Time Wars

Scientists say that as we approach the speed of light, time slows down for us compared to everyone else. If we actually made the round trip, we’d come back younger than the people we left behind. We might experience only a day, while a year passes for everyone else.

****

Emily grew up skipping time. Everyone with the gene could do it. She used her power for the little things—jumping past the wait at train stations, fast-forwarding through boring afternoons, or once, when she was in a car accident, skipping straight to the wail of sirens, pain erased by the promise of morphine.

But now it was different, she knew, while winding the grandfather clock in the foyer of her home, smiling to herself at the irony. She had an incurable disease that only the future could fix, and she was running out of time. The future advancements in medicine called to her, but only she had the gene to jump ahead in time to where a cure might be. Her husband, Isaak, and their five-year-old son didn’t have the gene, and would have to stay behind.

She moved the hands on the clock to the proper time. With each day that passed, she heard the ticking both faster and louder, counting down.

Isaak rounded the corner of the hall and saw his wife adjusting the clock. “You don’t have a choice. Jump, and maybe when you get there, they’ll have a cure. But time’s a thief, Em. We try to outrun it, skip ahead, but in the end, it takes what it wants.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Later, Emily wrapped her arms around her son—small, warm, and trembling slightly—and breathed him in. “And what about Jack?” she asked her husband, perched in his reading chair.

Isaak looked up with his eyes glistening. “We’ll be older. You’ll miss some time with us, and us with you, but you’ll get the chance for a long life, and we’ll get the chance to spend it with you. What else can we do?”

“I don’t know.”

Jack peeked from under his mother’s arms. “Where are you going?” He swiped his hair and stared at her, his eyes wide and scared.

Isaak lowered his voice. “Em, think about it. The doctors are giving you six months.”

“I’ll be giving up six months with you both.”

“Six months of dying?” Isaak tried to smile, but his face twisted into a grimace, reflecting pain in broken shards. “At least I’ll be the older man when you see me again.” His laughter caught in his throat.

They decided on ten years, long enough forward to predict a cure, but short enough that when Isaak and Jack arrived, they would only have aged ten years. For Emily, it would be the same day, and no wait at all.

The day of the jump, the family had a party. The parents explained to Jack that his mother was going away, but he’d see her again. They didn’t mention the length of the ‘going away’. Can a five-year-old understand the value of time? The following morning, Isaak and Emily went to the center of town and found a place that likely wouldn’t change in ten years—a courtyard with a fountain spraying water and in the center a Greek statue of an old man with wings. Emily picked the spot she’d jump from, at the feet of Chronos, holding the hourglass of time.

“Don’t you move in the next ten years to where I can’t find you,” Emily said to Isaak. The day was blue and fresh.

Her husband laughed. “What if I get an offer in five years to move to the West Coast?”

“You better—”

Isaak reached out and grabbed Emily, held her tight, and kissed her. Now, she thought. Now. Or I won’t be able to do it.

Her image shimmered, and she faded from her husband’s arms.

****

Maybe we should have seen it coming—the ability to jump ahead in time. At first, we needed a capsule that helped us move fast enough to skip forward. Then Dr. Forsythe figured out how to splice the trick into our DNA. Suddenly, anyone with the right gene could jump: five minutes, a hundred years, it didn’t matter. The only rule? No one could ever go back.

****

Emily staggered, her heart pounding, as an armored vehicle roared past. Soldiers swarmed the square. The air—so blue and clean before—was now thick and gray, stinging her nose with the reek of cordite.

A man in fatigues pointed Emily out to other men. “A jumper,” he said.

The men handcuffed her and threw her into the back of a transport vehicle. Soon they locked her away with other women in a fenced-in compound. Emily recognized her son’s elementary school, but there was no laughter echoing through the empty schoolyard. No children’s voices. No happy footsteps. Only weeds choked courtyards now abandoned laden with the smell of pending death.

A haggard woman with stringy hair blocked Emily’s path. She eyed her jeans and pink blouse. “New arrival? When did you jump from?” the woman rasped. Her eyes were a deep pink where the whites should be, and Emily saw a faint, unnatural movement, something slivering, deep within them.

“I guess I am a new arrival,” Emily said, her skin crawling under the woman’s stare. There had to be over a hundred women in the compound.

“How long?” the old woman asked.

“Ten years. At least I hope it was ten years.”

“Easy to figure. When did you jump?”

“I jumped from 2040.”

“You’ve landed right on target. It’s March 2050.”

Ten years. Her pulse quickened. All Emily could think about was finding her family. She knew Isaak couldn’t be far. But if they took her, could they also have taken Isaak and Jack somewhere? What had their lives been like over the last ten years without her? She looked at the woman, her lined red eyes pulsing faintly. Emily looked away, and a shiver went up her spine.

