Paradox Resolution

by K. A. Bedford

  Mr. Patel was roaming about the room again, talking, and Spider had not been listening. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that, please?” he said, worried that he’d missed his own sacking.

  “It’s all right, Spider,” Patel said, a little sharpness in his tone. “I was just talking about my very first jump in time, years ago, with my father, shortly before he died.”

  “Oh,” Spider said, embarrassed. “Right. Sorry.”

  Mr. Patel returned to his seat, sat there staring over Spider and out at the view across the swollen river, lost in his own thoughts, troubled, something weighing on him.

  Spider let this go on for half a minute and then said, “Okay, um, look, you asked to see me today?”

  All the joy had drained from Patel’s face. “Yes, yes, I’m afraid I did — or rather, I do.”

  “The message I got from your receptionist said it was about the ‘terms of my employment’.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Patel said, annoyed, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the desk. “She said that? My goodness that must have terrified you out of your wits.”

  “It did give me pause for thought,” Spider said, understating by orders of magnitude.

  “Of course, of course. No, that is not quite the message I wanted her to pass on to you. My sincere apology. No, you see, I saw in your personnel record that you, at one time, worked for the state police service.”

  “That’s right, yes,” Spider said, astonished. Why on Earth would he want to talk about that? Was all of that going to catch up with him here, now, after all these years? He took a breath. You don’t know what Patel wants. Just hear him out. It’s probably nothing.

  “I believe you did very well? High rank while still a young man? Very impressive achievement.”

  Frowning, worried, Spider said thanks.

  “It says here,” Patel continued reading something glowing in his desk surface, “that you became a whistleblower? Uncovered extensive corruption? Is that right?”

  “It is, yes, sir.” Keep it together, Spider. Keep it together. He could feel the old anger starting to boil.

  “That could not have been easy for you, going against your own kind like that. The traditional lot of the whistleblower…”

  “You’re not wrong,” Spider said, unable to keep from saying so.

  “Good, very good,” Patel said, nodding, glancing at Spider, and nodding some more.

  “Okay,” Spider said.

  Mr. Patel said nothing for a long moment, his hands folded over his stomach, a terrible blank look on his face, or so it looked at least, to Spider. Those eye-plugs made Mr. Patel’s emotions tricky to read. “Do you have any children?”

  “No, sir. Not been blessed.”

  “Children can be a very great blessing,” Patel said, staring out the enormous window behind Spider.

  “I’m sure they can,” Spider said, starting to understand what might be coming next. Something about Mr. Patel’s kids. That his own police background might somehow be relevant. There were only so many ways a set-up like that could play out, none of them good, he thought.

  “Of course, they can also be…” he trailed off, and glanced back at Spider. Eye-plugs or not, Mr. Patel was ashen. He fiddled distractedly with the gold band of his watch, trying to make it sit properly. He went on. “I — or, rather, my wife and I — we have only one child. A boy.” The way he said it, using the tone of voice you might use to tell someone that you had three months to live, filled Spider with dread. All at once, he saw that whatever was going on here would soon be his problem.

  “Uh-huh,” Spider said, adopting a defensive voice.

  “His name is Vijay. He’s nine years old.”

  The man was clearly in pain and Spider was starting to feel a great sympathy for his boss. Only minutes ago, he’d been bursting with time machine geekery, lost in the magical glow of the movie prop hanging over their heads. No trace of the time machine enthusiast now, Spider thought. Patel had sunken into himself, retreating from the well-honed image of “business predator”. Broken, with all his stuffing ripped out, Spider thought, as his own well-honed copper instincts for ferreting out the truth in any situation kicked in. Patel’s body language practically shouted that his boy was dead, but Patel had said “his name is Vijay”. So, if the boy was not dead, there were only a few other possibilities that would leave a parent looking like that.

  “Whatever it is, Mr. Patel, I’m sure it’s—”

  Mr. Patel slammed a fist onto the glass table surface. Spider jumped, startled. Mr. Patel, now staring at him, moisture brimming along the underside of those eye-plugs, ashamed, said, his voice a hoarse whisper, “Spider, my boy is gone.”

  Oh, shit, Spider thought. He’d been right. “How long has it been?” He wondered if Patel and his wife were separated, and whether she might have taken the boy on a ‘visit to meet the family’, and simply not returned. It was a dismayingly common tactic employed by separated parents, typically in mixed marriages. Trying to get the child back from his abductor-parent could be, Spider knew, insanely difficult, negotiating the treacherous reefs of two countries’ legal systems.

  Relieved that this meeting was no longer focused on “the job”, Spider said, “Pardon me for asking this, but was it your wife?”

  Patel was shocked. “What? My wife? No, no, not at all. No, it’s not that. He’s not been abducted, nothing like that.”

  “No? Oh, well, in that case — oh,” he said. “Then is he…?” This was unbearably awkward; he felt like he was intruding in the most delicate of matters.

