“Fuck!”
Penelope swore, then groaned, then sighed. This loop laid it on thick. Cosmic Alliance? Worms? All the stupid acronyms? Christ, it even gave Magnus a butchered Biblical name. It felt like the timeline was written by a teenager who watched too much anime.
Still, it did break her heart. Again. She didn’t know why she kept doing this to herself, late nights alone in front of a coldly glowing LCD, watching the temporal predictive model run through possible versions of her life. Watching as she met Weiss. Watching as she fell in love with him again. Watching as he warmed up, returning her affection.
Watching their only night together. This never changed.
Watching him die, then herself. This never changed either.
This one was particularly rough. Magnus---sorry, Samaiel ---caught them unprepared, brought them to some suitably dramatic abandoned building, and ran Weiss through with a scythe the moment he tried to fight back. Penelope watched, bound, horrified. She was chained to a wrought iron banister, her mechanical arm teasingly disconnected and tossed aside, just out of reach. Then, with a wave, the sadistic fuck just left. Left Weiss’s corpse on the floor to bleed out while she struggled to break her bonds. She screamed “I love you.” It would be the first time. It would be too late. It always was. Then, hours of suffering to scrub through. Thirst, hunger, the pain of the chains in her side, the emotional anguish, then blurry nothingness as she gave up.
PREDICTION MODEL ENDS, a text box blinked at her. REBOOT?
She always watched to the very end, her gut tying into knots as she tried to reconcile her hope that this time would turn out differently with the knowledge that there was no reason to believe it would. She closed the file---generation 257---and dragged it to the “Reviewed” folder, then took a nip from the bottle of Tanqueray on her desk before slumping back in her chair.
“Don’t you dare start another one.” Charlotte clicked the light on, casting a soft glow across the bedroom through antique stained-glass lampshades.
“How did you---” Penelope started to protest.
“Easy,” said Charlotte, stepping over to the desk and picking up the day’s used dishes. “You sigh the same way each time you watch him die. It’s not cute. You need a break; I’m getting worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” said Penelope.
“You’ve been watching your own doomed romance fall apart by way of tragic death every day for the last two months. You are not fine.” Charlotte put her hand on Penelope’s shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “Come hang out in the living room with me for a bit before you go to bed. If you don’t reset, you’re going to be moaning all night again, and I am not having that.”
“I don’t---” Penelope’s face contorted as she started to sob, emotion suddenly boiling over, as unpredictable and chaotic as it had been for the last ten years. “How can I go on if it’s just going to end like this? If no matter what I do, what the circumstances are, I’m just going to end up dead? Unhappy? Unsatisfied? I need to see something new. There has to be a timeline where we live happily ever after! If I can’t find one, then---then what’s the point of all this?”
The worried look on Charlotte’s face deepened. “I think I’m going to take this too.” She grabbed the bottle of gin. “I keep telling you that the only way to move on is to let all this go. I miss him too, but at this point, you’re just torturing yourself.” She offered Penelope a tissue. “Now, if you’re not going to watch trashy reality shows with me, you need to get some sleep, babe.”
Penelope, deciding after a long moment of stillness not to acknowledge the resentment in her heart, grunted an affirmative to her friend, took the tissue, and blew her nose. She knew Charlotte was right. Penelope was miserable, emotionally drained, and sore from being curled up in the old desk chair all day. She was exhausted, too; there would be no point in pushing herself any farther. She took a couple of deep breaths to try to recenter herself, took one last glance at the prompt on the computer, then looked up at Charlotte with a wan, almost apologetic smile.
“You look like hell, Penny.”
“I bet.”
“Are you coming or not?”
“Sure.”
Charlotte beamed. “That’s my girl. Come on, you can have the good blanket.”
It took only moments on the plush couch in the break room for Penelope, tucked next to Charlotte, having decided to share the wool-lined comforter, to drift off.
So, I don’t know if this is weird, but my Dad’s having a big press conference here at the Labs next Friday, and I mean big. Like, history-books-big. And, if you want, I could get you in. There’s going to be a reception afterwards, so lots of free food and schmoozing with important people, and we could finally hang out
Penelope stared at the unfinished sentence for a while, trying to work out how to reword it. It seemed a little too forward. She’d been thinking about using this press conference as an excuse to meet her pen pal Weiss Wakefield in person since it had been announced a couple of weeks ago, but she’d put it off and hadn’t mentioned anything to him yet. Now she was running out of time, and she didn’t want to lose her chance. The Materas Laboratories were her home, though because Weiss had first emailed in while doing research for a paper, inviting him over would be strange without some link to his academic interests. Now she had one.
