“Yeah. Right now they do.” An idea was forming in my mind. “But they won’t be soon.”
Rosa glanced up. “It’s expensive, right? I know lots of people who start work study in sophomore year. It’s good if you can focus on school when you’re a freshman taking all the weeder classes. Working is a pain.”
I offered Rosa another cigarette and we kept talking about financial aid. Listening to her made it seem reasonable and real. Maybe I could do work study and support myself. I imagined a future without the nightly calls. Without the fear. It was a tiny vein of hope.
I went to the financial aid office the next day, after the chem midterm. An administrator with a cheesy UCLA tie walked me through some of the forms, and promised I could apply for winter quarter if I needed to.
“Get your parents to fill this out.”
“I’m independent from my parents. I mean, I want to be classified as independent.”
The admin paused. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“So do you have legal documentation? You need to prove your parents aren’t supporting you.”
“What if I can’t get documents from them? Like is there a way for me to declare myself independent?”
He shrugged. “I don’t think so. But you should ask a lawyer about that. We have lawyers available for students—make an appointment down the hall.”
Walking down the tiled hallway reminded me of leaving my parents’ house without permission. I had no idea what to expect, or where I was going. I was breaking the rules.
Soon I sat on a cracked leather sofa facing a woman with a fluff of gray-brown hair and droopy stockings.
“I’m trying to find out how I can declare myself independent from my parents so I can get financial aid on my own.”
“Well, that’s something I don’t hear every day.” She perked up and jotted something down on a legal pad. “What’s your reason?”
I thought of a million excuses, and then I remembered what Tess had said.
“My father… he’s mentally ill. I need to be on my own.” I could barely hear myself over the blood throttling my ears.
The lawyer nodded and I thought sympathy inhabited the lines of her face. “I see. Let me research this and get back to you? I think we can figure something out.” Then she jotted down another note, as if everything was normal. I was flooded with relief. Her reaction didn’t feel like the fake normal I knew from home. Maybe she was actually going to help me.
I had one more midterm left, and it was the worst. Cultural geology was my least favorite part of geoscience, and this class involved a lot of hypotheses about travel that couldn’t be proven with repeatable results. Yet somehow Professor Biswas made it interesting. Besides, anything was better than weeder bullshit like chem. The problem was that Biswas had assigned a midterm essay about the Great Man vs. Collective Action theories of history. I was still struggling with those concepts, so distant from the molecular structure of acid or the decay of metals over time. Checking my watch, I decided I still had time to make it to her office hours.
The geology department was in a cluster of old brick buildings surrounded by plots of thick ivy and pine trees. Inside, the upper floors were a maze of narrow hallways lined with office doors. Some boasted a plain placard with the professor’s name; others were covered in cartoons, GIS maps, cutaway views of sedimentary layers, and covers of scientific journals. I waited my turn to see Professor Biswas, sitting behind a few other students on the cool linoleum floor, staring at a two-hundred-year-old map of the Caribbean islands taped to her door. A few minutes later, Biswas motioned me inside. Her window looked out onto the dingy geoscience courtyard, mostly used as storage for particularly large rocks.
“Nice view, Professor Biswas.” I immediately regretted my terrible attempt at a joke, but she smiled.
“Please call me Anita. My father is Professor Biswas. What can I do for you?” Sitting across from her, I realized Anita was pretty young for a professor—possibly in her early thirties.
“I don’t understand the difference between the two theories of history. Isn’t collective action still aimed at affecting a few great men? I mean, a protest is a form of collective action, but aren’t they protesting because they want to change what powerful politicians do?”
Anita twirled a pen over her thumb and nodded. “That’s a good question. The difference is that the Great Man approach assumes there are only a few people who can change the timeline at any given moment, and by the way they usually happen to be male.” She snorted. “But the Collective Action approach assumes that change is a complex process that comes from many quarters, with many people participating. So the end result might look the same, but the process is quite different.”
“But it still seems like you have to be a powerful person to change the timeline.”
“Maybe. From my perspective as a traveler, I think the main advantage of the Collective Action hypothesis is that it accounts for context. Let me give you an example. In 1993, I can be a professor and order you to write a midterm essay and you’ll do it. I’m kind of a great man, if you think of it that way. But when I’m back in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, where I do my research, most people assume I’m a slave. Sometimes I get classified as a free person of color because I’m half-Indian. My point is, there is no way for me to become a great man in that era, no matter how great I might be objectively. If I want to change anything, I need a community that recognizes my inherent awesomeness. That’s where your collective action comes in. You can’t become great without a community that recognizes you. But the Great Man theory suggests that certain special people are great regardless of context.”
I thought about that for a while. “So does collective action mean a bunch of people have to band together to edit the timeline, or can they be… kind of disconnected people making a lot of different edits?”
“It’s probably a mix of both, but the honest answer is that nobody knows for sure.” She ran a hand over the close-cropped froth of her hair and I noticed she wore purple nail polish. “Are you interested in traveling one day?”
“I like your class a lot, but I’m more interested in the physical side. I want to study the origins of life in the Cambrian.”
“Well, most of the Machines seem to originate in that same geological period, so maybe you’ll wind up studying them a little bit too. There is some great work on wormholes happening here at UCLA.”
I’d never thought about researching time machines, and I was suddenly intrigued. “Where do you think the Machines come from?”
Anita gave an elaborate shrug. “It’s not really my area, but the jury is definitely out on that one. Some people say it’s a natural consequence of crustal formation that we don’t understand yet. But that doesn’t explain the interface, and why it filters out weapons but not clothing. I’ve always been fond of the idea that it was aliens.”
I was surprised. “Really? Do people think that?”
“Sure. Or that it was a primordial civilization on Earth. There’s so little evidence that you can imagine a lot of things. Most geologists agree that the Machines were built, or at least the interface was. There’s some kind of intelligence behind them. It’s not a phenomenon created by plate tectonics or weathering or any other known geophysical process.”
“But there is a physical process involved. The timeline itself—”
“Sure. The Machines seem to be exploiting a force that pulls potential timelines into our own. But there’s a conundrum there, too. Let’s say there is a cosmic force that is engaged in a constant background shuffling of timelines in the universe. It’s like gravity, or an unknown form of energy—it’s causing historical change all the time. If that’s true, maybe the Machine is simply a viewing booth that allows us to see the shuffling. So we think we’re changing things, but that’s an illusion. We’re merely witnessing, or remembering, a change that would normally be imperceptible.”