by Anthology
“I did it,” Reggie-C said unbelievingly. “I stopped myself from stopping myself. That means . . . whoops, I’m about to cease to exist.” And he did just that, vanishing immediately into thin air.
Reggie blinked at the quiet street, trying to wrap his head around what he’d just seen. Cautiously, he took another step in the direction of the gasthof.
There was another flash of light in front of him. “Really?” Reggie said. “You again? Or, I mean, me again?”
“No,” the new Reggie, just as dirty and beat up as before, said to him. “I’m not the one you’re thinking of as Reggie-B. I’m you from two weeks in the future, but not the same two weeks. An alternate possible two weeks.”
“Reggie-B2?” Reggie asked.
“Basically. Now listen, you can’t do this. You’ve set something in motion . . .”
Two more flashes, two more Reggies. These two looked exactly like the ones who had disappeared earlier.
“What the hell are you doing back?” Reggie-C asked Reggie-B.
“When you stopped me from stopping me,” Reggie-B said, “you ceased to exist because I never became you. But if I never became you then you never existed to stop me from stopping me.”
“Well I’m here to stop all of you,” Reggie-B2 said. Both B and C looked like they were ready to attack B2, but they were stopped by another flash as a version of Reggie ten years older than all the others stepped into the street.
“I did it,” the new one said. “I got out of the whole mess. I’m . . .” He looked at all the other Reggies and screamed. “No! No, I can’t be back here! I’ve become Reggie-T63! This can’t be!” He ran screaming down the street and disappeared in another flash.
There were more flashes all the way up and down the street. What had been a quiet road minutes earlier was now loud with arguing Reggies, each one trying to stop another from doing something at some point in Reggie’s personal timeline. Reggie, the original Reggie, backed away from the growing crowd. When he was far enough away from all the bickering, he finally heard the old woman laughing. Reggie turned to her and saw her watching the whole scene, cackling softly to herself.
“This is what you get,” the old woman said. “This is what you get for trying to mess with time travel.”
“What do you know about time travel?” Reggie asked.
“I’ve got about fifty years of experience time traveling under my belt,” the old woman said. “Don’t you recognize me yet?”
Reggie leaned closer. She really did look familiar, but there was no way . . .
“No. You can’t be,” he said.
“Yes I can. You can think of me as Reggie-XXQ78 to the fourth power. The ‘fourth power’ thing may not make sense to you yet, but it will. Give it, oh, thirty-three years by your time.”
“But you’re a woman.”
“That one you’ll understand in time, too. Fifteen years and a multi-parallel world continuity crossover crisis will give you the answer to that one.”
“But why are you here?” Reggie asked. “You’re not trying to change or fix anything like any of the others.”
“Because it can’t be done. I’m just here because I’m finally at a point where I can laugh at the whole sorry state of things. I can finally laugh at how stupid and egotistical I was. You are. Whatever. Sometimes it all still confuses me.”
“No, I can still change it,” Reggie said. “I can avoid all of this if I just do it right.”
“And you’ll continue to believe that for far too long. It won’t be until you become me that you’ll understand: time is far too powerful and complicated to be at the whim of anyone as unimportant as you.”
“You’re wrong,” Reggie said, turning away from her and running for the gasthof to complete his mission. He could do this without complications. It really wasn’t that hard.
The old woman chuckled. “Kids,” she said, and went about watching all the other Reggies try to make sense of it all.
THE WORLD OF NULL-T
Gene DeWeese
Function without appropriate form is inefficient, but form without appropriate function is not only useless but an insult to the customer.
—Anonymous know-it-all
In the Timeshares Era, there’s no such thing as a middle ground position when it comes to being a ChronoCop. It’s either the most important or the most useless job on Earth. Any ChronoCop will tell you we’re unsung heroes whose battered fingers are figuratively plugging endless holes in the leaky dykes of Time. The ChronoCorps, they say, is all that stands between Earth and a ChronoTsunami. Just don’t press us too hard for precise definitions of terms, which are slippery at best even when Time is a constant, let alone the variable to end all variables.
On the other hand, if you ask one of the Timeshares people (we’re assuming they’re people) you’ll be told with a wink or a sneer that the ChronoCorps is nothing but a collection of feather-bedding Chicken Littles no better than those despicable but imaginative twentieth-century scammers who managed to sell “gravity insurance” to some gullible flat-earthers (is there any other kind?) when the early artificial satellite photos began suggesting, even to them, that the world just might really be round after all.
As for what we ChronoCops thought of the Timeshares people, suffice it to say that the recruiting requirements include a firm belief in Murphy’s Law, which means whenever anyone tells us “nothing can possibly go wrong,” we assume they’re either lying or are so arrogantly overconfident they shouldn’t be trusted with sharp objects, let alone the ability to time-hop pretty much at will.
And then there’s the Matiolin Society.
Maybe.
No one knows what to think of them. For all the hard evidence we have (zero), we can’t even prove they exist, and the “name” is nothing more than what our computers tell us are the most-often-produced set of sounds in the one and only static-filled “message” they sent. No one’s ever even seen a society member, only their building, which “appeared” not long after—or maybe just before—the Timeshares people’s flickering convoy parked in a twenty-four-hour orbit and began beaming down everything we’d need to get started in the time-travel business. A sort of time-travel kit, some assembly required.
