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

by Michael Ronson

  "I didn’t say anything else! ‘this is quite a puzzle?’ I don’t even kno-"

  I shook his face again in excitement and gratitude. "That’s it! You’ve cracked it! Then I cracked it better! Puzzles!"

  I relinquished Funkworthy’s face and called the professor over who was doing something less useful than listening to me. "I have it! We won’t even need all this time. It’s simple how we disable STEVE-A. All we need to do is-"

  And it was at that unfortunate moment that the doors holding back the robot army gave way. The molten doors fried by laser bolts and hard metal fists exploded into the room. A rasping electric scream of hate issued from under STEVE-A’s moustache as the hordes of robots flowed into the room like a bumpy, metal river.

  "Tell riddles," I finished, slightly lamely.

  The robots formed a line, politely and we had a second to take in the situation as they formed their robotic phalanx.On one side of the hall was the robotic army. I took in the sun below us, growing larger and probably hotter by the second. I saw the evil, unassailably asexual computer that wanted us dead. I saw the dozens of killing machines lining up to fire lasers at, into and through our bodies and I saw my two companions in this fight against titanium death machines; a computing professor and a small alien with visible handprints bruised into his face.

  "Riddles?" asked Funkworthy faintly.

  "Yup."

  I unlatched my pistol with one hand and tensed my fist with the other.

  "FOUR MINUTES TILL IMPACT," gloated STEVE-A.

  I aimed the gun.

  And the silence ended.

  Chapter Nine

  Riot in the Wards/ A War of Words

  * * *

  In the end, any sufficiently advanced washing machines will prove indistinguishable from magic and any properly advanced wizard will be hard to distinguish from a brevill sandwich maker

  Jemimah Thuddlefunk

  The Moped that Wouldn’t Slow Down

  Ѻ

  A psychotic the size of a shaved bear collided with a wiry black six foot man who was convinced he was the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette. The big man hit Antoinette like a beef tsunami and quickly had him pinned, but the French monarch was wily and as slippery as a squid assassin and shot out from under him and wrapped his/her legs around the psychotic’s neck and made a desperate thigh chokehold. He rained down blows on the man’s cranium, shouting slurs in what could almost be considered French. Nearby two time travellers and a severe autistic were overwhelming an orderly, kicking him across the floor like a stubborn flesh piñata.

  This would be a good study, I thought as I leapt over Antoinette. To really study the madness and resentments and the cliques apparent in the asylum riot would be beneficial for psychiatry. Unfortunately some inmates with severe paranoia had already ripped the cameras from the walls, as was to be expected.

  For instance, as I leapt over a table that had been hurled at me, I saw a small corner of the room where eight people who claimed to be Jesus were finally duking it out. Each one fighting more vociferously than the last to claim their place as the true Prince of Peace. One sprawled out toward me, sliding unconscious along the linoleum floor. I threw myself over Jesus and continued through the melee.

  It wasn’t just those fights that would have been interesting. Many of delusionals (the time travellers) were fighting the split personalities, the narcissists were brawling with the neurotics and the paranoid schizophrenics were covering the exits in small groups. A two-man team of Napoleon and Rasputin were dominating the security team with their canny tag-team tactics. It would have been an interesting study, I thought, before the punch landed.

  The sociopath threw his fist up casually and I simply ran into it. I chastised myself. I was too caught up studying the spectacle, allowed myself to be blindsided. My head smacked hard into the floor and the sociopath (and I’m not being mean, he really did suffer clinical sociopathy) leered over me as the lights danced before my eyes. He looked like several dozen police sketches had collided and come to life. Before he could do anything another patient flung themselves into him and began pummeling away, letting me get to my feet and get my bearings for a second. I had seldom been so grateful to a man suffering from dissociative personality disorder.

  I took to my feet and started after Tempus again, putting scholarly concerns out of my mind.

