Episode 12: Time of Your Life

Groom Lake, Nevada, 2022

The moment Elsa reappeared, she looked down at her hands. Kai and Kristoff both jumped from their chairs in the observation room, Kai already taking readings with his tablet while Kristoff handed her the lab coat and sweatpants.

Elsa beamed and held up her hands after she dressed. "Look," she said with a broad grin, showing off her injuries from the most recent leap into the past.

Gerda ran over. "Doctor Beckett! What in the world happened?" She turned to grab the medical kit behind one of the desks.

Elsa regarded the cuts and bruises on her hands. "I got into a fight this last trip!" she exclaimed. "Do you realize what this means?" She looked at the team, bubbling with excitement. "This is conclusive proof that I'm physically moving my whole body through time!"

Kai stared in wonder at her knuckles. "This… this is extraordinary, Doctor Beckett! You really are moving through quantum superposition as a coherent entity. I had speculated it was possible you were only viewing your past experiences, but it seems clear now that you are physically present in your own past. How amazing!" He took some additional readings, clucking to himself.

"Wait a minute, Elsa," Kristoff interrupted, astonished. "You got into a fight? You? What- how?"

Elsa recounted the factual events of her most recent leap as Gerda applied antibiotics and topical painkillers to her knuckles, omitting her younger self's confession about her feelings for Anna.

Kristoff shook his head. "You're… well, to be fair, if someone was trying to do that to one of my siblings, I'd throw down too," he chuckled. "I just didn't think you had it in you."

She threw him a long look. "Funny, Kristoff, the last three times we've done any sparring together at the base gym, you've ended up ass over teakettle," she smirked, flexing her hands as Gerda finished up. After one particularly long day about a year ago, Elsa needed to blow off some steam, so she'd hit the base gym and was doing a few rounds on the heavy bag. Kristoff was training separately, preparing to re-qualify for his fitness tests, and had suggested some light sparring. He'd been unaware of Elsa's extensive training in Takagi Yoshin Ryu and ended up face first on the mat more times than he'd ever admit to anyone else.

"What? No! I mean, you're skilled, you're very technically proficient. I just, I mean, I, uh… I'm gonna shut up now before I make things worse for myself at our next workout," he said, slumping into the desk chair. "So… besides getting into a fight, did you learn anything more about changing time?"

Elsa nodded with an eager grin. "The timeline has definitely changed. This past leap, some events happened that happened in my past, but in a different order and with a different outcome. The fight, the ripped dress, the drinking - they were all there, but not at all how they originally played out."

Kai smiled and nodded slowly. "That makes a great deal of sense. If time is a river, and those events are rocks in the river, then they would have to happen in some fashion, but the river would flow over them differently. And as we all know, rivers change course over time."

"Exactly!" she practically bounced with excitement. "What if… what if the accident has to happen, but she doesn't have to die?"

Kristoff exhaled a drawn-out breath. "Listen, Elsa, I, um, I just don't want you to get your hopes up too much, okay? I really do hope for your sake that you can change things, that you can change time, but… just remember that it might not break your way." He looked at his friend and colleague with sadness. If her sister still had to die, it would crush her. She'd clearly begun to hope more fervently.

"I… I know. Thank you, Kristoff. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, but evidence is accumulating that we- I might be able to save Anna after all."" Elsa's stomach rumbled. "What- what time is it, anyway?"

"Almost lunch, Doctor Beckett. You were away substantially longer this time," said Kai, standing up to retrieve his coat. "Shall we adjourn to the dining hall?"

The group walked from the observation room across the building to one of the base's mess halls. Unlike the average Air Force base, Groom Lake was reasonably well-appointed in terms of amenities, including the cafeteria food. After fetching their meals, Kai and Gerda sat together on one side of the table, while Kristoff and Elsa sat on the other.

"Must be Friday", Kristoff smirked. "Can always count on pot roast and mashed potatoes on Fridays," he said, looking at the contents of his tray.

