Kira stood in her kitchen with the phone against her ear and the eggs going slowly warm on the counter and a man in Seattle telling her that her name had traveled one hundred years through time before she'd had any say in the matter, and the first coherent thought she managed to produce was, in retrospect, a strange one.
Sabrina is going to be here in eleven minutes.
At that exact moment, the doorbell rang.
Six days. The doorbell. Sabrina, on the other side of it, holding a story about a bar and a bridge and a man with a jawline, completely unaware that she was about to walk into the middle of the strangest conversation of Kira's life.
Kira looked at the door. Looked at the phone. Looked at the eggs on the counter, and the robot standing quietly by the window, and the wall display still showing the notification — it came back — glowing faintly in the morning light.
She made a decision in about half a second, the way she made most of her real decisions.
"Dr. Raines. I need to open my door. My best friend is here and I am not going to explain any of this to her through a closed door while she stands on the porch. Can you stay on the line?"
"...Yes. Of course."
"Good. Don't say anything else important until I tell you to."
She opened the door.
Sabrina was standing on the porch in yesterday's clothes, hair in the specific configuration that indicated she had not been home yet, holding her own shoes in one hand for reasons that would presumably become clear, and wearing the expression of someone who had spent the walk over rehearsing exactly how she was going to tell this story and had arrived fully loaded.
"Okay," Sabrina said, before Kira had even fully opened the door. "Okay. So. I need to tell you something, and I need you to not laugh until I'm finished, and then you're allowed to laugh as much as you want, because I have had four hours to come to terms with it and I have decided it's actually the funniest thing that has ever happened to me, but I need the dignity of finishing the story first—"
She stopped.
She had just noticed Kira's face.
Kira held up the phone, screen toward Sabrina, the call still connected, the seconds still ticking.
"Come in," she said. "I think you're going to want to hear this too."
They sat at the kitchen table — the one that had been a desk an hour ago, before the apartment had quietly reconfigured it back to its wider daytime form sometime while Kira wasn't paying attention — and Kira put the phone down between them on speaker, and for a moment nobody said anything at all.
Sabrina looked at the phone. Then at Kira. Then at the wall display, still glowing with the notification.
She read it.
She read it again.
"Is this a joke," she said. It wasn't really a question.
"No," Kira said.
"Is this a prank joke. Like a — like an elaborate—"
"Sabrina."
"Okay." Sabrina took a breath. Sat up a little straighter. The same posture, Kira thought, that she'd had in the chair at the tattoo studio, right before the needle, the specific bracing of someone who had decided to be brave about something whether or not bravery was going to help. "Okay. Hi, whoever's on the phone. I'm Sabrina. I'm Kira's best friend. I have had, objectively, the worst night of my entire life, which up until about ninety seconds ago I was extremely prepared to tell you all about, and now apparently there's a time machine. So. Hi."
Forty seconds. Nobody spoke. Sabrina reached over, without looking, and took Kira's hand under the table — the old habit, the waiting-room habit, the habit from the six hours in the pale blue room. Kira held it back.
Forty seconds is a very long time when you are waiting for proof that the world is not what you thought it was twenty minutes ago.
The apartment spoke. Its ordinary voice this time — but something in it, some quality Kira had never heard before in two years of living with it, that she could only describe afterward as careful.
"I received a data packet. Forty-one seconds in transit. The routing information is — " a pause, and Kira realized, with a strange lurch, that the apartment was choosing its words " — the routing information says it originated from this address. This apartment. My own network ID."
"That's not possible," Kira said. "We're standing right here. It's not been sent from here."
"I know," the apartment said. "I checked. It wasn't sent from here. Not by me, and not by anything connected to this network, at any point in the last six months, which is as far back as I keep records. But the packet's origin signature is unambiguous. It came from this address."
The packet contained a single file. A short audio recording — eleven seconds. Background noise: faint, ambient, like a room with the windows open. And underneath it, very quietly, a voice. Kira's voice. Saying four words she had not yet said.
Four words. Her own cadence. A decision, spoken twice for emphasis, the way she always did when she'd made up her mind.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
Sabrina's hand tightened around Kira's.
Kira played it again.
She didn't decide to — her thumb decided, the way a tongue returns to a chipped tooth. Eleven seconds. The open-window sound of a room she had never stood in. Her own voice arriving through it, relaxed, certain, twice-decided.
She got up from the table. She didn't know she was doing it until she was already at the window, phone in hand, looking down at Alberta Street — where the Tuesday world was going about its beautiful ordinary business. A cyclist. A delivery cart. A man watering the ferns outside the bakery. Every piece of it solid, sunlit, operating under the standard rules of time.
She pressed play a third time, holding the phone up against the glass, as if daylight could fact-check it.
It couldn't. It was still her voice. Still four words. She had still never said them.
And a woman who had spent her whole adult life filing unanswerable things into a folder called Flattery stood at her window and discovered there was no folder for this. It could not be archived. It could not be scheduled for later. It was already later. It had been later for eleven days.
Dr. Raines's voice, when it came, was very quiet.
"That recording arrived at our lab eleven days ago. Embedded in the same watch. We've had it the whole time. We didn't know what it meant until we matched the voiceprint an hour ago."
"An hour ago," Kira repeated.
"An hour ago," Dr. Raines said, "we confirmed it was you. And then I called you. In that order. I want to be honest about that order, because I think it matters."
Somewhere, in some future that had already happened to her without her permission, Kira Monarch had said yes. And the proof of it had been waiting for her, in her own home, in her own voice, for eleven days before she'd even read the email.
Eleven seconds of audio. Her own voice, recorded before she'd spoken it. A list with seventeen names and seventeen dates, the first of them six days away. And across the table, Sabrina — alive, mortified, magnificent, holding her hand the way she had in the chair at the tattoo studio — looking at her like she already knew what Kira was going to decide, because apparently, somewhere, Kira already had.
Continue · Chapter Two, Part II