“Top plan,” Spider said, and turned his attention to the droid. Diagnostics shed no light on the problem. Auto reset didn’t help either. The only thing left to do was to open it up, and have a poke about. Which, this close to closing time, was a prospect that did not appeal much, but it seemed better than stewing in his own tension, brooding about Patel and his meeting Iris at 8:00. All in all, the coffee droid’s problems seemed much more attractive, and even more so when Charlie appeared bearing a big steaming mug of searingly hot instant coffee for him. “Malaria had the sense to put the jar of instant in her desk drawer!”
Spider blew on the surface of his brew, and dared a sip. It was hot enough, but also eye-poppingly strong. “Oh, Charlie! My hero!”
“Weren’t nothin’, ma’am,” he said, miming doffing his hat. “Anyway, thank Malaria!”
“I will, I will,” Spider said, inhaling instant coffee fumes, which certainly smelled better than the steam coming out of the coffee droid. They stood there a moment, taking minute sips of their coffee. “Looks like I’ll have to open him up.”
“Betcha anything you find a dead cat in there.”
Spider laughed, but in the process inhaled coffee, and now had what felt like white-hot coffee scalding his sinus membranes. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” Tears streamed from his eyes. “Oh, God!”
Charlie laughed and laughed, and ran off in search of something that might help.
After closing up the shop, Spider biked to Molly’s place — how long had he been thinking of it that way, as Molly’s place, he wondered. It used to be his place, too, long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, wasn’t it? He parked his bike in the garage, stretched, and felt the beginnings of a migraine starting to bang away behind his forehead. His old man, whenever Spider visited his folks, would offer to go out to the shed and get his power drill. “Soon sort out that bugger, you watch!” his dad would say with a smile, an old routine, more intended to get a smile out of his son than to provide actual assistance.
Then, he was there, on the front porch, facing the locked front door, and flashing back to the past, long ago, when he found the door ajar, and one of his Future Selves warning him not to go in. Those guys are a pain in the arse, Spider thought, time travelers from the future, always meddling; wanting me to do things I don’t want to do, always for the very best of reasons, at least to them, no matter what it winds up costing me.
He worked his way through the layers of security he had installed for Molly, disabled the security cams, the motion tracker, the heat sensor, and in the end, made his way into the entrance hall. “Hi honey, I’m home!” he muttered under his breath. The whole house smelled like clay, wet Swan River clay. When he lived there, Molly confined her hideous, breathing, stretching artworks to her studio, a converted bedroom in the back of the house, with its view of the tiny backyard and the back fence. Now, they were everywhere. She had taken over the huge open plan family room, and turned it into a full-on workshop. All around the room, Molly’s sculptures, her HyperFlesh creations, the very things she was right this minute hoping to exhibit in New York, loomed around him, watching him with their agonized eyes, things that looked like what he and his mates at school would once have called “transporter accidents”, and now looked altogether too much like unimaginable creatures in terrible pain. It seemed as if they knew he was there, in the room. The ones with eyes followed his movements, and recoiled in something like fear if he came too close.
He turned to the aquarium, under the main window, where poor, sick Mr. Popeye swam back and forth, back and forth, his bulbous eyes staring up at Spider. Spider thought of tapping the glass, but didn’t. “Two careful drops of the prescribed medicine,” Spider said to the fish, “and yummy fish flakes, too. Gotta keep your strength up. Yes you do. Yes you do.” The fish did not react, and continued swimming and staring, looking to Spider like he was bored and depressed out of his tiny fishy mind. “Yeah, mate. Know what you mean,” Spider said, nodding sadly. He made a note in the treatment log Molly had left for him to fill in, to provide a record of what he was doing for Mr. Popeye. “Good grief,” he said.
