Ana, Chronistic
Apr. 21st, 2020 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeAna, Chronistic
Series: None.
Summary: The first lesson they teach in Chrono-Def is “don’t go anachronistic.” Most people don’t listen. Ana listens.
Word Count: 3000
Notes: This was tied with “Quick and Dirty Plural History” this Patreon poll, so I exercised my blogly fiat, since Ana’s been waiting longer. Content warnings at the bottom.
The first day of Chronistic Defense, the old dogs tell Ana’s class about the guy who tried to kill Hitler.
(Tons of guys tried to take out Hitler: pre-birth, as a child, in art school, as Prime Minister. But this is the first day, so they keep it simple.)
Ana knows this story well. Guy goes anachronistic, lets their ego convince them that their version of time and history is the right one, tries to fix everything only to screw up, and everything goes to hell until the old boys revert everything back chronistic.
The lesson, of course, is not to go anachronistic. But that’s not the real reason they do this every year for every class, and Ana knows it. She’s done her research. Everyone in Chrono-Def knows that just about every new cadet goes anachronistic. It’s a rite of passage, the Chrono-Def equivalent of boot camp breakdown. Everyone has some tragedy they hope to avert. The Holocaust. A molested younger sibling. A bad investment. The Inquisition. There are stories about that one dinosaur nut who was obsessed with proving the brontosaurus existed. The noble, the humanitarian, the petty, the weird—everybody has something they want to fix.
The old boys know this. The way they figure, it’s better to let the new blood get it out of their systems when they’re raw and clumsy, making for easy fixes. So they give the object lesson, knowing nobody will listen, wait for the new recruits to go anachronistic… and make examples out of them.
Miguel is the first. Ana is there when he gets hauled up front for trying to sabotage Christopher Columbus’s ships. The old boys playback the results—the English get there first, bring one of the many recurrences of the Black Death with them. They show the bodies in the streets, the gangrene, the starving children. A decimated continent. Nothing solved.
“You did this, Miguel,” they tell him. “You caused this. Good work.”
By the end, Miguel is covered in tears and snot. Only then do they fix it, mend the leaks in the boats, make it chronistic.
“And what have we learned?” They ask the class.
“Don’t go anachronistic.”
“That’s right.”
Ana watches this whole performance and feels icy secondhand shame on Miguel’s behalf. She doesn’t know him, not really, but he shared his cake with her in the mess hall when she was homesick and they talked a little. He was an Iroquois Confederacy history buff whose family had gone through hell and high water to get him to Chrono-Def. With his snaggletoothed grin, he seemed confident and outgoing, a far cry from the broken sobbing thing at the front of the class now.
Afterward, at lunch, he sits alone, crumpled in on himself, avoiding everyone’s eyes. For a moment, Ana wants to sit with him like he did with her, comfort him, share her cake. But then she averts her eyes and moves on. All that history study, all the intake tests, and he didn’t do his research enough to learn the first lesson in Chrono-Def. He had to learn the hard way.
She won’t.
Training progresses, and Ana watches classmate after classmate go anachronistic. After Miguel, they try to be sneakier, more cautious, but it never works. One by one, they’re dragged up front, exposed, their shoddy work vivisected, every manufactured tragedy put up to class analysis and debate. Trying to save the Titanic leads to a baby being saved who grows into a despot. Trying to protect an abused family member leads to worse abuse in foster care. A never ending cavalcade of shame and horror, paved in good intentions.
The more she sees, the less Ana is bothered. In a cold, spiteful way, she’s even smug. She knows better. She learned the lesson the first day, the right way. It makes her feel superior to her naïve, thoughtless classmates.
Never mind that if she had any innate talent for manipulating the timestream, she might’ve gone anachronistic too. But she only barely scraped into Chrono-Def on academic merit; she needs to feel good about something. And so she never goes anachronistic.
Outside Chrono-Def, things are tense. Nobody’s sure what to make of the latest president, even worse than the last one. People are disappearing. There are whispers of the end-times. The social safety net is unraveling, die-ins becoming a literal form of protest in the wake of pandemics and healthcare costs.
Miguel, who has clearly not learned from the Christopher Columbus fiasco, says, “We have to do something.”
“Why?” Ana asks. “Do you have a plan?”
