Whatever happens in the Loop, stays in the Loop.
You shout and cry and carry on until Loop 20, and then you calm down. You start to explore, and by Loop 450, you have a general understanding of the parameters of your prison. The date, the time, where to find food, nearest toilets, bookshop, that kind of thing.
By Loop 1000, you will have extended that particular knowledge to reflect your own particular needs more usefully. Who will be kind, who will not, who you can talk to, who can be relied upon to perform a physical act at short notice on credit.
At Loop 2500, you have your first visit. Your caseworker, wanting to know how you’re settling in. They don’t know because you’re not observed. Even if they could, there’s no need. What you are doing, you’re doing in the distant past. If there was a ripple in the Standard History Eventline they’d know about it, but there is nothing. In these sixteen marooning minutes, fixed somewhere in a backwater of the 1990s, you’re temporally insignificant. A very small pebble in a pond with much larger, more recent and more relevant ripples.
Your caseworker doesn’t stay for long; just to tick a few boxes and move on to the next parcel of time. You ask him for outside news.
“There’s no news,” he says. “This is 1996. Everything you ever did, all the wrong you’ve ever done, all the happiness you’ve ever had—it hasn’t happened yet.”
“Then I haven’t actually committed a crime either.”
“Not yet,” he agrees cheerfully, “but you will, and with a hundred percent certainty. If it’s in the Standard History Eventline—which it is—it will happen, it did happen, it has happened. The fact that you’re here proves it.”
The logic isn’t totally sound, but then in the time industry, very little is.
“Has my lawyer lodged an appeal?”
The caseworker points to a pram the other side of the food court.
“That’s your lawyer. She doesn’t even know she’s going to be a lawyer. Take it up with her.”
He was bluffing. The toddler’s name is Charlotte. Her mother is Keilly, waiting for an old friend from school who is having a hard time. Good person on the whole, doing the best she can. You know, because you’ve chatted. Twelve times.
By Loop 5000, you’ve pushed the geographical boundaries of your prison, and discovered just how far you can get in your minutes. You can catch a bus or a train or even a cab—but the furthest you can get, furthest you ever got, is on a stolen motorcycle. Not the most powerful you could find but the fastest within the shortest time frame. You get almost twelve miles out of town to the south, but your time runs out within sight of the cast-iron road bridge. And no matter what you do, you can’t change that. You challenge yourself, you practice endlessly, you push too hard and you die in the attempt. It’s painful, but you come back, right as rain, just with a scuffed coat. No matter what you try, you never cross the bridge; it is the limit of your time and space. It’s the horizon you won’t ever cross.
By Loop 10,000, you’re starting to get weird, and angry, and desperate. You stop logging how many loops you’ve been in, and you kill yourself for the first time, then, when that doesn’t satisfy, you kill someone else. Someone you didn’t like to begin with, then just random people. But you don’t actually kill anyone or at least, not for very long. You may go on an orgy of violence just then, and work through your fury in a hundred or so loops until you calm down and start to log your loops again.
By Loop 20,000, you’ll have been Looped for over six months, and pretty much every sound, movement and scent will be familiar to you. You can predict what people will say, what people will do. You start to relax, read books, sketch, learn a musical instrument.
You start to count how many loops to go, rather than how many have been. Eight hundred and twenty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-four, or thereabouts: about twenty-two years in sixteen-minute hexitemporal segments. A couple of days later, when the subtracted Loops don’t seem to be making much of a dent from your tally, you go back to counting up again, and life gets back to normal.
You start talking about yourself in the second person. You’re not sure why.
You eat, you sleep, you shit, you wash, you exercise.
You are Looped. You are relooped, you are relooped again. Again, and again, and again.
“Will sir be having a dessert today?” asks the same waitress, taking away your plates and smiling in a friendly yet mechanical manner. You usually eat here and always the same—a ready-made burger that you divert to your table using some pretext or other. You’ve become connected to the waitress, but she doesn’t know it. You know her name, and what her mother thinks of her new boyfriend. Little by little you get to know everything about her, but she knows nothing of you. To her, you are just one more faceless customer on an unremarkable Wednesday late in the summer of 1996. You don’t know how her life turns out.
“Time is short,” you say, “but thanks anyway.”
“I’ll get the check.”
She doesn’t have time to get the check but you knew she wouldn’t. The world resets to the beginning of the loop. You are back outside in the parking lot, the place and time where your loop always begins. You have a generic car key in your pocket but the parking lot is large. Every tenth loop, you search for the car you arrived in, but you have yet to have any luck. It wasn’t in the multi-story, nor any of the open-air lots. You are slowly working your way through all the parked cars, but it will take some time. Hereford is a big place.
That’s when Quinn arrives. You haven’t seen him since your trial. He won, you didn’t.
“Hello, Algy.”
Anything remotely new in the sixteen is so utterly alien that it leaps out at you like a chainsaw on full power. You jump.
“Sorry,” says Quinn, looking around. “Want to talk?”
You know it’s a dumb question. Of course you want to talk. You go to a cafe. You order coffee, he orders nothing. The rule is never take anything out of the loop - not even liquid.
