Mesh and Lace

Of all the rules regarding time travel, I broke the most important one—don't fall in love—and now I have to break the rest.

See, my world is a good one. Clean air, completely renewable energy, communities that celebrate diversity instead of fearing it. We aren't without our problems and only the most optimistic among us would think to call it a utopia, but it's close. Form and function influencing each other, everything beautiful technology and technological beauty, the kind of place dreamed of by scientists and poets alike.

There was just one problem: my world, by all accounts, should not exist.

________________

"It's not like this where I come from," I tell her, tossing the rule about spoiling the future out the window. It lands on the rule about interacting with residents of the past and the one about telling people time travel exists.

"What's different?" she asks. A simple question from a complicated girl.

What's different. The differences between our worlds would take up terabytes of data and a library's worth of books.

Politics. Technology. Society. The sky. She probably thinks her sky is blue, because nobody in her world realizes the layers of grey haze wrapped around the atmosphere isn't normal, but I have seen skies so clean and pure and blue, nothing in her world even compares.

Except maybe her eyes. Eloise has impossibly blue eyes.

"Everything is different," I say, and I must look some sort of way because next thing I know, her hands are on the sides of my face and her lips are on mine. Quickly, softly, not like last night. Just like she's comforting me.

"It must be hard," she whispers, "being so far from home."

I shake my head. "That's just it. I'm not far from home." And I've already told her so much more than I should have, so I guess it's time she knows everything. "I only went back thirty

years."

________________

"That's impossible," I said, as if I hadn't been training in the impossible for months, as if I didn't hold a piece of impossible in my hand at that very moment.

The historians said nothing, letting me try to process everything they had told me. Another impossibility.

I stared at the screen, two thin sheets of bioplastic sandwiching a chromatic liquid modeled after octopus skin. Every individual molecule of that liquid could change color in a millisecond; the highest possible definition, and not even the most exciting technology I interacted with on a daily basis.

I stared at that screen where they had just shown me video of a time before all this was possible, before humanity changed their ways, unable to make sense of it. They were still pretending billionaires were the question, fossil fuels and capitalism the answer.

"There's no way," I said. Pleaded. "That had to be more than 30 years ago. Centuries at the very least."

"You are absolutely right," the lead historian agreed, smiling sadly. "There is no way the environment, technology, society should have changed so dramatically in such a short time."

"30 years…" I said, more to myself than anything else.

He corrected me. "Overnight."

________________

"It happens tonight," I tell Eloise. "One minute, it's your world. Hatred, classes, pollution. The next, it's mine. Peace, equality, hope."

She picks at the edge of her mesh gloves. "And you don't know why?"

I shake my head. "And we don' know why. We figure someone must have changed history, but—"

"Well, then… it's you," she says simply. Like it isn't time travel and paradoxes and science neither of us understands. "You need to go back and change history so your world happens."

I know I need to do that. I've known for a while now, but I couldn't bring myself to admit it because nothing is ever as simple as Eloise wants to believe it is.

She's an idealist. The woman lives in the middle of an extinction event, under the thumb of bureaucratic monsters that value her humanity only as far as it serves them, and she wakes up with a smile on her face every morning because "you never know, today might be different."

She was right this morning. Today will be different. Today her world will cease to exist, and her with it.

Unless of course I don't go back and change history. Then her world will go on, dark and bleak and hopeless but still bright and beautiful and hopeful because it's a world with Eloise in it. Her world will go on, and mine will never happen and neither will I.

________________

"It can't work both ways," I insisted, because I knew better than the scientists who not only figured out how to time travel but made the technology fit in the palm of my hand.

Beyond the stained glass window that automatically adjusted its opacity to always let in the perfect amount of sunlight, the bullet monorail zipped past. A decades-long, cross-continent engineering project that had been in use since I was a child.

"You can't tell me all of our history happened and then tell me there was a completely different history up until thirty years ago. Both worlds can't exist at the same time."

One of the scientists launched into a hypothesis about multiple timelines, quantum superposition, and something to do with a cat in a box.

"Simple language, please," I asked, and they complied.

"We think both worlds exist because both worlds could exist, because someone is in the position to make a decision about changing history and they haven't made it yet. Maybe they're

having doubts."

"Which is why you want me to go back."

They nodded. "Identify them, help them realize that our world existing is the best option for the planet."

I turned the time machine over in my hand idly, tracing my finger along the lacy vine motif that echoed the trim of my sleeve, wondering how anyone could ever doubt that.

________________

It's me. It was always, paradoxically, going to be me, and now both worlds exist because I'm holding Eloise in my arms and having trouble remembering what's so special about my

world.

"I'm staying," I tell her. It's a simply complicated solution that solves nothing, because I am a product of my world and I don't think I will exist if tonight becomes tomorrow and it's still Eloise's world waking up saying "today might be different."

But she will exist. And maybe she won't remember me, remember loving me, but she will exist, her eyes the one bright spot in a dark timeline destined to crash and burn.

And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I don't understand anything about the science of time travel, and I'll be here with her, and her love will be the thing that makes it all worthwhile.

"You aren't staying," she whispers, her lips brushing the side of my head.

"Well I'm not leaving you here." The words just fall out of my mouth, and neither of us moves for a moment.

Then Eloise pulls back, looks at me with those eyes she doesn't even know are sky blue. "Well, then… it's—"

I know it is. I've known for a while now, I think we both have.

"It's us."

________________

My world melted away, and the other world faded into existence. The smell hit me first, grimy and toxic, and I struggled to keep my composure, to keep my cover as a native of this time who didn't even notice the pollution anymore.

That was the first rule, one of many they drilled into my brain: don't reveal myself as a time traveler.

And then I met Eloise.

I met Eloise, and she knew something was different about me, and after a while I couldn't lie to her anymore. She made breaking the rules feel like falling in love.

________________

They told me not to let anyone else use my machine, just like they told me not to change history.

They told me not to do a lot of things.

It's Eloise and I, it always was. We went back, far enough back that the history of her world and the history of my world were the same, and we changed it. Just like we always have.

And then we traveled the timeline, hand in hand and cheek to cheek, watching the industrial revolution become the solar revolution. Watching classism and racism and all those other -isms fall out of favor as more people were welcomed into the mosaic of society. Watching the monorail embark on its first voyage.

And even though they told me not to let her world exist, we broke that rule, too. Just in a little slice of the planet, one of the few places that never did want to give up fossil fuels and capitalism. It's dark and bleak and hopeless there, but we didn't fight them because that's where Eloise lived and that's where the scientists' cameras ended up the first time they tested time travel.

________________

My world is a good one. Not because of the clean air or the renewable energy or the celebration of diversity, but because it's the one I share with Eloise.

Our relationship isn't without its problems, and only on our most optimistic days do we think to call it perfect, but it's close. Mesh and lace influencing each other, simply complicated and complicatedly simple, the kind of love dreamed of by scientists and poets alike.

There's just one problem: I had to break all the rules to make it exist.

Jennifer Lee Rossman (they/them) is a queer, disabled, and autistic author and editor from the land of carousels and Rod Serling. Their work has been featured in dozens of anthologies, and they have been nominated for Pushcart and Utopia Awards. Find more of their work on their website http://jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com and follow them on Twitter @JenLRossman

Copyright © 2024 by Jennifer Lee Rossman

Published by Orion's Beau