She is looking at Kitty and remembering Kate. It's hard not to; Kitty is now the same age Kate was when Rachel went back in time. She's never looked more like Kate, moved more like Kate, sounded more like Kate. The only difference this time is that Rachel is the same age. Not a traumatized teenager gazing at her with a mix of hero worship and schoolgirl crush, but her equal. Her wife.
Kitty is racing to close the blinds against the ever-present surveillance drones. She hacked the server that controls their power-dampening collars, the collars that also record their every move — location, video, audio, heart rate. O.N.E. can't possibly always be watching, but they always could be watching. An agent could log on at any moment, and you'd never know. And they're always collecting data.
She's only gotten this far because O.N.E. agents can't tell the difference between writing a smartphone app game and writing a worm that will take down their server. But the server will reset in less than five minutes, and if Kitty tries this too many times, it will surely not go unnoticed. They have only moments to use their powers again, to speak freely, to make a plan.
Rachel's telepathy has been suppressed for so long, the rush of others' thoughts nearly overwhelm her, as they did when her powers first manifested. But she quickly gets it under control. Like riding a bicycle. She feels the old familiar tug of her psychic rapport with Kitty, and tears sting her eyes. She missed this — the bright and bubbly spark of her wife's mind.
Communication is faster this way, in words and images and feelings and psychic shorthand. Kitty sits down before her, clasps her hands. She begins with a replay of the news broadcast they watched last night: the world stands, once again, at the brink of nuclear war. They find themselves, once again, in a world where mutants are hated and hunted, controlled and contained. Kitty knows the timeline Rachel came from, the timeline that got so bleak that the X-Men resorted to one last desperate measure: go back in time to stop it from happening in the first place.
And now, in a future that's different but the same, Kitty grits her teeth and stares into Rachel's eyes — that old familiar stubbornness — and says, I want you to send me back.
Back to…? Rachel asks.
Images flood her mind. Of Mutant Town, vibrant and teeming with life. Of baselines in Jumbo Carnation's summer '01 looks, dancing to Dazzler at Wannabee's. Of a time when mutants were cool. Not accepted, not even widely tolerated, but on their way. Making enough progress to believe that things would keep getting better.
Then — M-Day. Pictures of the dead and depowered. Millions of mutants, in an instant, whittled down to only 198. Kitty's mind briefly touches upon the Sentinels O.N.E. sent to "protect" Xavier's when the world's remaining mutants were brought there. A flash of guilt as Kitty remembers how traumatizing that was for Rachel. Quickly moving on to Wanda Maximoff, alone in a dark room. One woman's pain and the suffering of millions. Maybe if someone had been there for her…
It won't change our timeline, Rachel says. You know that. It'll just create a new one, branching off. One that'll turn out just as badly, but in a new and unexpected way. She doesn't intend to communicate that last part, but it comes out anyway.
I don't know that, though, Kitty says. The first time, you sent Kate's consciousness to a different timeline's past. Different before she got there. And she sent you to the same one. What if you sent me back in this timeline?
You assume I'm capable of that much control , Rachel says. She's already tried to do just that, and failed. I'm not good at this.
Bet you're better now.
Well, maybe we're just doomed. Flashes of Bishop. Cable. Madrox. So many mutants came back in time from so many different futures, all of them different, none of them happy. Maybe because there aren't any happy futures. Maybe because all roads lead to annihilation, one way or another.
And maybe they don't, Kitty says. You really wanna write off that possibility?
She is looking down at her newly-bricked collar and remembering how they got here.
In this timeline, they do not live in a concentration camp. Concentration is no longer necessary to control. Their power-inhibiting collars track their whereabouts and record everything they do. If those fail, there are drones always circling, cameras always recording. Most people won't sell or rent to mutants, so they concentrate themselves in run-down neighborhoods where slumlords and gangsters take advantage of their desperation to overcharge them for pathetically little.
Theoretically, not all mutants are forced to inhibit their powers. Only those who break the law. But there are so many laws — more every day — crowding mutants into tighter and tighter legal spaces. The few who can slip out of the tightening noose become reasons why there is no noose, the lack of opportunity an unfortunate side-effect of the free market. You can't force people to hire, rent to, sell to people they don't want to. And more and more people don't want to be anywhere near mutants.
The New York City Rachel remembers was blasted rubble. The one she lives near now is gentrified, a playground for the rich while the suburbs decay. In the old bad future, the Sentinels forced everyone to suffer equally. Even humans had to wear drab uniforms emblazoned with the letter "H." Cold, robot logic has its benefits.
It's nothing so simple as the government rounding people up and putting them into camps. But the effects are the same. The same hunger, the same squalid conditions. It's just easier to sweep under the rug. It didn't happen suddenly, like the military bombing Xavier's School. It snuck up on Rachel. One day she looked around and realized she couldn't tell the difference between this new world and the one she'd come from.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
She is listening to Lila Cheney playing softly in the background and remembering M-Day. That whole time in her life certainly felt like one apocalypse after another. The decimation itself, the O.N.E. Sentinels, the murder of her mother's entire extended family at the hands of the Shi'ar. And somewhere in there, Kitty got back together with Piotr — a body blow for reasons Rachel either didn't know or couldn't admit to herself or both. If you were trying to pinpoint one moment in history when it all went wrong, you could do worse.
And yet… it's hard for Rachel not to balk at the notion of unraveling history to a point before they admitted their feelings for one another. So many things could go differently. Kitty could end up marrying Piotr — and really go through with it this time. She could not end up trapped in that bullet. She could end up trapped in the bullet forever. She could die on Breakworld. Rachel could be killed by the Shi'ar. Is all of that worth risking for a shot at a better future?
