It was the moment I’d worked for all my life, and somehow it was even better than I’d imagined it: they named the crew of the Mars mission, and I was the engineer. “Lauren Skye Singh,” they said, and my ears rang, I felt like I was going to pass out. I was glad they were putting the crew names on a projection so I could see mine up there with Peter O’Riley’s and Leslie Neumann’s, so that I had confirmation it was not my imagination but the real thing.
Everyone applauded, and the other engineers from my training group were clapping me on the back and congratulating me, so many of them that their words blurred together: good show, Lauren, well done, babes, knew you’d be the one. There was champagne — well, sparkling something, anyway — there was cake. I called my mother, everybody called everybody else’s mother, they had us pose for the first crew picture ever, which frankly looked demented and they had to take at least nine of them to get one good one. Because we were all dazed — we were going to Mars. Yes, it was what we’d been training for, but so had everyone else in our groups. We, us personally: we were going to Mars.
So when I got out in the corridor alone for a moment of fresh air and Betsy Donnelly from my training group was pointing a gun at me, it just seemed like one more moment detached from reality. Houston, we have a problem, the Texas kind of problem? I wanted to giggle, but the gun looked very, very real. “Betsy, what are you doing,” I said. The cooler air of the corridor suddenly felt very, very cold.
“I have time-travelled to change this timeline forty-three times,” she said. “Forty-three times, Lauren! It is supposed to be me on that crew list! Not you!”
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“Are you all right, Bets? Have you — do you need to sit down or —”
“Don’t patronize me!” she snapped.
Time travel wasn’t real. I worked for three different space agencies on a joint project. If anybody would know if time travel was real, it would be me. Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t I? I squinted at the weird wires on Betsy’s belt and the determined look in her eye.
“You went off and invented time travel,” I said.
“It wasn’t easy. We were closer to it than you’d think,” she added reluctantly, “but it still wasn’t easy. But watching you go to Mars in my place — everyone I went to high school with knew your name. Your face was on all the screens at my grocery store and pharmacy. You on Mars. You. Not me. It was worth it.”
“You invented time travel,” I repeated. She didn’t seem to be getting it, and possibly I was not the most compelling conversationalist at that moment. “Don’t you think you could … be famous for that instead?”
“But I don’t want to be famous for time travelling, I want to go to Mars,” she said.
I thought about it for a moment and then a moment more, because I couldn’t think of a better way to put it that would be kind, gentle, wise. Eventually I had to go with my first impulse: “Too damn bad, Betsy.”
She looked like I’d slapped her. She looked like she was going to slap me.
“They don’t put nutters who shoot people on the Mars crew. I don’t know what you did for the other forty-two failures —” She flinched at the word failure, and the gun twitched; better not lean too hard on that “— but this isn’t going to succeed either. Because you cannot murder your way onto the Mars mission. Which you should have figured out, because you are, and I can’t believe I’m the one telling you this, smart enough to invent time travel.”
