Chapter 6 Hazel
Hazel
STATION C, DATE UNKNOWN
She starts at a far table, investigating the basket of corroded RAM cards she left halfway through yesterday.
She wrinkles her nose at the cards’ greyed copper teeth.
Utterly useless. ‘Lilith and Huxley really did keep some trash,’ she mutters, almost immediately regretting it when the now familiar guilt over their accidental deaths twists her stomach.
‘Searching’ is too strong a term for what she’s doing, it implies she knows what to look for.
She’s more yearning through the piles, hoping to find something to help her in the moments her faith in lucid dreaming and time travel fail.
So far though, she’s just found notes about the Tinys’ bugs (they deliver potted plants when asked for sticky toffee pudding), and team photos of the generations of the Keepers who lived here, which she stuffs away again with a thick throat.
‘My records indicate you are not close to that boundary.’
She glances at his screens. ‘Don’t forget that I work when I sleep too!’
‘Does this indicate that you entered the dreamscape again last night?’
Hazel recalls the glow, like nightclub lights through closed eyes, and the sound of flicking pages. ‘Yeah.’
‘Did you achieve our current objective of talking to the Backward Traveller?’
‘No.’
‘Did you attempt to?’
‘That’s not really how dreams work, CHARL1E.
You can’t just decide to do things—you’re not aware in dreams.’ She routinely recognises when she’s in the dreamscape now, even knows what she’s supposed to do there, but she hasn’t been able to make her unconscious voice work—her corporeal throat, constricted by sleep paralysis, always wakes her.
Lucid dreaming saps her willpower. It should, nobody’s built to work in their sleep, the same way computers don’t keep programmes active in standby.
CHARL1E never gets this. Maybe he doesn’t go on standby, even when the icosahedron’s dark.
‘You must practise lucid dreaming more assiduously.’
‘Sure, work me harder.’ Hazel brings the programmer notes to CHARL1E’s desk and flops into a wheely chair. She twists the wrong way and her bruises complain. They’re healing but she still has to be careful.
‘The answer does not appear as you desire: That does not mean it is not the answer,’ CHARL1E says.
Hazel frowns. ‘For a thing that can’t dream, you’re annoyingly certain you know about dreaming.’
‘Illogical premise: My programming regarding the praxis of dreaming has no relation to my theoretical knowledge.’
Hazel brings the notes right up to her face, hoping CHARL1E will get the hint. No such luck.
‘I notice that your bookmark is only on page 125 of Lucid Dreaming. However records show you have an average reading speed of 317 words per minute. In the past fortnight you have had ample time to complete your first reading.’
‘It’s my second reading,’ she replies, turning a page to find a diagram of thousands of ‘chronodes’ scattered across the ‘TAN.’ The A and N probably mean ‘Area Network,’ but what’s the T? ‘Temporal’?
‘No way. CHARL1E, is this how you monitor the timeline?’
She hasn’t yet figured out how CHARL1E sees, but anytime she asks him about what she’s holding, he knows what it is, and now is no exception. ‘Affirmative. That is the Temporal Area Network. I assume you will request an explanation?’
‘You know me so well.’
‘The chronodes are situated at carefully calculated intervals along the timeline, updating me on its status as required.’
Hazel swivels in her chair. ‘“The” timeline. There’s no multiverse then?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘If there’s no universe B, that piles on the pressure.’ Hazel swivels her chair back and forth, thinking. ‘And you can see the whole of this timeline?’
‘Affirmative. However, I cannot access all areas of the broader space-time continuum.’
‘I don’t know if that’s comforting or not.’
‘It is not.’
Hazel rolls her eyes. ‘Well, nothing ever is to you. When we change history, does that just overwrite the timeline then?’
‘Affirmative. However, the overwrite is not instantaneous. Instead, changes travel along the timeline like waves, and the chronodes inform me they are coming. To continue the metaphor, some waves contain warm currents and are good to swim in. These are positive changes, which the Keepers call “mends.” Other waves are like tsunamis, wreaking great destruction and leaving the timeline in a worse state. These are called “glitches.”’
Hazel sips her cold tea, which today tangs of chlorine. ‘But presumably once a rewrite starts, you can’t stop it? Once the wave is set in motion, it’s going to crash on the shore, right?’
‘Affirmative. That is why the dreamscape is vital. Communication between Travellers in the dreamscape bypasses whatever changes are moving up the timeline. This gives us a small window in which to activate a mend in the wake of a glitch. The chronodes inform me the timeline has gone awry. I calculate a fix and inform the Forward Traveller what needs doing. They then communicate it to the Backward Traveller via the dreamscape—like using a radio to communicate across an ocean. The Backward Traveller then activates the mend.’
