Smith's Monthly #21 Page 20

  “So all these years we’ve been wondering,” Dawn asked, looking at Talia and then Ryan, “What happened?”

  “Seems I died,” Talia said.

  Dawn shook her head and Madison smiled.

  “Remind me to tell you about when Madison died in the late fall in that valley,” Dawn said. “when no trails out would be open for six months. Our first trip back in time as well.”

  Talia just shook her head. That had to have been almost impossible to survive alone in that valley. No wonder Dawn’s book on the valley described how brutal it was, as well as how amazingly pretty it was.

  “So after you burnt down the place and blew up the mountain,” Dawn said, looking at Ryan, “what did you do next?”

  “I managed to get out over the Dewey Mine trail and down onto the Middle Fork,” Ryan said. “Took me almost a week to make my way through the snow and out of the mountains and back to Boise.”

  “Then what?” Madison asked. “If memory serves, Bonnie and Duster were both hooked up to the same crystal with you two.”

  Talia hadn’t even thought of that. Bonnie and Duster would have had lives as well in 1916. Ryan just couldn’t go pulling the plug on their lives without warning.

  “I was here,” Bonnie said. “I had finished up in San Francisco and came back north early.”

  “It took them a month to find me,” Duster said. “I was in Denver playing some cards. I was just about to head back here to go visit you two and the lodge when I got word to come as soon as possible. And what had happened.”

  Talia looked at Ryan. “That had to be a hard month, just waiting.”

  “Knowing you would be there when we unplugged the crystal made it easier,” he said.

  She kissed him again.

  “So what happened to all our stuff you rescued?” she asked, after a moment.

  “It’s in a time vault locker in the back,” Ryan said. “All our books, all our recordings, everything I couldn’t easily carry, stored and sealed to last through the years until now.”

  “And speaking of that,” Duster said, “did you two figure out the math on how sound travels through time?”

  “We did,” Ryan said, smiling.

  And Talia found herself smiling right along with him. “And even more.”

  “Oh, this is going to be fun,” Dawn said, laughing. “Don’t start until we get out of the showers.” And then Dawn looked at the soup and turkey sandwiches with a longing eye.

  “You want me to make you two some as well?” Bonnie asked.

  “Oh, please,” Dawn said.

  With that, Dawn and Madison headed for the locker rooms and Talia turned to Ryan. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “Just for everything and for being you,” she said. “I don’t think I could have done what you did. And bring all our work forward at the same time.”

  “You could have,” Ryan said, smiling at her.

  “How about we don’t test that for a few hundred lifetimes,” she said.

  “Deal,” he said.

  Then she kissed him as Bonnie and Duster laughed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  February 19th, 2021

  Boise, Idaho

  FOR THE LAST four months, Ryan and Talia, working with Duster and Bonnie in the Institute, had gone over and over and over the math that proved that sound could actually move through time and matter and energy. Ryan had loved every moment of it.

  And they all did a massive amount of research on the aspect of human brains having an ability to pick up the sound moving through time in one direction or another.

  For Ryan, not only had the work been wonderful, but being with Talia again was something he treasured every day. He loved having her beside him, having her laugh at his silly jokes, and challenge his assumptions. It was going to take some time to have that moment she died in his arms move into the past, but he was managing it.

  The massive Institute computers had just finished their final run on the math and Bonnie and Duster and Talia were sitting with Ryan in the large cavern living room area. A fire was crackling in the fireplace and both Ryan and Talia were sipping on hot chocolate.

  Ryan and Talia were on one couch, Bonnie and Duster were on a facing couch. Bonnie also had a mug of hot chocolate, but Duster had warm apple cider.

  Ryan hadn’t been outside the Institute in a few days, but he knew it was cold and snowing slightly. All the more reason to stay inside and drink hot chocolate.

  The silence in the large room was comfortable and Ryan finished his reading of the results about the same time Duster did. The results were as Ryan had expected. The math was right. They had proven that sound waves did travel through time and that the human brain was a perfect receptor at times for those sound waves, depending on the recipient.

  Ryan sipped on the warm and sweet hot chocolate while both he and Duster waited until all four had finished.

  Then Duster said simply, “I think it’s time we run a test, don’t you?”

  Ryan shook his head. He didn’t like that idea at all. What they had figured out with the last math was that a person actually did hear sounds inside their own timeline.

  Not from another timeline.

  The sound waves remained along a timeline, so a person could, in a sense, go back inside their own timeline, following the sound along to a point in their own memories like a lifeline back into time.

  And thus their own life.

  And in so doing, that person might be able to change something and alter the base timeline in ways that could not be predicted. This was very, very different from going into the past of another timeline. The original timeline here still remained and as Ryan had proven, even with Talia dying in one timeline, she was still very much alive in this one.

  “Far too dangerous,” Bonnie said, “for any of us to do, or anyone else in the Institute to do.”

  “I agree, Talia said.

