Temporally Out of Order

by Unknown

  He reached over and took the broken smoke detector out of Neil’s hands, setting it gently on the nightstand. Then he flopped back on the pillows and let his arm fall across Neil’s bare chest. Feeling more contented than he had in a long time, he murmured, “Totally. I’m totally making fun of you, mysterious dude.” His eyes closed as Neil brushed a bit of hair out of his face.

  Neil was still stroking his hair when Jack heard him ask, sounding half-asleep, “You want bagels in the morning?”

  Jack nodded without opening his eyes and his whole body relaxed into this moment, this universe, this continuum. Time-traveling smoke alarm or not, this was where he was supposed to be. Jack yawned, hugely. “Missed you,” he whispered as he drifted toward sleep.

  oOo

  He smelled toast burning and wondered if Neil was trying to surprise him with breakfast. Neil cooked about as well as he did, but surely it had only been a few minutes since the alarm went off. It couldn’t possibly be morning already.

  He turned toward the clock on his nightstand, but it was blocked by the shell of the broken smoke detector. Too much work, he thought, and almost went back to sleep. Neil will wake me up when it’s ready, and I really need to sleep some of this bourbon out of my system. But now he was curious—had he really dozed off without realizing? He made a heroic effort, and lifted himself up on one elbow to see the clock.

  Jack’s eyes stung, and he rubbed at them hard. The numbers were blurred, more orange than red, like he was viewing them through a sepia filter. 2:57? No one makes toast at three in the morning. Not even Neil. And Neil’s right here.

  The burned smell was stronger now. Unpleasantly strong. He cleared his throat, and Neil rolled over, burying his face in the pillow. Neil slept like the dead—always had—and he’d had four or five bourbons besides. Feeling a little woozy, Jack shook Neil’s arm, then sat up, trying to get his bearings. He immediately wished he hadn’t.

  He coughed harder this time, hard enough that his head pounded and sparkles of color flashed across the dark bedroom. But when he caught his breath, breathing shallowly to keep from setting himself off again, there were no colors, just smoke swirling overhead, obscuring the dark spot on the ceiling where the smoke detector belonged. He lay back quickly, gagging on the thick air his lungs wanted to expel even though there wasn’t any cleaner air to replace it.

  The smoke detector.

  Smoke.

  Fire.

  Heart pounding in his ears, he shook Neil again, but the bigger man just groaned and pushed him away feebly with one hand. Now Neil started to cough, gently, little puffs like he was clearing his throat. Jack looked up at the darkening ceiling and shoved hard at Neil’s shoulder, starting to panic. They were both going to die, because there was no way he could carry or even drag Neil to safety if he’d truly passed out. The man outweighed him by nearly eighty pounds, and Jack had never been particularly strong for his size.

  Goddamn smoke alarm would have woken him up, his mind raged. It’s my fault for taking out the batteries: I might as well have started the fire myself. And now we’re going to die. Mom was right.

  “Neil! Get up! There’s a fire!”

  But Neil just coughed a little, his face still buried under the pillow. The room was still dark; Jack couldn’t see any flames, but the smoke was definitely getting thicker. At least Neil’s using my pillow as an air filter. He’s smart even when he’s unconscious. A particularly violent coughing fit grabbed Jack by the throat and his stomach tried to empty itself. They couldn’t stay here.

  Gagging, he crawled out of bed, trying to keep his head low. The air was clearer down here. From the floor, he reached up and grabbed Neil’s arm. Bracing his feet on the box-spring, Jack pulled Neil’s torso off the bed. Neil thumped onto the floor, then sat up, shouting. Then he coughed, choking convulsively. He knocked the smoke detector down as he groped, still coughing, for his glasses. After he shoved the glasses on his face, they both stared at it.

  “Fucking smoke detector,” Jack rasped. Saving his breath, Neil tucked the smoke detector under one arm before reaching out for Jack. Gulping a deep breath, they crouched hand in hand, then rushed for the front door. But even before they touched it, they saw black smoke creeping from beneath it. The smoke must be coming from the elevator shafts or the hallway.

