I.

One hundred and eighty days. Today was it—the longest Annie had ever managed to stay at one job. The last time she had texted Charlie, it was to tell her “Charlie” was the name of a bomb and “Annie” was the name of another—this hadn’t gone as well as she had hoped. Now she had another excuse to reach out, after work. It was as if the morning, the same as it ever was here in the desert, had been painted with a brighter palette. Acrylics instead of oils.

Mercury Base Camp in southern Nevada was nearly as dry and barren as its namesake, its surrounding constellation of craters just as alien. Annie pretended to be an astronaut, to make her coworkers laugh on the way to the bus, moving as if she was trying to keep from floating off the cracked dirt. Their janitorial crew uniforms looked a lot like twentieth century astronauts’ suits, with their bubble helmets and radiation seals. Might as well use that School of Physical Theatre certificate for something, if Charlie wasn’t gonna forgive her for “running away to join the mimes” before she ended up here.

This area had actually been used for a forgettable sci-fi movie set once, when the Department of Energy sold it off in the 2060s during the Great Privatization. Now the former Nevada Proving Grounds was one-third tourist trap in the south, two-thirds inaccessible game reserve in the north.

How changes had timed—no, how times had changed. Annie was starting to feel her breakfast cocktail of cannabinoids and proprietary synthetics. Only job she’d ever had where being high all the time was a prerequisite, instead of getting her written up by a manager. She had started as a prep cook in the historically accurate mess hall at base camp, but now she was a “Canary.”

“This area was picked for nuclear testing because it’s one of the most inhospitable places in the continental U.S.,” Colette the tour guide’s voice blared from the upper level of the bus, where cushiony lounge chairs were set up with built-in cocktail tables. “Our air-conditioned tour bus notwithstanding.” The usual polite laughter bubbled up from the crowd.

“And because of the sheer number of atoms split here,” Annie recited in tandem below, from the crew deck of the double-decker, “it’s also the easiest place in the U.S. to open a time portal.”

“You’re well on your way to stealing her job,” Lars said from the too-narrow seat next to her, where he was trying unsuccessfully to keep his elbows to himself.

“Nah, my fake Texas accent isn’t good enough,” Annie said, but she hadn’t memorized the tour guide spiel out of ambition. She had memorized it to monitor her own inebriation. Every day, she made it a little further into the tour before her voice began to lag behind the movement of her lips.

“There’s your house.” Lars nodded towards the wooden structure with blown out windows in the distance, as he always did. Lars was the kind of guy who couldn’t drive past cows in the countryside without counting each one aloud. He sounded different today though—like he was saying it dutifully, without really wanting to. Like their little joke had become a ritual whose meaning was lost to time.

The house had been part of Operation Doorstep in 1953. It had been fully furnished by Montgomery Ward and posed with J.C. Penney mannequins, when an atom bomb called “Annie” was detonated 7,500 feet away, in the name of progress.

“Product placements were somethin’ else in the 1950s,” Annie recited as Colette pointed out her house to the tourists above. Of course, an irradiated house without windows was more than Annie could hope to afford.

II.

Annie raised her arms as one of the Area 5 portal attendants ran a wand over her suit to scan for weapons. The tourists of the day marveled at the shimmering wall in the middle of the desert, surrounded by food vendors, souvenir stands, and stunted sagebrush.

To Annie, it looked like rain running down an eight-foot-diameter porthole window. The sort of heavy rain that obscures what’s on the other side, reducing it to an abstract assemblage of colors. Like a Rothko painting. Annie had briefly majored in Art History, before dropping out of college two semesters in.

Every crater in the pockmarked earth around them was a portal of possibilities. Some weak, some strong, some too small for a human to pass through, some too large to control. Some just right, like this one.

“Do y’all hear that annoying low hum?” Colette waved her megaphone towards a series of enormous speakers on either side of the porthole, while a uniformed attendant collected waiver forms from her audience. “That’s the frequency we use to keep the portal open. Don’t worry, there will be music on the other side, so you won’t notice it as much.”

As many times as she had been across, Annie still liked to watch the tourists’ reactions to the change in scenery, while their guide explained that the cement domes and mangled metal structures were gone because they haven’t been built yet. Hadn’t been built yet. Annie was beginning to confuse her tenses.