  Tempus dodged his way through the crowd, unencumbered as he was by metal trousers, and darted toward the main security doors where Space was. Immediately as the riot had broken out, Space and his security personnel had grabbed a nearby sofa, shooed some narcoleptics off of it, and used it to form into a barricade and hunkered behind it, swinging their stun batons at any borderline personality that stepped toward them. The three of them were making an impressive defence, with Space swinging his baton like a savage semaphorist, shouting the words ‘electroshock therapy’ with every successful hit with an inappropriate amount of enthusiasm.

  Tempus came to a stop ten yards before it, as he recognized how unassailable the barrier was. He stalled, looked to Space and back to me. I could read it in his eyes: a frontal assault on Space would do no good, hate gave way to tactics. He was putting up an impenetrable shield of sofa-top thrashing, hitting so many violent inmates that even his baton was getting bored. I saw indecision in Tempus’ eyes. Then they slid over to the pharmaceutical office behind me and I saw a plan take its place. The small office that joined onto the hall was a secure room full of supplies, drugs, needles, psychoactive chemicals where I presumed that the inmates queued at mealtimes for their prescriptions. If there was a weapon it would be in there and if there wasn’t there would be enough steroids, anaesthetic and amphetamines to turn yourself into a human torpedo, and enough dopamines and sleeping agents to incapacitate a minotaur. Whatever he was planning that would be his best shot (no pun intended). Fortunately for him an inmate had been hurled against the security glass and the window was shattered enough to grant passage. Unfortunately for him I was stood between him and it. We squared off against each other as the lunatics around us fought.

  The idea seized us at the same time. I saw his eyes widen in inspiration and he flung an accusing finger at me.

  “Get him! He’s Judas Iscarriot, he’s Winston Churchill, he’s Hitler! That man is King George. He’s Benjamin Franklin. That man is the Duke of Wellington. He’s Nixon.”

  But two could play at that game. I pointed a finger at Tempus and yelled to the room. “It’s him! He’s a replicant. He’s one of the machines. He’s putting chemicals in the drinking water for the president. He’s a secret ape man! That is Quintus, leader of the moleman uprising of 2652.”

  The room quieted as two sets of delusions looked up at us. A dozen split personalities looked round at me, their eyes narrowing in hate. The Delusionals regarded Tempus with the same hostility, finding a target finally.

  They charged us at the same time.

  I had to stay alive long enough to see Tempus pummeled into oblivion, which was going to be difficult because a handful of dissociative personality disorders had just been told that I was their historical nemesis. The lead one was Tim. Tim had been pointed out to me earlier by Chad in his ad hoc tour. But nobody really needed to point out Tim. Tim was seven feet and about four hundred pounds. Three hundred of those pounds were hate, one hundred were muscle and two hundred were steroids. When you were this big, mathematics was too scared to apply to you. Tim believed fervently that he was Anne Frank. And now this lummox of a tiny Jewish girl was coming to pummel Hitler to death after spending several years in an institute doing nothing but push ups.

  He swung a huge uppercut at me that I danced back from then followed it up with a roundhouse kick more powerful than any fifteen year old German diarist has ever managed (with the greatest respect to their people). I rolled under it and scrambled to my feet. But strong hands wrapped around my neck and I found myself looking at a maniac in a paper tri-corn hat. A Napoleon.

  “Vive la France” he
snarled in my face. But I answered that with a headbutt that split his nose in a satisfying crack. He held fast around my throat and resumed his strangling, funnelling his nose pain into finger strength. I couldn’t take him, so I bobbed my head to the left. The shadow over me told me that Tim was behind me so throwing my head out of the way seemed wise at that moment. It was. No sooner had I shifted my head over than a tree trunk of a forearm whistled past it like a meat train. The blow was huge. After that I’d assume there was more of Napoleon’s face on Tim’s fist than on his actual skull. He flew across the room and would probably wake up sane. With Napoleon down I had Tim to worry about and another mystery assailant who was circling at the edges. Caught between the two, I was pretty sure I was dead. Tim was an industrial machine of a man, full of righteous jewish anger and this new fellow looked like if a caveman had mated with a hobo and had left the baby to be raised by pitbulls. I had only one reasonable gambit. I stood between the two of them and made a taunting gesture to both simultaneously. To the pitbull I made a standard vulgar gesture and I taunted Tim with a more historically accurate one which I’m not proud of, but it had the desired effect. They both charged at me in a blind homicidal rage. I waited until they were a nanosecond away from me before I threw myself backwards with as much force as I could muster. I cleared out of the way just in time. The two smashed into each other with the force of a detonating bomb. Tim was so large that he was legally considered unkillable but the other man I had previously seen beat a Jesus half to death, so he presumably thought he was now invincible. They started going at each other; each trying to turn the other into soup using just their fists.

