Paradox Resolution

by K. A. Bedford

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” she said, coming closer, sticking a finger in his chest, her face like thunder.

  “But—”

  “Suppose I let you slope off on your own, you with the huge bullseye on the back of your head and a sign that says, ‘Kick Me!’ How long would you last out there, on your own? The way things are going, you’d wind up dead within about…” She checked her watch. “Maybe half an hour, tops. Most likely because of some stupid time machine bullshit, again. So, my problem. As usual. Therefore, you stay with me. And don’t give me any of that Basset Hound face bullshit, either, with the sad eyes and the moping, yeah, that face right there!”

  He had not been aware he had been pulling any face other than, “shocked”. He went to speak, but Iris was not done yet.

  “You think whatever the hell happened here at this house was done by your precious bloody Molly—”

  “Not just Molly, she’s—”

  “Stop right there,” she said, holding up her hand. “Just give it a rest. You’re going to give me that bullshit about Molly and this, this, “Vore” thing, getting together, like that Stapleton guy told you, aren’t you! Because a perfect stranger is so trustworthy, and all. The guy who told you — and you believed him! — that Molly’s disappearance from New York landed her in the way far future, only not really, and now she’s here and trashing everything she ever valued—”

  “Except the fish.”

  At this Iris slumped against the car, and managed a bitter sort of laughter, coughing it out. “Yeah, except the stupid fish.”

  He went on. “It’s true. Molly and this Vore thing. And it was them last night, with Stapleton.”

  “You are most likely right,” Iris said, at last, after careful thought. “Certainly DOTAS thinks so, after all. I just can’t see it myself. I’m sorry. My poor old brain won’t go there. You’re talking about monsters, Spider. Monsters! Now come on. Help me out.”

  Spider took a breath, knowing none of this talk was going to make a difference. Iris was rooted in the here and now. He no longer had that privilege. He’d left all this behind, and gone to the End of Time, and seen things he never should have seen. He’d never felt properly anchored to this reality since. It was as if a part of him was still there, left behind at the End of Time, caught up in all the Zeropoint intrigues. All the same, he took a shot at it, starting with the basics. “Stapleton was at the Colditz detention facility where they had the Vore on ice.”

  “Until it did the nasty with your ex, of course!” Iris said, one eyebrow arched.

  Spider ignored that, or tried to. “And Stapleton escaped. He said the prisoners built a time machine—”

  Iris clapped her hands, delighted. “Of course they did.”

  “So he got away, and came to find me.”

  “And the big beastie came after him, and caught him, before he got to you.”

  Spider had been wondering about this all day. Why would this Vore, having escaped from its detention, go after a mild-mannered Canadian physicist, of all people? Stapleton told Spider that he needed Spider’s help, though he never quite got around to exactly what kind of help, did he? And now there’s this Mollyvore, which, of all the things it could have done after escaping from its captivity, chose to chase Stapleton across time, to keep him from reaching me. Like I’m some huge threat! he thought, which itself was clearly absurd. What am I going to do? Kill the Vore part of Mollyvore with a spanner? Hit it with heavy-duty sarcasm? Hmm. And then, he thought, following the thread where it went, when this unimaginable thing did catch up with Stapleton, it didn’t just kill him, did it? It destroyed him. Spider remembered the sensation of crazed viciousness hanging in the air. The Vore, or Mollyvore, had it in for Stapleton, Spider was thinking. And that was the puzzling thing. What could this guy have possibly done to so piss off an otherworldly being?

