At last the man pointed. “There.”
Travis followed his downstretched arm and fingertip and saw a medium-bright yellow star that’d just crept into the frame. At a glance there was nothing special about it. It was all but lost amid the scatter of other stars.
“Is that what I think it is?” Travis said.
Garner nodded and spoke just above a breath. “There’s not a day I don’t come to this room and look at it. I stare at that little speck, and I wonder if there’s anything left of the Ferris wheel on Navy Pier in Chicago, or the Koˉtoku-in temple in Tokyo, or Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. And I’ll never know.”
“Can you actually change things?” Travis said. “If all of you come through to 2016, do you really believe you can rewrite history? And if you can, how do you know you’ll make it better? Couldn’t the same kind of war still happen someday, for other reasons?”
It took a long time for Garner to answer. His eyes and his head slowly turned, tracking the distant pinpoint of light in the endless black. He was still watching it when he began to speak.
“I can tell you about dozens of close calls the world has scraped past, these last twelve hundred years. Any one of those could’ve ended it. Finally one did. It was a matter of time.” Far below the curved glass, the giant gas planet crept back into view. First came one horn of the lit crescent, and then the broad curve. The mostly dark mass of the thing blotted out the stars beyond it like an ink spill. “There are fundamental problems that never seem to go away,” Garner said, “no matter how advanced the world becomes. No matter what you invent. No matter what you cure. You never get rid of things like denial, in-group and out-group thinking, cognitive dissonance. The things that underlie every conflict and every war. There are always people who want to get rid of those things, and those people get smarter and more capable over the centuries—but so does everyone else: the people who don’t want those things to change. So the pattern holds.” Garner looked up at Travis. “Our arrival in your time would stand some chance of breaking the cycle. We have the interests of the whole world at heart—we know what it’s like to lose it—and we also have the knowledge and means to really change things for the better. We’re more than just well informed. We’re smarter, by a wide margin, than anyone on Earth in 2016. Our brains are physically different from yours, given what we’ve done to them. Any one of us could complete an IQ test from your side of the Breach perfectly, about as quickly as we could move the pencil.”
“But is that enough to change things forever? A few hundred of you, among a few billion?”
Travis watched Garner and saw something in his eyes, flickering beneath the conviction with which he’d just spoken. A vestige of his earlier remorse, maybe.
“No,” Garner said. “It takes more than that.”
Travis found himself speaking the word even as he thought it: “The filter.”
Garner nodded just perceptibly. “How much do you know about it?”
“Almost nothing,” Travis said.
Seconds passed. Garner looked away. “A few minutes ago you told me about a computer called the Blackbird. Alien technology that you repurposed in some other timeline. A machine that can make hyper-accurate predictions, even about random events that haven’t happened yet.”
Travis waited for him to go on.
“We found computers just like that,” Garner said, “governing the hubs of this tunnel network.” He indicated the massive planet, already slipping back out of view. “You can’t see it from here, but there’s an object the size of Long Island orbiting just above the cloud tops down there. An artificial satellite. We managed to board it soon after arriving in this system. The best we could tell, it’s a way station of some kind, connecting hundreds of these tunnels to one another. The place is filled with old electronics, some of it running down, most of it still working. There’s automated maintenance overseeing everything critical, and based on certain timers we were able to decipher, we figure the thing’s been abandoned for just over three billion years.”
Travis tried to get a sense of time on that scale, but gave it up after a few seconds.
“Huge areas of the satellite are just stores of backup supplies,” Garner said. “Including computers. We took one, brought it aboard this ship, and spent about fifty years learning everything we could about it. Learning that it does its computation by interacting with surrounding material. Large amounts of surrounding material.”