New Novel
Chapter 4: The Price of a Second Week

Chapter 4: The Price of a Second Week

"I came here once," Marek said, before Leon had finished sitting down.

"You remember once."

"In the first version of this week you contacted me anonymously and I answered without your name. You came here, examined the machine, called it an exceptional fraud, and left. You said one thing I decided to keep."

"What was it?"

"You compared my grandfather’s shielding design to a drunk electrician wrapping a microwave in roofing metal."

Leon glanced at the capsule. "Was I wrong?"

"Not entirely."

The hall was cold, and it had the particular acoustic of a building designed around a machine that no longer existed, so that every sentence went up thirty metres into the dark and came back slightly later than it should have. Somewhere above them a cooling pump ran up, held, and dropped back to idle.

"So you went back," Leon said.

"Seven days."

"And this week — the one I have just spent — is the second one."

"It is the second one for me. It is the first one for you." Marek lowered himself into a chair with the cane braced under one hand. "That distinction has cost me a great deal and I recommend you take it seriously."

Leon looked at the envelope on the table. The street sweeper. The football match. Lightning over a clear city. His grandmother’s handwriting under a red crayon bridge.

They had never been predictions.

They were memories.

"Yes," Marek said.

"You lived a week, went back to its beginning, and wrote down what you had already watched happen."

"Yes."

"And then you overwrote yourself."

"There is no second Marek. The chamber does not duplicate. It replaces." He said it without emphasis. "The week I lived is gone. What remains of it is in your pocket."

"And you damaged yourself to prove it."

Marek’s eyes went down to his right shoe.

Then he bent, unfastened the reinforced boot, and took it off.

The smallest three toes were grey at the tips, the colour fading unevenly back toward the joints. The nails had lost their shine. The skin was dry but not swollen, and there was none of the mottling Leon would have expected from anything he could name.

"Blood flow?" Leon asked.

"Normal. Pulse present in the foot. Capillary refill within limits."

"Diabetes. Embolism. Cold injury. Toxin exposure."

"Ruled out. More than once, in more than one country, by people I paid enough to be honest with me." Marek put the boot back on and fastened it slowly. "I removed a tissue sample nineteen days ago and kept it sealed and weighed. It has lost point seven three percent of its mass. It has not evaporated. It has not decomposed into any measurable gas. It has not contaminated the container. Its mass has simply stopped agreeing with the mass recorded the day before."

Leon had spent two years teaching himself not to be impressed by anomalies, on the grounds that most of them turn out to be instrumentation, and he sat very still now because this one had a boot on it.

"That result should be impossible."

"Yes."

"Pain?"

"Occasionally. The worse symptom is memory contamination — for two days after a jump I have recollections of both versions and no reliable way to sort them." A pause. "My grandfather called the underlying process temporal decoherence. He also called it four other things, in the same notebook, on the same page."

"How many times have you used it?"

"Personally, three." Marek raised a finger. "Seventeen minutes. Numbness in one toe." A second. "Six hours. Pain, temperature loss, two days of duplicated memory." A third. "Seven days. This."

"Will it spread?"

"Nobody knows. The border has moved twice. Slowly."

"Amputation?"

"Possibly. Unless the instability sits above the visible tissue, in which case cutting off the symptom removes nothing at all."

Leon looked at the capsule for a while, at the four decades of weld and the cable runs and the improvised cooling and the thing at the centre of it that had not been improvised by anybody, and he thought about a man who had spent a working lifetime building a container for an object he could not open.

"Why sell it? You have the only working example of the most important object on this planet."

"The pumps fail. The shielding corrodes. The property records attract questions. The core wakes at irregular intervals and I do not know why." Marek turned the cane slowly between his palms. "Sooner or later some competent analyst notices the power draw. And I cannot use it again."

"And so you chose a billionaire."

"I chose somebody who could pay for the machine, defend it, and had no institution behind him who would take it away and classify it."

"Why a hundred million?"

"Because that is enough to stop anybody buying it out of curiosity."

He got up and took a framed photograph off a shelf and set it down without ceremony, the way a man handles a thing he has handled ten thousand times. An older man in a laboratory coat, holding a clipboard, not looking at the camera. Steel-grey hair. A build that suggested he had been outdoors more than the coat implied.

"Professor Elias Kenji Weiss. My grandfather."

"He built the shell."

"He built everything you can see. He found the rest."

"Where?"

"He never wrote it down. I have looked for nineteen years."

"And nineteen years ago?"

"He ran the machine." Marek set the photograph on the table, face up. "The chamber came back empty forty-three hours later. No blood. No damage. No thermal signature. The restraints were open and the seat was cold."

He opened one of the paper notebooks to a page kept under transparent film. Elias’s handwriting crossed it at three different angles around a charcoal sketch of the core. Most of the equations had been struck out by the same hand.

Two lines had not.

A DESTINATION IS NOT THE SAME THING AS A DATE.

And underneath, smaller, pressed harder into the paper:

IF THE MACHINE REMEMBERS A PLACE, DO NOT ASSUME IT WANTS TO TAKE YOU HOME.

"Those are his last complete notes," Marek said. "After that it’s symbols, fragments, and corrections to calculations he never wrote down anywhere I’ve found."

"So you don’t know whether he died."

"I don’t know where the machine sent him."

Leon stood up and walked once around the platform, slowly, checking each face of the core against the last one, and on all four sides it declined to reflect him properly, returning an outline that arrived a fraction after he did and left a fraction after he had gone.

"I’d use it once," he said. "Existing-self synchronisation. The tenth of March, two thousand."

Marek stared at him. "You were alive?"

"Seven months old. Zero point five seven years." Leon counted on his fingers as he came back around. "Twenty-six years of adult knowledge in an infant with a clean start and two careful parents. Buy technology before it becomes religion. Acquire land before cities grow around it. Avoid the four decisions I would undo. Have a life that is not a corridor of purchased hobbies."

"Naturally."

"When you put it that way it sounds irresponsible."

"It is irresponsible."

"But technically possible."

Marek did not answer immediately. "Would you still be you? My grandfather’s position was that identity is a pattern, and the machine preserves patterns, and that this was either reassuring or the most frightening sentence he had ever written."

"You’ve used it three times."

"And I am the wrong man to ask."

Leon looked at the capsule.

"Send me the contract."

Marek did not move. "First, secure your family."

"They’re already comfortable."

"Comfort is not enough for what you are considering." He picked up the cane. "Give them enough that your disappearance cannot become their punishment. Irrevocable. Outside your control. Structured so that a court, a creditor and a grieving mother cannot undo it between them."

Leon’s amusement went out.

He thought about it for longer than he expected to.

"Forty million," he said.

"For your family?"

"Yes."

Marek nodded once.

"Do that. Then I’ll sell you the machine."