  Spider thought about his frustrating little talk with John Stapleton, in the Calgary diner simulation, and despite Spider’s best efforts, was damned if he could remember Stapleton explaining just how it was exactly that he had wound up in Colditz. Spider remembered the business about Stapleton, his wife Ellen, and some confederates, people who’d been part of Dickhead’s Zeropoint operation, bunking off, fleeing across time in one of Dickhead’s enormous fleet of timeships — but there was that big gap in Stapleton’s timeline just before he had been caught up in the space-time-twisting driftnet that was Colditz. That gap, Spider thought, was going to be trouble, and it likely concealed all manner of things Spider would rather not find out about. As it was, there was still the question: why build something like Colditz? Eight point four million years in a cold, dark future. What was that about? And what would it have taken to build such a place, in such conditions? What would be the point of capturing one of these Vore things? It would take limitless money; world-consuming resources; relentless drive and determination over a godawful long time. An effort along the lines of the construction of the Pyramids or the great Cathedrals: backbreaking effort over lifetimes. It seemed to Spider like a lot of trouble to go to in order to capture and hold this thing. The more he thought about it, the more gobsmacking it seemed, just trying to wrap his feeble 21st-century mind around the idea of far-future technology. Then again, he thought, maybe Colditz was nothing more than a very big, very elaborate bug trap, like the kind of thing you’d use to trap and kill pantry moths — only writ larger than large, with a strong dose of super-science. What did the freezing people of the bleak Earth of the Year Eight Million want with idiot time travelers from the distant past turning up, wanting to take photos of them and their quaint folkways? Maybe trapping those pesky time-travelers — and killing them? — was the idea. He remembered that Stapleton told him that he, Spider, or at least a future version of himself, had also been there. It was because Stapleton and this Future Spider were friends or at least allies in Colditz that made Stapleton come back to now to try and reach him. Yes, that was right, Spider thought, trying to keep it all straight in his overtaxed mind. Something to look forward to, then, he thought.

  Bloody hell, he really needed to talk to Stapleton again, and, this time, get some actual answers. He’d tried everything he could think of, on his own, to reactivate the diner environment, without success. The idea that everything he needed to know was, right now, this very minute, actually stuck in his brain, in a locked compartment, was driving him nuts. He thought again about his dad’s power drill. Tempting, real tempting.

  Then, a brainwave: what if John Stapleton, the physics professor, had not been just this unlucky time-traveling guy caught in the Colditz trap, but had been the secret mastermind of the whole thing? No, that was bollocks, he thought. Where would Stapleton get the resources for something like that? Spider had met the man. He was just this regular bloke, very brainy, sure, who’d been swept up in Dickhead’s insane cult, but who came to his senses and got out, just him and a few others, including, Spider remembered, Stapleton’s wife.

  Yes, all true, at least as far as it went. Spider had met his share of murderers and assorted scumbags during his time in WAPOL. He knew there were the ones who would blab everything as soon you looked at them; that there were the ones who wanted, badly, to unload this terrible burden they were carrying; that there were the ones who denied everything, and would continue to deny everything, no matter what the courts decided, until the heat death of the universe; and there were those who would just sit there, arms folded, eyes dead, staring and saying nothing; and then there were the tricksters, the ones who would bury you in details and factoids and narratives that sounded incredibly compelling and believable, about how they were the innocent party in all of this, and you need to be out there chasing after these other bastards, and they really, really sold it, and made you believe it. Spider had met them all.

  But, thinking about it for a second, Stapleton had worked for Dickhead. Stapleton was the guy in cha
rge of administering the poison — oh, wait, sorry. Poison, Spider thought, was a bit harsh. The facts were that Spider’s Far Future Self, Soldier Spider, and his time marines, were all set to storm Dickhead’s Zeropoint flagship, and Dickhead knew it. So he brought forward the “ascendancy operation”, in which his acolytes were told that it was finally time to partake in the Final Secret of the Universe, and that this meant drinking a lovely, tasty beverage. Stapleton and his wife had been part of the team assigned to prepare and distribute the stuff to the adoring crowds on all of Dickhead’s ships. Stapleton was part of Dickhead’s Inner Circle, one of his most trusted people. Hmm, Spider thought, maybe there was a lot more to Stapleton than he had hithero suspected. Spider remembered his first sight of the interior of Dickhead’s flagship when he and the time marines arrived — the frost-covered bodies of hundreds of people, all of them believers, all of them dead because of their faith in Dickhead’s ravings about the bloody Angels. Focus, Spider, he told himself.

