A Suspended Memory[]
Transportation in five… four… three… two…
The sunlight warmed Chiara’s face as she stood on the ash-covered ground. It was exactly as she remembered, down to the cloudless blue sky above. It was as if she had stepped into her memories themselves, only she was alone and countless years had passed while she was away. Time blurs when you don’t move through it the way God intended.
She walked over the soft gray ground to the crater in the middle of the field: the place where she had buried him. She could still hear Skipper’s voice ringing in her ear.
This isn’t a social call, Swallowtail. Don’t take this time to hug or kiss or do… whatever you’re thinking of. You’re here strictly on business.
Chiara doubted he would even want to talk to her now, after what she had done.
At last, she came to the edge of the crater. It was a meter deep, with a small pool of water at the bottom. She called out to him. “Copper?”
She didn’t know what she was expecting. She didn’t know how long she had kept him waiting. She didn’t know why she had thought he might pull through. No one was strong enough to resist the monster, anyway; why should he have been?
His eyes were dark and lifeless, unfocused like glass. He was sooty with ash and he stank from not having bathed in weeks, months, even years. Yet despite herself, Chiara wanted to run to him. She had missed him so much. She felt tears come to her eyes, and hurriedly brushed them away. Business call, she reminded herself.
“Chiara Angelina Rossi. Callsign: Swallowtail. Access code: 22O1. Division: Identification. You left me behind.”
Chiara took a deep breath and drew her electric baton. It crackled with current, and the thing would have been eyeing it if it could look.
“A cattle prod. How clever.”
“You don’t belong there. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“Well, I had no other choice, did I? Everything has to eat.”
“How long?”
“Oh, a hundred years, give or take?”
New tears forced themselves from Chiara’s eyes, tumbling down her cheeks. She wiped at them vigorously. She had screwed up so bad. So now, she had to set things right.
She ran at it, baton held like a javelin above her shoulder.
Before the Pendulum Drops[]
It was a chilly day in late December when they decided to take the kids on a field trip. Chiara was in fifth grade, and she felt like she was already a grown-up that knew everything there was to know about anything. It came with being double-digits.
As the electric yellow bus emblazoned with “COOK COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT” rolled up to the massive stone building that was supposed to be IOTA, the kids were getting restless. Chiara and her friend, Millie, were playing sticks as they waited for the bus to finally stop.
“I won!” Millie cried, vanquishing Chiara’s last hand with three fingers added to Chiara’s two. Chiara frowned. She always lost this game.
“Okay, kids, we’re here! Everyone off the bus, and then we’ll go inside,” Miss Kellings said. The children obediently stood up and filed off the bus, and when they got outside they stood, waiting for instruction. Field trips were special occasions, and they had been briefed on the consequences of misbehavior. Already, some kids were being threatened with the prospect of punishments back at school, and the rest of them were behaving much better than usual, only speaking in excited whispers. Besides, they were going to just about the coolest place in the entire city: IOTA.
IOTA was a museum, but it used to be the hub of time travel for the country- for the world. Chiara’s dad once worked there, though he had left that job around the same time he had left her. From what she remembered from the few visits she had taken, it was a shiny, interesting place with lots of things that she didn’t fully understand, but that nevertheless sparked a flame of curiosity in her. It was an old building, a relic of the nineteenth century. In order to house IOTA and meet up with modern construction codes, it had undergone significant changes, but it still had the feeling of being an old, wise building with many secrets and much knowledge of the past. Chiara looked at the Corinthian columns supporting the pediment, which had the slogan MEMORIALES SUNT RES COGITATIONIS inscribed upon its granite face. This was a new addition made by the organization, Chiara knew- the building was not nearly so symbolic before- but she liked the idea that this place held so much history.
Once the kids were lined up and all accounted for, a cheery tour guide wearing a smart suit walked out to greet them. He seemed like a relic of the past himself, wearing a three-piece outfit that had certainly not been popular for the past hundred or so years. He said his name was Lukas, and he asked them if they were excited. When he got a resounding yes in response, he went on to warn them not to touch anything, and then led them inside. Chiara whispered excitedly to Millie about how she had already been here and knew everything there was to know about time travel. She pointed out some of her favorite exhibits as Lukas babbled on about something to do with the disgraced Dr. Lainie Powell and how she had been driven mad by the corruption of the time travel apparatus: a tired story Chiara had heard too many times.
“You bored?” she whispered to Millie.
“Falling asleep!”
“Well, I have something that’ll blow your mind,” Chiara replied. She took off the lanyard she had been given that denoted her school and tracked her location in the museum and motioned for Millie to do the same. They snuck them onto some unsuspecting kids’ bags and made their escape quickly. Chiara took Millie’s hand and quietly led her away from the group, expertly evading the teachers and tour guides. She wound through the exhibits, leading them deeper into the museum until they reached the back rooms.
