A pinching sort of pain in her left jaw woke Kendra. She opened her eyes to see a blurred close-up of her computer keyboard, and lifted her head. She must have fallen asleep on her crossed arms, but at some point she had stretched her arms out as if reaching for something beyond her grasp, a thing she’d done in sleep since she was fourteen. Kendra smiled, then frowned. Was that a new memory, or a real one?
She shook her head, and raised a hand to her left jaw. It was pointless, she tried to reassure herself as she felt the furrow in her skin made by the edge of the keyboard, to think of “real” and “new” or even “old”. Time was circular. No doubt people from Earth’s future made trips into the past to alter it. How else to explain the fall of the Roman Empire? Any day now someone would go back and fix the Dark Ages. Perhaps then world war, global warming, and over-population would never become issues. She should keep an unalterable diary of these things, but hadn’t thought of a way to do so. She glanced around her spacious lab at the evidence that changes in the past did alter the present.
“My thoughts have not changed, or I wouldn’t recognize the difference,” she muttered, afraid that trying to remember everything as it had been would drive her nuts. The thought was not a new one and, having reached its usual endpoint, Kendra dropped it. She wanted breakfast, but one look in the little mirror that she found clamped to the storage cubicles behind her told her that she needed a hairbrush and at least half an hour for the dent her jaw to vanish before she could face the unwitting public.
Kendra sighed and hunted for her reliable low-tech coffee maker: a Bialetti espresso pot and a hot plate. She had bet that they, like the mirror, the piles of electronic equipment, and all the other things she regularly used, would show up in every iteration of her lab during her stay at Stamford. “--which soon will be over,” she thought as she spooned coffee into the bottom of the metal coffee pot. New oscilloscope in mind, Kendra thought she wouldn’t have minded an espresso machine—maybe in the next version, if there was one.
She needed to find a suitable place to continue her work after graduation, an employer that would offer her money, but not seize her research for some warped military application. Yeah, right. She screwed the top onto the coffee machine and plunked it on the hot plate, then looked around her new lab for The List.
She found it under the metro phone book. It took her a long time to recognize the current version of The List because it was huge--half the thickness of the metro phone book. In her diminutive lab at the far end of the hall, her list of job offers had filled half of one single page. Kendra resolved to cut The List down to the ten or twenty best offers over breakfast--she glanced at the clock in her computer--in 28 minutes, more or less. She checked the mirror, but could still see the dent in her jaw. Her stomach growled. She leaned against the bench. How long had it been since she ate? She ought to be able to remember. Her brain ran over and over the events of the last two days, fixed on the fact that her memory was the only repository for the way things really were—or had been.
Recognizing the fixation as a symptom of cerebral hypoglycemia, Kendra yanked open the drawers of her lab bench, and pawed through one after the other until she found what she was looking for--maltodextrin gel. She tore open a packet and squeezed the contents into her mouth--boysenberry, not her favorite, but it would do.
While she waited for the glucose to hit her brain, Kendra wandered to the window of her new lab and looked out. She could see The Commons, as the quadrangle at Stamford was called, another confirmation that she really did have the best lab in the physics department. Questions that would have occurred to most people sooner occurred to her then: how long, in the time line she currently inhabited, had she had the lab? Had she had some sort of media exposure that caused The List to be so big?
Still shaky, she hoisted herself onto her stool, then typed her own name into the Google search box. “Whew!” she exhaled a few seconds later. 250,000 hits, and on the first three pages, most of the listings were actually about her. She’d been interviewed by the major national papers. All the major science journals had published her scholarly articles. Feeling stronger and more coherent as the first molecules of glucose seeped into her neurons, Kendra leaned forward to squint at the titles.
“Damn!” She sat back. For one entire year in the old time line she’d submitted those same articles to those same journals, and been rejected. She shook her head, marveling at the length to which a self-made woman had to go to get published.
“It was easy”, she replied to an imaginary reporter who asked how she did it, “hard work and good science.” The tinge of bitterness in Kendra’s mouth made her snort. Ten minutes to breakfast.
She noticed an article from People magazine, and opened it.
Let no one say that science is boring, not with Kendra Tanagawa blazing a path across not only the physics firmament, but also the reign of time. Need to go back in forty minutes to get to your dentist appointment on time? “Certainly possible sometime soon,” says Tanagawa, a 5’2” hip 19-year-old, about to earn a PhD in physics…
Wow. Two emotions warred within Kendra. The first, she was embarrassed to admit, was pride. When was the last time that physics had had panache--Richard Feynman? The second worried her: why had she blabbed about her research to People magazine if she were being coy with the scientific press?
At least that solved one mystery. The People article had probably set Xenopoulos on Kendra’s trail. Why had she been so stupid as to talk to People? Distracted, Kendra slid off her stool, and grabbed her book bag. She stuffed The List--no wonder it’s so huge--inside, and walked out the door. Only after the lock clicked behind her did she remember that she hadn’t brushed her hair. Oh well, it wasn’t as if the press would lurk around the physics building at 7 a.m. on a Saturday just to click photos of Kendra Tanagawa. She felt her jaw line. At least the dent was gone.
