Groom Lake, Nevada, 2022
Electricity arced over the oscillator ring and exactly a quarter hour after she left, Elsa returned to the oscillation chamber. By now, the pattern of her disappearances and reappearances was well established enough that Gerda simply handed her the lab coat the moment she finished materializing as Kai scanned her.
"Twenty minutes this time, Doctor Beckett," he said with a smile.
Elsa buttoned up the lab coat and wordlessly ran for the restroom while Kai processed his data, eager as always. Though he'd been a data coordinator on dozens of projects for the military over the years, this was his big break, promoted to Scientist III on a high-profile project within the Department of Defense.
Kristoff strolled back into the room, his ever-present cup of coffee in hand to fight his equally ever-present fatigue. "Well? What's it looking like?"
Kai looked up from his instruments, a puzzled look on his rotund face. "It's still quite mystifying, Colonel. 70% of the bosonic particles remain active, yet we still have no clear power source for where they are coming from. They should have faded away the moment we turned off the oscillator."
Kristoff shook his head. "I still don't even understand a third of the science behind this after two years. How the hell am I going to explain to Weselton that his pet project sort of works but not really, and might accidentally beam a bomb into the distant past?"
"That's the least of our problems," Elsa's voice cut through his worrying. "Kristoff, you might want to grab either a bigger cup of coffee or a pair of headphones, because I need to ask Kai some very technical questions."
Kristoff pulled a chair from the observation room onto the floor of the oscillation chamber and sat down heavily in it, surreptitiously digging a small orange bottle from his uniform breast pocket. He wasn't subtle enough.
"I thought you got rid of those, Kristoff," Elsa hissed, staring the blond man down. "Can I have the room for a moment please?" she asked aloud, Kai and Gerda departing for the lounge.
The colonel looked at the bottle sheepishly, avoiding Elsa's glare. "I… uh, I thought I had. These were- they were in my truck, under the seat. I only found them after the drive over here."
She snatched the container out of his hands and threw it like a baseball down the oscillating chamber's firing range, listening to the plastic bottle clatter down one of the maintenance wells. "You know better. We've talked about this," she spit.
And they had. A year ago, Kristoff had hit a rough patch and was clearly out of sorts. Elsa noticed it and asked Gerda if this had been a problem before, but the CMO hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Elsa had, mainly because she recognized the symptoms from Anna's drug addiction as a teenager. She'd talked to him late into the night, helping him figure out alternatives to the intoxication he frequently sought.
"I- I know. I can't help it, Elsa. The pressure, all the time from Weselton and his boss… it's just too much sometimes. Weselton has been calling non-stop and…"
Elsa arched an eyebrow at his pregnant pause. "And what?"
"… and threatened to replace me on this project if we don't show some results in the next two weeks."
She exhaled upwards in frustration, ruffling her bangs. "That's not an excuse to fall off the wagon, and you know it. After we're done here today, I'm taking you to another meeting, okay?" A silent nod was all she received in return, but it was enough. She opened the laboratory door and shouted down the hall for the other two scientists to return.
Kai cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably. "You wanted to discuss something, Doctor Beckett?"
"Yes. We've been working on the premise this whole time that Novikov's self-consistency principle is at work, that any changes made in the past are rendered immaterial so that time remains consistent, yes?"
The portly man nodded vigorously. "Yes, Doctor. That's generally accepted. Though we may be able to jump backwards in a timelike curve, we are prevented from making any changes for time to remain self-consistent. One cannot go back and shoot their grandfather and such."
Elsa paced for a long moment, hesitating to give voice to the question gnawing at her since speaking with her mother as the rest of the staff watched her keenly. "What if it's not true?"
Kai chuckled, his thumbs absentmindedly rubbing up and down his suspenders under his lab coat. "How could it not be true, Doctor? You've traveled through time thrice now and nothing has changed despite you being there for substantial amounts of time and at critical moments in your own life, has it?"
"But," she said haltingly, "I think something did change. This last time, I was in Anna's room when she was 12 years old, and the posters on the wall were different. Her artwork hanging up in the house was different. It was a good different, but it was significantly different - and shouldn't have been different at all, should it? If we believe Novikov's principle to be absolute, then nothing should have changed at all."
