“Hooray,” said Lilah when Diesel won. They raised their glasses and sipped in celebration. “The drawing was for one point four mil, but I didn’t hear what the lump-sum payout is.”
“I think I heard them say a little over nine hundred thousand,” said Diesel.
Twenty-Six leaned in their direction and spoke in a soft voice. “By tomorrow morning, they’ll confirm there was just one winner. Wait for Twenty-Nine before you cash it. He’ll be here in three days.”
After their meal, Diesel led the way through the bar, shifting his lottery ticket from his shirt pocket into his wallet as he made for the exit. He pushed open the front door and stepped into the parking lot, belching as he did, and earning himself a bonus taste of his Reuben sandwich.
The bright sunlight caused him to squint. When he raised his hand to block the light, he saw a heavyset guy dressed in a brown hoodie and jeans leaning against his new car.
14. Twenty-Five and the next afternoon
“Can I help you?” Diesel called to the slob leaning on his car, adding “asshole” under his breath as he started across the parking lot.
“Whoa there, Deez,” called Twenty-Six, following behind him. “That’s a Brown.”
Diesel had heard the term but didn’t know what it meant. He wasn’t afraid of the guy either way, and as he crossed the parking lot, he stared at the Brown’s fat, round face and mop of dirty-blonde hair.
“You looking for me, pal?” Diesel squared up in front of the interloper.
The guy pushed off the car to stand up straight, his hulking body rocking the vehicle as he did. He looked at Diesel for three heartbeats, then said, “Don’t even think about claiming your winnings and skipping town, Deez.”
He stepped forward and brushed past Diesel, thumping shoulders as he did so. The Brown continued across the parking lot, calling back, “Oh, and Twenty-Five? Kiss my ass.” He laughed at that one, then disappeared down the street.
Diesel’s face flushed. “What the hell was that?”
Lilah, who’d been holding back, approached them near the car and asked Twenty-Six, “You know him?”
Twenty-Six nodded. “Like I said, he’s a Brown. And since this didn’t happen to me or any previous Twenty-Five, it’s a new event. I’ll report it and suggest backup for next year.”
In the car, Diesel sorted through his feelings. It wasn’t the Brown’s physical intimidation that bothered him. The guy was a slob, and Diesel was confident he could take him. It was the insider knowledge the Brown possessed. He’d called him Twenty-Five, he knew that Diesel had joked to Lilah about how he would have cashed her lottery ticket and skipped town, and even knew about the “kiss my ass” hazing call.
That meant he wasn’t some random asshole. He was part of the bigger swirl of events.
Diesel turned around and confronted Twenty-Six in the back seat. “Since Browns represent danger, you should have told us about them first.”
“Sorry.” Twenty-Six leaned forward to ease communication. “He didn’t appear again for me until the second month, so I thought we had lots of time. Let’s drive back to the house, and I’ll give you a crash course.”
“I saw him yesterday,” said Diesel, getting them underway.
“Sure, that’s the first time, when you reached the front steps of Bump Analytics. But Forty and Forty-Two were there enforcing for you, right?”
“They were there for that one, but I saw him twice yesterday. The first time was fifteen minutes before that, when he smacked shoulders with me on the sidewalk.”
“He did? Why didn’t you tell me? Jeez, Forty isn’t going to be happy to hear about two new events in two days.”
“Am I in danger?” asked Lilah. “I just want to know if I should be on some sort of alert.”
“You’re fine,” said Twenty-Six. “No Lilah has been confronted by a Brown.”
Diesel noted Twenty-Six’s careful phrasing as he turned the car onto their street. Then his thoughts shifted to his interaction with Lilah the night before. “Lilah, do you want to come up to my place to discuss this? Or we could go to your place. But I don’t want to sit in the conference room.”
“Seconded,” said Twenty-Six. “No conference room for me, either.”
“We’ll go to your place,” Lilah replied, adding in a matter-of-fact tone, “It’s harder to boot you out of my place than it is for me to leave yours.”
