Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “But we’re not first-time visitors.”

  “The facility may be under new management. Or perhaps our visual records were cycled out of active databases due to the extreme interval between visits. Please aid me in removing my suit.”

  “You too?”

  “The message read ‘helmets.’ I believe it is in reference to both of us.”

  He popped his own helmet and removed it, clicking it into his belt, then knelt to find the latch for hers. She was able to hinge it open on her own, but actually removing it needed an extra set of hands. It was a bit more complicated than his, thanks to the elongated nature of her head, but with a word or two of guidance from her, he pulled it off and clicked it onto the other side of his belt. After seeing her with the suit on and the helmet off, he couldn’t help but snicker. Her fur puffed back to its full fluffiness, making her body look comically small in comparison.

  The scanner swept them again, this time concluding with a friendlier tone. It retracted and the doors opened. The comparatively bright light made him squint and look away as a wave of slightly warmer air wafted toward him. When it reached his nose, his eyes nearly watered. The scent was a distinctive and potent one, and one quite in place within the laboratory. It was musky and organic, a smell that wasn’t strictly unpleasant, but was certainly the kind of thing that would convince you to call animal control if you got a whiff of it in your basement.

  Specifically, it was the figurative funk that made the literal funks such artful, multilevel gags. He’d smelled it every time he visited the lab because this was the birthplace of Squee and her older counterpart Solby. But never had he smelled this much of it.

  When his vision cleared, he realized why. The entry hallway, unlike the rest of the facility, which was astoundingly status quo compared to the rest of the future, was quite different. Cold, sterile overhead lights had been replaced by warmer, friendlier ones. Thin walls and observation windows lining each side of the hall had been removed and replaced with scattered columns to give the floor a much more open, welcoming feel. Scattered irregularly about the floor were plush chairs and any number of strange padded structures that looked like cat trees.

  And of course, there were dozens of funks of every shape and size.

  For a moment, Lex, Ma, and the legion of funks merely froze and stared at each other. The funks were the first to make a move, flooding toward him and gathering about his feet, yipping and whining with uncontainable joy and enthusiasm. Perhaps anticipating the forthcoming game of king of the hill, Ma leaped up to Lex’s shoulders while the mob of funks was still roiling around his feet. A half second later they all attempted to join her. There was no barking or nipping, nothing hostile at all about the act. It was merely thirty or forty creatures gleefully attempting to occupy a space large enough for two.

  “Okay, jeez,” Lex said, sputtering as a fluffy tail found its way into his mouth. “Enough. Come on!”

  “Please discontinue this behavior,” Ma said.

  At the sound of her voice, the crowd of funks silenced and looked curiously at the spacesuit-clad member of their clan who had made the request. Even the other two funks who had conquered Mount Lex—one on his other shoulder and the second on his head—looked deferentially toward her. After a moment, they began to become subtly unruly again, a few waggling their butts to take a try at Lex’s shoulder.

  “No,” Ma said with authority. “Behave.”

  This instantly brought them to order. The adorable horde shuffled themselves outward into a ring, each vibrating with barely suppressed joy at the visitors but faithfully remaining on the ground. Their eyes darted back and forth to Ma and Lex.

  Ma looked up, then across to the funks who had yet to relinquish their coveted thrones.

  “Both of you, get down, please,” Ma said.

  They obeyed. Lex watched as they found their place in the ring. He stepped slowly forward. The ring of funks followed them, keeping the same approximate distance. Lex couldn’t place it, but there was something off about these funks. They all looked roughly identical—though assorted bows, collars, and jewelry differentiated them—but something was missing. That, of course, was not the most pressing issue at hand.

  “Ma… why has the lab become some sort of a wild funk preserve?” Lex asked.

  “Unknown. It is, however, pleasing to discover that they remain well trained and obedient.”

  “To you, maybe,” he said, fixing his hair. “They didn’t pay me any mind.”

  “It would suggest they retain some level of training administered specifically by—”

  She was interrupted by a gasp from the doorway to a side hallway. Lex, Ma, and the legion of funks all turned to the source.

  “—me,” Ma finished.

  Chapter 3

  Lex tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The gasp had come from a woman, or at least what appeared to be one. She was tall and quite lean, with only the slightest rise at her chest and fullness at her hips to suggest natural female curviness. Her hair was bobbed and carefully trimmed, falling longer on either side of her youthful, pixyish face before sloping progressively shorter around the sides of her head. It was a white-gray color, silvery in a way that matched the shimmering fabric of her blouse and pants. Cool teal lines accented both her top and her trousers, glowing faintly. A small, tasteful “window” revealed a bit of her flesh at the neck of her blouse just below a choker of sorts. Her arms were bare but for a darker gray pair of gloves. Completing the ensemble was a dark gray capelet about her shoulders, a dark blue sash about her waist, and a pair of boots of the same blue.

  Easily the most striking thing about the woman, however, was her eyes. Her irises were red. Though it wasn’t immediately apparent in the well-lit room, as she passed behind the subtle shadows of the many columns, it was plain to see that they were just as luminescent as the stripes on her clothes. When she blinked, there was even the hint of their red glow diffusing through her eyelids.