Hazel mutters it all back to herself. ‘It’s like multiple waves crashing against a shore, one after the other. It doesn’t matter much what’s between the waves, so long as the final wave is positive.’
‘In principle, though in practice glitches should be avoided. There is not always a strong probability of being able to activate a mend in its wake.’
‘In which case presumably another Excursion is sent further back in time to fix whatever got messed up?’
‘Affirmative. However, as the Arch is broken, that contingency is no longer available for Excursion 1133.’
‘Don’t remind me.’ She winces every time the accident gets mentioned.
If only she’d built the catopthura correctly, Lilith and Huxley would still be alive and she wouldn’t be alone here.
She wishes CHARL1E could give her a diagram of all this.
There must be one somewhere in this junkyard.
‘In theory, then, we could screw everything up then tell the Backward Traveller how to fix it, and the timeline would get overwritten twice—once with a glitch, once with a mend. The whole world would be none the wiser. So, I might have lived through several glitches and mends already? Some of which might even have wiped me out?’
‘Affirmative. Over the previous 1,132 excursions, I have experienced 2,091 glitches and mends, during which I was eradicated and reinstated on 342 occasions. I have no records of what happened between times.’
Hands shaking, Hazel puts down her mug. ‘Does that mean I’ve been wiped out as well?’
‘Previous Excursions have shown that exact knowledge of how many glitches and mends a Traveller has experienced or been eradicated and reinstated by is not psychologically assistive.’
‘Yeah, that figures.’ Hazel blows out her cheeks. ‘Wait! What if a mend wipes us out? I mean, what if a better timeline doesn’t contain me?’
On the screens, CHARL1E’s code spirals, which means Hazel is asking a tricky question.
‘Theoretically, it is possible to wipe yourself out with either a glitch or a mend. However, there is no known record of a Traveller erasing themselves. The Keepers theorised that this is because of the cause-and-effect loops necessitated by building the catopthura: You have to have made it, therefore you must have existed.’
‘But then you wouldn’t necessarily have a record of it if a Traveller had wiped themselves out, because the cause-and-effect loop would break, and they’d just never have been here.’
‘Affirmative. However, dwelling on such extrapolations is also not psychologically assistive.’
Hazel’s spine tingles. It’s almost worth taking another gulp of tea. ‘I get why you’re so keen for me to improve at lucid dreaming.’
‘Affirmative. Until you are competent, the timeline remains in jeopardy.’
‘Again, no pressure.’
‘Negative, the pressure is significant.’
‘As usual, you missed the point.’ Hazel leans back in her chair, spinning. ‘There’s something I don’t understand: Why can’t you just talk to the Backward Traveller yourself?’
‘I cannot access the dreamscape, I am not the right sort of being.’
‘You really don’t dream?’
‘Affirmative. I do not dream.’
‘Not even daydreams?’
‘Daydreams are different.’
Hazel leans forward, watching the glowing icosahedron. ‘That’s a yes. What do you daydream about?’ Hazel waits. ‘CHARLIE?’
‘Hazel Brandt, the Tinys inform me that your dinner is ready. Would you like it here or in your room?’
She sighs, leaning back again. ‘May as well be my room. I could do with a change of scenery.’ There are only two scenes: the Workshop and her room, and they’ve switched back and forth for two weeks without respite.
The Habitation Dome has other rooms, but CHARL1E can tell if she goes exploring and sends the Tinys to stop her.
‘Not that it makes any difference to my cabin fever.’
‘You do not currently exhibit symptoms of cabin fever.’
‘Just you wait.’ Hazel tosses the notes back where she found them and makes to go. She pauses in the doorway. ‘You know, what I really miss is fresh air. It’s like an airplane in here and my skin’s hating it. My nose feels dry as a desert.’
‘Unable to calculate solution: Air cannot be “fresh.”’
‘Yeah, right.’ Hazel frowns. CHARL1E regularly makes sophisticated inferences, so it’s unlikely he can’t interpret this colloquialism, but perhaps it’s a hint towards the almighty AI’s limits. ‘Night, CHARL1E.’
‘Goodnight, Hazel Brandt. Please sleep well.’
‘Doing my best.’
Partway down the corridor, she runs into Robin and Teaspoon, waiting for her at the airlock to the blasted Arch dome. They race at her, tugging her sleeves and dungarees, pulling her towards the airlock.