Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

by K. A. Bedford

  “She’s been tormenting James for years. He couldn’t take it, so tonight he tried to kill her out of desperation, but—”

  “She got to him first?”

  They’d reached the road. The UWA campus spread out across the road. In a parking area, under sodium lights, Spider saw where Near Future Spider had parked the shop van, with an old Boron II on a trailer behind it. He could only assume the Boron belonged to a customer who had no idea what was being done with it.

  They waited for a gap in traffic and ran across the road, Iris dragging Near Future Spider like an unwilling suspect. Iris’s phone rang. “Street,” she said, then, “Oh, Ali, right. Listen, I’m commandeering a time machine — what? What? You are fucking kidding me, you are absolutely fucking kidding me! He said that? Well, yes, Spider is helping me. No, he’s not a suspect, as far as I’m aware — no, wait! Wait, listen to me. Ali! Oh, shit!” she said, “He hung up on me! Can you believe that, he bloody hung up on me!” She dialed again, but got nothing. She left a colorful message, then hung up, screaming in frustration.

  “Trouble?” Spider asked, guts tense, knowing exactly what was wrong.

  Iris went to the passenger door of the van. She called the Spiders over. “Get in!” Near Future Spider climbed up into the driver’s seat, and opened the passenger door for Iris, who hauled herself up into the shotgun seat. Present Spider made himself comfortable in the back, squeezed in amongst racks of tools and spare parts. Iris ordered Near Future Spider to take them to Rutherford’s place right now.

  “It won’t work, Iris,” he tried to tell her, as he started the van and got it moving. “All we’ll end up doing is make everything worse.”

  “Just bloody well drive! God!”

  CHAPTER 23

  Near Future Spider drove, or tried to drive. The roads were jammed with traffic: cars, scooters and bikes; no one was sticking to the marked lanes; progress was slow. Rain drummed on the roof of the van and spattered against the windscreen. Iris swore a very great deal. She got on the phone again, and anonymously arranged an ambulance crew to go out to Rutherford’s place, saying she was a neighbor and she heard “some scary shit” from his place. She told Spider, when he asked, that they would send the first available ambulance, but it could be a while. Swearing, Iris tore off her phone patch, screwed it up into bits and flung it out the window into the rain.

  “It’s something, though,” Spider said, trying to be helpful.

  Iris turned in her seat and shot him a hard look. He shut up and sat back in his seat amongst the tools. It was bad enough that Iris couldn’t get her squad to act on her information about Rutherford because of him, he thought. What was, in some ways, even worse was the sheer bloody-minded wretchedness of the modern health system, with its underfunded ambulance service. “First available ambulance!” she muttered.

  Then, still steamed, she leaned around her seat to look at him. “And guess what? If it does turn out that a man has been killed in Rutherford’s apartment, I’m to regard you — presumably both of you — as “people of interest”, and bring you all in for questioning.”

  Spider tried to protest, “But I…”

  “You said yourself,” she said to Near Future Spider, “that it’s partly your fault!”

  He nodded. “That’s true. The thing is, the thing you have to remember, though, is that Rutherford was gonna die tonight no matter what. The man was fated to be killed sometime tonight, regardless. That’s what drove me crazy. I know about time travel. I know about history. History pushes back against attempted changes — unless you make your push at exactly the right point. You can’t just go in anywhere in the timeline and try to change things. You have to know the right point, or it just doesn’t work, and you end up with a big mess. But there I was, trying it anyway, trying to save the poor bastard. He didn’t deserve to die! Nobody deserves to die. Sure, he had an affair with that bloody Clea Fassbinder woman, and sure that led his wife to get the best possible revenge a woman could arrange, killing herself like that. How could I not want to try and stop it happening? Plus, he’s a mate, right? You can’t let down a mate. It’s not on. You have to do what you can.”

  Spider said, “How did James’s wife kill herself?”

  “Oh, mate. You’ve got to see it for yourself. She made a video of it, and had it posted to him.”

