Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

by K. A. Bedford

  “Shit.”

  “Wait a moment.” She put him on hold. A recorded voice started telling him about the amazing range of helpful community-based programs provided by today’s modern Police Service. Spider clutched his forehead, a headache pounding away at him. He wanted to go get some sleep, but knew he was still so hopped up on caffeine he could be awake for days.

  Then Iris was back. “Sorry. Had to get away. Can you hear me okay?” Her voice echoed a little, but there was no other background noise.

  “Come on, Iris. Spill your guts.”

  “I had a visitor last night, Spider.”

  Something about the tone of her voice as she said this touched a nerve. “Oh?”

  “He said he was you, basically, but—”

  “From the future?” He was sitting upright, leaning forward, staring at the floor, heart banging hard, feeling scared all over again.

  “Yeah, but he looked a real mess, and he said he’d had a very fruitful meeting with you, too.”

  “This is what you wanted to talk about?”

  “You might say that, yes.”

  He squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Where and when?”

  They settled on a quiet spot in the middle of Kings Park, at eight p.m.

  Charlie Stuart came by Spider’s service bay. “That sounded intriguing.”

  “It’s nothing,” Spider said, grabbing his multi-tool and trying to focus again on the Boron’s problems, which was no easy task after a conversation like that, particularly with it so close to closing time. Key-point indicators be damned, he thought, and decided to wrap it up for the night.

  Charlie said, “That was Inspector Street on the phone, though, right?”

  “Yeah,” Spider admitted. “Just a follow-up. Strictly a formality.” He made a show out of securing all the loose parts of the translation engine for the night, but one tiny system module caught his eye, and he picked it up. After peering at it for a moment, he lowered his magnifier over his right eye and took a closer look. Something was different about it. He showed it to Charlie. “This look blown to you?”

  Charlie took the part and stared at it. “Have you checked the ‘scope?” They had a cheap Nigerian quantum microscope in the back of the workshop. It worked most of the time. Needless to say, Dickhead McMahon refused to buy something newer, something that might work more reliably, until that one failed utterly.

  “Yeah,” Spider said. “Yesterday I had a look at it, and it looked all right, right down to the atomic level.”

  Charlie asked to have a look at the component; Spider handed it over. Charlie was still wearing his antistatic gloves. He scowled and went cross-eyed as he looked at it. “So it was okay yesterday, but today it looks funny?”

  “Mmmm,” Spider said, secretly glad for the distraction from talking about Inspector Street.

  Charlie pulled down his own magnifier and studied the piece all over. “Looks okay to me, boss.” He handed it back.

  Spider held it in the palm of his hand while he grabbed his multi-tool with the other. He was dialing in the unit-integrity mode when Charlie said, “Say g’day to the Inspector for me, huh?” He grinned at Spider. Spider shot him a foul look, annoyed, wishing he didn’t feel the need to keep secrets. The fact that Iris Street had called him and proposed a get-together in an out-of-the-way location was giving Spider chills. It reminded him altogether too much of the old days, with secret meetings going on all the time, and it was hard to keep track of who was in league with whom without elaborate charts. Even after all these years, secrecy was a tough habit to break.

  “I’ll be sure to convey to the Inspector your kind regards, Charlie.”

  Charlie grinned, enjoying seeing his boss discomfited. “So, what’s on the cards, then, huh? Hot date with an old flame?”

  Spider found himself coughing out bitter laughter. “Yeah, that’s what it is all right. Yeah, absolutely.”

  Then Charlie’s tone shifted, and his voice dropped. He said, “You think she knows who the dead woman is?”

  Spider was still looking at the module, determined not to get drawn into Charlie’s teasing. As to his actual question, he said, “We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.”

  Spider plugged the suspect component into his multi-tool and hit the grimy scan key. After a moment, the tool came back with its verdict: positive. Yesterday, when Spider had tried this same test, it had come up negative. He was sure of it. Pulling out his handheld, he scrolled back through his work logs, looking for a record of performing the test, and found it. “That’s odd,” he said, staring at the handheld, and then at the component.

