The forms included typical basic identification questions, asking for name and city and home earth and timestream and occupation. When Art did not know an answer, he either called to Alex for help in the most annoying tone he could muster or made up an answer. These basic identification questions were followed by a huge psychological evaluation section for which Normal-Art merely wrote down the first ridiculous ideas to pop into his head. These tended to be jokes and commentary pertaining to fecal matter.
Meanwhile, much to Alex’s chagrin and Normal-Art’s amusement, Drillbot could not fill out his forms because he had no hands, only drills incapable of picking up a pen. Thus, Alex transcribed the answers Drillbot called out, which took a ridiculously long time because Drillbot’s speech was often interrupted when his gears seemed to clack against one another.
Finally, after writing for so long that his hand had long ago spasmed into constant cramping, Normal-Art completed his forms in triplicate. Ginny and Older-Art finished soon after, and following that, Alex finished filling out Drillbot’s forms. Normal-Art noticed that toward the end, Alex had stopped asking the robot for answers and simply wrote in answers of his own.
Normal-Art glanced up and saw that the queue for the bureaucrat’s desk had grown much, much longer. The old woman in the teal shirt—seemingly the only person working today—had not called any other customers to her station, instead waiting silently for Normal-Art and his compatriots to finish their paperwork.
Normal-Art led the group back to her station. He smiled and said, “Lady, I like your style.”
She did not smile back. Instead, she pointed to a rectangular square of teal paper that hung from the ceiling. “Stand in front of that, one at a time,” she ordered.
They did so, and each member of the group had a portrait taken. Afterward, the woman took one of the completed triplicate forms from each of their stacks and dropped them into a machine that began scanning them. The other two completed sets of forms she dropped haphazardly into the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet.
The group stood in silence for nearly two hours. Normal-Art dozed on his feet, but then jerked awake when the old woman’s computer finally erupted with a loud DING. Four licenses materialized from the bottom of her computer screen and dropped onto the counter in front of her.
Normal-Art grabbed his. It looked nearly identical to the B.I.T. badge that God-Art had insisted he implant in his chest when they first met. It had name, address, earth number, year of origin, time period, timestream, a picture, and a circular B.T.T. seal, which consisted of a silver clock with no hands surrounded by a ring in which was inscribed the words, “Time is on our side.” Every few seconds, hands appeared on the clock and spun around wildly.
Remembering the B.I.T. badge sent a chill down Normal-Art’s spine. Then the method in which he had applied the B.I.T. badge flashed through his memory, and his heart dropped. He glanced over at Alex and Older-Art and said, “We’re not about to do what I think we’re going to do with these things, are we?”
“Wait, what does that mean?” asked Ginny. “What’re we going to do with them?”
“Let’s show her, Arthur,” Alex ordered Older-Art. “Help me get the license on your younger-self.”
Older-Art smirked at Normal-Art. He said, “Unfortunately, licensing here works just like badging does for the B.I.T. You’ll be OK. It’ll only take a moment.”
Normal-Art held up his hands in protest. “No! Wait! I don’t want to get licensed. Just send me home!”
Instead, Alex stalked behind Normal-Art and grabbed the bottom of Normal-Art’s shirt. He yanked it off, exposing Normal-Art’s relatively flabby torso. On his right pectoral, his B.I.T. badge stood in stark contrast to his pale skin. His gawking face stared out at the world from amidst the card embedded within the skin.
Normal-Art had no time to wonder why God-Art had chosen to resurrect him with the badge intact before Alex grabbed his hands and held them behind his back. “Place the card on his left pectoral,” ordered Alex.
Older-Art turned the B.T.T. license over in his hand so that Normal-Art’s picture and identification information faced out. Then he touched the back of the card to Normal-Art’s chest. At first, Normal-Art felt only a slight tingling sensation. But then the skin began burning. His epidermis melted and engulfed the card. Much like the time that God-Art had badged him with the B.I.T. identification card, he tried to scream, but no sound left his mouth. The card popped out of his chest like a cartoon-heart and then slapped back down in place. It looked like he now had two badge-shaped nipples resting in his skin mere inches above his regular nipples.