A red-haired woman stepped from behind. “Take her boots, Kali!”

They pinned Emily down, her hiking boots soon stripped. Once the two women moved off, Emily lay in the dirt, staring at her bare feet, ignored by the other passing women in the compound.

A week later, a bald officer with a penciled mustache peered at Emily from across his desk. She felt his eyes undress her, and then his Boston accent growled into thick air.

He snickered. “It’s a funny thing, this jumping, don’t you think? The game is jumping or being jumped, and they say the army is losing. Not losing by battlefield deaths, mind you, da’ling, but to our men skipping ahead in time. We’re losing our own to a future sucking them forward, damn right we are.

“But here’s the deal, pretty thing. You desert, or jump, well… we’ll send a tracer. A jumper leaves tracks. But you’re a lucky one, not jumping to the war front. You’ll be helping with the arrivals.” Now he spoke louder so that those around them could hear. “We all need to pitch in for the war effort.”

Lucky one? Would she ever find her family? Isaak and Jack had already waited ten years after she jumped. Imprisoned not by bars, but choice, even if she jumped, she would be further away in time, and then the tracers would find her. She returned to the compound, resigned.

“You’ll die, girl, with that attitude,” Kali said. They were standing in line for the after-work meal. Kali heaped as much slop on her plate as she could. Then motioned for Emily to take more.

“Then I’ll die. What’s it to you?”

“I’m an observer of the human condition, is what I am, Emily. In this case, yours.”

Emily laughed. “What do your observations tell you?”

“You laugh, but I wasn’t always a slave, mistress. The odds are running you’ll fold like what we call a suburbanite, a waste of air.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Don’t look at me like that. My bets on you, not against you.”

“Good to know.” Emily moved away.

Kali called out to her back. “Em! You need to get your damn boots back, is what you need to do!”

Emily crouched with her food for a long time, but didn't eat.

A week later, Kali joined her in line and smiled. Emily was beat up, bruises on her face, her arm angled in a handmade sling. But she was wearing her boots.

Two years later, a line of jumpers queued up in front of Emily’s desk. The latest refugee jumper was in front of her. His clothes hung on his thin frame, and his eyes were red, like so many arriving. “What year did you jump?” Emily asked.

The man stirred as if waking from a dream. He shook his head at her question. “Last year. 2051. The year before. I don’t know. I’ve jumped a lot, ma’am.”

Emily barely looked him over. He was like thousands of others. Can he jump for the military? Or does he have the eyes of an addict, and jumped too many times to gain five minutes of convenience, a day to save time, or to move ahead to hoped-for better times? With each jump, how much of his mind had gone, carrying the burden? His deep red eyes and blank look gave Emily her answer.

The man stepped forward and leaned onto her desk. “I see that look, mum, and you’re right. I was sent up with the 51st in ’44—we jumped out quick as we could. Fire behind us, burning through our lines. My brother Billie died black in my arms, skin still crackling. I jumped again, and next thing I knew, a jumper was behind me, slashing away. We kept jumping, seconds at a time, trying for an edge, you know? But the eyes, Mum—redder every time, our minds peeled away like bloody hides. Now I’m near red-eyed and nothings left. But I’m not as red as some. Please don’t send me to the red-eyed quadrant. I’m begging you, ma’am.”

Emily shuddered. His eyes stared back like organic red stars, no longer his but lost from jumping time. She looked away. He needed to be processed, but there was nothing she could do. A chill rose on her back. “We’re looking for clean jumpers.”

Other red-eyes guided the man to another line.

“I’ve never jumped,” the next man said.

At first, Emily didn’t look up. He was one more person in line to be processed.

“Still like older men?”

Emily’s heart skipped. She’d never forget the sound of her husband’s voice. She sprang to her feet, her chair tipping over behind her. This man was gray at the temples, and lines creased his eyes, but it was Isaak!

He cautioned her with both hands. “Not now,” he said. “I’ll meet you where we last saw each other. Tonight.”

Later, Emily stood at the fountain in the town square. The water was dry and the winged statue was gone, but it seemed like yesterday she had faded from Isaak’s arms, nearly fifteen years ago. Would he really meet her? Was the man she talked to in line a dream? And what happened to Jack?

****

Of course, there were problems. In the early days, people disappeared when they jumped, only to reappear naked in the future. People skipped into death, embedded in walls within a building that hadn’t existed. The proximity monitor solved this, which enabled people to bring artifacts along: clothing, tools, military apparatus. Both armies chased the future until what they were fighting for was forgotten, and long ago in the past.

****

She heard Isaak behind her at the fountain. “I told you. Older men have their charm, Em.”

