A scientist gains the confidence to change her past for the better… and the worse.
tags: corruption, reality change, superhero
art by Sortimid
Alaya Naqvi, research technician at Chronodyne Labs, stood at the back of the conference room, nervously picking at her cuticles. It was a terrible habit, one that her mother had always criticized her for. But it was also the only bit of control she could exercise over the terrible situation she now found herself in: Alaya’s boss, Dr. Elizabeth Goodfellow, was in the process of very politely and very thoroughly stealing her life’s work.
In this effort, Dr. Goodfellow was, as ever, a consummate professional. Blonde, beautiful, bespectacled, she exuded the affected bookishness that the Chronodyne Board of Directors expected to see in their head scientist. She would listen to every inane question with the same probing intensity, and then her flashing smile would respond, shaping the answer into something as intelligent and piercing as her eyes. Her ensemble somehow evoked the idea of a slutty Halloween scientist, short skirt and pantyhose conspicuously and impractically wed to a long lab coat—and yet her poise and confidence exuded nothing but class. She would, when appropriate, sprinkle scientific jargon into her talk, her tone pronouncing the words with a transgressive air, as if she were sharing with the Board a taboo and powerful secret. And that was, in a sense, precisely what she was doing: Chronodyne Labs had spent trillions of dollars on this project, and now Dr. Goodfellow was eloquently and charismatically summarizing the research team’s findings. Even Alaya was impressed with just how well Dr. Goodfellow communicated these heady scientific topics, how easy she made the chroniton accelerator sound.
But that was the problem. The chroniton accelerator was not easy. It had taken Alaya six laborious years of all-nighters to hammer out the theoretical physics behind the device, and another three to create an entire new subdiscipline of material science to actually build it. It was her blood and her brains that were humming inside of that building-sized time machine, and every one of these directors should have known that.
But Alaya was everything Dr. Goodfellow was not: nervous and awkward, a forgettable lab tech that stammered through her answers and never quite managed to make her short black hair and boring brown vests anything more than “barely presentable.” And now she watched, powerless, as the picture of scientific professionalism explained Alaya’s work better than she ever would, and then basked in the praise.
That night, after the Board of Directors had eagerly shaken the hands of their head scientist and promised her another trillion dollars in funding, and after Dr. Goodfellow had wished Miss Naqvi a good evening, Alaya stood in the darkened lab, alone and in despair. She didn’t want Dr. Goodfellow’s responsibility or her power, not really. She just wanted respect and recognition for what she had done. For who she was, for what she was capable of. Only now did a tiny ember of anger finally, finally flickered to life in her heart. Hell, the machine was ready for its first real test, all because of her. If only she had the confidence—
Wait.
“I could…” An idea started to form in Alaya’s head. She looked up at the warehouse-sized coils of exotic materials her thoughts had crafted, and then at the command console her hands had programmed. The terminal was already queued for tomorrow’s test sequence, sending a rat back in time five minutes.
But it could run longer, theoretically.
Much longer.
“Okay, I could… just… recalibrate and go back.”
She knew it would work, she knew it. It had to.
“Make sure my past self stands up for herself.” That’s all she needed to do, just give herself a tiny push. “That should stop them from stealing my work…”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Alaya Naqvi, team leader at Chronodyne Labs, stood at the front of the conference room, fretfully glancing at her nails. They were a vibrant red, the sort of color that her mother had always disapproved of. But Elizabeth had recommended it, and the color made her feel powerful. Not that her fellow scientist’s support or her own confidence made a lick of difference, not now: Chronodyne was in the process of very politely but very firmly defunding her life’s work.
It shouldn’t have gone like this, not this time. She had done everything right. She had spoken up at the team meetings, been more forceful when she knew her colleagues were wrong. She had had the confidence to be a team player, and the results were phenomenal—they had sussed out the math in three years, the heavy engineering in two. Elizabeth had invited her into a management position after that, and that’s when the real breakthroughs started: miniaturization of the accelerator’s main components, blueprints for portable fusion reactors, even the first inkling of a quantum computer that could perform calculations outside of time and space. They had worked miracles, and they were on the cusp of even more.
But they had forgotten where their money came from; they had thought results were all the Board of Directors cared about. In hindsight, Elizabeth had spent too long in the lab and not enough time in the boardroom, doing the real work of securing their future. Alaya had tried to make up the difference, hosting luncheons and working on her professional chic look—a new bob, a pantsuit with pink pumps. But that only seemed to make things worse, her efforts an unctuous and uncanny take on what the Board really wanted to see. The two scientists standing at the front of the room weren’t sexy enough to sell the future, and their technical answers made their bosses feel small and stupid. The response was unanimous and unappealable: no more funding, and the lab would be shuttered at the end of the week, its equipment sold off to cover the exorbitant costs of this so-called boondoggle.
“Idiots,” Elizabeth hissed afterward, in the dark of their lab. “Fools.”
