Checking Out- The Complete Trilogy

by T W M Ashford

  ‘George?’

  ‘Hmm?’ I responded, tearing my eyes from the view outside. My head had started to pound.

  ‘I asked you, how did you come to be in Port Iridium anyway?’ said Pierre. ‘You’re a few trillion miles and about six thousand years off-course, by my reckoning.’

  I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose.

  ‘How long has it been since I left the hotel?’ I asked. ‘For you, I mean.’

  Pierre gave this question due thought. ‘A couple of months,’ he replied. ‘Maybe a little more. How long for you?’

  ‘Three days,’ I said, laughing. ‘I tried calling you at a time closer to the day I left, but clearly I’m not as good with inter-dimensional payphones as I hoped. Oh well. You’re here now.’

  ‘So what happened after you left Le Petit Monde?’

  ‘I found them,’ I said, bowing my head and playing with the tassels of my black scarf. All of a sudden I found it terribly hard to swallow. ‘I… well, I found them. After everything that happened at the hotel, after… after accidentally killing that other version of me instead of myself… well, I went after my wife and son. I knew that my Chloe and my Sam were dead. But I also knew that another version of them was just another world away.

  ‘I went to the Scottish service station we stopped at, back on the night they died. The night they died, and I didn’t. Stopping for Chloe’s nicotine patches and Sam’s chocolate buttons was the last thing we did before the car spun out on that damn black ice. I don’t know if that version of Chloe and Sam would have died in the accident. I don’t know if the accident would have happened at all. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to let it happen to them too.

  ‘Another version of me - their version of me - came into the garage. I managed to get across the forecourt and into the car without being seen, and… and I took his place. I reset my life from that point onwards. Their reality was close enough to my own that neither Chloe or Sam could tell the difference. I put their car in gear and drove away, leaving their George back in the service station.’

  ‘Jesus, George,’ said Pierre, grimacing. ‘That’s awful. I’m sorry, but it really is. It’s terrible. It’s… well, it’s kidnapping.’

  ‘I know. And it didn’t take me long to work that out myself, either. At first I couldn’t get over the fact that my wife and child were alive - actually alive! To talk to them, to hear their voices… to reach out and actually touch them. I couldn’t believe it. Even after everything I’ve now seen, I still can’t. Not really. And that’s probably because it’s not really true, is it? They weren’t mine. They were copies. Flawless copies, but copies all the same.

  ‘I realised as much when we got to the hotel. I kept them alive down those icy roads - when I think back on what I did, of that much I can be proud at least. The first pang of guilt - real, deep guilt - came when I was checking in, giving my name. George Webber. Even as I said it out loud I knew it wasn’t mine. It was his. His name wrapped in the fleece of my own. I was an imposter, you know? Like… like an actor, performing on a stage made of mirrors. But I was swallowed that guilt down. It was a price worth paying… or so I made myself believe.

  ‘Still, it didn’t take long for that guilt to creep back up. It came back hot and sticky and rank. And the second time there was no stopping it. Literally.

  ‘That was after I carried our bags up the staircase to our room. Chloe kissed me. The first time I’d kissed her was when I got into the car on the garage forecourt - the first time I’d kissed my wife since they day she died. It was indescribable. It was perfect. But that second time, when she kissed me… God, it wasn’t right. It wasn’t just like tricking a woman into cheating on her husband - which is precisely what I then realised I was doing - but it was like cheating on my own wife, too. I know, Pierre. I know. My Chloe is gone. But that’s just it - it was like cheating on the memory of her. Like I was tarnishing it, somehow. Scribbling over an old, cherished photograph in permanent marker. I kept my smile up long enough to make it to the bathroom, long enough to lock the door behind me, and then I threw up. The bleak reality of what I’d done came flooding in.’

  ‘So you left?’ asked Pierre.

