Time Bandits

by Dean C. Moore

  Kendra smiled, with the only evidence a thin, only slightly stretched line drawn across her face. “You’d think parenting the eighth wonder of the world, we could manage to upset the applecart that is this oppressive economy, give the one percent a good shellacking, run them all in, and make some real progress against the true criminals in this city. Not just the ones acting out in front of the monitors, impotently expressing their rage at the injustice, who it’s beneath me to punish any more than they’ve already been punished.”

  “We agreed we weren’t going to subject our daughter to the same save the world manipulative rhetoric that Clyde Barker did. That’s what got her this traumatized in the first place. As if day to day reality isn’t enough.”

  “I still think it’s a better solution than your idea.”

  He migrated over from his nearby coroner’s station. “No, I still say role modeling healthy, well-adjusted adults, who can laugh in the face of the madness, and not let the most crippling End Times economy sour their mood in the slightest, is the way to go. Otherwise we don’t have a legacy and she doesn’t have a future, not outside a looney bin, at any rate.”

  “Where is this store, exactly? Maybe I can at least deploy some robocops to secure the area so we can enjoy a day of shopping without machine gunfire and Molotov cocktails flying outside the store window.”

  “Davenport took care of that already. He’s far better at that sort of thing.”

  “Too good, if you ask me. Seems like any case I land worth a damn is secondary to his AI interventions. You ever wonder if that guy is even human? I mean, who but the City AI is smart enough to run algorithms like that?”

  “In some parallel universe maybe. But our City AI, forget about it, probably as senile and as broken down as every other part of the city. Not that I’m looking to be right on that score, doesn’t exactly portend for better tomorrows.”

  She took another deep breath to settle her nerves. She was doing a lot of that lately. It was time to take up Lamaze breathing classes, pretend she was pregnant, if only to perfect the breathing she needed to keep from passing out from shock.

  One of the maintenance bots, a robo vacuum scuttled about the floor in the shape of a giant sand dollar. It kept bumping its head against the legs of the desks and saying, “Sorry.”

  “When are you going to get that thing fixed?” Torin said. “It’s a violation of robo-rights to let it keep knocking itself senseless owing to a defective sensor.”

  She pointed to the droid midget hobbling towards them on one game leg with the broom and dust collector in hand. He kept swatting the backsides of the detectives to get them out of his way, or kicking them in the shins. “Technically he could get arrested for that. But he’s broken too. Can’t afford to fix him either.”

  “Well, in his case, we can chalk those defects up to character. I find him quite endearing,” Torin said, smiling at his little buddy. He waved at Shorty. Shorty took out his gun and fired at Torin, all six cartridges. The rubber pellets bounced off of Torin, causing him to flinch as if he were being stung by bees. Shortly after the gun had emptied, Shorty came out of his fog. “Sorry,” he said, holstering the weapon. “But that wave you just gave me means ‘off with his head’ in Yemeni. At least I think it does. My Yemeni isn’t what it used to be.”

  “You’re not supposed to be carrying a gun, Shorty,” Kendra admonished him. “You’re not a detective.”

  “I’m not? Then I guess my detective-algorithms aren’t what they used to be either. You’re still not taking the gun. Best way I have of getting these self-absorbed pricks, I mean detectives, to not step in the freshly mopped areas labeled, ‘dangerous when wet.’ So for now, it’s a better boon to social service than you two rejects.”

  He wandered on, resuming his cleaning duties, actually managing to get some dropped cigarette butts in his dust bin.

  She nodded towards the windows facing the city.

  Ian looked up from Shorty to see what she was talking about. “Oh, no, not again.” The windows were all covered with animated porno. The lewdest, most disgusting close-ups imaginable. “I hate it when the windows get hacked.”

  “You hope it’s a hack job. Could just be another short,” Kendra said. They were suddenly finding it difficult to talk without shouting over the din of whistles, catcalls and applause directed at the windows from the fellow detectives.

  Kendra noticed she and Torin were dematerializing. Torin must have too, as he was already reaching for his sci-fi novel. The man never stopped believing in better futures, his favorite stories being the positive sci-fi ones, those that described Singularity as simply a more matured, evolved, and long-lived Age of Abundance, instead of the progressive apocalypse she’d known it to be all her life. Even before post-apocalyptic New York became a fad.

