Time Bandits

by Dean C. Moore

  He nodded. “You’re thinking more like a scientist, by the way. Good for you.”

  “Well here’s a thought for you. What part of the dog should be in charge, the head or the tail? You’re talking about wresting control out of the hands of the Godhead and handing it over to a bunch of lowlife sentient life forms, human or otherwise.”

  He chuckled nervously. “Still, you have to admire where he’s coming from. Talk about a grassroots movement to end all grassroots movements.”

  “I love power to the people. Just not like this. This will always be too much too soon I don’t care what era of history it happens in.”

  “Still, a more egalitarian age ought to be possible.”

  “Then let’s co-create it together the old-fashioned way, two steps forward and one step back, with everyone having a say, not just one inspired madman.”

  “Wouldn’t you have then what we have now back in our timeline?”

  She sighed. “You got me there.”

  “But maybe you can settle into that world a little better now knowing that?”

  “Maybe. I’m certainly more inclined to give it a shot after this.”

  “Which just leaves us with the small matter of how to stop this guy.”

  “I might have some encouraging news on that front,” she said. “According to our dead selves in this timeline, the spirit world is a goldmine of helpful information.”

  “You saw our ghosts?”

  “The house upstairs is basically the Pandora’s box of the young child’s guilt-ridden unconscious opened wide. In it are all sorts of ghosts, including ours.”

  Torin rubbed his chin and nodded slowly. “Makes sense what they say about the spirit world. It’s just a different dimension relative to this one. In fact it might be enough of an in-between dimension that it can have access to multiple realities at once, sort of the way we’re taking advantage of certain quantum effects to gain access to this timeline without being fully a part of it.”

  “That honeymoon period I suspect is coming to an end. You forget the other two got killed in this timeline, creating a void we might want to fill if we expect to stop him.”

  “That’s gutsy, considering what happened to the other two.”

  “I’m not sure what we can do from this state besides create a few poltergeist effects if we get real bent out of shape.”

  “Point taken. I guess now all we have to do is to decide on the right moment to make our entrance.”

  “Notchka!” Clyde shouted. “I’ve got it!” He held up the vial containing his latest magical liquid.

  Kendra and Torin eyed one another. “Don’t think we can hope for a better cue than that?” Torin said.

  “I don’t suppose.”

  Torin reached out and grabbed the vial from his newly solidified state. Then grabbing Kendra’s hand, he teleported them the hell out of there.

  “What the…?” Clyde said.

  Notchka materialized beside him. “What are you so excited about?”

  “I had the solution in hand, the cure-all to the madness of the multiverse. And they snatched it away from me anyway, even after we killed them off.”

  “Their ghosts?”

  “No. I guess when you saw them coming after us and grabbing the vial in this timeline, I should have realized that other versions of them would be out scouting the multiverse to find out what we were up to.”

  “Don’t you have lab notes? Can’t you reconstruct your work?”

  Clyde shook his head. “I was following one mental leap after another in my usual right-brained fashion, too caught up in what I was doing. Now I don’t know if I can remember all the steps.” He pulled at his hair and roared.

  A few seconds later, he pulled himself together. “Can you see how things play out now?”

  “Yes,” the girl said, her eyes going vacant before refocusing. “You’re not going to like it.”

  FIFTEEN

  “I thought we agreed you preferred playing detective to playing mad scientist,” Kendra said, intently watching Torin mixing solutions in a beaker over a Bunsen burner, the type she hadn’t seen since high school chemistry class.

  “No, you assumed that because I like following your pretty ass around so much it had something to do with a taste for detective work.” Torin watched the solution turn from yellow to blue over the flame, and smiled smugly.

  “Just what are you trying to do?”

  “Simple, really. The opposite of what Clyde Barker was trying to do.”

  “I know I’m going to regret this but explain.”

  “It’s a gene modifier. Should work like an energy cocoon around the person. So instead of telecasting their thoughts through the heavens louder and louder as their minds get stronger and stronger, it’ll just absorb more and more mental energy. By the time they emerge from their chrysalis, assuming they ever do, their minds ought to be enlightened enough to consider the ramifications of what they’re doing and to allow them to make a more informed decision.”

  “How is it you can match Barker’s gene modifying prowess?”

  “I can’t. He did all the hard work for me. All I had to do was create an iso-polymer.”

  “A what?”

  “A long chain of amino acids that twisted left instead of right. The mirror opposite.”

  “It can’t be that easy.”

  “Might not be. Haven’t tested it yet. Care to try?”

  “Delighted to. Anything to keep you out of my head.”

  He gazed up from his beaker and gave her a hard look. “There’ll always be people on whom the magic won’t work. Evolution favors natural breakouts. Anomalies. It’s how Mother Nature moves things forward.”

  “You don’t strike me as a freak of nature. I’ll take my chances.”

  “Very well.” He handed her the beaker of the blue liquid. “Bottoms up.”

  He grabbed her hand at the last minute, as she had the liquid nearly flowing into her mouth. “Wait. If we take this we might not be able to get back to our home world. We might be trapped here.”