  “Boss?”

  Spider set down that component and started grabbing others from the same section of the engine and systematically trying each one in the multi-tool, then checking his logs from yesterday. The results were consistent: components that, according to the logs, had tested one way yesterday were testing the same way today, even though he clearly remembered their testing the other way yesterday. Or, at least, he thought he remembered it that way. The more he tried to concentrate on it, the less sure he felt. He looked at Charlie, and told him what he was finding.

  Charlie told him he must be misreading either his logs or the multi-tool. Spider showed him what he was seeing. Charlie took a little longer to go through the same tests and checks, but got the same results. Even as the sun was setting outside, and crows began cawing mockingly at them, Charlie failed to see the problem. “You’re saying this part tested positive yesterday, and it tested positive again today.”

  “Yeah,” Spider said, frowning, trying to think, “and that’s wrong. Yesterday it was negative, I’m sure it was bloody negative!”

  “Boss, maybe you’re just tired.”

  “Oh, thanks,” he said, irritated, looking at the exposed guts of the translation engine, and contemplating testing every single component, no matter how long it took.

  Charlie said, “You look like shit.”

  The kid was almost certainly right. He was tired, bone tired, but Spider was also feeling cold all the way through. An idea had occurred to him that would explain the discrepancy between his now-fuzzy memories and the results he was getting from his tools. It was a crazy idea, but it would explain what was going on, even if it did piss him off. “Hmm,” he said, wondering how he could prove his hypothesis if he had to.

  “Maybe you should look and see if the firmware in the multi needs upgrading,” Charlie suggested. “How long’s it been since you updated?”

  Spider thought Charlie had a point. He should try to exhaust all rational possibilities before leaping to crazy conclusions. He picked up the multi-tool again and hit the update key. It went online for a few moments, scanned for updates, and reported back that it was up to date. He did the same for the logging software in his handheld, and that came back also showing it was up-to-date, and all its checksums were good. Spider’s tools weren’t the problem.

  Charlie said, “Things don’t just change overnight.”

  Spider said, looking at him, “Well, that depends on what happened overnight, I’d say.”

  Charlie, not aware of Spider’s adventures the previous evening, was puzzled. “Um, what?”

  “Suppose, for a moment, that we’ve been shunted into an adjacent timeline.”

  “Hmm,” Charlie said, stroking his chin, “suppose for a moment your boss has just lost his bloody mind!”

  “Further suppose,” Spider said, annoyed, “that your boss has earned the right to formulate such an opinion, and would not formulate such an opinion just for the sheer overwhelming joy it gives him.” He paused for a moment, chewing his lip. “I realize it sounds nuts. I’m comparing these test results with the contents of my memory — never the most reliable source of information,” he conceded, and looked about at everything before him. It all looke
d and smelled and felt exactly the way it should — and that was the proof, because in his memory, everything was minutely different. If he didn’t have a good head for small technical details he would never even have noticed the change.

  The thing was, it made a certain kind of sense. In this timeline, Molly was alive and tooling around in Bangkok on a tuk-tuk and tending to her exhibition, but in the other timeline she was dead. Could Future Spider, in coming back to talk to him have either deliberately or accidentally disrupted or fractured things?

  So it was possible that he had been up all night driving around with his future self, just as it was possible that none of that had happened. Sort of. And then there was Iris Street’s claim that she had met Future Spider as well last night. What was that crazy bastard up to?

  “Yeah,” he said to Charlie, putting away his tools and closing the service bay for the night. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I just need to get a good night’s sleep and have another look at all this tomorrow, right?”

  Charlie smiled warily. “Yeah. Bet you wish you could take a couple of days off.”

