Paradox Resolution

by K. A. Bedford

Spider blinked. One moment, she was illustrating and describing a gruesome murder, and the very next moment, commenting on the coffee. Had he, Spider, ever been like that, switching effortlessly between the full grand-guignol horror that often went with work on the Major Crime Squad, and the banal details of ordinary life? Very probably, he thought. Hell, maybe, in that deeply-buried part of his mind, that vault where he stored his secret superhero identity, ‘Spider Webb, Homicide Squad’, with all its “Just the facts, ma’am,” patter, he was still like that. You had to be, he always told himself. It was necessary. You couldn’t let the nature of the work you were always dealing with smash your head in. You still had to function. You had to be able to leave it behind at the office when you finally, finally went home to your ordinary suburban life — or so the staff counselors always said. All of which sounded great, but it didn’t bear close scrutiny. The truth was that “leaving your work at the office” was perhaps the hardest single thing a cop had to do, and the truth was he had never been able to do it. What’s more, he didn’t know many other senior coppers who could, either. Every night, they always said, your sleep, it’s just shit. You shut your eyes, and go for a ride through your very own private museum of the vicious shit people did to one another, usually for the most stupid reasons in the world, or, worse, for no reason whatever. Every night. Most coppers Spider knew told their wives, and other civilians, that yes, it was fine. You just leave the job at the station and go home, everything’s fine, and you just pick it up the next day, no worries. Of course, there were some coppers who said that, and meant it. They could attend a nine-car horror-smash, and be fine afterwards. How did they do it? Spider never knew. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  “Yo, Spider!” Iris said, snapping her fingers.

  Spider blinked, startled. “Sorry, million miles away. Right. Yes. You said,” he stopped, tried to remember. “Yes, Dickhead’s head.”

  “His wife identified him.”

  He winced, imagining Sarah’s horror at the sight of her incomplete husband. “Right. I’m guessing she had no idea where you might find the rest of him.”

  Iris nodded. “Not a clue.”

  It had been four days since he’d found the head in the break room fridge. Four nights without sleep, dreaming about Dickhead’s enormous noggin filling that fridge, dripping blood, staring out at him, with that sharp look of recognition in his eyes, his blackened, blood-swollen tongue moving around behind yellow teeth. A Lovecraftian shoggoth lurking behind Dickhead’s lips; millions of tiny biting hungry mouths rasping out, “Help me. Help me.”

  Chilled, he blinked, and reminded himself where he was, what he was doing. He got up, stretching, yawning, and tried to shake that image.

  “Spider? You sure you’re—”

  “Yeah, fine. Go on. What else you got?”

  Iris watched him, concerned, but went on laying out details about the decapitation process, that the wound itself was precise, smooth, and that there would have been profound blood-loss approaching exsanguination. Moreover, the head showed signs that Dickhead had not been well for some time — that he hadn’t been looking after himself; the texture of the skin was poor, and he looked much older than existing photo records suggested he should look.

  Other than a guillotine, Spider thought, how the hell would you go about cutting off a head in one quick, clean cut? Quite apart from some thick, ropy muscle tissue in the neck, necessary to support that enormous head, there was the problem of the spine, with all those gnarly vertebrae just waiting to catch a knife not wielded with extreme surgical care. And the spine was tough to cut through. He’d seen documentaries about Mary Queen of Scots, whose brutal decapitation had taken a long time because of this very problem. It was the kind of thing that made Spider’s blood run cold, the sheer unbridled horror of the Middle Ages — which, meanwhile, were among the most popular time travel tourist destinations of all.

  Iris wasn’t finished. “You didn’t hear the ‘best’ bit, about his autopsy.” She indicated large air-quotes around ‘best’.

  “Do I want to hear this?” He took some deep breaths.

  Iris hesitated, glanced about the room, at the ceiling, and took a couple of deep breaths herself. She said, her eyes shut, “There were things in his head, Spider.”

  “What? Like tumors? Some kind of infection? Prions?”

