Scum of the Universe

by Grant Everett

  Tuesday relented...for now.

  On day eight, the end of his first week of study, Tuesday decided to flick through the AutoEducation guide to see what he had to look forward to over the next few months. The manual was ordered from the most basic programs to the most strenuous, and the intensity of the program was classified by a simple star system. Long story short, all of his uploads had been between half a star to a whole star. Jumping all the way to the very end of the plastic book, Tuesday came across a flashing red page with margins made from animated skulls. Doing his best not to move his lips as he read, Tuesday eventually discovered that he had to say the name of the final program out loud.

  “Advanced Temporal Calculus,” he finally managed.

  No matter how hard he tried, Tuesday couldn't pronounce most of the words that made up the summarised description of this particular upload, let alone understand what they meant when you put them together. Beneath the name of the upload, though, was its star rating: twenty-five stars.

  Tuesday thought on this for a time. He did some mental arithmetic. If one dose of neural gel allowed him to learn a one star program, then it made sense that twenty-five doses of neural gel would help him learn a twenty-five star program, right? Basic maths, that. And think of the time he'd save jumping right to the back! Surely September would be impressed by his initiative right? She'd be here in an hour, so he'd better get going.

  So, tapping furiously at the chemical pump implanted over his left ear, Tuesday selected Advanced Temporal Calculus with a swipe from his right index finger. However, something immediately went wrong: there was the smell of burning meat, and a sensation like a pipe bomb going off in his skull.

  To say that Tuesday “passed out” would be incorrect. It would be far more accurate to say that the shape of his consciousness shifted into something completely alien. To start with, his eyes no longer saw images: everything was made up of a tornado of liquified numbers condensed into solid shapes, of letters and symbols made from a hundred different colours, all dancing into complex pairings before pulling apart again with a loud RRRRIIIIIP noise. He could taste algebra, feel geometry, and hear trigonometry. And tying his senses all together was a smell like charred pork. For all he knew, Tuesday might have slid into a different dimension.

  Reaching out towards the swirls, Tuesday found that he could move the characters about, make them dance and link up on a three dimensional plane until they were arranged in the right way, the way he felt they were meant to be connected. It was as obvious as separating unripened green grapes from two-headed elephants, but exactly WHY the numbers had to be put together in this precise way couldn't be translated into Unglish. At least, not with Tuesday's meagre vocabulary. Finally, after about a million years, the numbers and letters were all where they were mean to be. Tuesday smiled in victory.

  Then, just as quickly as it had arrived, this entire alternate Universe immediately disappeared with the biggest slap in existence.

  “Tuesday?”

  Regaining his normal senses and thought patterns with a start, the first thing Tuesday registered was that he was holding a totally burned-out lasertip pen. The smoking cylinder had reached such a high temperature from overuse that it had fused to his palm with the stink of barbecued buffalo wings. A little vanilla circle near the immolated nib showed that it was on the WHITE setting. Moaning in pain, Tuesday burnt all the finger pads on his other hand as he tore the writing implement away from his scorched flesh. He dropped the lasertip pen into an identical baker's dozen of ruined writing implements. They had all been set to an entire spectrum of colours.

  “Tuesday? Can you hear me?”

  Looking up, Tuesday scanned his eyes along a complicated rainbow that had been burned into every flat surface of his bedroom room. He'd decorated every last inch of space with a multicoloured formula that was so big that there were numbers and letters scrawled all over the roof, across his bedhead, and even on the toilet seat. It was all totally senseless to Tuesday's eyes, but for some unfathomable reason it felt right. And all that had been required was a minor stroke and a bit of brain damage...

  Tuesday finally registered that September's concerned face was hovering less than six inches away from his own. Scowling, she raised her hand for a second smack across the chops.

  “I hear you!” Tuesday yelped before the slap could connect.

  September's concern instantly turned to anger. There was no midway point between the two emotions.

  “Why did your chemical pump contact me to tell me it's empty, Robert?” she demanded, immediately getting to the point. As usual, any question that September asked was purely rhetorical. “I was very specific when I explained...”

  September's eyes locked onto the wall directly above Tuesday's left shoulder. Her words faltered as she began to scan over the symbols as though she understood them. Completely ignoring Tuesday, September followed the chaotic swirl. She started to circle the room, bobbing up and down as the lines interconnected and spawned into complex branches. She was totally silent for well over half a minute, which must have been some sort of record.

  “What...” Tuesday attempted.

  “Shh.”

  It took another thirty seconds, but September eventually finished reading. She looked frustrated.

  “Almost,” she sighed. “For a moment there, I thought you'd...eh. Don't worry. The final part of the equation isn't...”

