The Only Thing Unraveling Is You
Reality had shifted again.
Chloe Grant had not dared to ask anybody about any details. The drive home from the inner city was a blur. A dizzying fog of broken memories, offering her no way to glue the shards of her shattered reality back together.
She had rushed straight out of her debriefing at Future Proof’s headquarters. Shrugged everybody and everything off. Someone had even asked if she was alright. Only an hour ago, she didn’t even remember who had asked that. Shrugged that off, too.
She had been feeling sicker and sicker by the minute of spending any time in that glossy tower of glass and computers and steel.
Unlike in the previous timeline she had known, Danielle Bennett no longer worked at Future Proof. She had quit her job a few weeks prior. Rida Singh now filled Danielle’s shoes, heading the communications and IT department in the corporation—as if he had never been imprisoned under suspicion of national treason.
The whole incident in Midland, Texas, must have played out differently somehow. Grant was too confused, reeling with the staggering realization of all that had changed in the timespan of a few minutes, just by having passed through several Anomalies to lure the pterodactyls out of present-day Appalachian woods.
And Max Carter was alive again.
Part of Grant wanted to be happy about that. About all of this.
It was good to know that Singh wouldn’t be rotting in prison, or Carter could still show up to work to be his usual grumpy self. He had shot her a few dirty looks for all her incredulous staring—it wasn’t easy to see him alive again, after having watched him die to bullet wounds in a desert.
On the other hand, it felt like her head was going to explode with all the changes in reality that had occurred. She couldn’t even begin to understand how luring the pterodactyls into some apocalyptic future had caused all… this.
And as if it all hadn’t already felt sickeningly alien, she now returned home to find it looking different, too.
The front door was painted red rather than white. She had double-checked to ensure she parked in the right driveway, at the right address.
Somebody else was inside her house.
Lights were on, and the shadow of a figure moved around in the den.
Grant’s hand, holding her key, hovered in front of the lock. She wasn’t even sure if the key would still fit.
Before another wave of nausea could make her knees buckle, she shoved the key into the lock. The key fit. Clicked into place.
She twisted it and the door yielded.
It made sense, given that she had left her keys at HQ, before even flying out to the Appalachian mountains. If reality had shifted during her time travels—or because of them—then this only made sense. The keys had to fit, because the keys would have shifted along with the rest of reality.
At least something made some semblance of sense.
The only thing that didn’t make sense was…
Herself. It was like Grant herself was out of place. Out of time. Making no sense.
With how hard her heart was pounding, her heart felt like it was a few beats away from breaking free from her chest. The rushing of blood in her ears dampened all noises coming from the stranger in the den, save for the loud monotone sound of a running vacuum cleaner.
Chloe Grant neared the shadow and vacuuming noise.
A feminine shape, a head framed by long, straight hair.
Steeling herself to meet this stranger, Grant rounded the corner and faced the person in her home.
Their home?
Danielle Bennett was busy vacuuming a particular spot on the carpet. She gasped and almost leapt away from Chloe, as if she had seen a ghost. Lids soon fluttered, blinking, as widened eyes normalized, and Dan turned the vacuum cleaner off with the tip of her socked foot.
“Hey! You’re home early,” Danielle said. The expression of shock had given way to something brighter, cheerier. Happy to see Chloe. That sentiment faded fast, turning into visible concern. “Somethin’… happen? Are you okay?”
Chloe Grant wasn’t okay.
It was too much for her.
The last straw to break the camel’s back. The last straw being Chloe Grant’s capacity to interpret how things had changed, and the camel’s back being her ability to cope with it. That last straw carried the weight of the world, because she didn’t know who to talk to about it with.
Or even what to say.
Right there and then, Chloe broke down. She ended up on her hands and knees, turning into a sobbing mess.
It would take a while for her to recover. The next thing that really sank in was them sitting on the couch, with a mug of tea in Chloe’s hand that had turned cold, a pile of used tissues on the coffee table, and Danielle cuddled up to her with a fuzzy blanket.
It was all so alien. So soft.
Some of it felt right. But not remembering how it had all turned out this way—that part felt wrong. Chloe Grant felt like she didn’t belong. Neither in the here nor in the now.
