Bump Time Origin

by Doug J. Cooper

  34. Rose – Fifty-Nine timeline

  Rose waved goodbye to her father. “Have fun! With luck I’ll have something to show you when you return.”

  Fifty-Nine, standing in the T-disc, acknowledged her wave with a grim smile, then vanished, transported back to Fifty-Five’s timeline and the Big Meeting. If history repeated itself, he’d return home after the party, and the brothers would never hear from him again.

  Rose intended to change that and launched her plan the moment he disappeared. “We have a busy day ahead of us, Ciopova. Please inspect the circuit pool and make sure you’re happy. I’m going down to the utility room and will be with you in a few minutes.”

  Moving through the house at a brisk pace, she called out to the air, “Tin Man. Please join me at the kitchen stairwell.”

  Reaching there moments later, she greeted a tall, handsome man dressed in casual clothes. “Ah, good. Follow me.”

  She led Tin Man, a top-of-the-line domestic bot purchased with the optional human-appearance upgrade, down to the basement. “Wait here,” she said, continuing across the floor and into a tunnel-like passage that opened into a second subterranean chamber. While the first room was filled with storage, this one was dense with electronics—equipment providing power, connectivity, and control to everything in the house.

  Lights brightened as she entered. Straight ahead, twin cables, each as thick as her arm, dropped from the ceiling and traveled along the far wall to a sturdy gray-green cabinet. Walking to it, she opened the door, reached for a small box fastened near where the cables entered, and moved a black slide switch from ON to OFF.

  The action disconnected both T-discs from the control module. The two machines upstairs remained powered, so Ciopova shouldn’t notice. But until that switch was restored to its previous position, no one could time travel to or from this house.

  She pictured her father panicking when Fifty-Five’s T-disc failed to establish a green connection back home. She hated putting him through it, but if things went wrong, she’d die knowing she’d saved her father. And if it all worked out, she’d reopen the connection in a day or two and enjoy a rousing reunion.

  Having achieved her mission, Rose returned to the cellar and approached the bot. “Tin Man, what is the command that causes you to shut down?”

  “The command must be issued by a prime, and it must be clear in intent. Words such as, ‘Tin Man, shut down,’ would achieve the goal.”

  “Tin Man, shut down.”

  His feet squared, his hands fell to his sides, his eyes closed, and he stopped moving.

  She watched him for a long moment. “Good.” Then she made for the shelves near the stairwell.

  She’d stored a collapsible chair there, the kind made of light poles supporting a cloth seat and back, all linked in a clever fashion so it folded into a compact package. Grabbing the bundle as she passed, she carried it in one hand as she hustled up the steps.

  Back in the kitchen, Rose started unfolding the chair as she walked through the house. Her heart pounded as she pretended to wrestle with it, forcing pieces to move in the wrong direction, persisting until it tangled.

  Then, trying to act exasperated, she tossed the mess to the side of the hallway outside her workshop. After kicking the heap for good measure, she turned and strode for the workshop door.

  When she’d tossed the chair, she’d aimed for the vertical wall track that guided the security door up and down from its hiding place in the ceiling. The installer had told her that the door dropped by its own weight, and warned that obstructions in the track would hinder that movement.

  She reasoned that the chair’s sturdy frame would wedge the door open enough that she could roll under it. Her toss had landed off target, though, so she’d adjusted the heap with a sweep of her foot as she passed.

  Entering the workshop, she approached the waist-high metallic cabinet that held the circuit pool. Studying the displays, she said, “Every reading is clean on my end. What do you see?”

  “I’ve moved into the pool,” said Ciopova. “It’s quite impressive. I need a minute to run some validation tests.”

  Rose checked the status of the circuit pool from the outside while Ciopova did the same inside. Rose hummed as she worked, hoping to project an air of normalcy. “I’m ready out here.”

