Unidentified Funny Objects 2

by Silverberg, Robert

  Guess which one you go for, as you run to the time machine, your clothes bundled under your arm, your own mother chasing after you, screaming: “Juden! Halt, Juden!”

  You flip the dials and watch as the counter changes from Mil to Cen to Dec to Yea all the way down to Day thinking: I can do this, I can fix this, I’ve got all the time in the world!

  And then your own mother throws a rock at your eye and you hit a switch by accident. The time machine revs up and you watch in horror as the dial flips from Day to Ma, same way kitchen dials do, switching from the lowest setting to the highest. Now the reading has changed, from 450 Day to 450 Ma and before you can utter a single word, you’ve already jumped…

  …and landed in the middle of a desert. Then in a city made of rock and wood, where starved men and despairing women scream at the sight of you. Then in the middle of a jungle, set ablaze, beneath a sky the color of charcoal…

  The time machine lurches for a final time, crushing something that screeches once as it snaps its neck. Terrified, you chance a look, fearing the worst. Thankfully, it is only a velociraptor caught in its dying throes, shaking its full, colorful plumage. With a great squawk, the majestic thing dies and you sit in your driver’s seat, on the verge of tears. Not only because you have just had velociraptors ruined forever, but because you have also plunged history into a mess that you couldn’t possibly get it out of. How the hell would you find the time traveler? And even if you did, how could you reason with him? How could you get him to stop you from making everything even worse? Why couldn’t time travel be simple like in the movies, where history and time are just obstacles to be brushed aside at the hero’s whim?

  You’re too busy feeling sorry for yourself and the entire universe, when more velociraptors burst from the foliage, seeking both to overpower and to devour the strange, weeping thing that just crushed their brother. They look like killer peacocks as they flap their tiny hands and shake their plumage, their claws aiming for your throat. You turn a lever blindly and watch them retreat back into the dense jungle, as you fast-forward yourself to safety.

  When you think you’ve reached a safe place, you stop the time machine and climb off it without turning the dial. Choking back your tears, you sit beneath the shadow of a great oak tree, looking at the instrument that you have just used to doom everything. You get dressed, take a deep breath and start going through the drawers all over again. The majority of the manuals and notebooks have been left in the field where you’d met Nazi-Lily. If the time machine had ever had an instruction booklet, it has been lost along with so much else.

  No way around it, you think. I’ll just have to find the time traveler myself.

  You’re too busy stuffing what few papers are left back inside the glove compartment, trying to come up with a solid, viable plan that would allow you to restore history back to its original, less-terrible state, when you notice the shape of a man, creeping up behind you. You’re about to turn, to talk to him, when you hear the distinct noise of a shovel being dragged across the ground and then swooshing through the air, going for your head. You needn’t turn around to know exactly who he is.

  “Oh, you stupid, stupid, bas—”

  Whomp.

  Story Notes:

  “How You Ruined Everything” is the kind of story I've always wanted to write, but had never got around to (until now, that is). We're all plagued by the constant thought of how different our lives would be if we had made our choices differently, if we perhaps had had the guts to walk up to that cute girl in the coffee shop (or that guy in the gym) and had asked them out; what our lives would have been like if we perhaps had not opted for that Bachelor's degree in Philosophy or a BA in English. Other times, we might slap ourselves in the face at random intervals, thinking about how we ruined our chance at that Dream Job. Oh, how different, how much more joyous and fulfilling our lives would be, if we had a time machine to right old wrongs!

  But it wouldn't. Because deep down, we know that our new choices would have spawned new regrets, new lines of hindsight and a secret longing for what we had BEFORE we fixed everything. We'd purposefully seek out to undo all the choices we made just so we could go back to our old path and lament our choices all over again. Human beings are an odd lot, really. Makes you wonder how the hell we made it so far in the first place.

  Konstantine Paradias is a jeweler by profession and a writer by choice. Plagued by an over-powering sense of hindsight, he finds himself constantly second-guessing his every choice and secretly knows that getting himself a time machine would be a pretty terrible idea. He vents his frustrations and dreams on his blog, Shapescapes, instead.

