write-off, open topic

[sonreir]

Raiders


Going back is easy. All I need is a pair of earbuds, a cassette, and some kind of player. I listen to the music, focus on the hiss of the tape, the sound artifacts that let me know it's genuine, and that's it.

It's not this easy for everyone, Parker says. She warns me not to get cocky, stuff about best-laid-plans and all that.

She's jealous. The farthest she's ever managed to go is 1991. She went to a concert, some band I'd never heard of before. We're not supposed to bring personal things forward, but she bought a t-shirt, wore it under her button-down and smuggled it in.

"They don't make these anymore," she said, when Wilson raised an eyebrow and asked her just what it was that she'd done. "Anyway, like you have room to talk."

Wilson has brought back more artifacts than any of us. There are stories, in the lab, that this is how he's able to afford the house he owns in the Heights, how he always seems to have money for whatever he wants to do -- that he brings back even more than he lets on, and sells it on the black market.

I know the truth -- his parents are loaded -- but there's a certain amount of romance to the other story, too, a bit of bravado and daring that we wouldn't otherwise ascribe to the stuffy Wilson, with his collared shirts and slacks. He's one of us, after all.

We want to think we're rebels, that we're doing something awesome, badass, that no one else does.

We don't join Prime for the money. It pays well, even for here, but there are other jobs that have similar wages and don't require the odd hours, the strange commitments, that Prime does.

We join Prime for the experience, the prestige.

We join because we're in love with the past.

We join Prime because we want to go back.


My roommate, Lisa, calls us pirates.

She's doing a history PhD at Berkeley, studying something about the medieval period, and she says, pretty frequently, that she's grateful there's no recorded music from that period -- "because if there was, Prime would use it to go back, and then what? Steal a bunch of illuminated manuscripts? Change the outcome of the War of the Roses? Fuck, Alicia, you've got to find something else to do."

I ignore her whenever she says this. We've been friends since high school. We went to college together, and when I got the job with Prime and she got an offer to go to Berkeley, I invited her to come out and room with me. I could afford a good house, near BART, and she was looking at subletting what might have been generously described as a shoebox. I offered to subsidize her share, in exchange for her agreeing to do the cooking and meal planning, and that was it.

I started work at Prime and made my way up the ladder fast, moving from one of the assistants (documenting and recording finds) to one of the mission leads in the space of a year.

"You've got a talent for this, babe," the Director of Artifact Recovery told me. "You're a natural. Give it a year and you'll be able to go further back than Wilson."

"You're a pirate," Lisa repeated, stricken, when I told her I'd been promoted. "You're raiding the past."

I tried to justify it. "We're only taking things that aren't important -- like, stuff that would have been destroyed. We don't buy things that were built to last. We're buying things to study."

That we also eventually resold everything we "recovered" didn't escape Lisa's notice -- or mine. We had fashion lines that were based off of the clothing we brought back, housewares and home decor that were modeled after the different period pieces that Wilson and I had managed to snag. Thanks to Parker's work, Prime had opened a publishing house -- re-releasing film and music that had been thought to be lost, different pieces that didn't make it past 2050.

Lisa never bought it.

She still bothers me about it, to this day -- "How's life on the high seas?" when I get home from a difficult mission, or else, "Don't you feel guilty, knowing that you're basically stealing from someone in the past?"

I take a deep breath every time she starts, remind myself that I pay the majority of our rent, and try not to think too hard about it.


My job at Prime is pretty simple: go back as far as I can, visit the list of sites I have that are still intact, and take whatever I can that's of value. "Value" is a pretty loose term. "Value" can be from something that's actually valuable -- artwork that will be destroyed before it makes it to this century, for instance -- or it can be relative, finding things that I think will be valuable in the sense that Prime can model a product line off of them.

Sometimes I was sent on missions to go to music stores and buy the oldest original recordings they had, pressings of the artist playing their own songs.

"Original is best" was the Prime motto. We'd found, through trial and error, that remasters and covers -- even if they were faithful ones -- didn't quite do the job.

There's an ongoing debate about why this is, why it is that only the originals work. Wilson says (in his pretentious way) that it's because music is the truest reflection of a time period. Parker says that it's because every artist puts a little bit of their soul into what they do.

I think that it's because it's easier to pretend that you're in that time period if you know the recording is original -- that the hisses and pops and little audio artifacts that give the recording its texture (so unlike the clean and crisp all-digital recordings we have) are what ground us and remind us to focus on the past, let us relax enough for the machines to send us back. It's all about setting the stage, making it seem like you're actually there. Live recordings are especially good for this. I don't think anyone's connected the dots, the way I have, but when Parker managed to go back to 1991, it was because I'd found a bootleg of a live show by Sonic Youth.

I ran this theory by Lisa once, expecting her to appreciate if not understand what it was that I'd figured out, and she just launched into yet another lecture about how we were no better than thieves, how capitalism was destroying not only our present, but also our past.

