Human (42 page)

“You’re sure it’s hers?” Dale asked.

“Positive,” Orrin said. “Ivy was wearing it the last day I saw her. The day she disappeared.” Orrin pulled the silver chain from his pocket remembering.

“The day she disappeared?” Dale repeated. His face drained of colour. “We were in the lab together that day! Phil didn’t arrive until the afternoon. Remember?”

“Of course!” exclaimed Orrin. “He walked in just after Ivy disappeared.”
The animalistic scream.

Dale jumped up, shot across the room and disappeared into Orrin’s laboratory office. He returned a few moments later carrying an encyclopaedia ensigned with the letter ‘H’. “This is yours, right? It’s been in your office since we moved here.”

“Sure,” Orrin said.

Dale flicked through the pages, finally resting it open under the heading ‘Hominid Evolution’. His fingers trailed the page until he found what he was looking for. “A phylogenetic tree.”

“Another one?”

Dale exhaled, as if he'd been holding his breath for days. “A different one. The
right
one.” He handed the book to Orrin.

There in black and white, the same illustration that Dale had brought in now clearly depicted Homo floresiensis as
extinct
, its genetic timeline ending fifty thousand years before present. Only
Homo sapiens sapien
carried on, the sole survivor of the hominid family to modern times.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Orrin whispered. His fingers shook as he traced the lines on the page.

“What does it mean?” Dale asked. He pulled the dog-eared paper from his pocket and unfolded it, laying the images side by side. “Which one is right?”

“They’re both right,” Orrin said, slowly. “But, I think… I think this one is right for us.” He let the pages leaf through his fingers.
Maybe she didn't run away. Maybe she just… left. Fifty thousand years… how in the hell…?

Minutes ticked by as Orrin stared at the papers without seeing them. Instead, another image formed in his mind, of an impossibility that tossed everything he understood to be real aside and replaced it with a new kind of logic.
An impossible logic.

Finally, he took a deep breath and met Dale’s eyes.

“Something has shifted,” Orrin said. “I know this sounds mental, but hear me out. Something has changed
in our past
and so the future has changed too.”

Dale's shoulders stiffened. His eyes were wide and his breathing almost stilled. “What do you mean,
in our past?
”

Orrin took a deep breath, steeling himself from his own thoughts as they tumbled out. “Something critical has interrupted our evolutionary timeline,” he said. “You saw the phylogenetic trees, something to do with these ‘hobbits’ has changed - and that change kept them alive. The whole world is different in millions of tiny ways but because human evolution skewed so long ago, no one alive would remember it. Their lives just developed the way they should, in this alternate reality. But for some reason, we were protected, you and I.”

“But why should we be? Why wouldn’t we change like everybody else?”

Orrin looked around. The white walls shone with monitors. Racks of equipment were gleaming and buzzing. Huge screens still displayed their attempts to decode the bizarre readings recorded after Ivy and the bonobo had left. Electromagnetic fields whipping and waning, the temperature and humidity of the room had soared, the extreme wavelength fluctuations and light intensity gone haywire. All systems had been affected in some way, all had been recalibrated and now they were trying to re-connect the dots. The giant monitors illuminated their failure so far.

“Because we were in the lab.” The answer came clear and simple and Orrin was surprised at the certainty in his own voice.

“When?”

“When the system shut down. You and I were in the office when we heard them scream. When we heard Ivy and Kyah –
disappear
.”

“So what? I mean the office is right in the lab – shouldn’t we have been the first to change our reality?”

Orrin sat quietly for a minute, contemplating.

“This whole lab is a giant faraday cage,” he said. “They installed mesh on the inside walls when I moved in - it was a condition of the OH&S requirements of our experimentation.”

“Why did the data change then?” challenged Dale. “Our computers are in this lab too.”

“All our data is virtually hosted on servers outside the lab,” Orrin said. “These are just server terminals - the rest of the world changed so our data did too.”

He glanced at his office door. An old radioactive sign still hung above the architrave, the lighting bulb long since broken.
A shield.
“The lead lining in the walls protected both of us - it stopped us being taken with Ivy and Kyah,” Orrin said, more certain now than before. “The office used to be a testing laboratory. Just because they refurbished it, doesn’t necessarily mean it no longer has the original paint or protective elements … when we were in there, we were safe - like a time capsule or a vault.”

“So the office protected us?”

Orrin looked up, suddenly grateful for Dale’s complicitness. He’d expected more condemnation of his sanity.

“I think so. It didn’t protect them though– in the lab.” The animalistic scream echoed through his mind. “We did this, Dale. We’ve changed history - no, prehistory. Ivy and Kyah are lost because I couldn’t let her go, because I insisted she come here, to this.” Orrin looked around the room. His head swum.
I did this. I lost her forever.

“So where is she?”

Orrin pulled the chain from his pocket and rolled it gently through his fingers. That one, he knew. “Flores, Liang Bua Cave. Fifty thousand years ago.”
I moved time.

The words echoed off the walls and both men sat silent, processing the enormity of their mistake and the potentiality of their discovery.

Finally, Dale stood up. “So, we need to fix it, right? We need to change it back. If we get them back, we can go back to the way things were?”

“Get them back?” Orrin murmured.

“What choice do we have?” Dale replied. “We have to figure out what went wrong and get them back. We can't leave the world like this. The magnetosphere is barely holding. It can't last. We have to undo whatever we did.”

Orrin studied Dale. The student’s pallor had lifted and a dim light burned within his eyes. “You have a plan, right Orrin? Just- just tell me what to do,” Dale said earnestly.