  INSIDER INFORMATION

  by Jody Lynn Nye

  “Uh, oh,” Detective Sergeant Dena Malone thought, as the five witnesses’ faces lit up at her approach over a Japanese plank bridge. At first, all they would have seen was a small woman with razor-cut brown hair and pale skin, wearing a police uniform tunic. Then they recognized her. Dena felt her face grow hot. It seemed to take forever to cross the expensively landscaped and gardened roof of the ultra highrise, the largest green space she had ever walked on in the city. “Here it comes.”

  “Cool!” said a tall man with a tattoo that ran from his left temple to his jaw. “We get the reality show cop! How’s your baby doing? Can we hear your Salosian talk?”

  Dena felt the inevitable roiling in her belly as K’t’ank shifted when he heard his name. The meter-long alien lived in her peritoneum, implanted there by the Alien Relations Department of Earth. She had been identified as an ideal host in spite of being pregnant at the time. K’t’ank’s optic nerves were connected to her own through her spinal column. Where most human beings might see a meter-long rose pink parasitic snake, Dena knew him as a scientist and a galaxy-class busybody. She had been fooled into thinking hosting K’t’ank was a temporary arrangement. It wasn’t. She reached for the platinum bracelet that provided the alien with his sole means of communicating with the outside world and switched it off.

  “Malone!” K’t’ank protested, his voice now only audible through bone conduction.

  “Let’s get the facts down first,” she said, firmly, settling her wrists on her growing abdomen. As if it wasn’t enough for a working cop to have to host a visiting alien, she was also five months pregnant. “Then we’ll all have a nice chat. So, want to tell me what happened here?”

  The five looked at one another, then over the side of the roof of Totality Software. Dena leaned over to see for herself. By squeezing her eyes, she activated the telescopic feature of her police-issue contact lenses, and zoomed in on the scene below. At the ground level, ninety stories down, occasionally obscured by passing air traffic in between, the coroner’s staff was putting a white-covered body on a stretcher into the meat wagon. The blue lights on top began flashing, and the vehicle took off, angling upward toward the northwest for the morgue.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  “Was,” said the man with the tattoo, with annoying precision. He, like all his fellow Totality employees, wore a headpiece with a single gray lens that covered his right eye like a pirate’s patch. “Art Smedley. Our CTO. Chief Technical Officer. He fell off the roof.”

  “Suicide?” Dena asked.

  A woman with brilliant neon green hair and golden skin nodded her head sadly.

  “I never thought he’d do it.”

  “Self-destruction?” K’t’ank asked, though audible only to her. “Curious! With so many means of achievable death available to one in the normal course of human life, why choose terror and collision?”

  “Hush!” Dena said. She gave the others an apologetic smile. “Had he been threatening self-harm?”

  Suicide was a major crime in the city, and unsuccessful attempts were usually penalized with terms in locked mental therapy facilities as well as eye-watering fines. The successful ones couldn’t be prosecuted, though they knew their families would have to pay the city for cleanup and nuisance costs. Dena hoped
that would deter some of them from going through with it.

  “I never heard him say he wanted to kill himself,” the man protested. The ID he presented gave his name as Frank Perugio.

  The green-haired woman’s eyes flashed. Her card named her as Roshin Caitako.

  “He did, though. To me. He didn’t feel he could confide in you. Any of you.”

  “That’s not fair, Rosh!” protested the other woman present, Magi Tene, a blonde of middle years clanking with computerized bangles and other gizmos. The two remaining males, who looked like father and son, added their protests.

  “We need you to find out why he did it,” the father said. He was Jerry Lopez. His son was Dario. Dena nodded.

  “I’ll need access to his personal computer—providing he didn’t take it with him—and to go through his office. You folks realize that as of the time you called us, your computer systems went on lockdown. Nothing can be deleted until we’ve had a chance to look at it.”