  On the floor I looked around, hoping that Tempus was in even more trouble than myself. Luck has never favoured me and it didn’t look like it was going to start today. The delusionals were fighting amongst themselves, each convinced that the other were a robot/ape/lobsterman and scurrying away from the melee was Tempus. He dashed past Tim and myself and in toward the pharmacy window. In a nimble leap he was inside.

  Stuck between two brawls I had to act fast before I became entangled again. I looked back over to Space behind his barricade. He was still wrestling with the scrum around the door, still applying his own concussive form of therapy. I once again toyed with the notion of approaching him but dismissed it. Another crazy approaching him would simply be another attacker needing to be repelled. I'd have to do it alone.

  I took off toward the pharmacy where Tempus was hiding, bashed open the security doors and faced him.

  ---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---

  Pow!

  I pointed and a head exploded.

  It blew apart in a satisfying, fizzy explosion, a spray of molten metal raining down around it, but before I could even think of a pun to say and before anyone could high five me, another metal dome took its place, the implacable red eyes fixed on me, its arms brushing aside the chassis of its comrade with no emotion or pause. I met it with another shot. The laser bolt pranged off of its head, taking out the upper left quadrant, plowing a red liquid tunnel through the metal. Not quite on-target. A small miss. But the beginnings of that one dreaded feeling; the feeling of transitioning from whelmed to overwhelmed.

  They had been steadily whelming me since the doors had buckled, since the robots had finally broken into the room and we’d taken up a defensive position behind some quickly flipped tables. One gun each and meagre ammunition between the three of us. And if I had lost the last of my whelms recently I could assume the other two had lost theirs several hours or even days ago. Or maybe we had too many whelms. I made a note to later look up the etymology of 'overwhelmed'. If there even was going to be a later.

  Panic threatened me. My heartrate increased, my brow moistened, my palms wettened, my knees tingled and my shins itched. I fought it back. My god,I thought, this must be what Ebenezer feels all the time. I had to act. I had to speak.

  “What goes up but never comes down?” I yelled into the air, over the sound of the battle.

  Without a microsecond of pause STEVE-A replied. “AGE, GRASS, THE XENON PARTICLE, THE-”

  “Alright, alright,” I interrupted, silencing him. Our barricades were pressed up against the main AI terminal so his face hung over us, looming like a giraffe. I hunkered down again and let of three shots at the robot horde. Three fell but four stepped over their bodies. Funkworthy and Bathby lay down a less accurate sheet of fire that cut through them but more kept coming; it was like fighting an angry tide. I tried to think of more riddles.

  That was the reason I was missing some shots. I was squeezing my mind almost as much and as hard as I was squeezing the trigger of my gun. It was the only way to shut down STEVE-A (probably) since sexual espionage was now off the table. Speaking of tables, ours rattled against our backs and warmed at the incessant lasering, like a deadly massage chair. I reloaded and thought.

  “What has a neck but no head?” I hollered.

  No pause before his electric bastard of a voice boomed, “A BOTTLE, A GUITAR, THE INHABITANTS OF ZELTON PRIME, PRESIDENT MATTHEW RENGAR.”

  “Damn!”

  It had long been known that the robot mind, though so much more advanced than human minds in things such as mathematics, equations and the downloading of erotic documentaries had some serious weaknesses. Human minds could connect and leap from idea to idea. Using linguistic clues, poetic language and artful similes we could make make unusual connections. It was the basis of all art (that and paintings of old ships). And in this way the strange illogic of our riddles, paradoxes and spot the difference puzzles had been a weakness in the electronic set; a way to short circuit them. I remember as a child being able to explode my own toaster sandwich maker simply by reading it the ‘Big Boyz Book of Brain-Benders’; a startling victory for humanity and sandwiches alike that I hoped to replicate today. I searched my mind for more.