Anyway, somewhere in there, the Matiolin Society building appeared, not in orbit but hovering a few feet off the ground right next to the ChronoCorps HQ.
And that was it. They/It didn’t offer an opinion either way on ChronoCops. Or the Timeshares people. It just hovered, looking sort of like a gigantic misplaced crystalline Christmas tree ornament, and waited.
Or watched. Or reviewed their notes from their last stop.
Or took long naps. Like I said, nobody had a clue.
Those of us in the ChronoCorps hoped there was some significance to the fact that the Matiolins had parked next to our HQ, not the other guys’. We could only hope it was for the right reason—they’d be close enough to help or save us if/when the Murphy’s Law poster boys did something both stupid and dangerous. And believe me, under the Timeshares “rules” that were included in every kit they shipped down, there was room for way more than enough trouble to go around.
See, the official and happy-making line touted by the Timeshares people goes like this: Time is the ultimate elastic, and nothing a traveler can do will keep the timeline—the real, core timeline—from being dragged, perhaps with a little figurative kicking and screaming, back to where it belongs before any “real” damage can be done. Therefore, say the experts in charge of soothing analogies, you don’t have to worry about the infamous butterfly that flaps its dusty wings in China and causes a hurricane somewhere around Cuba, half a world and a couple centuries away. What you have instead is more like an elephant jumping on an industrial strength trampoline in your backyard. He bounces a few times, maybe rattles a couple teacups in the upper reaches of your china cabinet before getting bored and wandering off, leaving Time to heal itself, which it does by repositioning the rattled teacups a millimeter o
r so from their original place, which takes it a couple microseconds and is never even noticed.
But, say the few remaining scientists not on the Timeshares payroll, if the changes are large enough and complicated enough, then all bets are off.
Anything can happen.
Like Time Knots.
“Anecdotal and unproven,” say the Timeshares people. “They’re the Timeshares Era equivalent of UFOs, and you know how real they turned out to be.”
“Anecdotal but inevitable,” say the ChronoCorps theorists. With the Timeshares people’s No-Fault-No-Limits approach to time travel, you don’t need Murphy’s Law to know there are going to be tangles in the timelines, and some will get so bad they can’t be untangled.
Which is usually when one side or the other will cite the so-called Hitler episode, when everybody and his third cousin twice removed suddenly decided it would be a great idea to go back and kill Hitler, only to discover that a similar number of skinheads were already back there providing him with a lifetime supply of disposable bodyguards. In the resulting tornado of successful, unsuccessful, and semi-successful assassinations, every assassin and every bodyguard was killed at least once, Hitler hundreds of times, along with a bunch of innocent bystanders. Each incident, no matter the outcome, generated its own little time thread that added to the tangle.
All of which turned out to be a remarkable piece of good luck according to the pseudomemories that soon began surfacing in the minds of the not-quite assassins—the ones who had changed their minds at the last minute and decided to stay home. Each time Hitler was successfully disposed of, these pseudomemories said, he was invariably replaced by a more pragmatic, less wacked out version who got rid of Von Braun and redirected the scientist’s rocket money to the Luftwaffe, which prolonged the war by several years and left the postwar U.S. Von Braunless and without a space program. The pseudomemories themselves continued to surface, albeit with rapidly decreasing intensity, until it seemed that everyone who had so much as dreamed about participating in the assassination had their own little packet of pseudomemories that quickly and seamlessly merged with their “real” memories until the two were virtually indistinguishable.
The Timeshares people and ChronoCops of course put their own separate spins on the incident. We kill-joy ChronoCops insisted that the important lesson to be learned was that Time Knots were not only real but would, if limits weren’t imposed, become both frequent and inevitable. Some of our theorists even went so far as to say that if a knot grew big enough, it could reach some sort of critical mass, at which point it would start expanding on its own, like a nuclear chain reaction. It could, they warned, become unstoppable and, for want of a better term, freeze time itself into one huge, universe-size Time Knot.
The Timeshares people, on the other hand, only scoffed at this “unfounded Chicken Little thinking” and reminded everyone that while the United States had been developing the first atomic bomb, one of the program’s Nervous Nelly scientists had gone completely off the rails and ran around warning that the bomb might trigger a chain reaction in the atmosphere and wipe out life on Earth. Luckily no one had paid him any attention, and the Timeshares people, never inclined to pass up an opportunity, soon began claiming loudly that the whole Hitler episode was, in fact, incontrovertible proof of what they’d been saying all along: Time could and did repair itself spontaneously no matter how much travelers changed things.
The pseudomemories, they cheerfully explained/improvised, were in fact real memories of what had happened in the depths of the time knot, and they were now being released as the so-called Time Knot itself unraveled (decayed?) and vanished, leaving the timeline unchanged except for the presence of a bunch of memories of things that hadn’t really happened and therefore weren’t even relevant to the real world.
