Mad-Sci-Soc

by Arrand Pritchard

  “But,” she continued, “adding the extra dimension, that thing that he wouldn't expect.”

  “What's that?”

  “Stopping him from reporting to the future about our plans to prevent him going back in time to prevent our plan from happening.”

  “And that's going to work?”

  “It has to. It has so far.”

  I had to stop the stage play again. The play where I was entering stage-left as a cameo and not the main protagonist. The reason: I had lost the plot again.

  “So how does this time travel thing work? If he has already succeeded wouldn’t he have already stopped us?” I said, trapped in my own mental loop of time traveling what-ifs and fatalism.

  “I can explain this to you again but I can’t understand it for you,” said Karmen with mock-sweetness.

  Terri looked up at me almost the first time this morning and pierced me with her stare and intensity but with the hint of a smile too, “Do you remember those old spinning records that played music at the museum? A giant spiral and the playhead would start at the beginning and run to the end.”

  I smiled. I smiled because Terri was talking to me. Gently and using an analogy I could understand. She had shown just such a device at the University museum and we had listened to The Dark Side of the Moon from a “Record Player”. I loved the scratches. But it was bloody long though. My counter-punk heavy water MP9s are extended to a minute of furious noise. Apparently people in the 20th century had an extra 43 minutes in the day to watch and listen to a plastic disk spinning round.

  “People think about time and experience it that way. As a play head. Time going forward. The music starts and continues in a spiral until it ends. There are theories that reality is continuously splitting and creating multiple universes and parallel worlds. Or that you can't go back in time and change the past because otherwise you would become your own grandfather or kill yourself and cause some Back-To-The-Future type anomaly. This is faulty logic. There's no mechanism that can stop someone in the past affecting the future. That is, if someone did manage to go back in time, there is nothing to stop time anomalies from happening. A time traveller would change the future by their very existence and no-one would notice unless you yourself are the time traveller. But the recording analogy assumes everything is fixed and it isn't. Nothing is. Time is more like computer RAM holding a virtual world. With each sentient being on the planet being a player in that virtual world. If anyone did travel back in time, then yes, they could kill their old self. They could kill their grandfather. Future events would change, overwriting what had already happened. No-one would ever detect the anomalies except the time traveller themselves.”

  “So you can create time anomalies? Meet yourself? Kill your younger self? Change the future?”

  “You could, for example, do this in a virtual world, right?”

  “I guess. Put your character on auto, create another character and kill the other.”

  “That's just about the same as time travel. But there is less control in the real world than in a virtual world. At least in a virtual world there is administration support making sure things don’t go haywire. And if anything does go wrong, there’s always recovery from a back-up.”

  “OMJ! I guess you're right. There's no back up of reality.”

  “Indeed, if reality were a product, our Stevie-ness would have never allowed it to ship. The user experience does not have good out-the-box characteristics.”

  “Amen.”

  “So you are saying that... Max... if he had gone back in time knowing about our plot now, then our plot would have already been subverted,” I ventured.

  “Right. We would not be here.”

  “So he could be one of the seven deadly dwarfs of the apocalypse?” I suggested.

  “He could be all seven,” said Conrad completely deadpan.

  “But because we are here, then our plot must succeed because otherwise it would have already have been stopped?” I suggested.

  “I think this means we have the potential to succeed,” offered Conrad. “Nothing is set in stone. But if we do not stop Max completely, then he could still go forward in time, then arrange to go back in time, and change what we are doing now. This reality, this timeline, would be wiped from existence. It hasn't yet, so we have at least some probability of success.”

  “A very good probability,” interjected Karmen in her shaky voice. Since this was her business, she had to have her say.

  “How do you prevent a time traveller and any of his copies escaping to the future? They just have to out-live us. Either that or you have to kill him,” I said.

  Silence.

  “That's the plan?” I said in shock. “Kill him?”

