Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Terminal C is now enabled for two-way text communication,” BSOD said.

  Lex hurried to the indicated terminal and tapped in Coal’s communication code. The text reply came within a few seconds.

  Please state status.

  Karter came and went. Took the GMVD. We’ve still got the code. Three hours to go, he typed.

  The code retention is fortunate. The loss of the GMVD is unfortunate.

  “Unfortunate” is a massive understatement. How long will it take for Karter’s ship to reach the GMVD cluster?

  Seventeen hours.

  How long will it take for you to get to me and for us to get there?

  Assuming your usual level of intuitive piloting, thirty hours.

  So that’s it. Game over.

  Not necessarily. Help is on the way.

  How? Who?

  The details of the plan are too complex to communicate through this means. Please trust me when I say that all efforts are being made to stall Karter. If all goes according to plan, we will have the means to increase our straight-line speed by the time we arrive. Focus on the completion of the code. We will arrive in approximately two hours and twenty-eight minutes. Our route runs adjacent to monitored corridors, facilitating constant communication and maximum speed.

  Okay. Just get here quick.

  Lex stepped away from the terminal and took a breath. That was it. There was nothing left for him to do but wait and hope that Ma could shake her magic wand and slow down the lunatic with the killer robot. At times such as this, when everything is on the line but there is nothing to be done, there are few things more difficult than convincing the brain and body to take advantage of a rare moment of calm. If he was in a ship, blazing through the sky with the knowledge he would not be of any real use for days, he could sleep like a baby knowing he was at least getting somewhere. Sitting in a facility, watching an unstable genius form lines of code he couldn’t hope to understand, his mind locked itself into a loop and wouldn’t slow down, surging from adrenaline with no place to go.

  Waiting was always the hardest part.

  Chapter 10

  “John!” barked Karter.

  Lex jerked awake. After two hours he’d finally managed to slip into a fitful sleep. That had lasted for all of thirty seconds before Karter’s outburst.

  He turned his bleary eyes to the inventor, who was waggling a memory chip in his face.

  “Here’s your firmware. It’s within the performance threshold based on the hardware you provided, fits in the footprint, can self-configure to ninety-eight percent of checksums with zero loss of data. Take it and get out.”

  Lex took the chip and continued to try to get his brain moving.

  “Uh, good… good… Is M-… my associate here yet?”

  “Who?”

  “The fuzzy dog thing.”

  “Yes. She’s been waiting outside. She just authorized the rest of your payment.”

  “Why didn’t you let her in?”

  “Because this is a lab, not a kennel. Up and out, John. I’m sick of you.”

  Lex staggered to his feet. BSOD spoke up.

  “Thank you for your patronage. We hope you have found our laboratory to be satisfactory. If you would like to provide feedback—”

  “You worthless piece of crap, enough with the surveys. Just get him up and get him out,” Karter growled.

  “Yes, Dr. Dee,” BSOD said.

  Lex had just enough time to click his helmet in place before the grippers physically yanked him from his feet and began herding him toward the door.

  “Tell your bosses to stop sending people,” Karter called after him. “When I say I want to be left alone, that means I don’t want to be bothered. I would have thought that would be clear. It’s bad enough John is here.”

  “I’d like to say you’ll never see me again,” Lex said. “But who knows what the future will bring?”

  “If the future is going to bring nothing but more idiots, then screw the future,” Karter said. “Out!”

  Lex shuffled along as a team of ceiling-mounted grippers pushed him toward the door. In a well-choreographed sequence, the inner door opened just in time for him to stumble into the airlock. Motors chugged to life and removed the good air, replacing it with the local fumes. He stepped up to the window, expecting to find Coal and Ma outside waiting for him. He did… but she wasn’t alone.

  Coal sat on the cement landing pad with Ma perched atop her. A second ship, far sleeker and more angular, sat on the yellow soil beyond. It was long and narrow, more framework than fuselage. In many ways it looked similar to the spindly ships Lex had encountered in what he’d come to think of as “the bad future,” though unlike those it was in superb repair, and rather than being mostly empty but for the minimal propulsion and life support, this one had a monster of a power plant tucked inside as well as a more spacious compartment for the pilot. The ship had the overall shape of an arrowhead. The front tapered into a point, trailing back into a sharp-edged wedge. The rear end of the vessel held a veritable constellation of thrusters. There were easily six times as many as it needed, which gave Lex a strangely nostalgic feeling. He’d given his first freelancing ship, good old Betsy, a similar treatment. This one, he had to admit, did a better job of making the engines look like they belonged there.

  The airlock finished cycling, allowing the repaired outer door to slide open. Lex stepped out toward Ma.

  “Lex, it is good to see you again,” she said, springing to her feet.

  She launched from atop Coal and struck Lex in the chest in what could only be described as a playful pounce. Lex caught her and she scrambled to his shoulders. Her helmet clicked against his, and he felt certain if not for their suits, she would be snuggling with him right now.

  As usual, Coal voiced the prevailing attitudes with a measure less tact. “Hi, Lex! I would hug you, but I lack the appropriate anatomy.”

