Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

by K. A. Bedford

  “All right, then,” Spider said, watching Dickhead as if his boss were a bomb that might explode in his face at any moment, “tell me more.”

  At that moment a figure in black flashed into existence right behind Dickhead’s chair.

  Spider froze for a moment, panicking — the figure had a gun — but then he recognized him, and swore. “Oh fuck-a-bloody-duck,” he said.

  Dickhead, surprised at Spider’s sudden outburst, looked around behind him, and saw an old man with buzzcut silver hair in a black commando outfit, and then he saw the gun, which was pointed at his head. This, the way Spider saw it, appeared perfectly fine with Dickhead, who said to the old man, “Is that the best you could do, Spider?”

  Surprised, Spider said, “What?” He had, from time to time, faced people with guns during his police career, but not often, and he had never had to fire a shot in anger. But that was then, and the visceral terror he felt right now, the fear that at any moment things could go very bad indeed and both he and Dickhead could die, was all he could think about. He wanted, he was embarrassed to realize, to dive under his desk and hide, but he couldn’t, not with Dickhead there as well.

  This left Spider staring at the new guy, and shaking his head with disappointment. Yes, the new guy was another future version of himself. This one, much older than the last visitor from the future Spider had met, looked like a veteran special-operations commando; you could see it in the way he carried the gun, the look in his eyes, even the way he stood, Spider noticed, spoke of long and bitter experience in some kind of warfare.

  Less obvious, and more frankly terrifying, was the way Dickhead sat there looking hugely amused at the whole scene — and the fact, Spider now remembered, that he had called the old soldier, “Spider.” As if he knew this soldier version of Spider very well. He closed his eyes, wishing he were anywhere else. Why couldn’t he be left alone, left in peace? What was it about the bloody future that made these latter-day versions of himself think they needed to come back and bother him? More to the point, he thought, staring at this old, military version of himself, since when was he likely to become some kind of hardcore commando? Yes, he’d once been a cop, but that was different. I mean, he said to himself, look at him! He could cut your throat before you even had time to blink! How the hell do I wind up turning into that?

  “All right, then,” he said to his two visitors. “You, put the gun away.”

  “Uh, no,” Soldier Spider said. “You’re coming with me.”

  Then Dickhead, who still looked like he was having a fine time, said to the soldier while staring calmly at Spider, “No, I’m afraid he’s coming with me. It’s his destiny.”

  Spider stared between them, starting to panic. “My destiny? My fucking destiny? Who the hell are you and what have you done with the real Dickhead McMahon, for God’s sake?”

  Dickhead told Spider, “It’s time, Spider, for you to learn the Final Secret of the Cosmos. It’s—”

  Spider was starting to panic. “I, what? You—”

  Soldier Spider said to Dickhead, “Again with that messianic bullshit, Dickhead?”

  “But—” Spider said, staring from one to the other, and then back to the muzzle of Soldier Spider’s gun.

  Soldier Spider shook his head, disgusted, and said to Spider, “Look. I don’t have time for this shit.”

  Dickhead, a weird gleam in his eyes, turned to look up at the intruder. “Oh, so what are you going to do, Spider, shoot me? You know that won’t—”

  Soldier Spider shot Dickhead in the back of his head, which burst apart. There was a lot of blood.

  Spider, spattered with gore, sat stunned, not breathing, hardly able to hear anything.

  The office door swung open. Charlie burst in, took in the scene, went pale, and said something Spider couldn’t hear properly.

  Soldier Spider turned and said something to Charlie. He backed out and closed the door behind him. Faintly, Spider heard a high-pitched scream, probably from Malaria.

  The gun in Soldier Spider’s hand swung around to face Spider. “Can. You. Hear. Me. Now?” he said.

  Blinking, aware of his heart booming hard in his throat, Spider nodded. “Sort of. I’m…” He indicated his ears, that they weren’t working.

  “I. Need. You. To. Come. With. Me., Spider.”

  “No. No fucking way.”

  Soldier Spider sighed and shook his head.

  Present Spider, trembling with shock and rage, got up from his seat, glanced around at the walls, took in the way Dickhead’s annoying motivational posters — DETERMINATION; DISCIPLINE; WILLPOWER — all featuring luminous angelic beings and spectacular cloudscapes — were now spattered with blood and gore. Spider felt things in his head starting to shift around, starting to maybe understand.

  Soldier Spider brought up the gun. “Don’t. Just don’t.”

  Spider approached the soldier. “I’m not going with you. I want no part of it. So fuck off.”

  “Shit,” Soldier Spider said.

  Spider boiled over. Screaming, he lunged at Soldier Spider until Soldier Spider brought the gun back up and aimed it at Spider’s head, and Spider stopped in his tracks, just a meter from the gun’s muzzle, breathing huge gulps. His heart either stopped entirely or was going so fast he couldn’t feel it anymore, and he stood there, staring at the gun, smelling gore and gunsmoke, only too aware that he was covered in hot and stinking bits of Dickhead—

  “Now, then,” Soldier Spider said. “You and me, we have to talk.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Spider managed to say, “No.”

