The Woman Who Died a Lot

by Jasper Fforde

  “Here,” Friday said, handing me a folder. “Shazza and I have been doing some research. We set up a bulletin board for anyone else who was now Destiny Aware to make contact. Do you know how many people have done so?”

  “First things first: How are you getting along with Shazza?”

  Friday thought for a moment. “Not brilliantly, but we’re working on it. Trying to prekindle a spark that will make us inseparable soul mates in two decades’ time is proving a bit tricky. I think she’s a whiny foul-mouth with a victim mentality, while she thinks I’m an arrogant middle-class ponce with an attitude so patronizing she would throttle me if it weren’t illegal. We tried sex to see if that would cement the relationship, but it didn’t help: She told me she’d ‘had better,’ and I told her that yelling out the titles of Tom Hanks movies was . . . well, distracting.”

  “So not going too well?”

  “No. And with less than forty-eight hours before I’m arrested, it’s not likely to improve.”

  “That might not happen. Besides, people have different needs at eighteen than at forty. And if those needs diverge, it can cause serious conflict. Probably accounts for breakups. Your father and I didn’t hook up properly until ten years after first going out. If we’d stayed together, we might not have survived. As it is, we’re still very—”

  “Mum, I’m going to stop you before you start getting all smushy about Dad.”

  “All right,” I said with a smile, “have it your own way. Do you want me to tell you how much I love you all, too?”

  “Definitely not. Look at the folder.”

  “Okay. What were you saying?”

  “I said that Shazza and I had set up a bulletin board for anyone else who had received a career summary from the Union of Federated Timeworkers. Do you know how many people have gotten in contact?”

  “A thousand?” I suggested.

  “One,” replied Friday, “and he only missed the meeting because his car had a flat—he lived over in Bedwyn, on the other side of the Savernake.”

  “That’s unusual,” I said. “The ChronoGuard must have employed several thousand from around here alone. What does it mean?”

  “It means that only those timeworkers who were living in the Wessex area have received Letters of Destiny—more specifically, only those in the Swindon branch of the timeworkers union. But this is what’s strange: It’s a shitty thing to do. If I were my future self, I wouldn’t send myself a Letter of Destiny. So then I got to thinking that maybe there was another reason I did it.”

  I looked at the folder he had given me. There were copies of all the letters. Two each per ex–potential worker—one of how it might have turned out and one of how it will. There were copies of the envelopes, too, and several maps, clippings and news reports about the disbanding of the ChronoGuard—it was big news when it happened two years before.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Let me explain the scenario. You’re head of the ChronoGuard and entering your seventy-sixth year, one year from retirement. You can gaze happily back upon a long career maintaining the Standard History Eventline. You’ve defended its manipulation by the unscrupulous and altered it to protect the citizens from mischief, asteroid collision and innumerable other menaces. You are happy that you have done what you could to keep the world safe, knowing that when you hand over the ropes to next chief, the department is in good shape.”

  “Okay, I can see that.”

  “Good. So this is what happens: Everything, but everything you’ve worked for is to be undone. Time travel is suddenly not possible, and due to the demands of a failure in the Retro-Deficit Engineering principle, all the time engines have to be switched off. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were going to happen in 2062, the time of your retirement—but it’s not. The switch-off will be retrospective from 2002. This is a worry, because the most dangerous event of all, the one that made your career, is slated for February of 2041.”

  “ HR-6984.”

  “Precisely. Everything you would have been, everything you would have done, everything that made you what you were—it will all be erased. The eventline is frozen. You’re not allowed to send yourself a message, and worst of all, the disaster that made you is now going to happen because you weren’t there to stop it. A single event with a potential seven billion lives at risk, all on your shoulders. What would you do?”

  “Yell? Kick some furniture? Get seriously shit-faced?”

  “Mum, I’m serious.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yes, to begin with, you could do all those things. But then I got to thinking: What if there was a way to help the young me change the eventline? How could I find a way to deliver a purposefully obscure message so I could do something about HR-6984?

  I smiled at my future son’s resourcefulness. “Let me guess: You made totally outrageous union demands.”

  He nodded. “I’m assuming this is the way it went: As chairman of the Swindon Branch of the Union of Federated Timeworkers, I insisted on the Letters of Destiny. I probably had to pout a lot, get annoyed and chuck stuff around—even threaten strike action, but I got my way. The eventlines were compared, the letters compiled and arranged to be sent.”

  “Even if true,” I said, “what were you trying to tell yourself?”

  “I don’t know, but muse on this: None of us live beyond the asteroid strike. Of the fifteen who die, seven are definitely murdered, five meet with accidents that might be murder, and only three die of natural causes. Someone is disposing of ex-ChronoGuard before the strike.”

  I stared at the list of murders. The first one wasn’t to happen until 2040, almost thirty-six years from now.

  “Makes it tricky to solve, doesn’t it?” said Friday with a sigh. “Crimes that haven’t happened, motive that’s not yet apparent and by someone who may have no idea he’s going to do it.”

  “So what do you know?”