The back rooms of museums were generally secretive and forbidden places where all the luster of the displays beyond faded and the history became much more intimate, personal, and real. Chiara slid behind the curtain, gesturing for Millie to follow. Her friend did so, hesitantly.
The first room was fairly empty, just a few broken artifacts and signs that needed updates. There was a door at the back, however, that lead to the real treasure trove: the archives. Mostly file folders, but a few real things that weren’t suitable to be put in the museum.
“Ever wonder what really happened to Dr. Powell?”
Millie shrugged. “I don’t really know anything about her.”
Chiara wanted to impress her friend with her expansive knowledge, and she could sense boredom and a bit of hesitation tinging the edges of Millie’s voice. “Well, rumor has it something ate her and took her over- wore her skin like a suit. Y’know that super old movie, Men in Black? Where the aliens wear human skins to blend in? Just like that. Chris told me. He said they had pictures in the archive.”
“How are we supposed to get in without tripping the alarms? Shouldn’t we just go back, Chiara?”
Admittedly, Chiara hadn’t thought that far ahead. But she was determined.
“It’ll be fine. What are they gonna do, expel us?”
“Yeah, probably.” Millie rubbed her arm like she was trying to warm herself, looking around the room for something to distract Chiara from her purpose.
“It’ll be fine, Mills. Don’t worry, okay?” Chiara took out two of the pins holding back her curls and stuck them into the keyhole in front of her. She had learned to pick locks from a book her father had given her once, an old book from the twentieth century that was more of a history lesson that anything else. Odd that this lock was so old-fashioned, though; probably a relic of the building, since this whole place seemed to be a blast from the past. She fiddled with it for a little, moving the pins until she heard a click that satisfied her that the tumblers had slid into position. And on her first try, too! She grinned triumphantly as the door swung open, just in time to hear footsteps approaching and a museum employee standing in front of them with a very angry-looking Miss Kellings. Miss Kellings was never angry.
“Chiara, Millie. What is this?”
“Oh, nothing, Miss Kellings, we just got lost and stumbled in here. We thought it was an exhibit,” Millie said innocently.
“Did you not see the sign on the front that said ‘staff entry only?’ And why did you put your lanyards on Simone’s and Jarvis’ backpacks if you just got lost, as you say?”
“We- um-”
With the archive door yawning open behind them, and Miss Kellings’ undeniable evidence stacked against them, the girls knew that there was no getting out of this scrape. So, Millie promptly burst into tears, begging for forgiveness, while Chiara sullenly crossed her arms and followed the two adults and her weeping friend out of the room.
In the end, they weren’t expelled, or even suspended. They were given detention for two weeks, and had to write an apology letter to the museum. After that, it was as if nothing had happened.
But Chiara still wanted to know what was inside that archive. She had to know.
LEPIDOPTERA -125[]
CLASSIFICATION: CONFIDENTIAL, LEVEL 1 CLEARANCE NEEDED TO ACCESS
CONTENT: Transcript of a recording made by Dr. John Walters, PhD., on a personal device.
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]
WALTERS: I- I don’t know how to get this out there, but someone has to hear it, so-
[Screeching and a low thrumming can be heard at this point, muffling Dr. Walters’ voice.]
Right, right, I’ll hurry up. You have to understand that we didn’t know what would happen when we made this thing. We didn’t understand what- what it would do. But now Sandy’s gone, and that thing is busting down my door, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be alive.
[Dr. Walters can be heard crying as he continues. The screeching and thrumming have faded to the background.]
Sandy and Lainie were both brilliant physicists who figured out how to travel through time. That’s- there are records you can find in the archives somewhere- I don’t know the number. I don’t have long enough to explain how they did it, but they did. And they commercialized it, took it worldwide. But Lainie, though, she didn’t settle for a world-renowned invention. She said she had things she wanted to do- I don’t know what- and she used this time machine to go back and fix whatever problems she had. You have to understand, none of us knew until it was too late. Until it- it changed her. I have no idea what happened, not exactly, but they were small adjustments at first. She’d say something off, or stare into space for too long, or get weird bouts of vertigo. It got worse and worse, though, and soon she was not herself anymore. That thing is not Lainie. It killed Sandy right in front of me, bit into her heart like an apple, devoured her like- like it was starving. It’s still starving. I can’t- Sandy-
[Dr. Walters begins to sob, making his words mostly unintelligible.]
I don’t know much about whatever the hell is going on, but what I do know is this: that machine poisoned Lainie. No one can use it. Time travel is dangerous and I’m going to make sure no one attempts it again. I have to try to put this thing into containment.
[END TRANSCRIPT]
Notes: Dr. Sandra Barnes and Dr. John Walters confirmed deceased. Dr. Lainie Powell confirmed devoured. Reference files LEPIDOPTERA-001 through 020 and LEPIDOPTERA-120 for further information on the incident. Further research on DEVOURER recommended. Enhanced body armor recommended.
