So You Had to Build a Time Machine

by So You Had to Build a Time Machine (epub)

  Karl pushed back the rolling office chair and slowly stood, whatever effect he was trying totally lost on Dave.

  “I’m actually glad you showed up, Collison,” he said, sitting on the corner of the table, his tacky J. C. Penney slacks stretched across his thigh. “I have a little problem.”

  “Slamming dimensions together through black holes cooked up in our little Easy-Bake Oven isn’t going the way you’d hoped?”

  This time, Karl barked a laugh in the gray haze. He was playing this one well. “Yes, and no,” the man who smelled like Cheetos said. He wheeled his chair next to Dave and dropped into it. “There have been some, um, complications in the experiment, but we never planned on finding the particle behind the God Particle.”

  This wasn’t right. That was the plan. That had always been the plan.

  “But—”

  Karl leaned close to Dave. “Come on, Collison. Think about it. Why would the United States government give a rip about discovering the building blocks of the universe?”

  That had never occurred to him. “I’ll take one of those beers now.”

  Karl pushed his chair even closer. Dave could make out his eyes; he didn’t like it.

  “The United States government cares about three things,” Karl continued. “Keeping its citizens complacent, keeping its enemies distracted, and looking for anything—anything—to have the upper hand.” He moved back enough that his crazy eyes were in the shadows again. “That was our purpose the whole time, to find a hand so high the rest of the world couldn’t see it until we slapped it down.”

  Cord’s yard shoes hit the floor as Dave pushed back, putting a few feet between him and his most probably former shit-house-rat crazy boss. “No,” he said. “The team would have known. Dana, Marcus, Oscar—”

  Karl’s head moved side-to-side like a bobblehead. “Compartmentalization. That’s how the government works, Collison.” He held up his hands and waved them out of sync. “Right one doesn’t know what the left one is doing. I’m the only one who did.”

  “And my foster father. How did he fit into this?”

  “He started it all,” Karl said, spinning in his chair. “The project germinated from his idea. He may have even been the one to see it to completion if he hadn’t sliced and diced his family.” He paused, waiting for Dave’s countenance to change. It didn’t.

  Things began to fall into place inside Dave’s head. He never knew what the guys in engineering were doing, not really. And Oscar? Dana? Marcus? They had their niches. Just like me. “Why did you show us your figures in Friday’s meeting?”

  The scientist leaned forward and patted Dave’s leg before he stood and walked toward the sleek metal lectern at the head of the conference table. “I was the only one who’d gone over them.” He pushed a section of wall, which sprang toward him, revealing a refrigerator filled with bottles and cans of everything from water to beer to Pepsi Ice Cucumber imported from Japan. He plucked out two bottles of Harps and an Ozarka water.

  “I needed somebody with brains to tell me I was right.” He opened both beer bottles with a church key from inside the refrigerator and walked them over to Dave, setting the beers on the table before opening the water and taking a drink.

  Dave took one of the beers. “So, the government was looking for a way into other dimensions,” he said to himself. “And eras.” He looked at Karl. “I went back in time—twice.”

  “I know.” The grin on the Cheetos-smelling cocksucker was huge. “That was something I’d suspected might happen, but you actually doing it?” He lifted his arms for a touchdown. “Score.”

  Goddamnit.

  Karl went behind the lectern and flicked a few switches. Panels on a large screen at the opposite end of the table lighted. One showed the hallway that went through HR, where man-sized lumps shifted in the shadows just outside the lights of the hall. One screen revealed a section of engineering that led to the Bridge, the heavily reinforced door dented.

  “What’s thi—”

  A figured jumped at the camera, filling the lens, its body covered in hair, its knife-like teeth the last thing Dave saw before that panel went blank.

  “Holy shit,” Dave yelled.

  “That was Dr. Oscar Montouez.”

  The bottom of Dave’s beer thudded against the table. “No,” he whispered. Oscar, Marcus and lab physician Chet Hahn came over to Dave’s place for cards every couple of weeks, and Oscar usually joined Dave at Johnny’s American Tavern for wing night. “It can’t be.”