  “I am pleased you did not come to serious harm due to my actions,” said Ma. “I offer my deepest and most profound apologies for what I brought about, and I commend you on your methods to circumvent me.”

  “Fat lot of good it did,” Lex said.

  “Do you have the firmware?” she asked.

  He held up the chip, still clutched in his off hand. “Here it is.”

  “Excellent, let us board Coal and discuss the next steps in our plan.”

  “Uh… aren’t you forgetting something?” Lex asked, pointing at the newcomer. “Who’s this?”

  “In order to avoid further complicating the mission, and to facilitate a clearer and more focused mindset, I believe it is preferable to—”

  Lex’s face became stern. “It’s me, isn’t it.”

  “I told you I’d figure it out,” came his own voice over his helmet’s communicator.

  The helmet overlay flipped on to reveal a familiar, but not identical, face. Rather than the head-on view of a camera within his own helmet, this view showed most of the interior of the cockpit of his vessel. Lex’s future self was not wearing a full flight suit. Both the gloves and helmet were absent, and the silvery suit had some odd, dusty white blemishes across its surface. The man himself didn’t look so different, but familiar as he was with his own reflection, he noticed more than a few details immediately. His nose had a dash of the telltale crookedness of having been broken and realigned. It was practically imperceptible, but as present Lex was still sporting the twin black-eyes and swollen face earned by the break, it stood out to him. Future Lex also had a faint white scar running down the left side of his neck.

  There were a dozen other little changes. His face was covered with stubble, as tended to be the case during lengthy space jaunts, and a smattering of gray was peppered into it, as well as a few threads of white at his temples. Future Lex reached up to scratch his chin with his left hand, revealing a small tattoo of an old-fashioned shield sporting the letters GCC. Most glaring however, was the simple silver ring he wore on that ring finger.

  “
Did you… did I… how did…?” Lex stuttered.

  “Lex, I literally know what you’re thinking, because I thought it first. Let’s not ask too many personal questions. It’d really spoil the next few years of your life.”

  Coal’s hatch popped open.

  “Hop in,” she said.

  Lex shook his head and climbed inside. As the hatch shut, Ma glanced down at the chip he held.

  “That is a fairly obsolete data storage format. However, as this is the intended era of our interactions, our need to read such a format was anticipated. Please place the chip on the small port in the upper right-hand portion of the control panel,” Ma said.

  “Roger,” Lex said, dropping the chip into place.

  It swiftly vanished into the control panel, and Ma tilted her head back as she linked up with Coal to read the code.

  “Yes… Though I lack the full resources necessary to run a comprehensive simulation, the mechanisms at work in this firmware should perform the required task. Karter even had the foresight to alter the code transfer algorithm to reconfigure and filter the code prior to duplication to prevent future duplicates from retaining his modifications. He is a gifted programmer.”

  “Well, yeah. He made you. By the way, never have I appreciated you more than after having to cope with the mess that was BSOD.”

  “His crash-prone nature is evidenced by his designation, which draws upon Karter’s predilection to substandard wordplay.”

  “I’d ask about that, but I really don’t care,” Lex said, taking the controls and easing Coal into the air. “Mostly I’m wondering what exactly the logistics of my other me being here are.”

  “They’re a headache, Lex,” said the other Lex.

  “I’m used to headaches. But while I admit my eyes were a little glazed at the time, I could swear you said something about time travel to and from a point in history creating a sort of no-fly zone for a few years surrounding the arrival. So how did he get here?”

  “I’ll field that one I guess,” Future Lex said, piloting his own ship skyward. “Some time… let’s say five to ten years after you left the first time, Ma will inform you she made a mental note a few hours ago to send you back again. Or I guess it’s more accurate to say she’ll remind you, since I indeed learned about it for the first time when I told you it just now. You have to go another ten to twenty years back before now.”

  “So I’m going to have to—”

  “Yeah, you’ll be coming back for a second tour, assuming this goes well. You’ve got a lot of freezer time in your future.”

  “Great…” Lex said. “Is there another version of Ma in there with you? Are we working with three Ma’s simultaneously again?”

  “No, very low-grade AI this time around. Needed the data storage and processing power for other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “Things you don’t need to worry about for another five to ten years, Lex.”

  “Fine. So what happens now? It seems to me Karter’s got a head start in a faster ship.”

  “Head start, yes. Faster ship, not anymore,” Future Lex said. “We about ready to link up?”

  “Link up?” Lex asked.

  “Yeah. This is not so much a ship as an overthruster for Coal. We call it Diamond.”

  “I’m not sure that name makes sense.”

  “Try not to think about it. The important thing is, combined we match and exceed the horsepower of Karter’s Behemoth, at least for sprints. We can get to where he’s going in… maybe fifteen hours.”

  “That doesn’t match up. He said he’d get there in seventeen hours, and that was three hours ago.”

  “Give yourself more credit than that, Lex. I’ve had twenty years to lay the groundwork. There are plans upon plans in place. Combined, I think they can eat up an hour or two.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “We’re both going to wake up in a future we aren’t expecting. With or without extra versions of ourselves. Hell, if we really screw it up, by the time I wake up there will be three of us running around. Me, you, and the local one.”