Her tone comes out harsher than she means, and she sees the fear and shame rise in Miguel. He curls in on himself in the seat and says nothing but, “you want my cake?”
Ana does.
Training continues. Ana slogs her way through the ranks, determined to prove herself in hard work and sense, if not talent. The old boys start paying attention to her.
“Good job, cadet,” they say. “Determined to earn your jockstrap, eh?”
Ana glows with pride. She’s not just a diversity hire to make the media happy. She’s going to be great, just as good as the white boys. She will earn her place, and she will shine.
She graduates with honors, gets an internship in some border town in Texas—a windfall, since all sorts of bizarre anachronisms happen there. Mostly immigration fraud; people planting their wizened old abuelitas in the past so they don’t cross the border, the border crosses them, that sort of thing. Ana catches them every time; Spanish is her first language, her undergrad major was linguistics, and she used all her free time in her Chrono-Def training to study the evolution of Spanish through the ages. The fakers might remember era-appropriate clothes, money, even the paperwork, but they always forget their language unless they’re traveling way far back, and pre-Columbian times aren’t Ana’s jurisdiction.
Working internships are a joke in these days—always working, never paid, as they say. But Ana knows this and devotes herself to becoming indispensable. No job is beneath her, no task beyond her excellence. She’s fighting an uphill battle as a Chicano girl with no innate chrono skill; if she can’t become the best, she’ll be nothing.
By the end of her internship, she’s the only one who can get everyone’s coffee right, fix the computers without calling on IT (a lazy slob named Melvin), and she’s plowing through backlog that’s been in stasis forever. When they offer her a paid position, she takes it. Contract, no benefits or PTO… yet. That will change.
Ana claws her way up the ranks. She gets better and better at catching anachronisms with a quick conversation. All it takes is the wrong accent, the look of startled recognition at modern memes, politics, or pop culture. (Her favorite is to ask, “Remember the Alamo?” before 1836. Texan would-be revolutionaries fall for that one every time.) Fortunately for her, these skills are getting more and more in demand, thanks to the current political climate. Soon she has a permanent position, a title, a pension, even dental insurance.
She also has a lot of enemies, but she doesn’t care. She’s not here to play dolls. It’s not her fault so many people are breaking the law incompetently. They don’t pay her to pat people on the head and say, “oh, all right, just this once.”
Sometimes her targets try to change her mind. They beg, they cry, they tell her epics of woe and poverty and desperation. They appeal to their shared heritage, shared gender, their presumptions of shared experience. They try to bribe her, threaten her, fight her.
The pity partiers are the worst. At least the others show her some respect.
Ana earns her jockstrap. The boys joke about how coldblooded she is, squeezing little old ladies and men dry, but Ana knows that they’re impressed—or intimidated, which is even better. They start calling her Anaconda and she wears it with pride.
At thirty, she wins awards. At forty, she becomes the top in her field.
At forty-five, she starts to get a niggling sense that something isn’t right, but she can’t pin it down. So she ignores it.
At forty-seven, the vague sense of apprehension has gotten much worse. It feels like she’s forgotten something, or failed something very important. But what? Her career is doing fantastically, as is her nice house in Brownsville and her dog, Perro. (Ana has many skills, but creativity in naming isn’t one of them.) It’s not her baby clock, is it? Seems a little late for that…
No. Ana has never wanted children.
She tries booze and antidepressants, even talk therapy for a little bit. (Ha!) None help much, and she tosses them aside. She tries dating and getting laid, with men and women and other, kinky and vanilla, and verifies that yes, it’s just as boring, empty, and pointless as it was in her twenties. Good; she would’ve lost all respect for herself.
But if it’s not sex, not love, not her career, what’s missing?
Maybe she needs a hobby, one that doesn’t involve her work. So after some failed attempts at square-dancing and gardening, she starts cooking elaborate fancy meals for Perro. He’s a cock-eared mutt of unidentifiable extraction who leaped the fence and started digging in her garden one day, and she considers him the ideal companion, far better than any of her sex partners. Sure, he drools and sheds, but he flops on the couch with her to watch stories together, he never complains about sharing her with Chrono-Def, and he’s warm and comforting and a good listener. He, of all people, deserves steak tartare, even if she can’t enjoy it with him; Chrono-Def requires strict mass maintenance.