That done, Spider turned around and tripped over the coffee table, knocking a large manila envelope to the floor. It contained the divorce papers Molly wanted him to sign. He carried it into the kitchen. Spider hadn’t signed them when she first presented them to him and he wouldn’t sign them now, not while she was away. Of course he knew that signing them was the right thing to do. His initial plan, to make himself available, to do all manner of odd-jobs for her, had not worked out. He had wanted her to know that he was over all the pain and wretchedness that had followed his departure from the Police Service. That he’d moved on, found a new career — he laughed a little, thinking about that — and was, in all respects, a New Man. Well, hadn’t that worked out well! In the process Molly had acquired a handyman who was available whenever she needed him, who never charged her anything, who even refused the money she tried to offer for his services (which were, at times, nothing short of heroic, and above and beyond the call of duty, but he was trying not to dwell on that). He did allow himself to be offered coffee and a biscuit, as a compromise, and still he hoped that it was only a matter of time before she came to realize the folly of her ways, and that he was really a New Spider, and that maybe they could, slowly of course, a bit at a time, negotiate their way back to some kind of relationship. Obviously, he told himself at night when he couldn’t sleep, it would never be the same. He was realistic enough about that, he thought. He’d seen too many families with warring parents, some of whom did manage to find a new common ground, a new energy level, where they could once again build something together — but it was never the same something. It made him think of a time machine that had been in a wreck. If it wasn’t fixed just right, it never really worked properly again. Yes, it would run, and you could use it, but it wasn’t truly fixed. Of course, beyond a certain point of trouble with a broken time machine, you just had to ditch the thing and get a new one.
Spider knew all this, knew it in his bones, but when he was with Molly, doing some stupid odd-job for her in the middle of a wintry night, he didn’t care. He watched her, trying not to be obvious about it, of course, for signs that she might be thawing towards him, at least a little. Sometimes it did look that way. Sometimes she was warm and caring. She smiled, even laughed if he managed to crack a particularly witty joke. He loved her laugh. He remembered how, when they were together, he often thought there was no finer purpose in life than making Molly laugh, because it was so rewarding, the way she would dissolve in fits of laughter. It was the best feeling in the world.
Spider just stood there, in the kitchen, over the sink, eating cold baked beans out of a tin, hardly even noticing what he was doing. “A good man, eh?” he said to himself. All he could see was a man in direst danger of surrendering his honor, his principles, even his sense of who he was as a person, in order to help his employer climb out of the deepest pit in the world. Because if he didn’t, if he refused, what would happen? Would Mr. Patel shrug, shake Spider’s hand, and tell him, “Oh well, Spider. No worries. Just wanted to sound you out.” Would he do that? Or would he instead give Spider the sack? And, into the bargain, spread the word on Spider in the time machine industry that here was a man who was not to be trusted? Or, hey, why bother with such puny smears when he could simply go to the police and accuse Spider of having made off with Kali. With Mr. Patel’s connections and expertise, he could certainly engineer Spider’s timeline where it turned out everybody believed that he had gone bad and stolen the precious machine, and, who knows, maybe interfered with those children somehow as well? Spider could see how his entire existence might be upturned in an instant.
That’s why he had to meet with Iris tonight. To talk to her before he agreed to do anything for Mr. Patel; to show her his file, and prove to her that Mr. Patel should be the person of interest here, and that he, Spider Webb, wasn�
�t an accomplice. She would possibly ask him to wear a wire when he next spoke to Mr. Patel. Now there was a quaint term, now wasn’t it? There were no wires these days. Undercover operatives had a tiny device injected under the skin of their faces and later retrieved under local anesthetic. It monitored everything the user saw, said, heard, everything, weeks and weeks of audio, video, you name it.
“Well, Iris,” he said out loud, there in the kitchen, between mouthfuls of beans, “my boss has done this hugely illegal thing, and now it’s all backfired on him something chronic, and he wants me to get him out of it, and will probably find ways to implicate me in the whole affair if I don’t go along with it.” Said aloud like that, it did sound crazy. “Oh, and Iris, there are two missing children in the mix as well.” He shook his head, found he’d lost his appetite for baked beans, and dumped the rest into the garbage. “Shit,” he said, and shuffled over to the family room.
He sat down on Molly’s couch, surrounded again by all those “things” watching him, feeling uncomfortable, as if each one knew he was being a damned fool and was trying, each in its own repulsive way, to tell him so. “Yes, I know, I know! Leave me alone!” He wondered if he could turn them around to face the wall without somehow damaging them. “Hi, Molly, glad you’re home, hope you had a lovely time in New York, one small thing, um, I inadvertently broke a bunch of your sculptures because they were being all accusing and mocking at me,” he said, and rubbed his stubbled face. Sad, more than anything else, he opened his watchtop, and piped the display output into the ceiling projector.
