Chapter 2 — Newsworthy
Hello Friends,
First, a big thank you to those who forwarded the opening chapter of The Curve of Time to a friend, there are more of us here today than there were last week!
Second, a confession: it occurs to me that some of you might want a little more of a hint about what exactly is in The Curve of Time. I mean from last week’s dispatch all you knew was that it, in some way, revolves around time travel. Well, I guess you also met our protagonist, Saskia, but, still, you might want some clues about the world you’re diving into.
So, here’s a quick laundry list of some of the elements, beyond time travel, that will make an appearance:
high dimensional geometry, and some mathematics more generally, but in a very approachable and friendly way. Think similarly expositive, but friendlier than Edwin Abott Abott’s novel Flatland, and set in a much more relatable world.
machine learning, or AI, because I got side tracked by the subject about three years ago and did a bit of a deep dive with an old friend from grad school. I then explained what I’d learnt to another friend, who felt that I made it approachable. So, one of the characters is involved in AI. Hopefully, if it’s not something you know a lot about, you’ll feel more literate in that world by the end of the book.
cats, because I love them, and they all have fun personalities, and I lost one near and dear to me about a year ago, and we have two kittens now.
food, because I love food too.
atmospheric diving suits, because why not?!
a Buddhist monk and meditation, because these sorts of things should appear in more novels. And the world would be a happier place if everyone gave themselves time to breathe.
philosophical explorations of what it means to be alive.
love, loss and letting go.
Really, there should be something in this story for everyone. In today’s chapter we’ll get an inkling of the what Saskia’s lottery win has set in motion.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter two.
— 2 —
Newsworthy
Mica was a budding journalist who periodically wrote fluff pieces on the local lottery winners. They weren’t the sort of stories that had drawn her to writing, but once she’d admitted to her editor that she had an inside friend at the lotteries office, a heads up to get a jump on the winner’s names . . . well, those were the sort of disclosures that got you regular work you weren’t looking for.
Still, it was the kind of work that was hard to pass up, given its obvious potential as a collateral chip in negotiating meatier stories.
Thirty six hours after Saskia won the lottery, Mica was knocking on her door.
∞
Saskia opened the door to a fiery redhead. Clad in a forest green jacket, Saskia expected Mica to produce a petition to sign. Mica was petite in a more bookish way than your typical greenie, but she had a friendly openness to her.
“Saskia Topp?” Mica asked.
“Yes,” Saskia confirmed, tentatively shaking Mica’s extended hand.
“Mica Pollock. I’m sorry to interrupt you——hey, you have gorgeous hands.”
“What?” Saskia laughed.
“You have callouses.” What could easily have been an insult was spoken with reverence.
Saskia blushed, self-consciously.
“You must do things with your hands.”
Saskia’s blush only reddened.
“I’m sorry, I——I’m a reporter. Look, the world loves a good luck story and I’m the poor sap sent to collect them. You won the Powerball, yes?”
Saskia was taken aback. She hadn’t expected this consequence of her actions, but then life was full of surprises. Some happier than others, and Mica was a cutie. So, she welcomed her inside.
Mica paused at a majestic photo of a climber halfway up a boulder just below the snow-line in Boulder, Colorado. “That’s gorgeous.”
“That’s me.” Saskia grinned, holding up her hands.
“Really?” Mica inspected the figure more carefully, “You’re ...” she appraised Saskia, with new appreciation.
“Come on.” Saskia led the way to the kitchen. “You want something to drink?”
Mica asked Saskia if she was going to share her winnings with family. A possibility Saskia hadn’t considered.
“Do you have a sister, for instance?”
Saskia said she had no family. “Well, no siblings at least. I guess I’ll share it with my mom, though she seems pretty happy with the way life is right now anyway.”
Mica looked confused. Disappointed perhaps? And Saskia wondered if other lottery winners were more generous? She hadn’t meant her sentiment ungenerously. Worse, though, she felt she was blowing her shot with potentially the best thing about this lottery win. She could have sworn they’d shared a moment in the hallway.
“Sorry,” Saskia started. “I ...” But it was she who was now lost for words.
Mica sipped the lemonade Saskia had given her. She well knew that lottery winners were often discombobulated, and she’d learnt the simplest solution was to give them space. “No rush. Take your time.”
Saskia’s difficulty believing her unbelievably good fortune had much less to do with the lottery win than what had made it possible. She really hadn’t processed the life changing fortune her lottery win meant, because when compared with slipping in time, winning the lottery was a positively routine occurrence.
She glanced out the window. The little birdie she’d seen a few days ago was perched on the same branch again. She felt it giving her permission. Permission to admit the lunacy of everything she’d experienced in the last week. Maybe it’d serve as a reset.
∞
“So, you were daydreaming about love and you stumbled on time travel?” Meeting lottery winners had been an eye opener for Mica. People were odd ducks, and more often than you might have expected winners were non- plussed about their win. Even so, Saskia was an outlier.