Kitty obviously believes so. She hears Rachel's thoughts and responds with a faith so firm that Rachel can't help but be convinced that they will find each other, they will be together. Kitty has a seemingly infinite supply of optimism. It's one of the things Rachel loves about her. It's also something Rachel will never entirely understand.
Kitty believes in chaos theory, in the power of a butterfly in Brazil to create a typhoon in China. That's why she keeps returning to this plan, this belief that one can look back on history, unravel the cause and effect, send one person back to the exact right place at the exact right time, give history a little nudge, and send it on its way in a better direction.
Rachel isn't so sure she believes that anymore. She thinks about statistics, probability. The jet stream that drives typhoons to China's shores. The global warming that supercharges storms. The simple fact that you're never the only butterfly in Brazil. The faults in our systems, in our societies, that lead to the same turmoil, again and again and again. Worse, the possibility that we ourselves fuel the very evil we're trying to stop.
The assassination of a senator might trigger an anti-mutant backlash. But does the lack of that assassination prevent it? Anti-mutant hatred remains. The country is a dry field awaiting a spark, and they kept one lit match from falling to the ground. But what's to say another isn't far behind? It's not just the assassination; it's the preachers every Sunday, it's the daily struggle to survive and the demagogues offering a convenient scapegoat. It's the economy, stupid.
Can you go back in time and stop the shredding of the social safety net? Stop the first coal miners from taking carbon out of the ground? Stop the first Neolithic farmers from planting those first seeds? Where do you even begin? How far back is far enough?
The older she gets, the more shocked Rachel is by the recklessness of the plan. Prevent nuclear war by changing something in the Cold War, when it was more likely than ever. If you truly believed a slight change could have a major impact, couldn't you just as easily have made nuclear war happen sooner ? What if Rachel had been carrying a stronger cold virus than had existed in 1980? What if that virus spread across the world, got to the Soviet Union by September of 1983? What if Stanislav Petrov took a sick day? It didn't happen, but it could have.
The woman who walks on air, who can make herself intangible, fears only that she can't make a difference. The woman who hunted her own kind doesn't doubt her ability to change the world — only that the change will necessarily be a good one.
Who wants to create a typhoon, anyway?
She is scanning their bookshelves and remembering Nietzsche.
In the two-and-a-half semesters she spent at college, she found herself drawn to philosophy. Even thought about majoring in it.
Nietzsche had a thought experiment. What if a demon came to you in the night and told you that you were going to relive every moment of your life, exactly as it happened, over and over again, forever? As soon as you died, you would be born again to the same mother, in the same place, at the same time. And everything that happened to you would happen again the same way, and every decision you made, you'd make again, and again, and again?
He assumed the average person would be horrified by this prospect. And Rachel certainly was. Her life had been one tragedy after another. But he went on to say that someone who truly loved life — the "yea-sayer" he aspired to become — would react with rapturous joy.
Rachel thought it was a load of bullshit. Not even the vicious misogyny of the ancient philosophers had filled her with as much rage as this thought experiment. The idea that she would have to relive her years as a Hound — that she should relish the thought! That to embrace life required embracing that horror all over again! — she could never accept that.
It bothered her so much she went to Professor Thorn's office to yell at Nietzsche through him.
"It's a tool," he said, "to help you build the life you want. The idea is to ask yourself, 'Would I want to relive this experience for eternity?' And if you wouldn't, well, why are you doing it? What experiences would you rather relive for eternity? And how can you experience those?"
"But what if your life already sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it?" Rachel asked.
Professor Thorn leaned back in his chair and regarded Rachel. "You're what, eighteen? Nineteen years old? Let's say all eighteen of those years were irredeemably awful. You've still got plenty of life left. Assume you live to age seventy-three — I think that's the average lifespan. Something like that. Anyway. You're about twenty-five percent of the way in. That still leaves you with another seventy-five percent. And you get to decide how to spend it."
"I still don't see why I should be grateful to relive the crappy twenty-five percent."
"Well, think of it this way: it was painful, but there was also a little joy in it, wasn't there? And all of it — the joy, the pain, especially the pain — it made you who you are. You wouldn't be you without the suffering. You wouldn't be where you are. And maybe who you are will be someone who can make the last seventy-five percent wonderful, and it'll all be because of that terrible twenty-five."
She is looking at Kitty and feeling, intensely, how much she stands to lose. Who she is, is married to Kitty. Where she is, is the home they share — however restricted, however dilapidated. It could be worse. But it could be even better.
A yea-sayer would embrace the bad as much as the good. Would a yea-sayer jump at the chance to have even more good than that? Nietzsche wasn't a mutant. He didn't know that rebooting reality was an option. And in all the histories of the multiverse, was there ever more of a yea-sayer than Kitty Pryde?
She is looking at Kitty and Kitty is looking back at her, passionate, scared, determined. They are running out of time before the server resets and their collars turn back on. What else is there to do?
Rachel presses their foreheads together. Nothing.
Then we have to do something. Whatever we can.
She is looking at Kitty, trying to memorize her face. They are here, together, right now. In an infinite number of timelines, this is the one Rachel is experiencing now. In a sea of pasts and futures, this is the only moment that truly exists. What is, is. Is this a life she'd want to relive?
With Kitty by her side?
Yes.
Rachel clutches her wife's hand, kisses it. She struggles to stay in the present.
And then, with a touch to her temple, she sends Kitty's mind back into the past.