  “I agree as well,” Duster said. “This discovery just scares hell out of me to be honest.”

  Ryan was very glad to hear that and agreed. The more he learned about this, the more he wanted nothing to do with actually using the discovery in any fashion, or even publicizing their results in any way.

  “So what are you thinking of as a test?” Bonnie asked Duster, giving him a long look that Ryan could only guess had a vast amount of meaning.

  “A jukebox,” Duster said. “We set it up with popular music, plant it in a small bar, and let others ride back on their memories to test it for a time before pulling it out.”

  “People not associated at all with the Institute?” Talia asked.

  Duster nodded.

  And everyone went silent in thought.

  Ryan wasn’t sure he liked that idea either, since they would have no way of knowing how someone else might switch the timeline into a very different road.

  “We would have to have an observer from the Institute on the jukebox at all times,” Bonnie said.

  Ryan agreed with that as well.

  “We pull it and destroy it at the first signs of a problem,” Duster said.

  Again silence.

  The idea scared Ryan more than he wanted to admit, but at the same time, it felt right to at least test the theories he and Talia had worked on for over a decade in the past.

  Duster looked around at everyone. After a moment Ryan nodded, then Talia nodded.

  “So we build a jukebox,” Bonnie said.

  “We build a jukebox,” Duster said.

  “When?” Ryan asked.

  “1980,” Duster said. “Before any of us were born.”

  “And not until we have a remote connector developed on it,” Bonnie said.

  Ryan wanted to ask Duster why 1980, but Bonnie’s mention of a remote connector puzzled him even more. Talia asked what that was before he could.

  “A remote connector would be a device in the jukebox that allows us here and now to know when a new timeline is set by someone going back into the
jukebox and changing something in their lives,” Bonnie said. “Like touching the wooden box to remember a timeline, but from a distance.”

  “Is that possible?” Ryan asked. The entire idea surprised him.

  Duster laughed and nodded. “We’ve been working on the math of that for some time now. It is pretty much developed and this will be a perfect test for it as well.”

  “So when that works,” Bonnie said, “then we build the jukebox. I want to remember both timelines if there is a timeline switch.”

  Duster nodded. “We need to get that connector on board for everyone anyhow.”

  Bonnie laughed and waved off a question that Talia was about to ask. “The reason the connector came up is a long story involving saving the world from a dictator. Ask us about it at some point later on.”

  With that, all Ryan could so was sit and stare at Bonnie and Duster and hope that he and Talia hadn’t opened Pandora’s box with their discovery.

  He had a hunch they had.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  May 8th, 1980

  Boise, Idaho

  TALIA JUMPED BACK to 1980 with Ryan and Duster and Bonnie. The time was a few years before Bonnie and Duster had been born. Just looking out at the cars on the street, she was amazed at how just forty years made such a huge difference. She had no intention of going out into the town at all while here.

  They were met in the Institute by a man by the name of Richard Cone. Richard had thick, wavy brown hair and a smile that seemed to light up his eyes. He was actually an historian doing human studies on regular people in this time period and was looking forward to being embedded with the jukebox.

  Talia was surprised that Richard was actually from 2120, but had jumped back to 2020 and then back to 1978 to establish a life in here.

  They had decided to build the jukebox in 1980, then store it for at least twenty years, if not longer. The remote connectors would work fine over a twenty year span from 2021, but not much farther back.

  Richard then was supposed to get the jukebox into a small bar somehow without anyone knowing he was doing it and then become a regular in that bar.

  With the connector running, from the Institute in 2021 Ryan and Talia would be able to trace its use and timeline shifts when they got back.

  They also set into the jukebox a limit on how many times it could be used before it shut itself down. A final safety feature that Talia really felt good about.

  Talia still wasn’t sure of the saneness of this idea overall, but like Ryan and Bonnie and Duster, she really wanted to see if their theories actually worked.

  Duster found them an old Wurlitzer Bubblier jukebox built in the late 1940s and they completely tore it apart in a workshop area near the main living area in the cavern under the Institute.

  They used a small crystal from one cave, worked to develop a way for it to power the time jump of the person along memory lines, but at the same time not cross into the timeline in the crystal. Luckily both Bonnie and Duster had been working on that math problem for a lot of years and had it solved.

  Talia watched as they set the crystal inside a closed box, then shut it and sealed it, then set the safety to shut off the entire thing after one hundred trips into the past. All of them figured that would be more than enough data.

  For some reason, Talia was very, very relieved when they returned to February 2021 and the world there was the same as they world they had left.

  She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but the relief of it being the same seemed to give all of them a moment’s pause.

  The data were waiting for them.

  The jukebox had already allowed one hundred people to travel back to their own pasts. And even though about a quarter of the trips had resulted in a slight timeline switch, nothing major had changed. Just personal directions for each person involved.