Diesel parked the car, and the three of them walked up to his apartment. Both Diesel and Twenty-Six kicked off their shoes in identical fashion and flopped side by side on the brown leather couch.
“I’m going to grab a glass of water,” said Lilah, continuing back to the kitchen. “Anyone want anything?”
“I’m good, thanks,” came the twin reply.
“Do you know how to use this?” asked Diesel, motioning to his entertainment center.
Twenty-Six showed him the basics and a few of the more important advanced functions, like how to blast music in theater mode while gaming on the big screen.
Lilah returned and sat in an upholstered armchair, holding her glass with both hands. She looked at Diesel, who turned to Twenty-Six, giving him the floor.
“So you’ve probably figured out,” said Twenty-Six, “that the Browns are guys who show up at awkward moments and project an intimidating attitude. They always wear the same brown hoodies and jeans, so you learn to recognize them right away.” He shook his head. “And like we saw today, they’re usually fat slobs.”
“He’s thumped shoulders with me. Twice,” said Diesel. “I’ll pop him if he does it again.”
“It’s your ego that’s hurt, not your shoulder. And before you escalate, think through how you would de-escalate. Thirty-Two and Thirty-Six both punched one of them early on, and the Browns in those timelines have come looking for a fight ever since. Those brothers have had to live with extra aggravation because of it.”
Diesel struggled to balance his response. His rational mind encouraged him to question the inexplicable. But the Browns pissed him off so, instead, he focused on how to counter their physical intimidation.
Slumping back on the couch, he crossed his arms and plopped his feet up on the coffee table. When he saw Lilah glare at him with wide eyes, he put his feet back on the floor.
“He called me Twenty-Five, he used a phrase from a conversation I had with Lilah, and he threw in the ‘kiss my ass’ hazing line on his way out. He’s been eavesdropping on me ever since I got into town.”
“We can’t figure out how they get their information, and that’s another reason why Ciopova needs to be developed as fast as possible. She’s helping us get our heads around it.”
Twenty-Six stood and motioned to a computer monitor and keyboard at a desk next to the entertainment center. “I need to use the computer for a bit.”
Diesel hadn’t even noticed the setup until now. “Just don’t break it.”
Twenty-Six pointed at him with an underhand motion while making a face to Lilah that said, Who does this guy think he is? Powering up the monitor, he told them, “This is connected to the system in the basement, and that connects us to Ciopova.”
He typed a series of commands on the keyboard, pressed buttons on the TV remote, and the big display screen powered up. “Ciopova,” he called. “Are you there?” Twenty-Six watched for something to happen, and when it didn’t, he studied the remote, pressed another button, then called again, “Ciopova?”
Ciopova’s face filled the screen.
“Whoa,” said Diesel and Lilah together.
“Hello, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six, Lilah,” she said, her image a vivid two-dimensional presentation of the woman’s face they’d seen earlier.
“She’s mostly show at this point,” said Twenty-Six, “but I assure you, she gets real pretty fast.”
“Isn’t that forbidden future information?” asked Lilah.
“You know what she’ll look like in five years better than I do. Well, I’ve seen her five years from now, but you know
what I mean. Anyway, that’s why we want you leading the way.”
“Very eloquent,” said Diesel, winking at Lilah as he mocked Twenty-Six.
Ignoring him, Twenty-Six typed for what became a sustained period, cursing along the way and using the Delete key often. He announced the end of his efforts with, “Please, God, make this work.”
Diesel and Lilah watched over his shoulder as he launched what looked like a multidimensional spreadsheet.
“It’s an archiving tool that I’ve just linked to Ciopova.”
“I’ve been trying to learn how to do that with another application,” said Lilah. She pulled a chair over and sat next to him. “What’s this for?” she swirled her finger over a portion of the screen.
“That’s the voice interface. It takes some practice, but it works great.”
Twenty-Six touched the screen, then spoke aloud. “Ciopova, open a file called ‘Interactions with Browns.’ Every time there’s an episode, plot its location on an incident map, and annotate it with the time, date, Browns present, Diesels present, and onlookers present. And include a detailed description of what transpired. Also, seek out and include pictures of the scene where publicly available.”