You shouldn’t have any trouble guessing which side won the propaganda war. Suffice it to say that within a few weeks, historical event markers everywhere began being papered over with suggestions as to how your average ChronoTourist could change the outcomes of those events. Ever wonder what kind of president Custer would’ve made? Head for Little Big Horn and give him a little extra firepower and find out. Or if you wondered how many terms FDR might’ve had if he’d been Time-napped from, say, January 1945 and taken to a twenty-second-century surgical center for umpteen bypasses and as many other repairs as they might find were possible?
Then, when all the changes were made, you could hire a camera crew and record the results of your changes. FDR, for instance, got two more terms and turned down a slam dunk for a third, and Custer became the first and only president to not only be impeached but also convicted. The video of his trial, especially the Crazy Horse testimony, easily beat OJ’s long-ago adjusted-for-media-inflation ratings numbers, and the rest was history, of a sort. You think reality shows were popular back in the olden/golden days? Try alternate reality shows.
At one time there were fifteen networks devoted to cranking out nothing else. Even the sporadic wink-and-a-nod oversight the Timeshares people had once provided vanished, as did larger and larger chunks of the ChronoCorps budget. If it weren’t for private donations of all sorts from all sources, legal and illegal, we would’ve gone entirely out of existence.
And no one would’ve noticed.
I even began hoping that the Timeshares people were right after all when they claimed that Time was virtually indestructible. If it wasn’t, something was bound to seriously bite us on the ass sooner or later. A runaway Time Knot that ate the universe, maybe—or at least a galaxy or two.
Or something no theorist had thought of, like the ChronoEquivalent of metal fatigue. After the millionth or billionth Stretch and Snap Back excursion, the superelastic fabric of Time itself would get fed up and rebel. “Screw it!” it would shout. “I wasn’t designed for the sort of aggravation you morons are putting me through!”
And Time would let go and turn to powder. Or molasses.
How’d you like that? Or maybe it would reset into another, slightly less grandiloquent Big Bang and tweak a few of the emerging natural laws in hopes of getting some less goofy life-forms next time around.
All of which was interesting, at least to me, but utterly useless.
As was everything else I’d thought about since the whole world had gone time-travel nuts. I mean, what could I possibly do that could have an effect, either good or bad? True, I could travel through time and space and do anything I wanted, but so could everyone else, and if you tried the one thing that might help—getting rid of time machines altogether—there’d be a thousand other travelers determined to stop me. Like the Hitler episode only way bigger.
But then, one day, my phone jangled loudly even though I was certain I’d turned it off long ago.
When I fumbled it out of my pocket and put it to my ear, an early-model Hawking Voice said, “Check your other pocket.”
Frowning, I looked around.
“Your other pocket,” the Hawking voice repeated, “not your surroundings. You don’t have a lot of time.”
I let myself shiver for a moment. “To do what?” I asked.
“To check your pocket and look at what you find there.”
I almost said, “But there’s nothing there,” but realized I would be lying. There was something there.
Now.
I could feel it moving.
“See?” the Hawking voice said.
Pointlessly, I braced myself and reached into the indicated pocket. And came out with a foldable sheet of digital paper. It must have been down to its standard one-inch square storage mode when I’d first realized it was there. The motion I’d felt had been its efforts to unfold itself.
Now, freed from its pocket prison, it snapped open like a spring-loaded umbrella. There were no words on the paper, no instructions on what to do next, only a single, constantly morphing image made up of several shades of red so similar to each other that the entire sheet seemed to be in deep shadow.
A shadow I insti
nctively knew I did not want to penetrate.
Except, I realized, I had penetrated it, not once but many times.
I could remember it vividly, positively. Just as I could also remember with absolute certainty that I had not ever seen it. None of which should have been surprising since Time had been converted into multilevel Swiss cheese.
“Now, now, Eldred,” said the Hawking Voice. “You’re resisting.”
I froze, realizing where I must be: In a massive Time Knot, trying to referee the countless pseudomemories that were assaulting my mind more harshly than ever before.
“Just relax,” the Hawking Voice said, “Let the Knot sort itself out. This is what it was made for.”
A Time Knot? Made on purpose? I shook my head, or at least I tried. Truth be told, I had no idea if my head was moving or not.
Or if it even existed outside my own imagination anymore.
“Don’t concern yourself with trivia, Eldred,” the Hawking voice said, beginning to sound more natural. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Just relax and go with the flow.”
Easy for him to say. His head didn’t feel like someone had drilled a hole in his skull and was tamping the pseudomemories into it at a fearsome rate.
Then I began to remember things—which is very different from being on the receiving end of a painful torrent of images and sounds and thoughts—none of which had anything whatsoever to do with me. Except for this one little snippet: The current scenario was ending, it said, and the results were being compiled.
In my head.
Except I didn’t remember having one.
I closed and opened my unseen eyes a few times and was relieved to discover that they really did exist.
And not just two. There were billions of them, each reading and storing a separate stream of data. In the head that, milliseconds ago, hadn’t even existed.
The head that was the Matiolin building.
“Good going, Eldred. You feel better now?”