can roll over in the night and wake up her laptop, getting to work before her eyes are fully focused. The room is also claustrophobically small, thanks to the writing on the walls. The equations begin next to the door and cover every inch of available space. Most are plain dry-erase marker, but a few are scrawled in red, and others are surrounded by boxy outlines, isolating them.
Roger looks at the room and feels himself relax in the alien face of it all. “I guess some things never change, huh?” he says.
“I guess not,” Dodger replies. “Are you planning to tell me what’s going on, or am I supposed to pack a bag and trust you after seven years?” She may be a paradox walking, revised by her own hand, but she’s still angry at him, under the forgiveness. That’s almost a relief. She’s changed some of her math; her core equations remain intact.
“Dodger . . .”
“I never gave up on you. I waited for you to call me. I waited for seven years. Do you have any idea what that’s like? I almost started playing chess again, just so I’d have something to do with my time.” Instead, she’s written books, taught classes, traveled the world; tutored high school students who needed help with math, spoken to groups of girls hoping to go into STEM, done work for some of the biggest tech companies in the Valley. She’s kept busy, because she’s had to. As she glares at her brother, she knows she would have given it all up to spend those seven years on campus, arguing about whose night it was to pick the pizza place.
Roger looks at her for a long moment before he turns away and says, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t deal with what we were when we were together.”
“You mean the earthquake.”
“I mean the earthquake.” He pauses before he asks, “Don’t you think we caused it?”
“I know we did.” She shrugs. “I did some consulting with the USGS a few years ago. They wanted mathematical models of probable quakes in this region, and I had a new way of mapping faults that seemed like just the thing. They gave me access to all their data. That quake began directly underneath us and involved a fault that’s never given way in that spot before. We created something we didn’t understand, and it hurt a lot of people.”
“It’s our fault all those people died.”
“No.” Dodger sounds surprisingly serene. “It’s the fault of the people who made us.”
Roger stops for a moment before he asks, “What do you mean?”
“We’re a government weapons program gone wrong, or some mad scientist’s pet project, or something, because there’s no way we happened naturally. We’re too Midwich for that.” Dodger looks at him levelly. “Someone made us. Someone made us, and then they separated us because we were dangerous when we were together.”
He laughs. It’s all he can think of to do. “How did you figure this out on your own? Erin had to tell me, and I’m still not sure I believe her.”
“It helps that I spent part of today talking to myself from seven years ago, right after she spoke to you in the future,” says Dodger. Roger stares and so she explains, telling him about the calls, telling him how the world rewrote itself to account for this new data. History is an equation. It can be changed under the right circumstances. It should be terrifying, but it’s really just wonderful, because it means so many of their mistakes have been curated ones, deemed necessary by themselves in the future.
When she finishes, Roger sits heavily on her bed and says, “You’d better pack. Erin will be almost done with Dr. Peters by now, and she doesn’t do patient well.”
“Why is she part of this? Why is she here?”
“Because the people who made us made her too. She was assigned to keep an eye on us while we were at college. I think . . . I think she was supposed to make sure nothing like the earthquake happened.” That’s the charitable interpretation. The more probable one says she was supposed to guarantee the earthquake, because the earthquake was what had proved they were growing into their full potential. Without it, they would never have run away from each other, but without it, they wouldn’t have needed to.
In a vague way, Roger is starting to realize that the earthquake, terrible tragedy that it was, probably saved their lives. Without it,