  She sighed, annoyed. “No.”

  “Well, what then? Come on. You come in here looking like trouble, you dance around the bloody topic for ages, preoccupied like I’ve hardly ever seen you, and I figure something’s up, something real bad, and then you come out and that’s all it is? Something in—”

  “Spider. There were structures in his brain. Man-made artifacts. Implants. Complex webs of some kind of thread. Things. Technological things.”

  He stared at her, feeling strange. “In his brain?”

  “Some kind of, I don’t know, the pathology people are baffled. All they could do was describe the structures—”

  “Structures?” Spider said again, gripped, a gathering tension in his gut. “So, like prosthetics, implants, you know, like…” He was thinking about the neural interfaces he’d read about, where people who were paralyzed, or who were in comas but still awake inside, or who had degenerative brain disorders, blind people, all sorts of people benefiting from remarkable technological developments that, years ago, were the stuff of , in Spider’s opinion, tedious cyberpunk tales.

  So, given all this, and the fact that Iris still looked dreadful, like she was what, apprehensive? Scared, even? What on Earth could possibly scare Iris Street? What could a big oaf like Dickhead McMahon possibly have going on in his head that could make Iris look like this? Spider was starting to feel like he really did not want to know. It was going to be nothing good. Structures built into your brain? Nothing good could come from that, he thought. That look on Iris’ face made him feel like the bottom was falling out from under his world, tumbling away into a void where any damn thing could happen, a void just past the End of Bloody Time, and he felt chills all over again. But there was one question he had to ask, and it embarrassed him that if he hadn’t read all that cheesy science fiction when he was younger he wouldn’t even think to ask about it now. He said, terrified of the answer, “Did he still … was it still … was it still his own brain?”

  Iris said, “Something had been done to it. Something had been built in it and around it, woven all the way through it, fibers and threads and tiny gritty structures in key areas of the frontal cortex.”

  “So, maybe something from the future?” There were stories of people here in the present who had dreadful illnesses who used their time machines to blip off to the various points in the future in search of medical miracles, the way sick people had once trekked off to Thailand and the Philippines and Mexico in search of miracle surgery and drug treatments. Such people often did not return.

  “No, Spider. Not at all. The pathologists said they had never seen anything like what Dickhead had going on in his brain. They consulted with other pathology specialists around the world, too—”

  “Uh-oh,” he said, realizing what she was going to say next.

  “Before the government told them to stop.”

  He nodded. Yes, exactly. Just what he feared. “The government?”

  “‘Fraid so.”

  “Right.” This was why Iris looked the way she had when she arrived. This was the reason for all the dancing about. Very likely Section Ten of the Federal Department of Time and Space had stepped in to have a quiet word behind the scenes. Section Ten was the secret branch of the Department, and existed to — well, Spider was not sure exactly. As far as he and everyone else these days had been able to establish, Section Ten existed to do whatever the hell it pleased, and the government let them.

  “My apologies, Spider, for not coming more directly to the point. I just,” she said,
glancing about again, “have concerns about people watching in ghost mode, you might say.” Ghost mode was the means by which time travelers could conceal their presence, usually in the past, in order to witness historical events, without interfering. In ghost mode you were effectively “not there” in any way, except you were.

  “I understand,” Spider said, now also paranoid about ghost moded public servants, himself. The temptation to wave at the empty corners of the room was nigh irresistible. “Where does that leave us?”

  “It leaves us with this,” Iris said, taking off her watchtop and handing it over to him. He took it; it was warm from contact with her skin. He looked at the scratched-up screen, which showed a document reader, loaded with what looked like a government-issued report. The data indicator reported that it contained video, text and images. The crest of the Australian Government, as well as the logo for the Department of Time and Space, DOTAS, were prominent at the top. The document came with various suggestions for appropriate action the government might or might not take. The file was open to the executive summary, the kind of thing prepared for the Minister responsible for DOTAS, a civilian politician who, Spider suspected, had no clue what went on in his own department. The executive summary had markings all down the left margin, indicating which paragraphs were subject to which levels of secrecy. Many of them were designations Spider had never seen before. Then he noticed the appended distribution list. “This one,” he said, pointing at one of the baffling acronyms, “is that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet?”

