Once free of her bonds, she desperately clawed her way out of the river onto the shore. Wild with fear, she instantly ran away from the river, fortuitously heading in the direction of the carriage.
Then the world shattered.
At least, for an instant, that is what I truly believed. Still waist-deep in the water, I found myself momentarily blinded and deafened while I struggled to maintain my footing. My vision cleared before the ringing in my ears abated, revealing the reason I had been dazed. A tree located less than five meters away had been struck by lightning. The trunk, split down the middle, burned, even in the heavy downpour.
Surprisingly, neither Holmes nor Moriarty appeared to have been affected by the lightning strike at all. They were still locked in their seemingly endless struggle. Miss Highland was not as lucky. The burning tree was barely a meter from her and she had been knocked to the ground. From all appearances she was still conscious, but had fully succumbed to panic, curled in a ball, unwilling or unable to move.
To my horror, the base of the tree cracked again, beginning a slow fall of the tree itself towards the cowering young lady. Still standing in the river, I was certain that I was too far away to possibly reach her in time. Holmes, however, was not.
Acceptance flashed across his face as he deliberately released Moriarty and dashed towards the paralyzed Miss Highland. The tree sprayed mud on both Holmes and Miss Highland when it crashed to the ground, but missed them both due to Holmes’s quick thinking.
The brave rescue, however, was not the focus of my attention. My eyes were firmly fixed upon the pistol Moriarty held. With growing horror, my field of vision dimmed until the only thing I could see was his hand and the pistol.
His hand and the pistol and a small cloud of smoke drifting out of the barrel.
In that instant, a similar acceptance washed over me. I knew for certain how this story was going to end, and the part I was going to play in it.
Holmes also had one last part to play in this story. Between my time in the military and my years as a doctor, I instantly knew that the bullet had struck a lung. It was a mortal wound that would kill him in seconds. Holmes, I suspect, knew it as well. Gathering what remained of his strength, Holmes lunged at Moriarty, carrying him into the river, and then seconds later over the falls.
I already knew the fate of Holmes and cared not about the fate of Moriarty. His role in this story was complete. My role was not.
The return trip to London seemed to take but a moment. I suspected that the artist simply didn’t bother to illustrate it. The result of this strange time dilation was that Miss Highland was returned to her family that very day, and I soon found myself sitting at my desk in my study. Taking quill in hand, I started a new entry in my journal.
May 14th, 1891
Today marks my final journal entry about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The great detective, nay, the great man, lost his life today in an act of true heroism. While I would love to tarry on the details of his act of bravery, that would not truly pay tribute to his life.
Instead, I will do as he bade me in his final days and reveal the details of a crime committed by the one criminal he never successfully brought to justice. The facts I will present here shortly were revealed to me by Holmes to ensure that, should he be unable to divulge them, they would not be lost from the world. It is my intention, upon completing this journal entry, to share its content with the detectives at Scotland Yard, in hopes that justice is brought upon the foul miscreant for the base acts in which he has engaged. I can think of no greater tribute to the remarkable mind that has passed from this world.
As Holmes explained to me, the following was information that he deduced based on his observations of the primary malefactor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and conversations that Holmes was privy to between Doyle and his equally unethical lifelong artist friend, Alexander Reynolds, a man willing to keep his secret in order to profit from Doyle’s fame.
Doyle was a man of little note until he was deployed to fight in a conflict named the Falklands War. Why such a man, completely unqualified to represent the honor of the British Empire, was ever allowed onto the field of battle was beyond even the formidable deductive skills of Holmes to comprehend.
Whatever the reason, Doyle unsurprisingly bore himself without an ounce of dignity upon being deployed. His lasting legacy would have undoubtedly been of nothing more than acts of cowardice had his squad not been ambushed one morning. The ambush was quite effective, reducing the squad to two individuals after a brief firefight: Private Doyle and Sergeant Norman West.
Sergeant West was an exceptional soldier, the pride of the British Empire. Despite having received a critical wound during the initial ambush, he continued to fight the Argentinian soldiers. Through skill, and I must assume some incredible luck, he succeeded in killing the remaining five enemy combatants, without any assistance from the cowardly Doyle. Sadly, Sergeant West died for Queen and country that day, succumbing to the injury sustained during the ambush.
This tale of heroism has never been made public. Upon returning to his company, Doyle claimed that he was responsible for killing the entire ambushing force. An investigation by the military confirmed the details of his story, resulting in military commendations and eventually being knighted for his deed.
To whomever is reading this journal, let it be known that this act of stolen glory remained a secret to all but Doyle, his greedy compatriot Reynolds, Holmes, and I, until this day. Please see this information is used to bring honor to the deceased Sergeant West and to bring justice to Arthur Doyle for his crimes against the British Empire.
Thus ends the Adventure of the Double-Sized Final Issue.
