The Time Trousers of Professor Tempus: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure

by Michael Ronson

  "She? Her?" Professor Bathby asked, rather breaking the mood I was creating. I brushed this aside, as I had done the lint, which is to say, with great aplomb.

  "Oh yes," I went on, yawning into the back of my hand as the robots worked the pistons of the door, "EVA. She’s a living computerized brain. An intelligence. Why, any moron could deduce that there was one centralized intelligence controlling both the robots and the station systems. I’d say that the situation was nearly impossible. We’re all pretty doomed. It would be incredible if anyone could solve this. Impossible even. No mortal man could think his way out of this.Gods would find this taxing. A super genius would be stumped. We’re all toast." I struck a thoughtful but worried posture, flexing my biceps as I clasped my hands behind my head.

  Funkworthy sidled up to me, as he tended to do (terrible one for sidling was Ebenezer) with a wary look in his eye and a suspicious angle to his elbow. He spoke in an undertone.

  "What?" I yelled. "Don’t speak in an undertone! Everything’s on fire and robots are trying to break in, it’s bloody noisy in here."

  He made an impatient noise and matched my volume as best he could.

  "What are you up to, Captain? You seem awfully happy about how doomed we are. If you’ve got something up your sleeve now would be the time to take it out. I can’t say I like how that Class 7 sun is looking at us and that’s not to mention the killer robots."

  Maybe I was overplaying my hand. I took it down a notch, tried to look dejected. "Just putting a brave face on for the civilian, Ebenezer. I can’t see any way out. I’m not some kind of handsome genius. I mean; that’s what I’d have to be to get us out of this, right?"

  "What?"

  "I’d have to be some kind of handsome, charismatic super genius to get us out of this. Right? You agree with that?"

  "Well, I guess so."

  "Pardon?"

  "Yes!"

  "I think it’d really be for the best, if anyone were to chronicle this later, if you were to state that fully," I prodded.

  Ebenezer took a frantic look around him. "Fine! You’d have to be some kind of handsome, charismatic super genius to get us out of this," he said finally.

  "OK." I called over to the professor who was a little preoccupied with looking at the metallic claws that were working at the door. "Professor! Ellen!" she looked over, "I was just saying; can you think of a way out of this?"

  She took a break from trying to stay alive to look annoyed. "No! Of course not. I think I would have shared it by now."

  "Yes, you’d need to be quite brilliant to get out of this." I mused out loud. I didn’t want to be too subtle. I had to make sure that the words were sinking in. After all, there was no harm in making this a better story before I went over and talked EVA out of killing us all. I let their words sink in as I struck a thoughtful planning kind of posture. When enough time had elapsed I stopped flexing my biceps and holding one fist up to my temple and made a noise suggestive of a grand breakthrough.

  "Plan! That’s IT! A thinking AI brain! An autonomous, truly intelligent computerized brain. Doc- I said this thing’s a thinking brain, right? That means it can be spoken to- reasoned with."

  I walked over toward the control panel and dusted off the interface.

  "Now this EVA here-"

  Bathby made to interrupt but I shushed her by raising my voice.

  "THIS EVA would be, I conjecture programmed with a personality- a female personality." I tapped the activation key and checked my reflection in EVA’s screen as she powered up.

  "Captain-" Bathby broke in, rushing over to me. I placed my hand on her flapping mouth and spoke louder once more. She was really putting a dampener on things.

  "NOW, as several of my ex-lovers, a few robot technicians, a certain holodeck maintenance team and one vending machine repairman will attest, I’ve got a way with the AIs. Something about me adds a few errant twos into their binary code. Now, this may be crazy, but I think I can work some of that legendary mojo on our friend EVA here." I noticed the display flicker to life and turned to face her. "What do you say hon-"

  I stopped.

  The words died on my lips.

  Bathby, at my side finally explained herself. It was about time.

  "I don’t know where you’re getting your information from. ‘She’? ‘Her’? That was months ago, back in the planning stages. No, no. We changed it. We received a note from one of our backers. What was that guy’s name again?" she asked to herself.