  “No, the plan is not as simple as that,” sighed Conrad. “For a start, we don't know how many Maxes we are dealing with.”

  ***

  Chapter Twelve The Big Cheese

  Saturday, February 2, 2123.

  Unbeknown to us, lost in our plans to thwart Max's potential take over of the fabric of the space-time and the history of the human race, Max himself had plans of his own. I discovered this information sometime later but I’ve inserted it here in a perverse and belated adherence to the correct chronological sequence.

  Max and six of his business-suited corporate cronies entered an unlicensed barter shop in Queens. There were no longer any queues in the shop. The market for Gruyère cheese had been exhausted, there was nothing much left to buy or steal. But Max still had some. He carried it in a small box, a cheese dish, in front of him like it was religious offering.

  The retro styled robot at the counter jiggled its head jauntily.

  “How can I help you?” enquired the robot happily.

  “How much will you pay for this?” asked Max and he carefully lifted the lid of the cheese dish to show the robot.

  The robot performed a visual check which was in fact a spectroscopic analysis of the cheese to determine its quality. The robot replied perkily, “This is a high quality product and we can offer five hundred new dollars per kilo. May we weigh the product?” The robot extended an arm.

  “Not so fast,” said Max withdrawing the cheese dish. “I know this a high quality product. In fact, I would say, this is the crème de la crème of Gruyère cheese... vintage and kept in impeccable conditions. I think it is worth more than that.”

  “I am sorry, Sir. I agree that you have a fine piece of cheese but I am not authorised to offer any more than five hundred new dollars per kilo. Perhaps sir would prefer crypto-currency?”

  “No.” Max smiled. “Take me to your leader!”

  The robot froze for a few seconds, no doubt communicating with some hidden hive mind.

  “This way,” the robot said, and swayed around to a door that had slid open next to the counter.

  “Wow, Boss, I've never known that demand to work before,” said the lead cronie walking next to Max.

  “I set up this meeting a thousand years ago, so it’s long overdue,” smirked Max.

  The suited man smiled back an obsequious fake smile. He did not understand what Max was saying but then, he was not employed to understand Max's master plan and so remained unaware of the risks he took working for a Mad Scientist.

  Out of the building across an alley, another door opened. It led into a large warehouse full of gantries and production lines. Max's band, the magnificent corporate seven, entered the building and stood open-mouthed at the maniacal industrial production in this otherwise desolate and sleepy part of the city.

  A good-looking man with a clipboard came up to them and said politely, “Come this way.”

  As they walked past the production line where huge components were being fabricated from mammoth 3D-print machines, Max's number one cronie whispered, “Boss, I think they're building robots here. Big robots.”

  “That's expected,” said Max confidently.

  They were led into a room with refrigerators lining the walls. The man with the clipboard t
urned, “You were discussing the price of some fine vintage Gruyère?”

  “Are you the leader? You can't be the leader. You're... just a replicant.”

  “That is true. But there is no leader, as such, so what you ask makes no sense,” replied the replicant nicely.

  “But you are operating to a plan. Who is the big cheese giving you the plan? And what is the plan?”

  “You asking for an exposition? What you ask makes no sense,” continued the artificial man in the same tone.

  “So the plan is secret? Of course it is,” said Max answering his own question.

  “Plans are only known to the planner. That it is secret is a reasonable assumption,” the replicant agreed, adding “Perhaps this would help you?” and it spread its arms, introducing the fridges.

  The fridges doors opened slowly and the interior lights flickered on.

  Max and his cronies looked at the fridge that had opened closest to them, towards the yellowing light and a gentle throb of activity within.

  Then, with no warning, seven yellow blobs leapt from the fridges simultaneously and splattered onto the faces of Max and his men. They had literally come face-to-face with the big cheese in fondue form. Writhing on the ground for a minute, as they were suffocated and became still.