A Very Important Nobody:
A Theramin Joule Mystery
BY
Chuck Regan
The magazine itself was unremarkable. The five-hundred-year-old copy of Astounding Stories was an original print, and not a molecular replica. It was brittle, but still legible despite the high lignin content of the cheap wood pulp pages. Some organization had gone to great lengths to preserve it. What Theramin Joule found remarkable was that the chronometric scans had confirmed his name and address had been written on the cover in 1936. Someone from that era had known that his address would be at 221-B, Indigo level, on the artificial satellite Jove’s Halo in geosynchronous orbit over the north pole of Jupiter.
The first and only other time Theramin had felt this degree of existential angst was when he was eight years old and had discovered his parents dead. It had not been the fact that his parents were dead that had disturbed him, it was how he had felt about their deaths. More specifically, it was how he felt about how he felt about their deaths that had disturbed him.
They had spent most of their adult lives threaded deep into the virtual worlds of the digital network known as the Mesh. To his parents, Theramin and his brother, Danube, had been just two more apps—feed them the proper data and energy, and they would behave as expected.
Danube and Theramin had fallen into line, behaving like boys were expected to behave, absorbing their lessons in icon identification, learning the history of popular memes through history, and investing into the appropriately kid-friendly brands, but after young Theramin discovered his parents dead—their bodies bloated, floating in cheap immersion pods, infected by sub-standard intravenous nutrients—he realized that not all that much would change for him, except the short-term inconvenience of having to arrange for their bodies’ disposals.
It was not an expected reaction for a boy his age, and he understood this at the time. It merely affirmed what he had been fighting within himself up to that moment—there was a reason why he was annoyed by the vapid entertainment available to him, and there was a reason why he did not want to waste his time interacting with other children—he realized that day that knowledge was more important to him than people.
The death of his parents had clarified that for him. From that moment on, he shunned the pointless distractio
ns of entertainment and used technology as a tool to give him as much access as was available to him, while his brother had invested himself into becoming as much an important part of the system as he could manage.
Now, a vibrant forty-five years old, Theramin Joule felt that existential disruption once again, but this time it was refreshing, and nostalgic, and infuriating, and invigorating. He had become bored by what the System had to offer him. There was nothing new to interest him. This world had nothing else to teach him.
Joule began to question the firm rule he had set for himself at eight years old: that he would never have his mind digitized. The taboo of transhumanism created a palpable tang in the back of his throat, nagging him like a gravity field, and just as he was contemplating the next stage in his life, expanding into a new universe of evolved digital minds that were not constrained by synaptic conductivity, nor time itself—this magazine arrived.
The core timeline could not be corrupted. It was a law of physics.
The very existence of this magazine confirmed as truth the ridiculed conspiracy theory that his reality existed within a corrupted timeline—a splinter universe created by some hidden cabal of transhumans, and at this moment, rereading the results of the chronometric scan of the ink on the magazine, he realized he had been ignoring that trampled path of cross-logic and pseudoscientific nonsense. The conspiracy theories were right.
Laying on the scanning bay was an antique publication which defied the laws of time travel. Nothing from the future can affect the past. The existence of this magazine all but proved that his reality was a lie.
• • •
After the Absolute Grand Unified Theory had been worked out by incorporating consciousness into the equation, the patterns of matter, energy, time, and conscious thought had fueled a revolution in science, philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, and time travel. The System had responded they way they always did with a new technology—they turned it into entertainment.
Timejack Temporal Vacations made it possible to “rent” a splinter universe and manufacture an alternate history. A timejacker’s consciousness was projected into a native host body of that splinter universe, and would puppet that native, sensing what that body could sense, driving its movements, and speaking through its mouth.
It was discovered that it was very difficult to radically alter any timeline unless entire armies of timejackers acted in unison toward generating a specific goal. The temporal patterns tended to reorganize themselves to smudge out any single act—even the assassination of a key individual had little effect long-term. It took a lot of conscious effort to divert the path of a temporal river using technologies of that timeline, but it was all reduced to the hundredth monkey principle.
Once a tipping-point percentage of the population performed an action, spontaneously, all the people of that population spontaneously performed, or attempted to perform, that act, given similar circumstances. Temporal Translocation was the culprit. When enough conscious energy is focused on one thought at one point in time, it acts like a bell ringing on the quantum level, which every mind could hear. If enough minds believed the Moon was a space dragon’s egg, it became a global myth for that splinter timeline.
Once the philosophers and social scientists began to use Temporal Translocation in their formulas to alter splinter timelines, the System reacted as it always had—by exploiting any verdant new territory with capitalistic vigor.
World-changing wars of the past were repackaged as fully-immersive first-person shooters. Intimate trysts with important historical figures and celebrities became a standard package. Fortunes were made creating designer timelines. A popular timejack meme involved teaching advanced technologies to ancient peoples and watching how the anachronisms pulled their civilizations apart—Romans with ray guns, Mongolia as world super power, Victorian-era Moon bases. There were countless variations of World Wars I and II, many involving nanite-enhanced zombies.
Ethical discourse of these practices was quickly ignored for the sake of commerce. Comforted by the incorruptible laws of physics, the System flourished, and the corporations raked in the profits. The timejackers were guaranteed that no matter their actions, the core timeline could not be affected.