I wanted to point out that thievery paid three quarters of the rent, but I didn't want to be a bitch, so I let it be.

At work, I complained about it to anyone who would listen -- usually Parker, whose parents had similar ideas about what it was that we did.

"Chill," she said. "They don't understand it. You do. Leave it be."


Wilson was the one that had the idea first.

"Hey, Marbo," he said, sidling up to my desk. "Your roommate is a history major, right?"

"Uh, she's doing a history PhD at Berkeley, studying the socioeconomic roles of unmarried women in medieval Spain, but...close enough."

"I heard you bitching about her to Parker," he said. "Have you ever thought about, like, bringing her in, taking her on a trip?"

I rolled my eyes. "What, and give her more to complain about?"

"It might help if she saw what we do," he said. "I've seen what they say about Prime in the news, that we're basically evil. None of 'em really understand it. Do you think she does? Because if not..."

"I see your point."

"I'm just saying, give it a shot." He tossed me a keycard.

"What's this for?"

"Guest pass," he said. "For when she says yes."

"Fuck off, Wilson."

He grinned at me and walked away.


I mentioned his visit to Lisa in passing, later, like, can you believe that asshole thought you'd want to go back in time, and she looked at me, thoughtful.

"Honestly..."

"What?"

"I've thought about it a lot," she said. "I want to see how it is that you do it. I've heard about the machines and stuff, but, like -- the past."

I could tell, as she told me this, that she was lying -- I just didn't know what about.

"Um. Where would you want to go?"

"What's the furthest back you've been?"

"1964." It was the oldest bootleg I'd found, scavenged from a record store on another trip back.

"Can you take me there?"

I took a deep breath. Most of my attempts to go back that far had failed. It was only recently that I'd managed it.

"I can certainly try."


Earbuds, a record, some kind of player. A splitter, for the sound, so that Lisa can listen too.

I round up everything at work, let my boss know what I'm planning to do. She tells me to get a guest pass. When I say I've already got one, she shrugs.

"Then you're set."

I buzz Lisa in, when she arrives; set everything up. I'm nervous. I don't normally get nervy, before going back, but there's something about how readily she agreed to the trip, without any caveats about how I can't do any collecting, that makes me worry.

I quash the fear, let the techs know: "Two outbound from Cube D", smile reassuringly at Lisa, double-check that I've got all the equipment I'll need to get us back, and drop the needle onto the record.

"Seriously?" Lisa says, as the sounds of a "I Want To Hold Your Hand" play in her ears.

I shrug, focus, and take us back.


I hadn't asked why she wanted to go back that far, almost a hundred years.

I should have.


We arrive exactly where I think we will -- by the side of the Coast Highway, circa 1964. It's quiet, near sunset, and there's no traffic.

Lisa looks around, tries to place where we are. "This is...just north of Santa Cruz. Why here?"

"It's one of my favorite places, no matter where I am in time," I tell her. "And there's not usually anyone here. Besides, I didn't think you'd want to go on a collecting mission with me."

She shakes her head. "No."

There's an expression on her face I can't quite read, some emotional response that doesn't jive with the current setting. Sadness? I wonder. Wistfulness? Regret? I can't place it.

"It's different," she says. "Quieter."

"Yeah," I say. "This is before the landslides."

"Before they moved and widened the highway, yeah. Way before the Big One."

"There's beach access about half a mile up," I tell her. "I didn't quite nail it, but we can walk over, if you want."

"No," she says quietly. "It's okay, this is fine. Can you take me forward? I've seen enough."

"Um." I hesitate a second. "Are you sure? We haven't even been here what, five minutes."

"Please, Alicia," she says, turning to me, and I notice with alarm that she's on the verge of tears. "Take me back."

I hand her a pair of earbuds, plug them into the splitter and put in my own, then hit "next" on the player I've got in my pocket. Going forward isn't too hard -- I just need to focus on the right time and listen to something that was released that year.

The music starts, and by the time the bass chord hits, before the end of the third bar, we're back in the present.


I turn the gear in and take Lisa home. I drove to work today, figuring that we'd both be too wiped to want to worry about taking transit, and it looks like I was right, though not for the reasons I expected.

I want to ask her, can you understand what I do a little better now?, but that feels like too much, like pushing my luck.

"I get why you like going back," she says, as I pull into the complex parking lot. "I just..."

I wait.

"Jesus, Alicia, how do you always manage to come back?"

It's not what I was expecting. I park and turn off the ignition switch. "Um. It's my job. If I didn't come back, they'd hunt me down, probably." I pause and think about this. Prime doesn't seem like the sort of place that would bother, if I didn't take any of their gear with me. They romanticize it enough, they must understand the appeal. "Besides, I've got a life here, and...I don't know. The 1960s were oppressive. I'd rather be here."

She sighs and unbuckles. "No landslides," she says. "No environmental collapse. The highway hadn't been moved and widened yet, because the Big One hadn't hit. There were still insects, did you notice? They were growing strawberries in the fields next to us..."

