A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (9 page)

The door had already announced her arrival. Jored would be opening it to welcome her. He would be excited. She needed to put all her misgivings out of her mind for his sake. Later, when he was tucked into bed, she’d pour out her heart to his parents.

“Dani!” Jored didn’t wait for her to reach the door; he ran against the motion of the slidewalk to meet her and gave her a big hug. She couldn’t believe how tall he was getting; his head almost reached her shoulder now. She was pretty sure he had been thirty centimeters shorter just a few months ago. Slight exaggeration there, but still: Were seven year olds supposed to be this tall? Well, his dad was a bit over 180 centimeters, so maybe.

“Hey, bud! I have some things to show you, but first, let’s give your mom her chocolate, okay?”

“Sure, no problem.” He knew, and she knew, that soon they’d be putting their heads together over a puzzle or a game, and he was content to share his Dani with others, for now.

“Hi Dani,” said Marak, when he caught sight of her. “How’s our favorite corporate minion?”

She made a face, but answered cheerfully, “Healthy and surrounded by my best friends. How can I complain?”

“Here’s a knife. Want an apron?” Kat offered. “Barbecue’s hot and we’re making shish kebabs.”

Dani put down her bag and folders. As she tied the apron and smoothed it down in front, she realized she still had the four objects in her pocket. She pulled them out and showed them to Jored.

“What are those for?” he asked.

“Why don’t you try to guess? I’ll set them up here on this shelf where you can see them, and you can tell me later.”

“The knife’s over here, when you’re ready,” said Kat. “We saved the onions for you.”

“Of course you did.”

“Hey, Dani! Do minions like onions?” asked Jored.

“Minions love onions. And they love Joreds, too! Yummy!” Leaving the knife on the counter, she ran after him with her tickle hands ready.

He ducked around a corner or two, but let her catch him. This was their game. “The onions!” he managed to get out between bouts of giggling. “They need you!”

Dani stopped suddenly and managed to assume a very serious expression. “Oh. You’re probably right.” Her abrupt change brought new giggles from him, but she maintained her solemn demeanor as he followed her back out to the kitchen.

“Onions,” she announced. “The onions need me.”

Kat smiled and handed her the knife. They chopped and sliced companionably for a while, Marak on the beef, Kat on the peppers, and Dani on the onions. Then Dani thought of something.

“Skewers,” she said. “The skewers need Jored.”

“Oh, they absolutely do,” Kat agreed. “Jored, they’re over there on the counter. Here’s a plate of what goes on them. Just separate the beef chunks with layers of peppers and onions, and be careful not to poke your finger.”

“I won’t,” he scoffed. “I’m not a baby.”

“Even older people can get poked, son,” said Marak. “I don’t know if you’re ready for this.”

He struck a stage pose and assumed a W.C. Fields voice. “Why, I remember when I was a lad of, oh, eighteen or so…” He whispered parenthetically to Jored, “before I ever met your mother,” then continued, “I poked myself a time or two while I was making this very recipe!”

“There he goes again with one of his silly soliloquies.” Kat rolled her eyes.

“It’s the way they communicate,” Dani observed in a whisper.

“There I was, standing all innocently in the kitchen of my own domicile…”

“What’s a domicile?” Jored was intrigued.

“A house,” explained Marak. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Not.”

“Oh, well, okay. On with the skewering, then.”

In another ten or fifteen minutes, they were finished. Marak told Jored, “These kebabs are ready to be shished! Or maybe it’s these shishes that are ready to be kebabed. Anyone have a dictionary with etymologies in it?” He was still talking as he moved out of earshot to put the shish kebabs on the grill.

“Set the table, Jored, and then Dani can show you what she brought for you.”

Jored was already opening drawers and cupboards. Marak came back in to help him reach the plates, and Kat helped him get the places set.

Dani went to get her bags and folders, and remembered to retrieve the four objects that had been part of her morning presentation. That seemed like a world away, now. She was eager to talk to Kat and Marak, but first she would milk every moment of joy out of the time she got to spend with Jored. She adored him, and she didn’t care who knew it. She set them on the far end of the table.

“Here are some more of those touch-and-color pages. You can do those whenever you want,” she said, as she brought out the pages, then reached for the game cards. “But I think you’ll really like this new game. It’s a holographic matching game. In each brown box, you touch the little blue circle in the center, and you might see a 3D image, hear a sound, or smell something. You can set it for sights, sounds, smells, or all three. Your goal is to turn over two that match at the same time, then you get to keep them turned. Otherwise, they flip back to the brown boxes.”

“Will you play with me?”

“Sure! We can take turns. Marak? Kat?”

Soon the whole family was playing. Jored quickly realized that it was actually easier when he put the settings on “all three,” and harder when they had four game boards going at a time, one for each type of sensory input and one mixed. Pretty soon they were sitting around the coffee table, turning over pairs, then passing the board to the next person. By the time the “sight” board got back to any of them, they had forgotten what was on it. They exulted over small victories and pretended someone had reset the squares when they couldn’t remember. The game cards kept them happily occupied until the meal was ready.

“Hot off the grill,” said Marak in his best waiter voice, and soon they were enjoying the results of their kitchen teamwork.

“Best barbecue ever!” said Jored, rubbing his tummy. “Now can you tell me what those four things are for?”

Dani brought the plastic, leather, stone, and metal objects over where he could touch them. “Do you want to guess?”

“Are they samples of stuff that can have chronographic recordings in them?” he asked, with that cute little look that his face took on when he was thinking. Was this boy smart or what?

“You’re exactly right. Except three of these objects are made of materials that can retain a chronographic recording, and one can’t. Can you guess which one can’t?”