Post-script: Body armor enhancements confirmed. Titanium alloy woven into fabric. Preliminary tests prove ineffectual. Stronger armor recommended.
First Impressions[]
It had been a long time since Chiara had been in the IOTA building, but its effect was no less impressive. Her electric cab let her out in front of the museum, and she was taken back to that chilly December day in fifth grade, when she tried to break into the archives.
Millie told her how insane she sounded over the phone, when Chiara called her about the job prospect.
“They reached out to me, Mills,” she had said, “they reached out to me. It’s like I was destined to find out what’s hidden down there.”
“You sound like the overeager fifth-grader that almost got us kicked out of elementary school,” Millie had responded. She had been right, but Chiara didn’t want to admit it. They had moved on to talk about other things, like Millie’s new job as a reporter for the Global Post. Millie was a brilliant writer, so Chiara wasn’t surprised she had gotten such a brilliant job- though of course, Millie had worked very hard before getting to where she was now. Chiara couldn’t help being a little jealous. While she had worked part-time living the student life, her friends had been getting ahead. She felt a tremendous amount of pressure as she walked into the building. This felt like her future.
She was greeted at the front desk by a young woman dressed in a tan blazer jacket with a fashionably-cut collar and a matching skirt, both detailed in gold. She had brown eyes that shone like two small suns, accentuated by her golden makeup and dark eyeliner. The woman looked up at her from the computer she had been typing at and smiled. “Welcome to the IOTA Museum, how can I help you?”
“Oh, hello, I’m Chiara Rossi? Here for the interview. Here’s the email; it told me to print it out and give it to you.”
The woman took the letter and scanned it quickly, raising her eyebrows.
“Welcome, Miss Rossi. I’m Cleo Ahmad. I’ll be conducting your interview today. Just give me one second.” Cleo called over to one of the ushers standing nearby with a pamphlet. “Hey, Lukas, mind covering for me? I have an interview.” She tapped the desk with a gold almond-shaped fingernail.
A man about fifteen years older than Chiara walked over to take up Cleo’s station at the desk. His name sounded vaguely familiar to Chiara. Maybe someone she knew from college shared it.
“Follow me,” Cleo said, and lead her through the museum, past the familiar exhibits that she had studied online and visited in person many times, to the back rooms that held the infamous archive door. Instead of taking that route, however, Cleo took another door, one Chiara didn’t remember from that day, and led her up a concrete stairwell to the upper offices. Chiara hadn’t known this was here, but with a building as massive as IOTA, she shouldn’t have been surprised. Cleo took her to an office that was unoccupied and shut the wooden door. The office was sparsely furnished, with just a desk, a painting of butterflies, and a few wooden chairs. Cleo took one and gestured for Chiara to pick another. Chiara took a seat and smoothed down her skirt, trying to quell her nerves.
Cleo took out her phone and unfolded it. She tapped on it for a few seconds and set it on the table. “I’ll be recording this interview, if you don’t mind. I’ll also be using a lie detection software to make sure your responses are truthful.”
“Yes, that’s fine,” Chiara said. Cleo nodded thoughtfully, taking a moment to straighten the shiny clips arrayed on her suit pocket. She then got out a small camera-like device and set it on the table, extracting several electrodes and placing them onto Chiara’s skull. There was a screen facing Cleo that Chiara could not see. This was the lie detector. The electrode patches felt cool against her skin.
“Let’s begin with something simple. How did you come across this job?”
Chiara thought Cleo should know this, seeing as she worked at this place and was in a position to be interviewing people, but she didn’t want to start anything on her first day.
“Well, I was emailed. Seemed pretty old-fashioned, since no one really emails anyone anymore, so I guess that piqued my interest. It was a fairly standard job offer, with a time and a place, and I ran it through a virus detection program that turned up negative. It seemed legit, so I took it up on its offer. It was from… staff@iota.org, I think, no signature. I’ve always wanted to work here, and my dad was an employee once, so I thought, ‘well, why not.’” She shrugged and gave what she hoped was a friendly smile. Cleo was inscrutable, just narrowed her eyes a little.
“Besides your father, do you know anyone else who currently works here or has worked here in the past?”
“No, I don’t.”
“And what was your father’s name?”
“Alessandro Rossi. He was a curator for a few years.”
“I see. And did he share much about his work?”
“Nothing other than the organization’s role in the development and expansion of time travel. Just basic history.”
Cleo nodded thoughtfully. “Switching gears a little, tell me about your credentials.”
“Oh, yes, I brought my resumé-” Chiara shuffled through her briefcase and pulled out a packet of papers- “you can look over it if you like.”
Cleo took it. “I’d still like to hear from you personally what you’ve done, regarding your school or career.”
“Well, I did my undergrad at Johns Hopkins, got my PhD in Physics from MIT, skipped a few years of high school because I tested into college early. I’ve only worked basic part-time jobs and internships, but I’ve worked at libraries before, so I understand how to catalog and take care of collections.”
