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Neil forgot for four hours once.
It had taken him four hours to remember, without provocation or external cause to lead him to forget. Just his own willingness to buy into forgetting, he supposed. It was easier. Simple, sweet, nice, not like losing a day after a frenetic bender in the library that ended with a bottle of scotch and abstract physics papers.
He was now sitting on a train in California, heading to Ames on the coattails of goodwill of his father, and somehow, even in the middle of so much research, he forgot. The world had become different, insidiously, expediently. More advanced, more, something, than it had the first time.
Sometimes he could almost believe this really was the future. It was more advanced, somehow, or maybe he was just paying more attention this time. He could have caused it, someone could have caused it. They were all wildcards, silenced wildcards.
He had become near perfect at fitting into himself. That was how he could think of it now, years out, the clock ticking ahead. He could live if he had a future but now, he felt more like the kid he was supposed to be. Sometimes it made it easier, when he was the one being ignored or chastened, but other times, he wanted to go back to his old life, anything to stop chasing the sidelines of it and trying to see something worthwhile. Not that he really had time for such things now.
He did not remember cell phones being like that, how they are now. He did not recall any breakthroughs in wireless technology and cities with public wifi, really going ahead with it, like they seemed to be now. Everything could be taken as either a threat, a way of spreading disaster from within, or simply an anomaly that should clue him in to something being wrong, something being off, a trigger, someone who knew something.
He honestly never expected to make it this long. Something they were doing was working, whether it was keeping someone from being somewhere or just a blip on the radar of whoever would ultimately bring about the destruction.
Senients. Cadre. He was going into the middle of it now, in a way, offering himself up to a different branch of NASA in order to find out if they had been snooping and if they had found anything. He had never been to Ames before, in what seemed like the real time line. The one where everything existed and happened and maybe this was some sick hallucination in the last seconds before perishing in the blaze.
Someone had to know something here and if they did not, he would be sorely disappointed in their investigative abilities. Or perhaps whoever was really behind things had gotten into their network and hacked things. Or something.
He was becoming tired of trying to justify how he felt about everything, about how closely he had mimicked his other life. Perhaps it was easier knowing that he could never, ever get back to it. But it was still there. It was still, uncorrupted, better. Sometimes he was surprised he had ever made it on the shuttle flight in the first place, that he had pursued such a goal in a short amount of time and become such adept at anything and everything. This second time, everything was harder and time went past and he could not fit everything in. He was slacking, because he was not adhering in those important ways. Though maybe it was for the best, maybe something he had done research on and published and contributed to the destruction of the...? But it was too hard to think in such terms, because it only brought the antithetical discussions--what if what he had originally done had delayed it, enough so that everything could fall in place to take him back?
One thing he had difficulty with, in a philosophical way, was the genesis of an idea in this timeline. What was proprietary and was it even fair he had access to knowing what should happen? And how could something ever be created, ever be guessed at, if everything had somewhat happened before? Did it somehow lock them in or were they really free, were they really able to conceive of the types of things that would even allow them to change things?
This would only bring insomnia, a guilty restlessness that was his burden. He tried to fit everything in, everything.
He was reaching, he was pulling at, grasping at, trying to get to ideas, some that could have been created, that were at the edge of his horizon, and the deep, unsettling fact that there were still years, nearly, that had happened in the other world and he simply couldn’t find them in a library database to help himself figure things out. Gaps in his knowledge, if it really could be considered his. It wasn’t fair.
Neil had remembered after those four hours. He didn’t even remember what brought him back to whatever this was, reality seemed like a grave misnomer. He was even getting good at being young again, which either opened up a can of worms and conspiracy theory or brought about the flaw of potentially being too naive.
The Caltrain departed the station and he still had nearly an hour to be at Ames. He was poking at science with a stick and hoping it poked back, or something stuck, something that could be taken further and susses out.
No, BART never extended to San Jose in the original time line.
Though weird, discrepancies had popped up. Google was not as prominent. He wanted to take it as an indication that something was dampening the search power, the networking ability, or at least cutting them, the humans, out of it. Any of this would be easier to accept than someone, a human, being a knowing cause. But he was beginning to become sure that they were complicit, even in simply failing to acknowledge discrepancies and strange details, or in outright abetting the insidious external forces.