Becoming Perro’s chef does the trick. The feelings go away, aside from a few odd anxiety dreams. She’s always had those “test she hasn’t studied for” dreams, but now she finds herself dreaming about Miguel, that poor sod who tried to sink the Santa Maria. She hasn’t thought about him in decades, but now she dreams about him over and over, endlessly chasing him in slow-motion as he walks away from her through a collapsing time loop.
“You don’t think something happened to him, do you?” she asks Perro. Normally she doesn’t go for that superstitious nonsense, but…
Perro’s tail thumps the couch.
“Right. Easy to check.”
According to Miguel’s social media presence, he’s alive and well and totally washed out of Chrono-Def—no surprise there. He has a husband—well, “domestic partner,” with the new legislation—and he has a cat and a job in some Indian rights org. His hair is all gray now, but his snaggletoothed grin is still the same. He’s got diabetes, has an ongoing fundraiser for his insulin, has been arrested multiple times, and he seems… happy.
It makes her irrationally angry. How can he be happy fighting losing battles that nobody cares about anymore? How dare he? She wants to grab him, talk sense to him, ask him why. For a second, she even considers making an honest-to-Jesus MyFace account or whatever it is those kids use, just to talk to him.
She’s halfway through the registration process when she comes to her senses. What is she doing? This is absurd. They were never close. It’s been decades. What is her problem?
“I’m getting old, Perro,” she says, killing the window and getting up from her chair. “Sentimental. Let’s make you dinner, pup.”
Perro wiggles ecstatically, and they go off to eat.
When Ana turns fifty-one, Perro stops eating. Nothing entices him, not steak tartare or cheese or garbage. He seems tense and unhappy, as though he’s in pain, so she takes him to the vet.
Stomach cancer. Incurable. Agonizing.
There is only one reasonable course of action.
“You don’t have to be here for this,” the vet says. “Sometimes it’s upsetting to watch.”
Ana stays. She gives Perro praise, pets, and ear rubs as the vet gives the injection, and she does her best to keep her voice and body language comforting and pleasant, though she hasn’t had much practice. It seems to work, though; Perro’s tail thumps against the vet’s table, and she feels him relax as the pain goes away. Then he’s gone too.
She makes arrangements with the vet, pays the bill, and goes home to break out the mezcal. Perro deserves a wake, and anyway, she needs it to cry. Perro deserves her tears.
When she finally falls asleep on the couch, one foot on the floor to keep the world from spinning, she dreams of Miguel again. She’s running through the endless collapsing time loop again, but this time, he’s not here with her, slow-walking away. He’s at the other end of the loop, a young man being pulled up front by the old guys at Chrono-Def for going anachronistic. Ana’s younger self sits in the third row, bolt upright, watching the old boys break him, face blank.
Present day Ana is voiceless, unable to break out of the loop, trapped like a fly in ceiling paint. All she can do is watch and rage and run, run, run as the old boys show the plagues, the violence, the suffering. Because maybe it’s the booze, maybe it’s Perro, but she’s not anxious this time, she’s furious. She wants to scream that it’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit, wake up, but she can’t speak, can’t leave, can’t stop, only watch and run.
“And what have we learned?” the faceless horde asks the broken sobbing figure that was Miguel.
“Don’t try to change anything.”
“That’s right.”
Ana wakes up with a gasp, and she scrambles off the couch for the bathroom. She makes it just in time before she vomits. As she retches and heaves, she feels like she’s just discovered that not only is her house on fire, but she’s been pouring gasoline on it for years.
Because it all makes sense to her now: “anachronism” is euphemism for “change.” That’s why Chrono-Def always make examples of cadets in their first year of study. Not because examples from experienced veterans don’t exist, but because they look less ridiculous. And because they need to break their cadets early, hammer it into them that nothing ever gets to change, that change is bad and makes everything worse.
That’s why the proverbial example is always shooting Hitler. Because Hitler isn’t the problem, just the face. A world war, a holocaust, eugenics and Goebbels and Mengele and anti-Semitism and all the rest of it, none of that can be solved by killing one man. That’s a child’s solution to an adult problem, and that’s why it never works.
But that’s not the only solution, and Ana is not a child.