  “This is fun,” Karl said.

  Dave started to rise from the plush office chair and punch that Cheetos-smelling Karl Miller right in his smug face, but Karl clicked another button and something appeared on the screen that froze Dave in his seat.

  Dr. David Collison, a three-day growth of beard, was lying unconscious on a hospital bed. This David wore the same shirt Dave wore, although dirtier, and the same pants, although the left leg had been cut and a wound in the thigh treated. A scrape across his cheek glistened with salve. “That, that’s me.”

  Karl stood behind the lectern, the water bottle hovering at his lips. Something came into the frame, its movement smooth and jittery at the same time. It hovered over the David on the hospital bed, cleaning its horrible jagged mandibles with the backs of its forelegs.

  “What’s that thing?” Dave demanded, swinging toward Karl. “What’s it doing?”

  Karl lowered the water bottle, a grin shined on his face. “You showed up out of nowhere earlier. You were pretty banged up. Looks like a puncture wound in your leg became infected.” He waved his bottle at Dave. “That’s not you, you, of course. You’re here and he is there. He must be you from somewhere else.”

  Dave sank deeply into the chair. He’d figured out that much on his own, but—“What the hell is that thing?”

  “Oh, that? That’s Dr. Chet Hahn, our lab physician. You know Chet. You guys used to go to that place in Peculiar for lunch. He’s a giant praying mantis now.”

  On any normal day before last Friday, Dave’s brain would have locked up like the engine of an old Dodge. He may have dropped to the floor drooling, or he may have run screaming toward the door, only to pound on it futilely because he’d given a woman named Skid his key, but not today. A giant praying mantis in a lab coat wasn’t his greatest worry.

  “Where’d he come from?”

  Karl took a slow drink of bottled water. “I don’t know, but isn’t he magnificent?” he said. “That’s Dr. Chet Hahn from some other dimension, and he’s exactly what the government hired me to find. Can you imagine a dimensional collision that would leave the United States Army with a division of soldiers that looked like that monster? The enemy would run away thinking that Hell itself was upon them. That guy’s terrifying—and he’s a doctor. Imagine what a professional wrestler, or a biker, would look like.”

  The mantis rubbed its head and slipped a sock off the David-on-the-table’s foot.

  “What’s he doing?” Dave asked.

  “He’s got you doped up on something,” Karl said. His eyes gleamed in the darkness. “Good old Chet’s been eating you alive for the past couple of hours. It’s hypnotic, isn’t it?”

  2

  They walked until nearly sunset. The topography of wherever they were consisted of brown prairie grass dotted with an occasional boulder and patch of trees, the world looking like an enormous sausage and broccoli pizza. Brick found a walking stick, a crooked six-foot-long dead branch he’d plucked from the leaf-covered floor of a small wooded grove. He started humming after that; Skid didn’t know how much longer she could stand it.

  She also didn’t know how many miles they’d pushed through the grass. Brick threw out some “party traveling at fast speed can go blah-blah-blah miles per day” bullshit. Was that miles on a flat, even surface? Miles in the mountains? Miles walking across the foreshore holding a daiquiri? Life isn’t Dungeons and Dragons
, Brick. I can’t believe I just said that to myself. Skid did know exhaustion kept taking experimental jabs at her. Not physically—she could keep up this pace all day—but mentally. Her soul felt tired, like one of the universes they kept intersecting with had descended onto her head and nested there.

  Brick walked in front because of “initiative marching order” or something else Skid, and she expected Cord, didn’t care about. She wasn’t going to argue, partly because Brick had taken control of their little group like a mad knight, and partly because it didn’t matter which one of them got to the lab four feet ahead of the other. They were all going to get there. At least, she hoped. They topped a small rise in the gently sloping prairie and Brick stopped, not suddenly and without a reason, but slowly, bending his knees as if he didn’t expect to stand still for long. He raised his arm level with his head, his hand in a fist.