  “I know three things for certain: I kill Gavin Watkins on Friday morning, and a cold-blooded killer is murdering ex-ChronoGuard thirty-six years from now. We know nothing about him except that he might be driving a Vauxhall KP-16, a car that hasn’t been designed yet, and he’s handy with a baseball bat.”

  “And the third?”

  Friday smiled. “I know that someone posted these letters from a Kemble mailbox only recently. Why wait until now to send the letters? The thing is that someone sent these letters— and whoever that might be could have an idea about what’s going on.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I kind of understood that.”

  Which was unusual, given the complex nature of the time industry.

  We passed the Bad Time warning signs seven miles from Kemble Timepark and drove slowly into the Mild Distortion zone, where a certain temporal lumpiness punctuated the countryside. For the most part, everything appeared normal, but the odd hot spot of temporal fallout showed up as a patch of spring foliage when the rest was late summer and even on occasion an isolated patch of snow. We noted that in several places the road had been diverted around hastily fenced-off anomalies. The hot spots were quite obvious to the time-savvy—the shadows cast by the sun were bent either forward or back, depending on whether the anomaly was running fast or slow. We also noticed that the land within the zone was cultivated, but in a unique way: The emerging science of agritemporal farming used the dilation gradients to ensure a rolling supply of ripe produce as well as nonseasonal growth. In one field we saw a farmer driving a tractor while wearing a clumsy gravity suit. We waved, and he waved back seven seconds later.

  We entered the village of Kemble soon afterward. The township was neat and tidy, but several abandoned houses suggested that living here was not without its risks and frustrations. The school was long closed and fenced off, the children now bused to Cirencester when a particularly steep gradient had seeped into the school one Friday afternoon, extending Mrs. Auberge’s French lesson from forty minutes to six days.

  We stopped at the main gates of the abandoned facili
ty. A small group of a dozen or so campaigners was camped out with several shabby-looking caravans, and placards had been tied to the fence. The first read PLEASE, WOULD IT BE TOO MUCH TROUBLE TO ASK YOU TO CLEAN UP OUR TOWN? and the next, VILLAGERS WANT ASSURANCES OVER REAL TIME IF THAT’S OKAY WITH YOU. I’d seen these guys before and knew of the protest. It was by local middle-class residents—hence the polite placards—who despite assurances that the decommissioned time engines were “perfectly safe within the broad definitions of ‘safe’ as outlined by the Environmental Agency,” had been collecting evidence of their own to the contrary. We parked the Sportina and climbed out.

  We greeted the protesters, who were friendly and unthreatening, and listened to their complaints with interest. It seemed that the engines were leaking flux at an increasing rate and that “no one was interested in doing anything about it.”

  “What time do you have?” asked one of the group.

  I told him, and he showed me his watch. It was a six minutes slow. Five others showed me their watches, too, and they all displayed errors between two minutes to six hours.

  “Have you spoken to the decommissioning agents?” I asked.

  “They ignore us,” he replied, “or tacitly suggest that we should be grateful for living longer according to an outside observer.”

  We listened to their grievances after that, which were long and tedious—mostly about a little-understood phenomenon called dilation lag that caused cell phones and other transmission signals to be unable to mesh.

  “If we want to watch TV,” grumbled one, “we have to go to Oaksey. The only radio stations we can pick up are those on AM, and the pitch of that is noticeably high.”

  “Yes,” said another, “I know for a fact that they’re thinking of moving the Stroud-Swindon rail line six miles to the east. I understand that the train is now always three minutes late—it has to slow down when traveling past here to stay on schedule.”

  “And house prices are tumbling,” said another. “If I wanted to sell, I’d have to accept half of what I paid for it.”

  “And what did you pay for it?” I asked. “Just out of interest.”

  “A hundred pounds. They’re dirt cheap because no one wants to live here.”

  “We get occasional Backflashes, too,” said the fourth.

  “And what did you pay for it?” I asked. “Just out of interest.”

  “A hundred pounds. They’re dirt cheap because no one wants to live here.”

  “We get occasional Backflashes, too,” said the fourth, “but we only know that from external observers. Ooh, look,” he added, pointing to a woman standing two hundred yards away who was waving a red flag. “Lori says we’ve just had one.”

  Most of their problems could be solved simply by moving away. None of the protesters were the original residents, who had all been compensated generously and wisely moved out or taken up agritemporal farming. We listened to them for just long enough to get their respect, but not so long that our ears started bleeding.

  “Does anyone know who posted these?” asked Friday, holding up the fifteen envelopes when there was a lull in the conversation.

  “Let me see,” said the one who seemed to be in charge. He examined the postmarks and passed them to a second man, who looked at them, nodded, then passed them back.

  “That would have been the Manchild,” he said, nodding toward the disused facility. “He made a rare appearance to post them.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “George!” said the first. “You can’t encourage people to go . . . in there.”

  There followed an argument in which the more moderate members of the group thought it insane that anyone would go any closer than the thousand yards we were at present and some other members who thought we should do as we wanted, then a third part of the group who didn’t know what they wanted but just liked to argue.

  “Hang on,” said another, who had just noticed that Lori two hundred yards away was now frantically waving a yellow flag. “Gravity wave coming our way.”

