“Oh, shit,” Spider said. “He spiked your drink.”
“He did, yeah,” Stapleton said, mouth twisted, embarrassed. “Next thing, it’s like, stuff is happening in my head, I’m sitting there, sweating, the sweat just pouring off me, and I’ve got the worst headache ever, like something was squeezing aside my brain to make room.”
“So what happened?”
Stapleton took a sip of his coffee. “I thought I was having a stroke! I told Dickhead to call emergency, but he’s suddenly all, ‘it’s okay, John. Just relax, let it happen. You’ll be fine. It’s just the immune response to the installation. Once the new system stabilizes, everything will be much clearer, okay?’ I tell you, Spider, it was one of those moments. You just stare and stare at this guy, this guy who as far as you can tell is killing you, and he’s talking about something ‘installing’? God!”
Spider thought about how the D6 seemed to have installed all of this in his own head. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”
“Mmm, yeah, well. So, the thing is, I must have blacked out for a moment, or something, because next thing there’s a voice in my head—”
“Oh, a voice! How nice.”
Stapleton continued under the withering gaze of Spider’s scorn. “Yeah, this TV announcer-type voice, like that movie trailer guy, Don LaFontaine—”
“Sorry, who?”
“You know, the guy who did all the movie trailers, with this heavy, gravelly voice. ‘In a world where madness has a name…’”
“Oh,” Spider said, getting it. He remembered that voice from when he was a kid, going to movies. “Him.”
“Yeah, only that voice is in my head, and it’s talking to me. ‘Welcome, John Stapleton, to Time Voyager, your gateway to the wonders of the past, and the mysteries of the Future!’ And you could hear the italics in ‘Future’, too.”
“Wait a minute, just wait one minute. Time Voyager? What the—?”
“Time travel without a time machine, Spider.”
“Without a time machine?”
“No machine, no problem.”
“No way,” Spider said.
“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “Scout’s honor!” Stapleton held up two fingers to illustrate. “And it works. You tell the thing where you want to go, and you go. Boom. Just like that. No machine. No hassles.”
This started to explain a few things. Like Stapleton turning up in Midland without a machine. Like Dickhead’s head turning up in the break room fridge.
Spider was trying to get to grips with the idea. “So, what? You’ve turned your brain into a time machine?”
“Kinda, but not really. It’s more that your existing brain now has new functionality. You can see Time itself. You can step outside the flow, and you can see how what we perceive as time is mostly illusion, an artifact of the way parts of our brains are structured.”
“Bull-hyphen-shit,” Spider said, sitting back in the booth, stunned at what he was hearing, and not believing a word of it. “No way. Just … no way.”
“Spider, there’s a considerable body of neurophysiological research backing this up. Time, as we have always known it, is an illusion. It’s not a fundamental part of the universe, the way we always thought.”
“But,” Spider said, feeling his own brain starting to ache as it tried to digest what he was hearing. “But what about Einstein? What about—”
“Yeah, I know. It’s okay.”
“It’s bloody well not okay! It’s not okay at all!” Spider said, getting heated. “No, I’m not accepting this in any way, shape or form! What you’re talking about is bloody magic. You’re talking about wishing yourself hither and yon in time, for God’s sake!” He was up out of his seat, pacing, clutching his head, trying to remember there was some trick to getting out of this world, and back to his own world, but what was it? It was the simplest bloody thing, but now that he wanted to use it, he couldn’t remember it to save his useless life. This, this “Time Voyager” nonsense was squeezing everything else out — or, maybe, it was more that all the sensible contents in his brain were retreating quick-smart from such an outlandish and frankly insane notion, boycotting the idea, perhaps even waving handmade protest signs and chanting. It just was not on, Spider thought. You could not simply wish yourself about in time. Even with the sorts of time machines he worked on every day, time travel was still massively difficult, the computations involved were of staggering, breathtaking complexity. Only the unbelievably powerful computer hardware of recent times was up to processing the white-water torrent of particle-state-vector data for every particle in not only the time traveler’s body, but the particles of the time machine itself, and even the air inside the time machine. All of the data for all of those particles had to be rewritten in the translation engine, a computational task that once only God could possibly have performed, and probably only with a really good calculator.
Now, Spider thought, everyone will be able to go anywhere in time; anywhere in the Manifold. It was unthinkable, to have such power. He turned to Stapleton. “What about ghost mode? What about historical events?”
“Like what?”
“Let’s say, the Crucifixion.” It was the number one time tourism destination, even if you could only go in ghost mode so tourists couldn’t interfere with Christ’s suffering, much as some often desperately wanted to do. The consequences of messing with the Crucifixion were considered by world governments to be far too dangerous to let mere mortals interfere with it. “What about that? Can Time Voyager—”
“No problem. Go back. Hang with the locals. Eat the food, drink the water, get lucky with the ladies, talk to Jesus, heck, talk to the Disciples, you name it. Whatever you want to do, you can do it.”
“So you could keep Christ from getting crucified.”
“It’s tricky and you’d be hard pressed to stop it, at least by yourself, but yeah, it could happen.”
