Joule responded, “Meet me at the dock, and I’ll tell you.”
To which Andwhinge replied, “Of course you will. See you then.”
Dr. Wheedle Andwhinge had been Joule’s trusted ally for over fifteen years, and in that time, Joule had rigorously tested the man’s reliability and earnestness. Consistently, Andwhinge had remained forthright and honest, never violating any words spoken in confidence to either his Timejack superiors or to Joule’s meddling brother, Danube, who often threatened to have Joule’s temporal excursions audited. Andwhinge had stood his ground each time. He was a good man.
Joule was not surprised when he felt a gentle warmth arise in his chest. Despite Andwinge’s augmented brain, he was still very human at his core. Andwhinge demonstrated no interest in those artificial experiences of “Viro,” nor any of the other childish distractions in which lesser transhumans indulged. Joule felt the prerogative of any enhanced mind should be to help evolve and sustain one’s own species. In his eyes, transhumans were obligated to raise up those who were less fortunate than they, not seek to escape deep into the chimerical, self-indulgent illusions of empty neurostimulation like his parents had.
It was all a macrocosmic parody of Joule’s parental issues playing out across the System. These 2.0 people were as useless as his mother and father had been. Joule empathized with the Human Purity Movement, and their struggle to empower all 1.0 humans like these migrant workers, the Greens. Had Joule not have been able to insulate himself in wealth and prestige, he would be just another human struggling for resources, just like these families surrounding him in the shuttle.
Although Joule recognized the Human Purity Movement’s struggles for equality as legitimate, he despised their use of brutal mind-hacks on transhumans—those acts were inhuman, and their leader, Antioch Krell, was the worst of all the Purists. He was an ideologue whose rhetoric had radicalized a quarter of the 1.0 humans to act on fear, bigotry, and violence. Terrorist actions against transhumans had increased a thousandfold within the last few months. Joule wondered what they would do once he revealed the truth that they all lived in a splinter reality. For now, Krell and his Purists were helping Joule’s career, providing a contrast, making Joule the perfect role model for what they called true humans.
The main door to the passenger area opened, startling everyone. Three men in blue coveralls swaggered onto the floor as if they owned the shuttle. Three different company logos were stenciled on their backs and sleeves. Odd. Blues were very tribal about staying within their corporate brands. They rarely commingled.
The look in their eyes revealed everything. These men were not there to intimidate the Greens. Joule had witnessed too many times the belligerent bigotry of Blues against Greens. It was a primitive rite on display whenever those of slightly more privilege kicked those beneath them. Blues received the same treatment from the Indigo-level managers, and all were under the heel of the Gold-level overseers of Seyopont, like Danube and the other Oligarchs of the System. These men had a glassy sheen to their eyes. They were under the influence of the mild hallucinogenic twilight gas supplied to the Blue section of the shuttle. They should be happily numbed and half-asleep, not marching into Green sections.
These men were being puppeted.
The men spotted Joule and weaved through the Greens toward him. Joule casually placed his tablet in the storage area under his seat and stood.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?”
The closest of them took a swing. Joule stepped into it before it reached the apex of its power. He deflected with his forearm, then kneed his attacker square in the solar plexus. Joule knew the cheap gray-plating in the Green section was shallow, only simulating gravity for the first quarter-meter closest to the floor. Joule’s strike lifted the man out of this zone, and the attacker flew into one of his companions, knocking him backward. The third ducked and lunged in. Joule leapt off the floor, flipped, and kicked off the ceiling, dropping an elbow to the nerve bundle behind the third man’s neck, knocking him out instantly.
The other two Blue thugs recovered and scurried between the cowering Greens. Joule watched the way they moved, and gauged what fighting apps might’ve been forced into their puppeted limbs. The two Blues were making use of the grav-plate effects, skating the soles of their shoes close to the floor. It would be easy for someone to trip them, but Joule could not expect a Green to risk a black mark on their record for attacking a member of a higher order. The Greens tucked their legs close to their seats and looked away.