  She continued to hold on to the beaker as she walked to the window overlooking the desert. The house itself was designed to look like a flying saucer. The window views swept the entire perimeter of the circle. Each window panel appeared to grant access to a separate world, owing largely to outrageously ornate landscapes inspired by Japanese gardens and homes that were built to confer similarly unique vantage points from each window. All manner of magical creatures made their homes in the habitats in miniature, each one an oasis against the savage desert in the distance. Enough so that it was as if there were invisible bars around each enclave. Kendra and Torin continued to walk the circumference of the “spaceship.” “Look at what we’ve achieved here in so little time,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s one advantage this planet has over ours. The psychic responsiveness of the world itself makes it that much easier to carve out our own retreats from reality, our safe havens. Even the most elaborate schemes to that end back home in our world can’t hold a candle to this.”

  “I’ll be more comfortable here than I ever will be back home,” Kendra confessed.

  “Yes, you will, no doubt about it. But you aren’t about being comfortable, are you? Some part of you knows that would be wrong. Some part of you is the bird inside the cage that just wants to be free. The cage is the rigid way you come at life, your inability to roll with the punches, to yield, to compromise, to adapt. I think we both know that’s why our home world is that much better suited to you,” he said, taking the beaker out of her hands. “It’s the hardest challenge you’ll ever face to deal with reality without withdrawing and regressing. If you can thrive there you can thrive anywhere. Then and only then will you truly be free.”

  She was silent but she was sure her face said it all. She was coming to terms with what she was at last. “I wonder if we’ll ever see our home world again, now that we’re doing missionary work to clear the way to a future that we each have a ha
nd in making, not just the precious few.”

  “I don’t know. We’re smart, but we’re facing enemies of humanity who are smarter, and they don’t see themselves as enemies. They see themselves as every bit as righteous as we see ourselves. Which means they have no self-destruct button, no hidden desire to get caught that most serial killers and demented minds have. Making their apprehension all the more difficult.”

  “But that’s not the half of it, is it?”

  “Nope. Clyde Barker can use his psychic apprentice to see if not what we’re thinking, then the outcomes of our actions. If we take a month, a year, or an eternity to figure a way to stymie him, he can just show up in the right time and place to undo us. Every time. In every timeline.”

  “How the hell do we get around that?”

  “I don’t rightly know.”

  “Wait. If that’s true, why isn’t he here now?”

  Torin shrugged. “Either my alteration of his viral-enhancing formula is not nearly as effective as I think it is, or it’s extremely effective, and neutralizes Notchka.”

  She sighed and broke eye contact briefly. “Maybe we should go back to our home world and leave the big picture projects for the people more suitable to the task.”

  “Isn’t that how we got in this situation in the first place?” he said. “By handing over the management of the future to a precious few visionaries and leaders?”

  “We can’t all be visionaries and leaders.”

  “Nope. What’s more, I believe in a right proper division of labor. No two people are born with the same mission in life. But for that system to work, people have to do what they’re born to do with zeal and conviction. That takes a whole lot of heart and skill. More often than not fears win out. And that’s when those who are more courageous and less risk adverse tend to herd the rest like cattle, if only to keep them from gumming up the machinery. And sooner or later they have to do everyone’s job, not just theirs, and we end up with Big Brother, a government or, in our case, a consortium of corporations that treats its populace like children.”

  She stared at one of the tableaus out the window to help her concentrate her mind. “And what could we do that could ever change that dynamic? Can’t force consciousness on people. You just have to hope the whole system crashes under its own weight without any resistance at all. Then, maybe, there won’t be any choice but to be courageous, to carve a path for yourself, because all other paths no longer work.”

  “Perhaps.” He looked inwardly as he considered the matter. “It’s how things played out on our world. First the global economic collapse. The darkness before the dawn. Then a million and one small pointed lights starting to light up the darkness, one garage, one attic, one basement entrepreneur at a time.”

  “It’s a romantic notion,” Kendra said. “But the fact is there’s a reason they keep you fat, dumb, and lazy, and most of all poor. You don’t have any time and energy left over after simply struggling to survive to overturn the system. You’re too exhausted when you get home. And most of all, you don’t have any resources. You’re too poor to put any of your bright ideas into play even if you could manage to have one against all the odds.”

  “So how come the Age of Abundance happened on our world anyway?”

  “You tell me.”

  Torin sighed. “Because the only way to eke out more money from a limited resource economy is to be smarter than the other guy, to do more with less, to be more resourceful, more cunning, more manipulative, in short, smarter in every way. And we’re a tool building species. We build things that make us more capable. Until the tools become smarter than us, our computers, our AI, our genetic hybrids. And we have to either hand over control to them or become like them, that is to say, much smarter, to stay in the game. That means one human upgrade or another. And you can’t very well just let the competition upgrade their employees, unless you want them owning you.