Patel’s file was an impressive document. There were countless photos of young Vijay, a shy wisp of a kid, always busy with handheld game machines; crouching to look at tiny marine creatures in rockpools; and leaping, arms flung wide, off jetties at Crawley to splash in eruptions of white froth in the river. There were photos of the whole family together, in happier times: at Hindu festivals here in Perth and back home in India, covered in brightly colored powders. Patel’s wife was a tall, serious woman, who never once, not in any of the provided images, looked happy. Never cracked a smile. Not even a smirk. There was one where she appeared serene, a formal portrait, standing there with her husband, and a very young Vijay on a chair before them, looking at something behind the photographer with rapt attention. Again and again, Spider’s attention went back to Mrs. Patel, regal, posing in luminous sari and golden jewelry, a vision — but not a vision of joy. What was her problem? Spider thought, and then felt a little ashamed. One thing he had learned as a police officer: you can’t judge people just from a few images. That was true, he knew that, but all the same, he thought, poring through these images, there was something about the family dynamic that, even allowing for cross-cultural differences he barely understood, still struck him as odd, nagging at the part of his mind that noticed little details: the way the knuckles on Mrs. Patel’s hand, resting on Vijay’s shoulder, looked tense, like she was holding the kid in place by main force (“or else!” added a little voice in the back of his head).
What else was there? Details of Vijay’s school, an expensive private school in Nedlands, but one that let the students go home each day, rather than board. There was an image of Vijay’s current class, Year Four (G). Spider didn’t know what that was, so he phoned Patel, who told him, “It means he is in the Accelerated Learning Program, for Gifted Children. Very advanced. Robotics, calculus, symbolic logic!”
Spider swore, thanked Mr. Patel, reminded him that he’d be around later, and said that he was taking a moment to review the file. Patel said that was good, but don’t take all night about it. “Yes, sir,” Spider said, hating himself. In the class photo, the kids were all standing in well-ordered rows, in the school library, but deliberately pulling funny faces, sticking their tongues out, sticking “V” signs with their fingers behind the heads of the kids in front of them. Enormously gifted children, but still children. Spider felt himself wanting to smile — but there was Vijay, in the back row, one of the taller kids, frowning, worried about something.
As well as a hefty dossier of Vijay’s school reports and class assessments (“easily distracted”, “could try harder”, “great facility with electronics”), Spider found a comprehensive dossier on Mr. Patel’s illegal, custom hotrod time machine project. Oh, my, Spider thought, flipping through, having a quick look. The man had documented everything, down to the last fastener, the last memristor wafer. The minute details were the things that struck Spider the most, the man’s astonishing attention to such things. Maybe, he thought, Mr. Patel was more like him than he wanted to believe. He happened to glance up, and saw again those monstrous eyes, and things without eyes but which seemed somehow to look straight into his soul, and moved back to the kitchen, where he could make himself a coffee while he watched the screen.
As to the machine in question: Spider was impressed despite himself. Boutique brands, and frequently the most exotic, high-end components available. No expense spared. It was breathtaking. Where had Patel found the money for this project? It must have cost a fortune — not to mention the additional payments for bribes and “facilitation expenses” to import illegal parts. According to the appended work log, documenting the construction of the unit, Patel had built it — with the help of his boy — over nearly three years. He’d started it while they were still living in an outer suburb of Mumbai, where it appeared he’d rented space in a local workshop. Then, when they moved to Perth a little over a year ago, they’d had to find a home with a double-garage, just to have space for the growing monster: there was an image of Patel’s car, an old Toyota, stuck on its own out on the paved driveway, while the beast took shape in the garage. Spider thought about it, the scope of the project, what it must have meant in terms of planning, organizing, talking his wife into it. Three years of snatched bits of time on weekends, late nights and early mornings, tinkering about in the garage.