“Mind expanding on that physics degree of yours?”
“Well, I specialize in quantum mechanics, and I’ve delved quite a bit into the history of time travel on my own time. I have lots to offer to any research endeavors of yours, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
Cleo riffled through the resumé. It was unremarkable stuff at best. “This says you were on several competitive dance teams from fifth grade through your first four years of college. And you’re also familiar with Jiu-Jitsu?”
“Yes, I’ve taken some classes for self-defense. And dance has always been a passion of mine. I still take classes today, even though I dropped out of the competitive scene.” This seemed unimportant for a job at a museum. Chiara was wondering where Cleo was going with this.
Cleo nodded. She put the resumé on her lap and looked Chiara directly in the eye. Chiara noticed her irises were the golden brown of warm sunlight. “Do you know what job you’re applying for?”
Chiara shrugged. “I assumed it was a museum curator position or something to do with research.”
Cleo’s lips twitched. “For someone with a doctorate, you don’t catch on too fast.” The way she said it, it sounded like a private joke, which only made Chiara more upset.
“What do you mean?”
Cleo shook her head, smiling to herself. Chiara felt herself growing angry- what was this lady keeping from her, and why was she hiding anything in the first place?
“Look, if you don’t-“
“Before I tell-“
Both women stopped talking and looked at each other. It felt like a face-off.
“Go ahead,” Cleo said, but Chiara felt like she was close to combusting, and that was never a good situation.
“No, you first. Please.”
“Before I tell you anything, I need to know a few things.”
Chiara waited. She crossed her legs, one knee over the other.
“First, do you know what happened to Dr. Lainie Powell?”
“What they say happened, or what really happened?”
“What do you mean by ‘what really happened?’”
“She got eaten by something. It wore her skin like clothing. It pretended to be her, but it wasn’t.” Chiara thought it would be an impressive display of her knowledge. But saying it like that, with triumph in her voice, made her feel like that eager-to-please fifth grader again.
Cleo raised her eyebrows imperceptibly. She tapped her knee with a gilded nail. “Who told you that?”
“My brother, Cristoforo.”
“Okay. What else have you heard about this place?”
“That you’re hiding something big. Something that I would do anything to find out.”
Cleo’s golden eyes burned into Chiara’s like the sun. Why was she saying all this? She would never get the job with this combative attitude- in face, she’d probably be banned from the museum. But at the same time, she felt they had to know.
Slowly, Cleo smiled. “Any ideas?”
“Of course, but they’re vague.”
“Second. Are you willing to devote your life to this organization, no matter what?”
Chiara paused. That was a big one. Her life? What was this lady on? There was no way she could make a promise like that- but then again, hadn’t she already? From the moment her father had told her about where he worked, she had known this was her destiny. It was born into her, seared into her blood. She would never be satisfied without this job. Her life already revolved around time travel and this museum. This was an inevitability; she was just admitting it now.
“I am.”
“Thirdly: Are you afraid of death?”
“Of course.” Wasn’t everyone? And what sort of a question was that, anyway? What was this job, exactly?
“Would you risk your life for something you believed in?”
“I haven’t had a cause to before. But I believe I would, if it was something worth a human life.” What an oddly serious question. There was something deeper going on here, but instead of tripping her up, it only interested Chiara more. She had to know what this all lead up to. What would the climax be?
“Then welcome aboard, Chiara Rossi.”
Cleo shuffled through her bag and got out a single sheet of paper. “This is a non-disclosure agreement. It is fairly simple. It merely states that you will not share any facet of your job, including your potential experiences, injuries, salary, coworkers, and employers, with anyone outside of IOTA. Not a single soul can know about your work here, aside from the most basic fact: you are a museum curator.”
Chiara was puzzled. Why on earth would she need to sign an NDA? What sort of work would she be doing here that would require one at all? Maybe it was the research she would be doing- it could be controversial, or even dangerous. That didn’t matter to her, not one bit. She read over the one page, typed in 10-point Times New Roman. It stated everything Cleo said it would, and didn’t seem to be trying to trick her. She read it once, twice, three times over, and though about calling an attorney- but where would she find an attorney? How long would that take? She wanted this job with every fiber of her being, and some slim piece of paper wasn’t going to change that. She signed on the line and wrote the date, thrusting the paper back at Cleo when she was finished. Cleo smiled her slow, catlike smile.
The deal was sealed.
Painful Proceedings[]
The electric baton cracked and fizzled above Copper’s head. Chiara had him pinned, his limbs restrained against hers. She could kill him with a swift strike, end it all, and the threat would be contained.
A voice came to her, a voice from the past that hurt her to remember. Most memories hurt nowadays. They couldn’t be taken in all at once- they had to be slowly sipped, like a too-hot mug of coffee. So she only remembered the voice, the one line the voice had spoken: Would you risk your life for something you believed in?