  “We need to make camp,” Brick said swinging his thick arm toward an expanse of trees at the floor of the slope. “We can hide there.”

  “From what?” Cord asked. “We’ve been walking all day, and the only things I’ve seen are butterflies. They’re pretty, I’ll give you that, but I doubt they’ll smother me in my sleep.”

  The big man’s head moved slightly in disapproval. “You don’t know that.”

  Skid stood straight, cupping her elbows in her hands and ignoring the men, which she figured was for the best. The woods below seemed harmless enough, and the orange, yellow, and pink clouds that spread across the darkening blue in careful streaks looked like finger paints. She wanted to sit someplace soft, eat a sandwich and drink water, none of which she realized might exist in this reality except inside Brick’s explorer’s pack.

  “Come on,” she said, starting the march down the rise. “Let’s make camp like the dungeon master suggested.”

  Cord followed, but Brick stayed, stuck in place. “You’re breaking initiative marching order.”

  She waved at him from over her head, not looking back. “I rolled a twenty.”

  “Natural or with your dex modifier?”

  I wish babysitting the universe came with a salary so I could say I’m not getting paid enough for this, bounced around her head. “Natural. Everything about me is natural. Now start moving before one of Cord’s butterflies straight-up kills you.”

  3

  The mantis started with the semi-conscious man’s toes and worked itself up to his ankle before stopping to apply a tourniquet and elevate the leg in a traction apparatus. The man who looked like Dave moaned, but didn’t call out. If he was on the type of drug Dave thought he was on, the man might need to scream but couldn’t. The giant insect pulled a blood-stained white handkerchief from its lab coat pocket and dabbed the blood from its mandibles before scraping out of camera range. It obviously wanted to keep this other Dave alive while it devoured him.

  The crack of a beer bottle opening came from Dave’s left, but he didn’t look. His eyes were fixed on the man on the table. Karl took Dave’s empty bottle, his second still half full, and placed a full bottle on the table.

  “You make a hell of a bartender, Karl,” Dave said, not turning his head. There was something wrong with this picture, besides the giant sentient mantis and his dying Doppelgänger. Something he couldn’t latch onto.

  Karl pulled out a chair and sat next to him. “You seem to be holding up well, Collison. I’m surprised and, I hate to admit it, a little impressed. I thought you were weaker than this.”

  The beer in the second bottle had begun to warm. Dave drained it and set it in front of Karl. “So, this was always the plan,” he said. “Not looking for the particle beyond the God Particle but looking for a way into other dimensions.”

  “Yes.” Karl picked up Dave’s empty and turned it in his hands. “Don’t be upset that I lied to you. I lied to everybody. It was the best way to get the job done.”

  Dave nodded because he knew it was true. Compartmentalization was common for top secret projects because it worked. If no one knew what anyone else was doing, the chance of them talking no longer mattered.

  The man on the screen moaned, although Dave couldn’t hear him. The other David turned his head slightly, facing away from the security camera, which was all he could do under the medication; his arms and left leg strapped to the table to keep them stable. Not at the wrists or ankles, of course, because he no longer had them. There was something wrong with the man’s head, though. But what?

  “Where did he come from?” Dave asked.

  Karl stood back up. The man never had been able to sit still long, even in the meetings he conducted. Dave’s boss tended to wander around the room and wave his arms as if delivering a lecture on Italian stereotypes.

  “The mantis?” He stopped and eyed Dave before a grin crept across his face. “No. You. Where did you come from? The buffet you, am I right?”

  Dave shrugged, toying with the bottle in front of him. “Yeah, sure. There are two David Collisons in this facility. Aren’t you a bit curious?”

  The room fell silent for a moment. The other David Collison appeared to moan again, and Dave was happy the security camera didn’t have audio.

  “I am.” Karl started walking toward the screen then changed direction. “Or, I was. When he showed up in the infirmary, I thought he was you, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  The Cheetos-smelling scientist walked toward the screen and tapped Infirmary David with a finger.

