6
I didn’t see Zoey again for three weeks after that, and there was an away message on her device. I went to work, I came home from work, I paced my apartment and talked to the cat. Finally, on a day off from the hotel, I left her a voicemail to say I was coming to her office. She didn’t respond, but I boarded a trolley to the Time Institute in the late afternoon. She’d told me her schedule. I knew she’d be there. I watched the pale streets slipping past, the old stone buildings with missing pieces of masonry and the ramshackle illegal dwellings pressed close against them—the influence of the Night City seeping in, a whiff of disorder that I found invigorating—and I had a strange, wild notion that she might be dead. She worked too much and drank too much. In that first year after our mother died, my thoughts often veered toward disaster.
I stood outside the Time Institute, white stone monolith, and called her one more time. Nothing. It was around six o’clock. A few people emerged from the building, singly or in pairs. I found myself studying their faces, wondering what it might be like to have a job with stakes attached to it, and then one of the faces was Ephrem’s.
“Eph,” I said.
He looked up, startled.
“Gaspery! What are you doing here?”
I’d talked to Ephrem at my mother’s funeral, briefly, but that day was a blur. We hadn’t spoken at any length since the last dinner party I’d attended at his house, a year ago now. Perhaps it was just the dome lighting—dimming gently but also increasingly silvery, in a rough approximation of an Earth twilight—but Ephrem looked older than I remembered, older and more careworn.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said. “What’s an arborist doing at the Time Institute?” He hesitated, and in that beat, I saw an opening. There was something he didn’t want to tell me, and there was something I wasn’t supposed to know. “You work here, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Yes. For some time now.”
“Then do you know about the project Zoey’s working on? The simulation thing?”
“For god’s sake, Gaspery, don’t say another word.” Ephrem was smiling, but I could tell he meant it. “It’s been a while. Shall we grab a cup of tea?”
“Love to.”
“Come see my office,” he said. “I’ll get some tea sent up.”
We walked together in silence through the atrium, past Security, into an elevator and through successive white corridors that all looked the same to me, a maze of blank doors and opaque glass.
“Here we are,” he said.
His office was identical to Zoey’s, but had a bonsai tree in the window. A tea service was waiting for us on the table, with three cups. I’d known Ephrem half my life, but had I ever really asked him about his work? He’d told me he was an arborist, I’d asked him the occasional question about a tree, but apparently I knew much less about my friend than I’d thought. His office was on a high floor, overlooking the spires of Colony One. In the distance, I saw the Grand Luna Hotel.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“About a decade.” He was pouring tea, but he paused for a moment, considering. “No, seven years. It only feels like a decade.”
“I thought you were an arborist.”
“I miss that job, to be honest. I’m afraid trees are just a hobby now. Will you join me?”
I moved over to his meeting table, which was exactly like Zoey’s. I was overcome by the strangeness of the moment, the disorienting sense of one reality slipping away and being replaced by another. But I’ve known you for years, I wanted to say, and you’re an arborist, not a suit at the Time Institute. We graduated high school together.
“Were trees easier?” I asked.
“Than my current job? Yes. Very much so.” His device vibrated. He glanced at the screen and winced.
“Why didn’t you tell me you worked here?”
“It’s just…it’s awkward,” he said. “By awkward, I mean classified. The thing is, I can’t really answer questions about my job, so I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Must be strange,” I said, “doing something secret.” By strange, I meant wonderful.
“I try not to lie about it. If you’d asked where I was working, I’d have said I was doing some work with the Time Institute, and let you assume it was somehow tree-related.”
“Okay,” I said. The silence extended around us. I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted. Hire me, let me in, let me be a part of whatever it is you people are doing here. “Ephrem,” I began, but the door opened just then, and Zoey came in. Her expression was set in a way I hadn’t seen since childhood. Zoey was furious. She sat across from me, ignored her tea, and stared into my eyes until I was forced to look away.
“I’ve been losing staring contests with my sister since I was five,” I said to Ephrem. “Maybe four.” He rewarded me with a weak smile. No one spoke. My gaze drifted back to the bonsai tree.