Saskia gave Mica a crooked smile. What kind of clown wasn’t happy about winning lottery. Had she really admitted that winning lottery was a kind of poor-girl’s second prize.
“Time travel’s not much good as a superpower if it doesn’t help you win what you really want in life,” Mica quipped. She left the implicitly embedded question hanging.
“Well it’s early days. Maybe my luck is turning.” Indeed, Saskia felt her circumstances improving, and her own smile grew in concordance. “Who knows how things will play out.”
Having heard the lottery spiel often enough, Mica decided to indulge the implausible pink elephant. “So, why bother winning lottery? You could have saved that little girl that was hit by a car last month.”
“What little girl?”
“The one that got hit riding her birthday present. A fluorescent yellow bike, I think it was.” Perhaps it was an occupational hazard, hearing about every local tragedy, but other people must read the newspapers too. How else was there money to pay Mica’s salary?
Once again, Saskia could feel her standing slip. “It’s not exactly that sci-fi version of time travel,” she protested. She explained that she couldn’t simply go to any point in time she wanted; she had to get there. “In the same way that you and I can’t just wish ourselves to a beach in the Maldives——we have to sit on a plane, or a boat, or whatever——I’ve got to traverse though time to get wherever I want to go. Actually, wishing us to the Maldives would be like having a teleporter.”
“But you can travel through time?” Mica asked, confused.
“Yes, but it’s more like I’ve just learnt to walk and dog paddle. Which means the Maldives is a long way away.”
In fairness to Saskia, she was right. And unlike a hike on a sunny day, the path back to another place and time was a bit like slogging through fog. Moreover, as she would later learn, it invariably left her feeling a whiff nauseous (though for now she assumed that was simply getting the hang of her nascent ability). Finally, as far as the future went, Saskia could no more predict it than you or I, excepting of course the times and places she had already visited. As for those exceptions, they felt like memories, the way you might remember last week. Meaning, they faded over time. With the effort involved, the idea of traveling back a month translated better to the way you or I might remember events from last year, which is to say it would be non-trivially draining, and you couldn’t hope to recall much in the way of specific details, save a couple of key moments. Traveling that far into the “past”, and then back to the “present”, would be a tough ask, and Saskia wasn’t even sure it was possible. Her longest trip thus far had been an hour back in time, to buy the lottery ticket. It wasn’t like she could simply click her heels and appear where she wanted.
“Maybe I do go back. Now that I know about your tragic girl.”
“Seems unlikely,” Mica objected, “or I wouldn’t know about her to tell you.”
∞
“You want to show me how it all works?” Mica prodded.
“Sure,” Saskia indicated the street out front, “I could go back and tell you which direction you came from.”
“Don’t bother,” Mica dismissed the offer with a laugh.
“Why not?”
“How do I know you don’t have a security camera?”
This time, Saskia protested: “But I don’t.”
“So you say. That’s what you would say.”
“And now, I’m stuck trying to show you something doesn’t exist?” It was the same existential conundrum Saskia had grappled with when she first brought Tomato home. Dogs are maybe different. But try offering a stray cat some food. Try convincing it you mean well.
“Right.” Mica guffawed. “Besides, it’s a fifty-fifty bet either way. Hardly convincing if you did guess correctly.”
Saskia objected that it wouldn’t be a guess. That that was precisely the point. Either way, whatever else was, or was not, the case, Saskia enjoyed her repartee with the woman in front of her. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Mica. Mica Pollock.”
“How do you spell that?”
“M-I-C-A, but you can pronounce it like M-I-T-Z-A.”
The journalist had a smattering of freckles and a very cute smile, and Saskia found herself replaying their conversation so far. Mica’s blue eyes darted right and back again, an amusing thought having just crossed her mind: “You know, I had to circle the block twice to find a parking spot.”
“What do you mean?” Saskia asked. It seemed to her that Mica was testing her somehow, but she couldn’t put her finger on how.
“I actually came from both ways.”
“You’re suggesting I couldn’t have gotten it wrong?”
“Or, that you couldn’t get it right.” Mica’s smile broadened.
It had been less than a week since Saskia first slipped in time, but Saskia wasn’t the patient type. She had been itching to tell someone about her superpower. And, who better than someone she didn’t actually know?
That that someone was a journalist reflected, perhaps poorly, on Saskia’s judgment, but we’ve all been dazzled by an attractive someone standing in front of us. It makes us do silly things. And in that moment, Saskia decided she really did want to convince Mica she could slip in time.
Mica pulled a coin from her pocket. “What side will this coin land?”
Saskia considered racing into the future, but decided on a stronger play. “I’ve got a better idea. You’ve got your car, right?”
Mica nodded.
Saskia took Mica’s hand and pulled her into the front hallway. She grabbed her bike from its spot leaning against the wall, and opened the front door. Slipping her feet into her tattered old pair of canvas slip-ons, the stenciled fish wriggling on the sides as her toes crinkled the fabric, she gently pushed Mica out the door. “Meet me at the racetrack.”