She wished she could bring Charlie here and watch her face light up, seeing it all for the first time. Charlie would pretend to be unimpressed, she would groan at the corny consumerism, but even she would gasp despite herself, on the other side.

“We’re standing on the site of one of 928 nuclear tests carried out at the Nevada Proving Grounds.” Colette gestured at the surrounding sand and scrub, like someone in a retro commercial bringing attention to the latest refrigerator model. “This spot will provide a good view of today’s blast in 1952, to the north of us in Area 7. Don’t worry—what you can’t see is the twenty-foot protective dome constructed around us.”

The construction crews worked in the middle of the night and slept during the day, so Annie rarely encountered them. The dome had to be disassembled and reassembled for each tour, and she was part of the destruction crew, as they called themselves.

In the center of the invisible dome, an Art Deco-style bar on wheels held silver trays of champagne flutes and bottles protruding from buckets of ice. Not the right time period, Art Deco, but most tourists didn’t care as long as it was twentieth century. Red checkered picnic blankets and white throw pillows were spread across the ground, where a material that looked like dull aluminum foil covered the dirt in a twenty-foot circle.

On a wooden console next to the bar, a hand-crank record player—another anachronism—played a tinny tune. At least the song was true to the time. A jangly, cheerful 1952 recording of “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” by Les Paul and Mary Ford.

Next to Annie, Lars coughed into his sleeve out of habit, knocking his helmet into it.

“You okay?” Annie asked, and he nodded, but his face looked paler than usual beneath its protective bubble of Space Age plastic, now sprayed with droplets of saliva.

“Beautiful day for it,” Lars said weakly when his coughing fit had subsided.

It was a beautiful day. It was always a beautiful day on April 22, 1952. The sky above the bomb-bleached Great Basin was cloudless and blue. As blue as one of the Atomic Martinis in the tourist bar. As blue as “Blue Lovers” by Marc Chagall. As blue as Charlie’s contact lenses.

Colette handed out dark goggles to the tourists, made to look like the primitive ones worn by journalists who had watched bombs explode from a few miles away.

Most of the tourists had dressed up in 1950s style summer suits and dresses, popular in the Vegas boutiques an hour away, where they had all been shuttled from on a day trip. Lots of white linen and pastel chiffons. They wouldn’t be leaving the comfort of the dome, so there was no need for the less flattering protective suits worn by the disassembly crew. Colette was dressed in clothing from the era as well, a form-fitting blue wiggle skirt and matching peplum blazer.

“You’re not supposed to monitor Colette’s ass,” Lars teased, and Annie stuck her tongue out at him.

Lars’s voice and his lips were out of sync, like a badly dubbed kung fu film from a hundred years ago. It took all of Annie’s willpower not to giggle every time someone spoke. She was the only one seeing things this way, by design—it wasn’t like passing a bong around in high school. So, she had to maintain a semblance of professionalism.

As a Canary, it was Annie’s job to monitor any changes inside the dome. Whatever they gave her, it disrupted parts of her brain involved in the perception of time. Annie had never had a great perception of it to begin with—something about “reduced activation” in her prefrontal cortex, from a childhood skateboard injury—and this allegedly made her a good candidate. When your temporal awareness was more bendy than the average person’s, it was easier to become chemically “unstuck in time.”

If something was to happen with their expedition here—a leakage into the past that would change the future—Annie would be the only one to notice. For everyone else, things would seem to be exactly as they always had been.

The bartender, in his silly black bow tie and white rolled sleeves, started filling flutes of champagne, while the tourists chose their seats and Colette told them which direction to face.

Annie’s eyes darted around the dome interior, taking note of each detail while trying not to draw attention to herself. To the tourists, she was just a member of the janitorial crew. She liked to think of herself as a secret agent, or a U.S. Marshall on an airplane flight.

Static hissed from the record console as the Les Paul song ended. Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Colette switched the single out and dropped the needle on “The Little White Cloud that Cried” by Johnnie Ray, while the bartender strolled through the dome, handing out flutes of expensive bubbly.

