In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Nathan Van Coops

  I can feel the anger rising in my voice. “I didn’t lose him. He got—” I pause, considering her attentive, curious expression. She doesn’t know. It’s not her fault. I start over. “Yes. I need a guide.”

  “Okay, no problem. It looks like we still have plenty of qualified candidates available in the alternates pool. All of them have outstanding credentials. Did you have someone in particular in mind?” Her eyes are bright and she beams at me as she waits expectantly for my answer.

  “I really don’t know any of them. Can you just pick me the best available?” For whatever it’s worth. This thing is clearly rigged against me anyway.

  The girl seems delighted at this prospect. “Oh absolutely! We have some great options here for you, lots of good candidates. Do you have a preference of men or women? Are you concerned about that? Some racers are married or in relationships, and their spouses don’t want them racing with members of the opposite sex . . . or same sex, depending on their, you know, orientation.” She watches my face. “So are you, um, married? Or . . .”

  “No, I’m not married.”

  “Great! I mean, right, that’s good to know. Any relationships that are, you know, complicating anything?”

  “Uh, no. I guess not.”

  “Okay.” The corners of her mouth turn up slightly as she searches the screen. “Well, our top ranked alternate is a man. Young man. Viznir Najjar. He had the highest marks this round on the guide exam. He’s a graduate of the ATS field program, and fluent in five languages. It also says here he made the Turkish National Jai Alai team at the age of fourteen.” The girl’s eyebrows rise at this. “So I guess that’s good, huh?” She looks back up at me.

  I shrug. “I’ve never seen anybody play Jai Alai. I’m not really sure what that is.”

  “Haha. Actually, I’m not really sure either,” she laughs nervously. “But it has to mean he’s athletic, right? Isn’t it like lacrosse, kind of?”

  “I really couldn’t tell you.”

  She looks at the screen and back to me again. “Okay, the automatic profile match has him as your best choice but do you want me to go over some more?”

  “No, he sounds fine. Let’s just go with him. I don’t really care.” Not like any of them are going to be able to help me much anyway.

  “Okay, great!” She grins up at me. “If you can just press your finger here—” she turns the tablet toward me and indicates an empty box. “—you can confirm your selection.”

  I hesitate over the pad. “This is all I’m authorizing, right? I’m not being contracted into anything else, or signing something that gives away all my internal organs or something . . .”

  “Oh no! Just this.” She looks concerned that I could suspect her tablet of something malicious.

  “I’ve just had some bad experiences with that lately.”

  “Someone’s trying to take your organs?” She holds a hand to her mouth, barely concealing her expression of horror.

  “No. Not literally that. Just some other things.” I take the tablet from her.

  “Oh, good, because I’ve heard about things like that. Urban legends you know, about people coming back from the future to try to harvest organs. Trying to get younger parts to keep themselves alive . . .” She looks away at the windows, as if worried someone may be looking to steal her organs at any moment.

  “Really?” I follow her gaze to the windows. “That happens?”

  “Um. Well, I don’t know. My dad is always telling me to be careful and watch out for stuff like that. I think he’s just concerned, you know? Like normal parent stuff.”

  “Yeah, definitely.” I press my thumb to the square and it blinks green. I hand the tablet back. The girl is looking into my eyes as she accepts it.

  “I’ll have someone go and get him.” She glances at the tablet again. “Get Viznir. You are welcome to wait in here or out on the porch. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Okay, thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “It’s totally no problem . . . Ben.” She smiles again. “I’m Carly, by the way.”

  “Ben,” I say. “But you just said that, so yeah. Nice to meet you.”

  She averts her eyes but looks back again as I turn away. I can feel her stare on my back as I push through the double doors. Way to go, Ben. Another random girl with your fingerprint. You probably just signed up for the next ten chronothons.

  There are still a handful of volunteers to my left, lingering around the railing of the porch. I go right instead, following the wooden decking around the corner to the side of the building facing the woods. The porch is vacant on that side, but at the far end, facing the rear of the building, I spot a wicker rocking chair. I make my way over to it and have just walked past the corner when I realize it is not the only one. A trio of chairs is spaced a few feet from one another and the third chair is occupied. The occupant has the skin color of a Pacific islander. His black hair is styled in a short afro and he’s dressed casually in khaki shorts and a rugby shirt. He seems to be just staring into the woods through thin-framed glasses. I follow his eye line but can’t make out what he’s looking at.

  “Hey, you mind if I sit here?” I swing my pack off and set it next to the closest rocking chair. The young man makes no response, but continues staring into the woods. His fingers are making occasional taps on the armrests of his chair. I’m about to speak again, but notice a device connected from his glasses to his ear. Is he listening to music? I take my seat and get settled. After a moment, I check the woods again, trying to make out what he is so concentrated on. I see nothing but trees and shrubs. His fingers continue their incessant tapping in fits and spurts. It makes me wonder if he is perhaps mentally ill or obsessive compulsive.