  “As you can see, the game itself is all there is and everyone has to play by the rules, even the ones who think they don’t. The game, moreover, functions by a kind of trans-logic that fosters trans-humanism rather well; it is, after all, about nothing else in the final analysis other than self-transcendence, transcending even the earlier modes of self-transcendence.”

  “Does make you wonder if Clyde Barker going back in time to create that psychic commune was all that necessary to fast-track the Age of Abundance,” she said.

  “You can bet it was his ace in the hole.”

  “But according to you, there’s nothing for us to do.” Kendra folded her hands defensively. “All paths, just not the select few, lead to an Age of Abundance.”

  Torin smiled ruefully. “Sorry to argue us out of our materialistic optimism into an existential nihilism.”

  “So what are we doing here?”

  “We got lost in a parallel world I imagine to hide the fact that we were already lost.” Torin sighed and leaned against one of the window panels, using the view to the microhabitat to help center his mind. “Pema Chodon talks about the wisdom of no escape. I think we’ve proved her point for her. I think it’s easy to imagine that escaping to parallel universes means we’re no longer prisoner where we are. But as we found out by coming here, we just build better prisons for ourselves wherever we go. We are where we are for a reason. That world. That timeline. Has been crafted specifically for us. By a far better, more responsible watchmaker. You can’t do the job of the Godhead any more than a fisherman can do a carpenter’s job.”

  “So, according to you, any world, any parallel universe, hell, any multiverse that Clyde Barker could create could only hope to draw rejects like him, people who just don’t get it, who don’t get the wisdom of no escape, who need to play the part of the victim or the savior.”

  “For the flypaper to work the flies have to be dumb enough to stick to it.”

  “And only they can get themselves unstuck. Because playing the victim is as much a choice as anything else.”

  “Being enlightened is kind of a bummer, isn’t it?” Torin said, turning back to face her.

  She chuckled softly; the sounds came out more like a frog getting stuck in her throat. “What’s to say our world isn’t a hideout, a refuge relative to some other timeline? And there isn’t a more courageous version of us less willing to lie to themselves about what their real mission in life is? Hell, you said it yourself, I became a detective so I could punish my father over and over again, all the bad men but shadows of him. And you autopsy the dead because…?”

  “Because I’m just too full of life. I need to make sure it isn’t OCD, it’s real. So the more morbid the surroundings the better the test. Aren’t we the pair?”

  “So, we’re outta here?”

  “The real salvation isn’t catching Clyde, it’s rebuilding ourselves.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” she said.

  “What am I doing?”

  “You’re using this philosopher’s game to make my mind more pliable, to do an end run around my more rigid, fear-based thinking.”

  He harrumphed. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m no philosopher. So it’s pretty clear to me I’m using this philosopher’s mind game as you say to do an end run around my own rigid thinking as well. My OCD versus your PTSD. As I said, what a fine pair we make?”

  “It’s time for this pair to go home.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  THE NEXUS TIMELINE

  SIXTEEN

  Bob, the coffee machine, poured Kendra a cup of espresso. “Just the way you like it, ma’am.”

  She took a whiff and smiled ruefully, “Yep, I guess this is just how I like it.” She sauntered over to her desk, taking in the old familiar surroundings, seeing the hundred and one subtle differences from the last timeline she’d been in, the stuff that used to grate her the most, the preponderance of hi-tech paraphernalia, noticing that they still grated, just not quite so much.

  Take the shape-shifting skyscrapers visible out the swe
eping windows. Talk about disorienting. Well, they annoyed her a little less, if only just a little. This being not exactly the ritzy end of town, the chameleon technologies were admittedly a bit more low-rent, sort of like a flock of schooners setting out or rolling up sails, more or less in tandem.

  Take the sight of Davenport doing holo bowling down the center aisle between desks with an imaginary ball and pins, though just as visible to her and everyone else in the office. The crashing pins elicited yells of excitement from his imaginary fans, whistles, and cat calls. She flinched just a little less than usual at the high-pitched sounds. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “You try sitting behind a desk all day. I’ll have you know the uppity ups signed off on it; less sick time they have to pay out for compressed vertebrae.” She figured the fake smile she gave him had to look a tad less disingenuous, as it felt that way to her. Though back at home, she’d elected to dial down the reminders of an intelligence-saturated flat, with all sorts of AIs embedded in most everything. Talking to the fridge, the toaster, and the apartment AI coordinating everything from smart lamps to smart rugs just made her feel all that more isolated an cut off from the world.

  Take Monitor, seated at his desk, waiting impatiently for his severed arm to find its way back to his nub, using its connecting attachments the way a centipede uses its many legs until it found the nub and surgically reattached itself. She winced at that sight as much as ever, she imagined. Small gains, Kendra. He must have been just checking to see if the nub was any further along in its regrowth path, courtesy of those tissue regeneration pills he’d been taking.

  At least the farm animals are gone, she thought. Willimino must be out of the hospital.

  She planted herself back at her desk in her old precinct, and noticed the uncomfortable seat actually felt good. “So run this by me again. What’s the deal with all these parallel universes and parallel lives?” Kendra said, twirling the pen in her hands.