The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

lotto numbers in it. Suppose you jot them down, and in the present time, you run to the store and buy a ticket. You win the lotto, and now your whole future is going to change. But when you look through the opening at your future self, the one ten days ahead of you, nothing has changed. She’s not celebrating. She hasn’t quit her day job. That future, on the other side of the opening, is still following the original track—the one in which you didn’t have the lotto numbers. It’s locked. That’s the only way I can put it. The future the cylinders show us is like a living snapshot of the future we were headed for, at the moment we first switched them on.”
    “So we can still save the world on our side of the opening,” Travis said. “But the future we see on the other side will always be in ruins. The way it would’ve originally turned out.”
    “Exactly.” Paige was quiet a moment. “Why the cylinders are designed to do that, I can only guess. It’s worth keeping in mind that these things are built for some purpose. Built to be useful. Maybe a future that reacts to present changes is too fluid to make sense of. Maybe it would flicker through alternate versions like some rapid-fire slideshow right before your eyes. Think about chaos theory. Sensitivity to initial conditions. Maybe it’s practical, or even necessary, to just lock these things onto one future and stick with it. That way, you can keep going back and forth between the two times, and never worry about the world transforming under your feet. And I’m sure the designers had some way to reset them, prep them to be locked again later on, whenever they wanted to, using equipment we obviously don’t have. We’ve got the iPods but not the docks.”
    Bethany gazed off at nothing, thinking it over. She seemed to be accepting it, whether or not it made sense to her.
    Travis didn’t expect to fully understand it, but Paige’s reasoning sounded right. If the iris opened onto a future that did react to changes in the present, it was hard to believe they weren’t triggering at least some changes just by looking at it.
    “I’m sure my expression at the time looked like each of yours does now,” Paige said. “I stood there for probably half an hour trying to get a grasp on it. And then I heard Pilar and the others shouting, and waving at me to come back, because one of the satellite pings had finally gotten a response.”

Chapter Twenty-Two
    The satellite was called COMTEL–3,” Paige said. “In our present time it’s positioned over the Atlantic as a relay for news-wire services, bouncing article text between ground stations in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. On the other side of the opening, we picked it up over the Pacific, moving east toward Ecuador, two hundred miles below its intended orbit. It answered the ping with a status screen full of critical error messages. It also had the date and time, based on its own onboard clock, which is probably accurate to within a few seconds over a thousand years. Adjusting for local time, at that moment in the other desert it was 6:31 in the evening, October 14, 2084.”
    A relative silence came, beyond the ambient whine of a jet powering up somewhere across the airport.
    “Christ,” Bethany said.
    Travis felt something like a chill. They’d already known the kind of timeline they were dealing with, but to hear it specified to the minute made it real in a way he hadn’t expected. He did the math. Seventy-three years and not quite two months.
    “Having a known position for COMTEL–3 did a lot for us,” Paige said. “After that we could rotate the dish to follow it, and stay in contact. Which was good, because Pilar believed some of the satellite’s final transmissions—news stories—might still be stored in its memory buffer. She worked on it for a while, but she wasn’t optimistic about actually retrieving the information. The bird was in pretty bad shape. It’d gone into some kind of safe mode after enough time passed without contact from its human controllers. Its orientation was off; its solar panels weren’t angled to grab as much sunlight as it needed. It’s a wonder it still worked at all. But after about half an hour, she managed to pull a number of articles from the buffer. They were corrupted all to hell. They were like fill-in-the-blank puzzles, with more blanks than words. We sat out there the rest of the day and most of the night trying to make sense of them, while we