He arrived in Malaga, a landscape of bleak concrete tilt-up light-industrial estates, and found his way to Inverness Road, to his own place of work, Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait. The shop’s sign also included the words UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT and sported a snazzy new logo that, to Spider’s mind, looked like a speeding clock mating with a spanner.
Spider shook his head, dismayed. It was bad enough that the name of the business made no actual sense, considering that, thanks to the magic of time travel, a repaired time machine was returned to its concerned owner mere moments after said machine was checked into the workshop. Now Spider’s new boss, Mr. J. K. Patel, wanted him to figure out how to bring in more business by offering a paradox resolution service as well. Which, when Mr. Patel told him about this, he said, “Yes, sir, I’ll get right on that,” but in his head, Spider felt sinking, suffocating doom. Time travel was nothing if not a good, affordable way to create all manner of idiotic time paradoxes. The detailed and user-friendly manuals that came with every new time machine tried to explain, in simplified language, how the “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” worked. Complete with funny box-out cartoons of Niels Bohr saying, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it,” and Richard Feynman exclaiming, “Hey, I said that!” But, unfortunately, almost no one believed that an infinite number of new universes would be spawned by every single decision ever made by every single person, all of the time. Fixing time machines was becoming frustrating and, as Spider pedalled up to the shop’s main gate, he found himself feeling melancholy and nostalgic for “the good old days” of time machine repair.
This morning Spider noticed that two new signs had been posted on the shop’s fence: NO CASUAL WORK and LOITERERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Signs of the times he thought.
Spider was first to arrive, as usual, so he had the place to himself. He liked his own company: it meant there was nobody about pissing him off, bugging him with phone calls. He was, at least until Mr. Patel arrived, his own master. It wasn’t much, as kingdoms went, but it was (mostly) his. He went around the workshop, checked the machines as they came online, and examined the tool systems, the automation, and the analytics. Everything worked the way it should. He had to give credit to the new owner for this. Mr. Patel, on taking over the firm, had replaced all of the archaic, dodgy hardware Dickhead McMahon, Spider’s former boss, had insisted he use. Spider remembered when entire days of work would be lost because the quantum analytics scanner was stuffed, or when the database servers in the back of the building would suffer kernel panics and stack crashes because of a power spike. It was the stuff of nightmares, but he had stuck with it. Now, though, under the new regime, everything was different. The entire building had been given a fresh paint job. There were even new carpets in the office areas. And the best part: a new, multifunction, automated coffee droid. A coffee droid that would actually trundle on its tracks out of the break room, and come and find him, asking, very politely, if he was interested in a nice, fresh coffee. The first time Spider saw the coffee droid doing this, he just about wept big salty tears of happiness.
As he surveyed the workshop, Spider noted that only one of the three service bays was occupied — a Boron III needed some routine maintenance. Since Dickhead’s disappearance last year, business had seriously gone off the boil. It was probably due to the world financial situation and the spectacular crash of the US economy. Businesses everywhere were going to the wall. But Mr. Patel reassured Spider that he and his coworker, Charlie, and their front office receptionist, Malaria, were safe from the sack. Would they still have jobs by Christmas? They didn’t know. What they did know was that idiots armed with time machines were buzzing about in the timelines of the recent past, trying to engineer ways to keep this financial catastrophe from occurring. He imagined they were only making it worse.
Spider headed for the break room — time for his first coffee of the day. He was in the process of training the droid to recognize him, and to anticipate his coffee needs. The machine was smart, but smart like a border collie, rather than, say, a small child. And, like a border collie, it was very, very keen to please.
“G’day, Spider-san!” it said as Spider entered the break room. Its voice was almost natural, but not quite, and Spider was relieved. The last thing he wanted in a robot was a human-like voice. The machine needed to appear, at least to some extent, like a machine, he thought.
“Good morning, Coffee Droid. How are we this morning?”
“Very well, thank you!” Spider could hear the exclamation points. Something would have to be done about that. The thing did everything but bow at him; it was annoying. “How can I serve you today?”
“Just the usual, a double macchiato.”
“I have the very thing, Spider-san!”
Spider stood there and sighed, staring out a small window, with its view of the car-park. It had always been a large car-park, much too big for the small number of staff here. Years ago, before Dickhead bought the premises to use for his time machine repair business it had been an auto mechanic shop. You could still sometimes smell the grease and the rubber, a ghost of jobs past. “Okay, Coffee Droid. Just don’t burn the coffee this time, okay? Have you got that?”
“No burning! Yes, Spider-san!” The machine set about grinding fresh beans delivered from a large hopper that Malaria had to keep filled up.
Spider had often caught her eyeing the machine as it went about its polite and enthusiastic business. Malaria, a classically trained barista, who’d placed highly in national barista competitions, had deeply mixed feelings about the coffee droid: she liked that it made good coffee on a reliable basis, and that it would walk around, asking them if they would care for a refreshing beverage, but it also creeped her out and made her feel superfluous. Not that she would ever, except in the most exceptional circumstances, make coffee for anybody herself, but just the thought of this huge machine clumping about the building, taking care of everyone’s caffeine needs, bothered her more than she could say, or even begin to articulate.
