The Mnemosyne Gamble- Chapter Four: All Roads Lead Home

Rhynar soon understood why Gent had been so willing to dump Tully off on her.

Tully had exhausted her before they'd even finished the relatively short trip back to her parents' house. Rhynar was grateful, at least, that they'd taken the express line instead of the scenic route she'd ridden into Central North. She wasn't sure she could have survived three days of this.

At every stop, Tully found something she suddenly needed. A drink. Something to eat. Something she'd seen in a shop window. Each time, she wanted Rhynar to use her corporate fob to pay for it, and each time Rhynar's patience thinned a little more. None of it was necessary. It was all dilly-dallying. For someone who had been so desperate to go home, Tully seemed determined not to get there.

By the time they reached the final checkpoint into the unincorporated territory, Tully had dragged her feet so thoroughly that they missed the last gate checkout of the night. The gates wouldn't reopen until sunrise. Rhynar was not happy about it.

They were stuck on a metal bench specifically designed to prevent anyone from getting comfortable. All the shops had closed for the night. The only source of water was a filthy drinking fountain that required a person to practically wrap their lips around the spout to get anything out of it, and the sole functioning vending machine contained nothing but old cherry syrup bars that smelled like moldy wax. Rhynar decided she'd rather dehydrate.

The terminal had grown unpleasantly warm after closing, and its open face allowed every tiny flying insect in the surrounding territory to congregate around the overhead lights. Rhynar shifted again on the bench. Her rear end had gone numb at least twenty minutes ago.

"Tully, I thought you wanted to go home," she finally said. "Why are you stopping at every point along the way?" Tully was sitting on the floor with her back against the side of the bench. "Why are you walking me all the way home?" she asked. "Gent only met me here."

There it was.

Rhynar knew exactly what Tully was getting at. Tully had used her family's home as collateral when she'd signed her employment contract. But the clause wasn't intended to punish someone for simply changing their mind. It applied if she completed her schooling and then failed to fulfill her employment obligation, or if she caused significant financial damage to company property.

Rhynar had already explained this several times. Each explanation had become progressively shorter.

"I have to get your parents to sign the clause acknowledging that the company can now take adverse ownership of the home," Rhynar said. "They aren't answering my messages the way they did when they signed everything for Gent."

Tully stared at her.

Rhynar stared back.

She had a feeling she would be explaining it again before sunrise.

Tully started to protest again, but Rhynar cut her off. "Tully, no one is taking your mother's house. It's a hollow contract clause. It's literally just there to release you from your contract. No corporation wants your specific family home, and there isn't a single recorded instance of them ever enforcing that clause. End of story."

The moment the words left her mouth, Rhynar glanced toward the security camera mounted above the gate. She hoped no one was actually listening. There was quite a lot she wasn't supposed to say, and she had just said most of it. Somewhere between the missed gate, the metal bench, and the moldy cherry bars, annoyance had finally overridden professional discretion.

Tully wasn't reassured. "I don't have to tell you where my parents' house is anyway." Rhynar held up her tablet. "The directions are already here." Tully kicked at the floor and crossed her arms.

"Corporate would never come all the way out here, if you don't mind me saying." The voice came from a man leaning against the wall about ten feet away. "Sorry, ladies. Couldn't help overhearing." He was obviously not from the city. He wore the practical clothes of someone accustomed to ranch country and carried a worn leather bag over one shoulder. Rhynar assumed he'd been in Central North on business and, like them, had missed the final gate.

Tully immediately perked up. "Why do you say that?" The man adjusted the strap of his bag and stepped closer. "I worked on the emergency pods for years, way back when. Corporate shelved the whole program overnight. Now there's hardly a record it ever existed. Hundreds of us worked on those things, and then they switched from one computer system to the next and—puff." He opened one hand. "Gone."

Rhynar had never heard of any emergency-pod project.

"Was that Midwestern or Central North?"

"Neither. Commerce Inc."

Rhynar looked at him more carefully.

He was old, certainly, but that old?

Commerce Inc. had ceased operations before her parents were born. It wasn't impossible that he'd worked for them, but she wasn't entirely convinced it was probable either.

Tully, however, had already accepted every word.

"What did the pods do?"

"Countryside emergency system," the man said. "Floods, fires, things like that. Pods were supposed to detect trouble and alert the cities before anyone out here had to make the trip themselves. Project was nearly finished, too."

"What happened to them?" Tully asked.

