Her life, every human life, was a labyrinth, a branching out of many possible paths through existence. Before the surgery she saw time like anyone else, experiencing only the present moving ever forward, but then the headaches came and the doctors ordered tests and scans. Abnormal growth, they said, a brain tumor, deep inside, near the center of her brain. Surgery would be risky, but the doctors assured her that it was completely necessary. The moment she regained consciousness she knew something was different. She was in immense pain, but she found that she could turn the pain off and on at will. She could stop the pain, but while it was stopped she couldn’t move her body. She thought something was terribly wrong and even considered the possibility that she was dead, but when she did it in the presence of another person, she figured out what was happening.
She was stopping time, or more precisely, stopping her forward movement through time. The nurse came in to see how she was doing and froze mid-sentence. It reminded her of childhood fantasies of freezing time and robbing a bank or checking to see what type of underwear her teachers wore. Unfortunately stopping time meant stopping herself too, and the only thing still moving was her mind. She felt like she was sitting on a wheel, and all she had to do to start up time was to lean forward ever so slightly. It wasn’t long before she found she could lean the other direction too.
Kendra was convinced that her brain had been damaged in surgery, and she didn’t know what to do. Moving forward in time she could almost feel normal, although she wasn’t used to being in control of the speed of her forward progress. But moving backwards was disorienting and unpleasant at first. She rushed back past the surgery and spoke to her mother and father backwards, words jumping into her mouth. She went through the awful experience of shitting backwards, and went past a big meal she’d had for breakfast the day before, with the omelette coming up her throat, being assembled by her teeth and spit onto her fork.
She was glad she could rush these unpleasant things, zip by them in a blur if she wanted. She rushed back and back to the last time she’d had sex with her boyfriend. Orgasms felt amazing backwards, so good that she became convinced that it was how they were meant to be experienced. She could stop all sensations instantly, and play them forward or backward, feeling the same intensity every time. Soon she stopped seeing her new abilities as a scary problem, and began to feel that she’d been released from the constraints of time. The only thing she missed was being able to change anything. Forward or backward she thought she had to live it the same way. Then came the first mysterious pulse.
It started as a kind of chatter in Kendra’s head, a bunch of thoughts that were both foreign and familiar at the same time. They got louder and louder and then the spatial reality of what Kendra was seeing snapped into focus, and there was a moment of two Kendras occupying the same body. They both reacted in fear. ‘Who are you?’ ‘What are you doing in my head?’ Kendra stopped her forward progress in time and listened to the internal chatter recede. She moved forward along the timeline again, but found that things were now a little different than they had been before. In this timeline Kendra tried to describe what had happened to her sister.
That was how she discovered that she could still change things if she wanted to, and it was how she discovered the branching points of her life. Right at the moment where the two instances of Kendra’s life diverged, things got blurry. She could feel the different directions she could go, almost spatially. She discovered, to her absolute amazement, that she had lived many thousands of lives as Kendra Dixon. Some of the lives followed almost exactly the path of a previous life, and some were radically different. The only thing all of them had in common was the moment and circumstances of her birth.
She discovered that if she felt a pulse coming she could stop all movement and clear her mind, and the instant of another Kendra passing by trapped in linear time wouldn’t cause such confusion. If she did it right it also wouldn’t create a serious branching point like it had the first time. Her theory was that there was something in the brain, some little node in there, that kept human consciousness glued to the present, of which there were many. Her node had obviously been removed during the surgery. The pulse was the present, a wave of time, another roll of the dice, and it moved across everything that existed.
As a soldier, Kendra had seen the civil war as inevitable, but she found out that it was actually not a very well-developed region of history. Each new pulse filled it out a bit more, but relatively speaking it was a new branch. In most iterations, the United States went through a repressive period, followed by a mass uprising, without ever actually going into a civil war.