And there was no going back.
Danielle deciphered most of Chloe’s speech and broken thoughts despite her sobbing breakdown. In broad strokes, Chloe had told her what happened, and Dan now shouldered part of the burden again, like she had in the previous timeline, with helping Chloe uncover Ruiz’s espionage for corporate rival Celeva.
All of that was news to Danielle—the Danielle of this new timeline, which would beg the question—had Ruiz even come clean to Grant in this timeline?
Dan did her best to catch Chloe up on what she had missed. They had been in a relationship for the past month, kept secret from their colleagues at the company. Dan had quit Future Proof. She had been trying to convince Chloe to do the same.
The danger was too big. “That place is going to unleash hell on Earth,” was how Dan put it.
Helicopter pilot Sears remained absent from the timeline, and this version of Dan knew about that from Chloe. And, although Future Proof now had ten times the amount of field operatives on the payroll as opposed to what Chloe remembered, a dozen of them had been killed on the job—mauled by prehistoric animals, murdered, EMD malfunctions, and one person was even cleaved in half when an Anomaly closed on them while they were crossing through a Flicker.
Too many deaths for Dan’s taste.
With a shuddering breath, Chloe Grant took stock of the new reality she now occupied.
There was no going back. Deep down, she knew it.
Dan’s eyes sparkled, just shy of tears, holding back from urging Chloe again to quit the job.
Dan sensed this was not the time. And Chloe sensed that she sensed it. This gave rise to a warmer, fuzzier feeling behind the nausea. A welcome reprieve.
Another shuddering sigh escaped Chloe, softly, as Dan gingerly brushed hair from Chloe’s face, and caressed her cheek with a gentle touch.
Chloe let her eyelids fall shut, and leaned her head onto Dan’s.
She had been moments away of celebrating success after ridding their timeline of the pair of aggressive pterodactyls, only to find the timeline completely altered.
The blur continued. The warmth within triumphed, providing some solace, yet the fog remained.
She woke up that night, to a dark room bathed in silver moonlight. Sweating, the blankets were cast aside.
Dan slept peacefully on the bed next to her.
“The only thing unravelling is you.”
Like a whisper outside of reality, those words echoed forwards and backwards through time. Like a sense of déjà vu, Chloe wasn’t sure if she had thought those words before she ever heard them spoken aloud. But she would hear them, eventually, and remember them.
She couldn’t quit Future Proof. Not yet.
She wasn’t even sure about being in a relationship with Dan. It pained her, seeing Dan sleeping so peacefully in the bed, beside her. Like neither of them deserved this—Dan didn’t deserve to be hurt by someone from another timeline replacing the person she liked, and this Chloe hadn’t earned her affection at all.
Chloe felt betrayed—like destiny itself had betrayed her. Like she had never had any choice in the matter. Like it had never been her, like she was some kind of impostor, some alien, just passing as Chloe Grant.
She spent a lot of time staring at her own reflection. She looked the same as ever, though that gaze in every window and mirror had turned vacant, and more alien than ever before.
As morning dawned, she spent time sitting in her car outside the café downtown.
Ruiz was meeting with his red-headed handler from Celeva—the woman named Loretta Corsino.
Chloe took a deep breath, still sorting out how this reality had shifted. Or rather, how she needed to shift her memories to fit into this new reality.
To understand what she even needed to do. It was like she was just going through the motions of whatever she was expected to do in the previous timeline she had come from. While, now, she questioned her motives, and wondered if they deviated from the Chloe that this timeline had known all her life. Her life.
Who was she?
She caught herself staring into her own eyes in the rearview mirror. The sound of Ruiz’s motorcycle engine roaring up served to snap her out of her trance.
She didn’t know what she needed to do. Time, fate—whatever forces were at work in this universe, they had conspired to screw her over. Royally.
Why couldn’t time have changed her memories alongside everything else? Why did she have to remember the timeline that existed before?
Her mind was threatening to splinter.
This all made her think of the very image of the Anomalies themselves—glowing orbs of light, hovering, chiming brightly, like tiny suns, that had exploded into shimmering shards of cosmic glass.
