Episode 17: Time After Time

University of Oslo, 2020

"Doctor Beckett! Doctor Beckett!" Doctor Kai Gushman rushed into the quantum physics lab, his tablet beeping, blinking, and gurgling.

"Gooshie, I am never going to convince you to call me by my name, am I?"

Kai laughed, a broad grin on his face. "No, Doctor. It wouldn't be proper."

"I swear, you could be a character from some medieval castle or something. All right, what have you got?"

"The latest results from the medical scans you ordered, Doctor. Our most recent test run on the laboratory mice indicates that exposing a living creature to the energy of a quantum superposition is safe and shows no genetic drift of any kind. This is excellent news, Doctor Beckett! With this, our project is one step closer to human trials," the portly scientist beamed.

"That is good news. Let's go tell my wife, shall we?"

Doctor Anna Beckett donned her lab coat and grabbed a sheaf of papers as she walked with Kai down to the particle accelerator laboratory. She smiled to herself as she walked along the sterile metal corridor. For the last twenty years, she'd been on a mission with her beloved sister to solve a mystery.

As early as she could remember, she'd been visited by a version of her older sister as an adult, at various times in her life. Eighteen years ago to the day, that version of her sister had perished in a car accident that very nearly might have killed Anna.

She'd grieved, but the medical examiner and police were unable to find any traces of the doppelganger's body in the wreckage, though they found the charred remains of the other driver. Police reports indicated the other driver was badly intoxicated at the time, and had it not been for her sister's doppelganger, Anna was certain she would have been killed.

The thought of the accident still sent shivers down her spine decades later.

Anna walked down the final flight of metal stairs into the particle accelerator lab, swiping her access card to the control room with Kai just behind her. At the center console in what could have been mission control for a space program, her sister examined complex formulas on a workstation with a gigantic screen.

"Hey Elsa! Gooshie told me the latest good news - no drift!" she chirped, bouncing across the room to hug her sister.

Elsa smiled and kissed Anna quickly on the lips. "That's wonderful news, Anna! We're a step closer to unraveling this mystery. I have a theory," she grinned, hugging Anna tightly, "that if time functions like a curve, almost, then something going back in time could change time's flow a little bit. Not much, not on any grand scale. It'd be like moving rocks around in a river."

"So the splash that a rock made while moving wouldn't last very long?" her sister asked.

"Yes and no. I think time can't be broken, any more than we can break gravity, but we can make enough subtle alterations that the overall flow does change, just like an eroding riverbank can eventually change the course of a river," Elsa said, looking out the control room window at a room with a small tungsten ring suspended by a control apparatus and a beam projector. "If we're lucky, this technology will give us the ability to view where the river was at any arbitrary point in time."

The sisters walked out of the control room, leaving Kai behind to enter his data in his workstation. Anna looked in awe at the laboratory setup. With a grant from CERN, they'd been able to afford constructing this laboratory with Elsa's genius ideas, to prove that time wasn't necessarily a linear construct. She reached out with her right hand and laced her fingers with Elsa's left hand, feeling the gold on Elsa's ring finger.

Anna always beamed at that feeling. After the accident, Anna had chosen to go to Europe with her sister and pursue her graduate studies, deciding to take up medicine. Elsa had dove deep into her physics research to better understand how another version of herself had traveled through time.

About 4 years into their combined studies, their parents had gone on a transatlantic cruise from New York to Oslo, planning to visit the sisters and enjoy their retirement. The ship was lost somewhere in the North Atlantic; to this day, no one had been able to adequately explain what happened, especially in an era of ubiquitous GPS and satellite tracking. They'd settled up their parents' affairs and sold the house in Eagle Valley, relocating to Norway permanently.

A year later, Norway became one of the first nations to legalize same-sex marriage, and since most people already assumed based on their shared last name that they were married anyway, they'd made it official. Both Anna and her sister had left any guilt about their relationship behind long before that, and simply introduced themselves as wives to anyone who asked.

