“Is that what ghosts call changing history?”
Ben tensed.
It was oh-so-slight, and I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been watching for it. “Gotcha,” I said, poking him in the holographic equivalent of his ribcage. “Spill. And none of this ‘Keep the world of the living and the dead separate’ bullshit, okay? You cannot bring me the coffee and still trot out that line whenever you want to dodge a question.”
Ben sighed. “Be gentle,” he said with a small smile. “Remember, the dead are curious, too. We wish to learn, to grow, as much as we did when we lived. It is why some of us have chosen to stay upon the earth, even after our days on it have come to a close.”
“Sure,” I replied. “So. A dead dude built a magic skyclock. Makes all the sense in the world.”
He pulled his arm away, and curled in on himself to rest his chin on his knees. I’d say he hunched over, but that’s not a Benism. Not unless I’d managed to find one of those rare topics that tore him up inside. We’ve all got those, and when we’re with those whom we love, we do our best to avoid them unless it’s absolutely necessary to pick at the scabs. Me and Ben, we’re no different; by now, I knew mostly everything that hurt him.
This was new.
I waited.
“The past cannot be changed,” he said.
I nodded. “Because paradox.”
“Because paradox, indeed. There is, however, nothing to prevent the dead from duplicating what they have seen in the future in their own time.”
“The magic skyclock was built by a ghost? I assumed it was yanked out of the future, whole, and then dumped in ancient Greece.”
He laughed, a sad chuckle. “What have I brought you from the future, Dearest?”
I had the answer ready. “Information and alcohol. And this.” I held up my right hand, with its ugly resin ring on my middle finger. It was a cross between a pager and a GPS, and it was keyed directly to Sparky’s implant. Anytime I needed him, I could press a hidden button, and he—and nobody else—would get the signal.
“Don’t you think that’s odd? You’ve often asked me why I haven’t brought you your own personal antigravity device. Barring that, a jetpack.”
“I assumed you didn’t want to scrape me off of the ceiling.”
“That, too,” he admitted. “But the technology to build that ring already exists within this time. The physical footprints for global positioning systems and pagers, both? That ring could have been made by someone with the knowledge and ability. I violated nothing by bringing that ring back to you.
“Now, an antigravity device? The traces of that technology might exist in ideas and experiments. There are some steps taken towards such a device within today’s laboratories, but these steps have left no significant imprints. One day, they might, and on that day it may be possible to bring you that device.”
“Ah. Paradox.”
“Yes. If there is no foundation in the timeline, an item should never be moved from the future.”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Ben was fretting. “Should never, or can’t be?” I asked.
He gave me a sad smile. “Very astute of you, Dearest. If I were to bring an item from the future back to the present, it would be unmoored in time.”
I tossed this idea around in my head, looking for a way to apply paradox to it. It took me a moment.
“Oh shit,” I said, very, very quietly.
Ben nodded. “Oh shit, indeed.”
You remember what I was saying about what might happen if information from the future informs our decisions? How what we decide would either be what we’d have done anyhow, or how the option might simply reverse itself?
I had just realized there was a third option.
“I can bring alcohol back to you, as alcohol may as well be a natural law in that it seems to violate nothing. I made a decision to bring back your ring, as the technology that informs it is already fixed within this time. I will not risk bringing back much else, as…”
“…it might cease to exist.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “And if that is indeed the case, it might erase parts of the timeline with it.”
“There’s no way to know for sure, is there? How would we know if we just stopped…existing?” I asked. I glanced down to see my hands, still wrapped around my coffee cup, the same cup that Ben had—“Hey!” I said, as I dropped the mug on the floor and kicked it away from me. “Where’dja get this coffee?”
Ben laughed. “A diner in Brooklyn. Don’t worry,” he said, pushing the mug back towards me. It had been refilled with that same perfect blend. “I have found that teleportation may violate the rules of physics, but not those of time. The physical realm is much more forgiving than the temporal one.”
“Uh…”
“I always leave a tip, and I make the effort to return the cup. It is a darling place. I have no desire to help nudge it into bankruptcy.”
Good enough for me. I took up the mug, and let the heat sink into my hands. “If we violated time and it erased itself…” I started. The coffee still had streams of white from the cream. As I watched, these melted away. “We’d never know it happened.”
“I have a theory,” Ben said. “I don’t believe that timelines cease to exist, but I do think objects of paradox can become lost.”
“That’s a relief. It’d be better than just…disappearing.”
“Perhaps,” Ben said.
That same sense of sadness kept coming off of him in waves. It was getting hard to pretend he wasn’t feeling miserable, but the thing about Ben Franklin? He needs to think he’s five moves ahead of you, or he starts feeling even worse.
“You think this is why we’ve only found that one clock?” I asked. “The others got lost?”
“If there were others,” he replied. “Lesser devices similar to the Mechanism were described by numerous scholars, but this one has always been recognized as exceptional.”
“So…” I began. My poor brain hamster was turning its wheel as fast as it could. “If those lesser devices didn’t have the same footprint as the Mechanism, and if the Mechanism was built by a ghost who wanted to develop ideas he or she saw in the future… The Mechanism could inspire others, who might expand on its advanced technology instead of working on technology native to their own timeline. Boom! Paradox. Unless it somehow…didn’t.”