She frowned and brushed an errant lock of auburn hair from her face, deleting the text and sucking on a cherry. She was curled up with her laptop in an overstuffed loveseat in her room, while the sounds of an old Elvis Costello record drifted from the stereo. Room 433B was originally an examination room in the medical wing of the facility, but as a young girl, Penelope would often go there specifically to see the unique view of the Sound and town in the distance it offered. With a little convincing, her parents had let her move her bed and the rest of her things into it shortly after her thirteenth birthday. All of the medical equipment had been removed, and she had spent the past five years decorating the place. She was proud of it---it was full of little decorations and mementos, she kept a small arrangement of flowers she picked herself on her desk cycling throughout the year (currently a little bundle of bluebells from the mountains up north---she planned on pressing them later), and most of all, it was warmcompared to the rest of the facility. Early evening sunlight filtered in through the windows in the corner, which spanned floor to ceiling, and a handful of antique stained glass lamps placed around the room would soak the room in soft light after dark. Her favorite was a rain lamp, in the center of which spun a figure of a woman she had painted to look like a robot. Her father even had a small fireplace installed shortly after she had moved in, but the thought of using it made her a little nervous. Still, the rest of the light in the Labs tended to be cold and utilitarian, so the amber coziness of her room was always a welcome respite.
How would you like to come to an event here at the Labs? It’s going to be something special. Brilliant scientists from all over the world, fancy catering, and an earth-shattering announcement. Not even kidding. Plus, you can explain why you’ve never asked to meet;lkasdf;kljdfas;kljfads
She hammered on the backspace key until the composition box was empty again. She had a bad habit of putting her foot in her mouth, and she was determined not to do it this time. Friends were hard to come by where she was. The Materas Laboratories facility was perched atop an island in Paradox Sound, which was itself attached to the mainland by a strip of causeway almost a mile long. She didn’t go to the local public school: the Labs were a living community as much as they were a research facility, complete with services for anyone who worked there, researchers to custodians, like schooling. While not everybody chose to live in the Labs, there were enough people who did for there to be a dense residential wing. As it turned out, however, busy researchers and scientists had little time for children. Penelope didn’t like to think of herself as being trapped---she had a car, after all, and spent plenty of time outside the Labs, but it was mostly hikes during the day, picnics on the bluff overlooking Paradox, movies in the evening, hell, even road trips sometimes during school breaks, all with nobody but herself for company, maybe a parent if she was lucky. She was lonely.
Moreover, she was about to graduate from high school. And once she did that, she knew what would happen: she would start to work for her parents. She would receive on-the-job training and education, and though she wouldn’t have an official college degree to her name, she wouldn’t need one. She would learn the ins and outs of the Materas Bionics department, fusing human to machine, restoring and enhancing physical abilities, a subject that fascinated her and one she could only learn here anyway. Here she would become a true world-class expert, her skills and knowledge honed by the highest technology and the smartest people on the planet. But when she did, that would be it. She would be just like her mom and her dad and every single other adult she knew, completely focused on her research and missing everything else.
Penelope spat the cherry pit out. It hit a glass dish with a ping! and rattled around the rim before settling in one spot. She knew what she was missing. Confidence. She and Weiss got along so well over email, if she just made it sound like the most obvious thing in the world, he would have to come visit, and she’d have that tether to the outside world she had always dreamed of. She reached up above her head, stretched side to side, and furrowed her brow as she started to type.
Hey, Weiss, it’s Penelope Materas.
I know it’s been a while. Sorry it’s been so long since my last email, I’ve had a lot to do to wrap up school, I’m sure you can relate. Your graduation was today, right? Congratulations! How did your finals go? Did you finish that thing for your film class? I’d love to see it. Did May decide on which college she’s going to? What are you going to do now? Oh, and what happened with that graffiti on the football field? I even heard rumors about that out here---someone said they were going to cancel prom if nobody fessed up. They couldn’t actually do that, could they? Assuming they didn’t, I bet you and May looked amazing. I know I said I didn’t want to go, but now I wish I had---the Materas High School “prom” was, uh… bad. It was bad bad. You know how on TV it’s always like a row of boys on one side of the room and a row of girls on the other? Yeah, it was like that, except imagine a total of 10 kids, and nobody likes anybody, they’re all just STEM strivers (unlike yours truly, who never needs to strive for anything, natch ;>) staring blankly at each other in a repurposed warehouse. The VP of marketing’s son asked me to dance, and, you know, I couldn’t say no, but ugh, was he ever stiff, and you just know he only did it because his mom told him to. It was truly the bleakest venue Get Low has ever been played in. Harrowing stuff.
Anyway.
I wanted to ask you to come to an event my family is holding in a couple of weeks. I have a +1 to a press conference---I know, bear with me---that is going to blow your mind. It’ll blow my mind if rumors are to be believed. My dad’s been working on it nonstop for the last few years, and he won’t even tell me anything about it, but every time it comes up, he can’t help but smile, so it must be huge. The man is usually a stone wall. I know you have a lot going on, but I have a feeling this is going to be worth seeing. There’s always a big reception after these things with the best snacks too. I know it sounds boring, but I promise it’s a good time.
Plus, cards on the table, I want to meet you. Don’t disappoint me ;)
-Penny
She stared at the last line for a good minute. Was it too much? Maybe, but she knew she could be intense sometimes. If that was going to be too much for him, she’d rather get it out of the way sooner rather than later. She hit Send, then slammed the screen of the laptop shut, stood up, and went for a walk to calm her nerves as the record fizzed and popped softly in a rhythmic loop, the album finished.