  “She what?”

  They were inching their way through the canyon of St. George’s Terrace, immense office towers looming either side of the road. “She uploaded the video to a service called Snuff.com. Somehow it ended up on an XVD posted to him. He didn’t know what it was. There was no return address. And this is a truly broken man at this point. His life’s in ruins — and we know what that’s like, right? So, one night, drunk out of his mind, his daughter off somewhere with her useless boyfriend, he puts on the disc, and gets the shock of his life.”

  “God,” Spider said, horrified. He had not known any of this. James had never gone into any detail about Sky’s death. That she had chosen to kill herself to get back at her husband for his affair struck Spider as breathtakingly cruel. He could not imagine a degree of cruelty like that, and he’d seen some of the dreadful things people were prepared to do to people they hated.

  Iris, settled down a little, asked, “How did she do it?”

  Near Future Spider glanced at her. He hesitated. “Self-immolation. Out in the bush somewhere.”

  Spider was speechless. Iris shook her head.

  Near Future Spider said, “Big on the dramatic gesture, was Sky Rutherford.”

  This, Spider was thinking, explained a lot about James’s recent behavior. “So did he kill Clea?”

  “Our late and unlamented far future self told us he didn’t, right?” Near Future Spider said.

  “I took it as more neither confirming nor denying, all that operational security bullshit.”

  “Well, the good news—”

  Iris interrupted him. “It seems to me, and sorry for interrupting, that we need more of a plan than we currently seem to have.”

  Spider agreed. “Well, yes. Obviously. We can’t just turn up at James’s place and run through exactly the same things he’s already tried. We need something new.”

  Near Future Spider, staring out at the teeming traffic and the rain, said, “Oh, I don’t know. All that experience made me the man I am today!” He was joking, but it was hard to tell. Iris shook her head.

  She said, “So what you’re saying, Spider — er, no, I mean you, Spider, not, oh God, you…” She looked back and forth between the two Spiders, sighed, took a calming breath, and pointed at Near Future Spider. “What you’re saying, is that a straightforward frontal approach is no good. History keeps repeating itself. James’s murder and so forth is not the place to try and change things.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that is the gist of it. The crazy bastards in that apartment have been stewing along for years, trying to keep this awful secret, but James is the one who’s in danger of cracking first. Electra can’t have that. James knows she’s scheming. Someone has to take the first step.”

  “Sounds like they bloody deserve each other,” Iris commented.

  “What if we went back to the night of Clea Fassbinder’s murder?” Spider said, thinking about it all. “It’s only six years ago.”

  Iris said, “Section Ten sanctions. You do not mess with those guys. Sometimes you hear rumors, like somehow they’ve got time-hacking gear from the future, and that’s what they’re using here, to lock down the entire event-sequence of the Fassbinder murder, across every universe, the whole manifold.” She shuddered, thinking about it.

  “And this is just because Clea was a Zeropoint agent?” Spider asked.

  Near Future Spider nodded, “Yeah. Section Ten would have their own investigation going. Or so they would have you believe, anyway.”

  Near Fu
ture Spider said, “And before you ask, no, James’s death is not Section Ten shenanigans. It’s strictly domestic.”

  Iris thought about all this, staring out the window. Spider, too. He said, “That just leaves the night Sky Rutherford killed herself.”

  “Except we don’t know exactly when or where that happened.”

  “Yeah, but think,” Spider said, “you, Spider, said there’s an XVD, a video she made of the event.”

  Near Future Spider brightened up slightly. “Oh. Metadata in the file headers!”

  Spider pulled out the screen Soldier Spider had given him, and looked up Snuff.com. “I’m just running a search for Sky’s video. Hang on. Oh, wait. I have to register before I can search. Shit, they want my credit details.”

  “You prepared to say bye-bye to all your money, your identity, everything you hold near and dear?” Near Future Spider asked. “I mean, I thought of trying that, too, but I couldn’t get the site to work. Every time it came up it flooded my screen with hostile malware, just about ate me alive!”