The moment her time off gets approved (“death in the family”) and the aspirin and liquids kick in, she boots up her old PC, grabs her pile of history books and notes and files, and gets to work. Trying to ignore the gaping void in Perro’s dog bed, she starts assessing, researching, putting things together, the way she has a million times for a million cases, though never anything this big before.
There are only two time periods Ana trusts herself to pass in—the current one and the Texas/Mexico border period she works in. Chrono-Def swarms the nowadays, have since they got created back before she was born (it’s the easiest time to access), but the Texas/Mexico 1800s border period is less harshly guarded, has fewer competent defenders, and immigration is what Ana knows, what she’s good at. She’ll start there.
But how does one person solve racism, xenophobia, the series of tinpot leaders riding a wave of rage and fervor and supported by a massive power structure? Those problems are big, diffuse, like a house rotted through. How does anyone fix that? All Ana can think is, by going back to the beginning and insuring it’s built better, then keeping it well-repaired throughout the ages so the rot never reaches this point in the first place. That’s fine for houses, but what about with people? She has no skill in this kind of bolstering. All her study, all her experience, all her life has been spent being part of the problem. That gives her valuable skills in knowing how the problem works, but none in knowing how the solution will work.
Then she thinks of Miguel, who’s somehow managed to be happy even in the face of unrelenting uphill struggle. Those sound like skills he would have, or at least have access to through someone else. And he washed out of Chrono-Def; maybe he could use a double agent…
As she looks for a way to safely contact him, she thinks that these problems are huge, unfathomable. Addressing them will entail the rest of her lifetime, helping people in another time, and if she does it well, nobody will know who she is. Nobody will even notice. And that’s presuming it works at all, which it probably won’t.
But the only things that have ever mattered to her are her dog and doing her job well, and now her dog is gone and her job has rotted. All that’s left is to find a new one, a better one.
Ana takes a deep breath, and she goes anachronistic.
Content Warnings: This is a story about a world sliding into hell and a woman who plays into it before having a moral crisis. It might be uncomfortable, considering the climate right now.
Series: None.
Summary: The first lesson they teach in Chrono-Def is “don’t go anachronistic.” Most people don’t listen. Ana listens.
Word Count: 3000
Notes: This was tied with “Quick and Dirty Plural History” this Patreon poll, so I exercised my blogly fiat, since Ana’s been waiting longer. Content warnings at the bottom.
The first day of Chronistic Defense, the old dogs tell Ana’s class about the guy who tried to kill Hitler.
(Tons of guys tried to take out Hitler: pre-birth, as a child, in art school, as Prime Minister. But this is the first day, so they keep it simple.)
Ana knows this story well. Guy goes anachronistic, lets their ego convince them that their version of time and history is the right one, tries to fix everything only to screw up, and everything goes to hell until the old boys revert everything back chronistic.
The lesson, of course, is not to go anachronistic. But that’s not the real reason they do this every year for every class, and Ana knows it. She’s done her research. Everyone in Chrono-Def knows that just about every new cadet goes anachronistic. It’s a rite of passage, the Chrono-Def equivalent of boot camp breakdown. Everyone has some tragedy they hope to avert. The Holocaust. A molested younger sibling. A bad investment. The Inquisition. There are stories about that one dinosaur nut who was obsessed with proving the brontosaurus existed. The noble, the humanitarian, the petty, the weird—everybody has something they want to fix.
The old boys know this. The way they figure, it’s better to let the new blood get it out of their systems when they’re raw and clumsy, making for easy fixes. So they give the object lesson, knowing nobody will listen, wait for the new recruits to go anachronistic… and make examples out of them.
Miguel is the first. Ana is there when he gets hauled up front for trying to sabotage Christopher Columbus’s ships. The old boys playback the results—the English get there first, bring one of the many recurrences of the Black Death with them. They show the bodies in the streets, the gangrene, the starving children. A decimated continent. Nothing solved.
“You did this, Miguel,” they tell him. “You caused this. Good work.”
By the end, Miguel is covered in tears and snot. Only then do they fix it, mend the leaks in the boats, make it chronistic.
“And what have we learned?” They ask the class.
“Don’t go anachronistic.”
“That’s right.”
Ana watches this whole performance and feels icy secondhand shame on Miguel’s behalf. She doesn’t know him, not really, but he shared his cake with her in the mess hall when she was homesick and they talked a little. He was an Iroquois Confederacy history buff whose family had gone through hell and high water to get him to Chrono-Def. With his snaggletoothed grin, he seemed confident and outgoing, a far cry from the broken sobbing thing at the front of the class now.