“We were a team,” Alaya muttered to herself. “We did it better. How…?”
Elizabeth shrugged and stood. “I’m going out for a drink. I’ll buy. You deserve it—no one could have done that presentation better than you.”
An image of another time flitted through Alaya’s mind—a charismatic Dr. Goodfellow securing a trillion dollars of funding, alone. “That’s… that’s not true,” she murmured, shocked and confused at this memory of a thing that had not happened. “You…”
A thought was coming to Alaya, but she needed time to suss it out. She collected herself. “You head on out. I want… I’ll be right behind you, promise.”
Elizabeth headed to the door. “Five minutes! That’s all the time you have. Then I’m coming back and dragging you out of here myself.”
Alaya said something in response, but she didn’t hear it; she was already staring at the accelerator’s car-sized rings, thumbing through the terminal’s menus, plotting.
She knew it worked; she had, apparently, already used it once herself. And if that was the case… one more time couldn’t hurt, right?
She’d get it right this time.
“If I rewind once more,” she said, beginning to key in override codes, “I might convince them to listen to me…”
No mights, she corrected herself. Not this time.
This time, she wouldn’t just be part of the team. She’d get the funding that they needed—that she needed. This time, everyone would respect her. Everyone would recognize her achievements.
She’d make sure of that.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Alaya Naqvi, head scientist at Chronodyne Labs, stood outside of the packed conference room, imperiously rapping the clipboard with her nails. They were long and black, the kind of terrifying talons her mother believed a jinn or a churel would wield. But Alaya had grown past caring what her mother thought of her—what anyone thought of her. She had no place for them in her life’s work.
Through the hallway’s glassed walls, she could see the Board dithering, discussing decisions that Alaya had already made for them. She had become accustomed to their trivial questions, their quaint need to feel relevant. But this time, she had shown them their place; even now, they spoke low, as if in fear that their head scientist could still hear them, and none glanced up to meet her eye.
Slowly, deliberately, she turned her attention toward her intern, a bespectacled and nervous girl who flinched under her boss’ stare. “D-Dr. Naqvi, I’m sorry for interrupting th-the meeting. You said to immediately come find you if the—if the test results—”
“I did say that, Liz,” Alaya purred. “Never waste my time by repeating something I already know.”
At the rebuke, Liz flinched again, and Alaya’s dark red lips curled into a sneer.
People respected her now, acknowledged her, feared her. That was appropriate: she was the protege that revolutionized Chronodyne’s R&D department, the Zeus from whose brain had sprung an entire new subdiscipline of theoretical physics, fully formed.
She had no peer in the world.
But some part of her, a weak part of her, would always be a research technician at the back of a conference room, nervously picking at her nails, losing. And it was the very woman who had taken everything from her that had provided Alaya with the template of what a successful corporate scientist looked like, all vicious reds and blackest ambition in stilettos and miniskirts.
But it was so easy to exorcise the demons of the past when you had a time machine. So she delighted in unmaking Doctor Elizabeth Goodfellow’s past, again and again and again, avenging slights that would never come to pass, ensuring the brilliant scientist could never, ever again steal her work.
Oh, she had tried to be friends, once. Tried to do things right. But there were only so many parties and movies and friendly conversations one could have—always the same parties and movies and conversations, all repetitions—before the world felt like a fake thing, a charade designed to shackle Alaya’s ambition. So now, for old time’s sake, she kept the girl close, delighting in crushing her under heel whenever she felt like it.
Sometimes, in the dark of the night, when all the world was asleep, Alaya worried that her time travel was doing something to her—that maybe, just maybe, shorn of all sense of causality and consequence, she was becoming something of a sociopath.
But that was the doubt talking, again trying to weaken her. To unmake her.
“Here,” she said, running a long nail along one of the test results. “Explain.”
“W-Well,” Liz started, “I think I found a way to shield the quantum computers from the chroniton radiation: we just need to reverse the polarity of the Gauss chambers! I implemented it for this one test, just-just to see, and…”
“That’s… a brilliant idea!” Alaya admitted, surprised. Unsettled. “Wish I had thought of it myself…”
Liz smiled, happy to have impressed her erstwhile mentor. “Y-You think so? I—”
She stopped when she saw her boss’ wristwatch began to crackle with the eerie, telltale light of a chronal breach.
“You…” The intern’s mind raced, snapping through a half-dozen conclusions in as many seconds; try as she might, Alaya had never been able to erase the girl’s intelligence. “You have a… you’ve… you’ve already miniaturized it?”
The light of the cycling chroniton accelerator caught Alaya’s eyes, and in the dark of the hallway, they seemed to glow red. “Of course I did. I miniaturized it twenty years and six timelines ago. And you’ve done a wonderful job helping me make it better. Every. Single. Time.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The woman who was once been Alaya Naqvi floated outside the conference room, her hands cloaked in the luminous strands of time itself. She grinned wolfishly as the suited figures inside became aware of her presence, abject terror on their faces as they tumbled away from the windows and toward the exits.