She had believed in Copper, once. She had loved Copper once. How could she end him? A business call. What had Skipper been thinking? Chiara couldn’t do it. Her hand trembled, imperceptibly, but enough so that the monster noticed.
“Do you feel sorrow, perhaps? Regret?”
It was speaking in his voice. It felt like a robbery. It gazed past her with unseeing, glassy eyes. His eyes. Dead eyes.
“You have no grit, Swallowtail.”
“Shut the fuck up! I-I can fix this, I know I can, I just have to go back, try again-“ She wondered if she would have time to activate the device and make a time jump before it killed her.
It used her momentary lapse to escape from her grip, kicking the baton away. It hummed uselessly on the ashen ground. The monster pressed its booted foot on her neck, hard. Chiara felt her vision growing dark. The swimming dots in her eyes nauseated her. She tried to breathe, but it was becoming laborious. It seemed as if she required all her strength to suck in just one breath. Chiara closed her eyes and held her breath. Maybe if it thought she was unconscious-
It leaned down to search her pockets for the device. For a moment, its weight on her windpipe lessened. Gasping, she pushed at that rubber boot with all her might, her adrenaline rushing to her arms. She shoved it away and scrabbled backward, her breath coming in rasping chokes.
Chiara sprang to her feet. Her frenzied flight had left scribbles in the ash covering the deserted field. The monster made no move to come after her, and that was when she realized it didn’t need to: it had the device in its hand. Chiara leapt at it, tackling it to the ground once more. They struggled in silence, only grunts and punches punctuating the stale air, until finally, she kicked its wrist and sent the device twirling through the air.
It landed with a thud on the ground, dangerously close to the still-active electric baton. Both Chiara and Copper lunged for it, and Chiara realized: she couldn’t get out of this one.
How could she live with herself after all she had done? Cleo, Skipper, and Copper. All three would never forgive her, not to mention poor Blue and Atlas, who had stood by her even as her life caved in on itself. Even they would not be able to save her now.
Time seemed to slow as the two of them were caught in a pivotal moment. Chiara knew all about pivotal moments: the places she was meant to maintain and fix in time. As they touched hands, hers on top of his, she remembered this place. Before it was barren and ashen, before the sky was clouded by a jaundiced haze and the thick smell of gasoline and smoke clung in her throat.
It had been a meadow, green and vibrant. Flowers that smelled of sweet grass and nectar grew in rainbows of color. Gentle hills had been there, and insects had hummed through the air. Chiara remembered lying on her back with him, staring at the blue, cloud-dotted sky. Once it had been sprinkling rain, and a rainbow had arced across their view. She had told him a silly story about leprechauns her mother had once used for bedtime and he had laughed.
She used to love to tell stories. She took after her whole family that way. But this thing next to her, it didn’t know any of her stories. It knew nothing but violence and hunger. As it reached for the device, she grabbed the electric baton and jabbed it forward, aiming for the forehead. Her resolve was steady, and she was ready.
The thing, however, was crafty. Its hand shot up, the device gripped in its palm, and before she could pull back the damage had been done. The thing dropped the transmitter, watching as it sparked and crackled in its death throes. Chiara’s mouth dropped open as the reality of the situation passed over her.
They were trapped.
Longing[]
Back in her apartment, still mulling over her odd job interview, Chiara was making pasta and salad for one. She liked to keep busy while she was thinking about things.
As she was stirring the pasta and cheese, the tablet on her fridge beeped. “Cristoforo Rossi calling,” it said calmly.
“Answer,” she said, plating the pasta. She dressed the salad and tried to toss in the vinaigrette in the limited bowl space she had. She heard Chris’s warm voice flooding in from the speakers. It was nice to talk to him again.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Just making dinner.” She presented her pasta and salad to the camera.
“Cacio e pepe, huh?”
“Quick and easy,” she responded, sitting down at her little island to eat and talk with him. She opened a beer and held it up to the fridge. “Cheers.”
“How, uh, was the interview?”
“Weird. The person who interviewed me was oddly intense. Pretty, though.”
“Oh, yes, the most important thing.” He chuckled. “When do you find out if you get the job?”
“I already did! Seems they don’t have lots of candidates for the position.”
“What position is that, exactly?”
She shrugged. “Museum curator? I’m supposed to come in tomorrow for basic training, whatever that means.” She wanted to tell him all about the strange questions, the NDA, the suspicious activity, but she couldn’t. It hurt her somewhere deep in her soul to hide all of this from her brother, who took up a sizeable part of her heart. She was betraying some basic instinct by lying to him.
“Probably something like ‘don’t break the artifacts,’” Chris chuckled. Chiara took a bite of her pasta and the two of them got quiet. They were dancing around the real subject: their father. The fact that Chiara was going to work at IOTA, no matter how long she had talked about doing it, was ripping open an old wound. It was worse for Chris. He remembered their father well.