  "Tempus?" I asked limply.

  "That’s it! Wonderful donor to our research here. Been backing us from the start. He only had one stipulation and that was this; we changed the AI personality model. No real reason for it, I suppose. It hardly affects its running. Just an aesthetic change."

  I looked up at the face, the bloodhound eyes, the digitized mustache, the pipe.

  "It’s not EVA," said Bathby above the screech of the sirens, "it’s STEVE-A."

  The green flickering form of STEVE-A’s face loomed down at me, all malevolent mutton chops and beefy jowls.

  "Wotch’a," he muttered gruffly at me.

  I could only stare up at him. Even as the windows turned scorching red as we tumbled toward the sun, as the doors buckled under the relentless assault of the merciless robot killing machines, as the sirens wailed and the sprinkler system kicked in. I looked up at his digital face.

  "So," Bathby yelled as she clung to my arm, "what was this fantastic plan you were talking about?"

  I turned to Funkworthy.

  "Oh balls."

  ---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---

  Balls were the first thing I saw; balls of pure energy circulating, flashing and dancing, forming a tunnel but quickly spinning so as to become nearly imperceptible. It was like being in a long tube that resembled the inside of a washing machine, if it were made out of pure time energy and spinning in an ever shifting pattern of light that went beyond the bounds of normal experience. So, not that much like the inside of a washing machine, I guess. Maybe a tumble drier.

  I was trying my best to keep a journal of my experiences as I slipped through a hole in the fabric of time. After all, very few people ever did this and came out on the other end. Most emerged severely mad, or irreparably physically impaired. I remember the pictures in the medical books still; the boy with the organs of a baby and the skin of an eighty year old man, the woman with a thousand year old face and the skeleton of a foetus. Of course, some never came out at all. Those were the scariest of all, since records of their non-emergence were so necessarily scant that they could theoretically be almost infinite. But since I was apparently set on being sluiced down a time hole, I thought it at least prudent to take some kind of a record of it for science, for posterity.

  However this noble goal was being hindered quite a lot by the pain that the trousers were causing. They were pulling me roughly forward(ish) and the strain of this force was having a painful effect on posterior, pelvis and (to be perfectly frank and bluntly straightforward about it) genitally inclined regions of my frontal bottom. So I was quite aware that as I was tearing down a time tube at a rate of several ice ages per square mile per second and seeing the wonders of theoretical physics before me, that I was mostly busy clutching my hands over my arse, wincing and screaming.

  This is not the first time that being forced into Space’s trousers has had this effect.

  Whatever path I was on, my speed, my destination, it was all Tempus’ doing. I had keyed my trousers into the same frequency as his, so wherever he went I was sure to follow. I looked up to a large, human-sized tear in the ball-wall ahead. What lay beyond it was a mystery, wreathed in blinding white light. I saw it seconds (or years? or minutes? or aeons?) before it was set to consume me on my path.

  I shielded myself and braced for the impact, feeling the draw on my trousers grow exponentially as the light grew blinding. I tried to dodge away from the thing out of reflex but the time tunnel had me in a vice-like grip now and I was propelled into
it to meet

  pure

  white

  stillness

  The motion died away. The sound in my ears dimmed. The light became one solid thing. My trousers stopped hurting and for a second I was floating in beautiful serene white light.

  When reality comes back it comes in layers.

  A shadow forms below you as you notice the floor. You look up to see the walls beam in, as if dragged into a computer program but for the second before they become permanence you glimpse behind them birds, streets, seas, towns, marriages and cornershops that are the reality behind them. Then that permanence blocks off the reality forming behind it and you realize a light has formed above your head, which probably means there’s a ceiling. You look up to make sure and again, the stars, galaxies, clouds and aircraft above you peek in before the ceiling tiles bound you inside themselves. Sound comes swiftly as your own breath and heartbeat are allowed back into the universe and the low level hum that is civilization fills your ears. Like the smell of home, it all comes back and becomes a nothingness in an instant.

