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

by Nathan Van Coops

  “I’ll run the symbol through my graffiti translation app,” Tucket says. He captures an image of the flaming circle and takes on a hazy stare as he runs through data. The far off look in his eye is familiar to me now as the way people access the meta-space in his time.

  “Can you link up to the modern internet somehow using your perceptor?” I gesture vaguely toward Tucket’s forehead, where I know the chip type device is imbedded under his skin.

  “Oh, for sure. Not nearly as much on it in your time, but that makes it easier to filter. I’ve also got a catalogue of future data downloaded. I can still get to lots of it offline. I’m getting some kind of metaspace link up here though.” He turns toward Mym. “Does your dad have a time relay in this lab? It’s letting me access future data. This is super groovy.”

  I look around the room, not seeing any of the future tech Tucket is referencing. I don’t doubt it’s there, though. If there is anything I know about Doctor Quickly, it’s that he’s clever at hiding things. “So the internet hasn’t just become one big montage of cat videos yet?” I ask. “I’ve always felt that’s where it’s headed.”

  As Mym puts away the first-aid kit she’s shaking her head. “Dad has a tachyon pulse transmitter here. Which reminds me, I should shoot a message to Abraham to let him know we’re okay.” She begins typing away on her MFD. I slide my T-shirt back on and wait, not having any fancy connections to other times to play with.

  “Oh hey, I found it!” Tucket exclaims. “But it’s not from the past. This symbol won’t show up in the ASCOTT’s time travel reference library till the late twenty-one hundreds. It’s from a religious text. The Zora Gnoma.”

  “What religion is that?” I step closer, though I have no way of seeing what he’s looking at.

  “It’s not very well known. It’s an addendum to The Chronicles of Gnomon. It says the book is authored by the “High Priest of the Eternals.”

  “The Eternals? Oh shit.”

  Mym’s brow furrows. “You know them?”

  “Yeah. Well, heard of them anyway. You know Jonah, the kid I raced in the chronothon with? He mentioned the name. Kind of made them out to be boogiemen. Had to do with subverting their own younger minds in order to—ah, that makes more sense now.”

  “What does?” Mym is studying me.

  I smack my palm off my forehead. “The kid I caught up to in the alley who I thought was having the seizure, he wasn’t possessed. He could have been one of them.”

  “The Eternals are kids?” Tucket asks.

  “No. Well, I guess sometimes. But the Eternals are old. From what I heard, when they are close to dying, they transfer their consciousness back into their own younger bodies. It’s a way to live longer. Cheat their way out of death.”

  “What would they want with my dad?” Mym asks.

  “No idea.”

  “Huh, that’s strange,” Tucket says. “Did you say that the person who told you about The Eternals was named Jonah? Is his last name Sprocket?”

  “Yeah, it is,” I say, turning to Tucket. “Why?”

  “I have an alumni services message alert from the Academy Liaison Program in my inbox. It says I received a social invitation from a Jonah Sprocket. I couldn’t figure out who it was from. I tried opening it, but it said I have to go sign for it in person at the Academy offices.”

  “When did it show up?” I ask.

  “Um, It says it was bundled with the data I got for my ASCOTT presentation, but I didn’t get the notice till just now when I logged in to retrieve my messages. Won’t open though. It’s time stamped to 2150, so it might not let me read it until we’re in that year. Sometimes Academy correspondence has limitations like that.”

  There is banging from the floor below and the sound of boots thudding in the stairwell. The fire department has finally arrived.

  “Do you think Jonah knows something about our investigation?” Mym asks. “Have you talked to him about it?”

  “No. Haven’t seen him since the after-party we had for the race. And I don’t know how he would know we were with Tucket. If Tucket had the message when he showed up at my place, that was before your Dad’s lab was even attacked. Seems unlikely to be a coincidence though. I suppose we ought to check it out.”