Afterward, at lunch, he sits alone, crumpled in on himself, avoiding everyone’s eyes. For a moment, Ana wants to sit with him like he did with her, comfort him, share her cake. But then she averts her eyes and moves on. All that history study, all the intake tests, and he didn’t do his research enough to learn the first lesson in Chrono-Def. He had to learn the hard way.
She won’t.
Training progresses, and Ana watches classmate after classmate go anachronistic. After Miguel, they try to be sneakier, more cautious, but it never works. One by one, they’re dragged up front, exposed, their shoddy work vivisected, every manufactured tragedy put up to class analysis and debate. Trying to save the Titanic leads to a baby being saved who grows into a despot. Trying to protect an abused family member leads to worse abuse in foster care. A never ending cavalcade of shame and horror, paved in good intentions.
The more she sees, the less Ana is bothered. In a cold, spiteful way, she’s even smug. She knows better. She learned the lesson the first day, the right way. It makes her feel superior to her naïve, thoughtless classmates.
Never mind that if she had any innate talent for manipulating the timestream, she might’ve gone anachronistic too. But she only barely scraped into Chrono-Def on academic merit; she needs to feel good about something. And so she never goes anachronistic.
Outside Chrono-Def, things are tense. Nobody’s sure what to make of the latest president, even worse than the last one. People are disappearing. There are whispers of the end-times. The social safety net is unraveling, die-ins becoming a literal form of protest in the wake of pandemics and healthcare costs.
Miguel, who has clearly not learned from the Christopher Columbus fiasco, says, “We have to do something.”
“Why?” Ana asks. “Do you have a plan?”
Her tone comes out harsher than she means, and she sees the fear and shame rise in Miguel. He curls in on himself in the seat and says nothing but, “you want my cake?”
Ana does.
Training continues. Ana slogs her way through the ranks, determined to prove herself in hard work and sense, if not talent. The old boys start paying attention to her.
“Good job, cadet,” they say. “Determined to earn your jockstrap, eh?”
Ana glows with pride. She’s not just a diversity hire to make the media happy. She’s going to be great, just as good as the white boys. She will earn her place, and she will shine.
She graduates with honors, gets an internship in some border town in Texas—a windfall, since all sorts of bizarre anachronisms happen there. Mostly immigration fraud; people planting their wizened old abuelitas in the past so they don’t cross the border, the border crosses them, that sort of thing. Ana catches them every time; Spanish is her first language, her undergrad major was linguistics, and she used all her free time in her Chrono-Def training to study the evolution of Spanish through the ages. The fakers might remember era-appropriate clothes, money, even the paperwork, but they always forget their language unless they’re traveling way far back, and pre-Columbian times aren’t Ana’s jurisdiction.
Working internships are a joke in these days—always working, never paid, as they say. But Ana knows this and devotes herself to becoming indispensable. No job is beneath her, no task beyond her excellence. She’s fighting an uphill battle as a Chicano girl with no innate chrono skill; if she can’t become the best, she’ll be nothing.
By the end of her internship, she’s the only one who can get everyone’s coffee right, fix the computers without calling on IT (a lazy slob named Melvin), and she’s plowing through backlog that’s been in stasis forever. When they offer her a paid position, she takes it. Contract, no benefits or PTO… yet. That will change.
Ana claws her way up the ranks. She gets better and better at catching anachronisms with a quick conversation. All it takes is the wrong accent, the look of startled recognition at modern memes, politics, or pop culture. (Her favorite is to ask, “Remember the Alamo?” before 1836. Texan would-be revolutionaries fall for that one every time.) Fortunately for her, these skills are getting more and more in demand, thanks to the current political climate. Soon she has a permanent position, a title, a pension, even dental insurance.
She also has a lot of enemies, but she doesn’t care. She’s not here to play dolls. It’s not her fault so many people are breaking the law incompetently. They don’t pay her to pat people on the head and say, “oh, all right, just this once.”
Sometimes her targets try to change her mind. They beg, they cry, they tell her epics of woe and poverty and desperation. They appeal to their shared heritage, shared gender, their presumptions of shared experience. They try to bribe her, threaten her, fight her.
