After hanging up with Jason, I waited alertly, hoping no one but him would find my hiding place. I knew it would take him nearly three hours to arrive, and a lot can happen in three hours. Fortunately, no one else came, when Maria seemed like she was starting to wake up I just knocked her out again, and, most importantly, the world didn't explode due to whatever time paradoxes I may have created by coming back here to begin with. As the first 150 minutes passed, I started to feel much more at ease, and then as I saw headlights approaching and recognized my parents' vehicle, I actually smiled.
Given the sweet exchange of love that had happened over the phone when I asked Jason to come get me, I wasn't quite prepared for him to seem as grumpy as he did when he arrived. Okay, so that's not quite fair. He seemed happy to see me, but his countenance dropped when he saw who was with me.
"Why on earth did you bring here?" he asked, gesturing to the still unconscious Maria.
"I had to," I said, realizing that I had made the mistake of not mentioning this over the phone.
"Why?" he asked again.
"She found us," I said. "And besides, in the future, we end up taking her anyway, to save her."
He gave an annoyed sigh, and said, "Okay, I have so many questions, but for now, let's just load her up and get out of here, I guess. I really wish you had asked me to bring some rope or something to tie her up."
I wished that, too, but going back in time to tell myself to do that didn't seem worth it, plus I actually couldn't do that as all the time travel cream was now either destroyed or in the hands of my other self who was currently back in time. Or was she me now? It was very confusing and I didn't want to think about it, so I just said, rather grumpily, "Yeah, me, too."
Fortunately, we did find some cloths we could use to make a gag and some cables in the trunk that we used as ropes to tie Maria up and then heave her in.
"You know this is totally illegal, right?" Jason asked as we got into the car and he programmed in our return route.
"Yes," I said with a nod. "But at this point, I'm not unconvinced that most of the past few years of my life have been totally illegal. Now let's get out of here."
"Fair enough," Jason said, seeming to calm down a little from when he had first arrived. As we got away from the warehouse district he said, "So tell me, who is this 'us' that Maria found."
"Me and the other me," I said.
"You mean..."
I nodded. "Yes. I came from the future to save the me from the past, or the present, or whatever."
"But you're the one from the future?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "At least I think I am."
He scoffed. "What is that supposed to mean?" he asked.
I felt a little annoyed. All that we had been through and now he was asking me dumb questions. "It means that time travel is damn confusing," I practically shouted. Then I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a couple seconds, and when opening my eyes again, said much more softly, "I'm sorry."
I looked over at him and saw that he was smiling in that sort of bittersweet both happy and sad way. "I'm sorry, too," he said. "I'm so glad you're safe. It took everything in me to stick to the plan and not rush into save you, and now I find..."
"I didn't stick to the plan either," I noted. "I understand why that would be frustrating, but I did stick to the plan. You, I mean this you, just didn't see the outcome. I did. I decided that outcome was not as desirable as we had hoped."
"So you came back to change it," Jason said.
"I came back to change it," I echoed.
He sighed. "Is having Maria tied up in the trunk really better than whatever happened in the future?"
"I think so," I said. "Really, this is the same outcome that would have happened, except now instead of a mob of people causing chaos and panic as the base is ransacked, it was just the two of me destroying what we could and getting out with the main cause of the trouble."
"I mean, it makes sense," Jason admitted. "It just didn't go down like I expected."
"Life rarely does," I said, "even when you can travel through time to try to make things right. But now, we don't even have that luxury."
He glanced at me, seeming a little nervous. "You destroyed all of the time travel lotion?" he asked.
I nodded. "All I could find," I said. "Other than what the other me needed to go back in time and rescue what I guess would be the other other me."
"My head hurts," Jason said.
"Mine, too," I admitted. There was a pause, and then I added, "but probably not as bad as Maria's."
He laughed at that. A true, genuine laugh that rang out through the car and made me smile. We looked at each other and he said, "I'm sorry for being so angry."
"I'm sorry for not explaining things better," I said.
"All is forgiven," he said. And he leaned over and kissed me as the car drove on into the night.
The car had been driving for about 40 minutes while we each sat in silence until I felt the need to speak up and say, "Maybe we shouldn't go all the way home."
"Are you worried about protecting our families?" Jason asked as he turned to me. He looked tired and I realized that while my internal clock had the time as probably around midnight, he was in sync with the true time of about 5am.