  Duster and Bonnie ran a massive program over a two-day period trying to calculate the changes that would affect the future, and from the looks of it, almost all changes to the timeline had just been absorbed back in. Only a couple of children that would not have existed without the jukebox and one child that didn’t exist because of the jukebox. All those changes turned out to be minor as well.

  Richard also had a report waiting for them that detailed out each of the memory jumps that he had witnessed, some he had heard about, and so on. He hadn’t gotten the jukebox into a position it was used until just a short ten years ago. The report covered just about eighty of the one hundred jumps, which Talia found amazing. Richard must have spent most of his time in that bar.

  Richard detailed out the bar, its main customers who knew about the jukebox and time travel, and how the owner of the bar had used the machine in a very responsible manner. They all sounded like great people to Talia.

  And they had told no one about the jukebox. It seemed to have been a very carefully guarded secret among only a few.

  Talia found it interesting that Richard now owned the bar with the jukebox. He knew it would no longer work, but he wanted to keep it in place as part of the bar for the regulars.

  So they quickly built a replica of the jukebox, right down to the same scratches, and replaced out the dangerous one with a jukebox that would only take a customer into a memory, not into the past.

  Richard let them in late at night in early March and was very happy about that switch.

  So just a regular old jukebox now occupied the place of the time machine in the small bar on the outskirts of Boise.

  And Talia was very, very relieved with that result.

  And very happy about the experiment.

  All their hard work had been proven accurate.

  Then, Duster and Bonnie and Talia and Ryan, on March 15th, 2021, locked all the results and their notebooks and data into a very secure secret vault in the third level underground below the Institute. And they locked up the jukebox with everything as well after they returned the crystal to one of the rooms.

  When that secure door slid closed and the wall slid back into place to hide the door, Talia felt a giant sense of relief. Traveling into the past of other timelines was one thing. New timelines were formed and nothing really changed.

  Going back into your own body, your own mind, in your own timeline, was just too dangerous for anyone.

  And after getting the data on the jukebox, they were willing to just put it all away now.

  Success. The End.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  December 24th, 2023

  Boise, Idaho

  FOR ALMOST THREE years real time since locking all the data and the jukebox in that safe room, Ryan hadn’t much thought about the jukebox or the math on sound through time.

  In those three years, he and Talia had taken one hundred and seven trips into the past, and by Talia’s count, had lived with each other for just under three thousand years. She had promised she would tell him when they got close to the big number three, since they had celebrated at one thousand and two thousand years along the way.

  Ryan found that amazing. He had never expected to find someone to live with for even one lifetime, but it seemed that the longer he and Talia were together, the more they didn’t want to be apart.

  They had spent thirty-one of those trips into the past living in the same cabin in the Monumental Valley, rebuilding it every time and then destroying it when they left. They loved it there, loved the solitude, loved the ability to work when they wanted and not be disturbed.

  They had spent another forty trips into the past living from 1930 into the 1960s being caretakers of the Monumental Lodge because Dawn and Madison wanted someone to keep up the tradition of the lodge through those decades.

  Both Ryan and Talia loved that as well. Especially the long winter months when they were the only two in the big lodge.

  This morning they had been both working together on solving a sight-wave issue on why sometimes events from the future poked back through time and were caught by human minds in what many called deja vu. Usually th
e experience was of images of physical spaces.

  They had been working on that math together now for two years real time and more years than he wanted to count in the past and had yet to make a breakthrough. Sending various waves backwards in time never seemed to be much of a problem. The problem was in figuring out why light and images came back from the future without bidding.

  But over the hundreds of years, they had learned to be very, very patient and they both knew that eventually they would work it out.

  “We’re going to have a visitor,” Richard Cone said as he came into the large living room area in the large cavern.

  Ryan and Talia had been sitting at the counter in the kitchen area working on beef sandwiches and chicken noodle soup for lunch. Bonnie and Dawn were sitting beside them at the counter, also eating.

  All four of them turned around to watch Richard approach from the elevator through the couches to the kitchen.

  Until Richard introduced himself and mentioned the jukebox, Ryan didn’t recognize him. The first time they had met, Richard couldn’t have been much more than mid-twenties and rail thin. Now he had gray and thinning hair and his face was a mass of wrinkles. He had on a tan jacket and wore a smile like he was used to it.

  But that first meeting in 1980 when they built the jukebox had been thousands of years before for Ryan and Talia. Ryan found it amazing his memory worked at all over that length of time. But actually, as the years went by, his mind and memory seemed to be gaining clearness.

  From what Ryan had heard in various reports along the way, Richard really loved owning the little bar and was staying on in this time as long as he could before going back and resetting.

  “So who’s this visitor we are getting?” Bonnie asked after hugging Richard and asking him to join them for lunch.

  “Stout from the bar, actually the original owner of the bar,” Richard said.

  “The guy that treated our time travel machine with such respect?” Talia asked.

  “The same one,” Richard said. “For three years, since the jukebox stopped working, he’s been trying to track down who built it.”