Groom Lake, Nevada, 2022
Familiar sparks danced across the floor of the military base as Elsa returned to her own time, reappearing just outside the observation room. She picked herself up off the floor and walked into the observation chamber, wordlessly taking a lab coat off the coat rack and buttoning it around her naked body.
"Ah, Doctor Beckett. Just on time, according to my calculations," Kai chuckled, tapping notes into his tablet as he stood up from one of the desks. "I predicted a return within 39 to 41 minutes, and you were kind enough to make it 40 minutes even."
"Gooshie, I've proven it! We've proven it," she said, turning to her colleague with an earsplitting grin. "Novikov only applies to paradoxes. We've changed the past! That means… that means I could save her!" she squealed. She sat down in a chair and recounted all the details about Anna that had changed on her last leap into the past as Kai furiously took notes.
Kai nodded his head, tapping on the tablet as he watched Kristoff meander back into the observation room. "This is extraordinary, Doctor Beckett. The implications of this are stunning. Time is… fluid, I dare say."
"What's that?" Kristoff asked with a tired sigh, collapsing into a chair with his usual cup of coffee. "What happened this time around?"
"I changed the past," she said proudly.
"Wait… so does that mean you could go back and, I don't know, assassinate Hitler?" he asked, his eyes widening at the implications.
Kai shook his head. "While the principles we're dealing with may allow for changes to the past, I would find that scenario unlikely. For one thing, we speculate that these quantum superpositions would only allow someone to travel within the span of their lifetime."
Kristoff tilted his head, puzzled. "Still… you could do a lot of damage, couldn't you? I mean, you could shoot… I dunno, Gorbachev and prevent the fall of the Soviet Union?"
Elsa jumped in. "The theory is that time is like a river. You could take a cup or even a bucket of water out of it, but the river will still flow in the same direction. Take out Gorbachev, and someone else takes his place and keeps the timeline intact."
She stopped abruptly, looking at the oscillator chamber, tears beginning to form as her own words crashed into her like a tidal wave, the realization that her hope was misplaced. "That's… even though we've proven some changes can happen, Anna is… is still gone. I come back here and it's as though I never went - she's still… dead. The river of fate… still leads to the same place. I- I can't save her after all."
Abruptly, Elsa turned and fled the observation room, choking back sobs. Kai moved to the door before Kristoff put a hand on his shoulder. "I'll take care of it, Gooshie."
Kristoff walked down one of the halls in search of Elsa, but the labyrinth of the facility worked against him. After checking numerous different places, he finally heard quiet snuffling off one of the power conduit chambers almost half an hour later. Elsa was in tears, curled up in a ball at the end of a utility corridor. He approached her cautiously, as a caretaker might near a wounded, frightened animal. "Hey."
She looked up, eyes red. "Leave me alone. Please, Kristoff, just… leave me alone. I- I can't. I've failed. I thought I might be able to save her but I've failed."
"How have you failed, Elsa? You've been saying this whole time that time was fixed, that you were basically going back as a tourist. Then you come back saying time can be changed, and then you say it can't be again because it's a river or something." He sat down next to her, bumping his shoulder into hers. "How is that any different than when this all began? You haven't lost anything. Literally nothing has changed."
He sighed. "Look, I get it. I'm not a genius like you, but I get it. You signed onto this project because it was the only way to get the funding and facilities to build this crazy thing. I know that, and it was a good deal for both of us. And I knew something crazy like saving Anna had to be part of the reason you were doing it. We threw mad money at you and you didn't even blink until we said you would be able to do the project entirely your way, no exceptions. I didn't know you'd actually built a goddamn time machine, but I knew something was up."
She began to weep softly again. "And yet… here we are. Twenty years of my life, ten years of research, and all I've proved is that I can find astonishingly expensive and complicated ways to break my own heart again. I… I did get to see her again, and I thought that w-would make me feel better. She- Kristoff, she forgave me, and I feel worse than I did before!"
"But why?"
"Because… I started to hope again, Kristoff."
Kristoff put his arm around her shoulders gently. "So the changes you've made… they exist, but she still dies?"
Elsa nods.
"Are they for the better?"
Another silent nod.
"I had a staff sergeant once who was kicking my ass to help me get ready for the AFT a couple of years ago - the Fitness Test - and he said something that stuck with me. Sarge said, Exercise may not add years to your life, but it adds life to your years." Kristoff smiled warmly at the memory. "Maybe that's what you're doing. Maybe you can't change her fate, but you're helping her make the most of her years?"
Elsa sighed, sniffling. "I… suppose. That seems like cold comfort, though. I… I thought that I might have had a chance after all. I … I pulled the rug out from under my own feet."
"Listen, there's something else I need to ask you, Elsa," Kristoff said after a few long moments, looking at her. "We've been friends for a while now, haven't we?"
"Yes, we have."
"And you trust me?" he asked, watching her carefully.
"As much as I trust anyone in a super-secret military project where the ultimate aim is to kill a bunch of people, yes. You're a good man, Kristoff."
"You knew, didn't you?" Kristoff looked at Elsa, a frown marring his expression. "When I asked you after your first leap about what happened… you knew from the beginning that this wasn't just some Star Trek device. You were building a time machine all along."
Elsa nervously wrung her hands. "I- I did. But I didn't mislead you, truly. The device will work exactly as we agreed. Your boss gets his superweapon, you get to look awesome before the brass… everyone gets what they want. It's just that it had an extra feature I didn't tell you about. And it wasn't out of malice. I truly had no idea whether or not any of this would work."
Kristoff ran his hand through his hair. "I know. And that's why I'm not mad at you. You did what you promised, I can't ask for more than that. But… you're sure you can't change history with it, that the timeline will stay intact?"
"Fairly sure, why?"
"It's just… I've done some things in my own past that I'm ashamed of, and… I was wondering if I could go back and fix them somehow, too," he muttered, looking at his shined, oiled black boots.
Elsa put a hand gently on his shoulder. "I'm fairly sure that unless it's something minor, you probably can't change it. And if you want to go back in time to fix it, I'm guessing it's something not minor." She coughed gently. "Is… this… what led you back to taking pills again?"
Kristoff turned red, ashamed, and hung his head. His ghosts clearly tormented him more than he let on. "Yeah. I… I did some stuff, pretty bad stuff and all this talk of fixing your past mistakes… it really threw me for a loop, brought up some really bad old memories."
"Weselton hasn't been breathing down your neck, has he?"
A guilty head shake. "I'm… I'm sorry for lying about that to you, Elsa. It- I wasn't ready to say anything in front of the others."
"I know all about guilt from the past, Kristoff. Do you want to tell me about it, get it off your chest?"
The burly soldier put his head in his hands. "No. No, not right now. Maybe… maybe someday. I can't talk about it, not now. But I swear, Elsa, that was my only bottle. I'm going to get myself straightened out again, I promise." Determination replaced shame on his face as he looked at one of his only friends.
"All right. Thank you for coming to find me. Wanna get the crew together and grab some dinner?" she offered, standing up.
"Yeah," he nodded, clambering to his feet, "That's a good idea. And hey, Elsa?"
She turned, looking back at him with a curious expression.
"If anyone can figure out how to save your sister, you will. Do what you have to, figure it out - because if you can fix your past…" he smiled sheepishly, "…maybe you can help me fix mine."
The next morning, Elsa walked from the barracks to the laboratory, running into Kristoff on the way over who looks like a dog's breakfast.
"Rough night, Colonel?" she teased him as she sipped coffee from a thermos. She felt substantially warmer now with some Air Force sweatpants on; the repeated trips back and forth through time meant keeping her apparel easy to don.
He groaned. "I… ugh. We might have celebrated too hard last night at dinner. My head is killing me."
They both badged into the laboratory complex and headed for the observation room. "Let's go find Gerda and see if she can fix you something," Elsa chuckled, hiding her laughter behind her hand. She'd only indulged in a glass of wine at the on-base tavern; despite being in the middle of the Nevada desert, they'd had one of her favorite Canadian ice wines in stock thanks to the unusually large number of VIPs that came in and out of Groom Lake. Kristoff had been drinking substantially more at dinner.
As they walked into the observation room, Dr. Beeks took one look at Kristoff and opened her medic kit, rummaged around for a moment, and handed him two ibuprofen and a glass of water.
He groaned quietly as he took the medication. "Thank you, Gerda. Ugh… I can't remember anything after we left."