That’s what it felt like now. Shattered.
Another shuddering sigh escaped her throat.
Corsino vanished into a black stretch limousine. Ruiz on his motorcycle was already long gone, likely headed to the office.
Chloe Grant readjusted her rearview mirror, fired up the engine, and did what she thought she was expected to do.
She drove to work. She drove to Future Proof’s HQ.
Her blurry trance took her down into the basement levels, where security systems beeped sharply, and red lights glowed in recognition of her clearance card.
She wandered down the eerie, cold halls of Containment Section, till she reached Doctor Solomon’s laboratory.
The head engineer and Doctor Trémaux stood together in a floating sea of light. They waved around themselves, wearing AR command gloves, pointing at the virtual objects around them, rearranging a…
“What am I looking at, here?” Grant asked.
The sight of this maze of lines and lights, projected as a hologram into the open, three-dimensional space of the room, was so engrossing that it yanked Grant right out of her trance. The fog lifted just enough for her to realize that she was witnessing the two scientists as they wrote a new chapter in human history.
Trémaux whipped her gray mane back, and waved her AR-gloved hands in the air like a sorceress, rearranging some of the floating strands.
“This is our current theory of the Tangle,” said the quantum physicist with the faintest hint of a French accent. Her gaze was locked onto the virtual construct she was busy building with Solomon. She pulled one virtual thread, bringing it closer to another, then fusing them into a glowing node with a double tap of her index and middle fingers. “This, here, for instance, would be an Anomaly.”
Solomon smiled with the excitement of a little boy playing with his favorite toys. The man in his early fifties said, “We have enough data for this model, now. Still some kinks to iron out, but it stands to reason… well, I don’t want to make any false promises. Let’s just say Spencer is bound to be thrilled about this breakthrough.”
“Augy is being modest,” Trémaux said, “because this may very well be a major milestone for Future Proof. If our calculations are right, we will become able to predict the opening of Anomalies before our detection system even pings their locations.”
Grant stared into the maze of threads, mouth agape.
Had she done this somehow? Had her interference in the timeline also somehow caused… this?
She dared not think about it too hard. Dared not dwell on it. She almost felt another wave of nausea, creeping up behind her.
Grant chewed on her lip and let their explanations stew.
Solomon chuckled, misreading Grant’s expression as stunned curiosity.
“Doctor Trémaux, how about you share your theory with Agent Grant? It’s quite the doozy.”
Trémaux ignored Solomon’s prompt. She pointed to another glowing node, fused between floating threads in the 3D-model. With a mid-air tap of index and middle finger, an array of text and data popped up, attached to the node.
Too much at once for Grant to quickly parse.
To Grant, Trémaux said, “This here is probably an Anomaly that occurred in the 200s, A.D., during the time of ancient Rome. What are the odds that people saw a dinosaur back then and… thought it was a dragon? Or a demon?”
Grant reeled. She steeled her stomach. Took another deep breath.
Was there a way to map out the Anomalies? To travel through time and make precise changes?
Where was this research headed?
“This… is… this a lot,” Grant muttered. “What… theory are you talking about, now?”
Solomon chuckled again.
Trémaux frowned.
“When I tried to explain it to your colleague, Mister Carter, he had less flattering words to share about it.”
“More like verbal flatulence,” Solomon said, still chuckling. “Please, Lucille. Your theory. I am certain Miss Grant is more receptive to it.”
Trémaux shook her head, then obliged anyway. She paused from manipulating the network of holographic threads. She turned to face Grant, and her eyes flashed with something fierce, and determined.
“I liken the timeline to a ball of yarn. Time would be like the string of yarn laid out, unraveled from the ball, with a definitive beginning and end. However, the string is not laid out flat nor straight, the yarn is all… balled up.”
Solomon chuckled again.
“Very mature, Augustus,” she said, though the corners of her lips twitched with the hint of a smile. Trémaux pointed to a glowing node in the three-dimensional network of threads—the ball of yarn. “Whenever anybody or anything tugs at different points in the string, the string throughout the ball is subject to friction. And where friction happens, the strings are touching, that is where the Anomalies occur, connecting different points along the string, even if only for a short time.”