“Um…the plastic one? Because it’s synthetic? Or the leather one, because it’s from an animal?”

“The plastic one is right, and you guessed the right reason. You can think of all the rest of these objects as little miniature recorders. They aren’t actually doing the recording, of course. They have to be placed in my chamber at work, and the chamber uses their chronetic energies to focus a recording device on some specific time in history. That’s how we see things.”

Jored touched each sample, except the plastic one, with a look of awe on his face. Dani laughed. “They’re not anything special. They’re a rock, and a metal disk, and a piece of leather.”

“But that’s what makes them special,” he said, earnestly. “Stuff we see every day can do all that.”

Dani told herself again how lucky she was to know this kid, with his untainted sense of wonder. She mussed his hair and gave him a hug. “Hey, how about a game of chess before bed?”

She had barely mentioned the idea and he was already pulling her down the hall to his room to get the chess set. She guessed that was a yes.

It was a cute room, decorated with scruffy-looking dog images hovering in a slightly raised 3D effect on several of the bright yellow walls. When he turned on the light, they chased each other and fought over a couple of tennis balls. She’d been in his room many times, and each time the pups did something different. If she ever had kids of her own, she thought, she’d have Kat come help her decorate.

“Do you want to play here?” Jored asked.

“Let’s take it back out to the living room, okay?”

WALLACE HOME, Lower Queen Anne, Seattle. 2030, Tuesday, June 6, 2215.

Kat came back from tuckin
g Jored into bed. She shook her head. “I still have to remind him to brush his teeth. He never remembers.”

“Probably has a lot of other things on his mind,” said Marak. “He’s always thinking about something.”

Kat glanced over at Dani. “Speaking of having other things on your mind, what happened yesterday afternoon? Do you want to talk about it?”

Dani sighed. She almost wanted to say, “No, we can do that another time.” It had been so nice to just behave normally for a few hours, but now all her doubts came rushing back and she knew she needed to talk. Now. Tonight.

She started slowly, watching their reactions. “I saw something yesterday that shook me up. A lot. I don’t know who else to talk to about it.”

“What happened?” asked Kat.

“I was doing an investigation—that’s usually a second, more specific look at something we did a sample scan of earlier—of an object. The date specified was not quite nine years ago, which is unusual because, as you know,” she looked at Kat, “I’m usually sampling things from hundreds of years ago.”

Kat nodded.

“This object was a padlock on an old iron gate.” Still no sign of recognition. “Marak, I saw you there.”

He looked puzzled. “With a padlock? Where was this?”

But Kat was getting it. “Nine years ago? Did it happen to be September 17?”

Dani nodded, miserable. She felt ashamed, like she had intruded on a private moment without being invited. “Marak, all you did was shake the padlock and put it down. But I felt like I was spying on you.”

A look of realization spread across his face, and he looked over at Kat. “September 17. That was … that was when we met, right? And the padlock must have been … the one on the gate to your uncle’s estate.”

Kat patted his hand, “Very good!” She turned to Dani. “He always has a hard time remembering dates.”

“Yeah, I remember that date. But, Dani, why would you feel like you were spying? There wasn’t anything personal about that moment. I was just shaking a padlock.”

“I know. It wasn’t that. It’s just that these scans I do are always so far away, so long ago, that they’ve only been interesting historically. This was within my lifetime. And of all the objects and places and moments within those years, what are the chances that I’d see someone I know? It shook me.” She brushed her eyes, willing the tears away. “Maybe I’m being silly, but I had nightmares all last night.”

“You’re not being silly,” Kat said firmly. “You’re just realizing what a lot of us have known for years.”

Encouraged, Dani continued. “And then, this afternoon, I went to give a presentation to the high school. I used to do those all the time, back when I was first hired. All my starry-eyed enthusiasm won over whole crowds of kids. We see them as potential scientists, you know, and potential investors and publicists and film writers who will shape the attitudes of the world in years to come. I’ve always felt like a missionary, and I’m pretty good—really good—at it.”

“But today was different?” Marak asked, keen on the story. In a family setting, she rarely saw the investigative journalist, but she could see it now. Marak was also really good at his job, mostly because people trusted him. They spilled their guts to him.

“Today, the high schoolers won
me
over. They had questions I couldn’t answer. They’d done research and dug into the math of the whole thing, and I realized….” She took a breath. How to say this, exactly? “I realized that there is not only the potential to abuse this whole technology, but there’s an overwhelming probability that it is, in fact, being abused. I came away from that meeting determined to try to find out where the institute gets its money, and why it’s looking at things that happened so recently. I actually kind of joined their club.”

Her two friends glanced at each other warily. “Dani, be careful. Sometimes it’s better to just let things lie.”

“Or let people lie? And keep lying?” Dani exclaimed, with fervor. “Don’t you see? I’m worried about people I care about. I’m worried about you, Marak! Why would someone be asking me to investigate something you touched?”

“Dani, really, don’t worry about me. Nothing happened there that day, except I walked away from the padlock, thought about climbing a fence, and greatly amused Kat in the process. There’s no vulnerability here. Really. Nothing to worry about.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

Her tension began to melt away. She felt her shoulders relax. And then, perversely, the tears began to flow. Kat moved over to sit next to her on the couch and gave her a reassuring hug and a tissue. She blotted her eyes, wiping off most of her makeup in the process. The moment passed.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”

“It’s all good. You’re loved here and you know it.” Marak smiled. “If we can put up with you acting like a maniac, running down our halls after our son, we can take a few tears.”

“Will you guys help me figure out what to do?”