"Yeah, but, like -- that was before any of the equality movements, really. Think about what a mess the country was at that point. The middle of the Cold War, Vietnam -- it's easy to come back. At least we're mostly at peace now."

"If you ignore the perennial conflicts elsewhere in the world."

"I come back because there's a lot holding me here, and not much holding me there," I finish. "Same for you -- what would you even do in the past?"

She shrugs. "Live," she says, and exits the car.


Lisa and I don't talk for the rest of the night, not because I don't want to, but because I'm not sure what to say.

I see her point.

I love my job because I get to go back. I ignore the parts I don't like in favor of the fact that it requires me to go back often, and that lately they've been wanting me to go farther and farther. I've found live records from the 1940s and 1930s, rescued from antique shops on other missions back. They're still playable -- I tested them at work. They'd be enough to pull me back even further, if I wanted to.

I'm not sure if I do, though.

I've been back a lot. I've gone further than anyone else in the lab. They're talking about making it my job, meaning that I'll not need to bring back artifacts, except music; they'll pay me to keep flinging myself back, as far as I can. The earliest recorded music they've found dates to the 1860s, and I have some ideas about recreating old pieces using period instruments, live performances, if Prime will pay for it...

I love what I do, but I love where I am now, too. I want to go back, but I don't want to stay back.


When I wake up, it's not to the sound of the alarm, but something else.

There was a noise, a familiar one, but I can't place it.

I put on a robe over my pajamas and pad out to the tiny apartment kitchen. It's empty, cleaner than I remember it being, and there's a plate of peanut butter cookies on the counter, a note tucked underneath them.

I blink at the cookies -- they're my favorite, but Lisa hates baking, and I don't know what would have inspired her to make them -- and pick up the folded note.

Alicia, it's addressed, in her slanted handwriting.

I unfold it and a check falls out -- two months' of her share of rent.

I didn't want to tell you in a note, but you were still asleep, so...

I read the rest of it, grab my keys, and drive to Prime, still in my pjs.


I explained everything to my boss, expecting to be fired.

She reassured me that it wasn't my fault, that accidents happen and it wasn't one of my units that was stolen -- it was Wilson's. He'd left it out; she would have been able to put it in her purse before I even buzzed her in to the secure area.

"Keep doing what we pay you to do," my boss said. "Don't worry about this. We'll find her. Keep an eye out for anything weird."

I kept my head down and my eyes open, the way my boss asked me to. I didn't notice anything weird, and neither did any of the techs. We couldn't figure out where she might have gone to, if she had gone back in time. The noise I'd heard in the kitchen was the sound of her departure, the odd "ping" that the devices make when you go back.

Wilson didn't get fired, but he was barred from going back for a month. He accepted this pretty readily. Parker made fun of him, but her heart wasn't in it, not really.

I made more trips back. I never saw anything weird. Parker did, and Wilson, too, after he was unsuspended. Artifacts that were supposed to have been destroyed in their time periods were mysteriously saved, replaced after whatever danger it was had passed. Artwork, jewelry, all the high-ticket items that people cared about -- preserved, somehow, usually under mysterious circumstances.

Inwardly, I wondered: Lisa?


I'm in an antique shop. It's somewhere around 1994. I've been told that this particular place, out in the western side of the city, has a particularly excellent record collection, and if I'm looking for anything pre-1940, they're the place to check, especially for live recordings.

The proprietor is nice -- he eyes my outfit (I haven't bothered to change, since the fashion in the '50s is similar to what a lot of women my age were wearing in the music scene of the 1990s), and directs me back to the records.

"Aren't you a little young for this?" he says. "Didn't realize kids still listened to records."

I smile. "It's not for me, it's for my dad. He's a big Count Basie fan, and he still listens to records."

He shrugs. "Okay. Yell if you need anything, I'll be up front."

I find a few that look promising, gather them up. There's a bunch that are missing their actual labels, have hand-written ones instead. "LIVE at..." and the name of a venue I can't quite read, the spidery handwriting faded by time or sun or both.

I pay the man at the front counter, take them back to Prime, and pop them into the record player to listen to them.

Not all of them work, but that's the risk. I didn't pay more than a dollar or two for most of them, so I can't complain.

I put in the last one -- one of the records with a handwritten label. It's Julie London, and it's not a live recording -- I can tell by the quality that it was studio. I sigh, and go to lift the arm off the record, when --

"Alicia," comes Lisa's voice, through the headphones I'm wearing. "I know you'll find this. I've been following you. I wanted you to know..."

I listen to everything she has to say, about the past, about how she's happy.

She doesn't say anything about Prime, about coming back, but I know.

"I've made it to 1921," she finishes. "It's beautiful here. You don't need music to go back. You don't. You just need to believe."

I pick the needle up off the record.

"Anything good?" asks Parker, as I walk out of the sound booth.

"Nah," I tell her. "Nothing we can use."