  What if Stapleton had been much more Dickhead’s man than he’d previously let on, or Spider had suspected and was one of these trickster bastards? What if he, for whatever demented purpose of his own, wanted to get his hands on this Final Secret without having to wait, or die? Spider could imagine it. “Hey, Dickhead,” Stapleton would have said at some point, “what exactly is this Final Secret thingy, exactly?” and Dickhead would have given him all manner of magical bollocks about angels and God and the tainted world that needed rebuilding, and all of that, and Stapleton would have asked, because he was a scientist, a man of reason, “No, really. What’s in the actual Secret itself? Have you had any, for want of a better word, spoilers?” Spider was pretty sure that Dickhead had no idea what the Secret might actually contain, but he could guess what Dickhead would tell Stapleton. He’d look at the guy, that weird, messianic light in his eyes, sweat pouring down his enormous great head, and grab Stapleton by the shoulders, and say, “Power, my boy. Knowledge is power, you mark my words!”

  “Oh, dear God,” Spider said, thinking it over, seeing how all the parts might fit together. And thinking, too, that Molly, his Molly, was right there, in the burning, crazy heart of the whole thing.

  He had to go there. There was nothing else for it. “Bugger!” he muttered, kicking at the pavement. “Bugger bugger bloody buggery bugger!”

  Iris did her best to conceal a look of amusement, watching Spider carrying on. “Something wrong, Spider?”

  He looked at her, none too impressed to see that his troubles amused Iris. “Just the usual.”

  She nodded. “Sorry I yelled at you. It’s…”

  Spider held up a hand. “No. No, don’t apologize. I was out of order.” He was still staring down at Molly’s driveway. Fitful weeds were struggling through gaps between the paving bricks here and there. He felt a strange urge to go and get a shovel and get rid of them before Molly came home. Then he remembered, glanced up at the house, thinking about the devastation inside, that the whole place was now a crime scene, and would be taped off. This presented Spider with a problem, he began to realize. Where the hell was he going to sleep tonight? Now that the Lucky Happy Moon Motel was closed, Spider was homeless. He hadn’t fully taken it in, earlier, when he saw the sign on the Motel’s door, that they were closing down. Now the enormity of it, the prospect of actual homelessness, began to close over him. Oh, God, he thought, wide-eyed, trying to think. “Um, Iris, listen.” Oh, he hated that tone in his voice.

  Iris was way ahead of him. “You could crash on my couch; it’ll be like old times.” Strangely, though, she didn’t sound too enthusiastic about those “old times”. He remembered how actually living in Iris’ small flat was good, but awkward, and none too cozy. “You know,” she added, “just until you get something permanent sorted.”

  “Sure. Of course,” he said, nodding. “Absolutely.” Or until I get killed, whichever comes first, he thought.

  “S’pose it would kill you to move back in with your mum and dad.”

  “Like nothing else. It’d be like bloody kryptonite.” Spider’s parents had been bugging him in recent months about doing exactly this. They’d told him they could not abide the thought of their son living in Mrs. Ng’s dreadful place one minute longer. “You’re better than that, son,” his mum told him. “Where’s your sense of dignity?” and Spider had told them that dignity cost money he didn’t have.

  “Where’s my bloody team got to?” Iris said, leaving Spider at the car while she went to stand in the middle of the yard, on the phone, yelling at people to “get their precious arses over here, pronto”. Spider could imagine that the prospect of attending a crime scene at Spider Webb’s old domicile was not filling Iris’ team with enthusiasm.

  “Look, Iris,” he called over to her. “Why don’t I just duck out to get something to eat. I’m bloody starving. What about you?”

  She ordered him to stay put, and said she’d send a uniform to get him something, and that he, Spider Webb, was not leaving her sight, not now, not later, not bloody ever, and was that understood? He wanted to answer, “Yes, dear,” but knew he’d be atomized if he tried it.