"That's the problem. Nobody knew."

He shifted his bag to his other shoulder.

"When they changed systems, locations got lost. Records didn't transfer right. Some of the pods could still be found and put back on a map, but plenty couldn't. Eventually, admitting they'd misplaced half an infrastructure project became more embarrassing than pretending there'd never been one."

Rhynar considered that.

It sounded absurd.

Unfortunately, it also sounded entirely plausible.

"So they erased it?" she asked.

The man gave a small shrug.

"Can't lose what officially never existed."

Rhynar looked at Tully.

"See? Corporate changes things all the time. They're not going to bother your family. They don't even have jurisdiction outside the corporate zones. Like I said, it's a hollow clause. Your parents sign it, it becomes one snowflake in a blizzard of documents, and nobody thinks about it again."

She lowered the tablet. "But if they don't sign it, the missing acknowledgment will keep appearing as an unresolved alert in every department it passes through until somebody clears it." Tully frowned. Rhynar leaned back against the miserable metal bench. "So, ironically, refusing to sign it is probably the best way to make Corporate remember your mother's house exists."

Tully considered this and began searching for emergency pods with her own fob. After several minutes of finding nothing, she looked up at the stranger. "Okay. If you're telling the truth, name one. Where's a pod you know is still there?"

The man tilted his head back as though the answer might be written somewhere in the rafters. "Umm... last one I remember was at Providence Park. Right in the middle of the receiving area, there was a big flower garden. Should be underneath that."

Rhynar didn't know much about this part of the country, but the name stirred something in her memory.

Tully recognized it immediately. "Providence Park? Like the theme park that went out of business? Isn't that only a day's walk from here?" The man chuckled. "I guess it is."

"I've heard of that place," Rhynar said, mostly to herself. "I just can't remember why."

The man laughed. "Every woman ought to know Providence Park. That's where you were supposed to be able to send a memory back to yourself. Stand in the right place at the right time and warn the person you used to be."

Then Rhynar remembered. Her grandmother had told her about Providence Park.

It had been built around the now thoroughly debunked Time Traveler Consciousness Theory, which proposed that consciousness didn't move through time quite as cleanly as the rest of the body did. Under very specific conditions, the theory claimed, a sufficiently strong memory could be carried backward along the same consciousness that had originally experienced it.

Providence Park had supposedly found a way to create those conditions.

The park's famous receiving garden had been constructed over deposits of photo-enhancing minerals that interacted with particular wavelengths of light. On certain days, during a narrow window of time, standing in precisely the right place was supposed to allow a person to send one memory backward to an earlier version of herself.

Not a conversation. Not instructions. Not an entire lifetime of knowledge. One memory. Something closer to a reflexive thought than a message. For a while, people believed it. Then people started making terrible decisions and waiting for their future selves to stop them.

When no warning came, Providence Park insisted the technology had never promised certainty. A light wave could carry only so much information. Memories degraded. Timing mattered. Some experiences apparently produced stronger impressions than others. There were dozens of explanations for why a message might never arrive. To the public, they sounded increasingly like excuses.

Then the Wexton twins died. Two little girls had been playing alone at an automated hydroelectric plant. Somehow, the twins, off on their own, had managed to tamper with the controls badly enough to damage part of the system. Both girls were lost, and the plant was shut down too.

The story became infamous. Their mother had apparently believed Providence Park's claims so completely that she'd reasoned her daughters couldn't possibly come to serious harm. If something terrible were going to happen, her future self would simply send the memory backward and warn her. No warning had come.

Afterward, public anger turned vicious. Providence Park argued that it had never claimed its process was absolute, but that distinction meant very little to a mother with two dead children—or to everyone who had spent money believing tomorrow could protect them from today. The park never recovered.

Tully lowered her fob. "If we find the pod, I'll stop fighting you about the contract."

Rhynar looked at her.

"You'll take me directly to your parents?"

"Yes."

"No disappearing. No shops. No suddenly needing something on the opposite side of town."

Tully hesitated.

"Tully."

"Fine. Yes."

Rhynar glanced toward the stranger. "And you're certain the pod was under the flower garden?"

"That's where we put it."

It was a ridiculous detour. On the other hand, Rhynar had never seen much of the countryside, and after spending an entire night on a bench engineered to punish the human spine, a day's walk suddenly didn't sound so terrible.

By sunrise, the gate reopened.

Rhynar and Tully passed through with the first group of travelers and started toward Providence Park.