  “You’re not wrong, Charles,” Spider said, thinking about what bliss that would be, actual time off, holidays. It was a sweet idea — and, under Dickhead’s rules, out of the question, unless Spider was gravely ill. Work for Dickhead McMahon, you agreed to work six days a week, and be available for emergencies on Sunday, no penalty rates, and no vacation time. “You want to be treated like children, go and work for the bloody government,” McMahon would say.

  Once the shop had been secured for the night, Charlie wished him goodnight and jumped into his fuel cell-powered jeep, telling him, “Be a good boy for the inspector!”

  Spider waved him off, smiling for a moment, but then plunged back into a gloom of speculation. What the hell was going on? He had no idea, and wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  CHAPTER 9

  Spider wanted to duck back home to change clothes before meeting Iris Street later that night. He parked his bike in one of the few available slots in the crowded locker at The Lucky Happy Moon Motel, got out and secured his ride. He went up to the motel entrance, passed through the outer door and logged in — or tried to. His key was refused. Surprised, he tried again, and again his key was refused. “Now that’s looking a bit odd,” he said. Meanwhile, a small crowd of other residents was accumulating outside, waiting for him to either go through the inner door or come back outside. And there was no going through the inner door without the system accepting his key.

  So he stood there, trying his key again and again. Each time he got the same frustrating result. “This is bloody nuts!” he said, even as residents outside, most of whom had that same beaten-down doomed look, started pounding on the outer door. He yelled back at them that he just needed a minute. The banging and mocking continued, only louder and more insistent. Starting to panic, Spider tried cleaning his key (no help), inspecting the key-reader mechanism for bits of dirt or other problems which might be causing the system to reject his key (no help), and he even tried yelling to the guys outside, some of whom he knew vaguely by first name or nickname, and asking — as politely as he could — if he could inspect their keys to see in what ineffable way his key could possibly read as different or suspect. There were no volunteers. In the end, swearing loudly as another aging Singapore Air A380-800 rumbled overhead, he went back outside, copped a lot of verbal abuse and shoulder-shoving, and considered his options.

  The best of these was to go up to the after-hours intercom screen, hit the big red talk button, and try to plead his case with Mrs. Ng. She peered at him with great surprise as he explained his predicament, then said, “But Spider, you’re already here, aren’t you?”

  He was confused for a moment. “Um, what was that?”

  Mrs. Ng leaned into the camera, the better to talk to him. “I said you’re already here. Look.” She grabbed another screen and held it up for him so he could see. “There, see? Six-fifty-two this evening, your key, containing your biometrics, accepted by the system.” She pointed at the relevant entry, in case he couldn’t see for himself. Spider stared and stared. He had indeed turned up a while ago. Then she peered at him more closely, and asked, “How did you get out without me seeing?”

  Then he started to see what might be going on. “Mrs. Ng, he’s a future version of me. What did he look like?” Spider asked, doing his best to look bemused, aware of how absurd this situation appeared — and starting to get deeply annoyed at his Future Self.

  “That’s the thing. He looked quite a bit like you, well, not exactly, you know a bit down and out, sorry. I just get used to seeing guys like that.”

  Spider nodded. “Seems like I fell on some hard times. He’s up there now?”

  Mrs. Ng sighed. “A future version of you, Spider? Really?” She was not amused. “Did you not read Paragraph Four of the Conditions of Service?”

  “It’s just, I—”

  Mrs. Ng cut him off. “Paragraph Four,” she said, reciting from memory, in aggravated tones, ‘The client will refrain from the use of any chronotechnology (time travel) device for the purpose of subverting this Agreement’! Did you not read this, Spider?”

  It was true. He had not read Paragraph Four. He hadn’t read any of the Conditions of Service. At the time he’d just been pathetically grateful for some cheap accommodation, and would have signed almost anything, quite possibly including a document allowing unsavoury doctors to remove his ‘spare’ organs. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ng I screwed up. Well, not me, exactly, my future self—” Mrs. Ng cut him off again, scolded at him again, and ultimately let him in. “Last chance, Spider! Last chance!”

