OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)

Chapter 05: My Wedding Reception (Lillabit)

So. I promised to explain the time-slipping process that I'd recently rejected in favor of marital... of marriage.

As I understand it, the difference between time travel and time slipping is that time travel uses a powerful vehicle--like, say... a souped up DeLorean, or a blue police box. In contrast, time slipping uses the power of the mind, like Dorothy wishing herself home from Oz to Kansas.

The ruby slippers didn't go with her, remember?

Mind you, I'm not an expert, not in any of this. Working as a client relations facilitator, I'd honestly thought the company that employed me, A Closer Look, was all about immersive multi-media, once called virtual reality. I never would have discovered their top-secret, paradigm-shifting research if I hadn't targeted one of their higher-ups, Everett Heard, with a sexual harassment suit for creating a hostile work environment. Rather than risk exposing someone who could do so much damage to them--Everett and, through Everett, me--the company had used both of us as temporal guinea pigs.

Even then, my brain had taken a week of 1878 to catch up to what had happened to me. Once I found him in Dodge City, Everett had filled me in on the basics, including the presence of other time travelers. Later, after his murder, I pretended to leave Dodge to go back east. Instead, I'd traveled by cattle drive to the others' field office in Julesburg, in the aforementioned Colorado hunting lodge.

It was in Julesburg that the real experts--Maddie, Mitch, and Ted--had tried to explain temporal inertia, determinism, self-consistency, and Einstein. I hadn't understood half of it. But I'd gotten the gist:

One? You can't change the past, so don't sweat the whole butterfly effect business. Apparently, time was more like a rushing river than a still pond, when it comes to analogies about throwing pebbles.

Two? We'd thought ourselves back in time... just with an assist.

We called ourselves "castaways" after an old TV show. Because being in the past was similar to being on a deserted island. But I was the only one among us, besides the late Everett, who'd been literally cast away.

My colleagues had trained and practiced to eventually slip willingly into the past, to set up their field office and observe for a year. They'd used grassy aromatherapy, virtual-reality visors programmed with 1878 photographs, and surround-sound recordings of nature to manifest their destination. Even with all that technological help, only three of the six who'd tried had either made it or managed to anchor here more than few hours once they arrived. Apparently, it's very easy to slip right back home, because home is so real to us. The old West? Not so much.

Like jetlag on steroids.

In order to anchor, they'd had to meditate and visualize like new-age workaholics until the 1870s became real too. And that, they told me, was how we would "slip" back home when the time came: meditation and visualization.

Also, mantras. We had some pretty good mantras to chant.

By this reasoning, what had happened to me and Everett shouldn't have worked. To manage something as enormous as willing oneself through time, one needed to at least want it, right?

Turns out being chained to a metal table, drugged, and denied food and water and God knows what else? It can make one want anything else very, very much. That's how Jacob had found me, naked and robbed of my memory by the trauma. I'd gone a week thinking I must belong here. By the time I'd learned differently, I was pregnant. And only after finding my own people, the other castaways, had I come to realize I wanted to stay. Here. Forever.