His breath came in shallow puffs. The pain was too much. The situation was too much. The realization that he was yet again being whisked away somewhere he did not wish to go overwhelmed him. His head ached, and little multicolored lights began appearing in his vision. Seconds later, everything went black.
Chapter 6
NEW OLD EMOTIONS
Ginny felt something wrap around her leg. She threw back the blanket on her bunk and looked down. A pink tentacle had grown from the floor and had snaked under the blanket to grab her. It coiled around her right calf three times. It squeezed her until she felt her tibia and fibula snap. As the bones shattered, she screamed, but no sound escaped her lips. The broken bones tore through her skin, and the pink tentacle shoved itself into the rips in her skin. It found a vein, squeezed into it, and then followed the vein to her heart. Pink filled her vision. Hatred overwhelmed her.
Ginny awoke with a gasp. Sweat covered her body in rivulets. She threw off the blanket and this time, rather than finding a pink tentacle advancing toward her, she found that her bed was so wet that it would not have seemed out of place in the murky abyss of some mermaid’s underwater kingdom.
She felt her torso with her hand. She cried in relief when she found the skin was solid and she had no hole permanently ripped through her middle, as she had for the ten miserable years that she had spent in service to the Pink One5. She cried even harder when she felt her eyes, confirming that she had two of them, and then cried even harder than that when she rubbed a hand across each arm, confirming that they were both once more covered in flesh6. She cried harder than ever when she realized that she felt hope, and that it had not been immediately crushed in a deluge of hateful pink overflowing her veins. Her emotions were her own. She breathed deep her freedom and sobbed into her hands, for decades had passed since she had felt any emotion other than despair or pink-hued hatred.
She stood from her cot and glanced around the room. It was a small twelve-by-eight affair with a cot near the door, a nightstand for personal effects near that, a set of drawers on the opposite wall for clothing, and a lavatory at the back. There was a small lip rising from the floor that separated the lavatory from the remainder of the room, and she had tripped over the lip first time she strode through her room. But it was there to keep water contained in the lavatory without flooding the rest of the quarters, since the back four-by-eight section of the room was occupied by a sink with a mirror above it, a toilet, and a shower. A drain lay in the floor below the shower and a plastic curtain hung from the ceiling that she could draw across the lip in the floor to prevent water from splashing everywhere during showers.
Ginny walked to the bathroom, careful to step over the lip. The tile was cold on her feet, but she did not pay it any mind. She walked to the mirror and watched herself cry. Eventually she was so overcome with her freedom that she could no longer cry, but instead had to laugh. She watched herself laugh for a while, the gap between her front teeth black in the overhead light and her snaggletooth poking out from beneath her top lip. She glanced down at her body. Her B.T.T. license shone as the light hit her left breast. She laughed at the confused look on her face in the picture. Then she stared hard below that, at the spot where her sternum met her belly. She laughed until she cried once more. Still no hole.
Ginny and her Art and the older-version of her Art and Drillbot had been guide
d to their quarters after the licensing—her Art had to be carried by Drillbot because he had fainted—and were told by First Officer Alex that after their collective ordeal over the past decades, they would be given a fortnight to rest and adjust to life aboard the B.T.S. Unicorn Husker, after which they would embark on their mission to save the Space-Time-Multinuum. Alex refused to elucidate on what the mission would entail, but he answered most other questions from the group.
For the past three days since being guided to her quarters, she had stayed contained to her room. The past three nights had played out identically to this one: some Pink-One-inspired nightmare invaded her sleep. In these nightmares, she was either killed outright, or she was returned to the pink fold through a massive act of violence, or she watched her home reality consumed in a fiery swath of destruction. Following whichever expression this nightmare chose to visit upon her, she then awoke in a pool of her own making. And then she spent the rest of the day simply feeling whatever emotion she felt like feeling and watching herself in the mirror as the emotions rolled over her.
