Other Earths (collection)

The black-ops commander looked at his feet. “No, not yet, we haven’t. And we don’t know why. The images are jumbled. Some might even be from our past or present. But we have managed to figure out one thing, which is why you’ve been brought here so quickly: Something will happen later this year, in September.”

“Something?”

Down below, the little man had stopped his purposeful wandering and gazed into one of the vats as if mesmerized.

“Something cataclysmic, Mr. President. Across the channels. Across all of the adepts. It’s quite clear. Every adept has a different version of what that something is. And we don’t know exactly when, but in September.”

He had a thousand more questions, but at that moment one of the military’s top scientific researchers entered the control room to show them the schematics for the machine—the machine they’d found in the mind of one particular adept.

The time machine.

The teachers are telling him about the weather, and he’s pretending to care as he continues to notice the florescent lighting as yellow as the skin that forms on old butter, the cracks in the dull beige walls, the faded construction paper of old projects taped to those walls, drooping down toward a tired, washed-out green carpet that’s paper-thin under foot.

It’s the kind of event that he’s never really understood the point of, even as he understands the reason for it. To prove that he’s still fit for office. To prove that the country, most of it, is free of war and division. To prove he cares about kids, even though this particular school is falling apart. Why this class, why today, is what he really doesn’t understand, with so many world crises—like China’s imperialism, like Iraq as the only bulwark against Russian influence in the Middle East. Or a vice president he now knows may be too old and delusional to be anything other than an embarrassment, and a cabinet he let his family’s political cronies bully him into appointing, and a secret cavern that has infected his thoughts, infected his mind.

And that leads to memories of his father and of the awful silence into which they told him, as he sat coked up and hungover that morning on the pastel couch in some sleazy apartment, how it had happened while his father was working an audience in Atlanta.

All of this has made him realize that there’s only one way to survive the presidency: to just let go of the reality of the world in favor of whatever reality he wants or needs, no matter how selfish.

The teachers are turning into animals again, and he can’t seem to stop it from happening.

The time machine had appeared as an image on their monitors from an adept named Peter in vat 1023, and because they couldn’t figure out the context—weapon? camera? something new?—they had to wake Peter up and have a conversation with him.

A time machine, he told them.

A time machine?

A machine that travels through time, he’d clarified. And they’d believed him or, if not believed him, dared to hope he was right. That what Peter had seen while deprived of anything but his own brain, like some deep-sea fish, like something constantly turning inward and then turning inward again, had been a time machine.

If they didn’t build it and they found out later that it might have worked and could have helped them avert or change what was fated to happen in September …Well, who could live with that thought?

That day, three hours after being sworn in, he had had to give the order to build a time machine, and quickly.

“Something bad will happen in September. Something bad. Across the channels. Something awful.”

“What?” he kept asking, and the answer was always the same: “We don’t know.”

They kept telling him that the adepts didn’t seem to convey literal information as much as impressions and visions of the future, filtered through dreamscapes. As if the drugs they’d perfected, which had changed the way the adepts dreamed, both improved and destroyed focus.

In the end, he had decided to build the machine and to defend against almost everything they could think of or divine from the images: any attack against the still thriving New York financial district or the monument to the Queen Mother in the New York harbor; the random god-missiles of the Christian jihadists of the Heartland, who still hadn’t managed to unlock the nuclear codes in the occupied states; and even the lingering cesspool that was Los Angeles after the viruses and riots.

But they still did not really know.

He’s good at talking to people when it’s not a prepared speech, good at letting his mind be elsewhere while he talks to a series of masks from behind his own mask. The prepared speeches are different because he’s expected to inhabit them, and he’s never fully inhabited anything, any role, in his life.