Anna pulled Elsa into a warm embrace, leaning against the metallic wall of the room. "This is so exciting, Elsa! How long do you think it'll be before we can run a test on something bigger than a mouse?"

Elsa's lips grazed Anna's before settling against her sister's neck. "I don't know, Anna. Building this setup beyond what we've got here just isn't in the budget, you know? Still, I feel like we're really close to understanding how all this works."

She pulled away to stare into Anna's gorgeous teal eyes. "I can't thank you enough for all your support over the years, Anna. You- you gave up everything to work with me, to pursue this crazy dream and understand how and why everything happened that night in Indiana. I don't know what I would do without you."

Anna melted in her sister's arms. "You'll always have me. After all, I've really always had you looking after me in one way or another since the day I was born. Now let's get back to-" she turned her head, seeing one of her staff walking towards them. "Gerda? What is it?"

An older woman, Doctor Gerda Beeks was a sub-investigator on the project and Anna's right hand. Truth be told, Anna thought Gerda could easily have been a principal investigator or even chief medical officer, but she was grateful to have her expertise in any capacity.

"Doctor Beckett - Elsa," Gerda said, smiling politely. "There's… someone here to see you. Says he's interested in our research. He's waiting in the visitor area."

"Thank you, Gerda," Elsa smiled. She turned to her sister. "I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere," she joked as she kissed Anna.

Elsa walked down the hall to the visitor area, a secure room designed to keep people (and mostly their outside dirt) from the rest of the facility. She took off her laboratory coat and scrubs, tied her golden hair back in a ponytail, then entered the visitor room.

A man in a crisp green military uniform stood up, his cap in hand. "Doctor Elsa Beckett?" he asked with a rich, mellifluous voice.

Elsa nodded. "That's me. Can I help you?"

The soldier smiled warmly and reached out to shake hands. "I hope so, Doctor Beckett. My name is Lieutenant Colonel Destin Mattias, and I've heard about the research you're doing here. The Department of Defense back home is very interested in your work, and would be interested in sponsoring it, if you'd like a partner on the project."

She arched an eyebrow at the seemingly friendly soldier, his grey hair offsetting his dark skin and brilliant smile. "I have a partner, my wife Anna. She's my principal co-investigator."

Mattias nodded. "I understand. I was more thinking about funding and direction. The Department of Defense would be able to given you substantially more budget and resources, if you'd like to continue your work with us? We even have a special facility to help scale up research like yours, out in Groom Lake, Nevada."

"And what exactly would we be doing there? No offense, Colonel, but building weapons of mass destruction isn't something I'm particularly comfortable doing with my life," Elsa said, eyeing him warily.

Mattias gave a brilliant, charming, white-toothed smile. "Why, continuing your research, of course."

Elsa's sixth sense twigged. How did a US government official even know what she was studying? She was careful, making sure that her academic publishing talked only about the quantum superposition aspects of her work, never the timeline research portion. Anna was even more tight-lipped about their research; any inquiries she got, she deferred to Elsa.

Uncomfortable in the long pause, Mattias broke the silence. "Look, we've read your papers and you're years ahead of anyone else on quantum superposition. Your work in the field has been astonishing. And yes, there is a military application for it, but think of how fast it would advance your work. You could build one of these-" he waved his arms around the room, "facilities to gigantic scale."

"I don't want to build weapons. That's not what I want to see my life's work become," Elsa said firmly.

"I understand. Okay, listen, what we really need - and I shouldn't be telling you this without some kind of paperwork, but I get the sense you're a trustworthy person - is help with quantum computing. That's what the project is. We're calling it Project Q," stage-whispered Mattias earnestly. "We're not trying to blow up the world or anything crazy. We're trying to find a more secure way to send messages. You know this as well as I do, Doctor - quantum computing is going to wreck cryptography."