The portly scientist stuttered and stumbled for words. "Well, umm, perhaps- perhaps none of these things were in danger of causing a paradox! After all, that's what Novikov and Polchinski were trying to prove, that you couldn't go back in time and shoot your grandfather."
Elsa rapped her fingertips on the hard tungsten surface of the oscillator ring, her brow deeply furrowed. "Time either does or doesn't change, Gooshie-"
"Doctor!" Kai interrupted, "Very few things in our line of work are binary choices. We left binary behind a long time ago," he grinned. Both scientists broke out into laughter, while Kristoff frowned in confusion.
"I'm guessing that's a physics joke?" he grumbled.
"Yes, yes, my apologies, Colonel. The, ah, nature of our work is predicated on binary choices simply not existing. We would not be here in this room today if the universe worked that way. Instead, as we have proven and are rapidly proving now, the universe is an array of infinite choices and possibilities. Now," Kai chuckled again, turning his attention back to his principal investigator, "I concede you may have a point. You have met yourself twice now and have not caused any paradoxes thus far, so it's possible Novikov's principle only applies to things that would break time, and what you've done so far has not broken time."
As Kai spoke, Elsa grew more and more pale, her eyes widening. Tiny beads of sweat broke out on her forehead, and her hands began to tremble. "I… I need some time to think. If… if you'll excuse me." She glanced at Kristoff as she headed out the door of the oscillation chamber. "We WILL talk later."
A military complex with a top-secret project that consumes inordinate amounts of power is by definition large and sparsely populated, giving Elsa plenty of places to walk and clear her mind without leaving the facility. She climbed up another flight of metal stairs in what to the outside world looked like an aircraft hangar, but on the inside looked like a gigantic steel and glass doughnut.
The steel stairs gave way to a catwalk over the particle accelerator, the source of the raw energy needed to fuel the time travel experiment. The air inside the accelerator facility was cool and dry, the better to keep corrosion at bay from several billion dollars of equipment, but it also reminded her of Oslo, where her time travel adventure began.
She walked over the massive ring, its steady thrum sounding like a heartbeat, sky blue flashes of light emitting from glass windows in the ring as pulses of energy raced around the interior.
Elsa gripped the handrails, her legs still unsteady. Novikov isn't absolute, she repeated to herself. The past can be changed. The implications of Kai's words a few hours ago kept hitting her like a bolt of lightning. It was like realizing the sun might not come up tomorrow, or that gravity might just stop working. If time wasn't absolute, that meant change was possible as long as it didn't cause paradoxes. After all, basic physics prevents people from doing all sorts of things, like flying unassisted.
She couldn't go back in time and shoot herself, but what if she COULD save Anna?
She'd assumed for years, ever since starting her research, that Anna was beyond saving. She could go back in time, visit her, apologize to her, try to set things right for her own peace of mind, but still had to accept that Anna would die at the age of 21 to a drunk driver. She'd always been pursuing the perfect goodbye.
But if saving Anna didn't cause a paradox… it might be possible to save her.
Elsa sat down hard on the metal grating, bruising her tailbone but not caring. She wrestled with her own heart, trying to smother the hope that blossomed in her chest. She scolded herself for acting like a child, wanting something she likely wouldn't get, like Anna did that one Christmas when she'd had her heart set on getting tickets to Lauryn Hill's tour when she was 15. Her parents absolutely forbid it, and she'd stormed out of the house.
Looking back, Elsa realized that was the turning point for when things went from bad to worse. Anna's rebellious streak pushed her away from the family, and she'd started hanging out more and more with a bad crowd.
She forced her mind back into focus on the present day. She needed some way to test, some way to prove that time was malleable. If she could prove that and find the limits of Novikov's self-consistency principle, then she'd know what was and wasn't possible. Only then could she dare to hope that perhaps Anna could be saved after all.
Elsa pulled herself back to standing and headed down the stairs, back towards the laboratory, when she felt a familiar tingling in her fingers.
No, no, no! It's too soon! I need- I need to test this theory! she silently screamed in her mind, breaking into a run towards the oscillation chamber. Sparks began to trail off her, arcing onto nearby metal surfaces as she ran down the hallway. Just as she rounded the corner and saw Kai in the observation room…
… she vanished, the lab coat flying through the air without her.
Author's Notes
Hope refuses to die in Elsa's heart, even though the science, by all rights, says it should.
Have you figured out what causes Elsa to travel through time yet?
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