Anomaly Summary
Chapter 1
Gaspery finds a copy of Marienbad in the prison library and mulls over a line from the text that the author pulled from Shakespeare: “Is this the promised end?”
Chapter 2
“No star burns forever,” the text repeats.
Chapter 3
Gaspery turns sixty in prison and is transferred to the prison hospital for heart trouble. He can no longer see the moon and takes to replaying vignettes from his memories as though they were little movies on repeat.
Hearing his name and feeling a sharp pain in his arm, Gaspery is startled and finds a hand over his mouth. It’s Zoey, now in her early forties and wearing a nurse’s uniform. As she cuts the tracker from his arm, she tells him to put a second one under his tongue.
Chapter 4
The two materialize in a different location, and Zoey tells Gaspery they’re on a farm outside Oklahoma City in the year 2172. She has paid off the owners, and he can stay there indefinitely.
Zoey was arrested the day Gaspery was sent to Ohio to be framed, she reveals, but her high status with the Time Institute was enough to afford her some leniency. Instead of being lost in time, she spent a year in prison before immigrating to the Far Colonies. The Time Institute doesn’t know everything, she confides, telling him there is a functional time machine somewhere in the colonies as well.
Gaspery thanks her, and she tells him she established a paper trail to solidify his new identity. He should make himself at home and introduce himself to the neighbors. She hugs him and then disappears. Gaspery looks out his new window to see fields of green, a beautiful blue sky, and the spires of Oklahoma City off in the far distance.
Chapter 5
The farm owners, a couple in their eighties named Clara and Mariam, are welcoming and kind and highly protective of Gaspery’s privacy. At his request, they help him quietly undergo cosmetic surgery to change his appearance to evade facial recognition.
Chapter 6
In a closet at the farmhouse, Gaspery finds a violin that used to be Mariam’s. The women arrange lessons for him with a neighbor, insisting that she arrived in “much the same manner as you.” Realizing that Zoey had been quietly encouraging him to go make a friend, he is shocked to see a familiar face when he arrives for his lesson: Talia, now going by Lina.
Chapter 7
Talia tells Gaspery that Zoey had rescued her, too, just after she had gotten out of prison and before the Time Institute had time to bring her in for leaking classified information. They had gone to the Far Colonies together until Zoey could safely relocate her. The colonies are beautiful, Talia tells Gaspery, but she didn’t care for living underground.
Chapter 8
Gaspery and Talia are soon married, and Clara and Mariam leave the farm to them when they die. The two live a happy, tranquil life on the farm together, playing violin, cooking, tending to the farm robots, and watching the distant airships rise over Oklahoma City. If it turns out life is a simulation, Gaspery realizes, he’s not sure he cares—this is still a life.
Chapter 9
Gaspery realizes that a countdown of sorts has begun: by 2195, he will be playing the violin in the airship terminal after the death of his beloved wife.
Chapter 10
Talia dies quietly of an aneurysm in her sleep at age seventy-five.
Chapter 11
Gaspery spends evenings on the porch by himself for a while, realizing that without Talia,...
(This entire section contains 908 words.)
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he is ready to be around other people again.
Chapter 12
Gaspery thinks about the nature of the anomaly. How remarkable, he notes, that nobody at the Time Institute realized that he himself was the anomaly’s trigger. Zoey’s new identity paperwork had been so comprehensive that nobody had noticed he had interviewed himself under the assumed name Alan Sami.
Heading to the airship terminal armed with advance knowledge of the immediate future, Gaspery takes out his violin and begins to play. He sees Olive Llewellyn walking along the corridor, and a younger version of himself nervously stepping out of a closet about to conduct his first interview. The world around him begins to ripple somewhat as the anomaly draws all iterations of Gaspery Roberts together: the one standing with Edwin St. Andrew on Caiette, the one hiding near Vincent Smith in the same location decades later, and the two in the air terminal with Olive Llewellyn. All this time, he realizes, it has been happening because of him.
The anomaly dissolves as the younger Gaspery, noticing nothing, walks up and introduces himself to the older one.
Chapter 13
Gaspery wryly answers the questions posed by his younger self, peppering his answers with things that he knows will keep the younger man off-balance: questions about his accent, which he knows he once felt insecure about, and references to Shakespeare, which he knows he hasn’t read yet.
He tells him about his wife and his life on the farm and that he moved to the city when his wife died, but he doesn’t tell him the rest: that the loneliness of life on the farm without her was all-encompassing, and he felt he might disappear. That now, in the city, he likes to walk the dog slowly amid the rush—he has moved too fast and traveled too much for a lifetime.