Elsa sighed. The colonel was correct. Quantum computing made child's play out of decrypting conventional communications. If that was truly the scope of the project, she could live with that - and being able to expand her research (and her budget) was no small thing. She mulled over the pros and cons before looking at the soldier.

"Okay, here are my conditions, Colonel. My team, my project. We stick strictly to quantum communications and cryptography. If there's even a whiff of weaponization, we walk." She looked at Mattias expectantly.

Mattias grinned wider, proffering his hand. "You got it, Doctor."


Groom Lake, Nevada, 2022

"Doctor Beckett! DOCTOR BECKETT! It's not safe! You have to shut down the quantum oscillator!" screamed Kai over the din of the particle accelerator, now one of the lead scientists on Project Q.

Elsa turned to her controls in the observation room and powered down the quantum oscillator, its tungsten rings spinning so fast that they appeared to be a solid metal sphere. Blue and yellow sparks arced all over the test range.

Kai raced to Elsa's side, his trusty tablet in hand. "Doctor Beckett, something is interfering with the test. Look here-" he pointed at a complicated wave diagram, "-and here. There's something else currently occupying our superposition target!"

Anna looked over from her workstation, confused. "That… that shouldn't be possible, should it?"

Elsa shook her head. "The odds of something else being at that exactly place, in that exact phase are so low that you'd have a better chance of being struck by lightning inside a windowless shopping mall."

Her heart sank a little. This was the last major test of their experiment which would prove that Project Q could send a message securely through the quantum domain in a closed timelike curve. If she succeeded, they'd be sending a message effectively through time in a way that couldn't be intercepted or decoded.

She looked once more at the data in Kai's hand. "Gooshie… this looks almost like we can't send because… because something else is trying to send. Am I reading that correctly?"

Colonel Mattias, who'd been sitting quietly next to Anna nursing a cup of coffee, elbowed her in the shoulder. "Hey… talk to me. What's going on? Is it serious?" Over the last two years, the sisters had gotten to know Mattias, and it was his easy demeanor that made the project work so well. He was clear about the military's objectives, honest, and shielded the team from the bureaucracy as much as he could.

Anna examined the data before answering the soldier. "Something's blocking our ability to run this test. It's like we're trying to call and getting a busy signal because someone's already on the phone, right Gooshie?"

"Yes, exactly Doctor Beckett," nodded Kai approvingly, "an astute observation and quite a good analogy."

"Should we just pick up the phone, then?" Mattias chuckled.

Elsa bit her lower lip in thought, a gesture that never went unnoticed by Anna. "That… isn't the worst idea I've heard, Colonel. Let's see if we can clear the interference by letting whatever's in superposition exit out first." She started keying commands into her workstation, reversing the spin of the oscillator's tungsten rings.

"All right, everyone. Here we go - safety glasses on!" she shouted with a chuckle, quoting Bill Nye, her favorite childhood entertainer.

The tungsten rings spun once more, pure yellow sparks flying off it as the computers in front of the sisters beeped and blinked with urgency. A brilliant flash of light momentarily blinded everyone, then receded.

A white rectangle of light appeared, as though it were a door opening from the bottom to top, and out stepped the flickering image of a person, dressed almost exactly like Colonel Mattias. He sat up, trying to make out the details of the soldier and gasped in shock. Same rank, same regiment, same medals - whoever this person was, they had almost identical backgrounds and service records.

Elsa and Anna clasped hands, watching the image of the soldier tentatively step through the door, before it closed behind him.

"Elsa?" the image spoke.

"Can he hear you? Does he know who you are? Is he real?" whispered Anna, leaning to her sister's ear.

Before Elsa could shush her sister or reply, the image of the man continued.

"So… uh, I don't know exactly how this works. Gooshie said you might not even be the person I know, but I promised you I'd talk to you, so…" the man took a deep, pained breath, "… here I go."

Kai, hearing his name, was frantically tapping away on his tablet, the sensors glowing brightly as they collected data on this mysterious visitor.

