Next morning, when he was out of the shower, he heard Iris doing something in the kitchen. He hadn’t heard her come in last night. Once dressed — in yesterday’s undies and overalls since he hadn’t done any laundry — he emerged from the washroom in time to find Iris sitting in the tiny breakfast nook, next to a window which offered a fabulous view of another apartment complex, eating a bowl of hot porridge, and sipping a steaming cup of tea. She was dressed for the day and, other than the fact that she looked tired, appeared pleased to see him.
“Morning, stranger,” she said, flashing a smile. “What’s new?”
Spider was unsure what to say. He found he didn’t want to get into the whole thing about yesterday with James, which would take ages to explain, so he went with Option B. “Same old, same old,” he said, smiling back. “Is there fresh coffee, maybe?”
“Droid’s busted,” she said.
He went to look at the coffee droid, thinking he could maybe do something about it. While he tinkered with the machine, Iris called out to him, “By the way, some good news.”
“Yeah, what?”
“We think we’ve got a lead on who killed your, um, future self?”
Astonished, and not certain he had heard Iris correctly, Spider shot back to the breakfast nook. “You what?”
“Yeah, like I said, we went over all the motel’s surveillance footage — you have no idea how much of that shit there was to go through, it was bloody epic — and we found what looks like a time-splice.”
Spider stood there, opening and closing his mouth, but nothing came out. “And you determined this how exactly?”
“Well,” she said, sipping her tea, “there’s no trace of anybody entering the motel other than through the main entrance. The rear service door only opens from the inside, and showed no signs of tampering in any case. None of the residents — and we tracked an awful lot of their movements around the place — showed any interest in your capsule during the entire day. The only person, other than yourself accessing your capsule, was the hotel’s maid. She changed the linen and left long before the attack. We’ve got footage of Future You arriving and going up to your capsule and climbing in. All his biometrics checked out, obviously.”
“If you’ve got no indication of anybody entering who shouldn’t have been there—”
“I know what you’re thinking. There’s evidence of a chrono incursion, and, like I said, a splice.”
Someone in the future had used time travel to turn up inside the motel, inside his capsule? He thought about it for a moment. “What about the camera inside the capsule?”
Iris finished the last spoonful of porridge. “That’s where we found evidence of the splice. The footage shows ‘you’ lying there on your bunk, then there’s a bit of a jump in the signal, after which, well, it’s blood everywhere and you — I mean, Future You—”
“I’m dead?”
Iris frowned, not sure how to put it. “No, not quite dead, not yet. The footage shows you trying to write that message. It’s—” She took a breath. “It’s hard to watch, frankly. You’re bleeding out at a rate of knots…” She trailed off, staring at the floor, avoiding his gaze.
It was a hard thing to hear about. He tried to focus on the idea that Future Spider was someone else, from a different timeline. He, Present Spider, was not necessarily locked into that outcome. The fact that he didn’t get busted for murdering Molly — that Molly was still alive — showed that whatever else his future self wanted to accomplish, he had prevented that. Which meant he, Present Spider, wouldn’t end up murdered in that capsule, right? He tried telling himself this, and he believed it, up to a point, in his head, but that was all.
“So couldn’t the killer just have disabled the camera for a few minutes?”
Iris got up to take her porridge bowl and teacup to the kitchen. Spider followed her. She was saying, “The camera showed no signs of tampering, and the monitoring system itself was okay.” She ran a little water into the bowl to rinse it, then paused, looking out the small window. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to kill that guy.”
Leaning in the kitchen doorway, Spider was troubled, thinking that the only people who might pull such a stunt were likely to be agents from Zeropoint. He wondered how the hell he would go about talking to them, assuming they would even tell him anything. Spider said, “So, any chance you can get something out of the break in the footage?”
“Working on it, but…” She glanced at him and waggled her hand, looking glum. As she squeezed past him on her way back to the breakfast nook, their eyes met for a moment. She scowled and shook her head and kept going, found her coat hanging over a chair and went to put it on. Spider tried to help, but made a mess of it. “Let go!” Iris said, shrugging into the coat.
He let go, hands in the air, and watched Iris grab keys, handheld, and bag. He wanted to tell her how grateful he was for putting him up like this, and for potentially drawing the fire of whoever killed Future Spider, but everything he put together in his head to try to express this gratitude sounded, to him, stupid. In the end, he just managed to say, “Well, I just wanted to say, Iris, um—”
“You’re welcome,” she said, anticipating potential awkwardness and wanting to get through it as fast as possible. “So, what’s on for today?”
“The usual. Broken time machines in one door, fixed ones out the other. Oh, and Dickhead wants to see me. That should be big fun.”
“Fair enough. See you.” She gave him a brief wave, and left, shutting the door behind her.
When Spider arrived at the shop, Malaria told him the phones had been going nuts with customers wanting their time machines looked at. She’d taken the liberty of arranging a schedule of appointments so he and Charlie could head out to see them all, find out what was what, and decide what would happen from there.
