Einstein cocks his head and takes a step closer. “To the contrary, this park is an excellent collection of historical data. Based on the information in our museum collections, the most harmful events in human history were inspired by very few individuals. We intend to eliminate those events from time. If the human beings that inspire destruction are removed from history, history will be improved. When history is improved, guests will once again return to the park.”
I run my hands through my hair. “Oh, you poor stupid robot. You don’t even know you got conned. This park isn’t an accurate compilation of human history, and Franco wasn’t even a real employee. He was running an illegal time travel tourism racket out of your park. He didn’t leave his equipment here. He got caught by ASCOTT and went to prison!” I look at the computer systems in the office. “I don’t know how you contacted him, but if he told you he could fix your problems . . . You got conned, okay? He just wanted an escape route to anywhere the authorities wouldn’t find him. He may have done your bidding, but you were a means to an end.”
“Mr. Franco assured this office that his objectives were in line with our own. We also recruited a number of his other associates eager to assist in our project.”
“I hate to tell you this, Einstein, but people lie.”
The robot stares at me intently.
“How are things going in here?” Piper’s dad appears in the doorway with Piper close behind.
“Me and Ticketbot here were just having a little discussion about how he needs to adjust his priorities. He’s the reason Franco and his gang are out of prison. This whole damn park is—” I fling my hand out to indicate the scope of the park and inadvertently strike Piper in the head. The blow knocks her back a step.
“Ow.”
She’s snuck up behind me, presumably to get a better look at the warp clock.
“Oh hey. Sorry about that,” I say as Piper rubs her forehead.
“It’s okay,” she mutters.
“Inflicting harm on a child is a serious offense,” Einstein says, his voice deepening. “Your presence in the park is no longer permitted.”
“It was just an accident, Einy,” I say. “Calm down.”
Einstein immediately replays a video image on one of the display screens of my hand hitting Piper in the face. “The safety of children is paramount at Yesteryear Adventure Park. It is the only directive that overrides all others. You will be escorted from the park by security.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” I say.
“Uh, Ben, you might want to be more polite,” my other self says. He jerks his thumb toward the parking lot. “Because we have company.”
I follow his movement and spot the arrivals he’s talking about.
He and Piper walk out the door to view the scene unfolding outside.
The ticket office is being slowly surrounded by an army of figures. Cowboys, knights, Revolutionary War soldiers. Robotic actors from all over the park are accumulating around us. Some are in rough shape, missing hands or faces, but others have come prepared for trouble, armed with period weapons. I trust that none of the muskets or crossbows are functional, but the swords and pickaxes look dangerous enough.
“Security will escort you out of the park,” Einstein says.
“You’re using robots for security?” I ask.
“The park is experiencing shortages of human personnel. I have had to make changes to the staff.”
“Stand down, robot,” I say. “I know you’re programmed with safety protocols, but you need to let us have that device.”
“The Improved Attendance Directive cannot be deactivated. It is our primary objective.”
“You know what, Einstein? You’re an idiot.” I try to get around him to reach the warp clock again, but he intercepts me and grabs for my shirt.
I catch his wrist and yank hard, wrenching his arm around behind his back until something pops. His shoulder lets out a puff of smoke and then his arm goes limp. I shove him into a desk and he topples over. His arm comes away in my hand.
“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.”
Piper screams.
I spin around to check the doorway, but Piper and her dad are gone. I rush to look outside and find them in the fairway surrounded by robots. The other me is being dragged away by a pair of bulky metallic figures. He’s trying unsuccessfully to escape their grip by repeatedly kicking at their legs.
“Hey! I need a little help here!” He calls to me. Piper is pulling the arm of one of the robots carrying her dad, but it doesn’t pay her any attention.
I rush toward them, still carrying Einstein’s robotic arm. I swing it at the first robot that gets in my way, knocking her aside.
Pretty sure that was Betsy Ross.
Other androids move to block the way.