Joule wedged himself into the corner of his seating area to force one attack at a time. He feigned a kick to the chest and, as the man shot out his hands to block, Joule’s foot arced up to connect with the man’s chin. His head snapped back and he drifted backward. The last attacker had crouched out of the way and crept forward. It was the stance of an assassin trained specifically for grav-plate combat. He kept his center of gravity low, but his thighs trembled—the body was not accustomed to the demands of the combat app. Whoever was behind the eyes of the Blue worker had not chosen his host wisely. Most Blues have enough enhancement to receive training apps to perform their specialized tasks, but it was clear that this worker had spent most of his life in Mars-standard one-third gravity. The fibers in his leg muscles were not dense enough to maintain the stance. All Joule had to do was show that he was ready to match his fighting style and keep the combat app on the defensive, trying to formulate a way through Joule’s calculatedly confusing microgestures and feigns. The Blue’s thigh muscles would eventually build up too much lactic acid, and he would collapse. The only variable Joule could not be sure of was how long it would take.
Not long.
Desperate, the man dove for Joule’s midsection, and Joule drove his knee into the man’s larynx. As he coughed and gasped for air, Joule pinched the base of the man’s neck with one hand, and grabbed his tablet out of the compartment with the other.
Within three seconds, he locked onto the signal puppeting the Blue worker, but Joule could only trace it as far as the shuttle’s relay before the signal was killed.
• • •
“Anything wrong?” Dr. Andwhinge said when he greeted Joule at the dock.
“No,” said Joule, smiling and shaking his old friend’s hand, defying the hygiene protocols. “This case has gotten interesting.”
Joule watched the departing Blue workers and saw one of his attackers, now fully recovered, and fully himself. He appeared confused, as if he were not sure why he had been hurt while he should have been safely dreaming in his Blue sleeping pod. The man noticed Joule and a sharp sting of concern crossed his face.
“Someone you know?” said Andwhinge.
“I just bumped into him during the flight. Let’s get to work.”
• • •
“I still don’t understand. What do you expect to find in 1936 about a dead musician?” Andwinge’s comment fed into Joule’s sensorium. A simplified avatar of Andwhinge’s face floated in Joule’s periphery. “Don’t tell me you’re investigating that Rand Paradox nonsense.”
Joule continued to deep breathe in preparation for the timejack. “Then I won’t tell you.”
“Joule, you know about Temporal Translocation. There’s been too much timejack activity in that era. You’ll be getting a lot of whispers.”
“I’m aware.”
“I thought you considered the hacked timeline a silly conspiracy theory.”
“I did, until someone sent me a five-hundred-year-old magazine.”
“Who did?”
“That’s what I plan to find out. The chronometrics confirm the ink on the cover was written in 1936. They had written my name and address.”
“But…how could…?”
“Precisely. Either someone has found a way to timejack into the core timeline’s past, or it’s true that we are living inside a splinter timeline. In either case, someone is trying to point me toward the truth.”
“Temporal physics cannot allow jack
ing the past. It’s…impossible. I mean, this goes beyond brainteasers about paradoxes like killing your grandfather. It comes down to math. It can’t happen no matter how much energy you throw at the problem. The paradox collapses in a quantum blurp.”
“I read your doctorate, old friend. Although, I don’t recall you using the term blurp.”
“It’s highly technical. It would take too long to explain. Three minutes until jack time.”
“You’re sure this splinter is clean?”
“I sifted through the code like you asked. No anomalies. It’s as clean as I’ve ever seen, aside from the translocation noise.”
“Can you keep it sterile?”
“I locked it off as a Black operation. You’ll be alone in there.”
“Good…I’ve already received some unwelcomed attention.”
“…that man from the shuttle?”
“He was one of the three men who attacked me right after I sent you my agenda. They were hastily puppeted. Someone else doesn’t want me to find out the truth.”