  ‘You’re damn right I did. I didn’t even come out of the bathroom before I jumped universe. I was scared that if I dared open the door, if I chanced a look upon their pair of beautiful, happy faces, I might never walk away. I might bury that guilt deeper than my soul could ever reach. The key you gave me still sat heavy in my pocket, and I savoured its weight in my hand for a long while before I could muster the courage to slip it into the keyhole of the bathroom door. All the while Chloe’s voice was asking if I was okay from the other side, like a siren beckoning me toward the rocks. I didn’t stop to decide where I wanted to go - I just knew I had to go somewhere, anywhere but there. Somewhere that at least approached the truth. I turned the key, opened the door, and stepped through.’

  ‘And you came here?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I laughed. ‘If only I’d been so lucky. No, I had to hop between quite a few universes before I came to anywhere safe enough to stop. Or one that had advanced enough technology for me to get hold of you, at least. I spent quite an eventful afternoon in the Italian Renaissance, if you must know.’

  Pierre leant forward and took a swig from his drink. I could hear it fizz on the way down his gullet.

  ‘What do you think happened to them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The other Chloe and Sam. The ones you stole from that world’s George.’

  I let that question sit with me for a moment, swishing it about my head as if it were a fine wine.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, eventually. ‘I’d like to think that their universe’s George went on to the hotel, on the chance they might have gone there. Or that he’d have called the police to report a kidnapping and then they would have checked the hotel, and found them safe and sound. I hope I didn’t do too much damage.’

  ‘Going to be hard for Chloe to explain how her husband managed to get from behind the locked door of their hotel bathroom to back at the service station in just a matter of minutes,’ mused Pierre. ‘Or George, for that matter. One of them’s getting institutionalised by the other, if you ask me.’

  Behind them, in the corner of the bar, the cloaked insectoid made a series of sharp snapping noises with his mandibles. The bartender hurried over with a small bowl of crisps.

  ‘Come on then,’ I said, trying and failing to get off my barstool with some semblance of dignity. I could feel the hangover kicking in before I’d even had the chance to get drunk. ‘It’s about time you got me home.’

  ‘Wait, haven’t you listened to a word I’ve said?’ Pierre spun around on his stool and gave me a withering look. ‘What home do you think you’d be going back to, exactly? Everything’s gone, George. Gone! I doubt Littlewick Green even exists anymore, let alone a house with your name on the letterbox. The Torri-Tau are rewriting everything, everywhere, in their own image. All we can do is try to stay ahead of their cosmic eraser long enough to work out a way of stopping them. And who knows how long we’ve got before…’

  ‘Before what? Before what, Pierre?’

  ‘Before all this is erased too,’ replied Pierre, distracted. ‘Look over there. Was that other hooded fellow here when you came in?’

  I followed his line of sight so that I too was facing the inside of the bar, and beyond that the vast blackness of space outside the windows. The first “hooded fellow”, as Pierre had so quaintly put it, was currently gnawing through his bowl of crisps like a pneumatically-powered beaver. But behind him… behind him sat another anonymous figure in a dark, billowing cloak. There were no drinks on the table in front of him, but the man appeared to be making up for this by resting his ramshackle spear against the side of it instead.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I replied, keeping my voice down. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ Pierre hopped off his stool and left the rest
of his drink to sizzle by itself. ‘Either way, we ought to get moving.’

  ‘But we’re not going home?’ I groaned.

  The man in the far corner slowly reached across his table and gripped the handle of his spear with a calloused blue hand.

  ‘Not yet, at least,’ said Pierre, grabbing my arm and hurrying me out of the bar. ‘Now stay close and whatever you do - don’t touch anything.’

  Chapter Two

  Though I’d been hopping from universe to universe for the best part of three days by that point, I hadn’t actually seen all that much of Port Iridium. In fact, I’d emerged through a door not far from where Pierre had himself come, out the back of some dingy android repair shop. I’d chosen to wait in the bar because a.) it was the most quiet, least dangerous-looking of all the neighbouring establishments, and b.) every bar in the multiverse has a payphone. I’d spent much more time listening to Pierre’s story than I had waiting for him.