  “We know!” the elder Lopez exclaimed, his brows drawn down. “Government invasion of privacy!”

  “It’s normal, Jerry! Come on, Detective, I’ll sign you on,” Perugio said. They headed toward the access tower. He gave her a sideways glance. “Uh, could we talk with Dr. K’t’ank now?”

  “Sure,” said Dena, with a groan. She switched on the bracelet. K’t’ank, never one to disappoint an audience, introduced himself.

  “Most curious the way your cities are constructed,” he said. “My planet-sharers are much more careful in the construction of their habitats. Are our lives more precious to us than yours?”

  “Not at all!” Perugio protested. “We prize life and safety. Look at our rooftop! This is our living space. We spend hours out here every day. It’s set up to protect us.” Dena swept an eye around so K’t’ank could take in all the features, a mix of cultures and eras. A croquet lawn sat beside a net-encased basketball court. The ornamental fountain she noticed on arrival was less than an inch deep, with sophisticated drainage preserving the water and preventing anyone from drowning. At the rear, behind the access tower, was a miniature arena, complete with electronic scoreboard and T-shirt cannons. It was fenced high so no ball, or ball player, could fall over the parapet just a few yards away.

  “But consider the statistics,” K’t’ank said, and Dena knew he had them at his fingertips, so to speak. He spent most of his life on the Internet. “Harm comes to humans in many ways every day… .” The Totality employees listened raptly, leaving Dena to concentrate on observing the crime scene. She took recordings of her own of the rooftop, the access tower, and the corridor leading back to Smedley’s office.

  That sanctuary reminded her less of a Fortune 5000 company official, and more of a toy store. Smedley had at least one of every major nerd collector toy dating back over a century—static, animatronic, holographic, you name it—arranged on paper-thin shelves that lined every wall. Enviously, she touched the holocrystal display from Star Trek 21, the first movie in the second reboot, a limited edition collector’s item. She noticed he owned copy #7 of 500.

  Under all the clutter were equally expensive office furnishings. She sat down in the enormous black nylon sling behind the translucent desk. The chair automatically adjusted to her size and weight. It was, without a doubt, the most comfortable chair she had ever felt.

  “It would be great to have a chair like this,” she said, shifting to enjoy the way it cradled and supported her. “I wonder how much something like this costs.”

  “My late host had such,” K’t’ank said. “Eight thousand credits.”

  “Wow!” Dena said, appalled. She bounced in it one last time. “Well, I’d better appreciate it for the moment.”

  According to the security cameras and the communication records, Smedley had taken a personal call on his headset just before walking up to the roof and jumping off. No doubt about it. She replayed the video from several angles again and again. Smedley had been talking animatedly, paused at the edge of the parapet, then leaped off into nothingness. The cry he let out as he fell was audible on several recorders in the building. She cut off the replay before she got to Smedley’s landing on the pavement. What she could see from the roof had been as detailed as she wanted to get. The coroner would let her know if there had been an organic reason for Smedley to want to terminate himself, like the onset of cancer or dementia.

  “I’m just bothered by the cheerful bound into eternity,” Dena said, frowning at the screen.

  “Humans are strange,” K’t’ank said.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious. But what do you think about his behavior?”

  “He deliberately takes the step,” K’t’ank agreed. “As if he was joyous to do so.”

  “Could he have been part of a cult?” Dena asked. “I agree with Perugio. I just don’t figure Smedley for a suicide. He seemed so happy.”

  A scan of his personal files bore out her initial impression. Sifting through the remains of a life was tedious work. The personal stuff she could do, using an algorithm to pick up trends in the backlog of the victim’s emails, notes, and diaries, not to mention online postings. When the program finished sorting, it would point out probability trees and anomalies. Smedley’s professional life, however, required a specialist. She could not download all his files to the police computer yet; undoubtedly she required a password or an override by the company sysop. She could, however, access read-only files.