  It’s a long ride to the Academy of Temporal Sciences. The main campus is in London around 2150, but fortunately the letter Tucket is supposed to sign for is located at a satellite campus in Barcelona during the same decade. That will be the first place Tucket can access time sensitive student data.

  With Doctor Quickly’s Valencia lab destroyed, finding enough anchors to get us forward in time that far presents a small challenge. It turns out time traveling by motorcycle is not quite as glamorous as I had hoped. We make use of whatever historical data Tucket can find to make safe jumps with the motorcycle, but it involves a lot of research. Besides needing access to traffic cams in the years we’re headed to, to be sure the area is clear, we also have to cross-reference road paving schedules to make sure the pavement hasn’t been resurfaced in the time we want to skip over. Whenever in doubt, we locate safer options like power poles or bridges. None of us want to end up infused with a road grader on arrival. All problems Doc Brown and Marty McFly never seemed to deal with in their Delorean.

  We spend a lot of time parked under overpasses waiting for Tucket to check safety issues via the maps he has downloaded in his Third Eye. The rest of the time we just ride.

  The hops we manage forward in time are like little windows into the decades of the future we’re passing and I marvel at the subtle changes we see, even on the freeways. We pass the latest of a series of low bridges over seemingly nothing and I point one out to Tucket. “What’s that for?”

  “Greenways!” Tucket shouts over the wind.

  Mym squeezes me a little closer as she leans forward to speak into my ear. “It’s for animals. All roads have to have wildlife passages above or below them. They ruled that long roads with no way across them were a form of animal cruelty.”

  “Huh. That seems like an easy fix.” I wait for the next mini bridge. Sure enough, as I peer over the guardrail, I spot a rabbit nibbling a bush in the green space below. As we cruise onward I note the corresponding lack of road kill with a sense of appreciation.

  The most significant change to the freeways comes with the advent of driverless cars. At first it’s only special expressways where driverless vehicles navigate their own lanes. Then, within a few years, it’s nearly all the vehicles. The speeds pick up drastically and before long I’m forced to abandon even the slow lane, as my motorcycle can’t keep up with the minimum speed limit. It’s just as well because a few years later we find that manually driven vehicles are made illegal on major highways. As we wander the back roads, we start to get more and more stares from pedestrians—at least the ones who aren’t glued to their technological devices.

  The advent of the metaspace in the 2080s drastically reduces traffic as people spend more time immersed behind digital glasses and do less traveling to real spaces. According to Tucket, it doesn’t take long for people to tire of the reduced visibility issues that come with digital lenses and, within a decade, the majority of users are testing out implanted devices.

  The nice change that comes with the metaspace is that it clears up the landscape. Road signs and stoplights begin to vanish. Advertisers no longer clutter the sides of roads and buildings with signage and billboards. The advertising all goes digital, only visible in the eyes of users. The vacancy leaves a blank canvas for freestyle artists, and intricate painted murals spring up briefly on walls and old billboards, only to go largely ignored by passersby.

  We reach Barcelona still a few decades ahead of our destination time so we visit the Sagrada Familia. Gaudi’s masterpiece is finally complete and bustling with tourists, one real world location that is still managing to pull people out of the digital ether with its history and intricacy. Affixing Tucket’s Temprovibe to the motorcycle, I program it to jump ahead of us to
our arrival time while we take a pedestrian detour. Mym nods in appreciation as the bike vanishes.

  “We just get there ahead of time and make sure the space stays clear?” she asks.

  “Yep.” I grin. “It will save us years worth of parking tickets.”

  Mym guides Tucket and me to out of the way spaces in the medieval church, and points out elements of the architecture. I marvel at the ceiling of yellow starbursts lit from natural light among the forest of columns. Tucket has his hands in his pockets and his head leaned back when he speaks softly. “And they shall bring out the bones of kings and princes, priests and prophets, and spread them before the sun and the moon, and all the host of Heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and whom they have worshipped.”

  “What’s that from?” I ask.