  The replicant bent down and picked up the vintage cheese that Max had brought with him and walked from the room back to the production facilities. He gave the cheese to the first in a line of a mismatched set of robots dressed in surgical gowns.

  ***

  Wednesday, February 13, 2123. Ms Bell Building

  As I climbed the wall of the Ms Bell building, with my rappelling equipment, I pondered how long this particular part of reality would exist. This mission was not only about the recovery of the Kittoffery Kart, saving the future from a Mad Scientist with a predilection for my girl friend (or at least the original version of her) and from a resourceful piece of cheese with a fridge fetish, but also about saving the whole of reality including my own existence. A car-sci-cheese-hole? No, probably not, let's describe it slightly more conventionally: a-fate-worse-than-death? Another fail: death is a consequence of being alive. If you never existed then how could it be a fate worse than it? A fate worse than never being alive? I think the Buddhists would agree, that never achieving enlightenment is the worst sort of karma.

  I reached the top of the building. Enough of this cogitation. My mind had wandered because we had rehearsed this part of the mission dozens of times in the virtual world simulation. Mad-Sci-Soc shunned the use of virtual worlds for most activities but when it came to rehearsal for operational missions, there was nothing better. After intensive virtual world training, climbing up the side of twenty story building becomes as dull as a visit to the local McSquirrel.

  However there are some parts of the mission that can't be rehearsed. Here was one, climbing over the edge onto the top of a tall building. Transition, of any sort, is risky and the transition from vertical to horizontal is the riskiest part of climbing up walls. There's often gutters or drainage of unknown strength to improvise around as well as extreme physical effort. The rappelling equipment's built-in hoist does not help once you are at the top. If I had been a better base jumper then I am sure I would have had better technique. I had a good attachment around the automatic window cleaning device and it should not have been difficult to scrabble over the edge but I still managed to make it look hard. And then there was the puddles. I found out my PK costume was not water tight and I was reminded just how cold it was in the real world, barely above freezing. I worried too, that the Valentine Card I sneaked inside my breastplate might get wet. I hoped to give it to Terri after the mission. After midnight. That would be big. I'm sure she would appreciate it. And perhaps secure our relationship in this timeline.

  After I recovered my breath, I continued carefully across the roof. Conrad had hacked the Ms Bell surveillance system so the guard drones passed by with a menacing professional buzz but completely failed to recognise me as an intruder. Similarly the doors would open without resistance; no alarms would be set off.

  Our invisibility cloaks made us invisible to cee-cee-tee-vee but Ms Bell was one of the few buildings in the city with human guards working alongside automated security systems. While having such men-in-the-loop was done as a job creation scheme for insomniacs, it did provide an additional security layer and a frisson to the operation. This meant we could not use the ground floor entrance. We were using the heliport door on the roof. Or rather I was. Conrad was on the ground directing me. Graphic dots were displayed on my heads-up display like a toddler's Easter Egg Chocolate hunt and the next mission objective displayed: “Go to door. Open door. Descend stairs. Call lift. Enter Lift.” I found it kind of patronising, like some form of ancient adventure fairy story: “Go North, Take Lamp, Rub Lamp”, but useful when I ran into technical problems... such as not being able to get through the ancient non-automatic helipad door. Conrad provided the right advice, “Twist the door handle” with the heads-up highlighting the knob. It did not look like a door handle to me. I'm not a door handle expert.

  ***

  Wednesday, February 13, 2123. Quantact Building

  In another part of Brooklyn, Karmen and Terri had entered the Quantact building but still had to convince the internal intelligent doors to let them into Max’s office.

  “Hello, employees,” said the door cheerfully. “The office is closed at the moment. Can I help you?”

  “We’re here to see Max”

  “I am sorry, the boss has noted that he is not to be disturbed this evening,” said the door, flashing the Access Denied lamp.

  Karmen whispered to Terri, “We can't beat this machine using a set plan, we’ll have to use the one thing that machines do not have...”

  “What's that?”

  “Intuition!”

