Time Machines Repaired-While-U-Wait
by K. A. Bedford
Copyright © 2008 by K. A. Bedford
E-Book Edition
Published by
EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing
An Imprint of
HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
CALGARY
Notice
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Dedication
To Brian and Anita — for everything
CHAPTER 1
“If it’s another dead cat,” said Aloysius “Spider” Webb, senior time machine technician, “you’re buying the next round.” Spider was driving the company van, a big fuel cell-powered behemoth, with the words TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT emblazoned on its side. In the shotgun seat was his coworker, mechanic Charlie Stuart, a young guy, very capable, lost inside a white lab coat at least a size too big for his scrawny frame.
“If it’s another dead cat,” Charlie replied, “I’ll eat my bloody lab coat.”
Spider shot him an amused glance. “I’ll hold you to that.”
The last time Spider and Charlie had been called out to look over a broken machine — yet another Tempo — it turned out that a cat had gotten trapped in the unit’s engine compartment and died. The deceased cat’s bodily fluids had then leaked into the translation engine and complicated things needlessly. Cats had a way of turning up inside broken time machines. They were a royal pain. Spider remembered how the owner freaked out when he was told. “It’s not even my bloody cat!”
Today Spider and Charlie had been called out to look over a twelve-year-old second-hand Tempo 300 whose owner reported that it was “acting funny.” The Tempo was the world’s most popular time machine model, far outstripping its nearest rival, the more up-market Boron. The Tempus Corporation, headquartered in Nairobi, was pumping out Tempos at such a prodigious rate that market experts were always predicting the end of the “time-travel bubble,” but so far demand remained high.
The owner of this Tempo, according to the work order, was a certain Mr. Vincent, who lived in a huge house, close to the coast but not too close, up in one of the more northern exurbs of Perth, Western Australia. At least, Spider thought, the guy wouldn’t have to worry about his expensive abode falling into the hungry sea anytime soon
Spider pulled into Mr. Vincent’s sweeping driveway and parked behind an immense, black hydrogen-powered SUV.
Spider said, “Get the gear.”
“On it, boss.” replied Charlie as he got out and went around to the back of the van.
Spider shut down the van and climbed out. He took a moment to take in the sheer monstrosity of Mr. Vincent’s house and thought about what you could do with the amount of credit it must have taken to fund the damn thing. You could do a lot, he thought. Buy your own artificial island, maybe.
The entrance of the house swept open, and a tall, thin guy emerged. “Hey!” the man said cheerily, and made his way down the driveway to Spider and Charlie. “How’s it hangin’?”
He was younger than Spider, and wore fashionable camo shorts and a Bali tee-shirt that played gamelan music. Most worrying to Spider, though: both of his eyes had been replaced by the eye-plugs favored by people working in the information business. They made Mr. Vincent look as if he had the eyes of a fly, all black, circular and studded with wireless transponders. It gave Spider a chill, but he adjusted his white lab coat and went up to the client.
“Mr. Vincent, I presume?”
“Geez,” Vincent said, grinning, flashing big teeth — which appeared to feature animated images — and pointing his eye-plugs at Spider. “You guys took your time getting out here, huh?” He laughed. Because, surely, time machine technicians would turn up even before you called, right? Right?
Mr. Vincent led Spider over to the time machine in question. This type of unit looked something like a helicopter, minus the tail boom and overhead rotors: it was an all enclosed cockpit with an engine compartment on the back. It rested on a carbon-fiber trailer, parked on the other side of the SUV. Vincent made nervous small talk of the sort that Spider hated. When he asked what footy team Spider supported, Spider said, “None of them.”
Mr. Vincent said, “Uh, okay, um,” and moved on to the Tempo. Spider asked him if it was true that Mr. Vincent had bought the unit second-hand, from a classified ad.
“Yeah. Going for a bloody steal, too. God, it would’ve been a crime not to buy it, you know?” He laughed again, and Spider once more had to look at the guy’s disturbing face. He shuddered discreetly.
“Hmm, okay,” Spider said, looking the unit over, “when you bought the unit, did you ask — or did the vendor provide — any documentation for it?”
“Um, what kind of documentation?”
Spider felt his blood pressure starting to rise, and he looked back at where Charlie was getting everything set up. His assistant was a good kid, didn’t require much supervision, and knew time machines in a way Spider found a bit spooky. Spider turned back to Mr. Vincent. “Yeah, documentation. You know, service manuals, travel logs, warranty papers, evidence that the vendor had actually bought the unit from an authorized reseller. Anything like that?”
Mr. Vincent shut his mouth and looked a little troubled. He stared up at the Tempo on its trailer, as if seeing it for the first time, and not liking what he saw. “Um, no, actually. None of that. S’pose there should’ve been something, huh?”
“So you bought a used time machine in a private sale with no support papers,” Spider said.
“Not so bright, huh?” Mr. Vincent said, flashing a God, I’m stupid nervous grin.