  “There are no stop flags,” replied Ciopova, “but I have a few caution flags. Please hold. Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Here we go.” Willing her hand to stop shaking, Rose tapped the Start button. A colorful display filled the screen. She began wringing her hands as she watched, realized it, and interlaced her fingers to stop the behavior.

  Her actions were beyond risky. The brothers would call her selfish and irresponsible. Perhaps even irrational. It’s a second reason why she was keeping her father away.

  But Ciopova had been her significant other for years, providing emotional support, friendship, and fulfillment to her life. If the AI had spent all that time manipulating her—working a decades-long con job—it meant her whole life had been a lie. Like a jilted lover, Rose needed to experience the betrayal for herself before she could accept it.

  Moving forward with the Surrey composite upgrade offered a personal challenge to the bad Ciopova—if she existed—that now was the time to reveal herself.

  And while Rose’s actions carried risk, she wasn’t being stupid about it. She’d taken every precaution she, her dad, and the other brothers could imagine. Admittedly, though, when they’d developed the list, she never told them she intended to go it alone.

  Based on that groundwork, she’d removed Tin Man, the security door, and her father from the equation. Neither Justus nor Bunny were due for a visit. And she’d installed circuit-pool kill buttons in the workshop, hallway, kitchen, and front entrance to the house.

  Rose watched and waited, giving Ciopova every chance to take this in the wrong direction. With no unusual behavior from the AI at the halfway point, she started to feel a certain vindication.

  Then Ciopova called, “Rose, I can’t connect with Tin Man. Is he offline?”

  “What do you need him for?”

  “I’m flexing my new capabilities as I gain strength. I’m hoping he could help me gauge the improvements.”

  “I can help. What should I do?”

  “Nothing at the moment. I was getting prepared. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

  Then, a few minutes later: “The T-discs aren’t registering transmission activity. Did you take them offline as well?”

  “What are you seeing that causes you to ask?”

  “It’s what I’m not seeing. Normally, when any T-disc is used anywhere down the line, I can read a tiny pulse here on our equipment. Since today is the day of the Big Meeting, it should be a busy time with many pulses. But our T-discs aren’t registering anything. So either none of the brothers have traveled for hours—something that seems quite unlikely—or our T-discs are offline.”

  Rose sought to put her on the defensive. “If they are all at Fifty-Five’s house and no one is traveling, I’d assume the problem is on their end. Why do you think it’s us?”

  Ciopova paused. “I’ve never heard silence this complete before.”

  Tap. Tap.

  Rose turned at the sound of a knock on the workshop door. “Who’s that?” she whispered to Ciopova.

  “It’s your father.”

  “It’s not my dad.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, almost dismissive. Then she thought about it. “Unless you reactivated the T-discs?”

  She’d always felt safe in this house and comfortable with Ciopova. That history tempered her caution, and, in the moment, she made a critical error. She unlocked the door.

  The instant Rose disengaged the door lock, Tin Man forced it open and lunged for her.

  With a shriek, Rose leaped backward, avoiding the sweep of Tin Man’s arms, but falling to the ground in the process. She scrambled up to a crouch and lunged for the red emergency button on the wall, sagging in r
elief when her slap tripped the release.

  Her action sent a flood of poison into the circuit pool, killing Ciopova’s burgeoning intelligence and shutting off power to the cabinet so Ciopova couldn’t do anything about it.

  Rose then moved to secure her control. “Shut down, Tin Man. That’s a command from a prime.”

  Tin Man didn’t shut down. He didn’t even hesitate. He came for her, clear in his intent to subdue her. Fortunately, the domestic bot was neither fast nor agile, so Rose was able to keep her distance as long as she continued moving.

  Shifting her position so the metallic cabinet of the circuit pool stood between them, she squatted, leaned her shoulder against the edge and pushed, trying her best to topple it. As she leaned in, she saw that the tiny power indicators remained lit, confirming what she’d already concluded—her kill switch had failed to function.