Colette glanced at a reproduction watch with a slim leather band on her wrist. “When this song is over, a B-50 bomber will drop a thirty-one kiloton nuclear payload. This is almost twice as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. So, y’all are in for quite a show today!”

Annie couldn’t imagine being able to say this with so much enthusiasm. The museum at Base Camp had black and white photos of the nuclear aftermath in Japan. When Annie looked at them, she still saw the effects of a rip in the fabric of reality, separating everything before from everything that would come after.

But each detonation, each tear, had also formed a connection.

Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha … thump.

“There’s our B-50 bomber … That … tiny … speck.” Each word was dragged out longer than Colette’s usual drawl, as the second stage of Annie’s psychedelic cocktail kicked in.

Colette pointed northwest and pulled her goggles on, instructing the tourists to do the same. Each movement was excruciating to Annie’s eyes, like the dome was a bundt pan full of clear gelatin, and they were struggling to push through it while Annie moved at a normal pace.

Lars lowered the sunshield on his helmet, and Annie hesitated. She always held off for as long as she could, feeling like she needed to bear witness.

Miles away from the dome, in four-foot-deep trenches at Yucca Flat, fifteen hundred soldiers crouched, waiting to simulate warfare on a radioactive battlefield.

In the VIP viewing zone of “News Nob,” hundreds of journalists and cameramen poised for the first nuclear blast to be broadcast live on TV.

“Bombs away!” Colette called, holding up her champagne flute, “And five … four …”

Annie lowered her sunshield.

For a moment, the whole world was white. Everything was gone. The desert, the hills, the sky, the tourists, her own gloved hand in front of her face. There was only the blast named Charlie, “fifty times brighter than the sun.”

And silence. She never got used to the silence of a nuclear detonation.

It was like she was in between worlds, in a void, waiting to be reborn. She wondered if it looked like this to an infant, being pushed out of the darkness of the womb and into the fluorescent lights of a delivery room.

Annie raised her helmet’s sunshield after the white light retreated into itself, and Colette informed the tourists they could take their goggles off. Next to her, Lars had another coughing fit, muffled by his helmet.

Annie wasn’t supposed to watch the bomb. The bomb never changed. Annie was supposed to watch the people watching the bomb.

She stole a glance at it anyway, as she always did. With the world slowed down, she could see the separation of the roiling cloud in the sky and the one on the ground below it, reaching out to each other like God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Then meeting to form an enormous brain and its stem.

“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” Lars said softly. Somebody always said it, but it was usually one of the tourists.

“Real original,” a man in an antique fedora muttered, then turned to their tour guide. “How do we know this is real, and you’re not just projecting footage inside the dome?”

Colette looked at her watch again. “Because we’re about to feel the shockwave in four … three … two … one.”

A booming crack tore through the eerie silence in the bomb’s wake, a sound like a limb being ripped from some unimaginably monstrous tree.

The ground beneath them shifted with a jolt. Champagne flutes sloshed in slow motion. Shrubs in the distance were flattened to the dirt, bouncing back into position as the dust cloud passed.

“Yee-haw!” a woman in a yellow dress shouted, and the other tourists laughed. Had she been wearing a different shade of yellow earlier? No, Annie’s eyes were still recovering from the blast.

“You see that dense gray cloud, covering the surface at ground zero?” Colette asked. “That’s the size of Manhattan.”

Annie tried to think of other things that were the size of Manhattan, then shook away the distraction. The more times she repeated this tour, the harder it was to keep her mind from wandering.

Colette pointed out the white cap of ice that had formed on the mushroom cloud, now flattened into a shape that reminded Annie of a crab. Things Keep Evolving into Crabs, Annie recalled from some clickbait pop-science headline, before willing herself to focus again.

“Ten years from now, the last atmospheric test will take place in 1962,” Colette recited while the bartender collected empty champagne flutes, “due to a treaty that bans nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. But underground testing will continue here for forty more years.”

“And that concludes our viewing of Shot Charlie,” Annie mouthed in unison with Colette, “otherwise known as Operation Big Shot.”

III.

Colette and the bartender herded the tipsy tourists back through the portal, leaving the “destruction crew” alone in 1952.

“Now we are become death, destroyer of domes,” Annie said, as she always did, but Lars failed to laugh this time.