  Mr. Patel peered at Spider, confused for a moment, then understood, and managed a weak smile that never reached his eye-plugs. “Oh, you think — no, Spider. No, Vijay is, as far as I’m aware, still very much alive. I’m sure I would know if he had passed from this life.”

  Now Spider was confused. “So Vijay isn’t dead, and not kidnapped — but he is gone? Um, sir?”

  “He’s taken off in my time machine, Spider.”

  “You have another time machine? Not this one?” He gestured up at the Machine overhead.

  “Oh, yes, Spider. As it happens, I do have another machine, at home. I believe the term these days for such a time machine is, ‘hotrod’? Yes? She is, so to speak, ‘totally tricked out’.” Mr. Patel smiled a little self-consciously, aware that he sounded like a fool.

  “Oh,” Spider said, dismayed.

  “You’re beginning to see the problem.”

  “He’s nine years old, you said.”

  “Yes, Spider, and he’s gone. And so is my machine.”

  Spider had heard stories, since starting to work in the time machine biz, of kids getting up to all kinds of mischief with their parents’ time machines. Even quite young kids, though he had never heard of someone as young as nine making off with one. “How does a nine-year-old even know how to operate a time machine?” he said.

  “He’s my son. He shares my enthusiasm for all things time-travel-related. It’s one of the few things we have in…” He trailed off, and dabbed at his eye-plugs. Spider looked away. Mr. Patel apologized profusely, and took a moment to compose himself.

  “All right,” Spider said, a little too cop-friendly. “Young Vijay appears to have absconded with your time machine. Fine. Can you please give me some details of the time machine in question?” Spider could hardly believe how easily he had slipped back into the old habits and professional demeanor of Detective Senior Sergeant Spider Webb. “Let’s start with the technical side of things, so I have a baseline idea of just how far away in time Vijay might be.” Spider knew some hotrod time machines could jump a few thousand years; others might travel even farther down- or up-time.

  “She’s a custom job. Very fast. Very powerful,” said Patel.

  Hotrods, once the domain of funky old cars given new life with
sexy overpowered chromed-up engines and slick custom paint jobs, now included bog-standard old time machines, typically Tempos or Dolphins, which hobbyist tinkerers “fixed up”: all-new, barely legal, radically overclocked, liquid-nitrogen-cooled engine units, often mounted in parallel, put together with long-range refrigerated hydrogen-slush fuel-cells, with just a two-seater cabin, all pimped out with custom fittings, and then the entire thing given a slick paint and polish job. If the hotrod’s owner was truly on his game, he would likely have gone to the trouble of making the cabin air-tight, and organized some reconditioned Chinese EVA suits — just in case. Such hotrod time machine pilots sometimes liked to see just how far back in time they could go — the current record, for a single jump, was 74,200 years; but most hotrodders eventually attempted to jump into the Future. The farthest future jump — with the telemetry data to prove it — was a gobsmacking 142,000 years. It was far less than Rod Taylor had gone in the eponymous Time Machine. The pilot of that record-setting machine, a kid of nineteen, returned in a persistent vegetative state. Attempts to make sense of the contents of his extremely agitated but still conscious mind proved fruitless.

  “So,” Spider said, “you built yourself your very own hotrod.”

  “It’s my hobby! Something to play about with in my downtime. It helps me think about things, provides a distraction.”

  “I see. And young Vijay helped you out, passed you tools while you tinkered with the components, listening to you, lapping it all up.

  “Parminder,” he said, shaking his head, “she’s been after me to sell it for years.”

  “That would be your wife?”

  “Parminder. Yes. Light of my existence.” He affected a dull monotone, saying this, which Spider could not help but find amusing, thinking about his own history with Molly.

  “She was concerned about Vijay getting into trouble with it.”

  “I’m assuming you had the unit pretty seriously secured, yes?” Spider said

  “The starter unit was in a safe in my home office!”

  Spider could feel a headache coming on. He shook his head. “When did you last see the boy?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Have you reported him to the police as a missing person?”

  “No, Spider. I have not.”

  “Um, what?”

  “I said, ‘No—’”

  “I heard what you said. It’s just that I can’t believe you said what you said. Sir.”

  “I am doing my best to keep the police from getting involved.”

  Spider thought a moment. “So you’ve heard from kidnappers?” Which made no sense, because Patel said the boy had not been kidnapped. So, if not kidnapped, and the kid had simply taken off with the machine to God knows when, why not tell the cops? “You are aware,” Spider said, “that there is now a dedicated Time Crime Unit attached to the Major Crime Squad. I could put you in touch with—”

  “Spider, yes, of course I know. Of course! I am not a stupid man.”

  Spider was up out of his seat, and leaning, on his fists, on the edge of Patel’s desk, glaring down at his boss. “Then what are you not telling me?”

  “Spider, please, sit. I will explain everything.”

  “You’ll explain everything. Fine. Great!” Spider said, but inside, in his mind, he was thinking, Bag and cat have now parted company.

  “It’s a complicated affair.”