Orrin's heart sped up. He curled his fingertips into his sweaty palms. A plan.
Fix it. Fix it and get her back.

“Yes!” Orrin said, jumping to his feet as well. “You’re damn right, we’ll fix it! God only knows how, but we’ll figure it out.” He took a deep breath and it felt like the first. “We’ll need Phil to analyse those environmental variables again. And you start with the electromagnetic equipment. I’ll search for anything we’ve missed.” Adrenaline coursed through Orrin's veins and his nerves felt on fire.
I'm going to move time. Again.

Half an hour later, Phil breezed in. Dropping his bag and phone onto his desk, he sat down and then launched his roller chair to the monitors where Orrin and Dale sat hunched.

“Wow dude, you stink. Did you sleep here again?”

Orrin grinned. He could always count on Phil for the truth. “Thanks and yeah.” Deep breath. “And we need to talk.”

The talk didn’t go well.

“You’re losing it man. No, you’ve
lost
it!” Phil yelled. “Whatever trip you’re on, I’m not joining you.” He looked resentfully at Dale. “It’s one thing to suck up, but buying into this crap isn’t doing anyone any favours. Especially him.”

Dale’s face reddened. “I’m not buying into it Phil. I’m living it,” he said. “Orrin’s right, our experiment has stuffed everything up and we’ve got to fix it.”

“You honestly think you’re that effing important, that you’ve single-handedly screwed up the entire world? Come on, man.” Phil eyed them scornfully.

“I’m not saying we’ve single-handedly screwed the world Phil, I’m saying that by sending Ivy back in time we’ve interfered with something we shouldn’t have,” challenged Orrin. “We’ve changed the way things should be for the worse. Much worse.”

“Who says it’s worse?” Phil yelled. “From where I’m standing the world is doing just fine, thanks. Who the hell are you to play God?”

Orrin leant forward. He picked up a week’s collection of newspapers and threw them at Phil.

“Pick one, pick any one, and tell me it’s not bad!” Orrin yelled. “The magnetosphere is decaying! I don't know how it's related to what we did, but I do know it's not bloody right! Thirty species extinct a day! Forest fires out of control! Droughts, floods, tsunamis - people are dying Phil! Explosive population outbreaks of vector-borne viruses and they’re spreading with the heat. And these damned ‘hobbits’ - they shouldn’t even be here! People seem torn between loving and hating the things. The very definition of humanity is under fire and rioters around the world are threatening civil war. Jaysus Phil! How can you say that’s ‘just fine’?”

“It’s not like this happened overnight Orrin,” Phil spat back. “It’s the way the world’s been going. Sure, it’s getting worse, but people are still living and enjoying their lives.”

“
Some
people Phil. Not everyone is going to get that opportunity,” Orrin said accusingly.

“And since when are you the bloody social justice committee, O? You’ve accepted it all up until now,” Phil yelled back.

Orrin threw his hands in the air. “I never even knew about it until now Phil, you gobshite! That’s what I’m saying!”

“So you say.” Phil crossed his arms tight against his chest.

Orrin took a deep breath. He tried a different tack. “You witnessed the aftermath of Ivy’s disappearance. Every single variable we’d set had changed and the readings were off the charts. The tesla coil was spewing electricity all over the place. We check that equipment every day and there wasn’t a single anomalous reading until then. It was all set up, ready to go and then
bam
! Totally screwed.” Orrin’s fingertips pushed behind his glasses. “Please,” he pleaded. “Help us. Search again, analyse the data one more time, check your code.
You
wrote these programs – this is
your
code, man. You know this shite couldn’t happen by itself.”

“So maybe you two did it,” Phil jeered. “I came in after the fact, didn’t I? Who’s to say you didn’t screw the systems before I got here?”

“And why the bollocks would I do that?” Orrin exploded, his face turning violently red. “You think I enjoy ruining my own life? Yours? Dale’s and the whole bloody world?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Phil said. His normally blithe features were unrelenting. “You seem capable of anything lately Orrin, you’ve bloody flipped.”

“That’s because of this, Phil!” Orrin yelled. “Look, I know this all sounds mental, but somehow the faraday cage and the lead walls kept us safe from the repercussions of this time shift. Anything in my office, including Dale and I, remained unchanged – objective observers, if you will – to whatever happened to the rest of the world. Look at this - phylogenetic trees from before
and
after the shift.” He thrust the papers at Phil’s face. “These hominids are meant to be dead Phil,
extinct.
Not a damn cuisine that’s causing a social apocalypse!”

Phil pushed Orrin’s arm away. “Sorry man, but it sounds to me like the ginger ditched you and you can’t handle it.
She dumped you. Get over it.
”

“You can talk, you bloody gobshite, throwing shapes around campus without a damned care in the world!” yelled Orrin. “This situation is desperate Phil, and you’re not even listening to me! Grow the fuck up!”

Phil's fist slammed the table between them. “You’re losing your bloody mind, Orrin.
You can’t control time.
You did not send a woman and her pet monkey into the Stone Age. And you’re not roping me into your damned lunacy.” Phil turned away, his hands up in surrender. “You know what, I’m gone.”

“Fine!” Orrin shouted back.

The door slammed shut and Orrin’s fist smashed the table where Phil’s had just been. Cursing he turned around, kicking a roller chair across the room.
Bastard!
Orrin pinched the bridge of his nose, hearing his own teeth grind in the deafening silence.

“We needed him, Orrin,” said Dale, quietly.