1
When the institute’s dispatch hums to life on my old watch, I am in the middle of celebrating the morning of my thirty-eighth birthday. A frutero drone offers me a mango across my apartment’s windowsill with its skinny legs. Supplicant position, I hold out my hands to receive it. The mango is dropped fat and heavy into my palms. It’s an exorbitantly expensive new subspecies grown in PW 3751, owned by the United Future Fruit Company. My headlink chimes with the sound of the debit hitting my account, and then the drone buzzes away from my window toward the New Malecón. The mango rolls across my plate.
I crosshatch one golden slice, turn it inside out so it will splay. When I set that fire in PW 3751, the one that sent me into disgrace, it was in hopes that this mango and the others like it would never be produced. The literal fruit of my failure before me.
I stick a candle into the grid made by jutting mango pieces, a large paraffin candle made of petroleum by-product extracted from PW 7694 until its ecosystem collapsed under the oil spills coating everything in black. Another pocket world ecologically decimated, another update of the times. I light the candle, and it sputters and blazes the way I saw those mango fields go up in flames. Happy birthday, me.
Embrace the new times, I was told when I emerged from PW 3845—after forty years taken from me in the blink of a few seconds relative. I stumbled out of that PW into all that I’d lost in those forty years: the institute transformed, the entire world I knew scarred by war, my parents and daughter gone, nothing but my wife and the pocket world I wore around my neck as refuge. Well, look at me embracing it. No longer Agent Raquel Petra of the institute, but I’m still celebrating.
I am alone. Atalanta is crashed on the couch, rebooting. My wife has not yet emerged from the pocket world I wear around my neck; I haven’t seen her for months. And who else would I even expect to join me? My parents and most of the people we knew in our youth just one relative year ago are now dead of old age or in the War of the Trees. Santo Domingo is a city I barely recognize as home; my apartment belongs to someone else. The sea rasps at the New Malecón just a few streets away, having swallowed most of my neighbors in its rising. The whole global institute reduced, brought to its knees, now at the beck and call of the corporations. Everything I spent my years at the institute preserving and researching now crumbled into ash or consumed.
I am ready to wish. I take a breath. The raging air in my lungs screaming to be let out, I chant, I will not think about before, I will not think about before.
But time never lets it be that easy, does it? Grief can make a single breath feel like a thousand years, but when you want to stay in the moment forever, time is a hound that hunts you down. Time, my enemy. Time, the thief.
2
We have always had stories of little girls who stumbled into other worlds, stories of children and adults and transportation vessels disappeared on hazy afternoons and moonless nights. Amelia Earhart. The ship transporting Queen Anacaona’s captured husband to Spain. The Bermuda Triangle. Missing pirate ships and vanished flights. Fairies snatching children. Stories of time dilation. The stories of parents or children missing for decades, returned identical to when they had left. A son who just the day before had been a teenager with his whole life ahead of him, returned the next day as a bitter and broken old man. People returned to a world that had transformed for the worse. People who never returned at all.
And once we discovered pocket worlds and their doorpoints, we could enter and exit those other worlds at will. We could run tests, rationalize their mechanics, have debates in the scientific community about their origin. We could manipulate them. The first studied PW: one lone physicist in Buenos Aires noticed a prick in space in her lab that didn’t follow the typical rules of thermodynamics. An entirely unrelated experiment that kept going awry alerted her to the doorpoint. In the aftermath of the news, she was tapped to create the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds.
The institute training manuals romanticized it, some poet hired as a tech writer having done the copy. I’m sure it’s been rewritten since. “Walking along the sidewalk on a rainy dusk, the gossamer light catches an oil slick just so. Stepping into it, you are pulled inside. Running from the playground, determined to hide your tears in the woods, you fall finally against a tree trunk, let out your breath with a sob, and just like that, the day blinks out. Or the air conditioner shivers above your shoulders in your cubicle, the glare behind your glasses not from a computer screen, but from a strange pixel of light just beside you. You reach out, wanting something new in your tedium. Suddenly, you’re not in the office anymore. Or at night, someone is after you; you’re crashing through the back of a warehouse, running blindly with the acid knowledge that you’re not going to get away, and then, you turn a corner and you do. You’ve found a pocket world.”