  “But then you showed up, and there he is. He looks, hmm, different from you, don’t you think? Beaten, worn down, even filthier than you are—and do you see his face? The beard growth? Yours is just a few days, but his? He looks like he hasn’t shaved in a week.” He moved from the screen and placed his palms on the table. “However, that is you, Collison. You from the future, or somewhere else. It doesn’t really matter.”

  Could that be possible? Dave wondered. The image of his grandfather alive just a few days before dragged itself into his thoughts. Of course, it could.

  “How about we test that hypothesis.” Karl jumped up again, marching to the head of the table. Dave took another drink of Harps. “What day is it?”

  “September 4, maybe? Things have been kind of jumbled lately,” Dave said, picking at the label on the bottle. “No. It’s the fifth. It’s September 5.”

  Karl smiled. “That is correct. If I asked Mr. NoFeet Dave, I bet he’d tell me it was September 9, or September 10.” He looked back at the screen, sweeping an arm like a game show model presenting a new car. “You’re you. He’s probably future you.”

  The David on the screen’s eyes fluttered and he moved his head again, slightly, beginning to fully wake.

  “I don’t think I want to watch this anymore,” Dave said. “Isn’t there a game on, or something?”

  A laugh erupted from Karl, a deep-down fuck you laugh. “No. No, no. I’m having way too much fun.” He pointed toward the screen. The mantis had shuffled back into view holding a hypodermic. “Looks like our friend Dr. Hahn is back.”

  Then Dave saw it. The thing that had bothered him. The thing that wasn’t right. It was the David on the hospital bed’s facial hair. Sure, it was just growth the man would shave off if he lived through being eaten by a giant insect and got prosthetic hands, but it wasn’t the beard that caught Dave’s attention. The man had sideburns, short ones, but definite sideburns. Dave had never worn sideburns—ever. That’s different-dimension me.

  Dave leaned backward in his chair, placing his borrowed shoes back onto the conference tabletop, and drained the bottle in his hand. He waved it toward Karl. “Hey, get me another beer, will you?”

  4

  Afternoon began its ritual flirt with dusk, the golden hour fading, the sky transitioning from azure to cornflower to whatever hue of blue Crayola chose to put in a box. Tamara Hooper sat on the front steps of the Sanderson Murder House staring at the nineteen other people who’d paid good money
to tour a certified piece of Kansas City history. Whether the murder house was actually certified, and if so, who had certified it, none of the people standing in Cordrey Bellamy’s yard knew or cared. Cord had thrown those words onto the website now bustling with reservations because they sounded good. The sale is, of course, all about the presentation.

  Tamara recognized a few of them, like the nurse who’d been on Friday’s tour, and the woman with her son. The rest were new faces. The guy in the KCFD T-shirt, the goth woman in gray and black, and the tall somber woman. She wore her dark hair streaked naturally with silver, and stood alone in the back of the group not talking to anyone, looking at the house like it might bite her.

  Tamara regretted coming tonight. But there are reasons, she reminded herself. Friday, she’d seen a ghost. A real live ghost, although Roman would correct her on that, but screw him. She also came because she thought Cord was cute. Roman—

  Pfft. Roman.

  Roman was pretty. You know, like those vampires on TV, as she’d told her friends, and decent in the sack, but he couldn’t hold a conversation that didn’t include protein shakes, how many reps he did at the gym, and how stupid the people in his office were because they didn’t recognize Justin Beiber’s artistic genius. Cord, on the other hand, was cute and funny. Tamara wanted to talk to him, you know, just talk, all night long. Then maybe have sex in the morning—and pancakes. Definitely pancakes.

  “Our tour was supposed to start half an hour ago,” said a forty-something guy in a business suit who’d probably come straight from work. He’d pulled his blue and green paisley tie loose and undone his top button, but still looked uncomfortable. “Anybody have this guy’s phone number?”

  The faces went from bored to the-hell-with-this.

  Business-suit guy threw his hands up. “I’m not waiting anymore. Nothing’s worth this bullshit. Anybody with me?” A few people murmured in agreement. Someone gave a half-hearted cheer and the group began to disperse.