  Life came next and I marvelled at a man’s hand before me. The bones formed and grew veins around them, which bloomed fungus-like musculature only to be covered by skin, clothing. I looked aghast at it, as the fist formed in front of me, holding a gun. What wonder!

  Wait.

  A gun?

  That’s the last thing to materialize from out of the time stream; feeling. To be more specific, that old familiar feeling of being held at gunpoint and not knowing exactly why. The only difference was that this time, it didn’t seem likely that it was Captain Space Hardcore who was directly responsible for me being held at gunpoint.

  I did as I normally did in these situations and looked around the muzzle of the gun, up the fist, past the engraved cufflinks, up the arm, past the epaulets and up toward the face of the person holding the gun. Perhaps I could reason with-

  Oh God.

  The man before me sighed wearily and cocked his gun. "For the love of God please- PLEASE - don’t say anything to me about time travel," he said.

  "That’s going to be pretty difficult."

  He raised an indulgent eyebrow at me and lowered the gun a quarter inch. "Why’s that, fancy pants?"

  "Well, because- and stop me if you’ve heard this one before- it was you who sent me here….Captain."

  Captain Space Hardcore squinted at me disdainfully. He gave me a look I wished I didn’t recognize. It was his look for deciding whether or not to shoot someone in the face.

  "Oh yes?" He said, affecting nonchalance. "To deliver the trousers I lost, I assume? No wait, it’s to deliver a dire warning about the future, isn’t it? What’s going to happen then? Ape uprising? robot uprising? Robot ape uprising? Souffle uprising? Sun uprising?"

  The chamber we were in was strange, lined as it was with enormous spherical buffers. it was like the inside of some kind of enormous sub woofer. Some kind of scientific chamber, the nodes positively dripping with time energy. Hadn’t Space mentioned something about one of his first postings?

  "Nothing so bad as that- although I have seen several of those things happen (some caused by you in point of fact) but my business here is more mundane than that." I said casually.

  "Mundanity! Well you get points for originality, I guess." His voice was lighter here, his face more youthful.

  "I’m here to stop someone from killing you- Captain Space Hardcore. I was sent here by you in the future, the man I know as Captain Space Hardcore."

  He looked at me for a long second. I knew how to pique his interest, at least. The key was to say his name more than was necessary

  He opened his mouth to speak-

  But was interrupted by a loud intercom, an officious voice over a speaker.

  "Private Hardcore! We have another incoming temporal spike. You know what to do."

  I looked back at Space, who was nodding resolutely to himself. That look was back-

  He sighed, raised his arm.

  And shot me in the face.

  Chapter Eight

  Mental Liberation/ Robot Defenestration

  * * *

  “Madness? Madness? Can you really call me mad? Look at yourself for God’s sake!. Living in a little box in a suburb, getting in a smaller wheeled box in the morning to get to a great big box where you sit for eight hours a day, staring at a glowing box. And I’m mad?! For what? For daring to be different? For dressing a little strangely? For teaching these students to think? For skinning fourteen prostitutes? For embracing life? Well if you’re sane, Chancellor Lacroux, then I’ll happily be called mad.

  Timothy Dreadful

  The Windiest Street I Ever Saw

  Ѻ

  Ache and fog were all that’s what greeted me when I opened my eyes. My brain creaked into life like an antique robot. I had been sent back in time, that much I remembered. I touched a hand delicately to a throbbing head. After that, what? I remembered balls of light and...A pain? It felt as though I’d been shot in the head. I rubbed my temples, tried to focus. I was back in time- for now that’s all I could remember. What year was it?

  "Napoleon’s fighting Caesar again. Someone separate them," a wall mounted speaker blared into the reception area.

  What year was it?!

  I’m no historian. How am I meant to guess a correct year with just a few clues? Look at the technology? Sure. Ask who’s President? Classic. But there are pitfalls.

  "Jesus has soiled himself. Again. Not my turn to clean him up," a nurse muttered as she walked past the bench on which I was sat.

  What if you appear in 2451 in a 1950s themed diner? What if you appear in the twentieth century in a field while some hobbyists are doing medieval battle recreations? You might adopt some pretty strange clothing or racial views that don’t aid you in the long term.