Emily spun and threw her arms around her husband. She held on until her breath came back, until she was sure he was real.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should have been here. I tried.” He pointed to a row of buildings in the distance. “See those? Labor camps if you can’t jump. Those were home for me and Jack. We were locked in those places when I should have met you. Isaak then motioned to the groups of homeless strewn along the streets. “Those are jump addicts, the red-eyed; their minds are nearly gone. They’re no good to the army, and they fend for themselves in refugee camps, living on streets, feeding in dumps.”

“And I’m part of the machine,” Emily said.

Isaak shoved a pack at her. “Not anymore. You’re coming with me.”

Emily picked up the pack. The same old Isaak. Never explaining, just assuming. But I’d go anywhere, I love him so. “So where are you taking me, old man?”

“To the mountains. You’re now a resistance fighter.”

“And Jack? Will we see Jack? He’s a young man, isn’t he? How does he look?”

Isaak stopped and turned back. “It’s not good, Em.”

“What? Tell me. Is Jack ok? Is he still alive?” Emily felt a horrible panic rise in her stomach. If something had happened to Jack…

“He’s alive. That’s not it.”

“What? The truth.”

Isaak’s blue eyes glistened once again, and Emily remembered the last time she’d seen her husband that upset.

“He’s who we’re fighting against, Em. He’s with the State.”

****

If you think about it, when you jump the world moves forward in time, but you stay put. The world around you is doing the changing. They could never figure out why a jumper didn’t just freeze, why they disappeared. But they did, disappear I mean. Then pop back alive sometime later in the exact same spot, a day, a decade, or one-hundred centuries later. Who knows.

****

“They’ve turned us down,” Isaak said, now the fifty-year-old resistance leader. “The negotiating team doesn’t want an armistice. The meat grinder into the future goes on.”

Ambassador Harrington sipped her wine. As she aged, she found she enjoyed the simpler things: wine in the afternoon, a sunset, a quiet moment with her husband where they weren’t having to strategize a campaign. The simpler things, she thought to herself. But enjoyed was the wrong word. ‘Cherished’ was closer. Even the pain in her leg seemed right. To live with it.

“Why would they trust us?” Emily said. “Neither can trust the other. But there’s a solution, and you know what it is.”

Isaak stared at Emily. “The Assembly will never go along.”

Emily’s voice was flat. “The virus stops the jumping, but it kills the host.”

“Which means it could kill you.”

Emily touched Isaak’s cheek. “Or not. I’ve lived longer than most said I would already. But don’t we all live with so little time? Maybe our time is over.”

“Millions will die, Em. They’ll be carnage once it begins, riots, looting. You know people will jump in panic, but the infection will follow them into whatever time they jump to. Imagine the panic as the virus infects jumpers who are generations, hundreds,, thousands of years ahead.”

A guard knocked. “The general will see you now.”

The general, Emily repeated in her head. My son. “Show him in.”

Jack entered. He stood in front of his parents and swiped hair from his eyes.

Emily broke, her face crumpled. She rose and strode to him, her arms outstretched. He turned away, and she stopped. A cold ache rose in her chest.

Jack spoke only to Isaak, his father. “I came because I think we are more on the same side than not. Only for that. The past is the past. I want to stop the jumping, and I think you do as well. It’s only ‘how’ we can’t agree on.”

“Jack, I lost you also,” Emily said.

He turned on her, his face a scarlet red. “Lost me? Can you imagine? A five-year-old?”

“I’m sorry.”

Jack closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry also, but it’s not about us anymore.” He turned to Isaac. “We don’t need a virus. We need a surrender, and then we’ll figure it out.”

Isaac sat back down. “I can’t advise that, son. We’ve gone too far already.”

“Then the war continues,” Jack said.

Emily touched his forearm, and he yanked it away

“I just can’t. It’s too late.”

He left without a word.

Emily stared at the door he’d exited, set her wine down, rose from her seat, and slowly entered another door. The Grand Hall of the United Nations Building opened up. Thousands crowded the layers of stadium seats. When they saw her enter, many cheered, more booed.

Isaac looked on from the side. He laughed, and Emily traced his eyes to her boots.

Her hand found the vial in her pocket. Her secret, her choice. She could stop the madness of jumping, but when?

She went to the podium. Now the hall was a crescendo of people screaming at one another. A fight broke out in the upper chamber, and masses of people turned to stare and jeer. Security stormed in from the rear doors and rushed the crowd.

Emily held out the vial and raised it high above her head as if offering it to the crowd.

A hush. Thousands of people, as one, frozen, fixated.

“Murderer!” screamed a man from the silence.

She unscrewed the cap.

“Emily. Don’t!” Isaak yelled.

Jack rushed from the audience towards the stage.

She held the vial higher with both of her hands, shimmered, and faded from sight.