"Can always count on the military to try and save money by recycling this week's proteins," she chuckled. "Speaking of saving time… Kai… read back the durations of each leap, please?" she asked, staring intently at the mashed potatoes on her plate.

The portly scientist pulled up his tablet and perused his notes. "Ah, here we are. First leap back in time, 5 minutes in our time. Second, 10 minutes. Third, 20 minutes. Fourth, 40 minutes. This most recent excursion to the past was 80 minutes. It appears that you've been roughly doubling the time you're away."

"Does that make any sense to you, Kai? Why would I be away longer in the present, the closer I get to it?" Her brow furrowed as she turned the problem over in her mind. If anything, time away in the present should grow shorter, rather than longer.

Kai cleared his throat. "I suspect, Doctor Beckett, that it may be because of the particles decaying. By my readings, only 40% of the bosons that flooded you originally remain; perhaps somehow their decay is making the window away longer."

Elsa drew idle circles in her mashed potatoes. "So… at full power, time more or less stopped for me here, and now that they're fading, time is moving for me again. I wonder… Gooshie, can we save this timeline somehow? Keep the memory of it preserved?" She started to trace an equation in her potatoes before snapping out of her mind's wanderings. "Did… did you make any progress on determining why I do or don't leap into the past?"

It was Gerda's turn to pull up her tablet. "In fact, we did make some progress there, Elsa. According to Gooshie's scans, we saw increased activity in your frontal and medial temporal lobes, activity significantly above normal just before your most recent leap." She handed the tablet over to Elsa, who immediately began scrutinizing the imaging.

"These nodes… here and here," she pointed, leaning over the table, "that's normally what? It's been a little while since my neuro classes."

Gerda zoomed in on the rainbow-colored image of Elsa's brain. "Episodic memory, typically. Long-term memory about very specific events, situations, and experiences."

"So…" she mused, "it's very specific memories." She thought back to the leaps. Anna's birth. Loneliness. Trouble in school. The holidays. Prom. All of them were pivotal moments in one way or another in Anna's life, moments when she started down worse trajectories. Every moment hurt Elsa's heart to think about how little she'd done to support her sister in the original timeline.

"That said, dear, Gooshie and I were discussing this morning while you were away and there's no logical, scientific reason your memories should have any impact on quantum particles. It simply makes no sense," Gerda said thoughtfully as she drank some of the iced tea on her tray.

Elsa shook her head. "Very little of this makes sense, Gerda. Think about it: the tachyonic field around me isolates me from temporal changes. I can accept that. Why haven't any of you been affected? Kristoff, what do you remember me telling you about my sister?"

"That she was a pain more often than not, she got into bad relationships, did some drugs… you loved her, you cared about her, but sometimes she drove you up a wall, and your guilt over her death was because of that. That's what you've told me over the last few months," he said, recalling their many conversations over coffees. "You've never mentioned any of what's happened on these jumps into the past before the last two days."

"Exactly! And yet I am the only one leaping into the past. When I return, I should be returning to a timeline where the changes have been made - and you remember the changes, not the original."

Kai was shaking his head vigorously, eager to interrupt. "Doctor Beckett, the tachyonic field surrounds this entire facility, not just you. I suspect we are all affected to some degree; it's just you that travels through time because you were at the focal point of the oscillator. We are all likely in a time bubble of sorts."

"And so when the field finally fades away…"

"Yes, we will all likely lose our current state and merge with the timeline that has changed. That would be the logical outcome, Doctor Beckett." The scientist mulled his words over for a moment before taking a bite of his pot roast. "Though, forgive me for saying so, Doctor, going back to your earlier question about preserving this timeline… If the timeline that you're modifying is for the better, why wouldn't we wish to forget it entirely? Why concern ourselves with a present-day that will cease to exist?"

The blonde scientist sat back in her chair. "I don't want to lose sight of why I'm doing all this. Why we're doing all this," she murmured.

"But why would you want to keep the bad memories at all, Elsa?" asked Kristoff, not looking up from his plate despite clearly having lost his appetite. "If you're really able to change the past, why keep any of it? Everything that you went through, everything that happened, is just pain for you. If you had the option to erase it all, why keep the pain? If you gave me that choice, I'd gladly erase everything bad that ever happened to me." He pushed his plate away and folded his arms.

Elsa squinted around the cafeteria's perimeter. Other than a few service workers behind the foods lines, well out of hearing range, there was no one else in the cafeteria. "Because… I need to remember what I've lost, Kristoff. I need to remember what could have happened, what did happen."

She looked around the table at her friends, her colleagues. Working with this team for the last 2 years, they'd become almost a family of sorts, and while she wasn't as close with Kai or Gerda as she was with Kristoff, they'd all heard their fair share of each other's struggles. "I… you know I have a tendency to shut people out. You know I tend to… to almost take things for granted when I'm focused on something. If this works, if I really can save my sister… I need that pain, that memory of what was, so that I never take her for granted again. Gratitude is… easier when you know how much you have to lose."

Gerda nodded in assent. "You're a good woman, Elsa. Your- your habits, your tendencies, they're an outgrowth of your trauma, though. You shut people out because you had to shut out the pain. Perhaps… if the experiment goes as you planned, perhaps you will never develop that habit to begin with. On that note, there's one other noteworthy thing, here in the frontolimbic network, the amygdala and the insula" she said quietly, pointing at the functional MRI scan.

Elsa shook her head. "I'm drawing a blank on what this activation pattern means, Gerda."

"Guilt, Elsa. These are the regions of the brain that light up most when expressing guilt. I suspect it's not just the memories of Anna that are triggering the leaps, but your guilt about those specific memories. How that factors into the quantum mechanics, I'm unqualified to say, but the imaging here is quite clear," the elderly physician offered.

"Perhaps. Anyway," she stood up, gathering her tray, "based on Gooshie's decay rate calculations, this tachyonic field won't last forever. We should probably continue our research, process the data, see what happens while we wait for… whatever the next leap will be."

Gerda stood alongside her. "Have you had any strong memories of your time with Anna since you came back?"

Elsa shook her head. "No, nothing substantial. I've been think-" she stopped as she glanced over at Kristoff. The conversation had clearly made him morose and withdrawn; whatever was in his past, he had never shared with her but it was eating at him nonetheless. She stared at him idly poking his fork into the back of his hand, lost in thought…

… and pain flooded her heart. Anna's sophomore year of college was the year she dropped out, despite going to one of the easiest local community colleges. Her dirtbag boyfriend, Hans, was hanging out with her all the time, and had been introducing her to progressively stronger drugs. By that point, Elsa was almost through her doctorate degree, and her parents had begged her to come home to see what was wrong with Anna.

After a sharp, vocal confrontation over dinner the night she'd flown back to Indiana from Cambridge, Elsa had grabbed Anna's arm to keep her from running away during the conversation, and recoiled in shock at what she saw. Track marks, a series of a half-dozen small, circular bruises along the inside of her elbow. Her baby sister was an addict. They'd fought and she ended up running away with Hans for a little while. The only thing that had brought her back was that Hans nearly died of an overdose; Anna hadn't known what to do, so she'd begrudingly come home.

She winced at the pain from the memory, frozen like a statue at the table, her tray still in hand as guilt overwhelmed her. The things she'd said to Anna in anger stabbed at her heart. "I- I just remembered something. The first time I discovered Anna was using drugs. Heroin. She was… 19, I think. It was two years before the accident." Elsa looked at Kai. "Get ready, Gooshie. That was… a really strong memory."

Within moments, the first tingles of electricity started at her fingertips and unlike previous trips, the sparks intensified almost immediately. "Wait! I forgot to ask- Gerda- what brings me back? Memories that trigger guilt send me back in time, but what brings me-"

With a bright flash of light, the tray clattered back to the table.


Author's Notes

Will Elsa remember what she's lost, or will time reclaim everything and erase her knowledge of what transpired?

Only… time… will tell.


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