“You have no way of knowing, for example, if the unit is stolen, do you?”
“Stolen?”
“Wouldn’t be the first hot time machine that got sold like that, sir.”
“The guy didn’t look like a criminal,” he said.
Spider said, “Okay, then,” perhaps too brightly, “maybe I’ll just have a first peek at the beast itself. How’s that sound?”
As if grateful for the change of subject, Mr. Vincent grinned. “Yeah, okay. I’ve already unlocked it. Knock yourself out.”
Spider nodded, climbed up on the trailer, and — tensing a little — pulled open the driver’s side door. He took a cautious sniff. No dead cat smell. That was a relief. So far, he thought, so good. Just the usual faint waft of electricity and lost time. The interior of the Tempo looked okay, more or less the way you’d expect a twelve-year-old, used time machine to look, with lots of custom mods and duct tape and epoxy. He closed the door. Externally the Tempo looked as if it had been through quite a few time jumps. The bodywork was dented and some of the hull panels no longer fit together as snugly as they had when the unit was still in the show room. He shivered, and jumped down to the ground.
Spider said to Mr. Vincent, “Before you gave the vendor any money did you at least, um, try it out to make sure it worked okay?”
“He offered, actually,” he said, smiling. “Took me and my girlfriend for a spin. Yeah, it was great.”
“So the unit
did work correctly at that time?”
“Oh yeah. He took us back to — oh God, what was it? 1974? Something like that. Anyway, that part of town was still just wilderness back then. Scared some local bird life, and the girlfriend got bitten by some kind of bug. God, was she pissed!”
Spider nodded, trying hard not to imagine how the picturesque moment must have played out. “Okay, so it’s started acting up since you got it home, yes?”
“Yeah, you’re not wrong.”
Vincent started telling Spider all about his exciting adventures in time and space. “It was bloody fantastic, you know? So cool, I mean, the first thing I did, the very first thing, I went back to when I was in high school, right? I thought it’d be fun to hang out with my past self, and, you know, give me some advice about ‘the ladies.’” The way he said “the ladies” creeped Spider out all over again.
“And let me guess,” Spider said, “your former self either didn’t believe you were really him, or he did but none of your advice made him change his ways, or he couldn’t actually see or hear you?”
“Uh, yeah. That last one. It was kinda puzzling.”
“Ghost mode, Mr. Vincent. It’s a toggle switch on the control panel. I’m guessing you accidentally switched it on at some point.”
“Yeah, okay, that makes sense, yeah. God, do I feel dense!”
Spider said, “So when did it start acting up?”
“You probably get to hear a lot of stories about people doing dumb things with their time machines, huh?”
“One or two, Mr. Vincent, one or two. Now—”
“Right. Yeah. Um, to answer your question. Let me think. Yeah, it was last week sometime, Saturday? Yeah. Thought it’d be a hoot to take the girlfriend and go and see the Titanic, right? The actual ship?” He paused a moment, waiting for Spider to laugh or at least smile.
Spider stared at him, not interested in playing along. “And that was when the problem manifested, is that right?” To say nothing of the fact that a Tempo model like this one couldn’t travel in space the way it could travel in time. Yes, idiot Mr. Vincent here could certainly go back to the date of the Titanic’s departure from Southampton, but he would still be in this particular part of Western Australia, in fact stuck in the middle of what at the time was very nasty outback desert. He would have had to make his own way, using available transportation, to Southampton. Spider had heard of plenty of idiots who had tried something similar, arrived in the middle of the desert where moments ago exurbia had sprawled around them, and rather than cut their losses and come back to the welcome embrace of the modern world, they’d chosen to set out, on foot, in the desert, in search of someone with a truck who could give them a lift to the nearest big town. It was amazing how many of these idiots met very bad ends, baffling the police of those periods very much. The federal government’s Department of Time and Space was threatening to mandate nationwide pilot training and licensing for time machine operators, which always met with enormous protests and opposition.
Charlie was finished preparing the gear. Spider asked him to take some preliminary readings and poke around a little. “Gotcha,” Charlie said. He opened his toolbox and pulled out a wireless scanning device. He switched it on, loaded a suite of analytic software, hoisted himself up onto the trailer and set about climbing his way around the unit, taking readings, all the while swearing quietly to himself. After he finished the external inspection, he opened the driver’s-side door and got inside.
Mr. Vincent was still talking, “Yeah, I’m sitting there in the driver’s seat, right? And I punch in the date and the time and everything, and hit the go button, and, well, nothing. So I tried again, and still nothing. Must have tried like twenty times. Then I noticed, and you won’t believe this, I noticed the TPS was on the blink—”
This got Spider’s attention. “The Temporal Positioning System? On the blink how, exactly?”
“Look, it’s easier if I just show you, okay?”
“Uh, no, sir. I am not setting foot inside that cabin until my assistant tells me it’s safe to do so.”