“She didn’t know Dad,” Chiara said. She didn’t think she was breaking any rules by telling him this. She looked up at the screen. Chris was focusing on something beyond the camera, drumming his fingers on his arm in that nervous way he had.
“Why should I care?”
“I just thought you’d like to know.” Silence again: it fell like snow, collecting in drifts, burying them. Chris couldn’t meet her eyes. He ran a hand through his curly brown hair, went back to tapping on his arm. His nails were bitten down.
“I just want to understand,” she said at the same time as he asked,
“How’s Millie?”
Chiara picked at her salad. “Millie’s good. She misses you.”
“Sure she does.”
“I wish you’d stop that, Chris. You were never this… rude before-“
“Before what, Chiara? Before everyone left me alone? Things were easier when you and Mills lived here, when Mom was still here, when Dad still existed on the face of the earth. So I apologize if I’m being rude, but it’s hard when you’re following the same exact path Dad did.” His voice was rising in volume.
“Why’d you call me, then, if you were just going to yell at me?”
“Because I wanted to talk to you, for God’s sake!”
He had shouted it, slamming his table in an exclamation mark. The two of them froze for a moment, staring into each other’s identical green eyes. What had happened to them? They used to be so close, and now they could barely hold a conversation. Chiara didn’t want to apologize first.
“I need to go,” Chris said. The refrigerator door flashed the ‘call ended’ icon, and then turned transparent again. Chiara cursed. She took a gulp of beer. She had lost her appetite. She thought, for a moment, about calling Millie, but she decided against it. Instead, she sent a text: wanna talk later/grab food? im in nyc rn.
She doubted she’d get a response until some odd hour of tomorrow night. Millie was awfully busy nowadays, what with her big-deal stories and her overlapping deadlines. And here Chiara was, training for a job as a museum curator. She sighed and took a bite of her pasta. It was too good not to eat, and her mom always said that good food was the best way to heal the soul. Whenever Chiara thought of her mother, she could smell the kitchen as her mom cooked: the warm herbs and vegetables and pasta scents mingling into the idea of a dish. Chiara began to feel homesick, desperately so. She was losing her friends and family. They were slipping away from her like fog burned away by the morning sun. Why was it that she couldn’t remember her mother’s face? Or her father’s voice, or the scent of Millie’s perfume? She took another bite of pasta, though it offered little comfort.
Chiara’s thoughts and feelings occupied her as she drifted through the motions of the evening. She finished her dinner and drink, cleaned the kitchen, showered and washed her face, brushed her teeth, and lay in bed, listening to the sounds of the city go by outside her window, focusing on her breathing, on the soft rasps of air in her chest. It sounded like the crash of waves on the beach, she thought. She closed her eyes and imagined the sea, waiting for sleep to come.
Her dreams were half-forgotten memories, incomplete stories that turned to ash in her hands when she tried to hold them closer.
Warm Embrace[]
The walls of the townhouse were infused with the scents of cooking and plants. Herbs grew along the windowsill, and flowers in brilliant arrangements exploded within the space. It was an old house. Chiara’s father had always been interested in history, so he had chosen to buy a twentieth-century house instead of any of the newer ones. However, he was a polymath by nature, and so he had outfitted the entire place with state-of-the-art technology. It made for an odd existence, being surrounded by sleek computers and rough hardwood.
Chiara’s room was warm with sunlight at all hours of the morning and afternoon, thanks to the temperature-controlling windows. They filtered in the right amount of light and warmth to always make the room feel pleasant, even in the hot summer months. It was on a spring day, when the exotic flowers in her window box were in full bloom, that she was reading her birthday present. It was from her father, a book called Scientific Concepts of the Late Twenty-First and Early Twenty-Second Centuries. Her mother had thought it a little too advanced, but Chiara hadn’t cared. Her father was interested in it, so she was, too, by extension.
She was puzzling over a particularly technical sentence when her dad walked into the room. He was a tall man, with a wiry frame and fine hands that had never known a callus. He was an academic, not a man of work. He had warm brown eyes and a head of curly brown hair, just like Chris’s. He always looked a little disheveled, as if he had been asleep just a moment before and hadn’t thought to fix his appearance. But his presence in that room was perfect, because his smile was just as warm as the sun.
“Do you like it?” he asked, sitting beside her on the bay window. The window itself was made of carved oak wood, the cushions quilted with warm, fiery colors. Chiara nodded, not wanting to admit that she didn’t really understand half of what it said. He could tell, though. He always seemed to know what she was thinking.
“I know it’s a bit confusing. Truth be told, I meant for it to be something that would be useful to you as an adult. It’s okay if you don’t grasp it just yet.”
“I understood it just fine,” Chiara said matter-of-factly. He looked over her shoulder and nodded.
“Ah, yes, ‘one of the cornerstones of the modern understanding of time is the principle that those parties affected by its passing can never look totally beyond their limited view of the cosmos as it is in their dimension.’ You should make light work of that.”