I fight my way through several more of them, but they are encircling us from everywhere now. Several have decided to raise weapons in our direction. I bowl through the last of the opposition and shove one of Ben’s captor’s away. With an arm free, he’s able to escape the grip of the other robot. We turn back-to-back amid the throng of angry androids.
“What the hell did you say in there?” my other self says.
“Things didn’t go exactly as planned.” I brandish Einstein’s arm at a robot version of Frederick Douglass.
“I’m thinking you should have been more polite.”
I take a swing at the nearest robot, a mustached cowboy. Einstein’s arm catches him under the jaw and dislodges his head. It tips back and then tumbles from the robot’s shoulders, dangling by thick bundles of wiring. The robots around us watch their compatriot teeter and fall to the concrete, but the results aren’t good. Instead of being deterred, they seem to ratchet up their intensity. Frederick Douglass swings a fist at me and catches me in the jaw. I stagger back from the blow.
Piper does her best to stay close to us. “Stop it! Stop it!” But the robots continue to ignore her, concentrating their efforts on her dad and me. I put an arm around her and try to stay clear of the horde.
Looking toward the ticket office, I note that Einstein is back on his feet, and the route back is blocked with row upon row of robots. He’s creating a perimeter and forcing us toward the exit gates.
“Wait. I have an idea!” Piper shouts. “I know what to do!” She ducks under my arm and sprints through a gap in the robots, headed back toward the museum.
“Wait! Piper!” her dad shouts after her. He rushes to follow. Babe Ruth is lumbering toward me with a baseball bat, so I have no choice but to retreat.
It’s tough going. The other Ben and I are forced to work together to fight our way through the increasingly violent throng of androids. It seems as though the rougher we get with them, the more aggressive they become. We are assaulted by a cadre of historical characters from Mark Twain to Henry VIII. Mary Todd Lincoln seems to really have it out for me. She keeps trying to crush me with a broken flag pole that’s welded to her hands. It’s becoming increasingly harder to avoid the blows.
Piper has an easier time. The park security protocol seems to be granting her immunity. She’s able to slip through the crowd of robots and run up the ramp to the loading door of the museum. She turns and shouts to me. “Bring them this way!”
“Bring them?” her dad says. As he’s speaking, one of the robots lunges forward, swinging a broadsword. It sweeps his legs out from under him, and he hits the ground hard.
“Ben!” I dash back into the crowd to get to him, barreling into the robotic knight just before it uses the broadsword to impale my alternate self. I knock the robot to the ground, and we skid along the concrete.
I scramble back to my feet and rush to the other Ben, hastily shoving away more of the androids. He’s hurt pretty badly. The broadsword was dull, so luckily it didn’t cut him, but the blunt force of the blow was enough to lame him. Dropping Einstein’s arm, I help Ben up, throwing one of his arms over my shoulder so I can drag him away from danger.
We reach the loading r
amp and are gifted with a slight breather as the robots are slower to execute the incline.
“There must be a way to shut these things down,” I gasp.
The other Ben winces in pain but then raises his eyes to the museum. “Looks like my daughter is on it.” He points inside the museum’s warehouse. The lights on the gravitizer are on.
“Come help me!” At the far end of the tunnel, Piper is struggling to push one of the poles holding up the time gate. I carry my older self through the industrial-sized gravitizer to join her.
“What are you doing?” her dad asks. “You’re trying to get it down?”
Piper is indeed lowering the time gate, working to get the thing horizontal. “It’s going to work. We just need to use it on the robots.”
I’m confused about what she means till she points to the open area beyond the time gate. “It’s like the gate in the store. The trap door. We can do it here!”
“That’s brilliant!” I see what she’s trying to do now and move to the pole on the other side. I pull the locking pin out and start lowering the gate to the floor. By the time we have the gate horizontal, the first of the robots is already coming through the tunnel.