  “Old bit of scripture verse I learned in history class. I always thought it was interesting that almost every religion had to compete with star worshipers in the beginning. But we still love them, don’t we?”

  “Yeah. Hard to compete with a beautiful sky.”

  I have to stop my open gawking at the breathtaking vertical spaces long enough for us to make jumps the last bit of the way to the 2150s.

  When we walk out the church doors and into the middle of the twenty-second century, we find that the space into which my motorcycle is due to arrive is now occupied by a portable ice cream vendor. The woman amazingly resists our encouragement to move for her own safety, and our assurances that she and her stand are about to be fused together with a few hundred pounds of twentieth-century road bike. It finally takes good old-fashioned bribery to get her to maneuver her cart to safety. The bike shows up as promised, but the woman merely shrugs and goes back to barking at the children passing by and waving popsicles about.

  It’s unseasonably warm out. Despite global efforts to reduce man-made climate change, it seems the earth has trended hotter anyway. I motor through the city with the sun on my bare arms. Tucket removes his jumpsuit and reveals more modest clothes underneath, tan pants and a simple white T-shirt. He looks subdued in his natural environment.

  The campus of the Academy of Temporal Sciences is a series of spires near the heart of the city surrounding a lush park. Despite the central location, pedestrian traffic is light. Tucket explains that citizens primarily telecommute to school and work via the metaspace and emerge outdoors in the evening in traditional Spanish fashion, making the early afternoon a quiet and relaxing scene. My experience with the metaspace was very limited during my chronothon adventure, but I understand enough to know that there is plenty going on that I can’t see, as digital avatars of students and citizens roam the streets and park spaces.

  Tucket remedies my blindness by purchasing a pair of digital lenses for me from a nondescript campus store. The generic glasses come with a pair of cheap-looking earpieces and some thin, rubbery gloves. It turns out Mym has her own far more stylish pair of glasses, and puts them on, then uploads something onto my lenses briefly before handing them to me. “I’ve given you a pre-made identity, saves us some time getting you set up,” she explains.

  When I slip the lenses over my face, the campus transforms. The formerly plain-looking stores and vendors are now bursting with advertising—interactive messages that move and change as I do, doing their best to get my attention. Some of it is blurry at first, but the longer I look at things the more the world comes into focus. I slip the earpieces in and get the full audio onslaught as well. The campus itself is bustling with students of all sizes and colors.

  Digital avatars can apparently stray wildly from the human form, because many of the pedestrians around me are animals like lions and wolves, cartoons, or otherworldly alien creatures. A polar bear is ordering a drink at the coffee shop next to the bookstore. I lift my glasses from my face and find that the owner of the polar bear avatar is actually a girl of no more than nineteen, with straight black hair and Pokemon pajama pants.

  I lower my glasses back onto my face and turn to comment on the polar bear to Mym, only to find a completely different girl staring back at me. Mym has transformed into a pleasantly plump brunette with a ponytail. There is a glowing label floating above her head that says “Julia.”

  “What the—” I turn and find Tucket has changed too. His meta-persona is taller and muscular. His avatar’s face still resembles his real life appearance, but has more sharply chiseled features and the hair of an eighties rocker. Like the real-life Tucket who showed up at my front door, this avatar is outfitted in clothing from a mishmash of eras. I’m visually assaulted by his tribute to my century in the form of distressed jeans, tie-dye, and flannel. Digital images not being subject to the whims of weather, his avatar seems unbothered by the heat despite layering on a studded leather jacket and infinity scarf.

  I look down and find my own clothing is different as well. In the metaspace, I’m wearing lightweight khaki pants and a blue polo. The boat shoes on my feet only accent the yuppie vibe. “What did you do to me?”

  Mym/Julia smiles. “Camouflage. I never use any real data in the metaspace. I prefer to keep my identity offline completely, but when I have to interact in this era I use alternates. I just uploaded a generic, cloned ID for you. We’ll stay off the radar that way. Your name is Reggie.”

