and Gatekeeper, who assumed that was what everyone was going for anyway. After going over some secret protocols with their two new allies, the three of them jumped back into their own bodies. They needed a couple of things to reach the Maverick, though, so Ecrin went out in physical form to shop. She came back with a cloak, and a dagger. She hung the cloak up on the door, and used the dagger to cut a symbol into it twice. They looked like bird tracks. Once she was finished, she jabbed the dagger into the cloak, sticking it into the door.

Within seconds, the cloak started billowing out, until the figure of a man appeared inside of it. He reached behind him and pulled the dagger from his back before turning around. He smiled and shook his head when he saw it was Ecrin. “I bet you just loooved doing that.”

“I don’t love that you’re here,” Ecrin said. “But we need your help. We just don’t know when.”

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Fervor: Escape from 1972 (Part VI)

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“My God, young lady, you look like a whore!” my mother shouts for all the world to hear.

“I beg your pardon,” the woman who was trying to help interrupts, but she’s still being ignored.

“What are you wearing? Why do you look so old? Where did you go?”

I’m fourteen years old, which is only about a year older than my parents expect me to be, but I guess their memory is of me as a twelve-year-old, which is a fairly big difference in a young lady’s development. I’ve had to grow up pretty fast because of the terrible conditions I started in, and when Serkan and Ace took me out of that life, it wasn’t like I started regressing, or anything. I’m still rather mature for my age, and my time in the 21st century has only made me more independent. These two people here may have conceived and raised me—though, there’s no way of knowing whether we’re related to each other, because I’ve yet to see proof of it—but they don’t control me anymore. I scoff at her, and try to walk away.

There’s got to be a way out of here. Okay, let me think. I seem to have the ability to travel through time and space using photographs. That would be fine if I had a picture of 2025, or 1491, but I lost my phone with tons of options from the former, and camera technology didn’t exist as far back as the latter. Hell, I would take it if something could take me back to sometime in the 2020s, as long as it was before the day that I left. No, I’ll even take a week or to after that. Thinking about it even more, I realize that all I really need is a way to get out of what I see now from a shred of newspaper blowing on the ground that it’s no sooner than October of 1972. I would need to find something more current to get an exact date, but that matches up with what I remember about when the famous Blue Marble photo, which I’ve been using as my phone background, was taken.

“Don’t you walk away from me,” my mother spits. By now the other woman has slipped away, not wanting to interfere too much in other people’s lives. I think in the future, people will be less forgiving, because they’ll never know when they’re being watched by video cameras, designed to record social behavior. For the most part, however, a 1972 mother is free to discipline her child however she sees fit.

“Do you have any pictures?”

“What?”

“Like in your purse,” I press. “Or dad, in your wallet? Do you have any picture of me as a baby? Or of anything?”

She’s noticeably thrown off by this, and interprets it as an attack on her character, which it partly is. I’m just looking for a way out. “Well, no, but...”

“Did you look for me? Did you send out a photo of your missing daughter? Or did you just go back home?”

“We haven’t been back home since you disappeared,” my father finally says. He never hit me, but he stayed quiet when my mother did, and maybe that’s just as bad.

“Oh my God, are you still on your ancestry tour? Christ, I had my blood tested. We’re not part African. That was just what your own father told you to excuse himself for being a racist piece of shit. We are British or Irish, though, so you got lucky with that one.”

“Now, you listen here,” my mother begins.

I scoff again, but much louder, as I’m rolling my eyes, and turning away. She grabs my arm. “Let me go.”

“I am your mother, and you will—”

I don’t let her finish. I just narrow my eyes and take a quarter step towards her, my arm fully within her grasp. “If you don’t let me go right now, you’re gonna find out how good 1970s South African medicine is.”

She’s never been scared of me before, and she’s never been scared of anything more than me right now. She releases me, and lets out a whimper so faint, I can’t be sure I didn’t imagine it.

