Talk about panicking. Now you can see what a thoughtless, bullshit idiot I am.

Neddy Nelson: Can you shrug off the fact that, before the rabies outbreak, the relatively younger Nighttimer community was about to outnumber the population of the Daytimers? Wouldn't a good epidemic do to Nighttimers what AIDS did in Africa? Wouldn't it devastate the political power of a rising community and preserve the existing power structures?

Galton Nye: We don't know if she's infected or not, but we're not taking our chances. We have our own health to worry about. I'm not saying her mother and I don't still love her, but the night she walked out with that so-called boyfriend of hers, our daughter was dead to us.

God bless her, but if our little girl shows up here some night, our door's staying locked.

34–What If

Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): I want to ask, you ever wonder why the dominant culture says certain stuff? I mean, really hammers on you that some stuff is absolutely, deadly impossible? For instance, what science calls the "Grandfather Paradox"? How it works out that you should never, ever even consider time travel, because you might go back in time and kill your own grandfather by accident, let's say, and then—kah-poof—you'd not exist? I mean, if you trusted in the government experts, wouldn't you be careful and never go back in time?

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): I was so little, but I remember the I-SEE-U Act shutting down the rubberneck studies—those government engineers, like my mother, crashing into each other to study the effect on traffic. I remember my mother saying who was missing from her office, and I thought she meant fired or laid off. A few more engineers each week. I asked if she'd be leaving, and she told me no. Never, she said, not without her little Echo, meaning me, and my father. She said she'd never leave us behind.

Neddy Nelson: What if this? If somebody went back and reworked the past, how would the rest of us know? Don't we only know the present reality that we know? What if reality gets reshuffled—in little, tiny ways—all the time? Or what if the people in power have already shuffled the past to get on top, and now they're telling the rest of us not to monkey around with history or we'll go back and kill our ancient ancestors and every generation after that, and then we'll never get born?

I mean, could the people who control all the money and politics ever invent a scarier warning? Didn't these same science experts used to say the earth was flat? Wasn't it really important we should stay at home and be peasants and slaves or we'd fall off the edge?

Echo Lawrence: As a little kid, I remember going to a fucking lot of funerals, mostly for people who worked with my mother. Sitting in church, my father would elbow her, saying, "This is where they really go…"

And my mother, behind her black veil, would tell him, "Not all of them…"

Behind their bedroom door, they'd argue about moving, leaving, taking off. My mother called it Reverse Pioneering, to some place where the air was clean and we'd have empty land all around us. It was a nice dream, but even to a little kid she sounded crazy. At this point in history, there was no place in the polluted, crowded world left like that.

Neddy Nelson: I want to ask you, instead of a "Granddad Paradox," I mean, what if there's a "Grandma Paradox"? I'm not saying anybody's done this, but what if somebody's gone back and screwed with their own past? Not major changes, but just stacked the deck so their present is—better? I mean, what if you found yourself a long time ago—by accident—and you met your own great-great-grandmother before it was wrong to date her? And what if she was a babe? And let's say you two hooked up? And how about she has a baby who'd be both your daughter and your great-grandmother? In the wrong, sick-minded guy, could you see where this plan might be headed? A hybrid you with superpowers? Couldn't you keep living, maybe hooking up with your next ancestor babes—your grandmother and your mom—stoking your own genetics so the future you—even the present you—was more strong, smart, crazy…some extra something?

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): No shit. I remember the big media push for everybody to get ported so we could all boost peaks. First off, stores stopped selling and renting videos and books. You couldn't get audiotapes or disks. Overnight, the entertainment industry switched to producing nothing except ports and out-corded transcripts. The real push was targeted at young adults, ranging from fourteen to forty-five. Among that demographic, not being ported was equivalent to not being able to read. Or not getting inoculated against some common disease. Or not wearing glasses if you needed them. Like you were a total cretin.

It's no coincidence that age group is the people most likely to Party Crash, to drive or ride along as part of a team. But I have to shut up. Hush. We're not supposed to talk about that.

Neddy Nelson: Jumping backward in time, wouldn't you be living alongside history, knowing what the news would be since you've already lived this part? Couldn't you be getting older, hooking up, trying to inseminate another, better generation of yourself? Buying lottery tickets and betting on horse races that always pay off?

If you lived long enough, couldn't you watch yourself be born? Couldn't you raise yourself? Be your own old man?

Echo Lawrence: Get this. Most passenger cars are crash-tested no faster than thirty-five miles per hour. The automotive industry reasons a driver will take evasive action and hit the brakes before the moment of impact. The pulse. Not my mother.

The officer at the scene reported that our car never slowed as it crossed the centerline. No skid marks proved my mom had tried to brake. While I snoozed in the backseat, she'd steered us head-on into another car. For all I know, my dad was right. But it's funny, I try to find, to meet and talk to, the engineers who worked with my parents. They'd only be in their thirties or forties by now, but they're all dead. Dead or missing. Killed in car wrecks, or just vanished.

Neddy Nelson: All I'm saying is: What if time is not the fragile butterfly wing that science experts keep saying?

What if time is more like a chain-link fence you can't hardly fuck up?

I mean, even if you fucked it up, even ten hundred times—how would you ever know? Any present moment, any "right now," we get what we get. You know?

Lynn Coffey (Journalist): Take the time to review the press releases, and the government's official statements seem to conflict with actual events. The rubberneck study wasn't suspended due to passage of the I-SEE-U Act. The study died because its chief engineers were failing to report for work. If you tally the expense reports and cross-reference them with payroll records and police statements, you'll find a pattern of wrecked government vehicles, and a significant number of the engineers driving those vehicles appeared to have fled the scene of each accident. They didn't die, but they've never been seen again.

Neddy Nelson: And by the time you were old, like creaky, fucked-up old, and you'd spermed your last version of yourself—wouldn't you get with that latest-model, young you and have a little heart-to-heart? Let's say this finely tuned new hybrid you is eighteen or nineteen years old?