Finally, mercifully, Ephrem cleared his throat.
“Listen,” he said. “No one’s broken any rules here. When Zoey spoke with you about the anomaly, Gaspery, it hadn’t been classified yet.”
Zoey looked at her tea.
“Of course,” Ephrem said, “that doesn’t mean you should be standing outside the Time Institute repeating the things she told you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Ephrem, can I ask, is it real?”
“What do you mean?”
“The things Zoey told me about seemed like a pattern, but, well, it was our mom’s thing,” I said. “Simulation hypothesis.”
“I remember her talking about it,” he said gently.
“I think that when you lose someone, it’s easy to see patterns that aren’t there.”
Ephrem nodded. “True. I don’t know if there’s anything there,” he said. “But I wasn’t close with your mother, which makes me a somewhat neutral party in this question, and I think there’s enough to make it worth investigating.”
“Can I help?” I asked.
“No,” Zoey muttered, barely audible.
“Zoey did tell me that you wanted to work here.” I noticed that Ephrem was very carefully not looking at Zoey.
“Yes,” I said, “I would.”
“Gaspery,” Zoey said.
“Why do you want to work here?” Ephrem asked.
“Because it’s interesting,” I said. “I’m more interested in this than—well, than anything I can remember, honestly. I hope that doesn’t make me seem desperate.”
“Not at all,” Ephrem said. “It just makes you sound interested. All of us are interested, or we wouldn’t be here. Do you know what we do here?”
“Not really,” I said.
“We safeguard the integrity of our time line,” he said. “We investigate anomalies.”
“Have there been others?”
“Usually it turns out to be nothing,” Ephrem said. “My first case at the Institute involved a doppelgänger. According to our best facial-recognition software, the same woman appeared in photographs and video footage taken in 1925 and 2093. I was able to collect DNA and establish that they were two different women.”
“You said usually,” I said.
“On a few occasions,” Ephrem said, “we haven’t been able to make a determination one way or the other.” I could tell he was unsettled by this.
“Is there something you’re looking for?” I asked.
“There are several things we’re looking for.” He was quiet for a moment. “The aspect of our work that relates to the anomaly,” he said, “is a continuing investigation into whether we’re living in a simulation.”
“Do you think we are?”
“There’s a faction,” he said carefully, “myself among them, that believes time travel works better than it should.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that there are fewer loops than one might reasonably expect. I mean that sometimes we change the time line and then the time line seems to repair itself, in a way that doesn’t make sense to me. The course of history should be irrevocably altered every single time we travel back in the time line, but, well, it isn’t. Sometimes events seemingly change to accommodate the time traveler’s interference, so that a generation later it’s as if the traveler were never there.”
“None of which is proof of a simulation,” Zoey said quickly.
“Right. For obvious reasons,” Ephrem said, “it’s difficult to confirm.”
“But you could move a step closer to confirmation by identifying a glitch in the simulation,” I said.
“Yes, exactly.”
“Gaspery,” Zoey said, “I know it’s interesting, but it’s a troubling line of work.”
“Zoey and I have some disagreements regarding the Time Institute,” Ephrem said. “I think it’s fair to say that our experiences here have been different.”
“Yeah, that’s fair,” Zoey said flatly.
“But what I can tell you,” Ephrem said, “is that it’s an interesting place to work.”
“What I can tell you,” Zoey said, “is that Ephrem missed his recruitment goals this year, last year, and the year before.”
“The training and the job both require immense discretion,” Ephrem said, ignoring her, “and a great deal of focus.”
“I can focus,” I said. “I can be discreet.”
“Well,” Ephrem said, “I’ll set up a screening interview for you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “This will sound…look, I don’t mean to sound pathetic, but I’ve literally never had an interesting job before.”
Ephrem smiled. “I’m not worried about the screening interview. You’ll pass easily. This calls for a celebration.”
But if it called for a celebration, why was my sister speaking so little, why did she look so grim? A troubling line of work. Look, I wanted to tell her, as Ephrem ordered three glasses of champagne, I would rather do a dangerous job than a job that makes me comatose with boredom, but I was afraid if I said this she might start to cry.