  Tuesday blinked. For some reason, September froze again. Gripping him by the jaw, September dragged Tuesday across the decorated room to the mounted shaving mirror. Thrusting Tuesday's face so close to the reflective surface that she could have easily busted his nose on the unbreakable glass, September forced down Tuesday's left eyelid. Tuesday could clearly see with his other eye that he'd burned a handful of symbols onto the thin layer of skin that covered his peeper. Taking one good look at the tiny characters, September suddenly assumed an expression of horror, dropped everything and ran out into the corridor as though chased by the spectre of JK Rowling’s damned soul.

  “I need the Head of Space-Time right now!” September shrieked into her Omni implant.

  Tuesday just sat there on his bed, confused, as September spent a solid minute demanding that the Head of the Space-Time Department get out of his bubble bath and come down to Alpha Deck as soon as he was decent enough not to get arrested for streaking. The irate scholar arrived in a bathrobe and fuzzy Pikachu slippers within three minutes. There were suds in his ears and he was leaving wet footsteps on the lino. Arriving at the bomb site that was Tuesday's room, he silently went over the equation for a good five minutes. He shrugged.

  “Eh,” was all the Head had to say. He shrugged. “Not quite. I'm going back to my bath...”

  September gripped Tuesday by the temples, dragged him across the room, and forced down his left eyelid. The Head of Space-Time took one glance at the solution and went pale.

  “No,” he said, disbelieving.

  “Yes!” September corrected in ecstasy.

  Tuesday wrestled free of September's grip.

  “No, yes, what?” Tuesday snapped. Although clueless by nature, he was feeling especially left behind right now.

  September composed herself for a moment before she was able to speak.

  “I don't know how, but – I think you just cracked time travel.”

  “Nice?” Tuesday half-asked, half-stated. He shrugged. “Is it worth much?”

  “This is too dangerous,” the Head of Space-Time snapped. “You are more than aware, September, that The Unison has placed a total ban on all thirty-seven methods of time travel, as well as any other kinds that may be devised in the future...or the past, for that matter. You know the rules as well as I do. It doesn't matter if it's a new method or not. Having possession of this kind of math is illegal, let alone experimenting with it. The space-time continuum is not our Lego set, damn it!”

  September gripped the scholar’s arm like a vice. Such physical violence towards her co-workers was unu
sual, as September normally relied on her ultra-genius to verbally beat them senseless instead. He winced.

  “We're not in The Unison anymore,” September hissed. “Any new methods of manipulating space-time are highly controlled, true, but who better to test such methods than us? After all, we are the cream of humanity! For all we know, this could cut years off our trip. It could possibly make our dimensional slides instantaneous! This could revolutionise the way mankind moves through space. Damn it, man, we can't waste something this valuable!”

  “Waste!” the Head shrieked. “Imagine what that…that chimp over there would do with a time machine! He'd probably kill his great-great grandfather before he was even born, or make love to his mother! He looks like the type that would put in a dozen winning lottery tickets and then go warn the Scandinavians about the Amerikan Uprising a week before it happens! Do you want the damned Skandos to still rule Amerika? Do you? And that's one of the best-case scenarios! Perhaps you'd like intelligent kumquats to become the dominant lifeform on Earth?”

  Ignoring the ranting of the Head as though what he was saying had less merit than Jimmy Slummer's online dating profile, September tapped her Omni implant and began to scan in the equation from the very start. She had to push away the Head when he tried to interfere.

  “You believe in God, right?” September demanded.

  “Yes, of course I do! All Space-Time specialists learn about temporally unchained entities in our first year.”

  “And do you believe that He'd give the keys of time to Robert if Robert was the wrong person to have them?”

  “That's just stupid, and you know it!” the Head snapped.

  To use an ancient term, Tuesday decked him. Nobody insulted September, especially in his bedroom. Smiling wide, Tuesday gripped September's thin left wrist. She didn’t recoil in disgust, which was always an encouraging sign. Then again, she was a little distracted looking at the Head's unconscious body sprawled on Tuesday's floor.

  “Let's go. Time’s a-wastin’.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  OUTTATIME

  It only took September a matter of seconds to convert the digital images of the Tuesday Equation into a living formula within her Omni. She spent a good minute double-checking and triple-checking the scrawl of symbols before she felt confident in uploading it anywhere near The Frontier's supercomputers. After all, September was very aware that messing about with the space-time continuum was always a very dangerous proposition. Every half-decent scientist knew that the Universe was a capricious bitch-queen from hell at the best of times, and an amazing breakthrough that saves mankind today could be tomorrow's extinction level event. Allowing a long string of potentially dangerous code to have direct access to The Frontier's mind was a good way to end up with yet another robot uprising, or perhaps even wipe all life from the galaxy. Though if any human was qualified to diddle space-time, it was September.