"That's part of it," I admitted. "But what good would it do to go all the way back home? What if we have to bring Maria back here again?"
"Why would we want to do that?" he asked. Then his eyes seemed to light up in realization as he said, "You aren't thinking of turning her back over the the agency? Revealing what she's done and hoping they're as against it as we are?"
"Possibly," I granted him, "but I was more thinking about the possibility of accessing those memory altering devices. If Maria really is as evil as she seems, maybe we can fix her."
He scoffed at that. "Fix her? You mean like she fixed me?"
I frowned. I hadn't thought of it as being the same thing. I had thought of it as helping her while what she did to Jason was hurting him. But maybe she too had thought of it as helping me.
"We need to figure out what she's really after," I said. "I don't think we should go home to do that."
"Okay," Jason agreed. "Then where should we go."
I looked out the window. "One of these abandoned farm houses," I suggested. "Any one will do."
Jason chuckled at that. "From an abandoned factory to an abandoned farm house," he said. "From industrial back to farming." He shrugged. "Well, I don't have any better ideas."
"This will give us more time to sleep and figure things out," I said. "Besides, they will probably have some rope or something we can use to tie her up better."
"Okay, sold," Jason said. He pressed the buttons on the car that told it to stop at the next house it saw.
"Are you sure all of these are really abandoned?" he asked as the car pulled up a driveway.
"As sure as I can be," I said. "And they sure look abandoned. No equipment. Okay there's one piece of equipment," I pointed out the window a the broken monitor on top of a broken open robot despensery, "but it looks pretty run down."
"What even is that?" Jason asked. After I told him about the robots that the farmers regularly use to scan their crops and sometimes even do the harvesting, he just shook his head and said, "Back in my day, that stuff was just getting started."
"You mean back in your fake day," I said.
He frowned. "Yeah, that."
"Let's just get inside, secure Maria, and get some sleep."
"Fine by me," he said with a nod.
As the car crawled to a stop, we got out and retrieved our captive from the trunk. She was still unconscious, but she seemed to be breathing normally, and almost looked as if she was asleep. I glanced at Jason and he seemed to have the same hesitation I did, brought on by fear that she had regained consciousness and was now faking. I shook her shoulder just a little and when nothing happened, we lifted her out carefully, relieved when she didn't stir. Jason carried her into the house while I went to the dilapidated barn to find some rope. I was happy to find some fraying rope and some power cords we could use. We tied her to the ancient looking wire frame bed that was still in the master bedroom.
"You get some sleep," I told Jason. "I'm not that tired yet. My internal time is different due to the time travel. I can stay up and watch Maria."
"Are you sure?" he asked.
I nodded. "Yeah," I said. "If I get tired, I'll wake you up."
He looked like he didn't quite believe me, but he also clearly didn't want to argue because he laid down on the floor and promptly fell asleep. I smiled as I watched him breath in and out. He slept rather quietly, just making a snore-like noise every once in a while. I wondered what would have happened if Maria hadn't taken him from me, if she hadn't robbed us of our memories from the first time we fell in love, if we hadn't been forced to meet and connect all over again. Would we be better or worse? Weaker or stronger? I was pretty sure we were stronger now, but it was hard to say with all we had apparently lost. Did I really love him, or did I just love this lingering shadow of a memory that was resurfacing? Or even worse, did I love the fake man Maria had made him into? That was the man I remembered meeting after all.
No, I told myself. I can't think like that. Whoever he is now, that's who he is. His parents and siblings didn't seem to think he had changed drastically. You might be able to change a person's memories, but you can't change who they are at their very core. I had to believe that.
Then I glanced at Maria. But if I believed that, what did I hope to accomplish by the possibility of altering her memories? If she was a bad person, changing her memories wouldn't change that. I realized that I was still clinging to this hope that she really wasn't a bad person, that she had reasons for what she had done. Even though I no longer trusted Maria, I wanted to be able to trust her, to really trust her, even after I saw who she really was, and not to be blinded by her. I didn't want to be distracted by the missions and the time travel and the supposed greater good. I just wanted to know what it was Maria really wanted. Maybe, if we were very lucky, it wouldn't be something all that bad after all. I felt my heart beating faster in anticipation of what she might have to say now that the tables were turned and we had captured her. I suddenly couldn't wait for her to wake up so that I could ask her. I didn't feel the need to sleep at all.
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