She discovered that in most instances of her life she had married and had kids. This was what taught her about the physical nature of emotions. She felt it impossible to keep herself detached from her kids. The emotions of whatever instance of Kendra had lived that branch of her life had felt, she felt the same reliving it. She became a connoisseur of the physical sensations of emotion, reliving moments when she felt pride, or passionately in love, or joyous. These moments, the really great ones, were rare, and she came to know the overall shape of her many lives by remembering how to find them.
Sometimes she would think back to before the surgery with nostalgia, because the kind of freedom she had was so limited. She was free to travel the paths of the thousands of lives she’d lived before, but influencing their paths relied on the pulse, which came irregularly when she was out on one of the branches. The closer she got to the day of her birth, the more regularly they came. When a present-bound Kendra came by, riding a pulse, she could momentarily take control, but it was violent and disturbing. If she wondered what a particular life would’ve been like if she hadn’t had that car accident, she could wait just before it happened and listen for the chatter. When the pulse came she would stay with it and forcefully take over her faculties for a second and slam on the brakes a moment sooner. Then she would hang back and follow the new path that developed from the branching point she’d created.
Major historical events changed much less frequently than personal events. Over the many thousands of Kendra Dixon lives, there were only a few hundred different versions of recent history. In most of them the crash happened, either when she was seven, eleven, or fourteen. In most of these instances the Christian Nationalist Party came to power, but in the instances where jailing the unemployed did not occur, the country eventually turned to a more socialist order. There were a few paths Kendra could take to a kind of apocalyptic nightmare world where the rule of law was totally absent, and the country was carved up by warlords and corporations. Kendra wandered down many paths that led to an early death. Most of the time she could see it coming and backtrack and find a branching point out of it. Every once in a while death came out of nowhere, and it was experienced by her as a place where everything just stopped and she couldn’t go any farther. She knew instinctively that if she were at one of these moments when a pulse came she would be propelled off the edge of life to god-knows-where. She never lingered too long around a dead end.
She started to wonder after awhile how long she’d been traveling through the Kendra Dixon labyrinth. She’d gone down at least seven hundred main paths, but she only moved forward at the same rate as time for relatively brief periods. A few minutes, a few hours, a day, a month at the most. She figured she’d been at it about a hundred years, judging from the pulse perspective of time. It wasn’t that she was bored exactly, just that she thought maybe she should try something else, to test the boundaries of her new existence.
Kendra thought about the way she influenced events, and how uncomfortable it was to have two Kendras in in one body. She thought that a Kendra could get used to it if introduced to the feeling at a young age. She decided to go way back, almost to the convergence point of all the branches, back to the crib in her parent’s bedroom in their little apartment on Wilcox Street. She’d always enjoyed reliving babyhood anyway, the breastfeeding, being held, the emotions associated with learning and discov
ery.
She would ride a pulse in real time through life, not using force to take her body over, but collaborating with an instance of herself on a life. With her knowledge and perspective there was no telling what she could accomplish. One of the things she learned living many different versions of her life was that success was mostly arbitrary, and very rare. The vast majority of Kendras lived middling lives, and she’d found a few where things had gone horribly wrong. There were three or four versions of her life where she got rich or attained highly respected positions.
One of these lives intrigued her, it was another instance of her being a soldier, not fighting in the civil war but in an African proxy war with China. After her military service she’d gotten into politics and had wound up a congresswoman. This was the path she wanted to follow for her experiment. She knew she couldn’t follow that path exactly, the historical circumstances would most likely be different, but in general terms she knew she wanted to get into politics. She enjoyed operating the mechanisms of power.
The pulse came and she fell in sync with it, sending the baby version of herself into crying fits. She sang herself a song in her head, and let the baby control its own body. Her dad, smelling of deodorant, his face covered with stubble, lifted her out of her crib and cuddled her. Kendra couldn’t resist and took over for a moment to say “dada.”