The pity partiers are the worst. At least the others show her some respect.
Ana earns her jockstrap. The boys joke about how coldblooded she is, squeezing little old ladies and men dry, but Ana knows that they’re impressed—or intimidated, which is even better. They start calling her Anaconda and she wears it with pride.
At thirty, she wins awards. At forty, she becomes the top in her field.
At forty-five, she starts to get a niggling sense that something isn’t right, but she can’t pin it down. So she ignores it.
At forty-seven, the vague sense of apprehension has gotten much worse. It feels like she’s forgotten something, or failed something very important. But what? Her career is doing fantastically, as is her nice house in Brownsville and her dog, Perro. (Ana has many skills, but creativity in naming isn’t one of them.) It’s not her baby clock, is it? Seems a little late for that…
No. Ana has never wanted children.
She tries booze and antidepressants, even talk therapy for a little bit. (Ha!) None help much, and she tosses them aside. She tries dating and getting laid, with men and women and other, kinky and vanilla, and verifies that yes, it’s just as boring, empty, and pointless as it was in her twenties. Good; she would’ve lost all respect for herself.
But if it’s not sex, not love, not her career, what’s missing?
Maybe she needs a hobby, one that doesn’t involve her work. So after some failed attempts at square-dancing and gardening, she starts cooking elaborate fancy meals for Perro. He’s a cock-eared mutt of unidentifiable extraction who leaped the fence and started digging in her garden one day, and she considers him the ideal companion, far better than any of her sex partners. Sure, he drools and sheds, but he flops on the couch with her to watch stories together, he never complains about sharing her with Chrono-Def, and he’s warm and comforting and a good listener. He, of all people, deserves steak tartare, even if she can’t enjoy it with him; Chrono-Def requires strict mass maintenance.
Becoming Perro’s chef does the trick. The feelings go away, aside from a few odd anxiety dreams. She’s always had those “test she hasn’t studied for” dreams, but now she finds herself dreaming about Miguel, that poor sod who tried to sink the Santa Maria. She hasn’t thought about him in decades, but now she dreams about him over and over, endlessly chasing him in slow-motion as he walks away from her through a collapsing time loop.
“You don’t think something happened to him, do you?” she asks Perro. Normally she doesn’t go for that superstitious nonsense, but…
Perro’s tail thumps the couch.
“Right. Easy to check.”
According to Miguel’s social media presence, he’s alive and well and totally washed out of Chrono-Def—no surprise there. He has a husband—well, “domestic partner,” with the new legislation—and he has a cat and a job in some Indian rights org. His hair is all gray now, but his snaggletoothed grin is still the same. He’s got diabetes, has an ongoing fundraiser for his insulin, has been arrested multiple times, and he seems… happy.
It makes her irrationally angry. How can he be happy fighting losing battles that nobody cares about anymore? How dare he? She wants to grab him, talk sense to him, ask him why. For a second, she even considers making an honest-to-Jesus MyFace account or whatever it is those kids use, just to talk to him.
She’s halfway through the registration process when she comes to her senses. What is she doing? This is absurd. They were never close. It’s been decades. What is her problem?
“I’m getting old, Perro,” she says, killing the window and getting up from her chair. “Sentimental. Let’s make you dinner, pup.”
Perro wiggles ecstatically, and they go off to eat.
When Ana turns fifty-one, Perro stops eating. Nothing entices him, not steak tartare or cheese or garbage. He seems tense and unhappy, as though he’s in pain, so she takes him to the vet.
Stomach cancer. Incurable. Agonizing.
There is only one reasonable course of action.
“You don’t have to be here for this,” the vet says. “Sometimes it’s upsetting to watch.”
Ana stays. She gives Perro praise, pets, and ear rubs as the vet gives the injection, and she does her best to keep her voice and body language comforting and pleasant, though she hasn’t had much practice. It seems to work, though; Perro’s tail thumps against the vet’s table, and she feels him relax as the pain goes away. Then he’s gone too.
She makes arrangements with the vet, pays the bill, and goes home to break out the mezcal. Perro deserves a wake, and anyway, she needs it to cry. Perro deserves her tears.