“Well, fine, maybe it’s a little difficult,” Chiara said, closing the book.
“It’s okay, mi luce, you’re only in second grade. This is just a taste of things to come. Would you like me to teach you some of this?”
Chiara nodded eagerly.
“Well,” her father began, leaning back. He assumed the far-off look he got whenever he was reaching into his mind for something. Her mother called it his wonder face. “You know where I work, right? IOTA?” He didn’t need a response. When he was like this, he talked without listening. “It stands for the International Organization for Timely Affairs, and it used to be the official organization for global time travel, with offices in every country. Ours is just the American branch. It was formed by the UN, but time travel itself was created by Lainie Powell, possibly the most brilliant scientist of the twenty-second century. Oh, but I digress-
“Powell was a genius physicist, and she discovered that time was malleable, that it could be bent and folded by human hands. She theorized that we could push through it with a sharp enough instrument. And she created that instrument: a machine that warped time and speared us through it, created a pathway to where we needed to go. At first, it seemed brilliant, but when we mess with time, we mess with a lot more than just the moment we travelled to. Some of it, we changed for the better: we prevented global warming, and we stopped millions of people from dying. But most of it collapsed systems, forced us to realize that maybe we weren’t doing the right thing. By then, the world around us was crumbling to ashes, and on top of that, time agents were getting sick from the effects time travel had on their bodies. IOTA was shut down, and only years later the UN gave permission to turn the remaining branches into museums. The wars, the disease, the atrocities- it seems that humanity can never really be fixed. Terribly sad that Powell’s discovery amounted to nothing, in the end. But we’re not dead, and the world is still turning, so that must count for something.”
“I want to travel through time, though,” Chiara complained.
“Well, I do the next best thing. I create the displays you see in the IOTA museum. Remember the last time we went? I get to comb through all that and organize it neatly. Learning history is really just like time travel in a way, only the apocalypse won’t come as a result of it.” He smiled with his whole face, an expression of absolute love on his face, and Chiara knew that her father was correct. He knew many more things than her, after all, and he was a smart man.
He tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “What do you say we go to the museum tomorrow, mi luce? It’ll teach you better than I could about all this stuff.” She nodded, eyes wide with excitement, and her father kissed her on the top of her head, rising to go. She curled into the warm spot on the cushion that he had left and resumed her reading.
Training Day[]
Chiara woke up to the soft chirping noise of the alarm clock on the screen across from her bed. “Clock, stop,” she said, and the sound suddenly cut out, its noise replaced by the hum and chatter of the city below. At times like this, early in the morning, the wakeful world beneath her feet, her little apartment felt very lonely. The yellow buttercups on her duvet and the worn dark hardwood floors didn’t feel very warm or cozy without anyone else to share it with. Maybe she should get a dog.
She slid out of bed and padded over to the screen, adjusting the amount of light her windows let in. It was late enough in the morning that the holos usually displayed on the tops of buildings had been turned off, and only darkened neon lights remained of the city’s vibrant night life. The warm sun spilled onto the floors and walls of her bedroom, and she basked in the glory of the morning.
She checked her screen, which displayed the weather, the stock trends, the calendar, and her messages. There weren’t any missed calls or texts from Millie or from Chris, to Chiara’s disappointment. She knew she shouldn’t have expected anything from them, but it would have been nice to have a friendly hello to wake up to.
Today was training day for her new job, and she felt excitement flicker inside her. Fueled by her first-day energy, she finished her morning routine with time to spare, and she left early to take a walk to the museum instead of hiring a cab or taking the bus. There was a chill in the air, but it was invigorating rather than discouraging. She felt more alive, like she had run a mile or taken an ice bath. She just knew that she would get to see inside the archives and unlock the secrets she had wondered about as a child.
“Miss Rossi, hello.” Cleo was sitting at her desk again, velvet brown hair cascading down her back in loose curls. She looked up from her screen, cat-eye glasses perched on the edge of her nose. Her dark eyeliner made her golden irises stand out. She was a beautiful woman, like Chiara’s idea of what a goddess must look like.
“Good morning,” Chiara said.
“Today we’ll be going over the basics. You’ll meet some people on the team and get to know how we run the place. If you’ll follow me, we’ll begin in the offices.”
Chiara could hardly contain her excitement as Cleo tucked her glasses into her forest green blazer and lead the way through the museum to the archives. The building’s interior was cavernous, with a massive skylight letting the sun illuminate all the exhibits in natural light. The floor was tiled in hues of blue, like it was reflecting back the sky, and the Grecian columns gave the whole place an austere aura. Each exhibit was displayed on an intricately carved pedestal as if they were relics of a long-distant past. It had been a hundred years since IOTA was disbanded, though to Chiara it often felt as if it were only weeks ago. It was probably the effect of reading all those books on the life and works of Lainie Powell and Sandra Barnes. She felt as if she knew the two women- and, by extension, all of the American IOTA crew. When she had accepted the job offer here, it had only really been half about finding answers for her and her brother. The other half of her decision was made by the irrational belief that she was also accepting a job offer from the original IOTA- that she would get to fulfill her childhood dream of travelling through time.