He chattered away, detailing what to collect and how to collate it in very precise terms.
When he finally slowed down, Diesel said, “Wow. That was impressive as hell.”
“Thanks. I thought I had a few more weeks to practice, but the excitement of today made it all just come out ahead of schedule.”
Diesel cocked his head. “Practice?”
“One of Twenty-Six’s first duties is to do what I just did here, set up a Browns archive. The brothers want us to collect and organize everything we can. My job was to memorize the setup they designed and then get it started in your timeline. It will give you the most complete archive we’ll have on the Browns.” He shrugged. “Of course, you’ll need to keep at it for years before the data set is big enough to be worth anything.”
“What do you use it for?” asked Lilah.
“Figuring out who they are, what they want, how they know what they know, and why they’re bothering us.” Twenty-Six pointed up at the big monitor. “We’re thinking she can find correlations in the data that explain it all. That’s the hope, anyway.”
When Twenty-Six pointed, Diesel noticed the counter display in the corner of the monitor. “She’s at three times her original capability already.”
Lilah walked to the screen and ran her fingers over the 3X image. “How high does she go?”
“I don’t know because the scale keeps changing. There are technology breakthroughs at points up the line that revolutionize everything, and then they start describing the new Ciopova as some multiple of the previous generation. That happens a bunch of times, and it’s hard to unwind it all back to this original version.”
Diesel’s stomach growled, so while Twenty-Six and Lilah talked about AI metrics, he strolled back to the fridge to check out the goods. The pickings were meager, and he settled on an apple, grabbing an extra for Twenty-Six.
“Catch,” he called after the apple was already in the air. Twenty-Six snatched it as it winged past his head and took a bite in one smooth motion—a snap as the apple hit his hand followed by another when his teeth tore into the fruit.
Diesel took a bite of his apple and saw Lilah staring at him.
“Do you want one?” he asked, inadvertently giving Lilah a show of red and white chunks churning in his mouth.
“It’s been less than an hour since lunch, so I’m fine. But thanks for asking.”
Seeking to change the subject, Diesel turned to Twenty-Six. “Is the Brown the same guy year after year? I mean, twenty years from now, will I see that same fat, ugly mug with that same rancid brown hoodie?”
“Nope. The one next month is a different guy. They change way more often than they stay the same, but I’ve had repeats.”
“This whole thing is disorienting and surreal. I feel like I’m dreaming.”
“Well wake up, buddy boy, because I’m an hour late already and going to catch holy hell from you know who.” He tilted his head toward Lilah.
“I just realized,” said Lilah, “this is a new experience for you. You didn’t live through it once before as Twenty-Five.”
“No. Like I said, I expected to have weeks to introduce you to the Browns.”
Diesel motioned to the front door of his apartment. “Let’s get you home. We can talk as we walk.”
As they made their way down to the landing, Twenty-Six gave them a thumbnail. “The first recorded incident with a Brown occurred twentyish years ago. They showed up here and there in the Fifties’ timelines. A few years later, they showed up in the Forties’, then Thirties’, and then it was all ages. And every year since, there are more interactions up and down the line. The enforcers are already overbooked, and there’s talk of changing how we handle them. Nothing’s been decided, though.”
They reached the landing, and as they looped around for the flight down to the basement, Twenty-Six called down the hall, “See you later, Justus.” He didn’t wait for a response though, instead continuing down. “As you’ve experienced, they show up at random times and act like assholes. And they follow temporal constancy, so far anyway. So once an interaction with a Brown occurs, it happens pretty much the same way every year after that.”
“You must have a working theory,” said Diesel as they approached the T-box.
Twenty-Six pulled on the latch handle. “Best guess is they’re stopping us from bumping. It’s mother nature’s way of preserving the integrity of the timeline.”
He pulled his shirt over his head and handed it to Lilah. She looked at it, looked at him, and said, “Now is a good time for me to say something to both of you.”