Patel had started with an old Hyundai Boron One, the original, big and boxy, not pretty at all, a unit whose primary virtue was that it was one of the very first consumer-level time machines available in Australia, or anywhere else. Prior to the Boron One, time machines and time travel had been the exclusive province of labs, governments, and corporations. There had also been a fledgling commercial time tourism industry, originally founded by Richard Branson, offering crazy bastards with too much money the opportunity to travel as much as ten years in either direction, and come home again after staying one hour. The early days of time travel, Spider thought. Crazy times indeed. Crazy because, and this was the weird thing, it turned out that the most happening, most up-to-date, post-modern thing a person with way too much money could do was to lob himself back ten years in time, to swan about in the recent past, all, “Hey, babe, I’m totally from … The Future!” Nothing was more futuristic than the recent past.
The Boron One retailed, on its first day on sale, for fifty thousand dollars, give or take. If you wanted “all the fruit”, you’d be looking at up to $150,000, and for that kind of money you could, and this was the cool part, you could travel as much as one hundred years into the future or the past, and stay, oh, four hours! The Boron One was the unit that introduced the wonder of ghost mode. The only drawback, which in those days nobody thought much about, was that the fuel-cell was only good for two, maybe three such hundred-year hops before it needed re-charging, and that, in the early days of the hydrogen economy, was expensive. That was the Boron One, the killer app in time travel. And here, Spider saw, in the work log, was the cracked and battered hull of the Boron One Patel managed to find in a salvage yard in Mumbai, an empty carbon-fibre hulk whose hardware had already been harvested by machine-recycling bots, stripping out all the stuff worth anything, leaving this sad, broken thing. Spider was struck afresh at the sheer size of the engine bay, which back in the day had housed not only the hydrogen fuel-cell, the considerable bulk of the scanning engine (the first version of the Boron One could only take one time traveler because th
e scanning engine did not have sufficient processor or storage power to handle passengers), but also the legendary Chronotek 5000 translation engine, the machine that powered a revolution, that was to consumer time travel what the previous century’s Xerox Alto had been to personal computers. At the time, the CT5K had been a world-beating quantum polyprocessing computing device, just barely capable of reading and modifying the quantum state vector data of every single particle in the vehicle and its occupant. Spider remembered that it was a colossal technical achievement, a genuine breakthrough, bringing time travel to the masses. Nowadays, almost fifteen years later, you only ever saw CT5Ks in engineering museums, turned into fetish artwork, or repurposed as avant-garde furniture.
As much as Spider hated time machines and the whole rationale of time travel generally, he had learned enough about hardware and machinery these past several years that he could begin to appreciate what the Boron One meant, what a breakthrough it had been.
Clearly, Mr. Patel felt the same way. While he had found the hull of the Boron One at a salvage yard, he had not been so struck with nostalgia as to dig up an old CT5K engine; he had looked at his budget and opted for a very big Chinese-built ex-military combination scanning/translation unit, and, of course, had it chromed. The images of the finished unit, Spider had to admit, with that fully exposed engine bay, the long-range super-cooled hydrogen-slush fuel-cells (you could clearly see them, wreathed in white frost, with icy fog flowing all around); the feral bulk of that mil-spec scanning/translation engine, all gleaming in chrome, and the whole thing sprouting all those long yellow-and-black heat sink fins — Spider thought the finished unit looked like a machine-porn lion fish you might have designed while off your face on cheap designer hallucinogens. It did not look like any time machine Spider had ever worked on. It actually looked, and he was surprised at himself here, kind of cool. In the course of pimping-up the hull — extreme glossy moral-panic red with blazing yellow lightning slashes — Mr. Patel had had the name KALI stenciled on the vacuum-tight doors. Checking Wikipedia, Spider found that Kali was the Hindu goddess of destruction, but also of creation, and even all eternity itself. Kali was as much about the universe, and the temporal continuum, as she was about sheer, mindless, physical destruction. Shit, he thought, impressed afresh. That was a lot of metaphorical freight for one machine to carry, even one as, frankly, shiny, as this one. Spider checked the projected range of the thing: unknown. He felt a chill crawl up his spine. “One hundred thousand years, possibly two,” Patel had written in tiny, intense handwriting. “We have not tested the unit yet, but all simulations suggest robust jump-range.”
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