  “It’s playing nice with me, so far,” he said, thinking about where this screen came from. “It still wants my details. Screw it, what the hell. I can always start over, and it’s not like I’ve got much identity to steal, anyway.” He entered his details, the system gobbled them up, and replied that he was now officially a member of “the most secretly visited site on the tubes — everyone does it, but no one admits it!” The flickering preview videos were distracting, and horrifying, enough. Spider tried to concentrate on the job, even as bits of footage kept coming at him showing people, often young people, about to be cut up, or shot, or operated on without anesthetic, or hit by out-of-control cars, or—

  “Holy shit, this is vile,” Spider said, and started looking for anything by Sky Rutherford. It turned out that Sky was quite the video artist, had been involved in several videos posted here — he wondered if James knew anything about this side of her — and, ah yes, here was her suicide video. “Got it!”

  “How bad is it?” Iris asked, turning in her seat to look back at Spider. He sat hunched forward, the screen in his lap glowing and flickering, lighting up his face as he watched.

  Spider paused the playback and looked up at Iris. “It’s… hard to describe, at least so far. She’s just sitting there, on a picnic blanket, in the middle of nowhere, looks like out in the bush somewhere. All red dirt, huge sunset skies, scruffy spinifex bushes here and there. Not a single landmark, point of reference, terrain feature, road sign, nothing. It’s eerie. Recognizably the Australian bush, but nowhere at all.”

  “Shit,” Near Future Spider said. “It’s like she knew people would try something like this, try and find her.”

  Iris agreed. “No luck on the metadata?”

  Spider was back watching the playback. Sky was sitting there on her blanket, reading a letter she’d written to James. Her hands did not shake; her voice never wavered. She was not visibly upset, nor did she raise her voice, or break down in shuddering sobbing tears. She read it with great, terrifying poise, like it was nothing. Her voice was mild, a little deep and smoky. She was, he thought, at once both very attractive, and also the most frightening thing he’d seen in years. She laid it all out very clearly: she was doing this to punish James. It was all very clinical and karmic in her view. You screw me over, I screw you over, only worse. She told him it might as well be his own hand killing her. His actions had led to this moment, she said. At the end, she paused, looked up at the camera, hesitated, her mouth tense, and for a moment she did look vulnerable, like a woman who knew she was about to die in extreme pain. Blinking a few times, she stared back at the camera, and said, her voice cracking slightly, “I love you, James.” Then she picked up the one-liter can of petrol she had with her — Spider imagined she must have paid a small fortune for that quantity of fuel — and began, very systematically, applying it to her hair, face, arms and legs, clothes (front and back), the blanket around her, until she was done.

  “Oh, God,” Spider said, watching her reach, in the fading golden sunset light, for the plastic disposable lighter she had with her. “Oh my God…”

  “Spider?”

  “There she goes. I can’t watch,” he said, still watching, staring, as blue and yellow flames quickly wrapped themselves around her. Even as her clothes, her hair, her skin, everything went up, she kept staring into the unblinking camera’s eye. It took, Spider thought, hours for her to start screaming. It was inhuman that someone could subject themselves to that and not scream, and when she did start, her voice almost lost amid the roar of the fire, it was heartbreaking. Spider watched on, wiping his eyes, unable to stop, for some reason needing to watch. He thought of Molly locked in stasis and buried in a freezer with dozens of corpses; he thought of Soldier Spider, deliberately blowing himself to pieces for reasons Spider could still only guess at, and hoped never to find out the hard way. He thought of Dickhead, talking his faithful servants to death that last day on the Destiny, motivating them to give up their mortal lives for the sake of the Final Secret of the Cosmos. He could see it, hear it, now. He thought, watching Sky Rutherford burn, curled up in a fetal position now, what someone with her awesome self-possession would have made of Dickhead, and he of her. He thought Dickhead would find her iron will and discipline irresistible.

  “Spider!” It was Iris.