“Yes. As such, the Mechanism vanished off of the face of the earth, never to be seen until—”
I sat up straight and finished his sentence for him. “—until technology evolved to catch up with it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Intriguing, is it not, that we have yet to find an out-of-place artifact that we cannot easily explain? By the time we discover them, our science has surpassed their merits.”
“I figured that’s because our technology was better than theirs.”
He gave me that same sad smile again. “Such ego, Dearest. The joy of discovery is admitting there will always be something we cannot understand.”
Ben stared down at his mug. I felt the cold starting to creep back in as his concentration slipped and my metaphysical energy blanket fell apart.
“Ben?” I asked. “What’s bothering you?”
It took him a minute to answer, and when he did, it wasn’t an answer at all.
“Dearest? I think I must ask you to go to Greece.”
CHAPTER FIVE
There was too much sun when I woke up.
The curtains are open, my brain informed the rest of me. You closed them when you went to bed, and Sparky wouldn’t have opened them, not when you went to sleep at dawn…
My body didn’t want to be awake, and it told my brain to shut up and deal with it. The cunning application of pillow to eyeballs would solve this problem. The pillow didn’t even have to be moved. No, I could just turn over, and—
My brain had me up and rolling into a zenpo kaiten before I could drop back into sleep. I was halfway across the bedroom before the crowbar crashed into
the exact spot on the pillow where my head had been.
Let me tell you about sugar.
My high school history teacher used to say that sugar was the catalyst for the Industrial Revolution. I checked his dates and he was off by a few decades, but sugar plus coffee did reach Great Britain right around the time that steam engines finally hit their stride. Imagine that for a second: the British and stimulants, together at last!
Shit got done.
Now, let me tell you about koalas.
Cute? Yes. Cuddly? Definitely. Stupider than rocks? Fuck yes. They have some of the least-developed brains in the mammalian kingdom. Their brains are so tiny that they’re basically bobbing around in the koala’s skull. When a koala does manage to process a thought, it’s almost always focused on one of three basic drives: they eat, sleep, and procreate, and they do this with the literal single-mindedness of a brain capable of holding just one thought at a time.
They’re fairly durable, though. If you were a mad scientist who wanted to write on a blank slate and see if you could enhance intelligence, you couldn’t pick a better test subject than a koala.
Except, around your third koala, you’d realize that the animal’s metabolism is causing problems. The critters only eat eucalyptus, and when they’re not eating or fucking, they’re asleep. So you start to tinker with the koala genome so they can live on a variety of plants, and don’t need to sleep twenty-two hours a day.
At Koala No. 4, you decide to see if you can also get them to metabolize grains. Fresh vegetation can be hard to find, but every supermarket has a cereal aisle.
By Koala No. 17, you’ve gotten the process nailed down. Brains, guts, everything works. You start to test the limits on what can be done to improve a koala’s smarts. Under the right conditions, can a koala become as intelligent as a monkey? A great ape? A human?
These experiments go great. So great, you run into communication problems. It’s harder to test the intelligence of an animal that can’t vocalize. You decide to tinker with their vocal cords.
Finally, you get to Koala No. 26. This one’s a total dud. Every single modification went right—better than on any previous test subject, really!—but the animal is a lump of stupid squeaking fur. You decide to euthanize and start from scratch.
Except Koala No. 26 beats you to it. The little bugger has been playing dumb all along. You’re proud of him, probably, in the instant before he shoots you between the eyes with your own gun.
Young Koala No. 26 spent a rough couple of days running scared in suburban Missouri before he was captured. And then escaped. And captured, and escaped, and captured, and escaped, and captured…and finally, a certain government agency got news of this “speedy devil” that could break out of any cage. They whisked him away to one of those subterranean buildings that form the stuff of nightmares, and performed unspeakable tests until they learned he had about 200 IQ points more than the average Harvard graduate.
Koala No. 26 sat in a cage and broke codes for years. Sparky rescued him. This…
Um.
Yeah.
This probably wasn’t the best decision Sparky’s ever made.
It’s not like he could release this koala into the wild, or even put him in a zoo. So? Sparky decided this koala was his responsibility. For a while, he made sure the koala had his own apartment. These days, he lives with us.
I love the little fucker, I do, but let’s face facts: if the entire Industrial Revolution was the outcome of moderately caffeinated cultural sugar high, a superintelligent animal with three all-encompassing drives and regular access to Cap’n Crunch becomes its own force of nature.
And he is an asshole.
Case in point: said asshole got his paws on a crowbar.
“Speedy!” Shouting was a mistake. Lack of sleep made my own voice bounce off the backs of my eyeballs. I tried again. “Speedy? The crowbar?”
“Found it in the kitchen,” he said. He’s got a smooth, dark voice, somewhere between a tenor and a baritone. It’s slightly disturbing. A talking koala should sound like a big squeaky chipmunk, not a radio talk show host. “Thought you might want it back.”
“I’m sure.” I crossed the room and grabbed the crowbar before he could smash anything. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” He hopped off of the headboard and settled into the hollow of the sheets.