  Now that I was getting the all-access tour, I was confident that staying put had been the right choice.

  We took a right turn immediately outside the bar. I didn’t question if Pierre knew where we were going or not. Almost a dozen passageways led away in every direction - including, for those less encumbered by the space station’s artificial gravity, up. Every metal inch of every metal corridor was a storefront of some sort or another. I looked up at one of the more vertical alleyways and saw the glistening lights of bars and stalls up there, too.

  Thick clouds of steam hissed like snakes from rusty pipes and vents. The air - or the turgid gas that tried to pass for it - was filled with a mad din of noises. Food crackling as it fried; the clanging of scrap metalwork; generators belching and conveyor belts buckling. A thousand alien languages were spoken by as many different species. If I hadn’t already stumbled through some weird worlds on my journey to the port, I imagine I would have gone quite mad.

  I happened to look down at my feet as we walked. There I saw a tiny hole in the wall, through which a small beetle in a spacesuit was selling black market computer chips. A queue of her own species, half a dozen long, was lined up along the wall beside it.

  Shaking my head in disbelief, I did as Pierre had advised. I stayed close.

  Well, I tried.

  ‘What seems to be the problem, sir?’ came a robotic voice from my left.

  I stopped and turned my head, but the question wasn’t meant for me. We had passed the same android repair shop through which I’d first arrived - I recognised it from the binary code printed on the sign above its metal shutters. Inside, robotic limbs hung morbidly from rails running along the ceiling. Spare parts overflowed from plastic crates. Everything smelled of oil. This was no high-end establishment.

  Its owner stood about six feet tall, and was thinner than me. He was also a brown, rust-coated robot - all nuts and bolts and chains. His head was round and stout, about the size and shape of a curling stone, and his eyes - or rather, the six or seven lights stretching like a band across the front of his “face” - flashed a welcoming yellow. He was stood beside what looked to me like a dentist’s chair, which another robot was now climbing onto.

  ‘Was loading one of them new X-13A--3 proton regulators down at the docks and forgot to reinforce my suspension,’ bleated the second robot. This one was bulkier, sturdier… better designed for a life in a loading bay. ‘One of my clamps got crushed when the regulator dropped. Lucky not to lose both, my line manager said. You got any of the same model?’

  He waggled and twirled his remaining clamp. The other was a mangled mess of shrapnel and wires. I winced. I don’t know if the android could feel pain, but it sure looked painful.

  ‘Pretty common piece, that,’ said the robot repairman, nodding. He rummaged through the scrap mountains at the back of his shop. ‘No offence meant. They going to dock your pay for the accident, do you think?’

  ‘Not unless they’re gonna cut me off from my allocated refuelling bay,’ moaned the patient. ‘You don’t reckon they’ll do that, do you? It was an accident! They know that! Oh, switches. I don’t want to end up like one of them unplugged scrap-dwellers…’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it won’t come to that,’ bleeped the repairman, returning with a replacement hand. ‘Now lie back and let me take a look at that clamp, eh?’

  ‘There something I can help you with, boy?’ came a deep, raspy voice from behind me.

  I turned around, feeling the sense of unwarranted guilt to which anyone who’s ever been orbited by a department store security guard can relate. Behind me, standing upright, was a seven foot reptilian in a sleek, stylish, armour-plated combat suit. His scales were a deep shade of green; his eyes flashed a poisonous yellow. His head was long like a crocodile’s and sported just as many teeth. Protruding from his sleeves were claws as long as each of my fingers.

  Pierre was nowhere to be seen, I suddenly realised.

  ‘Looking for something?’ said the space-crocodile. All I could look at as he spoke were those enormous teeth of his. ‘Something a little… off-the-menu, perchance?’

  He stepped towards me, grinning. As I took a step back I felt my spine bump against the cold, corrugated metal wall. Was I off-the-menu? Was that worse than being on it?

