This was in August of 2019. A day-old newspaper reported civil wars in Somalia and Yemen. A gunman killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart. Jeffrey Epstein had taken a plea deal, promising to name names, promising to name the name.

She looked like broken comfort, an American girl approaching thirty whose safety nets had been suddenly snatched away. She was dirtier than I was, but her teeth were beautiful; all the cuts on her hands were fresh.

She said the people who were chasing her would seem aggressively unremarkable. Mostly white men, mostly bearded, with the thick torsos of aging soldiers. They would be wearing cargo pants and polo shirts. They would favor knives over guns, for silence, and to confound forensics.

My tent was one of eight beneath the overpass. I liked my neighbors. Dorothy is in the next tent over; she is schizophrenic but she is quiet, if you can ignore the whispers. Minh is addicted to heroin, and none of us speak her language; she often cries. The rest of my neighbors are simply unlucky, or undocumented, or were born in the wrong time. Back home, I completed six years of university.

She came to our block around midnight, breathless and sweating, wearing stolen shoes. She asked us to hide her, and we asked no questions.

She did not hesitate to enter my tent. She accepted me immediately as a woman. She looked at my few books. I keep things tidy, and I don’t keep much; if something goes down I intend to jump up, and fast.

We sat facing each other, cross-legged inside my tent.

She pulled from the small pocket-within-a-pocket on the right hip of her jeans a black tube of stacked octagons, like a tiny kaleidoscope.

She called it a Grothendieck Lens.

I asked her to repeat it, to spell it out. G-R-O-T-H-E-N-D-I-E-C-K.

The glassed end of the device glowed faintly, more like a tiny port window than a flashlight. She told me to look through it.

I raised the lens to my eye, and watched her clap her hands, sharply but somehow silent. There was something wrong about her motion. My stomach lurched as if from a sudden drop.

I lowered the lens, and two seconds later she clapped her hands, the exact same motion, and this time I heard the report.

I felt sick. She told me it would get easier.

“Try it again,” she said.

I looked through the lens and watched her lips move, watched her reach past the lens, toward me. I felt nothing.

I lowered the lens. She said, “It’s okay” and put a hand on my shoulder in again the same motion and this time I felt the touch.

I fell back against the nylon of the tent, unsettled in gravity, awash in some directionless vertigo.

She said the lens was tuned to not-quite five seconds into the future.

To prove it, she took the lens and watched me, predicting two seconds before I clapped, before I dropped a book, before I made donkey ears with splayed fingers and thumbs-at-temples.

I tried to break from her predictions, but my body was always already in motion by the time my mind registered the words. I felt hollow, unreal, afloat.

This was in August of 2019. A day-old newspaper reported civil wars in Somalia and Yemen. A gunman killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart. Jeffrey Epstein had been killed by a fellow prisoner who had managed to get a gun from one of the guards.

I asked her who she was and why she was showing me this.

She said the Grothendiek Lens was evidence of a program. One piece of technology secreted out of a defense contractor’s laboratory. A private company that was creating the technology for a new era of silent war, and the economy that would follow.

She said “lensing devices” were the earliest iterations of the technology. Judas holes a little way into the past or future.

“Looking is cheap,” she said. “At considerably more effort and expense, they can send information into the past.”

I asked if they could send information into the future. She said that technology had been around for thousands of years. Paper and pencil. A charred stick and a cave wall.

“It’s not an optical lens,” she said. (I wrote this all down as soon as I could, in the last throes of some belief in posterity, now of course rendered violently absurd.)

“It’s not an optical lens,” she said, again. “It’s a mathematical lens. Everything post Los Alamos proved it: Math isn’t a map for understanding the territories of the world; math is the territory.

“All this meat and metal, that’s the map. Our broken approximation of the real experience.

“Existence is numbers. Not even. It’s algorithms.

“And once science has identified a thing, it can manipulate a thing.

“It was a short hop from being able to observe the past to being able to fudge the numbers.”

Sending information into the past effected immediate change, surgical alterations of historic events.

It had no immediate effect on memory, but every piece of evidence, every record would instantaneously revise. Memory, individual and cultural, followed with terrifying alacrity. The scientists and businessmen who affected the changes were themselves required to keep and study rigorous notes in order to preserve their pre-adjusted memories of history.

The engineers of historic modification designed changes with explicitly shabby details, like the plotting of a poor storyteller, so that people would doubt the basic chain of events, rather than suspect the fundamentals of their memory.

I said it wasn’t possible. One thing changes everything. The altered sequence of events, the downstream consequences.

She said any notion of a “Butterfly Effect” was childish, a meat-based understanding of a math-based world, a primitive attempt to apply pre-quantum mechanical cause and effect. Electrons leap to a point of existence upon observation without having traveled and determine ex post-facto how they arrived there.

“I don’t know how much of our history they’ve changed already. They probably have already forgotten how much of it they’ve changed already. The memory, the record, it all adjusts to fit,” she said.

This was in August of 2019. A day-old newspaper reported civil wars in Somalia and Yemen. A gunman killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart. Jeffrey Epstein had killed himself by hanging, the whole sad process captured on security camera footage leaked to YouTube.

She had been trying to get the Grothendiek Lens to a professor, an agent of foreign intelligence. Like nuclear weapons, maybe the technology would be slightly less dangerous in the hands of multiple, adversarial governments.

She had found the professor; it had cost the lives of multiple friends and strangers.

The increasingly desperate mercenaries informed by technologies known and unknown were ever at her heels.

The professor had taken one look through the Grothendiek Lens and cursed a lost god in some foreign tongue. She watched him pull a gun from a drawer and shoot himself in the chest; it took him minutes to die.

And now here she was, tired and alone and lost. Needing to disappear, she had come for sanctuary among the city’s ubiquitous invisible.

“Why don’t they just alter history? So the lens was never stolen in the first place?”

“Maybe the theft was too long ago,” she said. “I don’t know how far back they can make changes. Maybe a gun can’t shoot itself. I don’t know.”

I asked, “Does the future always happen the way you see it through here?”

“Yes,” she said. “Or your memory alters with the past to whatever future arrives.”

She kept saying, “I don’t know.”

I asked, “Even if you do get away with it, what’s to stop them from just changing what happened? Sometime in the future?”

She spread her hands helplessly and said, “Get away with what?”

I said, “I knew it. I knew something was wrong. Something’s been wrong for a long time.”

“It only seems that way because you’re human. The future belongs to math.”

“We can change it.”

“I don’t think we can,” she said. “From here on out the future is set. Only the past is unstable.”

This was in August of 2019. A day-old newspaper reported civil wars in Somalia and Yemen. A gunman killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart. Jeffrey Epstein had killed himself by hanging, a death missed by conveniently malfunctioning security cameras, casting the entire event in doubt and suspicion.