  “Fire stairs in the kitchen,” Jack said, coughing with the effort, and they covered their faces with their elbows and ran. Jack shoved the recycling can out of the way, strewing take-out bowls across the kitchen floor. Congealed egg and gochujang splashed across the floor.

  Jack couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened this door; he forgot it was here most of the time. He reached up to twist the knob on the latch, but the thing was stuck tight. This was so not funny. It felt like the worst of the bad dreams he had endured as a child. Hissing under his breath, he cursed the weakling genes his Grandpa John had given him. But he saved his most virulent curses for the building’s goddamn super, who must have bribed the fucking fire inspector who should have insisted on new smoke detectors and verified that everyone’s fire doors opened easily, instead of worrying about who had an illegal cat in their apartment. Thank god I don’t have a cat, his mind gibbered. That sucker would be hiding and we’d both die from smoke inhalation while I was trying to drag it out from under a bed.

  But of course, even though Jack might not be strong enough to open his own goddamn door, he wasn’t alone. And Neil was big, and actually put his gym membership to good use. Neil handed Jack the broken smoke detector—which he apparently planned to rescue—and Jack had an instant to admire Neil’s forearms tensing as he used both hands to get a better grip on the knob. Jack looked back at his apartment, wondering what he should try to save, but then more smoke billowed up from under the front door, chasing them into the gray-painted fire stairwell, so they just slammed the door shut behind them. At the bottom of the first flight of stairs, they paused to look up and catch their breath, spitting the sooty taste out of their mouths. Wisps of smoke were already dissipating as they drifted upward. They banged on every door on the way down, even though they could already hear the hallway’s alarms going off.

  By the time they reached the lobby, sirens heralded the arrival of the fire department. Other residents were beginning to join them in the lobby, managing to look both very sleepy and very worried as they searched for acquaintances in the growing crowd. Jack rasped, “You think everyone got out?”

  Neil looked up as if he could see through walls, as if Jack were asking for logic, not reassurance. “I think the fire had to be right beneath your place. Isn’t that the floor that the buyers are remodeling?”

  Jack nodded absently and then smiled. “Yeah. Been empty for six months already while the workmen do their thing.”

  “There you go. Someone did their thing wrong. So the flames were contained on an empty floor, and 12-A and -C are over there,” he nodded at Jack’s next-door neighbors. “And it would have taken a lot longer for a dangerous level of smoke to get to thirteen, so yes. Everyone’s likely just fine.”

  “Damn, I missed you, logic-man.” Neil smiled shyly, and Jack confided, “You know, I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to invite you up if not for that damned smoke detector. Well, that and being kind of sleep-deprived.”

  “And if it hadn’t woken us up just a few minutes before the fire—however the hell it managed to do that—all that bourbon might have made us sleep too soundly to wake up in time when we needed to. Dude. That would’ve sucked. Don’t ever let me drink that much again.”

  Jack smiled crookedly and nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “but if the smoke detector hadn’t been malfunctioning in the first place, it would have gone off at the right time.”

  “Maybe. But—and don’t take this the wrong way—I don’t think you could have opened that door alone. You need to spend some time at the gym, dude. And haven’t you ever heard of WD-40? You need someone to look after you.”

  “So you think the smoke detecto
r saved me by going off at the wrong time? And therefore making sure you’d be there with me?”

  “It went off at exactly the right time. Novikov’s self-consistency principle, dude.”

  “This may come as a surprise to you, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Time wants to run along its proper track. You know that, right? When your smoke detector’s worldline formed a closed timelike curve—a loop in spacetime, so to speak—it allowed the smoke detector to return to its own past. It had to find a way to right the world—bring things back on track—and this was the only way to do it.”

  “Wait. So you’re saying my smoke detector—this very smoke detector—knows its way around the space-time continuum and altered all this shit just to save us from a crummy apartment fire? I must be pretty damned important.”

