Mara sat alone on her deck and looked out across the lake. The sun was setting behind her and cast a warm glow across the meadow, the lake, and the fields beyond. Silently she watched the mirror image of clouds and their reflection off the water’s surface slowly roll by. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. The air was warm and smelled of summer grass.
<Mara?>
SID’s voice broke the evening calm. Mara ignored it.
“This is the most wonderful smell.” Mara opened her eyes and leaned back in her seat to look up at the darkening sky.
<You decided not to tell her.>
SID modulated its voice for the greatest receptivity.
“Today was a very good day. Can we just leave it at that?”
<Based on the substance and direction of your earlier conversation with Anna, this afternoon would have been the optimal time. She has the right to know. It impacts her too.>
“And what should I tell her, SID? The future is not what she thinks it is.”
<No, I’m referring to your situation. She believes she has a future with you. Don’t you think you owe it to her to be more forthcoming?>
Mara paused before replying.
“How long have we been doing this, SID? Over three years?”
<1,105 days to be exact.>
“Okay. For the last 1,105 days, we’ve traveled to how many destinations?”
<Twenty-six.>
“And the pattern has been like clockwork, correct? We arrive at a new destination and anomalies appear in the time delta almost immediately. Within a week, trumpets sound in the sky. Wormholes open up. Creatures escape from other worlds. Chaos. And then what happens, SID?”
<We detect the presence of the Others.>
Mara had no idea what to call them. SID could only detect changes in energy signatures. But Mara saw those creatures in real life and in her dreams—images of featureless bone-white creatures that felt so alien she could find no better word. The Others. From the first moment in the distant future, when she saw one across the street staring at her with eyes like spinning galaxies, she knew that these creatures were hunting for her.
Her initial encounter with the Others came on her first day of time travel. She had just returned from her maiden trip, which lasted no more than fifteen minutes and served as a test run to prove she could travel to a specific location and time with precision. It seemed to have worked so well, and SID’s numbers proved it out. Time travel was possible. She ran from her lab, excited to tell her father and mother. She carried images from the past on her iCom as well as a small extinct flower she’d plucked from the ground during her time travel as evidence.
She struggled now to remember what her old home looked like, but she would never forget the expression on her father’s face when he failed to recognize her that distant morning. Her father refused to open the door for her. Worse yet, he looked frightened of her. A quick scan of the network revealed what she was beginning to fear herself. There were no records of a Mara Banjoko Lee anywhere to be found. She didn’t exist. Disoriented, she stumbled down the steps of her father’s residence to the sidewalk and began walking in no particular direction for hours until she reached an unfamiliar intersection and saw the apparition that would change her future course.
She remembered how the Other stared at her from across the street, with eyes like spinning galaxies. Pedestrians were oblivious to its presence. No one else could see it but her. She knew it. The Other raised its arm and pointed its sticklike finger at her, then opened its mouth in a soundless cry that reached deep inside her chest. It told Mara that she didn’t belong there—or anywhere—in a language she didn’t understand but felt. It told Mara that it was time to leave her life behind and follow. Mara instinctively understood what that meant. It wasn’t death. It was nonexistence. She had broken the natural order of things and it had cost her everything. And so she ran.
She fled back to her lab and grabbed all that she could: data records from different destinations and times, the replicator, the fabricator, and SID. She set course for a distant future where she could do no more harm; instead, she arrived in a foreign landscape with no sign of humanity except for an occasional ruin—the edge of a building rising above a dusty plain or a dead satellite still streaking across the sky, sending messages to no one. She wasn’t sure if humanity had reached the end of its road or found a new home out in the universe. This future Earth was the perfect place to hide, but she was utterly alone except for the strange animals dotting the landscape who bore little resemblance to their evolutionary past. SID had always been by her side in her research—a voice to bounce ideas off and help correct her sketchy math. Now, in this isolation, SID became something more. A friend. It was SID who first recognized the damage that complete isolation and separation had on Mara and recommended they find a new place in time.
That new place was an equatorial village in the time of the great warming, but conditions were worse than history had taught her. She saw firsthand the human toll from climate collapse, so different from history’s sterile charts and data. She tried to help those around her with the knowledge she had brought from the future. Mara befriended a group doing their best to help humanity survive, and for a brief moment she felt she could belong. Then came the sounds from the sky, and the anomalies, and the rips in space and time. Soon the visions of the Others followed, along with rumors of bone-white creatures lurking on the outskirts of town. Mara and SID decided it was time to go.
But at each destination, the same pattern occurred. The more Mara interacted with her surroundings, the faster the visions and the sightings of the Others appeared, until she decided that it was better to remain hidden behind cloaked walls. She also quickly determined another pattern. The greater the number of wormholes in her vicinity, the faster the visions came, which led Mara and SID to believe that the Others used those holes to track her down across time and space. They researched ways to scan for those tears in space-time. They came close, but they never had enough time. The Others always returned. And Mara was forced to quickly break down whatever she had built, remove all traces, and then set out for a new place in time to hide. The pattern repeated itself again and again.
Until now.
“This time is different though, isn’t it, SID? We’ve been here for almost five months. That’s three times longer than any other place and still no sign of the Others. Why is that?” Mara asked.
<I don’t know what the Others are. I don’t understand their motives. But perhaps they’ve grown tired of searching for us.>
“Or maybe they’ve lost our trail.”
<Perhaps.> SID paused while processing the right tone and intonation. <Is this the reason you haven’t told Anna?>
“I think so.”
<You really believe we have a future here.>
“I didn’t think so until today. Anna helped convince me otherwise. Is it wrong to hope, SID?” Mara asked.
<I don’t understand hope. I understand probabilities. And our probabilities for survival greatly improve if we can identify the source of the anomalies and close the wormholes once and for all.>
“You can’t fool me, SID.” Mara smiled and stared up at the first sign of evening stars. “I know you want to stay here as much as I do.”