  “No?” Soldier Spider asked, then paused a moment, thinking, then said, “Oh yeah. I said no. Right.”

  Spider became aware that warm, stinking urine was running down his leg, and he swore to himself. “Great, now I’m pissing my pants. Thanks ever so much,” he said.

  Soldier Spider nodded, looking a little chagrined. “Hmm. Let’s see. When this was me, future me said something that made me go along with him. What the hell was it?”

  “Damned if I know.” The whole universe had come down to the muzzle of that gun, black and forbidding. Poised there, watching the gun, only too aware that his future self still had his finger on the trigger, as if he was still anticipating having to maybe shoot his way out of the situation if things didn’t work out. Spider could hardly hear anything, but he could feel his whole head vibrating with the throb of his pulse, and he was very hot, yet shivery, sweating, alive with tension.

  “Oh, the hell with it,” Soldier Spider said, the gun still leveled at Spider, as he reached into his pocket for what proved to be some sort of key ring. He touched a control—

  And Spider was back in his office, alone, waiting for Dickhead to show up, and thinking about razor blades and warm baths when the man in black showed up, gun already drawn, next to Spider’s chair. For a moment Spider remained unaware anything had happened, but then noticed a dark shape next to him where none had been before. He turned, saw the gun, saw the old soldier attached to the gun, and saw him reach for a key ring—

  And Spider’s office flashed away, to be replaced by a gray cell. There was a sturdy metal table in the middle of the room, and two chairs, one on either side, and Spider was there with this soldier fellow. It was cold, smelled bad, and Spider knew he was in huge trouble.

  His captor sat in the opposite chair, and put his gun on the table in front of him. He smiled wearily. “Welcome to the End of Bloody Time, Spider.”

  “Oh shit,” Spider said, recognizing the phrase from his meeting with the first Future Spider, and feeling utterly screwed, just like Future Spider had promised. Looking around, sniffing the air, it occurred to him that this was not exactly what he pictured when he thought about the “End of Time.”

  “It took some doing, getting you here.”

  Spider
, only too aware of that gun, did his best to keep calm. He sat back in the chair, crossed his arms, and looked at the figure in black. The guy looked familiar, maybe a bit like his dad, if his dad had ever gone into the military. He said, “Look. Take me home. I don’t know what you’re up to, or why you’ve brought me here, but I’m guessing it’s something to do with Zeropoint, and I’ve gotta tell you, mate, I’m just not interested. Not. Interested.”

  “Is that right, Spider?”

  “Not interested, even a tiny bit.”

  “You don’t even know why—”

  “I know it’s bad, whatever it is. I know it’s trouble.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “I dunno. Maybe the whole kidnapping thing rubbed me the wrong way.”

  “You wouldn’t have come if we’d just asked you politely, maybe sent you an engraved invitation, all RSVP, and dress smart casual, now would you?”

  The idea tickled Spider’s sense of humor. “Actually, that might have got my attention.”

  “So here we are, then,” the guy said.

  “We are indeed. I’m guessing this place is nowhere good.”

  He took in his surroundings. They were in a very small room with what looked to be steel walls, painted gray. There were a great many exposed pipes and conduit bundles. In one wall was a hatch that looked far too small for a normal-sized man to get through. The air, now that Spider stopped to notice, tasted metallic, and thin, as if it was being rationed. And, if he listened, there was a quiet background hum, and he could hear other people moving about and talking outside.

  “So,” Spider said, “this is some kind of ship?”

  The older man nodded, but looked nonplused. “Yup, ‘fraid so. She’s a timeship, and our last redoubt. We call her the Masada.”

  “Masada? As in the siege of…?”

  “The very one, yeah.”

  “Hope things go better for you guys than they did for those guys.”

  “Us, too, Spider, believe me.”

  “Well, then,” he said, taking it in. “Gosh. An actual timeship.” He folded his arms.

  “Not much to look at, I know,” the soldier said. “I brought you here for two reasons. One, the ship is mostly flux-proof, so—”

  Spider was surprised that he more or less understood what the guy might mean by this term. He said, sure he was probably wrong, but maybe not, “Causality attacks can’t inadvertently delete your whole existence, right?”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  “So how does that work?”

  The guy looked pained for a moment, trying to remain calm and affable. “Like I say, there are things I can and can’t tell you. Thing is, I just needed somewhere I could talk to you in peace, without being disturbed. Nobody can bop in from some other time to try and rescue you. It’s a bit like the Bat Cave. Creates a temporary bubble of space-time separate from the manifold, more or less. Takes a whole shitload of energy to run it, but it’s worthwhile for the sake of not being interrupted by well-meaning idiots trying to come and save you from our eeeeeeeeeevil clutches.” He mimed cartoonishly evil clutches, the sort of thing Spider would have done, and that made Spider laugh — and then hated himself for laughing, for relaxing his guard.

  “Well, you wouldn’t want that, would you?” Spider said, making a show of “understanding,” while still completely pissed off at getting shanghaied here in the first place.

  The old man, acknowledging Spider’s response, carried on with the briefing. “I’m only authorized to show you certain parts of the ship, at least at this point.”