With a cackle and a hand swipe, she pulled the wall apart, undoing the act of creation, overwriting the reality of the bricks and the glass and the mortar until they were returned to formless rock and insignificant dust.
She had once feared these people, these suited men and women who breathed power and wealth. And then she had seen them as a means to an end, an asset to be managed, a tool for her to wield and to control. Now they groveled at her feet, and her heart was filled with a mixture of pity and hatred.
“Please!” one of them cried out, “Please, Time! Have mercy—”
She hadn’t always hated, she dimly knew. Once, a very long time ago, she had been… someone else. Someone with a mother, with a job and maybe even friends. And she hadn’t hated then, she didn’t think.
But she was no longer that woman. She knew now that the old her simply hadn’t had the power to have strong emotions, had always been afraid to speak out or speak up. But now? Now she had become powerful enough, secure enough, to actually have opinions and dislikes and desires. And that’s when she learned that she could truly, easily hate things. That she could take things. That she could break things.
The supervillainess called Time chuckled and slowly floated down, soaking in her captive audience’s fear and attention. Her thigh-high boots, her midnight black leotard, her glowing red eyes and waving brunette hair—none of it was left to chance, all of it shaped into an ideal theatrical effort, perfected over hundreds of repeated scenes to inspire the maximum amount of dread and desire in her prey. Even her name—no title, just a proper noun made of that most simple, singular word—radiated raw, irreducible power.
She turned to one of the kneeling peons and smiled. “Kiss,” she commanded, “my boot, and I will spare the others.”
The woman was dressed in simpler, poorer garb than her peers—perhaps a secretary, caught up in the assault. She was also the only one to not cravenly prostrate themselves before Time, instead meeting the villainess’ eye with a defiant glare. “You won’t get away with this. She’ll stop you, you know. Good—”
Time raised a hand, and the blue-white threads of unreality reached out—not rending the woman down to her constituent atoms as with the wall, but twisting up and down the thread of the woman’s life, undoing what she had been, reshaping her into someone who had always been Time’s plaything, a minion, a collaborator and a plant.
“—timing, Mistress,” the woman finished, still on her knees, still dressed in the same business attire. But now her defiance was replaced with an all-consuming devotion, and she opened her blouse to reveal that she wore a matching leotard under her clothes. The woman who had once been a secretary and now had never been just a secretary smiled and, grabbing an executive, shoved him closer to Time’s boots. “You heard Her,” she growled. “Start kissing.”
“Don’t have the time to polish them yourself, I guess?” someone called out from behind them—which was impossible, because all that was behind Time was open sky, and because no one ever dared speak to her like that.
The villainess lifted off her feet and twirled, her hands beginning to glow with power, the hatred already curling tighter around her heart. She was met by a vision of white and gold and blue, another woman floating not ten meters away from her, dressed in a caped bodysuit.
“Who the fuck are you?” she snarled, instinctively threatened by something so… heroic.
The interloper responded by raising her own hand, and Time could feel reality being rewritten again, the changes she had inflicted on her new minion reverted.
“I told you she’d come!” the again-secretary whooped. “It’s Goodfellow, here to kick your ass, you goddamn loon.”
Time could see it now, behind the domino mask—blonde and beautiful, like she once was, before the villainess had twisted her into the pathetic Liz.
The superheroine Goodfellow gave a knowing smile. “For someone who has mastered time travel, you always seem so impatient, Doctor,” she quipped again.
Time’s face pulled into a rictus frown, her confusion and anger evident. How had this happened? What had changed? How had it changed? What little tweak to time had rippled out and caused this present? After all her work, after all her sacrifice and struggle, here was still the first face to disrespect her—the original thief, cast as a hero, out from underfoot and returned to steal it all away again!
“No, no, no!” she pleaded, her voice dropping low, grinding, the sound of sand in an hourglass. All her fears came pouring back, and for an eternal moment she was again the wretched, pathetic, ignored Alaya Naqvi, watching as her life’s work came crashing down.
But then she clenched her fists tight and willed away the doubt, steeling herself with pure fury. When her eyes opened again, her sclera had gone completely black, and her red irises blazed like laser dots.
She screamed, her banshee cry fanning out, twisting through time and space, defiant. “Fools! Fools! Who do you think you are? You cannot stop TIME!”
Goodfellow was halfway through a wordplay about turning back the clock when Time’s fist connected with her jaw, and the battle was joined.
This story came into existence entirely because of Sortimid’s Time Scientist Corrupted sequence. Sortimid is a skilled artist and a skilled author, specializing in rad transformation sequences. I’ve loved their work for a long time, and I was elated when they graciously gave me permission to write a story based on their art! You can follow Sortimid on Twitter, see their work on DeviantArt, and even support them on Patreon!