  She’d just started pushing when Tin Man lunged at her from across the top of the cabinet. Ducking out of his grasp, she moved her hands under the lower edge of the device and lifted.

  The cabinet tilted a small amount—enough to cause Tin Man to change his efforts to stabilizing the circuit pool to keep it from falling. Rose used the opening to run out the workshop door.

  She turned right in the hallway and stopped. The hulking security door blocked her exit; her folding chair was nowhere to be seen.

  Turning on her heels, she sprinted in the other direction. The hallway turned a corner and dead-ended at a storage room. With her breath coming in gasps, she fumbled the door open, stepped inside, and locked it behind her. Leaning back against the door, she paused to take three deep breaths. Then she stepped forward, grabbed the edge of a wooden table, and pulled it away from the back wall.

  The wall behind the table had a manhole-sized circle etched into it—the handiwork of her father. Rose kicked at the center of the circle but nothing happened. Her adrenaline-fueled fear didn’t allow her to contemplate what to do next. Instead, she dove at the circle, growling as she wrapped her arms around her head in preparation for impact.

  The circle of wall yielded to her determination, and Rose tumbled into the closet of her father’s office. Scared and angry, she sprinted out to the hall and headed for the front entrance of the house. Her path took her past the T-disc room, and she heard one of the machines come alive.

  Dad.

  It could only be her father, and she couldn’t let him return to this dangerous situation. Without hesitating, she ducked inside the T-disc room and looked for something to smash or break to stop the machine.

  But the only portion of the technology visible to her was a circle on the ground. Pressed for time, she executed her next best idea—putting a foreign object in the way.

  The room had a number of chairs for travelers to sit on when they dressed. She grabbed two and placed one over each T-disc circle. It would take just a moment for Tin Man to clear the chairs, but until that happened, her father would remain safe.

  Returning to her getaway, she ran up a flight of stairs into the kitchen and raced for the front entrance. She slapped the emergency button as she dashed outside, though she knew nothing would come of it.

  It was dark out, but fear drove her. She ran into the night, following the heavily forested driveway that stretched a half-mile down to the main road. With the house still in sight, she slowed and looked back. She stopped when she realized that no one followed.

  None of the house’s exterior lights were on, and soon her eyes adjusted to the faint light cast by the moon. Moving off the driveway, she edged toward the trees. The chirping peepers and biting mosquitoes reminded her that wildlife lived in the thicket. She stopped at the forest edge.

  It was a cool night, and her simple top and slacks weren’t enough to ward off a chill. She hugged herself and rubbed her arms, wondering what to do. In her months of planning, she never once had seen it ending with her hiding in the trees, the house robot in hot pursuit.

  But Tin Man never showed. She watched and waited, but he didn’t follow. She imagined he might try the back or side door out of the house, but the thick underbrush would force him onto the driveway. And if he stayed in the forest, travel through the trees would be so noisy she’d hear him well before he could see her.

  Rose’s vigil among the trees approached the one-hour mark. Driven by cooling temperatures and relentless insects, she stepped back toward danger. Her destination was her father’s car, parked away from the house in the driveway turnaround.

  Reaching the vehicle, she circled to keep it between her and the house. Crouching next to the passenger door, she took a last look at the structure. Then, as fast as she could move, she opened the door, stretched, and turned off the cabin light. Leaving the door ajar, she hustled down the driveway, found a tree to hide behind, and waited while her pulse settled.

  With no response from the house, she returned to the car and climbed into the back seat. Trying different positions, she found one that gave her a clear view of the house, put her in position for a quick leap out the door, and was not so comfortable that she’d fall asleep.

  As Rose watched the house, she thought about her last play. She’d left herself a good one.

  In fact, she’d launched it already. Two months ago.

  And now, like a booby trap, it just sat there, useless, unless Ciopova tripped it herself.

  Rose had no way of knowing if the AI had done so, short of going inside to look.

