by Carl Johnson
at all, but a robot.
The voice was mechanical, emotionless, with emphasis on the wrong syllables as it spoke. The word silent came through in a higher pitch than it should have.
“No,” Unquill said. “Can you at least explain--“
“Explanations are not needed,” the robot interrupted him. “You will be silent. Obey all commands given to you. Do not resist or deviate from your instructions. If you attempt to escape, you will be terminated. Is that understood?”
Savannah nodded even though the robot hadn't spoken to her.
She didn't want to think about going outside, not with hundreds of miles of air between her and the ground.
Unquill opened his mouth as if to speak again. He closed it when the robot raised a weapon at him.
“Walk in front of me. Obey all commands,” intoned Robot Number Two.
Exiting the craft into the hangar, Savannah took a step back when she saw one of their captors in full. Where she might have expected a mouth, she saw a black speaker. A wide luminescent visor covered the portion of the robot's face where its eyes might have been. A single green dot moved back and forth across the visor. Its skull, composed entirely of white metal, stood on its shoulders at a slight angle. The robot's creator had seen fit to make it anatomically similar to humans, though if Savannah had to guess, these robots resembled humans from before the 73rd century.
The robot wore no clothes to speak of, save for a pair of brown leggings whose function Savannah could not discern. The robot possessed three fingers on each hand. Instead of feet, small tripods served to balance the robot's body. Its legs bent just below the hip. When it walked, the robot produced long strides Savannah could not match. Each step produced a thud that echoed throughout the hangar.
She took her place walking in front of one robot, while keeping pace behind another. Kenneth and Unquill had joined her. Kenneth rubbed at his temples. Unquill muttered to himself about how impossible all of this was.
They left the hangar, entering a wide metal corridor. Markings on the walls gave directions in a language Savannah had never seen before.
A second language that made use of pictographs, however, was located directly below the first set of unintelligible markings. They reminded her of the hieroglyphics she'd seen in an educational video about ancient Egyptian civilization.
Instead of birds and jackal-headed gods, this language displayed machine tools. A drill bit had been paired with the half-moon shape of a buzz-saw blade. A series of instruments directly below these rebuses declared something else. Savannah put a hand against the wall where the symbols appeared.
“Do not touch the--“
“Do not touch the walls.”
“--walls.”
The robots spoke in near-unison.
Savannah withdrew her hand.
The corridor stretched on.
After a short while they came to a door marked with large key. The robot in front pressed its hand against the key symbol.
The door slid open.
“Enter.”
Savannah entered the room.
She recognized a prison cell when she saw one.
Two cots on each side of the room hung in place by chains extending diagonally from one corner of the room to its opposite. A rank odor assaulted her nostrils. She held her nose, looking around for the source. Once she saw it, she wished she hadn't. A hole dug into the floor against the back wall served as a bathroom.
From what she could tell, the robots didn't bother cleaning it out regularly.
A single bare bulb flickered overhead, providing barely enough light to illuminate the cell.
Only Unquill hadn't entered the cell when Savannah turned around.
He stood there, dejected.
Savannah wanted to give him a hug just then, even if her arms wouldn't reach all the way around his body. A short time ago, he’d been a happy worker at the Temporal Constabulary, living his life without complaint. Three days had been all it took to put him at the threshold of a room that stunk of rotting feces, surrounded on either side by a robot pointing a weapon at him.
“Enter,” one robot said. “Obey all commands.”
Unquill didn't make a move.
He looked down at the floor.
The robot on his right placed a hand on Unquill's back and shoved him inside.
Once inside, the door closed behind him. He choked back a sob.
“You will wait here for a period of one point two hours,” one of the robots said. “Then you will meet with Hensen Var. Do not attempt to escape. If you attempt escape, you will be thrown outside.”
Unquill sat down on a cot and buried his head in his hands.
Savannah sat down next to him, putting an arm around his back. He began to cry, then stifled his tears. He shook his head once, then shook it again.