  Addressing the door, Karmen said uncertainly, “We are real er... fans. We really want to see him,”

  “Ah... you must be Nerds. I'm sorry: No-Nerds-Allowed,” responded the door, double-flashing the Access Denied sign.

  “We have a pizza for Max. He's working late here tonight, er... right? He needs food,” suggested Terri.

  “There are no records of a call out to a pizza delivery service,” said the door.

  “It was done via a... uh... a Mad-Sci-Soc virtual world. We're friends of his,” stammered Karmen.

  Conrad’s voice came over their private channel. “I’ve hacked their comms. Get the door to verify with Max.”

  “Check with Max. He’ll authorise our entry.”

  The door fell silent for a few seconds and the Access Denied lamp dimmed. A green light and smiley face appeared accompanied by a happy beep.

  “Ok... Can I invite you to fill out a survey on our internal food service provision?” asked the door, obsequiously taking a role which covered the collective responsibility of all building services.

  Karmen gave the universal response, “Later.”

  “Can I ask why you have not used our internal food services?” asked the door, designed to never give up on collecting the most relevant information.

  “We couldn't tell... um... whether the bread was... gluten free,” suggested Karmen hesitantly.

  “Thank you for your feedback. Have a nice day,” said the door as it slid back to allow entrance.

  Terri whispered to Karmen as they walked through, “They can pass a Turing Test but automatons are still stupid. Look,” she said showing her hands. “No Pizza!”

  They switched off their civvies disguise to reveal their full super-suit togs; Karmen as Improbileon and Terri as Cloudera. As a Bombz, she was wearing the freshly fabricated costume for the first time on a real mission and she liked it. She felt re-united with her old self; the original Terri that had died wearing the same design. She had no inkling that history could be repeating...

  Karmen directed them to the third floor where her probability model having indicated it as the most likely location for Max's
laboratory.

  ***

  Wednesday, February 13, 2123. Ms Bell Building

  This was easy. Too easy. I admit that I am not the brightest spark in the Van-der-graaf generator, but even I could tell that something was not right.

  There was Conrad's water powered car in the middle of the room, with a large car size lift conveniently located to take it to the underground car park. Surely I could not just take it, push it to the lift and get away?

  I checked infrared. Something moved. Someone was in the room.

  ***

  Wednesday, February 13, 2123. Quantact building

  Over at the Quantact building, the female Mad-Sci-Soc members stood in front of a looming big black sphere. This Death Star-like machine was at the epicentre of the time-lines splicing the old Terri and new one. It was bigger than Terri remembered but it was still the same sphere just with a slightly higher podium. She went up to it, opened the side hatch and peered inside. It was empty but dusky; a damp smell.

  Karmen whispered to her over the private channel, “We have company!”

  ***

  Wednesday, February 13, 2123. Ms Bell Building

  I challenged the heat signature outlined in yellow aiming my dart weapon at it. From behind the screen a short man in a business suit appeared.

  “Maximilian Ceillingheit, I presume,” I said boldly.

  “Hello,” Max replied. “And you are Peaky, the Sidekick Guy, I presume.”

  “You presume too much. I'm Psychic Kid.”

  “Well I do know that, Aaron. I did design the costume, devise the original name and agreed your induction.”

  “Hah. Manly taunts! The prelude to all superhero battle contests,” I blustered.

  Max smiled congenially, “It was just a tease. They'll be no contest. We're on the same side. Remember I co-founded Mad-Sci-Soc with Conrad.”

  “You resigned from the Club!”

  “I resigned from SHUMMS, just suspended my Su-U license. I felt I wan’t cut out to be a superhero. Not many scientists are. Certainly not the majority that join our club. That’s why we recruited you. You’re not lumbered with the same limited physical liabilities and personal safety issues.”

  “You’re still a member?”

  “Yes, I'm still a member of the club. It's in my DNA. Just not the Su-U.”