  “Physics doesn’t work that way. You’re as important as any other particle in the universe—no more, no less. The universe just wants things to happen the way they already did, and something obviously got out of whack and needed correcting. Unless you want to get into paradox theory and different branching realities, and I’d rather not. Because dude, honestly, I think we both just died in most of those. Besides, do you have a better explanation?”

  “You’re the physicist. I just write ad copy. My point is that it seems rather, um, improbable. Arbitrary.” Jack stared hard at the smoke detector, wondering if he would be relieved or creeped out if the thing started glowing red right now.

  Neil smiled a little. “The world is a mysterious place, dude. For tonight, that’s good enough for me. Of course, I’m still a little bit drunk. Also I’m starving. What time does the bagel place open? Four? Five?”

  Two firemen in full gear pushed past them, and he and Neil hurried through the front door to get out of their way. Jack looked up, shielding his eyes; he didn’t see flames shooting out any windows. It was chilly, but the gooseflesh rising on his arms wasn’t from the cold. Flames or not, I could have died up there tonight.

  Other residents began straggling out of the lobby too, wearing pajamas and cradling their illegal pets with the same care Neil was showing for the stupid smoke detector. Jack hoped the building superintendent wasn’t going to be a dick and make a fuss over a cat or two.

  “Bagels,” Neil said sharply, snapping him out of his reverie. “I’m starving, dude.”

  Shrugging, Jack looked up at him. “Even if they’ll sell us something at the bakery window, my apartment’s going to be trashed, between the smoke and the water.”

  “I’ve got a better view anyway. And I think I’ve still got some of your clothes somewhere. Um, you should just stay with me ‘til your place is cleaned up. If you want. You being so important to the universe and all.”

  “Really?”

  In answer, Neil draped one big arm over Jack’s shoulders again. Another fire truck pulled in, red lights flashing, as they started walking toward the bagel shop. “The universe is a mysterious place, dude, and it seems to want us to stick together. And don’t believe for a second that I mean that as a bad thing.” Neil’s squeezed Jack’s shoulders and lowered his voice. “In fact, I’ve been thinking of all the money we could save if we just gave up your apartment. What’s mine is yours, etcetera.” Neil hefted the smoke detector in his free hand. “I’m claiming this, though, and you can’t have it back. I’m feeling very sentimentally attached to it, all of a sudden.”

  Jack nodded happily. “Let’s go get some bagels and talk it over,” he said, as blithely as he could manage around the lump in his throat. But for the first time since they had met, he thought he knew exactly what Neil meant.

  ALIEN TIME WARP

  by Gini Koch

  Author’s Note: For readers of the Alien/Katherine “Kitty” Katt series,

  this story takes place during the events of Alien Separation.

  Time is mutable.

  That’s been shown to me in a mind-shattering way. And I’m not sure I’ll ever recover.

  Einstein, Hawking, all the scientific greats, they’ve all tried to figure out time. Maybe some of them did figure it out. If they did, I know why they didn’t tell anyone. Knowing what I now know about time makes everything meaningless and, at the same time, makes every action, even the minutest action, the most vital thing in the multiverse.

  “Chuckie, are you okay? You look … funny.” That was Kitty. My best friend. For most of my life, my only real friend. My first big love. Until I’d met Naomi.

  I was sure I did look funny. We weren’t where we were supposed to be. We should’ve been on Earth. Instead, we were on an alien planet in the Alpha Centauri system. But that wasn’t the real issue. It was when we were that was wrong. So very wrong.

  “How did we get back here?” Jeff Martini asked. Jeff was Kitty’s husband and an alien, from a different planet in this system than we were on right now. But he’d never been here before. None of us had. And yet, we’d been here many times before.

  We were high up on a mountain. A very flat mountain. Me, Kitty, Jeff, Jeff’s cousin, Christopher White, sixteen of our people, plus a lot of natives. And yet, at the same time, in both my future and my past, I knew Jeff was being tortured in order to force me to allow our enemies to use my mind to power their mind-connecting machine. Which would, if unchecked, blow my brain out and make me a gibbering idiot in a very short time.