“I can't believe this is happening. It's not real. It's not. I'm still dreaming. It's not real. Oh my dear universe, what have you done to me?”
The robots moved away from the door, fading from view. Savannah ran her fingers through her hair, trying to work out the tangles that had developed there. She winced, then gave up the project when it hurt too much.
She didn't know what she could say to console Unquill.
She didn't even know if he could be consoled.
Then, thinking on what he had said, her mind stuck on a particular word.
Savannah said, “What do you mean, you're still dreaming?”
Unquill blinked. He himself didn't seem to know what he had said.
“Dreaming,” he said.
“Still dreaming,” Savannah said.
“Yes, that's right, I forgot, so I did. Forgetfulness, one thing that happens when you get over 150,” Unquill said. “Before I met you. Well, should I tell you this? It might not be revelant.”
Kenneth spoke up for the first time in awhile. “You might as well. We're just going to be sitting here, wherever this is.”
Unquill sighed. “Okay, I'll tell you what I know, then.”
THREE
“IT'S NOT MUCH, but here it is.
“You remember how I told you there are different types of time travelers--the journeyman and the historian, right? I was a journeyman. What I didn't tell you that a journeyman is what people of your age would call a guinea pig--a test subject.
“You'd think information wouldn’t have trouble surviving intact after five thousand years. But because journeymen are the guinea pigs, we’re the first ones to investigate the unknown. The others never need to worry about getting their hands dirty, so to speak.
“In any time period we visit, we usually have incomplete information about the state of the world for that particular venue. If we're going to any place in the future for the first time, we simply have no idea what the world will be like when we go. For instance, when I traveled to your 21st-century world, I knew pollution had run rampant. Many history books tell of times when citizens were forbidden travel to certain areas of the world because a resource company had made a mess.
“We at the Constabulary didn't know the full extent of what had happened. We decided to take a precaution we usually don't take. I went in an atmospheric containment suit.
“As it happened, that decision saved my life.
“When I entered your part of the time stream, I detected inordinate quantities of particulates floating about in the air. Particulates are these little insidious things that get into lungs and stay there. When you live for seventy or so years, I guess it doesn't matter much. When you live to be 500 or 600 years old, particulates matter.
“Your lungs aren't like your stomach. Imagine what might happen if you live for a very long time and all the while, you're inhaling microscopic particles. It adds up.
“So we did away with unnatural particulate matter around the 62nd century. Now, a few generations later, we--or should I say the people of my time--have far less resistance to particulate matter than one might think. That's why I needed one of those suits.
; “You see, decisions regarding the time stream aren't taken lightly. They're made well in advance of their execution. We have hundreds of people called actuaries who do nothing more than sit around all their lives and examine possibilities. When a problem is encountered, they come up with a solution. Faced with the annihilation of the human race, their solution happened to be two young people from a middle age with great potential. So it's only natural that I had this dream about a mission to retrieve you both.
“In every period, beginning with the widespread use of gunpowder on Earth, journeymen such as myself use special environmental protective gear if they are unsure of the area they explore. On occasion, the atmospheric predictor proves true and a person ends up in an area where particulate matter is non-existent. In that case, a further study of the area is made until the time stream path opens at the appointed time. If the predictor is wrong, the journeyman must wear their protective gear and wait until the path is opened from his or her point of origin.
“In your case, I expected the predictor to be wrong. You see, everything had been analyzed carefully--everything but one item of interest that often goes overlooked.
“Shall I tell you what it is? I suppose it wouldn't much of a story if I didn't.
“Chalk. Or, more specifically, the dust that arises from use of an eraser and a chalkboard.
“Your period of history is in the middle of a transition from chalkboards to projection-based learning. The actuaries didn't account for the economic situation of your township. They thought that your instructors would all teach via computer rather than making marks upon a blackboard.
“I didn't tell them, of course. It's not