Annie started picking up and sorting the revelers’ trash, while Lars gathered picnic blankets and pillows, and the new guy wheeled the bar and console across the portal, returning a few minutes later for the linens and garbage.

Someone had discarded their goggles on the ground, rather than take them home as a souvenir. Annie popped one of the shaded lenses out while Lars and the new guy were tossing bags through the portal. She hid the lens in her toolbox before handing them her assortment of recycling.

When the new guy had vanished into their time again, Annie showed Lars her other treasure—a crumpled piece of paper she had tucked into her belt.

Don’t invest in your college buddy Darren’s startup, it read.

There was always a tourist who tried to leave a note for their future selves, without thinking through the logistics of it.

Lars let out a single huff of disdain, and Annie stashed the paper in her box with the goggle lens. She would tack the note up on the wall of her bunk later, with the rest she had collected.

With the dome now empty, Annie and Lars began to disassemble it and stack the pieces in crates for decontamination. The outer shell of the dome was a mirrored material that reflected its desert surroundings. Like their radiation suits, it was made to deflect the surveillance technology of the time. What would have happened, Annie wondered, if this tech had been available in 1952? Would the Cold War have ended earlier, or would it have dragged on even longer? The second possibility was too chilling for her to consider it further.

“You know this is all for show, right?” Lars asked, bringing Annie back to the present.

No, the past. Back to the past. “What do you mean?”

“We can’t change the past,” Lars said, gesturing at the horizon, where the sky disguised a more subtle menace as the mushroom cloud dispersed. “They don’t want us to know that. So, here we are, pretending to protect the future.”

Annie had never seen this side of Lars before. She supposed she hadn’t seen many sides of Lars at all—she hadn’t allowed herself to settle in that way here, despite it being her longest job posting so far. “Well, at least they give us a paycheck,” she said, not wanting to encourage him. She didn’t want to find out if he believed the Earth was flat, too.

“Time is like a hamster wheel,” Lars said, drawing a circle in the air. “We think we’re going somewhere, only to end up where we started.”

This, Annie couldn’t accept. “No, it’s more like one of those modular tunnels for guinea pigs, that you can attach more tunnels to. Branching off in every direction, endlessly.”

That wasn’t quite right either, but she liked the sound of it. She had worked in a pet store once, for two weeks.

Lars knelt in the chalky sand and pulled back the edge of the tape seal on his boots.

“I don’t think you should do that,” Annie said, but Lars plucked something small and round from under the tape.

“You see this marble?” He held it up against the now hazy sky. It was clear glass, with a little pink mushroom cloud inside it. “My great-great-grandfather gave it to his son, who gave it to his daughter, and eventually it was passed on to me.”

“Wherever you’re going with this, Lars, I’m too high for it,” Annie said, watching a lizard scurry across the sand in slow motion, as a flurry of white ash drifted down from the traveling cloud. They were far enough from the blast that the poor creature was probably just a bit radioactive, but otherwise unscathed.

Little lizard caught in a blizzard,

In a …

A blizzard conjured up by wizards.

“My great-great-grandfather was a soldier stationed here,” Lars went on, interrupting Annie’s impromptu nursery rhyme. “What if this is where he found the marble, because I left it here in 1952?”

“Come on, Lars.” Annie stacked another triangular piece of the dome in a crate, trying to remind him—and herself—of the job they needed to finish before the portal collapsed. He was usually the one who kept her on task.

Lars wasn’t finished. “So, he passes it on to his son, who passes it on to his daughter, and it makes its way to me.” He took Annie’s gloved hand and put the marble in her palm, his face uncharacteristically grim as his eyes met hers. “So, where did the marble come from?”

Annie gave it back to him. “That’s a trick question. A causal loop isn’t possible.”

“God.” Lars held the marble up to the sky again. “The only answer to the paradox is God. He—or she, or they, or it—is the missing creator of the thing caught in the loop.”

“I thought you weren’t religious,” Annie said, taken aback. That was one of the first things she had learned about Lars—his disinterest in spiritualism. One of the few things she had learned about him. “Why are you so interested in God all of a sudden?”