  I was chosen for this because I’m the smartest. Which really wasn’t fair. Why not turn a moron into a vegetable? Supposedly an idiot would be using less of their brain, meaning more untouched brain for the brain battery I was strapped to. Not that we had any of those along, of course. But then, that’s pretty much how my life has been—reasonably good with a lot of unfair thrown in so I don’t get cocky.

  It was unfair Jeff stole Kitty from me. It was unfair I fell just as deeply in love with his cousin, only to have Naomi killed before we’d been married six months. It was consistently unfair that being the smartest guy around just meant I’d gotten picked on and abused my entire life. But it was really unfair, once my friends risked everything to save me, that a part of me was still trapped in, lucky me, what looked like a time loop.

  I saw myself getting rescued, saw us saving the day, saw my friends doing amazing things in order to get me to safety before my mind exploded—just before, really—and yet, we weren’t saved and I was still trapped.

  Because while I was still in the brain torture contraption, I was also on this mountaintop where we could see for miles. The planet looked the same—a bizarre spiral of colors surrounded by ocean, the only continent on this entire planet.

  Making the whole experience a complete mind freak, there was also a giant telescope, hanging right above us, held up by absolutely nothing. That shouldn’t have been possible, of course, but there it was. And I knew it was supposed to be there.

  There were natives up here with us—creatures who seemed unfazed by the telescope—and they were sentient. That they were sentient was one thing, but that they weren’t questioning the giant floating telescope was, frankly, amazing.

  But not as amazing as what else I was seeing.

  We lived in a multiverse and because of the device strapped to my head, I could see each universe as it peeled off from the main one. Or at least what I thought was the main one. Maybe there were as many main universes as there were new universes being formed. And I could see them all—past, present, and potential futures—all at the same time.

  No wonder God checked out of the day-to-day running of all of this.

  I sincerely doubted the people who’d strapped me into this mind expanding device expected that I could see all of time and all the multiverse, too. Whether that meant the damned device was malfunctioning or not was probably the relevant question. But who was I kidding? This was us. Of course it was malfunctioning. Our luck, mine in particular, didn’t run any other way.

  I was sure the telescope had been stolen from Earth and then, somehow, put back on this planet. It looked just like t
he telescope that had been stolen right when I’d joined up with the C.I.A., which was less than a decade ago. Only, as I looked at the timeline we were in, when we were on the mountaintop, we were thousands of years in the past. And so was this telescope, which hadn’t been created yet. And this was possible, not only because I was seeing it, but because whoever was in charge obviously knew how to use time to his or her advantage.

  Whoever this being was, I was pretty sure he or she was a bastard.

  “I think we need to, ah, take some action,” Christopher said. “Because the natives look restless.”

  We looped. It was as if we stretched out along time itself, went through adventures here, battled in space there, then came back again, right to the top of this mountain. And what I knew and the others didn’t was that, when we were on the mountaintop, we were thousands of years in the past from the moment when we’d first arrived. And yet, Jeff and I were being tortured now. Whenever “now” really was.

  My head hurt.

  While Kitty again asked me if I was okay and Jeff again asked what was going on, I looked for any sign of my life with my wife, any other universe where we might have actually gotten a fair chance. I didn’t see any. And that was, possibly, the most unfair part of all. I’d finally moved on from the first love of my life only to have the second one ripped away from me.

  I wanted Naomi back. Would it be so wrong, in the grand scheme of all the multiverse, for her and me to be together? I didn’t think so. Surely there was some way, some place, where we actually got more than six months of married happiness. Dammit. I wanted more than six months with Naomi. I wanted the rest of our lives.

  Another loop. I noted again I was both released from the brain torture contraption and yet, at the same time, I was still in it. Meaning I wasn’t free at all—I was still a human battery and was just seeing possibilities. Great. So, where were my possibilities with Naomi?