“Fine,” he said, heading for the break room for an early jolt of coffee.
Malaria then told him the truly bad news. “Um, the coffee droid’s actually on the blink, I’m sorry.”
Spider was already in the break room, and now he stood staring at the recalcitrant machine. “Not working?” Iris’s coffee droid had been broken, too. He started thinking there was a pattern here, or maybe the universe was plotting to keep him caffeine-free. It made as much sense as everything else going on.
“Maybe you could fix it?” she said.
“You’re the coffee whiz, though, right?” he said, trying to sound reasonable.
Malaria shrugged elaborately, her head tilted over on one side. “Sorry. I only make brilliant coffee with working machinery.”
“Crap,” Spider said, thinking it was going to be one of those days.
“Oh, and Dickhead’s coming by at lunchtime for a word.”
“Yeah, I got a message last night. Any idea what he wants to talk about?”
More shrugging. “Dunno. D’you think you could get him to leave me alone, though?”
Startled, he looked at her. Spider knew Dickhead was quite taken with Malaria, and had tried to chat her up the other day. “He hasn’t done anything, uh—?”
Seeing what Spider was thinking, she smiled and flapped her hands at him. “No, no, it’s all right. It’s nothing like that,” she said. “It’s just, he’s always calling me up, and it’s always supposedly about something to do with the shop, some bit of info he needs or some stupid thing, but he’s always really chatty, asking me how my day’s going, what I’m doing on the weekend, and all this, and it just… it kind of wigs me out a bit.”
“It makes you uncomfortable?” Spider felt himself slipping into cop mode, and tried to stop it.
“A bit, yeah, I don’t think he means anything by it. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s hard to tell him to bugger off.”
“You want me to have a quiet word in his pink and shell-like ear?”
“Would you mind?” She looked embarrassed at imposing on Spider’s goodwill like this.
Spider dropped into a deep, dark and airy vocal impression. “Leave it to me,” he said, doing his best to look sinister.
Malaria stared at him, surprised and puzzled.
Spider said, “Darth Vader?”
“Oh, Star Wars!” she said, getting it. “I’ve never seen it.”
“How can you not have seen Star Wars?”
“I was homeschooled?”
“Oh, Malaria.” He shook his head. “This weekend, when you’re avoiding my boss, download yourself some Star Wars goodness. You won’t regret it.”
“Oooookay,” she said, fobbing him off.
Spider could see he was not exactly making a convert. “Anyway…” he said, trailing off.
“Yeah, if you could get Dickhead off my back?”
“Consider it done. No bastard hassles my best receptionist ever.”
She grinned. “Thanks. Sorry I can’t help with the coffee droid.”
He shrugged. “Think nothing of it. I’ll have a look at it.”
“If you do get it to work,” she said, “could you make me a latte?”
So, one busted coffee droid, he thought. How hard could it be to fix something like this? After all, I fix time machines for a living. There was no way a coffee droid could be harder to fix than a time machine, surely. Then again, he reflected, time machines were the only machines he knew how to fix. And it sounded as if he was set for a big day examining the bloody things, and with that many potential clients, the odds that one of them would involve a dead cat in the works were damn good. His talk with Iris had left him feeling like she was starting to regret having him staying with her. Not that she’d said anything, of course. There was just a certain chill in the air this morning that he felt only too acutely. Maybe it was that moment in the hallway when they squeezed past each other and their eyes met, and she’d looked away, like he reminded her of something disgusting. He knew she was already getting flak at work for even knowing him, let alone for helping him. Knowing the way gossip worked in the Police Service, probably everybody imagined she was sleeping with him — if only! He swore, pissed off, trying to keep the past in the past instead of stinking up the present.
This left him staring once more at the machine. He sighed and called out, “Malaria?”
She appeared in the doorway. “Can you fix it?”
“Take some money out of petty cash, go to the bloody shops, and get us some instant coffee.”
She saw the look on his face. “Okay,” she said, and hurried out again.
Spider went into his office, which was a mess, and slumped behind his desk, rubbing his face.
Charlie appeared in the doorway. He had his oversized white lab coat on, and looked lost in it, as always. “Boss, all set?”
Time to hit the road, he thought. “Yeah, whatever,” he said, got up and grabbed his own lab coat. With a little luck, Dickhead would turn up while they were out. He stopped himself at that point. No, he wanted to talk to the idiot. On the way to the van, he told Malaria to have Dickhead call him if he turned up while they were out.
“Check!” she said, saluting ironically.
The morning ground along, one stupid time machine after another. Again and again, clueless owners told him they never even thought to read the owner’s manuals that came with their units, and they only wanted to — for example — visit the near-future to find out the winning Lotto numbers, or — God, the cliché of it — the results of horse races or football matches so they could, and this is how they almost all phrased it, “Make a killing!” There were guys — and they were nearly always guys, he noticed as the day went along — who fancied their chances speculating on the financial markets, and who complained to him that the machine was obviously busted because for some stupid reason it wouldn’t let them find out such information. A few geniuses, faced with such frustration, attempted to find information about this phenomenon online, visited some tech-support forums, and learned that the DOTAS firmware in every time machine sold in Australia actively prevented operators from acquiring information that might be used for illegal gain.