Spider could barely think. He had to hold his head. His heart boomed in his chest. Spider was thinking about the consequences of Time Voyager going public, going viral. He thought of guys like bloody Mr. Patel, who’d spent all that money and all that time building his Best Time Machine Ever, now needing only to drink what amounted to a bloody potion. It was too much, too much power, too much influence. The temptation to meddle would be unbearable. Governments around the world had no chance of stopping it, not once the instructions got pirate-bayed. Reality was done for. Every clueless moron who ever bought himself a time machine for the express purpose of using time travel to scam reality out of big bucks could now rampage about in history, screwing things up, creating great turbulent changestorms rippling all over the Manifold.
Then Spider stopped. “So there you are, a mild-mannered Canadian physics guy, minding your own business. And you meet this amazing guy, who gives you an amazing superpower. A bloody superpower that allowed you to appear in the middle of Midland…”
“As easy as stepping in and out of your timeline.”
“So where’d Dickhead get it?”
“Dunno, you’d have to ask him. He never said.”
“Well, since the git in question has been separated forcefully from his enormous great head, I don’t see much prospect of asking Dickhead much of anything.”
“Um, what?” Stapleton said, startled.
“Dickhead. Someone’s cut his head off. Wound up in my break room fridge.”
“In your fridge?”
“Yeah.”
“A fridge.”
“Yes, a fridge. God, do I have to draw you a diagram, Physics Genius?”
“How the hell would it get in your fridge?”
“Me, I reckon it was time travel,” Spider said.
“Why would someone time travel a severed head into your fridge?”
“I think Dickhead did it himself.”
“
You — what?”
“Dickhead’s head. Gets cut off. Lots of blood. But this Time Voyager thing is in his head, like it’s in your head. First chance he gets, post-slice, he blips away from wherever he is, getting parted from his body, and winds up…”
“In your fridge.”
“Yup. Just like that. Which means…?”
Stapleton saw where Spider was going, and was clearly thinking hard about it. “Why would he wait until after his head was severed before blipping out? Why wouldn’t he just blip out at the first sign of trouble?”
“Exactly.”
“Hmm,” Stapleton said, a little pale, amazed at the very idea. “A head could do that, on its own?”
“Severed heads are conscious, more or less, for anything up to a minute after they’re cut off from fresh blood and oxygen, depending on how the cut’s done,” Spider said, and went on to explain about the experiments conducted on guillotined heads during the Terror. “As for Dickhead, well, his head comes off, and all the blood pours out, and that’d be bad — but there might have been just the merest speck of life left in that enormous noggin of his, just enough, that he could punch out, and find me, good old Spider, lucky Spider. Spider who owes Dickhead a big favor.”
Stapleton was lost in thought for a long moment, frowning, fiddling with his bitten-back nails. “You told me in Colditz that Dickhead saved your life once.”
“More than once, really, if you factor in giving me the job in the first place. Less dramatic, but it was a good deed, even if he did have an ulterior motive at the time. Just like he must have had with you, that night in Calgary.”
“Well, yeah, since you mention it…”
“He put the hard word on you while you were all ga-ga over the Time Voyager thing, right?”
“He said he’d just upgraded my brain, so I’d be able to deal with this big project he had cooking, this really big special deal.”
“Was it called Zeropoint?”
“Yeah, that was it.”
“Got the same offer.”
“So you got the—?”
“No. No I did not. And I wouldn’t have accepted it, anyway. Would have done everything in my power to get it the hell out of my head right then.”
Stapleton nodded, looking sad and tired. “I should have, too.”
“Regrets?”
“I’ve got a few, yeah, you might say that. One or two.”
“Shiny future not quite so shiny?”
“Not shiny at all.”
“You could have just bugged out, though. Time machine in your head. Nothing to keep you there, at the Arsehole of Time with Dickhead, right?”
And here Stapleton looked at Spider, and for the first time Spider saw some vulnerability, some fear. “You know about his cult, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Spider said. “Been there. Saw the bodies. Got the t-shirt.” He was being flippant about it, but in his head, where he still saw those frozen bodies every night when he tried to sleep, the silence of Dickhead’s abandoned flagship still boomed in the big empty spaces of his mind, cold and hollow. “You were there?”
“Spider, we were on the Gold Alpha Protectorate Team.”
“Cool. Did you get special glow-in-the-dark badges and secret handshakes?”
Stapleton ignored him. “It was our job to carry out the ascendancy operation.”
This made Spider shut up and adjust his attitude. “Oh,” he said in a small voice. “You had to…” He nodded towards Stapleton, indicating the obvious.
“That’s right. We had to acquire the drug — the ‘eucharist’, if you like — work out dosages versus body weights for each member of the Ascendancy Team.” His voice was quiet, almost inaudible; his eyes were staring at something far away Spider did not want to see. “But there was a problem. Some members of the team were allergic to one of the ingredients in that formulation of the drug. We had to recompile it, test it, to make sure it was safe—”
Spider sat blinking slowly, unable to believe what he was hearing. “Make sure it was safe,” he said, trying out the sound of each word. “Safe,” he added, now shaking his head. “You were going to kill people.”