  Once inside, he thanked Mrs. Ng, patted the Buddha on the counter and decided it was time he had a quiet word with his future self. The elevators were still under repair, according to a sign, so he puffed his way up to his level and found his way to his capsule.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, tingles going up and down his spine. The flap on the front of the capsule looked much as it would if he was in there. The occupied light was on. But something about it looked all wrong, and he could not say why. Well, he reasoned, it might have to do with the whole bloody time paradox bullshit, meeting your own future self, and so forth. Then he thought, No, it’s not that. He wished he were still a cop, and that he had a gun.

  Spider approached the flap. He knocked on the front of the capsule. “Hey numbnuts!” he said. “Get your ugly mug out here!”

  There was no answer. And, this close, there was a very familiar, very bad smell. “Fuck,” he said, tense. Standing to one side, he pulled the flap open.

  Nothing happened, but the smell got worse. Some of the guys nearby gave him nasty looks. One told him to “Clean up your shit, man. What’s wrong with you?”

  Gritting his teeth, knowing what he was going to find, he leaned over and looked inside — and immediately pulled away, revolted, spooked, gasping for breath, his heart booming. He stood there, his legs threatening to give way at any moment, and tried to think through his options. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, the cops would have to get involved. No doubt they would be fascinated to see what had happened to Spider’s future self. He checked himself for any possible forensic traces that might conceivably tie him to what had happened, and found none. Which meant nothing, of course. As best he could tell, forensics should only show that he was here, standing outside his capsule. He had not been inside interfering with the scene. All the same, his DNA and so forth would be all over the inside of the capsule, simply because that was indeed himself in there, and it was the place where he lived, such as it was, day to day. He swore under his breath and rubbed at his face. He felt weak and dizzy and cold.

  He forced himself to take another look inside, trying to distance himself, as if it were any other crime scene. It wasn’t easy. It was too much like seeing his own future, which he supposed it was, or at least might be.r />
  The victim, he thought, forcing himself to see the scene professionally, had clearly been knifed, by the look of it, several times, primarily in the gut and chest. The quantity of blood sprayed across the inside walls of the capsule and pooling next to the narrow mattress suggested strongly that the heart had been punctured. There were few signs of a struggle: possibly the victim had been asleep at the time of the attack, or otherwise subdued, or caught by surprise.

  It felt strange. He was the observer of his own messy death and yet remained detached from the fact it was himself. He used his watch to take some photos, just in case he might need them later.

  How had the murderer got in here, without disturbing the victim? The capsule was barely large enough for one person. Surely Mrs. Ng would remember a blood-soaked killer leaving the premises. Everybody would notice something like that. Or, he thought, would they? He looked around at his fellow residents. There were few residential options lower than this, other than getting yourself a refrigerator box and finding a quiet bit of city sidewalk. Guys living here were hanging on by their fingernails. So, one day, as you go about your business, doing your best not to disturb the other residents because you’ve seen how disturbing the wrong guy at the wrong time could go all kinds of bad, you spot this guy, carrying a blood-soaked knife, and he’s covered in blood, too. You’re not going to make trouble for this guy, are you? You’re not going to report him to the coppers, or raise any kind of alarm, because you might wind up dead, just like the guy’s last victim.

  Spider could see how that could work out in the killer’s favor, but he still could not see how he could escape Mrs. Ng’s notice. She, unlike the residents, would make a stink about it. She would call the cops, and lock down the building until they arrived, and she’d have surveillance footage.

  Interesting, he thought, still detached and doing his best not to think about the victim as his own future self — yet he realized that he himself had this very same appointment with the very same murderer. Which future had this guy, this future version of himself, come from? From this point in time, he knew, millions, billions of alternate futures spread out before him. The dead Spider could have come from any one of them. He, Spider here and now, could, through his choices and the choices of other people, avoid this fate — but how would he know?