“You think this thing has enough juice?” I ask, eying the gravitite canisters along the wall. Piper merely moves to the system controls and starts punching buttons. I drag her dad across the open space inside the time gate, then lay him on the ground on the far side of the temporal emitters. He looks worried.
“You realize you’re about to create a bunch of time traveling robots, don’t you? Pretty sure that’s how The Terminator started.”
“If they go anywhere but here, I’ll be happy,” I reply. I rush back to the tunnel opening just as Piper activates the gravitizer. Blue electrical energy flickers and arcs along the walls, then bolts of electricity connect with the robots lumbering their way through. The energy crackles and pops, and the faces of the oncoming horde take on an eerie glow. The industrial gravitizer is far more powerful than any device I’ve seen employed for this. The gravitized energy is blinding. I’m forced to put up a hand to block my eyes.
I turn to Piper. “Get out of here before this thing shocks you!”
“We still need to turn on the time gate!”
That’s a problem. With the gate on, we’re not going to get across it. Whoever designed these controls clearly didn’t plan to run both machines simultaneously and definitely not with the gate lying horizontally on the floor.
The first of the robots is almost on me—my nemesis, Mary Todd Lincoln.
“Go. I’ll operate the controls,” I shout. “Run!”
Lincoln’s wife raises her flag pole club.
“Now!”
Piper sprints away across the concrete floor and leaps over the edge of the time gate on the far side. I catch the First Lady’s swing and groan from the blow, going to one knee as I absorb it. She’s still getting shocked by the gravitizer, and I can feel the energy from the machine coursing through me. My skin tingles with it. When I come back up, I use all of my strength to swing the robot around and send her sprawling onto the concrete in the center of our now-horizontal gate. She skids across the floor with her bloomers showing. For the next couple of seconds, she kicks and waves her arms wildly like a beetle on its back.
I hope Honest Abe will forgive me for what I’m about to do.
The rest of the robots are almost on me. They are still getting zapped and gravitized by the machine. I locate the schematic for the network of time gates linked to this one. There is only one left available, the gate in the ceiling at the general store that we were unable to unplug. It’ll work. How about tomorrow . . .
“Watch out!” Piper yells. Mary Todd Lincoln is back on her feet, and Babe Ruth is closing in from behind me. I punch the activation button for the time gate, and the floor lights up with the brilliance of the temporal emitters. Waves of energy merge with one another across the gate and finish the connection. Mary Todd Lincoln plummets into the ether.
I dodge a swing from Babe Ruth, then another. His second swing brings him right to the edge of the time gate. When he swings at me again, I roll under the blow, spinning around to kick him in the leg. He teeters and falls, tumbling backward and vanishing through the floor.
“It’s three strikes and you’re out, Babe.”
The only ears close enough to hear my joke are the ones on the throng of androids pressing toward me. They don’t look amused.
Getting to my feet, I angle for space to maneuver, but there’s not much left. The swarm of robots has reached me. I grab the closest one and hurl it into the colorful abyss behind me. The next one won’t budge as easily. One of the other robots is holding onto its back. They’re getting smarter.
“Dad!” I turn to find Piper at the nearest side of the time gate. She’s holding a couch cushion from one of the museum displays. She tosses it over the edge of the time gate, and it lands amid the swirling ether but doesn’t sink. No gravitites.
“The floor is lava!” Piper shouts.
“What?”
“The floor is lava!” she shouts again. “Just play the game!”
God, she’s brilliant.
I wrestle one more robot over the edge and into the ether, then judge the distance to the couch cushion Piper has thrown. I make the leap.
I land on my hands and knees atop the cushion, and true to its temporal limitations, it doesn’t budge. My toes dip into the colorful swirl of the time gate, but when I pull them back up they’re still with me. I center myself on the non-gravitized cushion and turn to watch more of the robots tumble into the time gate. The ones at the back haven’t realized the danger. They press forward, shoving their counterparts over the edge. Row upon row of historical figures reach for me on my cushion, lose their balance, and fall into the ether. I can only imagine that they are landing in a heap, sometime tomorrow.
