Unhappenings (14 page)

Una got up and put her jacket on. “It was lovely meeting you, Mrs. Walden,” she said with a cheery grin. “Thank you for letting me wait here.”

My mother got up as well, and gave Una a hug. “It was my pleasure. When do you think you’ll be back?” It took me a second to realize that was directed at me, but Una caught it.

“I’ll try not to keep him out past curfew,” she said to my mother. Another round of polite laughter. Una took my hand and led me out of the house. My mother raised the eyebrow of we-have-much-to-discuss-young-man, and waved us both goodbye.

With the door closed behind us, and the two of us walking to I had no idea where, I asked, “What on Earth did you tell her?”

She countered with, “Me? What about you? What’s with Una?”

That made me laugh for real. “Can I assume I still haven’t found your name?”

“You have not. And I much prefer Penelope.”

“Well,” I said, “now you are Una. Unless you’d like to come clean with me.” Pause. “I thought not. Oh, and by the way, what are you doing here, and where the hell have you been for the last three years?”

“Three years?” She seemed genuinely surprised by this. “You haven’t seen me for three years? Not even some future version of me?”

“Not a sign. I was beginning to wonder if you had given up on me.”

“Never,” she said. We walked in silence for a bit.

“You could have told me you were from my future, you know. When you first met me.”

“I’m not sorry about that, if that’s where you’re going.”

“You will be,” I said.

She huffed. “You can’t possibly know that.”

“Actually, I know it for a fact.”

“Oh,” she said. Making the connection, she pouted. “Well, I’m not sorry now.”

“Fair enough. That’s not where I was going anyway. Are you going to tell me why you’re here?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t like the way we parted. I thought if maybe I gave you a while to cool off, we would be okay again.”

“Well, that much worked. We’re fine. How long ago was that for you?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “Why Una?”

“Yesterday? Wow. Yesterday.” I finally released my first impression of this girl as a contemporary of mine. Time travel was second nature to her already, and perhaps had been her whole life. “I’m calling you Una to remind myself that no matter how many versions of you I get to know, there’s really only one of you. Someday I’m going to reconcile all the different points of your life and figure out who you really are.”

She laughed. “Good luck with that.”

“Can I ask your advice on something?” I said.

“Me? Is that a thing you do? Ask my advice?”

The question sounded sarcastic to me at first, until I realized she was sincerely trying to get a feel for what her relationship with me was going to be as she got older. I almost never shared with her anything that her future selves did or said. “Sometimes,” I said. “I got a visit today from future me. He wants me to help him with some bugs he is having on the Time Travel Project.”

Una got very quiet.

“Am I asking the wrong thing? If I’m not supposed to know this stuff, I don’t want to put you in a bad position. But I figure if I’m not supposed to know it, I wouldn’t be traveling back in time to tell myself stuff. Mind you, I kind of have the sense that Future Me isn’t quite playing with a full deck. That’s troubling in a couple ways, and I’d rather not dwell on it, but I’m just trying to figure out how safe this is going to be.”

Una’s silence continued to stretch. Looking away from me, she said, “Don’t.”

This was turning very uncomfortable. “Don’t? Don’t help him?” Una seemed afraid. I tried to think of a way to backtrack.

“Don’t,” she repeated. “Don’t… Don’t ask me about this. You can’t ask me about this.”

“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to compromise you, or whatever this would do. Forget I asked. I’ll figure it out on my own.”

She shook her head. “No, you won’t, but I can’t help you with this. It’s… I’m too close to it. You’ll understand some day. Just, please don’t make me choose.”

“Choose?”

She shook her head.

“Okay, I’m sorry.” Whatever Una knew, it was something vital, something I absolutely had to know, but I wasn’t going to get it out of her, and I was afraid if I tried I would lose her for another three years. Pathetically, I tried to change the subject. “How did you convince my mother to let you in without telling her your name? She’s not usually that trusting.”

Una smiled a bit at that. “Do you seriously think this is the first time I have met your parents?”

“Too much to hope you’ll explain that?”

“Not happening.” She smiled, but it was heavy, and masking a pain she clearly hadn’t expected to be confronted with today. “I should get going.” She surprised me by giving me a hug, something she had never done before. Or had done many times before. Impossible to know.

“Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

“I won’t,” she promised.

I never saw that version of Penelope again.

omewhere in my head was the secret to time travel. If Future Me was telling the truth about that much, at least, then my dream was no conceit after all. Part of me knew that would be exactly the sort of thing someone would tell me to lure me in. The rest of me told that part to kindly shut up.

Given the proper resources, I could make it work. I did not have those resources, at least not exactly. I did have one thing, though. I had a functioning example of the technology bonded to my left ulna.

The prospect of digging it out to inspect it did not appeal. But with only two months to go, I needed answers, and that was the only place I knew where to start. What I really needed was access to a medical scanner and a technician who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions. That was not going to happen. However, I did have access to something that might accomplish approximately the same purpose.

My father’s work was designing multi-processor industrial robots. Specifically, he was a Restrictable Intelligence engineer. His job was to traverse that narrow band between non-intelligent and artificially intelligent machines. Too dumb, and the robots can’t do their work. Too smart, and they won’t want to. Dad helped develop the Crawford-Walden Processor, which is meant to be both fully integrated and remotely reprogrammable. Part of that system incorporated a CWP scanner, which could both diagnose and reorient the robots’ multiple brains without the need to physically remove them, which was often a prohibitively complicated procedure. Presumably, whatever the device in my arm was, it had to have some sort of processor. A diagnostic scan might give me a starting point in figuring out what it was.

A proper CWP scan would have to be conducted at the manufacturing facility. Even if I could convince the dozen or so people who would need to authorize it—including my father—it would end up entailing every one of them knowing what I was looking at. My own reluctance to dig it out of my arm might not be shared by all of them.

However, Dad kept a couple of early prototypes from his lab. They were technically obsolete, useless for any application to current CWP models, and a form of technology that had already been cracked by dozens of other companies. Security being a non-issue, he was allowed to keep them in a trophy case in his office. He was also allowed to bring one of them home, to satisfy the curiosity of his son who had a sudden and renewed passion for science and wanted to study it. The prospect of getting me fired up to go back to school was more than enough incentive to bring me one, which he did the same day I asked for it.

It took me two days of tinkering with it in my room to figure out how to have it scan through soft tissue without risk of injury, something it was certainly never designed for. I got some fantastic images of the interior of the module, revealing a nanoscopically complex structure. I also got a plethora of data regarding its functionality, as the scanner attempted to guess how and why a CWP would behave the way this device did. Several treatment solutions were presented to correct what it saw as aberrations, and I of course rejected them all.

Unfortunately, the scanner was not equipped to tell me anything that I was able to connect to time travel theory. The only hard piece of analysis it was able to provide was both entirely foreseeable, and regrettably troubling.

Too Smart
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ith one week to go before I had to make my choice, I got another visit from Una. She looked about thirty this time.