In a museum’s basement, at the end of a hall, is a humble little office. It used to be a storage space, although a sturdy wooden desk, a whiteboard along one wall, and a shiny new nameplate on the door has helped to make it feel more like a space someone can work wonders in.
In this office for the first time is a woman. She is tall, and seems to fit in her own skin well, comfortably worn in like a favourite sweater. Her hair is fully grey and kept short. Like her mother before her, she does not bother to dye it. She has a hefty ring of keys clipped to one belt loop, a box of various things in her arms, and a smile as wide as the room.
The first thing she does after putting her box down on the desk is take out a hammer and nail and gently tap it into the wall behind her seat. That done, she takes a framed degree out of the box, and puts it in its place of honour. The degree is a doctorate in chronoconsequentalist retrocontemporary archaeology, which sounds to Carolyn Thompson (PhD) like some poor academic throwing down train tracks as a bright new industry comes barrelling down them. Her colleagues have taken to calling themselves temporal archeologists. Shorter, catchier.
But don’t let any of these words fool you. What this woman really is, what she has been studying and working towards for years and now, at the spry age of 47 has the right to call herself, is a time traveller.
She gives herself thirty seconds to just take in the moment. Then she takes out her journal, as worn-in as its owner, opens it up to a neatly-handwritten list of things to do, and gets to work.
Half an hour later, the office is starting to feel like a home. The whiteboard already has some scrawled notes on it, things she still needs to get, one-sided conversations with herself. She’s humming along to a song she doesn’t quite know, something from the 1990s. Tamir, one of her classmates, had panicked halfway through a study period one night and had put together a playlist for each decade the course covered. It had helped, and had the added effect of always being able to tell who was thinking about what time period based purely on the song they had stuck in their head.
Only after every pen is in its place, every paper filed away, computer plugged in and charging, does she let herself reach into the bottom of the box and pull the locked case from the bottom.
It looks like a briefcase, like something a man in a too-expensive suit would cart his life around in. Yuu had already transformed her own case, given to her officially at their graduation, gorgeous lace stretched across the metal, turning the utilitarian thing into an art installation. She’s their fabric expert, somehow found time to fit in a degree in history of fashion into a schedule that had the rest of them gasping at the pace. She had gifted the other four inaugural graduates of their program with period-accurate underwear from their favourite points of history, which summed up her irreverent, detail-oriented personality to a tee.
Carolyn preferred to leave her case as it is—there’s something she enjoys about the image of her carrying it to work with her. She has an office and a briefcase, like her father always wanted for her. It’s the location, the field of work, the ma’am (and now Doctor) that she gets that doesn’t match the dream he had for his only son.
She thinks he’d be proud of her, but she is proud enough for the both of them. She has long since let go of any lingering skeletons in the back of a closet she waited too long to come out of. She has new family now—four colleagues who took to calling her Mom halfway through the last two years of their program, where they watched 75% of their peers drop out. She had watched a sea of hopefuls whittled down by quantum physics and endless discussions of ethical time travel. Carolyn made it, when no one thought she would, and she is proud enough for her and her dead father and her whole line of disgruntled relatives.
Anyway, all she has done is left behind one industry’s expectations for another’s. There’s a long-standing tradition of time-travelling Doctors who used to be boys and are now women, after all.
Tomorrow, she will go into the museum’s archives. Her job here is to look through them, use the artifacts there as anchors to send her spinning back into time, looking for good stories that will make the otherwise-unassuming plates and children’s toys of the museum’s backlog come to life. She has a year until the museum’s new wing is finished, and she’ll be hard-pressed to be finished by then, but there’s no doubt in her mind that she’ll get there.
That is for tomorrow.
Today, she starts another journey. One she’s been dreaming of since her first time travelling, years ago now, her cohort’s first practical. This one is tucked into her pocket, not written in any of the journals that will stay on the shelves here.
It is the first day of her new job, and she is about to break all of the rules.
See, time is a tricky thing. The slightest thing can set it askew. An outfit slightly out of date can draw unwanted attention, and suddenly you’ve introduced a fashion trend a decade too early. The devices they use must be worn under their period-appropriate clothes—no cars or phone booths here. They can make no meaningful connections with the people of the past, can take nothing back with them but notes.
They are not superheroes. There is no Deus Ex Machina for the tragedies of the past. They are there to observe, to understand, and to leave without a trace.