“Beth, Beth!” He shouted. “You missed it! She looked right at me and said dada!” He tried to get her to say it again, but Kendra held back. She stayed with the pulse and found herself taking on the role of teacher to the baby version of herself. When no one was paying attention she would line up the blocks so they spelled ‘cat’ and she would sound out the letters. Soon baby Kendra could put them back in order. Her mother noticed a change in her daughter’s personality and behavior, and she brought the child to specialists, thinking she might be autistic. Kendra would keep quiet and let the baby take over during the tests. Baby Kendra, they told her mom, was special, a child prodigy. Why not with a teacher who had learned the lessons of hundreds of lifetimes inside her head?
As the child learned to speak they would have long internal conversations. Kendra explained that she must never tell anyone that there were two people in her, because they wouldn’t understand. She didn’t want to confuse the child by explaining that they were the same person, she just told her that she was her special helper, there to make sure she had an extraordinary life. The child was put into accelerated classes at a young age.
Kendra helped her young protégé with schoolwork, being careful to make sure she learned everything she was supposed to, but stepping in when she had something wrong. They wound up having fights as the child grew, and sometimes Kendra would take time to just let the girl live normally for awhile. Kendra had lived many adolescences with more or less the same group of kids, so she knew Jordan Brayer was bad news, but she couldn’t convince thirteen-year-old Kendra of it. After the rape she made her feel better with tales of Jordan’s future, which was success followed by downfall and jail in most instances.
Young Kendra had never known that the woman she shared a body with could tell the future, and even after Kendra explained that it was just one of many possible futures, the kid still pressed her for information. During the aftermath of the crash when violence and death were rampant, she soothed Kendra, telling her it would pass. When the CNP came to power and started locking up the unemployed, Kendra knew the historical branch she was in. It was the one she’d lived originally, the one that led to civil war.
Kendra thought that rising to political power would be easier in a newly formed country. She was only fifteen, but she struck out on her own, headed west. She made it, half-starved, into Oregon, riding out with a work crew and fending off the sexual advances of a bunch of desperate, would-be code writers. The man in charge of the bus had all their ID cards, but Kendra had given him a fake, and once she was in Oregon she walked away. She got a free sandwich from a preacher and hitched a ride to Eugene with a nice Mormon couple. She lived on the streets for a few months and she joined the Revolution Party. She went to rallies and protests.
When the civil war broke out and the United Pacific States of America was formed she joined the Pacifica National Guard. After training, which she went through performing at the highest level, she was made captain of a small unit that managed and protected supply lines. She was working under a lieutenant named Mya Brecker, who valued her and treated her with respect. One night she and two guys from the unit were in a civilian transport, bringing datcoms with new software to a crew working up in the mountains, when their vehicle was hit with an incendiary sludge that poured from some unseen source in the sky above them. The car crashed and young Kendra was knocked out, but the other Kendra remained conscious and took control of her faculties. She dragged one of the guys out of the car with hands that looked like raw hamburger.
Kendra was discharged from military service to recover, and when what she’d done was reported, she received a medal for valor. She’d saved the guy she’d dragged from the car, even though she was wounded worse than he was. The other soldier didn’t make it. Kendra had to have a bunch of surgeries, replacing her burnt flesh with new flesh grown in a lab. Eventually she was back to normal, and eighteen months after the attack she was even back in uniform, only now they had her at a desk. She’d become well-known as a war hero and the Guard didn’t want her put back in harms way.
When her service was over she started doing advocacy work for wounded veterans and had testified before the first congress in Seattle. She got a job as an advisor to the governor of Oregon, on veteran’s issues, and then wound up running the state’s healthcare system. She instituted popular overhauls and publicized all her major reforms. She was laying the foundation for a run for governor, and both Kendras enjoyed the climb up the ladder of success. It was her role in healthcare that first led Kendra to the discovery that she wasn’t the only consciousness that was free from the constraints of linear time.
