“What’s that?” Charlayne pointed to a small star in the margin. I shrugged and tapped the symbol once with the stylus. Nothing. I tapped twice, and then a small information window opened on top of the handwritten page:
Infanta Eulalia (1864–1958): Daughter of Queen Isabella of Spain and Francis, Duke of Cadiz. Full name: Maria Eulalia Francisca de Asis Margarita Roberta Isabel Francisca de Paula Cristina Maria de la Piedad. Expressed progressive views on women’s rights in her later writings. Caution: Infanta’s visit will ruffle feathers of Chicago society. Was often found eating bratwurst or smoking a cigarette at German Pavilion when scheduled to attend official functions. Spouse found most evenings on the Midway Plaisance.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Charlayne said when we’d finished reading the entry. “If Katherine had the answer here, why did she make a background request?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she added it later?” I closed the pop-up window and we returned to reading the diary entry.
I am spending the afternoon at the Woman’s Pavilion where the World’s Congress of Representative Women is scheduled to begin its session. The Woman’s Pavilion is viewed as something of a wonder in itself—it was designed by a female architect, Sophia Hayden. Saul may attend later in the day, as there are scheduled speeches on the topic of women in the ministry, but he will spend most of his day at the other end of the fairgrounds, attending a planning meeting for September’s Parliament of the World’s Religions.
P.M.
Saw only a few activists; either have not arrived or (wisely) opted to skip this session. The welcome addresses were even longer in person than they seemed in print. I thought the introductions of the various foreign dignitaries would never end.
Submitting speeches and crowd view of Midway Plaisance.
CHRONOS File KS04012305_05151893_1 uploaded.
CHRONOS File KS04012305_05151893_2 uploaded.
Personal File KS04012305_1 saved.
I tried tapping each entry with the stylus, but there was no reaction and no little symbols appeared in the margins. “If the files are linked, I can’t figure out how to open them. I’ll have to ask Katherine later, I guess.”
“The second set of numbers…” Charlayne pointed at the file names. “Those are the date of the entry, right? May 15th, 1893.”
I turned a few pages and clicked the top, scanning quickly through the entries. Each of the pages that had been used contained the entries for an entire year. Most of the entries contained a CHRONOS file upload, and the last numbers always corresponded to the date. There were usually several sets of daily entries and then a gap of a month or so. Most were written in Chicago. The last two were from New York, on April 21st, 1899, and San Francisco, on April 24th, 1899.
“The KS must be her initials,” Charlayne said. “And… the first group of numbers also follows the format for dates, but…” She reached out for the diary and I gave it to her, along with the little stylus.
After a few seconds, a frown creased her forehead. “It’s not working.”
She pulled the stylus along the edge of a page, just as I had done, but the text didn’t move. It looked like a static page of handwritten text. “Maybe there’s a dead battery or something?” she asked.
I took the book from her and slid the stylus along the margin and, once again, the page shifted.
Charlayne looked a bit annoyed that she couldn’t make the diary work, but she shrugged. “Maybe it’s just sensitive—like the touch pad on my brother’s laptop. That never works for me, either.”
I scanned back through the entries, and Charlayne was right about the dates. The first two digits for each entry were always 01 through 12, and the second two digits were always between 01 and 31. “So we seem to have someone trying to blend in with the crowd in the 1890s by disguising a high-tech device as a handwritten diary. And we have two sets of dates, one from the past and one from the future. If we’re reading this correctly, and if this isn’t some elaborate forgery, this would suggest that these are entries about the 1890s recorded by someone in 2304 and 2305.”
Charlayne nodded. “If this isn’t some sort of elaborate forgery, then yes. I’m not ruling out elaborate forgery, however.”
I gave her a tight smile. “You weren’t on the train today. Those two guys just vanished.”
“Are you sure you didn’t just scare them off with the Ice Princess stare, like you did Nolan?”
I tossed a pillow at her head and she ducked, laughing. Nolan, a friend of Charlayne’s brother, was the victim in her most recent attempt to fix my love life. Nice guy, really cute, with nothing in his head other than soccer. I could have been friendlier, in retrospect, but I didn’t see the point in leading him on, especially when it was clear by the time we’d finished our pizza that Nolan and I were a total mismatch.