  “He does not appear to be part of a collective personality,” K’t’ank said. “Greatly an individual dedicated to individuals.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Dena said, pausing the video of Smedley just before he plunged over the side of the Totality building. “But he wasn’t pushed. What happened there?”

  The person on the other end of the call Smedley had been on when he died was a stockholder in Totality, Iris Bendix. Dena put in the code on her police handset, and connected. For the next ten minutes she listened to the woman at the other end downloading her shock and grief. In between wails, Dena made the right noises, and managed to work in a few words. When Iris stopped for breath, Dena interrupted in her calmest voice.

  “Tell me about Totality,” she said. “I see that you’ve owned a piece of it for years.”

  The distraction worked. “I’ve been on board from the beginning,” Iris said, sounding as if she was pulling herself together. Dena ran the brief ID video on Bendix’s file. A slim woman with smile lines but no other wrinkles. Long white hair. Former model, presently CEO of her own company.

  “What do they do?”

  “They make a total immersive environment,” Iris said. “It’s like having your own holodeck. Companies have been moving toward this for years, but never quite getting there. Totality did it.”

  Dena had a few headsets, helmets, vests, and bodysuits in her closet that had promised that holodeck experience. They didn’t deliver, and had become obsolete almost as soon as she bought them.

  “It’s in the eyepatch?” she asked. “The gray eyepatch?”

  “Yes. It projects a whole user experience into the eyes. One or both, depending on how you program it. It’s fabulous. You’ve never tried it?”

  “No, I…” Dena didn’t want to admit that she and her husband couldn’t afford the system on their combined salaries. Not yet, anyway. Maybe after the next raise. “Ms. Bendix, could it—I’m sorry to have to put it like this, but this is what happened—could it make someone walk off a cliff?”

  She was afraid Iris would fold up again, but she remained calm.

  “God, no! Totality has more safeguards than the Academy Awards voting system.”

  “I’ll look into it. Thanks for your help.”

  “Anything I can do to find out what happened,” Iris said. “Art was a great guy!”

  THE PROGRAMMERS WERE EAGER to let Dena experience the Totality system. Six of them fussed over her in the white-walled, gadget-filled showroom, getting her preferences on fantasies or favorite programs down on a rol
l-up screen monitor, accessing her social media to download her friends list, and fitting the surprisingly light headset to her face.

  The gray patch was translucent, but it bothered Dena to have something so close to her eye.

  “Stop fluttering your eyelids!” Caitako said. “You’ll forget all about it in a moment.”

  “I can’t,” Dena protested, batting away the technicians’ hands until someone sat on her lap to stop her.

  Then they turned it on.

  “Oh, my everliving God!”

  An endless plain of grass and wildflowers surrounded her. Birds flew, chirping musically. Huge, white, fluffy clouds rolled overhead. A gorgeous dark-skinned man, muscled like an ancient god, rode up beside her on a white horse. He plucked a bunch of grapes, glistening with dew, from a vine that suddenly sprang up from the ground and took one perfect, round purple globe from the bunch. He leaned over toward Dena with a knowing, wicked smile. She opened her mouth, waiting for the grape’s cool, wet shape to touch her tongue.

  “It is baffling!” K’t’ank’s voice interrupted her. She felt his tail whipping against her internal organs. “It is not natural! Stop the illusions at once!”

  Dena blinked. Through the hazy image of the divine man and his horse, she saw the Totality employees and the lab.

  “That is absolutely amazing,” she said. “I felt as if I was there. Wherever there was.”

  “It’s the greatest system we have ever made,” Perugio said proudly. “We’ve sold over eight hundred million units.”

  “I do not like it,” K’t’ank said.

  Dena removed the light band from her head.

  “I can see how it would overwhelm reality,” she said. “Is it possible there was a system malfunction that caused Mr. Smedley to see something that wasn’t there?”

  “Never. You get used to it in a short time,” Dario Lopez said, polishing the eyepiece and putting the headset back into a pure white carton. “You’re always aware of what’s real and what isn’t. It’s why we made the background lens gray. It sticks out.”