  And we hurriedly moved to the other side of the road as the wave moved past, bending the shadows cast by the fence as it went and drawing dirt and debris from the road closer to the fence.

  “You don’t want to meet the Manchild,” said one protester, whose name was Ken. “He’s—”

  “Everyone should know what has happened here,” interrupted another. “If you see him, take a picture so we can use his suffering to advance our own agenda—No, hang on, what I meant was so we can get him the help he deserves.”

  The arguing continued with increased vitriol until Friday said, “I would have become the sixth director general of ChronoGuard.”

  The protesters all fell silent and looked at one another nervously. When the leader spoke again, it was in a quiet, respectful tone.

  “You’re going to need gravity suits.”

  28.

  Wednesday: The Manchild

  The D-H 87-B Mobile Localized Temporal Field Generator, colloquially known as a “gravity suit,” was developed and built by Dover-Percival Aerospace, one of the main contractors for ancillary equipment to the time industry. The first suits were introduced in 1938 but were prone to leaks and malfunctions. They could function only at a limit of Dilation .32 and had a limited range due to their clockwork mechanism. Later suits greatly improved upon this, and the D-H114 of 1978 was the last improvement upon the line and could increase the variable-mass substrate to a staggering .88 of the infinite.

  Norman Scrunge, Time Industry Historian

  They kept the gravity suits in the abandoned school, and we were measured precisely for size, as an ill-fitting suit could give you “old feet,” which was not recommended. After we were weighed, had our density checked and then our center of balance ascertained by being made to lie on a tilting bed, we were helped into the hardshell suits after first having to remove anything of greater than bone density from our pockets. I’d worn a gravity suit once before, but a long time ago. It was when Dad was still at the ChronoGuard, before the regrettable Sarah Wade stretching incident brought the SO-12 Bring a Child to Work Days to a rapid end.

  The suits looked old and worn on the outside but almost brand new on the inside, which was at least some comfort. Friday pointed out that the suits had been built in 1992 and had long surpassed their four-thousand-year design limit, but I simply shrugged. The dilation level inside the facility was a life-frittering D=.31, and if we didn’t wear gravity suits, we’d be lucky to get out within ten months. Once the suits were sealed and tested for leaks, the helmets were latched in place and the power-supply and life-support units placed on our backs.

  “Comfortable?” yelled the protester named George.

  “Not at all!” I yelled back. “Bloody heavy, in fact—I can hardly move.”

  “Totally normal. It’ll weigh less than nothing when they power up. Don’t forget that the Tachytalk™ intercom has a range of only forty-seven seconds, so don’t stray too far from each other. The batteries will give you an hour’s suit time at anything up to D=.5. Skirt any hot spots and you’ll get longer, but don’t venture inside the main engine room—we think it’s at D=.82 in there. You’ll need these.” He handed us each a marker pen and a whiteboard the size of a legal pad. “Okay?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Good. You’ll feel a slight thump when you flip the switch, but wait until we get to a safe distance, won’t you? Gravity Suits have an eight percent chance of explosive fragmentation on start-up.”

  “Nice to know,” I murmured.

  Friday and I exchanged glances and smiled nervously at each other.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Ready,” he replied, and I turned my backpack toward him so he could switch it on.

  The thump was anything but slight—more like seven idiots hitting you repeatedly all over the body with three-day-old baguettes. I felt the suit creak and flex as the variable-mass substrate start
ed to increase its unidirectional mass to offset any dilation gradient outside the suit. Inside the helmet were a few gauges that could viewed from within—one that listed battery power, a second that was marked “External Flux” and was broken, two that just blinked annoyingly and an analogue clock with two second hands—a normal one and a sweep that rotated the dial once a second. There was an identical clock mounted outside the suit, and as soon as we powered up, the clocks started to run out of sync. I gave a thumbs-up to the protesters and was delighted to find I could move a lot easier in the suit than I could outside it, which was something of a relief, as I wouldn’t need my stick.

  We waved to our new friends and walked across the road to the chain-link fence. We pushed open the gates and climbed aboard an electric crew cart designed for gravity-suit use. The old car park was covered in dead leaves and other detritus, and as we trundled toward the administrative buildings almost a mile away, the asphalt became older as the dilation gradient became more apparent. The closer we approached the source of the leaking flux, the older the surroundings became. In the two years since the abandonment of the facility, mature trees had grown up through the paving slabs. But the oddness of it all was that from an outside observer the facility had actually aged just two years—it was only as we walked closer did the aging occur. As we moved in, the trees grew and the building decayed, until by the time we reached the front entrance, the paint was mottled and cracked, the woodwork had rotted away, and the internal steel within the concrete had begun to rust, spall and fracture, leaving large areas where the concrete had fallen from the wall. As we stepped off the electric buggy, it almost corroded to dust beneath us.

  “The building was only abandoned two years ago,” murmured Friday, sounding a lot like Jane Horrocks, one of the unavoidable consequences of the Tachytalk™ communication system. “It looks as if five decades have passed.”

  We walked cautiously past a sign marked WARNING: STEEP T-GRADIENT, and the sun suddenly moved faster across the sky.