“Absolutely,” said Twenty-Six, pulling down his pants. “The floor is yours.”
“I’m not going to play all shy with your nudity anymore. It’s part of what’s going on, and I can deal with it. That said, don’t think that you being naked in front of me gives you the right to act lewd or crude, and never should you entertain any expectation of reciprocity.”
She pointed at Twenty-Six. “And you, having supposedly lived with my twin for a year, know this already.”
Twenty-Six hung his underwear on her pointed finger. “No lewd, no crude, no expectations. Understood.” Then he stepped to the T-box door.
Diesel crowded behind him. “Show me how it works.”
Lilah dropped the clothes on the floor and joined them. “Me too.”
“There’s not a lot to it.” Since there was room in the cabin for just one person, Twenty-Six stepped back and let Diesel in. “Face this way,” he said, pulling him around so he faced the back wall of the basement.
Twenty-Six swung the door most of the way closed, and the cabin became like an upright coffin. “Imagine how tight it is for Forty,” he said through the crack in the door.
Twenty-Six opened the door again, reached in, and tapped a small screen on the wall in front of Diesel’s face. It came alive, showing the number “25” in green on the left. In the center, a green arrow pointed to a blank space on the right.
Twenty-Six looked back over his shoulder and spoke to Lilah. “I’ll do this again for you in a minute.”
Turning back to Diesel, he said, “It works like an elevator. It shows you the year where you are. We’re in Twenty-Five’s year. You tell it the Diesel year you want to go to.” He put his head near Diesel’s and spoke to the screen. “Travel to Twenty-Six.” A green “26” displayed in the previously empty space on the other side of the arrow. “Now come out and let me show the very patient Lilah.”
“Wait, how do I start it?”
“You’ll learn that soon enough.”
Diesel and Lilah swapped places, and Twenty-Six repeated everything for her. Then he addressed both of them.
“It only transports Diesels. It kills everyone else. Please hear that, Lilah.” He caught her gaze
. “It will kill you and none of us know how to change that.”
“How hard could it be to figure it out?” she asked.
“There was an accident in another timeline where a Lilah died using the box. We don’t want that to happen again.”
“Maybe we should put a lock on the door,” said Diesel. Then the phrase, “only transports Diesels” hit home, and he felt a rush of fear. “What’s the process for taking the screw out of my arm?”
“It’s a Phillips-head, so we can use a standard bit.”
Diesel grabbed his arm and held it like it was injured. “Ow.”
“Stop teasing him,” said Lilah.
“What do you know about it?”
Diesel heard challenge in Twenty-Six’s tone.
“I know that however it works, you made it through, so it can’t be anything to sweat about. And I also know that there is teasing and there is torment, and only one of them is funny.”
“You are tough at every age, Lilah.” Twenty-Six shook his head and turned to Diesel. “And she’s right, it doesn’t hurt. On your first trip, your fillings and screw just get left behind in the T-box and fall to the floor. I’ll be here to show you how to run the box and make sure it all goes smoothly.”
Lilah put a hand on Diesel’s arm when Twenty-Six said all would be fine. Her touch sent jolts of excitement through him, and he thought of nothing else until she took her hand away.
“Our destination on that trip will be the Big Meeting at Fifty-Five’s place. Medicine is so advanced thirty years from now that they just wave instruments over you and somehow you’re all better. Fifty-Five will be waiting for you, and you won’t feel anything except the high from your first visit into the future.”
Twenty-Six pointed to the clothes on the ground. “Run an ad for a cleaning lady, Monday and Thursday every week, five-hour shifts. You’ll get a pile of applications. Hire Bunny.”
He held up his hand. “She’ll interview just as ditzy as her name sounds, but she’s prompt, discreet, nothing shocks her, she keeps the place spotless, and she’s fun to have around. Make sure she covers both apartments equally, plus the common areas. Ask what she wants and pay double, and add a huge bonus at Christmas. She’ll be like part of the family.”
Bump Time Origin Page 11
