4

It’s only now that Amelia notices her right arm has gone completely numb, trapped as it was under her chest, and this finally gets her to retract this melted grasshopper pose and slide back to dangle legs off the unslept-in side of the bed, Mrs. Inessa’s, originally. She leans over the two Polaroids.

“Wha—what? What?”

This is absolutely it, why, how…?

In a moment of logical crisis like this, when a worn, treasured, family photograph that hasn’t left her childhood bedroom in, what, 15 years?—appears amidst the few personal belongings of your professor and thesis advisor and grad school recommendation-writer, whose house you have slept outside, and then literally broke into with bolt cutters—not even Seattle fishscale will cut it¹.

No, right now Amelia needs to get her head straight using the best method she knows and has had at her disposal for four years running. Not since the day before June 15th, 1990 has she had to turn to the stacks of clothing magazines or her father’s textbooks to seek calm and sanity, for it was on that day that he made up for a decade or so of frequent truancy with one quite valuable piece of Japanese-made consumer electronics.

Yellow, teal, red, blue scenbelysning lift their heads to blind the audience.

With the Sony Discman D-20, even your French exams (Why is there a language requirement for physics majors??) can be accompanied by high-fidelity digital stereo which almost no one else in Collins can overhear. That is, as long as the four AAs hold out (Daniel did not spring for the battery pack).

Mina damer och herrar, musiken ni har kommit för att se och musikerna ni har kommit för att höra! Var snälla, sätt högt på…

For her first seven semesters at UPS, Amelia had carried the Discman between classes listening mostly to folk, Merseybeat, and pop rock albums she had grown up hearing in vinyl format–If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears having been a prominent selection since a compact disc of the album was released halfway through her tenure.

The first kick hits simultaneously with a wavering C#5, which sustains for two beats before switching to E5 for a sixteenth, then back to C#5, then up and down again; some kind of sweeping ocean breeze is coming in, and you can bet it’s somewhere more glamorous than the Baltic Sea. And here’s Ulf, pretending to play that saxophone–give him a break folks; no one outside Sweden knew about the salutes and armbands yet—

But on 23 November, 1993, as determined by the Arista deities, the world would taste a new, groovy, reggae-driven pop sensation, and on 7 January, our lead character would fatefully hear the album’s titular song on KUPS, and pick up the CD three days thereafter.

Välkommen… Ace. Of. Base!

Amelia is rushing back down the–clang! clang! clang!–down the (Did I say corrugated?) perforated steel staircase, because her backpack is still in the truck, and along with it the Discman, and along with it, The Sign. She leans over from the driver's side, yanks the black backpack out of its passenger seat, sets it roughly on the gravel and opens both zippers at once as if there's an automatic defibrillator inside and someone nearby lacks a pulse. Her backpack is currently largely empty, but for the Discman and the remains of last night's snacks. She fishes the headphone cord out from under a backup shirt, sits down cross-legged, shifts over–aaouch, gravel–takes it off hold and—

Aw, no, no no... No no no.

Battery's dead, again. Amelia bonks her head back against the body of the Ford, doesn't feel it; she is already sobbing. A cascade, as it were, of emotion has found its breaking point at last. かわいそうに。She's had about six hundred calories since two in the afternoon yesterday, those automotive sleeping conditions, plans for the future, letter of rec, Professor Lindon's pillow, agh!

She's got her face screwed up with too many worries for any one to dominate, a panic attack brewing that's already causing her to forget the tactical mystery of the photo with Dad.

Let's give her some space, for the moment.

~

The Setting

Outside of any given universe, things are very, very bright. In this sea of shimmering photons, timelines wriggle and collide in an opaque mass, filling the three dimensions of time as long as the eye can see. And normally, you won’t see for very long at all, crowded as these wormy universes are in the ocean of before and after, if and if-not, had-been and hadn’t-been.

After unknown multitudes of frames, by which this system evolves, some timelines found greater entropy in geometric partnerships, and thus were temporarily coaxed into those formations². This pattern continued, under random bombardment, until enough tori and cuboids and cylinders of time had been present in the same era such that a jackpot became inevitable. An extremely rare configuration involving rings of nested cones could persist due to its internal inertial flow.

In brief, polarization of the corkscrew pattern that a universe makes as it sails through time creates a had-been, hadn’t-been dichotomy. A cone will usually be fully polarized, due to its convergence point at the tip, where twisting timelines flow together. And when two cones intersect, with one’s apex inside the next, a chain reaction occurs. The state is “handed off” to the next cone, and the prior is inverted.

Had-been and hadn’t-been thus became the natural binary logic of the 6th dimension. From there, it seems entropy would demand more and more complex structures which could take in timelines from the surrounding sea efficiently and process those into copies of what we can now call an organism. Incredible strings of time cones developed with junctions, looping storage bytes, and error checking, and these formed even more massive blocks which carried out the self-preserving code pulsing within them.

And so the 6th dimension had its first colony of bacteria³, clumped together in a very brief ball, reproducing as they secured loose strands of universes from the surrounding bustling sea.

~

Now, wasn’t that refreshing? Unfortunately, Amelia is still not having a good time, and that’s not set to improve any time soon.

