Scroll down for a bonus scene from Titanic Voyage!

But first, if you have a second, it would really help me out if you’d sign up for my mailing list. I won’t email you often at all, but it’s the best way for me to let you know about any projects I have coming up (maybe a sequel?) or if I ever do any giveaways.

If you sign up through the below link, it will send you a link to download an ebook copy of the bonus scene, too!

If you can’t stand mailing lists, no worries; I’ve posted the scene below. You can also catch me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. The social media sites don’t always show everyone my posts, but I’m there!

End marketing spiel. Thanks for your patience!

I wake to what sounds like someone puking. I sit up and fumble around until I find my phone next to my pillow. I use it to turn on the LEDs in the ceiling. The light stings my eyes, but I kind of like the pain.

Two people are huddled in the middle of the floor of my lair/bedroom. A man in a suit is wearing my best VR headset, and he’s struggling with it like a dog in a cone of shame. Not a very smart dog, either. A woman in an evening gown has my second-best headset at her side. She’s the one hurling into my trash can.

I hope they’re assassins. Even kidnappers would be all right. But I doubt I’m so lucky.

I get out of bed, tug my sleeves down over my wrists to cover the scars, and go to the idiot who’s too stupid to take off a visor. “It’s a buckle,” I tell him.

The stranger fumbles behind his head and finally manages to get the rig off. He blinks, then looks around my bedroom like he’s lost. He’s pretty young for a guy in a suit. 

The woman’s still puking. The man grabs a fast-food bag from the floor and uses it for the same thing.

So two strangers snuck into my room to use my gear to play games, and now they’re going to give me some deadly plague. 

Good. I hope it’s quick.

The man looks up and his eyes go wide, like he didn’t expect to see me. “I’m—I’m not contagious. Sometimes I—I fall ill when we change history.” 

Change history? I take a step back. “Who are you? How did you get in here? We have security.”

“I—I’m Liam Peterson. You’re Rocky, right? Alistair Seymour Rochester the Fourth?”

Rocky. I haven’t let anyone call me Rocky in ages. 

The freak starts claiming that we’re friends, that we had a class together, and that we met at something called Historytown. 

He’s insane. He has to be at least five years older than me. How could we have had a class together? “Never seen you before in my life. What’s Historytown?”

“A history-themed amusement park. I work there, and your family owns it.”

What a stupid story.

He moves a little, then groans. He claims that I—or another Rocky—helped him travel through time to save the Titanic. And he goes on, talking about the Olympic and the Britannic.

I’d just been reading about ships the other day—not sure why—but the Titanic isn’t famous. They scrapped her before World War II started.

“Have you been spying on me?” I move toward my computer. “How? My PC’s locked down. Did you slip cameras in here? Or are you in league with Winston? Or the maids?”

The man protests, shaking his head. He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and hands it over.

I’m still pretty sure he’s going to give me the plague, but I take the note from him. It’s in my handwriting and it sounds almost like something I might have written back before . . . well, before. It’s addressed to me—or to someone named Rocky, anyway—and it’s signed “Love, Rocky.”

Rocky #2 tells me that I changed history through Titanic Voyage, a ride at Historytown in Eloy, Arizona. He talks about Clara Jones, says the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, and claims Liam Peterson is the key to everything. He tells me to trust Liam and do what he says.

Rocky #2 ends the letter by saying that we’re super rich in his timeline. Who cares?

But he also says that Mom and Dad and Ember are all good. That makes my breath catch in my throat.

There’s a memory card taped to the note. And on the back, Rocky #2 wrote the first twenty lines from the first complicated thing I ever coded myself. (It was a stupid text adventure game. Mom said she loved every route. Even the one where the player turns into snot.)

The woman stranger pulls her head up just long enough to have a mumbled conversation with Liam. She’s old enough to be his mom, and she looks like she’s nine-tenths of the way to turning full zombie. 

Liam introduces her as Melia Thomas, his boss, and says that she didn’t know they were changing history.

Why does he keep pretending he can rewrite the past? It’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. I glare at the two of them, then go to my PC and check the video feeds. The cameras are sensitive enough to grab images even when the lights are out, but I can’t figure out how Pukey and Pukeohontas got in. If I go through in slow-motion, they’re not in one frame and then in the next frame, they’re in my room, like a bad special effect. I don’t see where anyone tried to hack in to change the video, either.

Plus, professionals would have probably spent less time throwing up and more time stealing things or killing me or whatever.

Liam holds out his phone and asks me to look at it.

I keep back several feet and his hand’s shaking, so it takes me a little while to figure out what I’m looking at. It’s a photo of two people. One is Liam, except his face is brown instead of muddy gray. The other looks a lot like me, only fatter and with zits. He’s wearing short sleeves, and he’s smiling. 

Liam claims it’s a picture of him and me, in his time.

I grab the device. Once it’s in my hands, I realize it’s probably more germs than phone. But since I’ve already touched it, I check the metadata. It says the photo was taken two days ago in Eloy, Arizona. I check the coordinates and they point to an empty field.

If he was faking it, why wouldn’t he use a picture that looked like me?

Did he actually change history? Is there really a Rocky #2 somewhere who helped him?

Could there be a world where Mom’s all right? Where I’m happy?

There’s no way. Saving Mom after she died . . . died and worse . . . that would be a miracle, and I’m not stupid enough to believe in those. And I’d be certifiable to believe a couple of hurling strangers who randomly appeared in my room.

Still . . . what if I did trust them? The worst that can happen is that they kill me and I end up wherever Mom is.

And if there’s even a microscopic chance of changing the past and bringing her back to life . . . 

I set my system up to check in with me every few minutes. If I don’t respond, or if I scream, it’ll set off the alarm and wake the whole house. That way, if these two off me, at least they won’t get Dad or Ember, too. Then I bring the strangers some water. Not my job, but I don’t want them dying in my room. Too much cleanup.

It’s a little scary to have strangers appear out of nowhere. But you know what’s ten times more terrifying? The thought of hoping again. 

I know; I’m an idiot to even imagine that things could ever be all right. But somewhere deep inside, I still have a few shreds of my soul left, and something in them wants to believe.

“All right,” I say. “What do you mean, we saved the Titanic?”