“My great-great-grandfather, he died of a rare type of leukemia,” Lars said, rolling the marble between his gloves while avoiding Annie’s gaze. “So many downwinders did, around these parts. And now I’ve got it—”

“Oh, Lars, I’m so sorry.” Annie cautiously put a hand on his shoulder, not knowing what to do. It was one of the most infuriating ironies of the modern world—that humans could now travel back in time, but there was no cure for certain cancers.

If only they could travel forward, bring back a cure from the future—but they had only been able to open bridges to the past, from their time.

“They tell us there’s no danger from time travel—from crossing the portals too many times,” Lars said. “But they lie, just like the military lied back then. The first nuclear tests here, the secret ones—people in nearby towns thought the fallout was snow. Kids were playing in it.”

Little lizard caught in a blizzard, Annie repeated, like a spell to banish the image in her mind of children playing in nuclear fallout.

“You haven’t been here as long as I have,” Lars said, “and I don’t recommend staying much longer, if you can help it. It’s too late for me.”

Annie gave him a solemn nod. She didn’t know how to comfort him, and they were behind schedule, which could leave them both crossing an unstable portal. She did the only thing she could—pretending not to notice when Lars hid his marble under a fist-sized rock a few minutes later.

When the last crate was full, Lars and the new guy hauled them back through the portal, and Annie was finally alone.

She took one more look at the painted hills surrounding the desert basin, their color blanched by the dust still settling in the distance. Somewhere nearby, a group of sage grouse—locally extinct in her time—called to each other in their strange gurgles and pops, like liquids bubbling in some mad scientist’s lab.

Annie knelt to pick up the marble Lars had hidden. Another lizard watched her from its sandstone perch, doing lizard push-ups.

She partially buried the lens from the tourist’s goggles in the sand, before turning to walk through the shimmering window into her time.

Lars was chatting with the new guy next to the porthole, their helmets under their arms, sweat beading up on their faces in the late-twenty-first-century heat.

Sweat beading up on their faces.

Where Lars had been bare as a baby, he now had a thick, glorious ginger mustache.

Annie’s heart tried to climb out of her chest. She did her best not to stare.

Hands shaking, she joined her crewmates and surreptitiously dropped the marble next to Lars’s boot.

“What’s that?” the new guy asked, pointing at the little piece of glass as his shadow changed position and the sun glinted off it.

Lars looked at the marble, then at the unstuck tape seal on his boot, and his lip twitched into a resigned smile. “A test,” he said, picking up the little pink mushroom cloud in its glass enclosure, then holding it up to the clear blue sky. “I had a feeling it would find its way back to me. We can’t really leave things in the past.”

Annie let her jaw relax. Her entire body felt like a knot that had just been unwound. She didn’t want Lars to go back and look for the damn marble. She wanted him to leave this place behind. To be at peace.

She didn’t want him to know there was no hamster wheel, only chaos.

“Any changes to report?” the portal attendant asked Annie in her usual monotone, looking bored. “Please be sure to note any detail that was off, no matter how insignificant it may seem.”

“Nothing,” Annie said, as she always did.

She had only left small things. A souvenir pen, an iridescent beetle carcass, a copper “Moscow mule” cup from the bar, a tiny bottle of sand from their time. Things like that. Nothing too technologically advanced.

The changes were small things too, as far as she could tell, and none of them predictable. The font on a champagne label. The band on Colette’s watch. The number of bullet holes in the sign for Mercury, Nevada.

A ginger mustache.

But one thing was always the same, so far.

Hey, Operation Big Shot, she texted Charlie from her bunk that night, I made it to 180 days here!

Stop calling me that, Charlie texted back after what felt like a strategic pause, then, You must be getting antsy after 6 whole months

I miss you, Charlie

Sure you do. You’d be right back out the door again if I let you back in

I know. I know you’re right

Why do you keep contacting me, Annie?

I was hoping you’d be wrong, this time. That I’d be different.

Annie unfolded the tourist’s note and tacked it up with the rest, next to the note for herself that was still where she had left it 180 days ago.

WHENEVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE.

She couldn’t leave this place. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t go back to Charlie. There were too many possibilities in each crater, out here in the Nevada desert.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Morgan Braid

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors