Two Roads Diverged
by Karone
Chapter Two
Pickford was a different place these days.
Or had the Pickford of the twenty-first century been the oddity?
Back when their time machine had stranded them in the past, the entire Diffy family had been uneasy with the idea of living in that strange primitive civilization indefinitely.
Buildings made of steel and wood, cars with wheels, airplanes and telephones.
It had all seemed so archaic to a family that came from a world of hovercraft and teleportation booths, like they'd been transplanted into one of the holoexhibits at the Museum of Human History.
Now, Phil found himself longing to take a drive in the Mustang convertible he'd had to leave behind.
Warm summer days like this one had been made for slow, pleasant drives through the countryside with the top down, the wind ruffling his hair and his arm around Keely as she sang along to the radio, her golden hair streaming out behind her in the wind.
I hope you're having fun driving it, Keel, he thought wistfully.
Like most of his twenty-first century possessions, Phil had left his car to her when the time came to return to his own century. It wasn't like he could bring the car back with him, and she had always loved to drive the convertible.
This way at least one of them got to enjoy it.
Sighing, Phil pressed his hand against the touchpad, and, after the scanner identified him, the front door to the Diffy's skyhome slid open.
He stepped inside, and the door closed behind him, sealing itself shut once more.
It was funny, but the home he'd grown up in no longer seemed like home. He missed the simple two-story house of the twenty-first century, the one that his family had lived in for six years. Even after he'd moved into the dorms on campus, it had been nice to go back for a visit with his parents, to be back in that familiar, comfortable place.
Phil had always imagined that he and Keely would one day have a house just like it.
Trudging through the skyhome, Phil noted absently that there didn't seem to be anyone around on the first level. That wasn't entirely unexpected, though, his parents would still be at work, settling back into their old jobs.
He was about to take the turbolift to the next level when he heard noise from the data room.
Taking a few steps in the direction of the room, Phil glanced through the open doorway and wasn't surprised to find that it was his sister, seated at the data terminal and hammering away at the keypad intently. It was reminiscent of an afternoon back in the past, where she'd gotten hooked on the primitive information highway called the 'internet' and was always glued to the computer.
Phil smiled faintly despite himself.
Then he turned away and started for the turbolift shaft.
"Phil?"
The key strokes had come to a halt, and at the sound of Pim's voice, Phil sighed, then backpedaled his way to the open doorway and forced a smile for her sake.
"Where were you?" Pim demanded, sounding irritatingly like their mother.
"Out for a walk," Phil replied flatly. "What's it to you?"
Pim rolled her eyes, an exasperated sigh escaping her lips. "Like I care."
In the six years they'd spent in the past, his little sister had grown up. She was nineteen now, and taller than he'd expected her to be, although he still dwarfed her by several inches. While Pim had lost none of her attitude during that time, she'd softened in a way that was hard to really define, except to say that it was there.
And she'd definitely picked up some twenty-first century lingo that probably amused her friends.
"What are you doing?" Phil asked uninterestedly, just to be amicable.
"Nothing," Pim said quickly.
Too quickly.
Phil raised an eyebrow and his sister bit her lip nervously, eyes flickering back to the data terminal screen anxiously as her fingers twitched toward the keypad.
Curiosity now thoroughly peaked, Phil strode into the room.
Pim tried to close whatever she was looking at, but she wasn't quick enough, and Phil pushed her arm away, peering at the screen despite her protested and attempts to shove him away from the data terminal.
"Don't!" she cried, almost desperately. "That's private!"
"Pim," Phil grunted, shouldering her hand off of him. "What is so..."
He trailed off as he got a good look at the screen, and Pim instantly stilled, her breath catching in her throat.
For a long moment, Phil stared at what was displayed on the screen in front of him, and then he sighed wearily. "Pim," he murmured, running a hand through his hair. "You know better."
"I know," Pim muttered.
"Then why are you doing this?" he inquired.
"Because I had to know," Pim responded sharply, back in attack mode. "I had to know, okay? Is that so wrong!"
"Yes," Phil replied softly.
When he'd come home to find his little sister searching the data terminal, he'd assumed that she was doing some work for school, or that she was playing some new hologame.
Never in a million years had he expected her to be researching Pickford.
Or rather, the lives of one Debbie Berwick and one Bradley Benjamin Farmer specifically.
Phil closed his eyes, trying not to think about where Pim's friends were, and the fact that they were only blocks away from Keely, both attending the same college.
During their early years in the past, Pim had barely tolerated Debbie most of the time, and she and Bradley had fought like cats and dogs, but over time the three of them had become a tight-knit trio. Pim had even shared a dorm with Debbie her first, and only, year at Pickford University.
It couldn't have been easy for Pim to leave, either, he realized.
He wasn't the only one with ties that had been severed.
"Why?" Pim demanded indignantly. "Why is it so wrong to want to know how my friends lives turned out, huh?"
"Because, Pim," Phil said wearily. "You think that you're just going to take a peek, that a little bit of information will be enough. But it won't. It's just going to drive you crazy, and you'll be obsessed with finding every detail you can about their lives, no matter how insignificant."
"And wondering my whole life is better how?"
"It's better than going crazy over things that happened a hundred years ago," Phil answered shortly. "Things that you have no control over, that you can't change."
"Ignorance is bliss, is that it?" Pim asked sarcastically.
"Something like that, yeah," Phil retorted, ignoring her tone.
Pim opened her mouth to make a nasty remark, then paused, a sly gleam lighting her eyes that told Phil she was about to pull out the heavy artillery. "You know," she said thoughtfully, with feigned innocence. "We could always look up Keely..."
Phil drew a sharp breath, his heart wrenching in his chest.
He did know, that was precisely the problem.
From the very instant he realized what Pim was up to, he'd been painfully aware of how easy it would be to find out what had become of Keely. All it would take was a few key strokes, and he'd have her whole life story in front of him.
But it wasn't right, and more importantly, his heart couldn't take it.
What if she'd found someone else?
After all, it might have only been a month to him, but it had been a hundred years in Keely's lifetime. A hundred and fifteen years, to be exact.
And a hundred and fifteen years was a long time.
Keely would be dead by now, he knew that, though he hadn't allowed himself to dwell on it much. Humans had a longer lifespan now than they had in the twenty-first century, the average man lived to be a little over one hundred, but even by twenty-second century standards, there was no possibility of Keely still being alive.
People didn't live to be one hundred and thirty-six, no matter how special they were.
But here was the chance to find out when she'd died, and how.
To know if she'd finished school and gone into fashion design, or if she'd followed her true dream and become a singer. To learn if she'd stayed in Pickford, or gone out into the world to create a new life after the one she'd wanted to build with him had turned to ashes.
If she'd ever, in all those decades, found someone to replace him.
It was temptation at its finest.
And Pim, the little devil that she was, had know it.
"No," Phil managed to say at last, his voice surprisingly steady considering that his heart was in his throat. "We can't."
For a long moment, Pim glared at him, and it was hard to tell if she was more angry or incredulous. She hadn't expected him to say no, that much was obvious. "You're pathetic," she accused, shaking her head in disgust. "Keely's better off without you."
And with that that she turned and stormed out of the data room, muttering under her breath about Pickford and something about how six years in the past hadn't made him any smarter.
Phil stared after her with a frown, not sure what she was on about, then shrugged and turned to shut down the data terminal.
His hand hovered over the keypad, though.
Just a quick peek couldn't hurt, right?
He would just check to see when she'd died, to find out if she'd at least had a long life, then he would walk away and never visit this path again.
Before he could change his mind or talk himself out of it, and before Pim could come back into the room and catch him in the act, Phil selected a new search entry and typed in Keely's name and birthdate, hoping there wouldn't be too many Keely Teslows in the database.
There weren't.
In fact, there were less than a hundred, and he easily found the one he was looking for.
Keely Anne Teslow
Born: 8/12/1990
Birthplace: Pickford
Date of Death: 4/21/2088
2088.
She'd lived to be just shy of a hundred years old.
It was strange to know that Keely had died, an old woman of ninety-eight, a good twenty-eight years before he had even been born.
Phil tried not to think about it, about the inescapable reality that fate had never meant for them to be together.
At least she had a long life, he thought, his heart aching.
He hoped it had been a good one.
His eyes stung with tears and he blinked, scrolling down the data entry. He wasn't looking for anything in particular, he just wanted to get away from those words: date of death.
And then something caught his eye.
Survived by a son, Phillip James Teslow.
Phil stared at the screen in shock, unable to comprehend what it said.
He blinked once, then twice, but the words did not change and something sharp had lodged itself in his chest.
After a moment, his fingers flew across the keypad, moving on their own, and a new entry flickered across the screen, this time for Keely's son.
As soon as he saw the birthdate, Phil knew.
On May 20, 2011, he'd said goodbye to Keely and the twenty-first century.
Nine months later, Keely's son had been born.