  I lean back in the Adirondack style rocker and rock back and forth a couple of times, trying to let the calm of the scenery keep the chaos of my morning at bay. But the more I stare at the woods, the more thoughts of my blonde apparition reoccur. It couldn’t have been her. Your mind was just playing tricks because you want to see her. I wrestle with the thought. Did I really want to see her badly enough to see her there? Would I want to see her at the scene of Charlie’s murder? I try to shake the thought from my head. The young man next to me is still tapping away at his armrests.

  “Hey, man. You okay?” I lean forward in my chair to be farther into his eye line. This time he notices me. He pulls his glasses from his face and sits up straighter.

  “Oh, hey. Sorry. I was kind of getting in the zone there. Didn’t see you.”

  “Yeah, I could tell. What were you staring at?” I jerk my head toward the woods.

  “What? Oh. No, I wasn’t staring. It was these.” He holds the glasses up, angling the interior of the lenses toward me. “Just getting some work done.”

  The interior of the lenses shimmers with an internal glow and I can just make out an image of some photos and a block of text.

  “Oh. Cool. Is that a computer screen?”

  “Yeah, they’re digi-lenses. Old tech, but they work. I didn’t want to bring my good stuff in case I lost them.”

  “Seems pretty fancy to me.”

  The young man considers me. His eyes are friendly and have a sharpness about them that hints at intelligence. “What time are you from?”

  “2009, I guess. That’s the most recent place I’d call home anyway.”

  “Ah, a local. You been back here in the twenty-first century for a while?”

  “Actually I’m from here. Well not here, here. Not 2016. I’m really from 2009.”

  “Oh shit. Really? What’s your name?” He leans forward in his chair.

  “Benjamin. Benjamin Travers.” We’re too far away from each other for a handshake so I stay seated.

  “I’m Milo.” He gives me a nod. “You don’t meet many people from the early years. Tourists of course, checking out the scene, or maybe in events like this when they set them in the past to add color, but I’ve never met a time traveler who was actually from here. Are you an analog? Wh
at do you use for hardware?”

  “Uh, I guess I am. I’ve got a chronometer.” I hold my wrist aloft.

  He lets out a low whistle. “Dang. You really are old school. So no grid contact at all? No traces?”

  “What’s a trace?”

  “Tracing is the tracking method. How you keep track of your timestream history so you don’t accidentally overlap yourself.”

  “Oh. Like a logbook?”

  “Yeah, logbooks are the original way. Some of the old timers still do that, and people that want to live off the Grid. Or people living in pre-Grid times.”

  “I’ve heard of the Grid. Somebody mentioned that to me one time.”

  “Just heard of it? It’s a pretty big deal. You must not have been very far forward yet.”

  “No, not yet. What’s the Grid for?”

  Milo taps a button on his glasses to turn off the display and slides them back onto his face. “Well, if you’re registered with the Grid, it keeps you from running into other time travelers or yourself by jumping to the same time and location simultaneously. It was a huge advancement in time travel technology from your day. The rate of involuntary fusions dropped by over seventy percent when it was implemented. Pretty much everybody after the 2160s is registered with it. They made it mandatory that any new travelers being infused with gravitites be automatically registered.”

  “So it can track everybody?”

  “Well, it can track all the registered people. There’s still a few out there who run analog, like you I guess. But like I said, that’s the old school way. Pretty much everybody’s had a trace done at some point. The results are private. They give you the only copy of your file, so no one else can use it to track you. That way you have the option to destroy it if you want to.”

  “What does it involve?”

  “They inject this probe into your skin temporarily, and it reads your timestream signature from the gravitites in your body.” He pauses to see if I’m getting it. “So you know how you have a baseline, right? That’s the place you’re originally from. You aim any old degravitizer at someone and take a reading and it will show you their home timestream frequency, because that’s where the molecules of you were originally made. All the parts of you that aren’t gravitites still resonate with your home frequency. But when you became a time traveler you had the gravitites infused into you. Those let you move to different timestreams, and this probe can read them. They can study the gravitites and tell which timestreams you’ve been to and when. It saves you having to write it all down. Most people just leave the probe in, that way they can check their trace history anytime they need to.”

  “But people can use that to track you?”

  “Yeah, potentially. So you don’t want to go giving your trace history to anyone who hates you or let them get access to your probe’s data. They could go to any point in your past and screw with your life. But like I said, that’s why they keep all the results confidential. There are privacy laws about that stuff. Some people don’t care. They like to show people their traces. Kind of like a passport full of visas. You can brag about all the timestreams you’ve visited.”

  “Who came up with all this tracing?”

  “A few companies do traces. Ambrose Cybergenics is the big one. They hold the original patent.”

  “I feel like I’ve heard that name before.”

  “Of course you have. They’re one of the sponsors of this race.”

  “Oh, right. So when are you from?” I lean forward, curious to have someone so knowledgeable to talk to.

  “I grew up in the 2140s. Like a lot of these academy kids.”

  “Did you go to the Academy?”

  “No. I mostly studied on my own. I took the exams with an ASCOTT facility and got infused there. Been mostly traveling with my own crowd since.”

  “How far have you been? In time, I mean?”