"I suppose I should follow Gooshie's advice in case you aren't the Elsa I know. My name is Kristoff Calavicci. I'm a colonel in the Air Force, and we've been working on a project together for a couple of years now, Project Q. You used it to go back in time to save your sister, Anna, from dying in a car crash," the image of Kristoff said glumly.

Anna gasped, hearing this story from a total stranger decades after her sister's doppelganger first visited her. She pulled Elsa to her, wrapping an arm around her sister's waist for support. Mattias pulled out a secure phone and started searching for the man's name.

Kristoff continued. "You just left for what you said was probably a one-way trip to the past. What's been bothering me, what I promised I would tell you is… I'm pretty sure I was the one who killed your sister."

The entire room stopped breathing, everyone's eyes transfixed on the image of Kristoff. Elsa impulsively hugged Anna tightly as Kristoff continued his confession.

"We've been through a lot the last couple of years and yeah, the pills you caught me with was because I needed something to keep me steady once I knew where you were going." The hologram began pacing, walking through the walls of the test chamber into the observation room. "Once we learned you had succeeded in traveling back in time to meet Anna, I did the research and the dates lined up. I was driving my pickup - drunk and high as fuck - home one night when I collided with a tiny little Kia."

He walked past Mattias and straight through Kai, the portly man gasping as the image imitated a ghost from the past.

"When I told you that I had done some things in the past I was ashamed of, a lot of it was around that. The drugs, the booze, the everything. I was a total fuckup, and the last straw was a hit and run. I swear, Elsa, I didn't know it was your sister until I looked at the dates and locations earlier." He paced around the room, the hologram passing through consoles and people alike.

"After the accident, my dad forced me to join the military. He said it was boot camp or jail, and I picked boot camp. That's how I got involved with the Air Force and how I ultimately ended up here, working with you." Kristoff's image pulled out an unseen chair as he collapsed into it. "That's what I wanted to tell you before you left, Elsa. That's what was so wrong with me, what was eating at me. And I… I hope when you go back, you can put right what went wrong, that you save Anna… from me. I'm so sorry."

The white doorway opened up once more and the image of Kristoff walked through it, vanishing.

The silence in the aftermath was deafening. Even Kai's instruments made no noise. A tear dripped down Elsa's face; Anna swiped it away with her thumb wordlessly.

It was Gerda who finally broke the silence. "That poor young man," she murmured, "carrying so much pain around. I hope he got the closure he needed."

Mattias cleared his throat, looking at this phone. "Unfortunately, Doctor Beeks, the Air Force has no record of a Colonel Kristoff Calavicci, and the only thing I could find was-"

"-A man by the same name who died in a car crash in 2004?" Anna finished.

Mattias' eyes widened. "Y-yes. How did you know that, Anna?"

Anna rubbed her thumb over Elsa's knuckles as she recounted the long, strange journey of her life over the span of an hour. Mattias looked more and more shocked as she acted out portions, describing Elsa's doppelganger, and the fateful night when she should have died.

"So…" Mattias looked puzzled at the conclusion of Anna's tale, "what DID happen to the other Elsa?"

"They never found a body," Anna whispered.


Author's Notes

Mattias asks the critical question at the end.

The scene with Kristoff was my nod to Quantum Leap. Because of the mechanism of time travel (from the Time Traveler's Wife), I couldn't work in the hologram of Al talking to Sam throughout the series, but I wanted to acknowledge it somehow. At the end of Chapter 13, we saw Kristoff looking at the equipment and Gooshie's remark that there might be a way to communicate with the future. That's what happened here.

To the question of whether this is a paradox, I'm interpreting the echoes of the original timeline as Echeverria and Klinkhammer's resolution. In that answer to Polchinski's paradox, time resyncs with itself to resolve a paradox. Thus, the echoes of the past would still be knowable, but wouldn't impact the present because of the sum-over-histories function. You can read more about it in the Wikipedia articles about Novikov's self-consistency principle.


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