  “Uh-huh,” Spider said, refusing to engage with the whole thing — though he was, despite his best efforts, intrigued by the idea of a flux-proof timeship.

  “Must admit,” the man in black said, “I’m a little hurt that you haven’t realized who I am yet. The previous times, you—”

  “Previous times?”

  “Like I said, it took some doing getting you here.”

  Spider scratched his nose, and took a closer look at his captor. Definite resemblance to his dad, but only up to a point. The eyes were the wrong color, and the nose — he peered at the man’s nose from each side, and noticed a familiar scar, almost hidden by age. All at once Spider realized who this man was. He stared, wide-eyed, touching his own face, and sagged, feeling defeated, into his chair. “Shit,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  “Hello, Spider,” his future self said.

  “Hello, your treacherous self.”

  “You think so little of your own future choices?”

  “I’m just disappointed in myself. At some point, for some reason, and no doubt against all my better judgement, I appear to have decided to play along with you clowns, and, from the look of you, I’m guessing hijinks ensued.”

  Soldier Spider smiled, thinking back. “Yeah, hijinks have indeed ensued.”

  Spider was shaking his head, pissed off at himself. “So,” he said, “was it at least something, you know, good and worthwhile that got me to sell myself out?”

  The old man in black took a long moment to think about this. At length, he said, “At the time, and this is going back a long while now, when I was where you are now, I didn’t think anything could get me to help these bastards. I was furious, just furious, not just at being kidnapped, not just at being so thoroughly fucked around with — I mean that weird business with that other Future Spider was still fresh in my memory, plus,” he paused, shaking his head, “the murdered future me, and, of course, sleeping with Iris… I was just fed up to the back bloody teeth with all this time travel bullshit! I’d had a bellyful! All I wanted to do was go back and fix stupid time machines for stupid owners so they could go off and do stupid things with them. I’d always hated the whole time travel thing, but compared to all this other stuff, the plotting and scheming, the whole ‘Secret Squirrel’ thing” — He sighed, remembering everything— “Well, it made being a time machine repairman look pretty damn sweet, to be honest.”

  It was eerie, Spider thought, watching and listening to this. The old man really knew him, to a degree that was downright spooky, like a violation, only of course it wasn’t, not at all. For the old guy, Spider’s current life, such as it was, was a distant memory, something he’d given up for some greater good, but which he still remembered, from time to time, and hated that he’d been living such a shitty life. Spider thought about it, allowing himself, just for the sake of argument, to consider the possibility that there might be something worthwhile in his future, if he would only accept this dubious fate.

  If he were to go along with all this nonsense, would he miss anything? Sleeping in a smelly, stale plastic capsule at Mrs. Ng’s, eating not much more than instant noodles and similar shitty stuff because it was all he could afford? No, he wouldn’t miss that. He would miss Molly, he knew, and his mum and dad. And Charlie, who made getting through each day at the shop that much easier, a good and unexpected friend to him at a time when he’d had no friends. For that matter, he even quite liked young Malaria, though he hardly knew her.

  He found himself picturing Iris Street in his mind’s eye. Not the cold female inspector she was now, but the Iris he’d known when they were both young. Their affair, if you could call it that, had lasted no more than ten breathtaking days, but what days those had been! Even at the time he’d known the relationship was a hopeless cause. Iris, always ambitious, was already planning her ascent through the Police Service, putting in long, hard hours studying, reading old case files, training, always training, doing her damndest to be the best, most go-getter copper she could possibly be. After they’d made love, and they were lying there tangled together, and he marvelled at her spectacular passion and sublime body, she’d be talking about how she wanted to make inspector before she turned thirty-five. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind by way of pillow talk. M
ore recently, when he had been around Iris, remembering those extraordinary ten days, it was hard to believe this was the same woman — and yet he sometimes caught himself wondering, particularly late at night trying to get comfortable on her couch, aware of her natural scent everywhere, if she still harbored those same amazing passions. And realizing, well, yes, she evidently did still have at least some access to that part of herself, if what she blushingly admitted about her night with the other Future Spider was to be believed.

  Spider, sitting there, overwhelmed with strangeness, found himself reaching for the familiar, for things he already knew, for the world he might well have lost. Thinking about Iris, and what he knew about her — that she might be part of the whole Zeropoint apparatus. Could she have deliberately lied to him about that night with his Future Self? It was a maddening thought, the kind of thought that led nowhere good — but at least it was a familiar kind of madness, a madness he could understand. The alternative, to embrace this Future Spider’s world and perspective, was a pathway to an entirely unfamiliar, terrifying madness, and Spider was determined to resist.

  With that decided, he said to his future self, “I’m not prepared to give up my former life.”

  Soldier Spider smiled and nodded, in a way that Spider was learning to hate. The old man said, “Nobody wants you to give that up.”

  This was the last thing he expected. Uncertain, he said, “So I’m going back to my life?”

  “Of course,” Soldier Spider said. “What did you think was going to happen?”

  Spider shook his head and rubbed his face. “If you’re really me, you know damn well what I was thinking.”