He asks how it’s going.
“It’s kind of samey,” you reply, trying to be sarcastic.
He asks if you’re past the berserker stage and you say that you are.
“How many did you kill?”
“One day it was eighteen, I think. I wasn’t really counting.”
“It gets tiresome, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” you say, “and messy, and pointless. What do you want?”
“We want to know who was responsible. Who gave you the access codes, whose bright idea it was to go trolling around the Middle Ages. Most of all, how you all got past the 1720 pinch point without setting off every trembler at head office. That could be real useful to us.”
You tell him you flashed through during the monthly telemetry squirt from the Renaissance, but you know he knows this. What he actually wants is the gold. Taking that much historical gold destabilized the monetary supply in the early history of banking. And banking doesn’t like to have its history pissed around with. The ripples cause crashes. Our heist has already been blamed for two depressions, the crash of 2008, and some inexplicable currency variations. Historical gold is a good moderator. You want financial stability? Flood the past with gold. Lots of it.
You tell him it’s in the Holocene.
“The Holocene is a big place,” he says. “You need to be more specific.”
You tell him you never knew where the gold went. That only Kitty knew.
“Kitty says that you know.”
“Kitty’s lying.”
“One of you is.”
“I was only a small cog,” you tell him, “blinded by cash and the misplaced hubris of down-streaming. I’d never done the Middle Ages before. Kitty asked me to join her. I was…flattered.”
Quinn takes a deep breath. Your sixteen minutes were up long ago and you haven’t reset. That’s what happens when they drop someone into your loop. You hear new stuff, see things that hadn’t happened, like you’re watching a sequel to a film you’re very f
amiliar with.
“Last word?” asked Quinn.
“Last word.”
And you are back at the multi-story, Loop 42,001. All the players have reset themselves to their start positions. The kid on the bicycle, the balloon seller, the harassed father with the two unruly kids, the busker with the accordion. The same sixteen-minute section all over again. You look for your car, and you don’t find it. You give up at Loop 61,200, and never look again.
You’re hungry again and go and find the waitress. The burger tastes the same. It should do; it’s the same one. You try out a joke you found in a book in Waterstone’s. You think she will laugh, and she does. You know her sense of humor. You know her.
At Loop 150,000, you have an intimate knowledge of the town and everyone in it. Even so, you systematically search out and take fascination in anything that is new or unfamiliar. You find a new street, or knock on a door you’ve never knocked on before, or find your way to a room you never knew existed, with a person you’ve never seen, a closet space you’ve never explored before. You visit the same place for the next ten loops, learn everything to be learned, then move on. Everything that happened within that sixteen minutes, you are an expert upon. It is an expertise of the narrowest of fields.
At Loop 200,000, Quinn visits again. You expect he will because two hundred thousand is a nice round multiple of sixteen, and the Time Engines work on hexadecimal architecture.
“Back so soon?” you ask, still being sarcastic. Quinn doesn’t do sarcasm, you realize.
“We need you to turn Kitty,” he says, and shows you an agreement from the Temporal Attorney. If you could find out where and when in the Holocene the gold is hidden, you could expect to be out a hundred thousand loops earlier. You hold out for two hundred thousand, and get it.
You sign the agreement, and ask where she is.
“Where she’s always been, ten minutes north.”
You know this is unusual. Loops were designed never to overlap geographically or temporally. Intersections gave convicts potential areas of conflict with other prisoners. Quinn tells you to make it look like a chance meeting.
You drive out north on the same motorcycle you used to try and reach the bridge. It takes you until Loop 200,032 before you spot her, and she you. It’s not hard. Anything that is at variance to the rigidity of the timeline stands out like a flashing beacon. You drive past one another on the road, you both stamp on the brakes and then back up.
“Algy?” she says.
You say hello. She doesn’t look very happy. The gold heist was her gig, after all. You were just the muscle.
You find that the maximum amount of time you can spend together is one minute and nine seconds before you both get reset to the head of your loops. You tell her about Quinn’s deal straight away. She is not surprised.
“He asked to find out the same from you.”
She says she doesn’t know where the gold is but you know that, because you’ve known where the gold was all along. All seventeen tons of it, lying in the open on the edge of a bay that fifteen thousand years later, will be in the Derry peninsula. It’s still there, in the back garden of Mr. and Mrs. Tyrone, under eight feet of accreted soil and peat. They have barbecues over it, with their friends.
Over the next three hundred loops, you try and rebuild your relationship with Kitty, but all she wants to know is about the gold. You come to realize there was never a relationship. You think you might tell her, but you don’t. There’s nothing to be gained from it.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” she says finally.
“No.”
You don’t meet her again. You turn back to the waitress in the burger joint. She has a delightful gurgle of a laugh. You find yourself in love.
Quinn returns at Loop 260,000. You tell him Kitty doesn’t know where the gold is, or if she does, she’s not telling.
“You’re both a bunch of time wasters,” says Quinn, apparently not realizing the irony of his words. “Enjoy your time.”