  Chapter 17

  Much later that evening, once the scene at Molly’s house had been sampled, sniffed, skimmed, vacuumed, scanned, probed, and otherwise investigated as far as was considered safe for Iris and her team, Iris left Mullens in charge of the continuing examination of the front and back yards, and the interviews of all neighbors out to a radius of about half a kilometer. Mullens was in for a long, long night. Iris, meanwhile, grabbed Spider. “Hungry?”

  “I was hungry hours ago,” he said. He was reading a message he’d just received from Stéphane Grey about Molly and her disappearance.

  They wound up at a late night fast-food place, a franchise operation run by spotty teenagers in ill-fitting uniforms, where what passes for “ambience” is drowned out by constant beeps, hums, howls, chirps, and klaxons going off as various automatic food-production machines finished their cycles. The smell of hot grease and burned meat made Spider’s stomach rumble. Iris looked right at home, Spider was surprised to see.

  Once they were settled in an out of the way corner of the restaurant, Spider tried to explain to Iris what Stéphane had to say about Molly’s disappearance. “The key thing, right, is that Molly seems to have met this old woman.”

  “Name? Description?” Iris dabbed at her mouth and wiped her fingers.

  “No name given. Description, well, elderly, but upright, strong, in good nick, I guess you’d say.”

  “An old woman, eh?” Iris said, with a small sigh.

  “Yeah, that was my thought, too.”

  They both said, as one, “Future Molly.”

  “So did Old Lady leave a name and contact details with this art guy?”

  “No. He only heard about her in the first place after asking around when Molly failed to show up to a lunch meeting he’d organized. He went back to the hotel where they’d been staying, looked around, and found a note.”

  “So long and thanks for all the fish?” Iris asked, tired but sense of humor still intact.

  Spider was amused. “Something very much like that, actually. Just, ‘thanks for the opportunity’, was pretty much all she said.” Spider didn’t mention that the note, a copy of which Stéphane had attached, had been signed, “Love always, M.” He went on. “She’d taken one of her suitcases, her handbag, and that was about it. Stéphane started asking around, talking to everyone on the hotel staff he could find, which is how he found out about the old woman, very well put together, elegantly dressed, accompanying Molly through the lobby, into the lifts and, presumably, up to Stéphane’s suite.”

  “So this woman was actually in his suite. If it was Future Molly, it’d be hard to tell, fingerprint- and DNA-wise.”

  Spider said, “What about microbeprints?” This was a new thing, only recently accepted as evid
ence that would stand up in court. The idea was that people carried patterns of microbes, bacteria, on their hands and fingertips, and that as people went about their business, touching things, they left samples of these microbes behind, which could then be matched to their owner. Microbeprints were not considered an absolute proof of identity, since a person could go through several microbe patterns in the course of his or her life, and in this particular case, involving a version of a person from some far off point in the future, it was entirely conceivable that Future Molly and Present Molly would have different but similar microbeprints.

  Iris lifted her eyebrows. “You’re well-informed.”

  “I try to keep up.”

  “Still, you’re talking about a hotel room. In New York, right now. Have you seen the news? If those rooms are getting cleaned at all, I’m guessing management’s doing it.”

  Iris was probably right about that, Spider thought. She went on. “So where did Molly meet this woman? Did he say?”

  “He said, earlier that day, he had a bunch of meetings, so he left Molly with strict instructions, an armed minder, and some transport credit—”

  “Wait, she had a minder?”

  “The minder says Molly went to one of the few remaining Starbucks to get a coffee, while she, the minder, stood out by the entrance. She added, by way of covering her arse, that she insisted Molly wear antiballistic armor, which the hotel provided as a courtesy service. Nice, huh? Anyway, Molly goes into Starbucks. A while later, Molly and this woman emerge. The old woman, the minder commented, looked a bit like she could have been Molly’s mother or grandmother, with the coloring, bone structure, that kind of thing, and wore sunglasses. She also, this old woman, did not have any apparent body armor or sidearm protection, but then didn’t look like she needed any, either. Minder said, quote, ‘she herself wouldn’t try to take down that bitch,’ unquote.”