When she finally falls asleep on the couch, one foot on the floor to keep the world from spinning, she dreams of Miguel again. She’s running through the endless collapsing time loop again, but this time, he’s not here with her, slow-walking away. He’s at the other end of the loop, a young man being pulled up front by the old guys at Chrono-Def for going anachronistic. Ana’s younger self sits in the third row, bolt upright, watching the old boys break him, face blank.
Present day Ana is voiceless, unable to break out of the loop, trapped like a fly in ceiling paint. All she can do is watch and rage and run, run, run as the old boys show the plagues, the violence, the suffering. Because maybe it’s the booze, maybe it’s Perro, but she’s not anxious this time, she’s furious. She wants to scream that it’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit, wake up, but she can’t speak, can’t leave, can’t stop, only watch and run.
“And what have we learned?” the faceless horde asks the broken sobbing figure that was Miguel.
“Don’t try to change anything.”
“That’s right.”
Ana wakes up with a gasp, and she scrambles off the couch for the bathroom. She makes it just in time before she vomits. As she retches and heaves, she feels like she’s just discovered that not only is her house on fire, but she’s been pouring gasoline on it for years.
Because it all makes sense to her now: “anachronism” is euphemism for “change.” That’s why Chrono-Def always make examples of cadets in their first year of study. Not because examples from experienced veterans don’t exist, but because they look less ridiculous. And because they need to break their cadets early, hammer it into them that nothing ever gets to change, that change is bad and makes everything worse.
That’s why the proverbial example is always shooting Hitler. Because Hitler isn’t the problem, just the face. A world war, a holocaust, eugenics and Goebbels and Mengele and anti-Semitism and all the rest of it, none of that can be solved by killing one man. That’s a child’s solution to an adult problem, and that’s why it never works.
But that’s not the only solution, and Ana is not a child.
The moment her time off gets approved (“death in the family”) and the aspirin and liquids kick in, she boots up her old PC, grabs her pile of history books and notes and files, and gets to work. Trying to ignore the gaping void in Perro’s dog bed, she starts assessing, researching, putting things together, the way she has a million times for a million cases, though never anything this big before.
There are only two time periods Ana trusts herself to pass in—the current one and the Texas/Mexico border period she works in. Chrono-Def swarms the nowadays, have since they got created back before she was born (it’s the easiest time to access), but the Texas/Mexico 1800s border period is less harshly guarded, has fewer competent defenders, and immigration is what Ana knows, what she’s good at. She’ll start there.
But how does one person solve racism, xenophobia, the series of tinpot leaders riding a wave of rage and fervor and supported by a massive power structure? Those problems are big, diffuse, like a house rotted through. How does anyone fix that? All Ana can think is, by going back to the beginning and insuring it’s built better, then keeping it well-repaired throughout the ages so the rot never reaches this point in the first place. That’s fine for houses, but what about with people? She has no skill in this kind of bolstering. All her study, all her experience, all her life has been spent being part of the problem. That gives her valuable skills in knowing how the problem works, but none in knowing how the solution will work.
Then she thinks of Miguel, who’s somehow managed to be happy even in the face of unrelenting uphill struggle. Those sound like skills he would have, or at least have access to through someone else. And he washed out of Chrono-Def; maybe he could use a double agent…
As she looks for a way to safely contact him, she thinks that these problems are huge, unfathomable. Addressing them will entail the rest of her lifetime, helping people in another time, and if she does it well, nobody will know who she is. Nobody will even notice. And that’s presuming it works at all, which it probably won’t.
But the only things that have ever mattered to her are her dog and doing her job well, and now her dog is gone and her job has rotted. All that’s left is to find a new one, a better one.
Ana takes a deep breath, and she goes anachronistic.
Content Warnings: This is a story about a world sliding into hell and a woman who plays into it before having a moral crisis. It might be uncomfortable, considering the climate right now.
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Date: 2020-04-21 10:57 pm (UTC)Credit to one novel, though. The MC spends the whole book trying to magically time travel, and in the end he realizes that magic was never real in the first place.
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Date: 2020-04-22 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-22 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-21 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-21 11:01 pm (UTC)Michie
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Date: 2020-04-21 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-22 01:19 am (UTC)I found a typo: "They pity partiers are the worst. At least the others show her some respect."
Shouldn't They be the?
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Date: 2020-04-22 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-22 08:27 am (UTC)