It isn’t always that simple. Most doors are wily. They have to be entered just so, or their positions in space are inaccessible. Their doorpoints are hidden or locked. Or you need equipment to bend physics, fluid dynamics, in your favor. And despite the poet’s hopefulness, entering them isn’t always an occasion for relief, especially with vast time dilations or inhabitable ecosystems. The poet never mentioned what awaits you inside, or after you escape. In some time dilations, spending just a single second in that PW means that by the time you come out, it’s hundreds of years later in standard time, everyone you loved gone. In others, you can live an entire life and return to Earth Standard back to the second you left—except you are changed irrevocably. Too many lovers waylaid on their way to meet, families separated.
When we were young and still studying in Santo Domingo, Marlena and I would talk until late in the night about the pocket worlds we would discover, catalogue, theorize. Large worlds filled with astounding creatures for biologist Marlena. Pockets filled with Taino cave paintings and the palimpsests of cities for archaeologist me. Time dilations that challenged our understanding of biology or history. Back then, fools that we were, we daydreamed
about going into a PW and coming out decades later, when it wouldn’t be remarkable in our country for two women to love each other like we did. But we didn’t know how the job would change us, or how the world would really change around us, in one blink.
As soon as we graduated from our PhDs in the States, of course we’d both applied for the institute. Pocket worlds had only just been discovered that decade. The world was lousy with hope for what we could do better. Every researcher wanted a job at the institute. The best and the brightest got in. Biologists like Marlena to study the new species we found in them, to theorize hominid development if it had been cut off from the rest of Earth, to study the effects of time dilation on the body. Archaeologists like me to catalogue the remains of cutoff civilizations, the passage of time on any evidence of human intrusion, to track the interruptions of history that had transpired by people moving in and out. Historians and sociologists to develop new theories of history and society that would allow for subjective time dilations and interruptions. Mathematicians and computational physicists to study the opening of the doorpoints, ways to enter, to lock them, and to pry them free. Ways to create them. And most important in the popular imagination: physicists searching for another full universe. Pocket worlds were usually tiny bubbles formed from our own reality, small derivatives of our own, penetrated by photons from our own sun. A rare few were as large as a continent. None were as large as the Earth, none their own universe with their own sun and their own galaxies. The only doors out we discovered came back to our world. But what could we do, given another universe, a do-over? So many people chased after the possibility of Universe Two.
Marlena and I asked to be stationed in the Santo Domingo lab, back home. Whenever a PW was discovered in the Dominican Republic, we took those engagements first rather than fly all over the way some of our teammates often did. Most researchers had their pet projects on the side. Marlena’s Haitian roots gave her the idea to look for a lost storied medicinal plant used in vudu that she theorized had actually come from a pocket world. She also brought back cuttings, seeds and bulbs, cultivated strange new strains on the windowsills of our apartment. My pet project was the studying the Quisqueyan Tainos who history said had all been wiped out by Spanish slavery or disease. We knew so little about them. But genetic tests had shown that a significant portion of the country had Taino genetics. The conquistadors and sailors had arrived without women, had taken and raped Taino women. Any children who survived were subsumed into the conquistadors’ project or slavery again, later having children with the African slaves and Arab indentured servants who were imported to take their dead parents’ place. Mestizos, we Dominicans. I had some Taino, some African, some Indian, some Spanish in me, though I looked white enough to elicit comments over my green eyes and pale skin, enough to become a disappointment to my parents when I arrived from school with a Haitian-descended lover, prieta with unstraightened “pelo malo,” and a woman at that. How far the golden child had fallen was their notion of it, and they screamed at me. After they stopped speaking to me, I replaced my parents’ space in my life with my hobby project: I was determined that if any of the Taino had survived the Spanish by escaping into a pocket world, I would find them. Perhaps even a short-time world which would reveal them still alive the way they had been before the Spanish. ...
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