“It had to be painless. It had to be free of any kind of unpleasantness, sickness, pain. It had to be like going to sleep, or people would refuse to take it. Dickhead was extremely clear about this. Taking it and succumbing to it had to look — and here Dickhead was very specific in his choice of words. He said it had to look, ‘inviting, even tempting’.”
Spider thought he might be ill. “How could you…?”
“Spider, we didn’t.”
“What?”
“We didn’t.”
“I saw the fucking bodies.”
Stapleton could see the look on Spider’s face. He said, “Some of us, Ellen, me, Deb, Lee and Lyn, we hatched a plan.”
“Ooooh, a plan! Was it a cunning plan?”
“Well, it worked. How’s that, Spider? Huh? It worked. It got us out of there. We stole one of Dickhead’s timeships and blipped out of there, we—”
“Why not just blip out with the Time Voyager thing?”
“Time Voyager doesn’t come with a battleship’s worth of cross-time weaponry.”
“Ah. Good point.”
“So there we were, hurtling across the Manifold. It was Ellen, in the beginning. She saw what we were doing, and she just plain refused. Me, I was still a loyal acolyte. Yes, Dickhead, sir, whatever you say, Dickhead, and all the rest, but Ellen took me aside, and she, well, she tore me a new one. Told me she did not marry a monster, and she would not become a monster herself, just to satisfy some madman from Australia with a Jim Jones fetish.”
“Ellen sounds nice.”
Stapleton smiled, but then the smile broke. “Yeah,” he said, and wiped his face, looking at his empty coffee mug.
“You’ve lost touch?”
“Dickhead’s people came after us. They used all kinds of custom hacks to break into our ship. They sent chronovirus attacks, causality bombs, scatterboys, chum-chums, you name it — and we were doing the same, trying to crash their Time Voyager installations to keep them the hell away from us, chasing illusions and false leads, hopping timelines, switching universes, sheaves of alternate realities, bouncing back and forth, back and forth, sometimes hundreds, thousands of times per second, desperate to keep ahead of them, to get some distance, to change our identities. The speed of it, Spider. Hot pursuit! Burning through billions of years in a moment. Wiping out entire nascent cultures with every other step, but then inadvertently causing life to sprout on some dead, ancient rock the next. It was a rush, to be honest, a blur of adrenaline, calculation, blinding speed, dazzling power — and in the end, yeah, we lost the pursuers…”
“But you also lost…?”
“Yeah. Yeah…”
“Is she—?”
“No, or, well, I don’t know. We got separated.” He stared to one side. “And that was that. No time to check. No time to loop back.”
“Mate,” Spider said, feeling for him. “I’m sorry.”
Neither said anything for a long while. Spider wished he had another coffee. He got up, wandered around the diner, admiring the small details, the textures, the play of light and shadow. As virtual worlds went, this was a good one, though too heavy with silence at moments like this. After a while, as Spider played with the cash register, he said to Stapleton, “So what happened next?”
“That’s just it. I don’t remember.” He got up, and came over to the counter, as if he wanted to order something. He was studying the menu on the wall behind Spider.
“How can you not remember?”
“Memory, Spider. It’s a funny thing. Easy to get tangled.”
“So how’d you wind up in Colditz?”
“Don’t kn
ow. There’s this gap in my timeline. A big gaping hole. Time traveler goes in, nothing comes out. One moment we’re fleeing for our lives, blazing across the Manifold. Next moment, we’re cooling our heels in Colditz, and we realize we’ve been there a while.”
“Eight million years from now.”
“Yeah.”
“You think Dickhead built it, or had it built?”
“Dunno. Don’t think so.”
“But if you’ve got all that time travel stuff in your head…” Spider said, thinking aloud.
Stapleton finished the thought. “How do we wind up stuck anywhere, least of all there?”
“Crossed my mind.”
“Colditz security system. Interfered with Time Voyager, rendered it inoperable. The only way out of there, well, getting out of the facility wasn’t actually that hard. In some ways the guards even encouraged it, since it cut down the numbers of prisoners — sorry, detainees. The only thing was: The atmosphere was frozen and had collapsed. Outside of Colditz, if the vacuum didn’t kill you, the temperature would.”
“Someone stole the sun?”
“That’s what we were told, yeah.”
“But you can’t just go around stealing whole stars! Who could do that?”
“Dunno. We were too busy trying to survive and get out of there.”
“Fair point.” Spider stared at him, horrified. “So, at minimum you’d need an EVA suit.”
“And a ship, or at least a decent high-end time machine, good for really heroically long jumps.”
Like a hotrod, Spider thought, thinking about Mr. Patel and Kali. “But,” Spider said, “somehow, whether by luck or good fortune, or whatever, you managed to get out of Colditz.”
“Yeah,” Stapleton said, sipping a mug of steaming coffee he’d just magicked into existence, not looking at Spider.
“You got out of the inescapable prison.”
“No prison is ever escape-proof, Spider,” he said, meeting Spider’s gaze over his coffee. “You and I were on the escape committee—”
“There was an escape committee?” Spider said, eyebrows raised, astonished. “And were there a couple of flinty guys up in one of the towers building a glider, and everything? Or maybe an elaborate tunnel system underground?”
Paradox Resolution Page 16