Before her experience with the Pink One, if she had stood outside herself and watched her behave as she was behaving now, she would have assumed she had lost her connection to reality and needed to be sent to a mental ward. Instead, she continued staring at herself.
*
On the fourth day, Ginny finally left her room. She smiled and waved and said hello to every single person she passed in the crowded halls. Many did not reply, though many others smiled back at her, taken aback but delighted by her unorthodox, utter friendliness.
When a spider-creature wearing a purple shirt hissed back joyfully at her and then high-fived her with all eight of its arms, she rushed to find a private alcove in which she sat and cried with joy for twenty minutes.
She walked all over the ship this day, exploring everywhere her license gave her access. She saw the engines at the back of the ship, each of which rose over twenty-levels tall. She met Officer Trixie the Cockatrice in the Jump Chamber, which was located on the top level at the aft-and-starboard corner of the ship. At the bottom of a staircase near the bridge, Ginny found the pub, which was gigantic and filled with crew members wearing an array of purple shirts, marigold shirts, and teal shirts. Ginny noticed that there was little intermingling between shirt colors. She shrugged, drank her first beer in over two decades, and coughed with every swallow as the bubbles tickled her throat. Feeling drunk from her single beer, she wandered the halls until she found the mess hall. She ate so much food that she ended up vomiting most of it back up. Her body could not yet handle the richness.
The next day, she decided to find Art’s cabin. Though she had helped drop him off after he had fainted at the licensing, those first hours aboard this ship were such a blur that she could not recall where the cabin was located. She walked from her room to one of the touchscreen computer terminals that lay embedded in the walls of nearly every hallway on the ship. She tapped the black screen with her forefinger. Green letters appeared, spelling out, “Identify yourself.”
Ginny shrugged and did what she had seen crew members do throughout her exploration of the ship. She leaned her left breast against the terminal so that she touched the screen with the spot where the B.T.T. license lay under her clothing. She felt a tiny jolt of electricity and jerked back. It must have been a signal that the license had been read and accepted, because where the computer terminal had been mostly lifeless, it was now filled with menu options, each of which was a different color. She found a green tab that read “Cabin Directory,” and she tapped it.
A new page flashed up on screen and prompted her to enter a name. She typed in Art’s full name and received two cabin numbers and locations in response. She was confused at first, but then she remembered that the older-Art was the same person as her Art, so they would show up identically in the system.
Her life was made at least slightly easier when she read the details of each entry. The entry displayed original earth and timestream numbers, as well as cabin and floor numbers. The Arts were both being housed on the same floor, Deck 8, the one above Ginny’s. One’s cabin number was fifty-six while the other’s was seventy-five. She shrugged, logged off the terminal, and decided to check the lower cabin number first.
Ginny walked to a nearby elevator bank and waited her turn to enter. She disembarked on the floor above hers and walked through a hallway with cabins lining both sides. The numbers started at one on the left side of the hall and two on the right. Ginny came to the room on her right marked fifty-six and knocked. Embedded into the walls outside every cabin were small shelving units with plexiglass doors in which crew members placed their shoes before entering their quarters. She did not look in this room’s external shelving unit, or she would have noticed a pair of pink carpet slippers sitting next to a pair of busted, undersized B.T.T. uniform shoes, which were sitting next to a pair of larger, clean, unbusted B.T.T. uniform shoes.
The door zipped upward into the ceiling, and she found herself face to face with the older-Art. He arched an eyebrow and said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” she said back.
He smiled. “I’m trying to remember from my past which visit this would be. Have you been to my younger-self’s cabin yet?”
She shook her head.
His smile grew wider. “Then he’s in for a treat. He won’t realize it, because I was still an idiot back then, but he’s in for one, nevertheless. I’ll see you back here before too long,” he said. Then he pointed down the hallway. “He’s in cabin seventy-five, down that way.”