…

She’s got the CD player in an iron grip, and is perfectly still. There’s a sharp little corner of some kind poking her gut. Do you ever finish crying, but then hold the position long as possible, even though you’re alone? Some kind of feeble attempt to tell the cameras, “No, look, I’m really suffering here, I’m even putting up with these—”

Sharp little corners of some kind poking her gut. What in the hell is—?

The Polaroids have been stuffed into her windbreaker’s left pocket. Man, this insane shit—still sniffling a little over the irrepressible thought that you are not getting into grad school at this rate, and will be stuck upstream of where anything cool is happening for the rest of eternity.

She stretches forward to dump the Discman in the backpack, huffs back into place, glares at these two photographs through residual tears. How did you get here?—but the only logical explanation is that Professor Lindon broke into my parents’ house and took this so that I would know…

That I was supposed to find it. She knew I would come here? This still doesn’t make any sense. If I was supposed to find this one, then—flips out the dark one again—then I was supposed to find this.

What does it mean, Professor? If this is some kind of extreme game or like test, then that’s really cool but why couldn’t you explain in a letter, maybe?

Because they’re after her. Who? Uhh, secret physics police. Umm remnants of the KGB, seeking revenge on her family for fleeing. Fuck, I don’t know, but this is freaky, man. I don’t like it.

Amelia has been staring through the poorly-lit Polaroid and has come to recognize the shape formed by the orange dots in the midground. A circle with one quadrant removed. Which could be…

She stands up slowly and hikes uphill at a funeral pace, turning back occasionally to hold the photo against the horizon and check for fit.

~

 “—And Bootes, and Serpens, and Draco, and, and… Jupiter Mars and Saturn in a row! And and and, Antares and Pie Scorpion and a Crab…”

“Okay Amelia, we’re here.” Daniel hefts out of the car and walks around to open the front passenger door. “Can you get your own seatbelt?” The nine-year-old is vibrating with excitement.

“Dr. Esparse!” A student calls out from the white double-door entrance.

Daniel raises a hand and looks up to the darkening sky.

In 1972, the University of Washington Department of Astronomy dedicated the Manastash Ridge Observatory, almost halfway across the state–an hour north of Yakima on the eastern side of the Cascades–so that students could escape the sleepless skies of Seattle, perform independent research, and learn about the hands-on aspects of running a professional telescope. Daniel, who by 1978 was already sick of putting his engineering PhD to use for a very large and very evil company with divisions around Seattle–in this case, Auburn–and which we probably shouldn’t mention by name here, Daniel Carlito Esparse, erstwhile thirteen-year-old hustler and pickpocket of Little Ecuador, Westchester County, decided to shift careers towards his lifelong passion: the stars. Only a year later he had completed a pro forma MS in Astronomy and had begun to lecture at UW.

“Hey Amelia! High five?” An undergrad crouches down and raises her hand. Amelia returns the gesture with force and a little hop, and trots on ahead into the cinderblock facility. The student looks up at Dr. Esparse—“Well she’s ready to see some stars!”

There are five or six undergraduates here today from UW’s main campus, ready to stay the weekend. A graduate student has been on site since a few days prior, affixing balloons and streamers to welcome the new MRO director–and, it turns out, his daughter.

“I can’t really convey to you all how much of a dream job this is for me. I think we’re truly in heaven out here.”

The grad student is about to make a supportive comment when, from inside the building, an excited scream—

“WHOAA! WHAT’S THIS THING?!?”

~

Halfway up the ridgeline, aiming for the local maximum where this Polaroid was seemingly taken, Amelia feels a small resurgence of that wonder of discovery. One boot after another, she sludges, unaware of the easier National Forest route that cuts along the ridge, worries and desires draining away, something approaching ekaggatā. Reaching the summit, she holds out the picture once again to find that the treehouse-house below and Mt. Rainier above match just right.

So where am I?

She’s on a little bit of cleared land, an RV-sized water tank at its northern edge. Nothing much here but a beautiful view—does she–did she come up here to stargaze?

Amelia finds a natural seat on a granite boulder and loses track of time between ānāpāna and the sati thereof. She leans back slowly and her back cracks once, then again–extremely satisfying–and finds a right arm wants to dangle near some dandelion seed heads. Third and fourth fingers lazily scrape off a few fluffy cypselae, some remnants of verdant sparkling nail polish caressed by soft little pappi.

This whole lot is full of dandelions, actually. All the little clock heads waving and bobbing in the midday mountain breeze. Except this nearby spot of dark, fine dirt. A gopher?

She leans up and crouches near the beach ball-sized perturbance. No, this has been stomped back down… by a human…

So much for the green sparkly nail polish. Amelia is now the pocket gopher claiming this territory; she’s digging with fingernail claws, methodically, in no rush.

About 20cm down, a corner of black plastic trash bag emerges from the loam.

¹The author, who is morally opposed to puns, keeps trying to get me to remove this one, but I refuse ardently.

²Until a fast-paced timeline smacks into one and ruptures the shape.

³Comprised entirely of autotrophs. Heterotrophy is impractical due to the extreme difference (1080) in hardness between a random volume of time strings and the chronobiologic structures which constitute life. In other words, it’s essentially impossible to eat anything but the constant, low hum of fresh strings sailing about. Only when an organism has died does its structure unravel into free strings and 3d dust.