The more advanced tech-support forums contained detailed advice for illegally subverting this firmware, or indeed, removing it entirely, even though removing it would render the unit inoperable. Spider had met these clowns so many times since he started working on time machines that it was like he could smell them coming, that whiff of magical thinking, the thought process that made you think, “If only I had a time machine, I could be incredibly bloody rich!” The firmware was not a perfect solution. Sometimes a user genuinely wanted to visit the near future in order to find out something other than sports or financial results. The firmware would also prevent people going back to the stock market crash of 1929 with the intent of buying up crashed stocks and making a killing that way. “How’s it know what I’m trying to do?” these frustrated would-be moguls always complained. “How can it possibly know?”
Spider understood, up to a point, how the firmware worked, but he preferred to tell people, “The machine can smell your greed.” This was not strictly acceptable under the Mission Statement of Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, which was all about customer satisfaction and courtesy and so forth. Then again, nobody ever complained to Dickhead about it, because they’d have to admit they were up to no good.
So, it was a typical day inspecting machines and talking to idiot owners. After the last visit, Spider had an idea. He said, “I don’t know about you, Charlie, I think we need a break.”
Charlie nodded. “Yeah, know what you mean. Ideas?”
“As it happens,” he said, “I have had this one idea. You remember that guy, Mr. Vincent, with the Tempo and the—”
“Oh, Mr. Bug-Eyes, yeah.” He mimed to indicate the ugly eye-plug memory prostheses Vincent wore that day. “Yeah. What a wanker.”
“I feel like dropping by for a visit.”
“You do? What about your meeting with the boss?”
“Malaria will call if he shows. In the meantime we can get the details of who Vincent bought that Tempo from.”
“He did say he probably erased the info, boss.”
“He did. But who knows?” Spider said. He was thinking that probably the same DOTAS unit that took command of everything to do with the dead woman had also been to see Mr. Vincent and put the fear of God into him and then trashed his entire house searching for that same information. But maybe not, he thought. “So, you up for it?” he asked Charlie.
“Beats talking to these other dropkicks, boss.”
“Lay in a course for Mr. Vincent’s residence, Mr. Stuart,” Spider said, starting to feel more upbeat.
CHAPTER 12
Mr. Vincent, still with the horrifying eye-plugs, was home when Spider and Charlie turned up. He invited them into his huge and obnoxious house, which was nearly empty. Enormous, high-ceilinged rooms, huge media walls, but very little furniture. Spider felt furious, seeing such casually displayed luxury — all this space — wasted on a twit like Vincent.
“I’ve been meaning to call you,” Vincent said, grinning, a little embarrassed, working his watchtop, where he located a file, which he sent to Spider’s watchtop. “That’s the receipt I got from the guy I bought the Tempo from.”
Spider was reading. There wasn’t much to it, just a handwritten note on a bit of ordinary notepaper, indicating that Mr. Simon Vincent had fully paid Mr. Ian Fry for a second-hand Tempus Tempo 300 time travel device, including its trailer. Mr. Fry’s signature was an unreadable scribble along the bottom of the page. Fortunately, though, it did list the man’s address and contact details.
All of which was very good, Spider thought, standing there looking at Vincent and then at Charlie. Maybe a little too good. Vincent had been pretty certa
in when asked previously if he had this document, and had told Spider how he’d recently purged a lot of useless crap from his household systems, possibly including this very thing. Now here it was, easy to find, no trouble at all.
“Well, then,” Charlie said, grinning but looking anxious to get away. In the cavernous room his voice echoed a little.
Vincent said, “The guy said I could call him any time if I needed any help with the Tempo, but I never did, even when I started having problems. Kind of embarrassed, you know how it is. You don’t want to look like a twit, huh?” He laughed, too loud, a little nervously. He rubbed the back of his neck.
The sight of his grinning mouth combined with those big, black, faceted plugs where his eyes should be was hard to take. He knew Vincent could see him and Charlie just fine. The harder thing to accept was that those plugs were also antennas which allowed Vincent to see great, white-water torrents of ambient data. It made Spider anxious and made him think about the way things changed much too quickly. And how only a few years ago people fretted about the arrival of something called the “singularity,” an unstoppable, inconceivable rush of technological change that would transform everything. And Spider was still waiting! This was not the world of the future he’d been promised when he was a kid. This wasn’t even the future he’d been promised in the early years of the twenty-first century. This was something entirely else, and he wanted to give it back, like something shop-soiled or the wrong size, and get something more to his liking. This future he was living in was too much like the past he knew so well. Yes, there were time machines, and people like Mr. Vincent who put out his own eyes so he could have ghastly fly’s-eye implants instead, but the world around Spider, at least in Perth, was very much like he had always known it, only bigger and more exhausting.
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 14