  “Of course it is.” Spider sat back in his seat and rubbed his face, sure he was not going to like this next bit. “Complicated,” he said. “Nothing’s ever simple, is it? It’s never, ‘Oh well, I’ll just download some fresh bloody drivers, and she’ll be right’. Oh, no. It’s always, ‘Oh, Spider, look, it’s complicated…’” He shook his head, eyes closed, feeling his beleaguered heart racing, aware of the adrenaline gushing through his body. He wanted to hit something, someone. If only Stéphane were here, he thought.

  Chapter 7

  Patel went over to stand by the billowing window, the glass darkening to ease the blaze of the afternoon sun, and told Spider everything. It was quite a story.

  Patel had indeed built himself a superior hotrod time machine. It was, he said, “fully unlocked.” Spider bit his lip. That meant the machine was unregistered. DOTAS had no idea it existed. That meant it could go anywhere, and the operator could do just about anything, unfettered by the usual restrictions imposed by governments everywhere on time machine use. “And your kid’s got it?” Spider said, more to himself then to Patel.

  “My work is extremely demanding, Spider. Business conditions are nearly impossible, and yet here I am trying to establish a Bharat Group presence in this country, intending to take advantage of that very situation. It is… It is hard. Very hard. Obtaining working credit in order to build, to hire staff, to buy plant and equipment — there is almost nowhere today you can get it at anything less than loan-shark rates, and even those sources are starting to balk. To be perfectly frank with you, Mr. Webb, I am not at all sure we can make a success of this venture.”

  If Mr. Patel were a soldier, he would be on the point of rout, ready to flee the field of battle. He was exhausted, Spider saw, beyond the point of utter fatigue, but Patel knew he had to fight on, regardless. How close was this man to a full-on breakdown? There was only so much pressure one could take before he snapped. Spider knew that only too well from his own experience. Push a man too far and you might damage him for life.

  “Right, I didn’t know things were in such bad shape,” said Spider.

  “That’s business,” Patel said, sounding like one of the many motivational videos Spider had been required to watch. “You take your opportunities where you find them. Work hard. Be diligent. Own the chronotechnology market.”

  Spider was all too aware of the impossible business conditions under which the Bharat Group was battling. Things started to spiral down when, to no-one’s great surprise but awe-inspiring dismay, the United States president resigned from office, citing the “ungovernability of the union”. The United States was “united in name only,” the president had said. Vital legislation in the nation’s interest could no longer be passed. The two legislative assemblies could no longer function. Bipartisanship was dead. So the president decided to fall on his sword, and he hoped his successor, his very surprised-looking vice president, might do better. International financial markets and institutions had not reacted well. The US dollar, already a mere shadow of its former robust self, crashed, blue-chip companies — businesses that had lasted a century or more, that had withstood the deadly rollercoaster financial crises of the past twenty years — laid off eighty percent of their workforce, or closed altogether, turned the lights off, locked the doors on their way out. It all happened so fast, the media — in any form — could hardly keep up. Suicide rates soared. People marched in the streets by the millions, waving signs, demanding the US be bailed out, and castigating the ex-president as a “quitter”.

  In the midst of the catastrophe, one product remained a strong seller, the one thing everybody wanted: time machines. Desperate people needed to think they could use the damned things to escape their predicaments. Millions attempted to use the machines for a one-way emigration back to the past, where they could set up new businesses, buy cheap land, and start over. It didn’t matter that they might run into their past selves. They could exist in the same timeline without consequence. Spider knew this and supposed most of the time travelers just didn’t care. Others opted to vault over the current crisis, hoping to land on the other side of it all, when things had settled, the US was saved, and it was back to business as usual. And, of course, no surprises, there were still others who simply wanted to meddle and speculate, either trying to keep everything from going bad in the first place; or hoping to find the critical nodal point that had set the catastrophe in motion. The United States had never been short on people keen to make mo
ney from ordinary people’s fears of the future. These folks, the meddlers and the for-profit prophets were the ones who kept running afoul of the US government’s Timeline Security cops, many of whom had gone private, and still, as in Australia, very keen to keep people from using chronotechnology to take any kind of financial advantage of their knowledge of how things have turned out. How could such time cops possibly know what ‘simple, honest folks’ were up to? It was a common question: just how do they know what I’m doing? The answer: they just know. That’s all you need to know. And when you bought a new time machine, you had to sign a clause in the sales document specifying that you were aware of the government’s regulations governing this kind of thing, and that you would indeed comply with it. Yes, they would argue, but if the government’s collapsed, and the constitution’s just a piece of paper, how can you prosecute me with any kind of validity? It didn’t matter. Some rules were bigger than mere national constitutions.

  Chapter 8

  Spider stood, staring out the window. He saw that it was a beautiful sunny day, saw the way the river sparkled in the afternoon sun, how the traffic flowed along the swooping freeways, and marveled at the thrusting office towers all around. From Patel’s office everything looked fine, a persuasive illusion. But in the office, right now, with Patel sitting at his desk, looking like a prisoner, things were quietly going from bad to worse to sheer, mindboggling catastrophe.