Gerda tsked him in her best doctor's bedside manner. "Colonel, I've been talking to you about your alcohol consumption for some time now. You have improved over the last six months, but you still behave as though you were a 22-year old second lieutenant. No offense, sir, but you are well past those days."
Elsa suppressed a laugh as she examined the readings on her workstation, Kai handing her the most recent collected data. She'd been on the receiving end of a few of Gerda's corrective ministrations herself. At least the good doctor was as kind as she was honest. Midway through a calculation, Elsa recalled Kristoff's words and murmured, "…can't remember…" She swiftly turned her desk chair to Kai, who was still absorbed in his work.
"Kai!" she nearly shouted, excitedly.
The portly scientist jumped, nearly flinging his tablet in the air. "Yes, Doctor Beckett!"
"Can't remember! Why?"
Kai scrunched up his face. "I-I'm not quite sure what you're asking me, Doctor Beckett."
"Why can't I remember any of the changes made in the timeline? Clearly they've happened - I still remember Anna as a rebellious teenager, drinking and smoking and partying. I definitely do not remember her falling-", she choked back her words instantly, coughing. Elsa blushed, thinking about Anna's embarrassing revelation the previous day, and managed to catch herself. "-falling off a- a boulder and hurting herself. Why don't I remember the timeline changes? For that matter, why do I still remember the unchanged past?"
Kai, completely missing Elsa's stumble, stared intently at his console. "Perhaps… perhaps it is the tachyonic field itself, Doctor Beckett. Bosons carry force and they're still saturating you, though only at 60% of the strength they were after the first oscillator discharge. Perhaps they are somehow insulating you from change." He stood up and began to pace the room. "In theory… you sent yourself through time using the photonic cannon. That much energy perhaps acted like a camera taking a photograph, not just of you, but of time itself around you, and-"
"And it's insulating me from timeline changes," she finished. "So when the tachyonic field finally fades away-"
"So will your knowledge of the unchanged past," Kai completed, nodding. "That would seem to be the logical conclusion, Doctor."
Elsa stood up and started pacing, absentmindedly sipping her coffee. Her mind was buzzing like a hornet's nest right after a child had thrown a rock at it. If the tachyonic field was preventing the timeline changes she was making from catching up to her, then did she dare to hope that she could save Anna after all? She'd just visited Anna at 15 and found things very different. What if the changes she was making had bigger and bigger ripple effects?
She thought back to another pivotal moment in their relationship, when Anna started dating that piece of human garbage, Hans. Anna had been a senior in high school and by 17 was a hellion. Her partying only increased when her relationship with Hans deepened, who also got her smoking and eventually addicted to some nasty stuff. But on her last trip, Anna hadn't seemed to have been partying very much… so there was definitely a chance for Elsa to keep pushing against fate. If only I had the ability to control how I transited through time, she thought.
She looked across the workstations in the control room. "Kai… do we have any sense yet of how this time travel works? I just seem to disappear and appear at random."
Kai shook his head, holding out the tablet for her to see. "Your… temporal incursions, if you will, seem to be at random. I have not been able to find any data that would suggest it is conscious or under your control, Doctor Beckett."
Sure enough, the data he was showing offered no solace. She couldn't see any time of day, duration of trip, nothing that would offer a hint as to why she just kept popping in and out of time. Two of her leaps had been within minutes of each other, another two after sleep.
"I just don't get it, Kai. What is it that decides when in Anna's life I pop in or not?" She looked down at her hands, a familiar tingling starting. "Kai… turn on your instruments. I think I'm about to leap again."
The scientist immediately began waving probes near Elsa as sparks began to race across her body, aiming them at her head. "Ready, Doctor Beckett!" he said, raising his voice as the cacaphony from the electrical discharges increased. Another wave of blue-white light passed over Elsa, and she was off to the past again, her thermos hitting the floor with a loud crack, her lab coat and sweatpants following much more quietly.
Author's Notes
We're starting to understand a bit more about Kristoff. He's not just a cardboard cutout military guy whose sole purpose in the story is to be the face of the military. In fact, if you go back to Chapter 1, we've known part of his story all along.
As for Elsa's jumping through time, she and Kai are wrong. She's in control of it. She just doesn't know it yet.
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