I take a moment to calm down, and try to be as cold as possible. “I left you in Stonehenge because I was done being treated like two chalkboard erasers. I have gone on to see wonders, to meet wonderful people, and to learn new things.” I realize I can’t say anything about being a time traveler, but as I’m speaking, I’m also realizing no time traveler I’ve met has actually said anything about some Time Patrol. Maybe I can tell them the truth, and no one will care. I don’t think I have to, though. “I left because it was best for me, and for you. You never wanted kids, and only did so because you were indoctrinated into a society that expected it of you. I’m pleased to announce that you have fulfilled your obligation. I may have escaped a few years sooner than you expected me to, but I think we all knew it would come to this. I’m not calling the cops, or seeking a journalist to tell my story about your abuse, but I’m also not going home with you. This is my life now, and that is yours. I need to find a newsstand, or maybe a library, so I can make my way out of this country. If you pursue me, in any capacity, I’ll make Lizzie Borden look like Cindy-Lou Who. Are we on the same page?”

They don’t say anything, and I just walk away, not sure who’s more scared of me; my father, my mother, or myself. I do find a newsstand, and discover that it’s the seventh day of December. The latest paper from the states is from the first of the month in New York. I feel like my best option is to at least get back to the states. I don’t know of any time travelers that lived in this time period, except for Detective Bran, who is still a child at this point, but the U.S. still seems like the safest place to go. I pay for the paper, and choose the first headline I see with a picture: Storm Caused Traffic Mishaps.

Maybe that wasn’t really the best one I could use, because I’m suddenly standing in freezing cold weather in late Fall. Several cars are stopped on the wrong side of the road—that is, as long as I’m not still in South Africa. I hear honking and screaming, and the sirens from a trooper. He gets out of his car, and starts rounding up help from other drivers, to get the cars back where they belong. Even though it’s cold as hell, I still have no idea what I’m going to do, so I might as well help too. I get behind one of the cars, and prepare to push. The big strong men also getting ready to push look at me funny. “Call me Rosie the Riveter,” I say to them. One of the men trying to push another car takes off his heavy coat, and gives it to me, which I don’t see as an affront to my feminism. Together, we all get them up the hill, and out of the way. I try to return the coat to the man as he’s getting ready to leave the scene, but he just winks and says I should keep it. He’s older than me, but I don’t get any creepy vibes.

As strange as it must look for a teenage girl to be wandering the highway alone in the middle of the day in November, nobody else gives me any trouble, or offers to help. There’s no telling how long these people were stuck in traffic, but surely they’re all just in a hurry to get home. It was probably mentioned in the article from the paper, but I didn’t bother reading it that closely, and I couldn’t take it with me, because it was run a day in the future. I start walking down highway 20, headed towards civilization, thinking about what I could have done better, confident that I made all the best choices with the cards I was dealt. Goddamn it’s cold, though. If I’m going to be a time traveler, I need to start thinking about not going anywhere without a bag of essentials. I need to keep things like water and cash with me at all times, but the first order of business would be a coat. I stick my hands in the pockets, and find what feels like a piece of paper. I take it out, hoping whatever it is isn’t important to the guy who gave me the coat. It’s a photograph.

At first everything seems normal to me, but then I realize that photos these days aren’t printed on paper like this. You would need a personal computer to do it, which is impossible. Even if you didn’t, the picture itself doesn’t look like anything that exists today. I don’t even know what it is, but it looks like something out of a science fiction movie. I flip the paper over, where it reads, Giant Magellan Telescope, April 4, 2025. “Holy shit!” I can’t help but exclaim out loud. That’s a few days, off but I'll take it. I look behind me, half-expecting the coat’s owner to have followed me there, but the afternoon rush is over, and I’m alone. Worried a time pigeon might come and snatch the picture from my hand, I concentrate on it until my eyes start burning, and I make the jump to the future. Man, that’s a lot easier that I would have thought. In movies, it takes superheroes days to master their powers, if not longer.

I stand and marvel at the telescope for a good long time before someone realizes I don’t belong there, and escorts me off the premises. I discover that I’m in Chile, so I make my way to the nearest internet café. I tell the woman working the counter that I just need a minute to look up directions, and she gladly activates a computer for me to use, free of charge. I try to run a search of J.U. Mithra Labs, but none exists on the internet, which is strange, because I feel like I’ve seen one before. Maybe it’s a weird timey-wimey thing. No matter. I just need a picture of Independence, Missouri, and I’ll figure the rest out later. The most recent I find is a photo that a Local Guide took of some temple with a crazy spire on top, from the fourth of April. Perfect.

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