  He jumped, startled, the screen slipping from his lap and tumbling to the floor, lighting up the darkness in the rear of the van. “God, Iris! What is it?” He bent forward and picked it up, but this time when he looked at it — a barely recognizable human form made of charcoal, wreathed in fire and thick smoke in the gathering dark — he looked at it differently. He stopped the playback, and then kept staring at the initial freezeframe image of Sky Rutherford, close-up, frowning intensely, adjusting the camera’s lens. He felt cold and strange, his mind whirling about no central point, at once here in the back of this old van, and yet also still lost somewhere at the End of Time, the stink of smoke and burning composite materials thick in his nostrils. “Time lag,” he said, absently.

  “Spider, are you okay? You—”

  He folded up the screen and put it back in his pocket. “People who time travel a lot, they build up a consciousness differential between their home and all the places they’ve been, and the more they jaunt about, the more the differential builds up, and starts messing with your head, and you start feeling not quite tethered to the here and now. Got it a fair bit back when I was a copper…” He trailed off, remembering what it had been like as he followed Sharp and his mates all throughout time.

  “Spider, mate,” Near Future Spider called out. “Get a bloody grip!”

  “It’s like,” Spider went on, “kinda like the first time you get drunk. A bit out-of-body, looking at yourself, and you think, ‘not looking too flash!’”

  Iris said to Near Future Spider, “You know anything about this?”

  “Yeah, but I’m over it now. Happened to me ages ago. It’ll pass in a while, couple of days. I’d say that video did his head in, basically, plus everything else.”

  Iris said to Spider, “Can you hear me, Spider?”

  He looked at her and smiled a little. “I’m not deaf, Iris, just a little timed out, so to speak.” His tone of voice was light and dreamy, but in his head, Sky burned on, over and over. He suspected he’d be seeing her burn for the rest of his life. It was the first time he’d ever seen, albeit on video, someone take their own life. That she had been so determined, so cold and focused on the task, was the thing he kept coming back to, thinking about it, trying to imagine his way into her mind, trying to grasp that level of fury, but could not. It was frightening because it was so inhuman.

  He heard Iris asking Near Future Spider how much further it was to Rutherford’s place, and heard him tell her not that far.

  Right, he told himself, his voice seeming to ech
o and echo in the cavernous, flaming darkness in his head, time to snap out of it. Nearly there. Have to be on the ball, ready for trouble. He remembered Soldier Spider telling him that he stood only a 14 percent chance of surviving tonight. Fourteen percent. These were not good odds. It got his attention, at least a little. He said, very deliberately, like a drunk trying not to sound drunk, “There was no time or date-stamp on the video. By the way.”

  Iris glanced at him, sorry for him, but also more than a little annoyed at him spacing out — timing out — on her, just now. “So we need the disc itself,” she said.

  Near Future Spider agreed. “Now how do we get the disc without Electra killing us?”

  “How much of a threat is she likely to be?” she asked him.

  “In my experience,” he said, indicating a spot on his torso near his kidneys, “she can be quite a handful. Depends, though. In some versions she tops herself after doing her dad. Hard to say. Won’t know ‘till we get there.”

  “Lovely family,” Iris commented.

  “Yeah, and to think if only James had just kept his wick dry when he was with Clea bloody Fassbinder. If he’d just left her be, treated her like a professional—”

  Spider, in the back, piped up, “Yeah, but she was pretty much obsessed with finding out how she died back here.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Near Future Spider said. “I’d forgotten that bit. Seems like bloody ages ago I did all that.”

  Iris said, “It’s extremely difficult, I have to say, from my perspective, to imagine what this ‘End of Time’ might be like, let alone being there, and then back here.”

  “Not much to see,” Spider said. “Blackness upon blackness. The ultimate void. Kind of scary.”

  “Sounds like something out of Lovecraft, home of the Elder Gods, dancing madly to the insane tootlings of their servitors,” Iris said.

  “Yeah,” Spider said. “Like that, but worse.”

  “You all right, Spider?”