  Milo contemplates the horizon momentarily before turning back to me. “Pretty far, I guess. Forward anyway. Made it up to the edge of the twenty-fifth century. That was a long haul, though. My unit will only do seven and a half years at a pop usually. Maybe eight if I get it tuned just right. What’s yours do?”

  I look at my chronometer. “Mine only goes to five. Used to need external power even for that but I had a mod done recently. Now it can do about five unplugged.”

  Milo nods. “That’s pretty good for an analog device. Actually that’s good, period. Can I see it?”’ He begins to get up.

  “Um, I’d rather not. No offense.”

  “Oh, no problem.” He settles back in his chair. “I’ve just never seen one before.”

  “Yeah, It’s pretty cool.” I fiddle with the dials on my chronometer. “I’d show it to you, but I haven’t had the best experiences with people lately. Sorry.”

  “No worries. I get that. Plus with a race coming up, it’s probably not great to go showing the competition what you’re working with.”

  “So what about the past?” I try to change the topic. “How far have you been that way?”

  Milo stares off into the woods for real now. “Not far. That’s why I wanted to race a chronothon. It’s tough to go very far into the past without the time gate technology. Chronothons are special events so they waive a lot of rules, but usually they make you get permits to come back to timestreams like this one where time travel isn’t public knowledge yet. It was a long hike to get back here for this. Trying to find safe anchors to get back to anywhere pre-photography times gets super hard. And the lack of electrical power is a huge factor. Most people from my century barely make it back this far, let alone earlier. And then there are all the environmental factors to consider.”

  “Like what?”

  “Language barriers, transportation issues, getting lost, slavery, diseases. You name it. I’ve heard half the recon travelers for these chronothon gates never make it back.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Oh yeah. Time gates are ridiculously expensive to set up, so they have to be really selective of where they send their building crews. Getting a crew back a thousand years is a huge undertaking. ASCOTT lost tons of scientists and money that way, back when they were trying to keep the expeditions for scientific purposes only. I know they lost at least four expedition teams trying to find Jesus.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Who knows? Some say they never made it past the Dark Ages. A lot of experts suspect they got lost or killed by the Romans. A few figure that Jesus might have just been exactly who he said he was and raptured up the lot of them as soon as they arrived. It’s anybody’s guess really. ASCOTT ran out of money in any case, and had to team up with the entertainment industry to get better funding for time gates. Chronothons bring in a lot more sponsorship dollars than purely scientific excursions, apparently.”

  “Sounds about right. People in my time love stuff like this. That’s how we lost MTV to reality TV shows.”

  Milo nods knowingly and smiles. “I guess some things never change.” He glances at the bracelet on his wrist. “Hey, I gotta get going so I can get ready. Good talking to you.” He pushes himself out of his rocking chair.

  “Yeah. Good talking to you.”

  “See you at the starting line. Hopefully we can chat more later.”

  “Sounds great.”

  He gives me a quick salute and heads the other way around the building.

  I watch him disappear around the corner, then go back to contemplating the woods and wondering what it might feel like to get involuntarily raptured.

  “Of all the messy ends available to time travelers, fusing oneself into another object is perhaps the most gruesome. We are a fragile species when it comes down to it. Our bodies don’t appreciate being combined with the furniture.”–Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1880

  Chapter 10

  “Are you Benjamin Travers?”

  I twist in my chair to see who’s speaking. The olive-skinned young man is standing at a distance, considering me. His
right hand rests on a pistol at his hip. His eyes flit from me to my bag and back. I stand up to greet him.

  “Are you Viznir?” I walk the couple of paces to him and extend my hand. He removes his hand from his gun and shakes mine lightly, still sizing me up.

  “I understand you lost your guide under unusual circumstances.” His dark eyes are reading my face attentively.

  “Yes. He was murdered this morning.” I put my hands back in my pockets, wondering how much he has heard, and hoping he won’t ask me to relive it. Chatting with Milo has been a good distraction, and I’m not eager to let my mind go back to that bloody scene.

  “I see. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it. So I guess we don’t have much time before this thing gets going. What’s the next step?”

  “I think we should discuss our general strategy and make sure we understand each other.”

  “Okay, that sounds good. So far my strategy has just been to get through it, but I’m open to raising the bar a little.”

  Viznir nods. “I’ve been hoping to be involved in a chronothon for many years. I’ve studied many strategies, so I believe I can help us achieve more. You should collect your things. We’ll make our way to the starting line.”

  I pick up my pack and follow him along the porch to the front of the building. Viznir is dressed in cargo pants that look like they could be military issue. Besides the pistol, he has a flashlight and a hard black leather pouch attached to his belt. At the front of the building he picks up a pack of his own and hefts it onto his back. He’s shorter than me but seems fit and strong for his size. He leads the way up the road away from the registration building.

  “You have friends here? Anybody come to see you off?” I ask.

  Viznir hitches his pack higher on his back and keeps his eyes ahead. “I’m paid to be here per our contract, so I plan to be as professional as possible. I didn’t feel it was something I should invite friends to.”

  “Oh. Gotcha. Well it wouldn’t have bothered me. If you wanted to you could.”