  ‘Roasted pterosaur?’ he suggested, examining the scarf around my neck. ‘Illegal in six star systems, of course. Very rare. For a price, I can get you whatever species you like. Sentient creatures cost double. Just point out who you fancy tasting, yes?’

  ‘No,’ said Pierre, suddenly at our side. He gently pushed the reptile away from me. ‘He’s not hungry. Come on, George. I told you to stay close, not go off galavanting with bounty hunters.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, hurrying away. ‘I got distracted. There was a robot repair shop, but the repairman was a robot too. Androids fixing androids - it just seems a bit strange.’

  ‘Hmm. Must be how God feels when he looks at doctors. Now come on, we’ve got a long way to go and no money for a shuttle. Do I need to hold your hand or are you going to keep up this time?’

  I grumbled something unintelligible… but kept pace all the same. I didn’t fancy being turned into some other alien’s sandwich.

  For a long while the market didn’t seem to end, and we were long past the point of being able to look out through a window at the comings and goings of the various docks and ports. There were a lot more bars, of course. Some were open to everyone, others were designed around the unique requirements of very specific (and in some cases, very segregated) groups of species. One set of mammalian aliens were drinking (and cheering) from a communal trough. In another pub, gelatinous slugs were “drinking” by injecting feeding tubes directly into their space suits. Their happy smiles said it all.

  Twice Pierre and I stood aside to allow huge, lumbering beasts to pass down the alleys we were following. They looked like woolly mammoths to me, but Pierre assured me that they were just as smart and spacefaring as anyone else. I guess a middle-aged man from Littlewick Green isn’t really one to judge.

  We passed more cramped and dingy workshops operated by cephalopods. Tentacled engineers were cutting up androids and stitching new ones together. Although there were plenty of robots perusing the stalls - and a good few cyborgs too, if my eyes didn’t deceive me - none seemed particularly perplexed by the widespread buying and selling of their own kind. There were whole crates of them in some cases, standing inert until their serial numbers were called out, at which point they’d walk out onto stage and be bid upon by buyers. They reminded me of slaves, but, as with the mammoths, what do I know?

  And there was food. Plenty of food. All kinds of food - just none that I recognised. Except ramen. No matter where in the universe you go, there is always ramen.

  ‘Not everything here seems all that savoury,’ I whispered to Pierre, watching a tattooed humanoid use a crowbar to open a crate of cybernetics and laser rifles. ‘Is all this… legal?’

  ‘Er… well none of it is illegal,’ replied Pierre, edging his w
ay past two tall, floating aliens as thin as shoelaces. ‘I mean, three-quarters of it is probably illegal somewhere or another, but not here.’

  ‘So Port Iridium’s like a duty free, only in regard to the law instead of tax?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said Pierre, barking a single laugh. ‘Another way is that we’re far outside of any legal jurisdiction. There’s nothing illegal in Port Iridium because despite how immoral things get, there’s no law to be upheld. I’d keep my eye on my valuables if I were you.’

  We walked past a row of rose-tinted windows behind which were displayed a wide variety of female “entertainment”. Some were humanoid in an uncanny valley kind of way. One might even have been my own species. She wore a pair of dark, smouldering eyes and nothing else. Beside her floated a fluffy, glowing orb beneath which draped tentacles a couple of feet in length. At first I thought it was some kind of communication device, but then I saw a matching sphere floating on my side of the glass, flashing warm pink and orange hues. It turned out the orb was on offer too, and doing much better business than the rest of her colleagues.

  ‘Noted,’ I replied, stuffing my hands inside my pockets and hurrying on.

  Eventually the market did come to an end, as all things inside the multiverse must, and as the suspect stalls and rowdy bars petered out we emerged into an enormous hanger. Thick, industrial doors slowly closed behind us, accompanied by the grinding and rattling of oily gears and then a deep, echoing clunk. I was glad to find that much of the market’s din was lost behind it, as were its smells.