“Spider-san!” the machine said, fresh-ground coffee aroma filling the break room. “It appears I am out of milk. Please re-supply my milk reservoir!”
“Oh,” Spider said, still floating about on the coffee fumes. “Righto.” He went to the fridge, opened the door. Inside: several bottles of cheap Italian mineral water; disposable plastic boxes of home-brand instant noodles; several well-used Tupperware containers, all marked, “Property of Malaria Brown! Hands off!”; puddles of blood on the floor of the fridge; one plastic milk bottle, about half-full, but which might be past its use-by date — and, by far the biggest thing in the fridge, something huge and round, and if it had not been dripping blood Spider might have mistaken it for a particularly gross-looking melon of some kind. He paused a moment, deeply disturbed but not sure what had disturbed him so, and looked back — and looked back again. In fact, no matter how many times he stopped, looked away, and looked back at it afresh, it appeared, at least to Spider’s coffee-starved eyes, to be a severed human head, facing forward, its eyes squeezed shut, its whole face locked up in an agonized grimace, cold and pale, a hideous grey non-color.
Spider stood there, his right hand on the door of the fridge, staring, tense, starting to feel faint and cold, but also thinking, what the fuck is this? He knew what it looked like, but there was no way in the teeming multiverse that it could in fact be what it looked like. Nobody would have broken into the building during the night and parked a severed human head in the break room fridge. That just would not happen. It was a non-starter, as ideas went. For one thing, the building had all-new security systems, with constantly scanning cameras in every conceivable location, watching the entire premises, inside and out. Certainly, Spider thought, nagging doubts starting to bubble up in his mind, the sort of doubts that told him that no matter how convincing the thing might be, it must surely be some kind of prosthetic movie prop,
a confection of latex and paint and, and … there was, if he leaned in close, the smell. And it was that smell that finally convinced him. This was a real head. It smelled like — oh God — like meat, reasonably fresh meat.
“Fuck a bloody duck,” he said, barely breathing, staring at it, his legs starting to wobble, a cold sweat beading all over his own head.
He heard Charlie’s jeep arriving.
The coffee droid said, “Spider-san!”
Spider screamed, and just about leapt out of his skin. Turning to the machine, he said, “Look. I need a moment. Just … just wait up.”
Then, as he turned back to see the head in the fridge, something bad happened deep inside Spider’s mind: it suddenly occurred to him, as he stared at the thing, that he recognized that head. Thought, in fact, it looked real familiar, and, thinking that, his stomach locked up tight, and he felt sick.
“No way,” he said, “This is not happening! There’s no way that’s—”
Then things got much worse: the head’s eyes began to open, with difficulty, as if they were all gummed up. They focused, and looked at him, filled with an unbearable sense of pain, bewilderment, and despair.
Spider gasped, startled, and stumbled back against the counter, staring.
The head spoke. It said, “Spider…”
Spider, hardly breathing, stared and stared at the severed head of Dickhead McMahon. It said, its voice barely a whisper, and with a great struggling, gurgling effort — Spider could glimpse the blackened tongue behind the teeth, something that nearly made him spew right there in the break room — “Help me. Please … help me.”
Chapter 3
“It spoke to you.” This was Inspector Iris Street, once of the Major Crime Squad, but now consigned to the misery of the Time Crime Unit. She wasn’t happy about it.
“Yes, it bloody spoke to me!” This was Spider. He’d suggested they talk about the incident in the quiet of his office.
Iris was an attractive woman in her forties, short blonde hair, dark grey eyes, no makeup, dressed in an expensive black skirt suit, a crisp white shirt and sensible black shoes. Iris hated working Time Crime. She believed, correctly, her sideways promotion from the Major Crime Squad had been a “reward” for being, even in a strictly “just friends” basis, involved with Spider, and had told him so. Spider had felt bad about this ever since. There was no end to the mischief people tried to get up to with their time machines, though fortunately most of it was (a) juvenile, and (b) stupid, and (c) easy to foil. Of course there were “curly ones” — offences where specialist handling was called for — and Iris’s team was needed. This business today did not immediately, in Iris’s opinion, cry out in favor of a time crime interpretation. The uniforms who first responded to Malaria’s emergency call thought it might be some sort of prank, even if a nasty one. Yes, it was a real human head, and that made the uniforms think there might be a freakish type of killer at work. The two cops had wanted to know if Spider had any enemies, and then were all confused because Spider wouldn’t stop laughing in their faces, only it wasn’t happy laughter; it was the sort of laughter that makes you worried that the person in question is about to break down. Clearly, they had not heard that he, Spider Webb, had once grossly offended the sensibility of the WA Police Service by testifying against Superintendent Alan Sharp, time-traveling pedophile. When these fresh-faced coppers doubted Spider’s suggestions that some serious temporal malarkey was in the works, he suggested, very gently, that they should get Iris Street and her team involved. He was, he told them; pretty sure this was a serious crime involving time travel.