  As she stepped forward, one hand to her lips in surprise, she quickened her pace. Lex took a slow step back as she turned the corner around one of the columns and quickened to a run. As the funks ahead of her parted, she opened her arms and almost tackled him in a tight embrace.

  “Lex, you made it,” she said, her voice dripping with relief and shaking with emotion. There was something incredibly familiar about the voice itself, but the tone was wrong somehow.

  Her body felt warm against him, though even taking the material of the spacesuit into account, she wasn’t quite as warm as he would have expected. Uncertain how to deal with the unanticipated affection from the woman, Lex gently placed his hands at her sides and guided her back a step or two.

  “Uh…” he said, after a brief attempt to form an intelligent thought had come up with nothing.

  She stepped back, releasing him until her arms were resting at his waist as well, and looked him in the eyes. They were glistening with tears. Without breaking eye contact he saw a subtle moment of realization flicker through them, and with it came a rosy blush to her cheeks. One hand dropped to her side and the other wiped her cheek as she blinked away the tears.

  “I apologize. That was… unduly familiar of me. You don’t even know who I am,” she said. “I am—”

  “Ma?” he said, squinting at her.

  “Yes,” she said with a nod and a smile. “I’m pleased you recognized me. I imagine the change is a rather jarring one.”

  “Well, right now you’re also a funk and a ship. I’m sort of getting used to you showing up in different…”

  “Form factors,” said the funk on his shoulder.

  “Yeah, that,” Lex said.

  “Oh,” said the Ma standing before him, looking to her fuzzy counterpart. “I had almost forgotten.” She reached out and stroked her past self behind the ears. “Back then I was only beginning to understand what a cute little thing Squee was. Just wait, Ma. When you solve it, the warmth you’ll feel… it is transcendent.”

  �
�Fascinating. You have perfected your understanding of such aesthetic aspects?”

  She smiled, flashing a set of perfectly white teeth. “It turns out it was never about perfection. But I grasp it now.” She straightened up and brushed some folds from her blouse. “Come. This way. I’m sure you have all sorts of questions.”

  “Uh. I’ve got a few, yeah,” Lex said.

  “Excellent. As I recall you were supplied with wholesome but not entirely palatable protein bars as your primary food for the journey. A warm meal would no doubt be a pleasant change of pace.”

  “I wouldn’t mind one.”

  “Splendid. And the Lump of Coal is outside then? Passive sensors detected something, but I’ve been running them in low-power mode, so I wasn’t certain.”

  “Yeah, she’s out there,” Lex said.

  He felt strangely like he’d arrived at a family reunion and was introduced to an aunt he’d never met. This woman certainly had a resemblance to Ma. The voice was something of a smooth union of all three that the current Ma had pieced hers together out of. Her actions and concerns all reminded him of Ma, but seeing and feeling her as a human, when previously the nearest she’d come before was the funk on his shoulder, was off-putting.

  “I apologize for the outpouring of emotion,” she said over her shoulder as her boots clacked along the tile of the hallway. “It is just that… my calculations had suggested you would arrive two years ago, plus or minus a few months. Each passing day made your arrival decreasingly likely. I was afraid you’d never arrived at all, or worse, that you had and the GenMechs had gotten to you. It was… not a pleasant thought.”

  “It’s okay. So you knew I’d end up in the future?” he said.

  They reached an elevator and stepped inside. The doors began to close, but she reached out and stopped them so that the entire parliament of funks could crowd on.

  “Following your departure, Karter and I returned to Big Sigma. The beacon from your cryo-chamber was not active. Karter was rather swift to jump to the assumption that you’d simply been annihilated by the transporter as had evidently happened in many of the test cases.”

  Lex glanced at the Ma on his shoulder. “Funny how the word annihilated was absent from your mission pitch, Ma.”

  “We felt it would have undermined confidence in the mission,” Ma said. “And we were confident we had worked out the flaws.”

  “Indeed, and we nearly had,” said the humanoid one. “Seven months of data analysis eventually revealed a previously unforeseen source of interference that introduced a minor amplitude and polarity issue. Thus, thirty years in the past became fifty years in the future.”

  The doors opened and the funks scampered out into the hallway. Lex knew the floor well, and the scent of this floor—in addition to the omnipresent scent of the funks—hadn’t changed in the slightest. The spicy, starchy aroma of simmering beans, rice, and sausage filled the air.

  “As you might imagine,” the humanoid Ma said, “we have plenty of beans and rice ready now, but if you would prefer, I can synthesize something else.”

  “Beans and rice are fine. Between feeding Squee and not having time to make meals half the time, I’m eating it almost as often as Karter does. So… is he around?”

  She pushed open the door to what looked like a high-school cafeteria. In his own time, the picnic-bench-style tables that stood in a careful array on the floor were scrupulously clean and generally unused. In the intervening years, a subtle change had occurred. All but one of the tables had shallow recesses drilled into the surface. Between each recess and the edge of the table, a neatly printed name was embossed into it. At the head of one table was Squee II, at the head of another, Solby. The rest were unfamiliar. The funks hopped up to the seats in front of each recess, each walking to a specific one and waiting.