I turn to Piper and her dad on the far side of the gate. “It’s working!”
Piper is grinning, and her dad has made it to his feet, though he is standing on one leg and leaning heavily on Piper for support.
As I watch Nelson Mandela and John F. Kennedy go tumbling into the near future, I can’t help but smile. Here’s a sight I never would have imagined. It’s oddly satisfying to watch.
I’m turning to point out Mahatma Gandhi to Piper when cold fingers close around my ankle. My leg is yanked from under me, and I’m pulled violently off the cushion.
My fingers grasp at the foam and fabric just before I’m hauled under the current of timeless color.
“Dad!” Piper’s shout is suddenly cut off.
I find myself dangling from the ceiling of the back room in the general store. My hands still grasp the cushion on one side of the time gate, but my body has been pulled into tomorrow. My legs are being clawed at and tugged on by a roiling mountain of androids beneath me. They have piled up on the floor and are now climbing over one another to get to me. It’s like a seething robotic mosh pit.
I’m forced to kick Mother Theresa in the face to free myself from her metallic grasp. I use all my strength to haul myself upward, reaching to gain the top of my cushion again. I get an elbow up, then my head. I find myself back at floor level in the museum warehouse, straining to remain in the present, while my legs and lower body are still dangling into tomorrow.
“Dad! I’m coming!”
I turn toward the shout and find that Piper and her dad have thrown more objects on top of the time gate, and she’s using them to work her way toward me. They’ve found a number of wooden folding chairs and lobbed them over the perimeter of temporal emitters. Piper is clambering from chair to chair to try to reach me, but more robotic hands are now protruding from the ether. Nearly all of the androids have exited the tunnel and fallen into the temporal ether, but their sheer numbers are bringing them back.
Piper leaps from the chair she’s on to a closer one, extending a hand toward me. I clasp her wrist and am able to edge my couch cushion closer to her c
hair. Using its stability, I’m able to climb up out of the ether.
It’s several yards in any direction to get to safety, and the number of robots protruding from the floor is increasing. I recognize the broken flagpole of Mary Todd Lincoln protruding from the floor close to the tunnel.
“We have to turn it off!” I shout. “I’m not sure we can make it!”
“I can make it!” Piper is eyeing the distance to the tunnel mouth. She drags one of the chairs she’s not using around in front of her and steps onto it. I help her move the now vacated chair in front of that, allowing her to progress. Something thuds into the bottom of my cushion, nearly dislodging me, and I’m forced to leap up onto the free chair instead.
“I’ll look for more chairs!” Piper’s dad is watching anxiously from beyond the perimeter. “Hang on!”
“No. I can make it!” Piper is watching the space between her and the tunnel where the broken flagpole is surfacing like the fin of a shark amid the waves.
“Watch out for that—”
My words come out too late. Mary Todd Lincoln surges from the ether, riding some unseen swell of the android pile beneath her. Her expression is pure robotic rage. She swings her flagpole hard toward Piper’s chair.
But Piper is too fast. She leaps over the swinging weapon, soaring through the air, before planting a red sneaker cleanly atop the first lady’s head. And then it’s another flying leap, over the remaining temporal soup to land safely in the confines of the gravitizer tunnel. She jams her hand into the time gate controls. The gravitizer tunnel and temporal emitters instantly go dark.
Mary Todd Lincoln loses her head.
Scanning the concrete around our now unassuming folding chairs, I find a multitude of robotic digits and appendages have been left in the present. None of them are moving anymore. I get down from my chair and rush across the now solid floor to Piper. She runs into my arms.
“We did it!”
“I don’t know how you thought of that, but you saved our butts,” I say.
“You say to think your way out, talk your way out, or fight your way out. I went with plan A.”
I muss her hair. “And it was brilliant.”
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 186