  “Jeez. We better do this right then. My credit is bad enough like it is. I don’t need what amounts to two justified identity thieves.”

  The ships made their way into the high atmosphere, past satellites that, thanks to Ma’s handiwork, were willfully ignoring them. Once they were clear, Future Lex’s ship drifted ahead. The network of engines opened, hinging at the edges and revealing hefty-looking docking clamps.

  “Bring her in,” Future Lex said.

  Lex guided Coal forward. The hinged framework had barely a centimeter of slack all around and conformed precisely to her near-spherical shape.

  “Tight fit.”

  “We didn’t have a lot of wiggle room. Sending stuff back in time isn’t the most efficient process, you’ll recall.”

  When he was in position, the clamps locked down. The result was apparent. All the internal lights in Coal’s cockpit flared with the influx of fresh power. Her navigational displays rolled down time estimates, and her thrust indicators multiplied. When combined, the ships had a higher thrust-to-weight ratio than even Lex’s ridiculously overpowered SOB.

  “Okay, all hooked up,” Future Lex said.

  “What’s the plan?” Lex said.

  “Step one, we go that way, really fast, until we catch Karter. Step two, we figure out step three.”

  “Ah. It’s nice to know my plans haven’t gotten much more complicated in the intervening years. Let’s get moving then. I’m eager to see what these two ships can do when they’re teamed up.”

  “Gladly. Oh, and I’m flying.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I’ve got seniority, because my ship’s got the overthrusters, and because I had to sit through it the first time. Just buckle up and enjoy the ride.”

  He didn’t wait for further objections, of which there were plenty. Future Lex just punched the throttle and shifted to FTL. Thanks to the instantaneous lethality of the accelerations involved, Lex didn’t get the coveted wedged-into-your-seat feeling that so often comes with raw vehicular power. That was nothing new, though. He’d long ago learned that when it came to modern spacecraft, power usually wasn’t about how it felt. It was how it looked, smelled, sounded, and a thousand little things. The view outside his window made the shift from visible to invisible in a flash rather than a steady shift. He flicked the display button and moved the heat, power, and velocity readings to front and center, even switching them to analog view so he could watch simulated needles shift and rotate. It took a seasoned pro to understand the story the dancing needles told. Lex was just such a pro. And knowing the sort of speed the two ships had combined made him burn all the more viciously with envy that his future self was the one at the controls instead of him.

  “Five to ten years before I get to fly this thing properly?” he muttered to himself. “… Might be worth the wait.”

  #

  Karter watched the ETA tick down and began to plot out the tasks from this point forward. Dropping off the GMVD with its new firmware was first on the list, which he’d have to get done quickly. In his long life, Karter had faced a great deal of potentially catastrophic things, but the GenMechs had made it on the short list of things that made him legitimately uneasy. Get in, drop the bot, watch if it does its job, and get out of there. Simple enough. If it didn’t work, he’d make another and try again, since this time he’d taken the precaution of loading up the schematic for the device. If it did work, that’s where the fun part would start.

  He couldn’t be sure how much of the past few days had been part of his own timeline and how much hadn’t, but the really notable stuff had taken place in relative isolation, so his records would probably stay good for a while longer. That afforded him tremendous opportunities to dig himself a nice little corner to hide himself in. Financially, he could probably ride the stock market to a few big payoffs before that diverged from his records. He still ha
d plenty of time to snipe his younger self on some of his patents, so that’d be a good income. Then there was—

  A loud warning tone sounded, and his ship dropped down from FTL, jarring him from his train of thought.

  “What the hell?” Karter griped.

  He looked to his sensors to find several dozen ships, small, but large enough to be a problem if he’d struck them, scattered in a wide net between himself and his destination.

  “We are light-years past the edge of mapped space,” Karter said. “What are these things doing here?”

  His screen lit up, and a small message scrolled across it.

  My apologies, Karter, but you deserve this. Sincerely, Ma.

  He’d barely had time to read it when the screen, and almost all other power on the ship, winked off.

  Karter released a string of unrepeatable words and stormed to a maintenance panel by the glow of the emergency lighting. Activating all available sensors in his cybernetic components, he found that all the individual drones were broadcasting commands, each attempting to exploit a different weakness in his security he’d not been aware of. He tore the door to the maintenance panel free and manually activated the power system. The control system of the ship was still booting when it started receiving and executing commands from the drones. His shields shut down and cleared their firmware. His weapon systems locked up. The ship was utterly crippled within fifteen seconds.

  “No… No! I know I didn’t have this many gaps in my security,” he snapped, reviewing the readings he was getting from the drones as they continued their data assault. “Even if I did, it would take decades to crack my encryption.” His eyes narrowed. “… I knew I should have set that time machine to autodestruct…”

  He twice more attempted to initiate the ship’s systems, but each time the computer took its first instructions from the drones instead of Karter himself and ended up getting tied in even tighter knots.

  “Fine… you want to screw with me,” he said, pulling a wire from his communication system and linking it to a port on his neck. “Then I’ll screw with you…”

  #

  “Everyone up? Everyone got their eyes on the nav?” Future Lex asked.