  "Hose him down and stick him in the cell with Rasputin and Joan of Arc. I’m going off shift in an hour and I can’t be bothered with another sermon," a communicator in the orderly’s pocket crackled.

  What if you end up in an insane asylum?

  It can, I can assure you, be terribly confusing to wake up in the past and hear about a scuffle between Hitler and Isaac Newton. The ‘Delusionals’ wing of a psychiatric ward is no place for a befuddled time traveller.

  The bench in the reception area was as cold and uncomfortable as was medically mandated and the orderly had shackled me to it with too-tight handcuffs, but as I came to my senses the thing bugging me was trying to work out my current time period. I would have to talk my way out of this, have to convince the nurse that I belonged in this time, but not this institution. No clues from the décor. It was the same stark white tinged with nicotine yellow of all Earth institutions, smelling of mould that would be as at home in Edwardian London as it would be the hovering proto city of Nu-Doncaster. The tiles and decoration were the kind of aggressive banality that is designed to soothe the maladjusted.

  Before I could truly gather myself the orderly yanked me rudely before the desk.

  The nurse regarded me suspiciously. She scrunched a bloodhound face over some half-moon spectacles at me. Alright, so I had that-glasses existed. My head was muddy from a recent concussion. It felt almost like a concussion from Space himself (I had had enough to be a bit of a connoisseur) but I knew that couldn’t be the case. I had just warped back in time…I had appeared…In a room…Darkness took the rest. She still looked at me expectantly.

  "This one?" her voice was leaden. The voice of a woman dealing with more than one Genghis Khan.

  The uniform holding me up answered. "One from the COAR science division.” COAR! Another clue. My mind quivered, telling me that I already knew this. I tried to shake off the head injury but only got dizzy instead.

  "Another?" she asked incredulously. "What are they doing over there?"

  "No idea. Time traveller, as you’d expect," grunted the orderly. "Here to save us all."

  She levelled her gaze at me and spoke as one would to a particularly slo
w child. "That right? You’ll be from the future, will you?" She smiled brightly and raised her eyebrows expectantly.

  I did not, I decided for the fifth time in my life, want to be committed to an insane asylum directly because of the actions of Captain Space Hardcore. I made an earnest expression. "No! There’s been a terrible mistake. I work in that division, you see. I was picked up by mistake! I’m not from the future! I’m from now. The year twenty…um, now." I winced at my own stupidity.

  She narrowed her eyes at me. This, I decided, was probably not the first time she had heard this.

  She steepled her fingers. "Oh yes? Who’s the President then?"

  Damn. Earth presidents. Never my strongest area. They were all too similar; a point which it’s hard to clarify as an alien, since it’s always taken as brilliant satire and not earnest inquiry. I would have to work it out and read her expression.

  "Why of course I know that. It’s that automate-" her eyes flickered, I changed tack, "I mean organic, yes, organic clone of-" a sour look. "Clone of nobody. There are no clones! It’s the original body of…Miss-" a pursing of lips, "-ter. Mister Ah… Buh…. cuh… coh?...D uh…. Dee… Eee…?"

  She regarded me for a sinister second.

  "Mister Abuhcuhcohduhdee?" I regarded her, my face frozen mid-plead. "Alright, you got one right. Maybe you’re not so crazy. But maybe that was a lucky guess. Tell me- what year is it?"

  "The year of the horse."

  "Which Earth is this?"

  "The first one, before the massive…I mean, the only one. Earth One. Earth Prime."

  "Who have you been sent back to save?"

  "Captain Space…Nobody. Nobody. I haven’t been sent back to save anyone," I said, recovering smoothly.

  "What was our most recent war?"

  "World…War…Z?"

  She smiled soothingly at me and took out an ominous stamp. "Good try, sweetie. I may have even believed you if it weren’t for the small matter of recording of you ranting and raving that Private Hardcore gave us. Another time traveller, alright. At least he isn’t another bloody Jesus. Take him in." She waved to my handler and stamped a large form with some degree of finality.