  “What’s brown and sticky?”

  “A STICK, MOLLASSES, THE INTERIOR OF A BLACK HOLE.” His answer was immediate, he taunted me with his extra answers.

  “What gets wetter while it dries?”

  “A TOWEL, AN ADROXIAN STEAM GOLEM, A-”

  “While I was walking to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, each wife had seven sacks, each sack-”

  “ONE PERSON. JEREMY IRONS”

  “A train leaves the station in Wolverhampton at 3pm, another train leaves Scunthorpe at 1:30-”

  “11 PM THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY. FOURTEEN SURVIVIORS.”

  “That’s not even a riddle or a paradox,” Professor Bathby cried, between blaster shots.

  She looked panicked and angry, and something told me she didn’t trust my plan.

  “She doesn’t trust your plan,” noted Funkworthy. I glanced over to him. They both looked on the verge of mania. Ebenezer kept casting looks and laser bolts at the growing robot threat (which peopled almost the entirety of the room by now) while the Professor busied herself with looking at the windows which were a toasty orange flame. As I followed her look a fat crack appeared in the glass, making that creaking groan of a dying ice rink. Charm had failed me. CALAPAW was reduced to mere LAPAW, and that wasn’t even a word. They cast distressed looks at me, their body language, actions and mouths told me that they thought my plan was failing, that they didn’t want to burn and be shot to death as I recounted a remembered children’s book to an indifferent computer.

  “I didn’t expect to go out like this,” said Bathby, showing a remarkable lack of foresight

  “TWO MINUTES UNTIL SOLAR IMPACT,” taunted STEVE-A

  “They’re flanking us,” said Funkworthy, pointing around our barricades at the metal figures, “we’ve not two minutes till they get to us.”

  “Any ideas? Any better riddles? Any plans? Tell me we’re not going to die with Christmas cracker puzzles as our last memories.” Bathby cast a hopeless look at her gun, which was nearly empty. Ebenezer looked at me, hope smeared all over his face like jam.

  “Professor, I trust this man with my life. I know h
e has something else for us. This can’t be it.” There was a hint of pleading in his eyes. I opened my mouth, searched for something to say, a plan, an answer- something.

  “Wh…what’s black and white and red all over?” I asked.

  He pursed his lips and dropped his head. I heard Bathby exhale.

  “A NEWSPAPER, A SUNBURNED PENGUIN-”

  “I’m not going down like this.” Bathby said, tears threatening the corners of her eyes. Her chin quivered with emotion but she bit down on it, reloaded her gun and eyed the horde.

  “A STABBED ZEBRA-”

  “Well put, Professor,” said Funkworthy. They nodded at each other over my head and briefly touched hands. Their last looks to each other spoke of the quiet courage of the damned, knowing they would not be remembered they still chose to fight this implacable foe to the last.

  “AN EMBARRASSED SKUNK, A NUN CHOKING ON A BONE-”

  They leapt over the barricade, firing their guns, letting a defiant scream, meeting naught but metal and death. I stood, turned and went to meet them, unsure if I could save them.

  “A SUNBURNED VICAR.”

  And we met them. In our plummeting station. Seconds before fire would take us all we met the robots with the last of our fight and will. And if they could feel awe or fear they would have then, to see we three charge them, knowing our deaths were as assured as our seats in Valhalla.

  “A PANDA IN A BONFIRE”

  Chapter Ten

  The Identity Theft/ No Choices Left

  * * *

  Everyone leaves something behind when they die. An estate, a will, a family, a memory of good deeds or simply, finally, an unpleasant smell in the bedroom. This is the essence of legacy. Mine is you, my boy. You are my finest legacy. You are what is left of me in this world. Now go out there, go out beyond this old school, this damned country, you go out there and you kill as many Hungarians as you possibly can!