“But it’s—”
“You want to show me what happens, that’s fine. But I’m not climbing into this unit until I know I’m not going to end up three hundred years in the future, okay?”
“What about your assistant?”
“He gets paid to do that. I get paid to talk to you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
“Has that ever happened to you, though? Suddenly flung off into the far future by mistake while fixing one of these?”
Spider allowed a small smile. “Uh, no, not to me personally. Now then, we’ll just see how Charlie’s doing.” Spider went around to the driver’s side. “How’s it look in there?”
Charlie opened the door, and the first thing Spider noticed was that Charlie was unusually pale, even for him. He said, “Something is so not right in here, boss.”
“How do you mean?”
Mr. Vincent piped up, “Actually, that’s one of the things I wanted to tell you about. If you sit in the cabin for any length of time, even with everything powered down—”
Charlie leaned out of the unit and sat there, taking deep breaths, feeling woozy. “Oh God,” he said.
Spider helped Charlie down, took the scanner off him, and got him to go sit in the van. He asked Mr. Vincent to get Charlie a glass of water, and the guy hurried off. Spider leaned against the unit’s trailer and scrolled back through Charlie’s scans. The readings were strange: in many ways, even though the unit was powered down, it was reading as if it was in fact powered up and ready to launch. And, yes, the Temporal Positioning System, which was supposed to tell you the unit’s current location in its own timeline, and which should have given a straightforward reading of time since leaving the factory, was indeed on the blink. The numbers were a flickering whirl, a blur. The unit had no idea when the hell it was located; as far as it was concerned, it was lost in time.
Spider saw this, freaked out a little, and sprang away from the trailer, swearing under his breath. He stood there, hands on hips, staring up at the thing, feeling nervous in a way he never usually felt. He went and found Charlie, sitting sideways on his side of the van, the door open, his legs dangling outside. “Feeling any better, mate?”
He did look a little less pale. “Sort of, boss. It’s just, I don’t know, maybe a touch of food poisoning. Had some Chinese takeaway last night after work, and you know what that’s like, bloody salmonella roulette…”
Spider nodded. “Look, if you want to take the rest of the day off—”
“No way. I’ll be right.”
“You think maybe the unit made you sick?”
Charlie looked him in the eye. “Soon as I sat down in there, I started feeling clammy, but I ignored that and kept looking around, doing my thing, checking everything like you said. But after a bit I did start feeling really crappy, and I just figured it was last night’s Chinese, but—”
“It’s not you, Charlie. Something’s spooky wrong with that thing.”
Mr. Vincent found them, and handed Charlie a glass of cold water. “There you go, straight from the tank to you. Fresh as,” he said.
Charlie lifted the glass, said, “Cheers, mate,” and took a long drink. “Oh, that’s just magic. Thank you!”
“No worries. I’m just sorry you—”
Charlie waved off his concern. “Quite all right. Quite all right.”
Spider looked at Mr. Vincent. “Have you ever felt sick inside the machine?”
“Well, yes, now you mention it. A couple of times. I never thought too much about it, and figured it was just, you know, too much fast food. I don’t do much cooking here at home, and I’m always working late…” He was looking at his time machine now. “You think it made me sick?”
�
��Could be,” Spider said. “It’s not unheard-of, but it is rare.”
“Not a good sign?” Mr. Vincent said.
“No. Not a good sign,” Spider said.
“What’s it mean, though?”
Spider scratched his chin. “Most likely thing is just that the unit is not fully here in this spot in space-time.”
Mr. Vincent stared at Spider. “What?”
Spider left Charlie to rest while he took Mr. Vincent back to the unit. “Look here,” he said, holding the scanner in front of the guy. “See this graph? The way that line curves way the hell up there like that?”
“Yeah, what does it mean?”
“The whole unit is powered down, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course it is. You could see that for yourself. Just look at it.”
“I know. The unit looks powered down. This says it’s powered up. Mr. Vincent, what you’ve got here is a bloody death trap. You’re damn lucky you and your girlfriend weren’t killed!”
“We could have been killed?”
“Or worse, yeah.”
“What’s worse than being killed?”
“Worse than being killed, sir, is being lost. As in nowhere, and nowhen.”
Mr. Vincent thought Spider was kidding, so he smiled to go along with the gag. “Like that ever happens, yeah, right!”
Spider paused a moment, staring at Mr. Vincent’s horrible bug-eyes, wondering which of the vast number of things he could say at this moment would prove most effective in convincing Vincent that he had the luck of the truly stupid, and which would also be very satisfying to say in a very loud voice. He waited for his heart-rate to settle, and then said, “It would be tempting to tell you to drop your Tempo into one of those car compactors they have at the salvage yard, and turn the thing into a nice cube of dead matter — but, sadly, that wouldn’t be safe. There could be so much energy still running through the unit that you would end up wiping out a large swath of the metroplex, and the local coppers would understandably take a dim view of that outcome.”
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