“Spider, the thing is half-frozen,” Iris said.
Feeling all cold and clammy, wrapped in a fire blanket and sipping horribly sweet warm tea, Spider was attempting to give her his statement. They had been over the basic facts several times.
Her team and some blue-suited forensic guys were going over the scene in methodical detail. They even asked Spider to make the coffee droid go to the workshop and wait for further instructions. It shuffled off, “Yes, Spider-san.”
It had been nearly two hours since Spider had found the head. He still had the shakes and was still imagining it there, in the fridge, its faint, hoarse voice whispering to him; its desperation and horror — the sense that the head was revolted at itself. Bloody Dickhead, he thought. Always leave them wanting more, that’s the spirit!
“Iris, I’m telling you, I’m trying very hard to tell you, that, yes, it was Dickhead McMahon, of all people, and yes, he spoke to me. He asked for my help. He addressed me by name, Iris!” He knew Iris’ forensic people had already gone over the camera feeds from the break room, starting from close of business yesterday, and found only the usual overnight contract cleaning crew, all of whom were vetted and cleared, and none of whom, in any case, had been seen transporting a freshly severed head into the break room and popping it into the fridge. There was no blood trail through the workshop or the offices.
Iris was staring at him, head tilted to one side, mouth pressed shut, quite unimpressed with the situation. “What is it about the shit that follows you around, Spider? My God!”
“I don’t know! I’ve wondered the same thing myself.”
“This is the kind of thing that the people in the Service — the ones who hate you — can’t get enough of! ‘That Spider bloody Webb, did you hear the latest?’”
Stay calm, Spider. Breathe. Take a moment. He said, at length, “I know. I do. But I also know what I saw.”
“You realize we’ve been reviewing the security feeds. We see you coming into the break room, we see you faffing about with the coffee droid, then turning to the fridge, opening the fridge, and then you just kind of stand there, staring into the fridge for a while, and then you jump, screaming—”
“I did not scream.”
“Oh, please, you screamed like a little girl.”
“I was a little startled, that’s all.”
“Spider, come on. You jump, screaming, in the air, glare at the coffee droid, and then you go back to staring at the head in the fridge, and then you just kind of, well, collapse in a bit of a heap, and not long after that Charlie Stuart comes along—”
“I do know what’s on the feed, Iris.”
“Yes, but do you see how it looks, at least to me?”
He knew very well. “It looks like a stunt, like I’m having a lend of you.”
“That head, I’ll give you the point that it’s a real human head, okay? And I’ll spot you the point about it being a freshly severed head. No question. The blood’s real, it’s all legit. But so far my team thinks this is a stunt you’ve somehow put together using a time machine, and the thing I’m wondering—”
“Iris, please, that’s—”
“No,” she said. “Just no! I don’t know why you’d want to piss me off like this. I think I’ve been a pretty good friend to you recently, for all the good it’s done me, so I’m left wondering, you know, why you—”
“It’s not like that! For God’s sake, Iris! It’s not.”
The vehemence of this retort got Iris’ attention. She stopped. “No?”
“I did not do this,” he said, trying to keep from yelling. “I can’t tell you enough times. This is not my doing. I did not set it up. I did not go out and cut off Dickhead McMahon’s enormous head and somehow stash it inside the fridge, Iris! I don’t even know where Dickhead is! The last I heard of him? The last I heard, he was off somewhere in his little empire at the End of Time, supervising the universe, tweaking everything to his bloody liking, so far uptime it was a miracle I managed to get myself back here — to the present. Iris, I need your help. I need your help like I’ve never needed it before, because yes, I do understand how this looks, and how it will play once word gets out. I’m in the shit, huge shit, and I need you to back me up, and speak for me. You believed I wasn’t inv
olved in that business with the woman in the time machine. I can’t tell you what that meant to me. I just, I just… Oh, for God’s sake, now look at me,” he said, struggling against the unstoppable and humiliating biological urge to start crying, right here, in front of Iris. He hated crying. It made him feel like he wasn’t in control, like he was weak and useless, and — he started dabbing his eyes with the scratchy blanket. He felt his face on fire with shame, and he wanted to turn away from her.
Iris, on the receiving end of this speech, and seeing the state it had left him in, looked at the floor, abashed. She took a step towards him, tried to give him some kind of hug, but she wasn’t a hugging kind of person, and he wasn’t the type of guy who would respond well to a hug while he was doing his best to spontaneously combust to hide his embarrassment and anger. They banged their heads together, and there were arms everywhere, and in the end Iris backed away, and Spider slumped, covering his face with the blanket, his overheated mind awhirl, the sight of Dickhead’s head still before him, and all the rest of his relationship with Dickhead, and what Dickhead had done to Molly in the other timeline, all of it, going around and around in a cyclone of misery.
Paradox Resolution Page 2
