Ainan picked her way down the mountainside escarpment to within inches of the rock outcropping’s precipitous edge. She inhaled deeply and sat down.
Dangling her legs and letting them waft in the breeze, she stared out over the expanse of prickly evergreen treetops that stubbled the face of her haven. Her left hand idly sifted the loose dust and gravel beside her. She started to hum, then sing, the song in her head.
"...The wind of change blows straight / into the face of time / like a storm wind that will ring / the freedom bell for peace of mind / let your balalaika sing / what my guitar wants to sayyyyy..."
A fingerling pebble attracted her touch. She picked it up and worried the smooth, long roundness of it with her thumb, removing the dust. For a few minutes, her soul gathered the smoothness from her fingertips and transformed it into empty quietude.
A minute later, she hurled the stone into the greater nothingness. She knitted her eyebrows.
Nobody thought anything of her “temporal science” theories and experiments…until she’d met Jonas and hired him as her assistant. He alone believed in her and her ideas.
Together, they made a discovery that changed everything. But it was Jonas’s literal “time capsule” – he chuckled when he named it – that had allowed a body to be removed from the current time stream, to see and join a different flow, to use the portals.
Fortunately, he might as well have been pointing a banana instead of a gun when he tried to stop her from plunging into the first portal they discovered. He couldn’t bring himself to kill her.
Once she was in, she put a bookmark in her former out-of-control life, closed the book, and threw it out the window.
Before, she had been a largely disregarded scientist. She had been an overloaded engineer and inventor with too many projects and papers and the weight of expectation stacked in overcrowded rooms and closets, with nothing but a dream of a better and easier future.
All I need is the portals now. And maybe Jonas's skin-mapping system and the upgrade to the capsule.
She took another deep breath of freedom and stretched as all the bitterness inside disappeared into the wild landscape of her victory. No more need for self-analysis or self-criticism; she had achieved everything she ever dreamed and more.
She now had the ability to test every theory—every timeline change—without real consequences to anyone she cared about.
I just have to figure out how to get the skin mapping system, and then deal with Jonas.
When she stood up, she stood outside of time, yet she was more in tune with the flow of it than anyone else in the world had ever been.
She clambered back up the rough path to where she knew the portal was, and pressed the button on her time capsule. Her current time stream became visible.
Ainan stepped back and raised her gun. The out-of-season "snow" had dissipated, but the flow of the metallic, spiral river had not gone back to normal while she'd been away. Someone's coming.
For a moment, the mercurous appearance of time was mesmerizing. Then, she could make out a dim form growing nearer and clearer.
"There you are, Jonas."
The other jumper floated through the time stream and was ejected from the portal. She fell to the ground.
"Wha--?" Ainan flinched and dropped her gun arm. The strange woman’s head was on...backwards?
The other woman looked confused, then horrified. She gasped silently, as if she had gills instead of lungs. Meeting Ainan’s eyes, she reached out with one hand—but it went out from the other side of her body, in the wrong direction.
Ainan lifted the gun and took aim--to put the jumper out of her misery, of course--but the woman fumbled and found her homing button first.
What happens next?
Reply to this email with your vote (1, 2, or 3):
- Ainan goes back to the lab and steals a critical piece of tech
- Jonas catches up to Ainan while she is still on the mountain
- Ainan tries to follow the strange woman