Trémaux flicked a node with her AR glove, dissolving it. The thread parted there.
Grant tried to make sense of this. She tried to relate her brief experiences of time travel through the Anomalies, and how that all translated into wiping people or events from existence, or altering the world in other, unpredictable ways.
“What—what about, say, a time paradox? Let’s say we, I dunno, went back in time, killed Hitler before he rose to power, and changed the course of history. How would that fit in with this… uh… would this unravel, the, uh…”
“Yarn ball,” Solomon said with a straight face. He no longer chuckled.
He stared at Grant with burning curiosity.
As if sensed there was more behind her questions.
Doctor Trémaux pursed her lips. She pondered Grant’s question.
“I don’t believe there is a such a thing as ‘paradox’, as such would imply that time itself is an entity that defies change. However, any changes in the past would be cascading, both backwards, and forwards through time.”
The only thing unraveling is you.
“So, to extend your example, let us say you kill Hitler in the 1920s. If you return to your time afterwards, you would find that history played out differently, and only you would remember how it was before you killed Hitler and change the history you knew. You might have never been born as a consequence, therefore nobody would know you, yet you would continue to exist because you were born in a different version of reality. You may call that a paradox, but it is the only logical consequence I can envision, with all that we know. You remember Mister Sears, and you alone.”
“So, what you’re saying is—in theory—it would be possible to wipe out humanity by committing a single mistake in the prehistoric past.”
Trémaux shook her head.
“Not just the past, Miss Grant, even in the future. The ‘Crossroads’ you discovered behind the Anomaly in the Appalachian has shown us this quite clearly. There, Anomalies to past and future were open in close vicinity of one another. It is difficult to grasp, but the future has been affecting the past for longer than we realize. If the future is connected to the past in different ways,” said the physicist, pointing at a glowing node between threads again, “then any change in the future can also affect the past. Cascading. A waterfall of consequences.”
Now Grant shook her head in return.
“I don’t get it, though. What if you stopped whatever… whatever caused all the Anomalies to appear? To even happen in the first place? Do we even have any idea what caused this?”
“Nope,” Solomon said with strange enthusiasm and an energetic shrug. “Not a clue.”
“An interesting thought,” Trémaux said.
Grant asked, “What’s stopping the ball of yarn—what’s stopping time from unraveling?”
“I do not know,” Trémaux said, pursing her lips again. The pause that followed only filled a short beat. “All I know from yours and other previous accounts, such as that of Mister Sears vanishing from time altogether while none of us remember him having ever existed, is that time does not unravel. The thread has a beginning and end, and the Anomalies are persistent. Arguably, the only thing unraveling is you. Witnessing reality change as you travel through Anomalies should be against protocol, in my opinion. And, please forgive me if this sounds, eh… offensive? But perhaps you should check in for psychological counseling. The mental stress you must be undergoing must be quite significant.”
The last word carried the most of Trémaux’s French accent. The rest of her words echoed in Grant’s mind like a deafening series of explosions.
Had she thought them, lying in bed next to Dan, before she ever heard Trémaux say them out loud?
The only thing unraveling is you.
Grant’s blank stare burned through the void. The holographic display of the timeline’s tangled thread glowed in a cold blue, with the Anomalies bright white, all burning themselves into her retinas.
How long had she been staring blankly, rooted in place like a statue, in stunned silence?
Probably more than long enough—long enough for concern to color Trémaux’s tone.
“Not to add to any pressures, my dear, but we must be aware of our responsibility in dealing with the Anomalies. Humanity has only existed for a very short period of time in Earth’s history. It would be very easy to wipe us out entirely by accident. As such, I think it is of utmost importance that you as field operatives are in top physical and mental condition. I think you should see Doctor Chao as soon as possible, for psychotherapy. Again, I mean no offense.”
Chloe Grant wouldn’t remember the rest of their exchange that day. In a daze, she replied to Trémaux, somehow. Saying something.
It all rang hollow.
A ball of yarn.
Seeing Doctor Chao for a long conversation and an unspecific amount of therapy sessions started sounding like a good idea to her. A great idea, even.
The only thing unraveling is you.
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