“Sixty seconds. I’ll set up three more empty Black lock excursions to throw anyone else off your scent.”
“Thank you…and although I trust your due diligence implicitly, Andwhinge, I’m going to need you to watch closely for any incursions.”
“If someone at Seyopont wants in, they have the equipment to break in and cover their tracks, but…I have some work-arounds. I got your back, Joule.”
“You’re a good friend, Andwhinge.”
“Downstreaming in ten…nine…eight…”
• • •
The asylum staff doused the floors regularly with ammonia, bleach, and camphor to cover the stench of urine and feces seeping out from the seams in the tiles. Repetitive, wordless screams and gibbering chatter echoed down the hallway as Joule sorted through his host body’s memories.
This orderly at the asylum, James Ortmeier, had wrestled so many patients into their restraints and straightjackets that, as a defense mechanism, he had bleached his own memory of any human traits those patients might have had, remembering only their gnashing teeth, blood-scraped fingernails, torn-out hair, and feces-smelling breath. Ortmeier had wrangled the most disturbed patients at that asylum, but remembered only enough of their gibbering words to know how to retaliate against the wounds they had inflicted on him.
Ortmeier was almost as bad as the worst of the patients—he himself struggled with an obsessive compulsion of his own thoughts. He feared the patients’ ideas could somehow infect him, so he tormented them, exacerbating their conditions by playing to their paranoid delusions. Joule felt the mnemonic bleed worm into his mind—the orderly’s thoughts and affectations flooded into Joule’s sensorium, tainting him with twisted, sadistic ideas. Joule pushed back, using his lifetime of mental discipline to reassert his personality. The orderly’s thoughts gnashed like a rabid beast.
To a female syphilitic patient in restraints, Ortmeier would whisper that beetles were eating her alive from inside. To a paranoid schizophrenic with religious persecution delusions, Ortmeier would use details from the patient’s case history to describe what tortures awaited him in hell. The orderly took great steps to hide his sadistic behavior from the other staff and doctors, and Joule had all of it at his fingertips. Joule squeezed Ortmeier’s mind like a grapefruit in a vise, but each drop of the orderly’s memory juice taxed Joule’s sense of self. Each extracted thought held the danger of taking root and infecting Joule with Cross-Consciousness Psychosis. Joule’s sensorium flashed warnings. One by one, the firewalls protecting him from mnemonic bleed were failing.
And there it was—a memory of this orderly listening to a patient jabbering to a psychiatrist about how his mind had been taken over by someone from the future. This had fascinated Ortmeier. He had recently read something similar—a flash of the magazine cover—Astounding Stories—the same magazine Joule had been sent—and the story, “The Shadow Out of Time,” described the experience of someone being timejacked.
Joule pulled back from the interface and let his systems rebalance.
“You were deep into the red,” said Andwhinge’s avatar. “Another few seconds, and I was going to yank you out.”
“What do we know about this author, H.P. Lovecraft?” Joule said mind-to-mind. It struck him as odd that he had never before heard of this writer.
Andwhinge downstreamed all the data on file about the author. Joule’s tablet filtered the information and reparsed it into a shorthand mental notation system of Joule’s own design, tailored to his synaptic architecture. Joule immediately understood. H.P. Lovecraft had been very sensitive to temporal translocation—it was a rare, but well-documented phenomenon—and, inspired by the other splinter timelines which he experienced in dreams, Lovecraft had constructed an elaborate fiction of alien gods and occulted, ancient histories.
Joule was also surprised to learn that there existed many artificial splinter timelines which attempted to reconstruct Lovecraft’s fictional creatures for the sake of fandom. It was as if they had been consciously hidden from him. Thousands of timejacking fans had created genetic labs deep underwater off the coast of Massachusetts in the late 1920s, and had successfully bred into existence hybrid human-amphibians and other monstrosities. The technology had to have been developed in secret, based on early twentieth-century resources.