  “Reggie?”

  “The person I copied this avatar from was actually ‘Regulus,’ because people are really into Roman sounding names again this century, but I tagged you as Reggie. I’m not calling you Regulus.”

  I look up and notice the digital flag hovering over my head that says “Reggie.” It also lists that I’m a recreational sailor, a Pisces, and my current mood is “Fresh.”

  “Thanks. . . Julia.” I read Julia’s public info. She’s apparently a biology major and loves cats.

  “It will be a little glitchy at first,” Mym says. “The perceptor in the glasses is new to you so it’s going to take a little while to read your brain activity. Once it does it will start triggering sounds and smells and things directly into your mind. The operating system is going to see how you respond to different inputs. It wants to learn your brain’s responses so it can transmit the right data.”

  “Uh, okay. That sounds kind of weird. This is all safe, right?”

  “As long as you remember it’s not real,” Tucket replies. He’s smiling. “You ready to see the school?”

  “Can’t wait,” I deadpan. Tucket grins and leads the way down the sidewalk toward the nearest building.

  Two women run by in form-fitting jogging outfits that leave very little to the imagination. Mym notices my attention drifting and smacks me on the butt. “Careful what you wish for around here.” I lift the glasses to take in the real-world view of the women and find the reality of the situation to be an overweight, middle-aged man running by himself. When I look back to Mym, she’s smirking.

  I resume my view through the meta-lenses and grab her hand. “I like my reality.”

  Mym/Julia smiles.

  I look with curiosity at the other pedestrians. “So how does it work? Two people running but it’s really only one guy?”

  “The other person is commuting to the space from somewhere else. Running programs here can digitally enhance any landscape, add people, scenery, whatever you want. The other person might be running a similar course in another city or country, or could just be jogging on a treadmill at home.”

  “If they are both running on different terrain, what happens when one person needs to make a turn or go up stairs or something and the other one doesn’t?”

  “The program factors that in. It shows the terrain to the person who needs it. The other runners just see their own program, but you can talk and interact as if you were in the same space. The person with the stairs for example, would see their friend climbing the stairs along with them even though they aren’t.”

  “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Comes in handy. Makes people feel closer than they are, especially families that live apart.”
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  “Probably does wonders for long-distance relationships.”

  “Definitely,” Mym replies. “It’s fairly common in this century for people to get married without even having met each other in the real world.”

  “Ugh. I don’t know how I’d like that. I mean, I guess it’s nice to have space sometimes . . .”

  Mym grabs my arm and squeezes herself up against me. “What’s that? You need more space? How come?”

  I laugh. “I misspoke. I don’t need any space.”

  Mym grins. “Didn’t think so.” She relaxes her grip on my arm but keeps her fingers intertwined in mine. The smile lingers on her lips.

  “Now Reggie on the other hand . . .” I quip.

  Mym shakes her head. “Yeah, I hear that Julia girl can be a total clinger.”

  Tucket leads the way into the administration building. On the door I spot a digital notice. “Keep traced. Keep safe. Please report any suspicious time travel activity to the Department of Irregular Displacement.”

  The dual reality of the world here is in full effect. What we see indoors looks like no office building I’ve ever seen. For one, the space is massively larger on the inside. The foyer is a balcony overlooking a sort of bio-dome of plant life and a beautiful ocean view beyond. As Tucket speaks to someone at the concierge desk, I step to the railing and rest my hand on it cautiously. I lift the glasses from my nose to find a real railing circling the perimeter of the room a yard or so from plain white walls. In reality, the room is not large at all, just big enough to host a dozen people and the young man at the concierge desk.

  The desk is just a podium with a stool, the kid behind it probably a college freshman. He’s wearing shorts and flip-flops and a wrinkled tank top. When I drop the lenses back onto my face, the young man is professionally dressed in a jacket and tie with an Academy name badge pinned to his lapel.