Dating : Xii, Again

As soon as she was forced back into her cell, Dr. Sandra Chapur ran cold water over her wrists to prevent swelling. They wouldn’t beat her, not before the trial, for fear that a bruised face on a rebel leader, even one who had helped Adam Benson bring the Order to power, would incite another riot. But when they eventually convicted her, which they would, both because she was guilty and because she posed too great a threat to the Order to be set free, she was sure the abuse would be frequent and severe, and that these sore, purple wrists would seem quaint by comparison.

Above the sink was a window, and as Ark Xii raced through the galaxy, just shy of the speed of light, the stars stretched into straight horizontal lines and then disappeared with a blink. It had been beautiful at first, but this was the only view any of the crew or passengers had seen for almost a decade, and it made her wonder why Benson had built the arks with any windows at all, let alone so many that even the captives had them in their cells.

She heard footsteps in the hallway and reached for a towel to dry her hands — if they were still wet, the metal restraints would stick against her skin and rip her already-swollen flesh — but the door opened to reveal Michaels, a rebel pilot, holding a gun and splattered with blood.

“We need to go,” he said.

“Michaels,” she started, but didn’t know how to explain what he surely already knew: there was nowhere to go, and even if there was, no way to get there. They were light-years away from any of the other arks, scattered throughout the galaxy, each on its own quest to find a habitable planet among the stars. And with a rebellion in full swing on Ark Xii, surely Benson had commanded the Order to guard the hangar.

But the blood on his face and the gun in his hand told a different story. Michaels had a plan, and had apparently already put it in motion. He had to have killed at least one guard to get to her, and she knew what that meant for him if they didn’t leave now. But where would they go?

“The wormhole,” he said, answering the question he could read on her face.

“It’s suicide.”

Michaels shrugged, gesturing to the gun in his hand, the guard’s blood plastered to his body. “So is staying.”

Eight years earlier…

As soon as Adam Benson reached the the flight deck, every face turned toward him, searching for an answer to a problem he didn’t even understand yet. “Who called it in?” he asked.

A young cadet, shaking in her seat, raised her hand. Benson walked to her. “Say it again.”

“There’s an inbound ship, sir. One passenger.”

“Impossible.”

The cadet pointed to her radar screen. A ship was approaching.

“That’s not even the weird part, sir,” she took a breath, summoning the courage to deliver news that would make her sound insane. “The inbound ship is identical, sir, and I mean the exact same ship, as one that is currently on board Ark Xii.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The inbound ship,” she said again, “with a passenger, that’s approaching the airlock as we speak,” she looked over her console to scan the vessels through the window that separated the flight deck and the hangar. Her gaze fixed upon a parked, motionless, untouched emergency escape ship, and she pointed. “It’s that one.”

The hangar airlock opened automatically to welcome the mysterious ship. When the seal closed, Benson led his closest advisors and a security team to the ship as it settled and parked.

The hull door opened, and Sandra stepped off the ship. She blinked in silence at her old crew, eight years younger and ignorant of the civil war that was about to tear them apart. She saw Benson, frozen in wonder, and walked straight towards him.

“Dr. — Dr. Chapur? ” he said, and an electric bullet ripped off half of his face. Sandra took aim again, at an advisor who screamed just behind Benson’s twitching, gurgling body, before she was blindsided by security and knocked unconscious.

Hours later, Sandra sat at the table and told the story, again, to a rapt crew. All but the physicists had, by the third retelling, lost interest in the time travel itself. They didn’t care about her escape, how Michaels had died piloting their ship through the wormhole. What they wanted to hear was their narrowly-avoided future: the mutiny, the Order, the rebellion, the deaths. Benson’s true aspirations and his plans to accomplish them. Eight years of the future, dropped at their feet in minutes. “He didn’t do this alone,” she told them. “He had help.” The crew looked at each other and shifted in their seats.

Her interrogator, a man whose name she’d forgotten because he had been one of the first to die in the mutiny, came out of the haze first, realizing that he was neither in the future nor Sandra’s past. This was the present. “You must know the punishment for murder here,” he said.

“I do,” she said, “but preventing that future from happening,” she paused, looking each of her old, yet younger friends in the face, many of whom would have died at Benson’s hands without her intervention, “it’s worth it.”

The interrogator got out of his chair and nodded at a security guard, who released her restraints from the table and repositioned them behind her back as she stood.

“Wait, wait. Just to be safe,” Sandra added, nodding towards the back of the room, where a younger version of herself was trying to blend in with the wall, “you should probably kill her too.”