  “Yes,” Iris said dryly.

  “And this one?” He showed her.

  “Office of National Assessments.” An intelligence agency, part of ASIO.

  “Right. And this?”

  “I believe that’s the head of ASIO.” Australia’s domestic intelligence service.

  “ASIO?” Spider said, gulping. “I didn’t know they were interested in time-travel-related stuff.”

  “Anything that might threaten the security — or even the very existence — of the nation is their bailiwick.”

  “I thought that was Section Ten.”

  “It’s thought that ASIO’s Temporal Affairs Office acts in a supernumerary capacity over Section Ten. Nobody knows for sure, of course.” She tapped the side of her nose in a very significant manner.

  “So,” Spider said, once he’d wrapped his brain around this latest development, “the contents of Dickhead’s enormous head were so alarming that the nation’s spy agencies were notified, and the Prime Minister himself was directly informed.”

  “That’s correct, yes.”

  “And now here you are, with a copy of the report.”

  Iris flashed a cheery smile for a moment. “I have to keep up with things, Spider.”

  Spider imagined squads of black-clad SAS soldiers on the end of rappelling lines crashing through the windows and into the room, bearing flashbangs and automatic weapons.

  “And that’s just the preliminary report,” Iris said, all the color gone from her face.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “But guess what?”

  “Iris, what are you doing with this? You could be in—”

  “I don’t officially have it. And I’m not giving you a copy. I pirate-bayed it from a site called The Memory Hole.”

  “Of course!” he said, now scrotum-pricklingly scared. Perhaps Dickhead was a Johnny Mnemonic, a courier for valuable data from the future. Was Dickhead doing that? But if not that, then what?

  “All right”, Spider said, trying to get a grip. “Where does this all leave us? What’s next?”

  Iris was checking messages on her watchtop. She glanced up. “It leaves us nowhere, Spider.”

  “Why am I not surprised by that?”

  “I told you the government stepped in to shut down the pathology work?”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “They confiscated the head.”

  “The head, the fridge, the feeds, everything.”

  “Damn,” he said. “Have to get a new fridge. Not sure if the budget will stretch to that.”

  “Spider!”

  “Well, what do you want me to say? We’re screwed!”

  Iris looked at him for a moment; then she leaned forward. “Not just yet. Listen.”

  Chapter 5

  Spider’s phone went off. It was Mr. Patel’s office, in the city. His boss’s expensive robot receptionist informed Spider that Mr. Patel wanted to see Spider tomorrow afternoon, at two p.m.

  “Why’s that? What’s up?” Spider asked.

  The receptionist explained to Spider, in a soft, sing-song sort of voice, very realistic, that Mr. Patel wanted to discuss Spider’s terms of employment. “Nothing to worry about, of course,” the receptionist was keen to reassure him, using a tone that might otherwise be used to inform him that he was about to receive a slice of cake.

  Oh, shit, Spider thought, staring around at the vast empty spaces in the workshop. The base-station time machines combined with the economic fallout from the world’s financial system’s long-forestalled ultimate collapse had come to make Spider’s day, far sooner than he had hoped. “Okay,” he said his mouth dry as outback dust. “I’ll, um, right,” he said, and touched his phone-patch to kill the link.