She was going through some pediatric mental health studies when she came across a paper about what was thought to be a new form of psychosis. The kids were high functioning, almost to an alarming degree, and displayed two distinct personalities, one age-appropriate, the other far too mature. The kids would reference things they shouldn’t know about and scare their parents, and they often displayed an emotional detachment that was concerning. Some parents even thought their kids were clairvoyant. What really got Kendra’s attention were the ones who claimed to be able to travel backward in time.
Kendra went deep into the research, reading many interviews with these kids. She noted that all of them were born within the last eight years. She decided she had to talk to one, she was convinced that these were people like her, and she wanted to find out what was going on. She chose seven year old Michael McKinnon because he was at a group home and had no parents to get past. As the governor’s head of health and welfare she had no problem setting up the meeting.
She took the train to Portland and walked a half of a mile to an old four-story house. When the door opened she was met by a tough old lady who let her know how disappointed she’d been in the governor’s education policies. She took Kendra to a room off the main hall and told her to have a seat while she went and got Michael.
He was a thin, black-haired boy with intense eyes. Kendra said hello and introduced herself. “I’ve read a lot about you.” She said.
The boy stuck his hand out and Kendra shook it. “They took me out of class, I’m missing my spelling test.” He said.
“Michael,” the tough old lady said, “she’s from the Governor’s office, you can take the test later.”
“I’m really sorry about your test.” Kendra said to the boy. She turned to the lady. “Do you mind giving us some time alone? I was hoping to speak with Michael one on one.”
She said it was okay and left the room, shutting the door behind her. Kendra asked Michael to sit, and then she pulled her chair partway out so she could face
him. “I think you and I have something in common.” She said. “There are two people inside of me too. I chose to keep that hidden, but you didn’t, can you tell me why?”
“Because I see no reason to hide what I am.” He said looking directly into her eyes. “I have nothing to be ashamed of, the biggest problem is people being too dumb to understand what I’m telling them. Mostly it’s well-meaning adults who think I’m psychotic, or that I’m putting on a show because of some emotional trauma. They keep trying to put me on medication.” He shook his head at Kendra. “You’re not like me miss, I’m sorry, You look like you’re what? Thirty? It’s highly unlikely.”
“So you think you’re the only one?”
“Oh no, just that the others are around my age or younger.”
“You had a procedure? Maybe you were old when you had it, maybe you were one of the first?” Kendra had his attention now.
“That’s right.” He said. “A procedure in a very under developed region of the future. A tiny fold at the center of my basal ganglia was eradicated, freeing me from the constraints of the present.”
“I had a tumor.” Kendra said.
He nodded and smiled. “It was theorized that there might be people like you. In all possible human histories there had to be people who had achieved freedom accidentally. Tell me something, is this the first time we’ve had this conversation?”
“Yes, from my perspective it is.” Kendra said.
“Mine too.” Michael said. “Us free travellers have an organization. We’re trying to work together to shape the past in an attempt to create better future possibilities for humanity. What are you trying to do?”
“An experiment.” She said. “I’m working toward becoming president of Pacifica. I just wanted to see how far I could take my life if I put my mind to it.”
“Is this your first attempt at agency?” Michael asked.
“I’ve created branching points before, but this is my first time staying with the present for a whole life. You’ve done it before?”
“Thousands of times.” He said. “You can do anything you want, anything, and if you mess up, just start over. Your timeline goes the farthest back of any free traveller I’ve ever heard of. There’s a sort of debate going on about bringing this technology into the past. We could illuminate all of human history with the knowledge, but then we would be living in a world that is very different from anything we’re familiar with. You could help to show what that world might be like. As of this moment most free travellers haven’t been born yet, you can radically alter the worlds that they’re born into.”
“So you think it’s worth it? Trying to achieve power?”
“Absolutely.” He said. “History is hard to shift, but it can be done. I’ve done it myself. Mrs. Erin will be concerned if we stay in here too long, she might even be listening in.”
“I have so many questions.” Kendra said.
“It’ll have to wait for another time.” He said.
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Founding Fathers