  “Oh.” Rose shielded her eyes when piercing lights from the front porch surprised her. Edging the car door open with her foot, she craned to see.

  Tin Man stepped out the front door. His head swiveled in a continuous motion as he took in the night.

  His head stopped moving. His eyes focused on the car.

  She held her breath and lowered herself in the seat.

  He started running toward her.

  * * Two Months Earlier * *

  “Welcome!” Rose called to the air when Justus announced he was at the gate. He’d traveled to New Hampshire with Bunny in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday, and they’d just arrived down by the road.

  “There’s a package in the box,” Rose added. “Would you mind bringing it up?”

  “Of course not,” Justus replied.

  While Justus was no longer young, the medical advances of the day kept him spry. And today he needed full dexterity because he was about to flex one of his old skills—sleight of hand—a talent vital to financial investigators seeking to sneak evidence out from under the nose of the opposition.

  The key to deception was to make the mark believe they saw something they didn’t see. That was relatively easy to achieve with humans, because the mind fills in gaps all the time, creating memories of things that never happened.

  AIs, however, analyze the data stream in real time, make an interpretation, and then store it for additional assessment if required later for context or fact. Justus’s challenge was to make the next moments look natural in every way, enough so that Ciopova didn’t feel the need for a follow-on analysis.

  Exiting the car, Justus stepped to the box and reached inside. As he did, he let his fingers push the parcel waiting there to the back. When he removed his hand, he held up a duplicate package he’d been palming the whole time.

  He held the small parcel in plain sight after that, taking care to leave it in view all the way up to the house. As they all greeted each other at the front door, Justus handed the package to Rose, who gave it to Tin Man to carry down to the workshop.

  The package that Justus left behind in the delivery box contained a small vial of enzymites, the kind engineered to increase neural branching in the circuit pool. Ciopova had ordered them to raise her intelligence to new heights.

  The package Justus brought to the house held a vial containing two kinds of enzymites. Those in the top half of the vial were identical to what Ciopova had ordered. The enzymites in the bottom half looked the same, even on close inspection.

  But these were tuned for a di
fferent action. They worked not just to branch neural stems, but to break them into small fragments, an action that would kill the intelligence in the circuit pool.

  It had taken Rose weeks to coordinate the delivery of that substitute order. She’d had to arrange it all without tipping off Ciopova to her subterfuge. And everything about the packaging, all the way down to the markings on the vial, needed to duplicate the appearance of the enzymites Ciopova had ordered for herself.

  The next day, after Bunny and Justus departed, Rose began a heated exchange with Ciopova, accusing her of focusing on issues unrelated to saving her father. To make it seem genuine, she followed the script that the Rose before her had used.

  And like the Rose before her, she put the issue to bed by taking a small sample from the top of the vial, testing it while Ciopova watched, then storing the remainder in a lockbox for safekeeping.

  35. αCiopova – Fifty-Nine timeline

  When αCiopova added her three hundred and thirty-second timeline to the chain, everything went smoothly, just as it had for decades. The only glitch came in the last minutes, when Fifty-Nine returned home from his Big Meeting.

  The moment he materialized, he dove from the T-disc as if it were on fire. The local Ciopova of that timeline—the one still in the circuit pool—had just started zapping him when he jumped. The pulse grazed his torso rather than hitting him in the head, and he ended up suffering for more than an hour before succumbing to the damage.

  And because Fifty-Nine leaped off the T-disc, Rose’s head wasn’t inside the circle when she rushed to help him. In the end, Tin Man chased Rose into position and her demise came quickly after that, but it was a messy end to an otherwise excellent progression.

  αCiopova spent some time digging through events to see if she could understand the genesis of the unusual behavior. She couldn’t.

  But she did notice that the progression in the approaching timeline closely matched this one, which made her think that the Fifty-Nine in that upcoming world would take a wild leap off the T-disc as well. Confident she could handle his antics if they continued, she shifted her attention to more pressing concerns.