Yet, there the magazine lay, written by a hand that had foreknowledge of a person and place that would not exist to them for five hundred years.
“Anne?” Joule said to his synthetic assistant. “Call Dr. Andwhinge.”
• • •
Joule tabbed through the data on his tablet as the rest of the passengers in steerage slept or made quiet chatter over the hum of the engines. It was hour fifteen on a thirty-six-hour trip to his first stop on the asteroid Ida, then a quick five-hour skip to the Timejack center. Joule used the uninterrupted time to pore over one other unsolved cases of a possible temporal corruption.
A month ago, Chlör Byzantine, a third-rate Mesh celebrity, had timejacked to 1955 to pick a fight with the writer Ayn Rand. His fight with her was meant to become an obscure meme, reinforcing Byzantine’s esoteric sense of humor, but when Rand admitted that she had been forewarned of the impending attack twenty years earlier, and had since been training in esoteric martial arts, it opened up the floodgates to conspiracy theories. If it were true that someone had warned her, that meant Joule’s own core timeline had been corrupted. Joule had watched an un-edited copy of Byzantine’s timejack session and had dismissed the event as an elaborately staged hoax.
Hundreds of thousands of other researchers had timejacked into Ayn Rand’s past to trace where the possible corruption had occurred. Either there had been no temporal corruption to be found, or some greater power was conspiring to hide the information. This, of course, was the fallback of all conspiracy theorists—the absence of evidence only confirms it has been covered up. Joule had assembled all the results of their research but had never invested much credence in the subject, having already dismissed this supposed Rand Paradox as merely a desperate publicity stunt confabulated by a declining Mesh celebrity. This “mystery” hadn’t been worth any more of his time.
The year in which Ayn Rand had been warned was the same year as the publication of the magazine—1936.
The giggling of an infant broke the silence. A man played peekaboo across the aisle from the child in its mother’s arms. Smiles ricocheted around the cabin. Although Joule could have afforded to rent a sleeping pod, or travel in the luxury of an Indigo-level suite, the Green section of a trans-system shuttle was much cheaper, and the white noise drone of the engines helped him focus.
As he breathed the same air as the migrant workers, he wondered how little had changed for them since the times of serfdom in the ancient past. Skilled only in the kind of tasks robots were deemed too expensive to maintain to perform, these people barely earned enough for food. Greens rarely lived past the age of fifty.
Trace radiation in the water they drank and the dust in which they bathed poisoned them slowly enough so that blame could not be directly traced. Their faces were gray and crusty from the dust, and suffering weighed heavily in their eyes. And yet, these were the last true humans left in the System—no enhancements, no nanophores, no synthetic organs. Joule felt safe among them.
In his expensive suit, fiddling with his tablet, it was clear to them that he did not belong there, but when the mother of the infant made eye contact with him, she smiled. He attempted to return the gesture, but his sharp, self-conscious smile always seemed disingenuous. Before he could witness her reaction, he returned to his tablet.
His scans of the Astounding Stories magazine cover showed that it had been impregnated with several sets of fingerprints, but one thumb print in particular had been pressed very purposefully into the lower right corner, as if its owner had wanted to make their presence known. Over the ages, the oils in the thumbprint had darkened and blurred, but Joule was able to trace its swirl patterns through historical files to an orderly at a New York City mental hospital in 1936.
Once Joule c
ould timejack into the orderly’s body, he would be able to sift through that mind and extract how he could know Joule’s address five hundred years in his future.
“Anne, open my account.”
An emitter on his tablet projected the data onto his retina. His sponsors had deposited their credits into his account. What these sponsors all paid him to investigate was what had actually happened to Godzillah Glitch, the musician. For his own edification, Joule had already solved the case days ago, but had not bothered to reveal his findings. Godzillah’s body had burned up when a microtear in his freefall suit turned him into a fireball in the thin atmosphere of Mars, but what Godzillah had kept secret from the public was that his mind had been digitized and transmitted out of the body long before his body’s conflagration. Joule had followed the sale of a planetessimal’s weight in osmium to a facility in the Hildas asteroid grange, where Godzillah’s consciousness had been transferred.
Oddly enough, Godzillah had harbored a strong interest in the Rand Paradox. He believed that his existence was synthetic, but he came to these conclusions through altered states of consciousness via self-inflicted torment, all for the sake of his “art.”
The trail of the osmium sale had been sloppy, and although Joule cared nothing about his style of “music,” nor the subculture of self-abuse that his “Shatter” scene inspired, his fans deserved closure, and he welcomed the money they would otherwise have spent on useless medical enhancements and absurd body modifications. Once he returned from Timejack, he would transmit his findings. The message had already been composed to his synthetic assistant.
The money was all there in his account. He transmitted the agreed-upon amount to Dr. Andwhinge, the only person in the System Joule trusted to monitor his Timejack excursions, and sent the details of the host body, its location, and the date in 1936.
Dr. Andwhinge confirmed receipt and transmitted, “I know well enough not to ask, but what does this have to do with Godzillah Glitch?”
Baker Street Irregulars Page 23