If people like them had put as much energy into transforming the real world as they did toying with these splinter timelines, the real world could be transformed into a viable utopia. This reinforced to Joule how distorted his world had become, with its absurd imbalances of equality.
Most intriguing, these many bizarre curated splinter universes inspired by Lovecraft’s writing had caused a feedback loop into the richness of the author’s imagination, creating resonances in his fiction for hundreds of years after his death. According to the Absolute Grand Unified Theory, ideas had energy, and with enough energy, these dark gods might gather the temporal translocation energy impregnated with their fiction-made-flesh realities and manifest across all splinter universes.
It was the orderly’s thoughts seeping through. Joule had dropped his guard. He tightened the reins on his host body’s mind and dug deeper.
The orderly had given this patient a copy of the same Astounding Stories issue. The patient had written notes in the margins about people in the future taking over his mind. This was the evidence he needed.
The magazine had been locked away in a filing cabinet in the patient’s case file. If Joule could send that evidence back to his present, it would prove that the timeline had been corrupted. But first, a conversation with the patient was in order.
• • •
Joule turned the key and unlocked the isolation room, which smelled like cottage cheese and rubbing alcohol. The patient kept his face to the wall as Joule stepped inside and closed the door.
“I got nothing to say to you, Jimmy,” the patient said, defeated, curled on his bed, his back to the door. “Don’t take my tray, I’m saving it for later.”
On the hospital table, a bowl of cold lentil soup had solidified into paste.
Joule paused the timejack stream and scrolled through the data on the man on the hospital bed, Christopher Spark. The latest information on him was spotty and generic. Usually, the quantum flux linking every splinter reality collapsed quickly into an ocean’s worth of details. The more pure the timeline, and the closer in proximity to the person, the more consistent the details should be, but it was as if the fabric of Mr. Spark’s existence after 1935 had been mauled by a rabid animal, and large chunks of his psychic pattern were missing.
Prior to 1935, the patient had been an accountant, and not at all prone to wild imaginings. He began to have blackouts and would disappear for weeks on end. He would return, confused and afraid that his body had been possessed by demons.
His family had him evaluated by a psychiatrist. He was committed soon after, and the patterns frayed dramatically after that. Too many timejacker
s must have been kicking around in his head. The intense temporal translocation energy had annihilated Spark’s personality until he no longer was sure who he was.
Joule un-paused the moment and cleared his host’s throat. “What do you remember about Ayn Rand?” Joule said through Ortmeier’s mouth, but using Joule’s paternal voice—the specific tones and inflections that tended to garner the most cooperation from people he questioned.
Spark rolled over and looked into Ortmeier’s eyes. Playing on Joule’s periphery had been Ortmeier’s memories of the many encounters between this host body and the patient. Ortmeier had consistently spoken to Spark with mocking condescension. This paternal voice was different.
“Jimmy?” Spark said, sitting up, the plane of his eyes locking on to Ortmeier. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you remember?” said Joule, maintaining his soothing delivery.
Spark’s breath snagged in his throat. He swung his feet to the floor. “It’s you!”
Joule held back Ortmeier from grabbing the billy club at his side. “Who do you think I am?” Joule said.
“You’re the one from the future! You did this to me! Why?” Spark stood.
“Sit down!” Joule barked, taking a step forward. Spark was in a fragile, manipulative state from a combination of the drugs in his system and the abuses by the host body who had barked the words. “Now tell me what you remember,” Joule said, returning to his paternal tone.
Spark eyed him suspiciously for several moments. “You testing me? Because I said too much already?”
Joule weighed the intelligence of the patient against the trauma of his experience. He decided to try the truth. “Mr. Spark, I’m investigating a crime, and you would be helping a lot of people by telling me what you know.”
“Got tired of poking around in my brain, so you decided to talk now?”
“You remember speaking to Mrs. Ayn Rand, the writer?”
Baker Street Irregulars Page 24