  Impressed by the insane beauty of the Tuesday Equation, The Frontier's supercomputer stack took a long, long time (nearly three seconds) before it responded. When it did, September smiled.

  “Verified! I just sent your formula over to the fifth-dimensional printer at Applied Physics so it can mock-up a tangible representation.” September swiped at the floating lightscreen being displayed by her Omni. The hologram disappeared. “All the scientists from Applied Physics are asleep, so we should be able to get in and out without any problems.”

  Tuesday was silent. He felt as though this was all very familiar, but he didn’t know why. Thanks to the whims of the Universe, he had no solid memory of how his last experience with time travel had destroyed the galaxy and beyond…twice. So all he had was a vague sense of doom, but Tuesday always felt like that.

  Tuesday followed September all the way to the Applied Physics studio. Here, the most brilliant mathematicians on board could convert their intangible equations into physical constructs in very short order, as the studio was equipped with a cutting-edge manufacturing machine known as a fifth-dimensional printer. As there were only a handful of fifth-dimensional printers in all of The Unison, having access to this amazing device almost made taking a one-way trip into deepest space worthwhile all on its own. It had been one of the big drawcards in recruiting all the geniuses that were necessary for this pioneering mission.

  The fifth-dimensional printer was an oversized lump that sat lazily in the corner of the Applied Physics studio like a fat, slobby teenager in front of an Xbox. It had hundreds of delicate little arms with an endless assortment of nozzles and cutting implements and soldering guns and far more. The finger-thin limbs dangled above a flat, bare platform that was roughly the same height as Tuesday's floating ribs. Although Tuesday was hardly an expert in cutting edge technology, he wasn't very impressed.

  September kept a close watch on the fifth-dimensional printer, tapping her knuckles while she ensured that the design process was going as planned. Once the blueprints had been set, September filled out a seemingly endless list of electronic disclaimer forms that just kept popping up on the screen. After tapping the final I DO button, September turned to smile at Tuesday.

  “Robert, we’re about to have access to a genuine time machine.”

  “So we could do anything we want with this, right?” Tuesday asked, thinking about the possibilities. For some reason, all his imagination could conjure at this point was a pile of money the size of a small moon. The exact way he was going to actually attain that cash was just detail. “We could meet anyone we want, see anything we please...”

  September gave a time-out motion with her hands. She raised one finger and pointed it at Tuesday in warning.

  “Listen, Tuesday. We're not gallivanting through history, okay? I have a comprehensive understanding of all the mistakes you can make with a time machine, and we're not going to make any of them. I have printed up this device purely to see if your formula has some kind of merit when it comes to space-time manipulation. This is for science, understand? This could be a new epoch in human history! We are not taking you to grade school so you can win back your childhood sweetheart. You are not playing the Lotto. JFK will remain assassinated. We will change nothing. Do you understand?”

  Tuesday nodded, but his face collapsed into a sour expression the moment September turned away.

  “Don't see the point, then,” Tuesday muttered.

  Once September had legally accepted the consequences of her printing task (in triplicate), the delicate little arms of the fifth-dimensional printer began to move at top speed. Tuesday watched in fascination as the limbs sprayed out paper-thin layers of resin and weaved circuit boards out of thin air. The arms only went quicker and quicker as they continued to build a machine that was only meant to be found in the imagination of lazy science fiction authors. Once the articulate digits had finished soldering a hundred kilometres of molecular wiring onto circuitry wafers that were so thin and narrow that they were almost invisible to the unassisted eye, the arms stopped so suddenly that the silence was louder than a skydiving rhino.

  September picked up the pocket-sized contraption, taking care not to touch anything that might change human history. Even up close, the time machine was an unimpressive lump of generic-looking hardware. A simple dial on its face said UP at the top, while the bottom of the dial said DOWN. There was a gun-like trigger on the side, a little RESET button opposite that, and not much else.

  Tuesday squinted at a line of nonsense embossed on the face of the time machine.

  “What the hell is a Nokia 3310?”

  September shrugged.

  “I've never heard of it, so it's probably something ancient. I instructed the fifth-dimensional printer to cover the components with any public-domain shell it had on file. It looks as though the printer decided to use something really, really old.”

  Tuesday grumbled. September sighed in exasperation.

  “What now, Robert?”

  “It's just that we have an actual, real-life time machine, and it looks like crap.”r />
  “Robert, this is a prototype,” September growled, annoyed. “The entire purpose of a prototype is to test out functionality and iron out any endemic faults in the design to gather data that can assist with future versions. For now, I am far more concerned with the possibility that we are about to tear out the backside of the entire space-time continuum. Whether it looks cool or not is entirely irrelevant. I am sure, in time, that a whole team of designers, marketers and advertisers will spruce it up.”

  “So we can't make it into a car?”