7

A week later I arrived at the hotel fifteen minutes before my shift, and went to Talia’s office.

“Gaspery,” she said.

I started to close the door, but she shook her head and rose from behind her desk. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“I only have a few—”

“You know, it’s interesting.” She gestured for me to walk out ahead of her. “I studied the history of work in university, and if there’s one historical constant over the centuries, it’s that no one especially wants to mess with HR.” She opened the side door and we emerged into daylight by the loading dock. “I told your supervisor that I needed to meet with you. No one will mind.”

Today’s weather programming called for clouds, so the daylight was dim and grayish. I found it unsettling.

“It’s hard to get used to,” Talia said. She’d seen me glance uneasily at the sky. We were walking toward the path that ran alongside the Colony One river. All three colonies had rivers, for mental health reasons, running along identical white stone riverbeds, with identical white stone bridges arcing across them. They were engineering marvels. They all sounded exactly the same. “Why did you leave the Night City?” she asked.

“Bad divorce,” I said. “I just wanted a fresh start.” There was comfort in the sameness of the river sound; if I didn’t look up, if I didn’t pay attention to the strange grayish fake-cloudy-day light, I could pretend I was home. “Why did you come here?”

“I’m from here,” she said. “I didn’t move to the Night City till I was nine.”

“Oh.”

We were approaching a bridge. In the Night City, the bridge would’ve had a selection of derelicts napping or getting high underneath, in the peace and shadows of the embankment, but here there was just an old man on a bench, sitting alone and staring at the water.

“You came to my office to give your notice,” Talia said.

“How did you know?”

“Because my boss’s boss’s boss told me to speak with a couple of suits from the Time Institute three days ago. I could tell from their questions that they were vetting you for a position.”

Is there an unease that’s specific to the sense of an invisible bureaucracy in motion around you? Talia stopped walking, so I stopped too, and I gazed down at the water. When I was a kid I used to float little boats down the Night City river, but the Night City river was a dark and sparkling thing, reflecting both sunlight and the blackness of space. The Colony One river was pale and milky, reflecting the fake clouds on the dome.

“We used to live there,” Talia said, pointing, and I looked up and across the river at one of the oldest and most splendid of the grand apartment buildings, a white cylinder of a tower with a garden on every balcony. “My parents worked for the Time Institute.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. There was no non-catastrophic reason I could think of why a family would go from one of the most fashionable addresses in Colony One to a falling-down house in the Night City.

“They were both travelers,” Talia said. “Until a mission went wrong in some kind of awful way, after which my parents were unable to work, and within a year we were in that run-down neighborhood in the Night City.”

“I’m sorry.” I resented having to say this, because the thing was, I loved the Night City, and that run-down neighborhood was my home. My family—me, Zoey, our mom—weren’t there because we had to be there, we were there because in my mother’s words, “at least this place has some character to it, not like those sterile colonies with the fake lighting,” although as I remembered this, I was also remembering that we couldn’t afford to fix the roof when it leaked.

Talia was looking at me. “Drunks are indiscreet,” she said. “As I’m sure you’re aware, if you’ve ever thought about the question for more than five minutes, sending someone back in time inevitably changes history. The traveler’s presence itself is a disruption, that’s the phrase I remember my dad using. There’s no way to go back, engage with the past, and leave the time line perfectly unchanged.”

“Right,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, but listening to her made me so uneasy that I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“Sometimes the Time Institute goes back in time and undoes the damage, ensures that the traveler doesn’t do the thing that changes history. You know, the little thing, like you hold open the door for the woman who goes on to create a civilization-ending algorithm or whatever. Sometimes they go back and undo the damage, but not always. Do you want to know how they make that decision?”

“That sounds extremely classified,” I said.

“Oh, it is, Gaspery, but I like you and also I’ve developed a reckless streak in my old age, so I’m going to tell you anyway.” (She was, what, thirty-five? In that moment, I found her thrillingly jaded.) “Here’s the metric: they only go back and undo the damage if the damage affects the Time Institute. What am I, Gaspery? How would you describe me?”

This felt like a trap. “I…”

“It’s okay,” she said, “you can say it. I’m a bureaucrat. HR is bureaucracy.”

“Okay.”

“As is the Time Institute. The premier research university on the moon, possessor of the only working time machine in existence, intimately enmeshed in government and in law enforcement. Even one of those things would imply a formidable bureaucracy, don’t you think? What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.” She was gazing across the river again. “We lived on the third floor,” she said, pointing. “The balcony with the vines and rosebushes.”

“It’s nice,” I said.

“Isn’t it? Look, I understand why you’d want to work with the Time Institute,” she said. “It must seem like an exciting opportunity. It’s not like you’ve got much of a career path at the hotel. But just know that when the Institute is done with you, they’ll throw you away.” She spoke so casually that I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her correctly. “I have a meeting,” she said. “You should probably start your shift in the next hour or so.” She turned and left me there.

I looked back at the apartment building. I’d been to one of those apartments once, years ago, for a party, and I’d been fairly drunk at the time, but I remembered vaulted ceilings and spacious rooms. What I was thinking was that if anything went wrong with the Time Institute, I would never be able to say I hadn’t been warned.

But I felt such impatience with my life. I turned back to the hotel, and found that I couldn’t go in. The hotel was the past. I wanted the future. I called Ephrem.

“Could I start early?” I asked. “I know the plan was to give the hotel two weeks’ notice, but could I just start the training now? Tonight?”

“Sure,” he said. “Could you be here in an hour?”