Five October 17, 2023 #3
“Really?” Her younger self’s voice rises in delight and Elsie remembers the feeling. She wanted so much to please her dad, to prove herself to him, to connect with him. He was the only parent left to her, and they’d never been close, not in the way Elsie had been to her mother.
But then he kept talking. “What is the point of this? I can’t see a company using this as a presentation for shareholders.” He takes another look. “Actually, they might. But I doubt they’d pay us for it.”
Ziz slumps in her chair. “You don’t understand.
It’s not just a presentation. I’ve used the GIS software to automate road layout and design.
” To find the best locations for forestry roads, avoiding steep slopes, marshy ground and wetlands, unstable soil, or hard bedrock, mapping out the shortest possible route a bulldozer had to take in its construction.
Her father sits forward, arms on his desk. “But you’re not an engineer. In the end, Rob still has to sign off on this.” Rob, the firm’s engineer.
“We’d have to train him in this software,” Elsie says.
“And that will cost—what? Twenty grand and another twenty in software?” Her father pushes the laptop away. “And in the end, he still has to ground-truth it, walk the bush. All this would be a huge expense and lead to a loss of billable hours. Why would I agree to that?”
“It’s about updating the business, making it more efficient.
This is standard stuff I learned at school, Dad.
Everyone’s using it. And it’s not just about this software.
If we bring in drones, we can cut reconnaissance time way back.
Travis could accomplish in two days what he currently does in three weeks with a handheld GPS unit. ”
“You’re talking about cutting jobs.”
“If we streamline things, we can take on more work.”
“And where is that work going to come from?”
“We can diversify. Work for non-profits, environmental groups.”
“You do understand what we do here.”
“We help logging companies manage forest resources.”
“Exactly. We serve logging companies, not environmental groups. If we also work for environmental groups, we may well lose the trust of the logging companies we currently work for. They could drop us, hire someone else.”
Ziz slides her laptop back towards her father. “If you would just take a look at—”
“You’re a talented analyst, Elizabeth. But you’ve got a few things to learn about the realities of our business.” He closes the laptop.
“But Dad—”
Her father pinches the bridge of his nose. “I can’t do this right now, Elizabeth. It’s too much to think about. I haven’t been sleeping, and since the funeral—”
“You don’t have to do anything. It’ll be my project. I’ll—”
He looks up at her. “How’s that map coming? The one I assigned you this morning.”
That was the moment, Elsie realizes now.
After her father admonished her that day, she’d lost all energy for her side projects, even her art.
She’d done as he told her, kept her head down and completed her assigned work, pumping out what seemed like the same mapping project day after day, and gone home to play her farming game, sinking even further into the hopelessness that had sucked her down since her mother’s death.
Inside her father’s office, Ziz tucks her laptop under her arm and rushes out the door on her way to the bathroom, already crying.
Head down, bangs over her eyes, she pushes past Elsie as she hurries by, knocking the atlas out from under Elsie’s arm so she’s forced to grab it midair, snapping it shut.
Elsie feels a rush of vertigo, a sensation of being pulled backwards at a phenomenal speed, and all at once she’s back at her desk, disoriented as if she’s got low blood sugar and has just dropped into her seat to avoid fainting.
Hannah and Kyle are still in their seats.
Kyle’s wearing the T-Rex T-shirt again. The drones are back on the shelves.
(An addition her father eventually conceded to, at Travis’s request.)
Elsie’s vibrating. It all happened exactly as she remembered.
Except it didn’t. At the time, as that twenty-three-year-old, she didn’t see that her father was still grieving, that he was also lost after her mother’s death.
His impatience with her ideas was a sign that he was overwhelmed, struggling to cope, as she was.
It wasn’t about Elsie at all. But she never would have seen that if not for this different vantage, as a time traveller.
Time traveller. She laughs out loud. She’s time-travelling.
Kyle raises a brow at her.
Then again, thinking that—that she’s time-travelling—could be a delusion.
The twitch at the corner of her eye starts up again.
But what if she really can use the atlas to travel in time?
Then maybe she can go back to her mother’s death again and save her, and in the process save herself and her family from getting lost in that long dark tunnel.
Perhaps then her father would have listened to her ideas about streamlining their mapping and field operations.
She might be managing the mapping department by now.
Elsie opens the atlas. Okay. She’s either losing her grip on reality or time-travelling, but either way the atlas is somehow a trigger for her experiences.
Just as it did up at the lookout, the weirdness started when she opened the atlas and stopped when she closed it.
And it happened when she was at the location on the second page’s map.
But why did it trigger things today and not yesterday?
It had to have something to do with that old woman.
The ghost has appeared three times now, once at the eclipse when Elsie wished she had a guide for her life, and twice just before Elsie was shunted back in time.
Is the old woman responsible for this atlas? But if so, who is she?
Once Elsie has paged all the way to the thirteenth chart, which is a repeat of the first, she turns to the beginning and starts again, scanning each page for something—anything—she might have missed.
She’s an analyst. She can figure this out.
She starts up a new GIS file to map out the locations in the atlas, putting a point to each coordinate.
There’s got to be a pattern here, something that can tell her who created this book.
But there’s no pattern. Some of the locations are places she’s been to. Some not. And she has no idea how the astrological charts play into all this. Or how to read them. She needs help to figure them out. And Zander is the only astrologer she knows. Damn.