And Carolyn understands this. It makes sense to her, in the way that hard things do. In a way that makes her heart ache even as she accepts it as law. The problem is that every bit of logic has a logical counter. And if she is right—if she pulls this off—then she has found a way to change nothing and everything, to sidestep the rules in a way that would leave perhaps even her Ethics professor scratching his head and admitting that it’s a grey area.
If she pulls it off.
The piece of paper in her pocket has an equation on it. There are two ways to travel—one is with an anchor, an artifact to the past to focus in on. With this, the recommended way to travel, it’s as easy as dialling back in the object’s personal timeline and picking your point.
She has no anchor, so she is relying on numbers, a safety net solid in theory but temperamental in execution. It’s why she leaves the scrap of paper on her desk, once she’s done programming it into her travelling device. If she doesn’t come back, they’ll be able to look and understand why she had to try.
When Carolyn goes to get dressed, pulling her clothing out of the garment bag she had brought with her, her fingers shake with each button. It’s not nerves, which surprises her. Now that she is here, really doing this, all she can feel is excitement.
She slips a book into her bag, and she is almost ready. The last touch is a sign on the doorknob—another gift from one of her classmates. Richard had painted them, a two a.m. craft project full of more love than sense. They are all identical and read “Gone Travellin’, Back Soon” in a whimsical green font. There are four offices similar to hers, at some of the best museums in the country, and she is sure they will all be sporting their very own signs.
Something they always come back to is that it’s the little things that make all the difference. These gifts, these connections, they burn bright against the backdrop of stress and exhaustion the last few years have been. Carolyn has no doubt they will continue to do so. They can all walk through time at will, now. A few thousand miles means nothing, to a family like theirs.
The travelling device is a familiar weight on her waist, something between a corset and a tool-belt. She doesn’t need to look, as she presses the final button that will send her off. It’s as familiar to her as her own skin.
Something she’s not sure she’ll ever get used to is how small big moments feel, when you’re in them. The people walking past the alley she appears in do not know that they are living in a time that will be analyzed and picked over by every clever mind for the next hundred years. They are simply focused on this moment, and it is easy to fall into step with them, pull her coat closer around her against the chill of late spring.
If this were a movie, she would fall in love here, in 1930s Berlin. She would fall for a revolutionary, and their passion would light up the sky here, serve as something bright on an increasingly dark horizon. But Carolyn has her own lover at home, who listens to her gush about history with a well-worn smile and kisses her hands like they’re still young and sneaking into each other’s dorm rooms. Rebecca’s knees aren’t made for sneaking anymore, although her paintings are still bold enough that Carolyn can’t walk past one without stopping to stare, just like she did twenty five years ago when she got lost in the Art wing.
This is not a movie, so no music swells, as she approaches her destination. She can feel the heat before she can see the flames, and even after months of preparing herself her eyes water when she sees those books burning. It gives the scene a dreamlike quality, something slightly less than real, and in this strange bright night she takes the book out of her bag and clutches it in one tight fist.
Once she’s close enough, she sees what she’s looking for—a book on the edges of the fire. Left where it is, it’s only a matter of time before it burns, but for the moment it is untouched. She leans over and in one fluid moment slips it into her bag as she stands, tossing the book she brought herself into the flames. It’s nothing, something she grabbed from a thrift store at random, battered enough to not look too modern. It’s nothing, because there are thousands of copies, because if the future has anything going for it, it’s that things are harder to bury now.
Still, she can’t help but whisper a thank you, as she watches it burn away. Her heart is pounding, but her steps are steady, as she walks away, finds an alley, flicks a switch and opens her eyes to her own office, her own time.
The book in her bag, rescued from ashes, more precious than gold, is with her.
Time is tricky. If you save a thing in the moment before its destruction, replace it in such a way that nothing changes, then nothing changes. Nothing changes, and everything changes, because books hold so much more than pages.
She clutches at the book she has stolen from time, and can’t help but think of timelines. Personal timelines, but also the timeline of her people, which has grown so thin at times but never broken. With this, she thinks that line has strengthened. Just a little.
Doctor Carolyn Thompson knows, better than anyone, that one cannot change the past. But one can honour it, remember it, learn from it, and change the now.
One book, retroactively saved, isn’t going to change the world. But.
But.
“A good start,” Carolyn says, and opens the book.
First appeared on Patreon in 2020.
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