Look, it’s not like he actually wanted to bean me with the crowbar. If he had, he wouldn’t have bothered to warn me by opening the curtains, or by waiting until I woke up enough to know to move out of the way. What he wanted was to cuddle with me in a warm bed. He just has an extremely violent way of asking permission.
I shoved him aside and got back under the sheets. Somehow, purely by accident, I ended up with the soft crease at the backs of his ears under my fingernails. I sighed and started scratching.
“What happened last night?” he asked.
“Where were you?”
“Out.”
“Do I get anything more than ‘out’?”
He tilted his head so I’d hit the itchy spots. “Nope.”
“Fine, then. No gossip for you.”
“Oh?” He peered up at me. Whatever he saw there set him to grinning. “Oh-ho! Someone was visited by three spirits last night.”
“One spirit. The Ghost of Paradox Present.”
The koala batted my hand away and climbed on my stomach. “I was running an errand. Now, what’s up?”
“An errand? That’s all I get?”
Speedy’s eyes traveled to my hand and back, and he gave me a wide smile. It wasn’t a nice smile. Smiling isn’t a natural gesture for a koala, and they have a lot of teeth.
“Don’t even think about it,” I warned him. “A bunch of guys broke in last night, and I’m running on zero sleep.”
“Cops show up?”
I nodded. “We had a…logical misunderstanding. They saw all of the bodies on the ground, and me standing over them.”
He snorted. It was a sound somewhere between a grunt and a happy kazoo. “You’d think they’d have heard of you by now.”
“They had, but protocol is protocol,” I said, shrugging. The motion tipped Speedy sideways, and his claws bit into my ribcage. (Pro tip: if you’re ever given the choice between being on the business side of a koala’s teeth or its claws, go with the teeth. Those fuckers don’t sprint up the sides of trees because Ben Franklin’s ghost brought them invisible jetpacks.) I waved the crowbar at him until he climbed off.
This time, he snuggled against my arm. He was tired. We usually went a few more rounds before he settled down. “You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”
“Fine.”
“Got a commission from the Smithsonian. They wanted a second opinion on a few Babylonian texts.”
“You speak Babylonian?”
“Nobody speaks Babylonian except for scholars, and they butcher the pronunciation so badly that you can’t call it speech,” he said, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling. “I read all of the Semitic languages, Akkadian included.”
Right. Speedy is a genius, remember? Specifically, a genius with languages. If he doesn’t already know a particular language (unlikely), give him a book and a week. Lately, he’s been dabbling in dead languages for the local museums. He doesn’t do it for the money; he says breaking the spirits of overeducated thumb-monkeys is a delight.
Of course, said overeducated thumb-monkeys don’t exactly enjoy having their work discredited by a thirty-five-pound marsupial. So the museums bring him in at night, when there’s fewer people around to witness the swearing and the sobbing.
“’bout you?” he murmured into my armpit.
“Ben is sending me to Greece to track down the origins of the Antikythera Mechanism, since he thinks it might have something to do with ancient ghosts.”
Speedy sat up so quickly that there were little rip-POPS! as his claws poked through the sheets. “That rat bastard!” he hissed.
Okay, one last thing ab
out koalas’ thought processes? They aren’t creative thinkers. Speedy can logic his way to the moon and back if he’s got the pieces of a spaceship laid out in front of him, but he’d never even dream of putting pumpkin, spice, and latte together in the same cup.
He had seen something I missed.
Whatever. Solving puzzles is what he did. And I could either beg and plead for him to tell me, which he wouldn’t, or I could annoy the shit out of him by ignoring him.
I rolled over and hit the button on the curtain remote (everything is remote-controlled in a cyborg’s house, a fact that I remember only when I’m conscious), and pretended not to notice that Speedy’s ears had flattened against his head.
He hunkered down beside me, grumbling.
I started scratching his ears again. They gradually unplastered themselves as he relaxed.
“Hey, Speedy?” I whispered. “Want to come with me to Greece?”
CHAPTER SIX
The world’s worst psychic was waiting for us at the airport.
Mike Reilly is as Scots-Irish as they come. He’s medium-height and stocky, with the obligatory green eyes, red hair, and freckles. Slap a kilt and a sporran on him, and he’d blend right in with those dudes who toss whole telephone poles for fun.
He was arguing philosophy with a baggage clerk.
Which is in character, really. Mike will argue philosophy with anything willing to talk to him. (This is why his partner’s parrots all scream “How do you know?” when the phone rings.) The baggage clerk seemed quite happy arguing back, so I chose a different line.
“This is Speedy, the talking koala,” I said to my own clerk as I passed him Speedy’s papers. “He doesn’t travel in a carry-on, and he’s had all of his shots. He’s cleared to visit Greece, and they’re expecting him at the airport and our hotels.”
It’s a rule of my life that I manage all of Speedy’s affairs before I manage my own. First, it’s not as though I could pretend he was a Cocker Spaniel and sneak him aboard a plane in a carry-on, and it’s hard to miss a koala sitting on a woman’s shoulders. I think that’s remarked upon even in Australia, let alone Dulles International Airport.
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