  Next day, at two p.m., dressed in his best civilian outfit, cotton trousers and a short-sleeved blue poly-cotton long-sleeved shirt, but the same scuffed Doc Marten boots he wore all the time, Spider found himself on the sixty-eighth floor of a gleaming office tower on St. George’s Terrace, a little woozy from the too-fast lift. Outside, it was a lovely day, an early taste of spring: bright, sunny, mild breeze; three small, puffy clouds. The views from the enormous windows were sublime: the swollen Swan River, like blue glass, pressing against the concrete barrier walls erected along the city foreshore; picturesque yachts cruising about, sails luffing in the light breeze; the huge white apartment towers along the South Perth foreshore startling against the harsh blue sky. The door to the Perth office of the Bharat Time Machine Company of Mumbai stood before him, with its colorful logo that tried to combine the Hindu god Ganesh and a stylized time machine. He hesitated, not sure what to do, but full of a sense of impending doom.

  Spider’s coworker, Charlie, himself full of false cheer and bravado, no doubt waiting for his own call to come and have a chat with Mr. Patel, had taken Spider into the city in the shop’s battered old Nissan fuel-cell van, and gave Spider a chummy punch in the shoulder telling him to “kick arse”, and to “make sure the boss follows all the terms of the employment contract!”

  Spider said that he would indeed kick arse and have a word with Mr. Patel. If, he thought, he could. The fact was that trade union membership in Australia was down to under ten percent of the workforce, and time machine repair technicians did not have any kind of formal union representation. Spider, Charlie and Malaria had had some legal protections and rights under the terms of their contracts with Dickhead, but when the Bharat Group, and in particular its business unit concerned with time machines, came to town, and took over the Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait operation, and all its franchisees, the first thing they did was to instigate new individual employee contracts. Spider, who remembered the way that the trade union movement had taken care of his dad and grandfather, back in the day, felt vulnerable and scared.

  He approached the glass entrance to the office suite; it swept aside, beckoning him within. Faint, haunting but very pleasant Indian music played at him, and there was a beguiling mélange of scents, spicy and exotic but not distracting, that carried him into the reception area. The sheer expanse of the space was magnificent. The Bharat offices occupied three floors of this building, all of them arranged around a central glass atrium. From somewhere he could hear a waterfall, a real waterfall. There were beautiful rainforest plants everywhere. And the view! You could w
alk out onto a vast observation deck that projected out from the side of the building, all cantilevered engineered glass. Spider did not dare step out onto that platform. The height, the fear of the glass failing, it was too much and as it was he already felt a little woozy, a little buzzy, like he was not quite in his right mind.

  The receptionist, a female-type android, skinned to look like a gorgeous Indian princess, all luminous saris, gold jewellery, caramel skin and dark, liquid eyes, with the red dot in the forehead he had never understood, floated across to him, a picture of serenity. “Mr. Webb?” she said, her voice very realistic, her accent Mumbai-meets-Oxbridge. Her face and form strongly suggested a beautiful young woman, without looking too much exactly like one. It was more that her appearance suggested those things, like a Picasso sketch of a beautiful young woman, rendered in plastic, vinyl, rubber and glass. The effect was disarming, but also a little disturbing, Spider thought.

  “Hello, um, hi, um—” Spider tried to say, but found he could hardly talk. His mouth was dry, and now that he was here, moments away from his appointment, he was starting to feel numb, clammy, and not sure his legs would hold him up much longer. “Do you mind — a glass of water, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just sit over…” he gestured at a couch with a spectacular view of the river below. There was just one cloud visible from this position, small and discreet, perfectly art directed.

  Seated, he felt a little better. When the receptionist presented him, with elegant economy, the glass of fresh water he had requested, he found he had to hold the glass with both hands, and even then, they shook so much he thought he was going to splash water everywhere. All at once, he felt ill, the way he used to feel just before exams at university, and in the police service when he was trying to get a promotion. This whole place, this perfection of space and design, was, he thought, oppressively beautiful. It was too much. It was no wonder they had a robot receptionist: a human receptionist would have found it too hard to take and likely would have quit after two hours. He compared it with the decidedly humble reception area back at the shop, with its naked brickwork, cheap laminate counter-tops, the posters and calendars up on the walls showcasing gorgeous high-end time machines, classic units from the previous decade, when designers put a bit of work into their drawings. Time machines that looked like they were going fast, as if they sped through time.