She had been following Cleo without thought until she nearly walked right into her back. They had reached the back rooms, and again, passed by the archive door in favor of the other door that lead to the same area where Cleo had interviewed Chiara. The sounds of their footsteps echoed off the concrete walls as they ascended the stairwell. When they arrived at the floor with the offices, Cleo walked to a lone door at the end of the hallway, which Chiara assumed lead to a conference room of some sort. Cleo had to type in a keycode in order to open the door. Chiara was confused at the secrecy.
And then Cleo opened the door on a scene unlike anything Chiara had been expecting, and everything seemed so clear that she laughed, an astonished, relieved, incredulous laugh.
“Welcome,” Cleo said with a flourish, “to the bridge.”
It was a well-lit, circular room, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a domed roof. Chiara realized that they must be at the center of IOTA, in the massive dome with the mirrored panels that rose above the rest of the building, visible from the street. The mirrors were, apparently, one-way glass. The roof was tall, with a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and at the center of the room was a large table with a touchscreen and several panels that Chiara recognized as likely covering hologram projectors. Interesting.
The bridge was bustling with activity, people talking with each other and exchanging notes, others passing in and out of doors with keypads beside them, still others using the touchscreen table to show each other different things. Before Cleo said anything, Chiara knew that this was not a museum, but history come to life in the present.
“This must come as a shock to you, especially seeing as we lied to you about all that this job entails. You will, indeed, be a museum curator, with a few other things added to your job description. And, of course, your salary will be ample.”
“What- what is this?” Chiara asked, though she knew. She was smiling wider than she had in a very long time.
“This, Miss Rossi, is the International Organization for Timely Affairs- the very same brainchild of Dr. Lainie Powell.”
Collegiate Level[]
Chiara sometimes hated college more than anything, but she would never tell that to anyone except for maybe Millie, and even then it was a stretch.
It wasn’t only that she was younger than everyone else, or that she felt overwhelmed by the amount of work she had to do, or that she felt claustrophobic holed up in one little town, or that sometimes she felt as if everyone was against her, or that she sometimes didn’t know how to get through the week without drinking a few too many some nights, or that her work reminded her too much of her father, or that she felt further away from her father every day. It was all of these things at times, but when she really, truly detested college, it was not because of any of these things.
No, she hated college because it wasn’t enough.
Chiara was the overachieving type, and not in a healthy, go-getter kind of way. She thirsted after knowledge and discovery like it was a drug. She was addicted to the “eureka” moment. She needed to identify a fault in a seemingly flawless argument, or to discover something entirely new that everyone before her had missed, in order to feel like her life meant something meaningful. And at college, doing the same assignments as everyone else, taking courses others had taken before, she couldn’t do that. She was only ordinary.
On nights like these, poring over books she had borrowed from her school’s library database, scouring them for something revolutionary, anything she had never heard before, Chiara felt the full weight of her hatred. She glanced at the gift her father had given her, an old book that was so well-worn that the edges of its jacket had gone soft and faded: Scientific Concepts of the Late Twenty-First and Early Twenty-Second Centuries. She kept it around for sentimental reasons. When she had absolutely nothing else, at least she had this book. Chiara reached out and touched it, ran her fingers over the cover. “Why couldn’t I be more like her? Like you, Dad?”
Chiara wasn’t religious, but this book was like her altar. She would use it to speak to her father, as if somewhere his soul could still hear her even if it had been reduced to atoms spread across the earth. She felt tears come to her eyes. She took the book and held it to her chest, cradling it like it was her child. “I wish you would just talk to me. I wish you would tell me how you did it. I’ve been stuck ever since I got here.”
She pulled away from the book to look at it again. She had read it cover to cover so many times that she knew it almost by heart. But when every other avenue was exhausted, sometimes it was necessary to return to what she knew well.
The basics of Powell’s theory were rooted in the malleability of spacetime. It was soft enough to be bent, shaped, and pierced, but could not be broken. Powell thought of it as something like electricity, which could be controlled and harnessed by humans to do what they wanted it to. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? Chiara put the book back in its place and stood up, pacing around her small dorm room. Yes, there was more to it than that, but she had never been able to puzzle out what. There was the timesickness- Powell’s Disorder- which had played a large part in IOTA’s closing. How had Powell contracted it, though? She had died soon after the mass murder at IOTA-America, and her autopsy had been inconclusive. It was almost as if it were a ghost that had done it. Chiara was reminded of what Chris had said all that time ago, that horror story he told her to scare her as a kid. Something killed her and wore her skin like a suit. It consumed her, and devoured everyone else. Could that have been true? Had it been some sort of supernatural being that resented her for messing with the flow of time?