Ginny nodded. “Thanks,” she said.
The door to cabin fifty-six shut in her face, and she turned to continue walking down the hallway. She reached the proper cabin and knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked harder. No answer. She slammed the butt of her palm into the space between the red numerals seven and five that were painted on the metal door.
Finally, the door zipped upward into the ceiling and her Art stood before her. He looked so unkempt that he could have passed for an unwashed panhandler on the street, if said panhandler were wearing nothing but ragged boxer shorts. A scowl was etched across his face. He said, “Are you deaf? I said who is i-”
Recognition hit him, and he cut himself off. “Oh,” he said. “Hi, Ginny. I thought it was another B.T.T. person coming to bother me about eating.”
Ginny smiled. “Can I come in?” she asked.
“I don’t know, can you?” he replied with a smirk.
Ginny sighed. “You’re so annoying. May I come in?”
“Yes, you may,” Art said, and waved her in. Her nose was assaulted by the smell of barbaric slovenliness. But the smell was one she had not experienced in years, and tears came unbidden to her eyes.
Art placed a hand on her shoulder. “You OK?” he asked.
“No, I’m Ginny,” she replied.
Art sighed. “You’re basically one big dad joke, did you know that? But really, you OK?”
Ginny nodded. “Yeah, more than I have been in years. You?”
Art shook his head. “No. I just want to go home. And nobody’s listening. They should, like, rename this ship the B.T.S. Earless-Unicorn Husker.”
Ginny broke into a fit of laughter. She guffawed and guffawed until she was sitting on the floor and tears were streaming down her face. Art stared at her and scratched the back of his neck in confusion. He said, “Uhh, Gin, that was probably the most unfunny thing I’ve ever said. I wasn’t even expecting a pity laugh. I said it mainly so you’d give me one of your annoyed sighs, because those are really cute.”
Ginny looked up at him and smiled. “It’s just been so long. So long since I got to enjoy even a terrible joke.”
Art frowned. “That pink bear really did a number on you, didn’t it?”
Ginny nodded, deciding not to mention that Hell had not been so great to her, either. Instead, she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him down on the floor with her. He complained the whole way down about how c
old the floor looked, but she clamped a hand over his mouth to shut him up. When he finally did cease complaining, she said, “What’d you mean when you said that you thought I was somebody from the B.T.T. coming to bother you about eating?”
Art grinned. “I’ve got a plan, Gin. They said it themselves: they need me to save the Space-Time-Whatever. But I don’t want to. So, I’ve gone on a hunger strike in protest and am refusing to leave my room. If I’m really the key to saving everything, they can’t afford for me to die on them. So, they’ll have to let me go! You want to join me?”
She stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. If the B.T.T. needed him to save the Space-Time-Multinuum, they were not going to let him die of hunger, but they also were obviously not going to send him home, either. “You are such an idiot,” she said. “But I missed you.”
Ginny did not wait for him to say something to ruin the moment. She kissed him. More tears fell from her face as he kissed her back with his limp lips. She was quite positive that he was the worst kisser in the entire Multiverse, but even the worst kiss was better than anything she had experienced in as long as she could remember. She cried with joy. She stayed in his cabin this night.
Tonight, though, when she awoke from her pink nightmare naked and covered in sweat and terrified and panting and screaming about the Pink One, she at least was not alone.
Art rolled over to her, stroked her cheek gently until she calmed down, and said, “I think you wet the bed.”
* * *
5 The Pink One is a cosmic incarnation of Death/Destruction. Ginny served the Pink One as its Right Hand of Destruction for a decade, during which the pair destroyed countless realities. In exchange for Ginny’s service, the Pink One spared Ginny’s home reality. The Pink One takes the form of a cosmic, pink teddy bear. Coincidentally, it is also a version of Ginny originating from the center of the Multiverse.
And Now, Time Travel Page 7