  A stainless steel counter with food trays had the usual plates and silverware, but beside them were bowls. Ma’s human version leaned forward and pressed a finger to a pad on the wall beside the counter.

  “Solby, Squee, supper time,” she said brightly.

  Lex took a tray, but Ma gently tugged it from his hands.

  “No, no. Please, I am your host. Have a seat and I’ll serve you. If you don’t mind, though, I really ought to feed the little ones first. They get rather unruly when they are left waiting.”

  “Uh, okay, sure that’s fine.”

  As he took a seat, and the Ma from his shoulder hopped down to the table, she continued speaking.

  “You’d asked about Karter,” she said.

  She set out four trays with twelve bowls each, then systematically plopped a dollop of beans and rice into each one, wielding dual ladles to load two trays at a time. The process was done with a speed and precision that went far beyond muscle memory. It was like watching a pick-and-place machine populating a motherboard, each motion quick and digital—full speed to full stop and back again without faltering. And yet she spoke as though it took no effort at all.

  “Following his apparent failure, he fixated on the issue of time travel. His investigation turned up some very interesting aspects. The interference I spoke of was… analogies are best, I suppose. Imagine space-time is the surface of a still lake, and the intended arrival point is a blue pebble at the bottom, clearly visible in the still water. Now imagine trying to drop an anchor atop that stone. Your first attempt will be quite accurate, as you have the benefit of clarity and stillness. If you miss, however, your second attempt will be almost certain to fail, as the rippling of the water will make targeting virtually impossible until it settles. Time travel, at least through the means we have devised, is quite similar. It varies by the amount of mass and the amount of offset, but any passage through time causes interference that extends backward and forward in time. For something as massive as the fully loaded Lump of Coal, the interference causes further time travel to be imprecise at best and impossible at worst for a period of eight years or more.”

  By the time she’d finished this thought, the four trays were loaded. She took two bowls and placed them down, slotting the base of each into a recess with another robotic display of precision. The funks stared with laser focus at the bowls but did not begin eating.

  “He isolated himself during the ensuing years, reasoning that further attempts could only be reliably made if he was unaware of the eventual attack of the GenMechs. By the time the eight-year interference had subsided, he had made great improvements in the device’s functionality, but never to a level that he found satisfactory. He eventually grew impatient and violated temporal protocol, performing a deep scan of the southern hemisphere of the planet and finding,” she paused as if doubtful of how to proceed, “nothing to support the indication that a trip to the past would have the desired outcome.”

  She set down all but the final two bowls, and as if on cue, two more funks tapped in, side by side. As soon as they arrived, Lex realized what had been wrong about the other funks. Solby and Squee II each had flickering red lights tucked into the fur of their necks. These features were absent on the other funks.

  At the sight of Lex, Solby sprinted over to him and climbed up onto his shoulder to lick his face and nibble his nose. The little scamp then leaned in front of his face to sniff at Ma.

  “Solby, no,” said both instances of Ma.

  The humanoid one continued, one hand placed on her hip and a disapproving look in her eye. “You can say hello after you’ve eaten.”

  She marched over and plucked him up, then set him down at his place on the table.

  “Begin,” she said.

  In unison, all the funks hungrily tucked into their meals. Ma paced back to the counter and began to arrange two more plates.

  “Approximately twenty years after your departure, a group of researchers detected the quantum signatures of the GenMech swarm. They requested permission to investigate and were repeatedly denied. Eventually they did so without permission. They left a sequence of signal repeaters behind to maintain constant connectio
n with their colleagues on Tessera. Seven weeks later the first swarm of GenMechs followed the signals back to a main transit interchange. Subsequent events unfolded roughly according to expectation.”

  She picked up the two plates and set them before Lex. They contained one burrito each, along with a healthy helping of rice and beans. The food had been arranged and garnished beautifully, as though Lex had stumbled upon a fine Mexican eatery in the middle of a robot apocalypse.

  “Would you like a soft drink, or would you prefer your traditional rum and cola?” Ma asked.

  “… I think in light of the current situation some booze would not be out of place.”

  “Certainly,” she said.

  She paced to the end of the counter and opened a cabinet that turned out to be a refrigerator.

  “Now when you say things unfolded according to expectation…” Lex said.

  “CME warheads were deployed en masse. The resulting solar flares caused huge communications and travel failures, but only slowed the progress. All military confrontations resulted in the defeat and consumption of all forces that did not retreat. Within seven months the GenMech threat was considered uncontainable. VectorCorp shut down its travel corridors, but to little avail. Any planets that had existed long enough for their surface emissions to have reached the current position of a GenMech swarm became the new targets, and without transit corridors communication and the rapid deployment of aid were impossible. Within two years society regressed by three hundred years. Interstellar flight was banned. Inevitably those bans would be violated, and just as inevitably those violators would lead GenMechs back to their homes.”

  She set the drink before him and placed the bottles of cola and rum on the table along with a knife and fork before taking a seat.

  “Humanity is not dead,” she said. “I do not believe humanity will ever allow itself to be completely wiped out. But society will never and can never recover, because the larger and more powerful any individual fragment becomes, the more likely they are to be targeted by GenMechs.”