You go back to your sixteen-minutes loops, over and over again. Another year’s worth of sixteens go by. It’s never the time, it’s the repetition. There is not a book you haven’t read, not a person you haven’t spoken to. You’ve been served by the waitress over a hundred thousand times, and when Quinn reappears at Loop 320,000, you do the deal, but for a full pardon. You are one third of the way through your sentence. To be the eighteenth richest person on the planet, you thought you could last out.
“Everyone comes to their senses eventually,” says Quinn. “If the gold is where you say it is, it’ll be time served.”
It is your final loop, the only one that will have any lasting consequence upon the townsfolk around you. Pointlessly, you say your goodbyes to people who have met you only a few minutes before. To them it’s just plain weird, but to you it means more than you know how to express. The man in the corner store who was always cheery, the busker who played the accordion in the main square. Most of all, the waitress. You feel emotional speaking to her. You make her laugh again and hand her your address on a scrap of paper.
“O-kay,” she says, somewhat uneasily.
You have a speech, and it’s a good one because you’ve had ten years to write it. She stares at you as you speak and raises an eyebrow. You know that no one has ever understood her so well, no one has ever encapsulated what she needs in words of such poetry and power. You know she’ll remember you.
But it’s not to meet in the 1990s. It’s to meet you back here in twelve years, if she wants. It’s a long shot, but she finds you intriguing rather than creepy, which is a good sign.
And that’s where you are now, in a much-changed market town, the shop fronts modernized, the clothes different, shoppers clutching smart phones, going about their business. You’ve been out for a couple of days. You don’t have a job and you don’t have much money. But you have liberty, and the sixteen minutes you’ve just witnessed has faded without ceremony into the past.
There have been 8,356 different sixteen minutes since your release. It’s a hard habit to break. You’ll be counting your sixteens for at least another six months. You glance at your watch and wonder if she will turn up, always supposing things didn’t work out for her. You hope they did, of course, because she was a good person, and deserves a good life.
You’re still waiting.
American Changeling
By Mary Robinette Kowal
Half-consciously, Kim put a hand up to cover her new nose ring. It pissed her parents off no end that she could tolerate touching cold iron and they couldn’t.
Iron still made her break out sometimes, but didn’t burn her. It had taken forever to find someone to make an iron nose ring, but the effort would be totally worth it.
“Kimberly Anne Smith.” Mom’s voice caught her in the foyer as surely as if she’d been called by her true name. “I’ve been worried sick. Do you know what time it is?”
“11:49.” Kim dropped her hand and turned to face Mom, her Doc Martens making a satisfactory clomping on the hardwood floor. “I’m here. Home before midnight. No one with me.” Sometimes she thought about bringing friends home to show them what her parents really looked like after their glamour dropped.
Everyone thought Mom was so pretty, so Betty Crocker, and Dad was all Jimmy Stewart. Whatever. Maybe if people saw that her parents were freaks like her they wouldn’t look at her with such pity.
“I specifically asked you to come home straight after school, young lady. I tried calling your cell, I don’t know how many times. You have no idea how worried I’ve been.”
“I was hanging out with Julia and Eve on Hawthorne.”
Mom took a step closer, wearing pearls, even at home. “What’s that in your nose?”
Kim blew her dyed-pink hair out of her face. “It’s called a nose ring.” Having people stare at her for the piercings and hair and leather was way better than having them stare at her because she looked prematurely old, like a progeria victim.
From the den, her father called, “Is she home?” A piece of ice clinked against glass. She so did not want to deal with Dad if he’d been drinking. He got maudlin about the old country and if she had to hear one more story about how life was so much better in Faerie, she’d scream.
“Yes!” Kim shouted. “I’m home and I’m going to bed so I don’t have to look at myself.”
She ran up the stairs two at a time, Utilikilt swinging against her legs. Mom hollered up the stairs at her, but Kim didn’t care. She hopped over the salt line on her threshold, slammed the door to her room and threw herself on the bed without even bothering to turn on the lights. What was the point?
The mantel clock downstairs chimed midnight.
Kim’s mom knocked on her door. “Kim? Come out, honey, your father and I need to talk to you.”
“Why don’t you come in?”
“If you’ll sweep the salt aside.”
Rolling her eyes, Kim dragged herself off the bed and opened the door. With midnight, the glamour masking her mother’s appearance had dropped. Mom had shrunk and twisted, aging one hundred years in the stroke of the clock. Gone was her carefully coiffed platinum hairdo in exchange for sparse, dry hair. The hall light gleamed off her scalp. Her nose nearly touched her chin, where a wart sported more hair than was on the rest of her head.
The thing that burned Kim like cold iron was that, aside from her dyed hair, she knew she looked just like her mother. All changelings were born looking old. That might be fine if you lived in Faerie with other people of your species, but here, Kim was just a freak. “What.”
Mom smiled, showing her scraggly teeth, but her chin trembled and her eyes were moist. “We’ve had a message. From the old country. Come downstairs so we can talk about it.”
Despite herself, Kim stepped over the salt line, into the hall. The only time she could remember Mom crying was when their dog had died. She’d held Buffy’s head and wept like her heart had broken. Dad had said the golden retriever had been the first mortal thing Mom had ever loved. Death wasn’t common in Faerie.
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