  “Let’s hope our daughter just got a lock on us and not the bigger picture,” he said, frowning at the window porn.

  “Drinking in her childlike innocence in the middle of my day?” Kendra said. “You sure she isn’t the one doctoring us back to health?” Her voice was sounding emptier and fainter as the dematerializing effect continued to bleed her out of this time and place in favor of the dress shop.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “Do you believe this thing?” Bertram said, petting his baby, and regarding his daughter, Kendra, standing off in the distance. He was the same old dad she knew from as young as she could remember. Put him next to a well-made engine, even one of alien origins, and he purred like a kitten even before it did. His hair was long and scraggly and largely grey, his beard, what little he could grow of one, being fifty-percent Native American, was also largely grey by this point. He’d never lost the hippie sensibility or the look to go with it. Even now, a joint dangled at the edge of his lips. He’d long since mastered talking and toking so he didn’t have to take the joint out of his mouth just to express himself.

  “Dad, that engine and the ship it’s powering is dragging away our moon. So you’ll forgive me if I’m not yet ready to join this mutual admiration society.”

  “You never were. You’re such a hater. If I taught you one thing it should have been that life is full of awe and wonder, more awesome and more wondrous with each passing day. I’m holding the evidence in my hand, right here.”

  Kendra rolled her eyes then parted her hair and looked around the chamber to confirm what she already knew. Notchka had had the foresight to split up the landing party, leaving her with dad, and no doubt leaving Torin with his parents, and she free to roam the spaceship as she pleased. Even now Kendra’s better instincts told her to table this argument with dad for a more favorable opportunity, one that didn’t involve handing over the fate of the world to a fourteen year old. But she’d dodged this moment of truth long enough, and by her own reasoning, if she expected to rein in her daughter, she’d better take her mind to the next level, heal what needed healing in her relationship with her dad so she could be whole again, so she could throw all of her mind at the problem of rescuing the moon rather than what was left over, not busy working away at an unconscious level on the problem of who she was and what she had become.

  “This is why we’re here today,” she said. “You love what you do to the exclusion of all else. You should never have had children. There’s no room in your life for them.”

  “I should have been more like you, is that it?” He walked along the engine’s exterior, feeling it out, psyching it out, talking at her with just a piece of his mind. “Balancing career and parenting, finding a way to do both? How’s that working out for you, by the way?”

  “A work in progress, but nothing to suggest my approach is worse than yours.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t. But then I never had the luxury to pick my own child. Tell me, would you have taken to being a grease monkey like me? Fixing engines your secret passion, is it?” He glanced away from the engine just long enough to glare at her. “No, that’s what I thought. That left me with one option, to lead by example. Maybe if I could
show you that the point of life was to love what you were doing so much, that you couldn’t wait to get out of bed in the morning, then I would give you the best gift a parent could give a child, a reason to live, a real reason, not just a reason to survive. Tell me I failed you there. Go ahead, tell me.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. This wasn’t going as expected. He was actually winning this argument! She’d lived her entire life with a sense of purpose, a focus and determination. That had not only made her highly successful at what she did, but filled every moment with joy. And she wouldn’t be surprised if she’d picked that up from him; if it wasn’t in the genes, then it was in what he’d role modeled for her, a truth that he never had to communicate in words or even actions; it just spilled out of every moment of his existence like a genie which couldn’t help but escape its bottle, a soulful essence which couldn’t, wouldn’t be contained. Life didn’t give him that, it was what he brought to life; it was his gift to it.

  “You could have done what normal parents do,” she said, “put me in swimming classes or gymnastics, anything to see what I might take to.”

  “Didn’t need to. I may not have been psychic, but it was pretty clear to me from an early age what got you excited.”

  “How could you possibly know? You were never there!”

  “Do you remember that time we were taking a walk and chanced upon a dog that was tied up? The rope had burnt through his neck, he was so determined to get away from his master? You stole the mutt away from him, fed it, watered it, kept it as your own until it healed. The whole time…”

  “I plotted my revenge against the owner, came up with quite the elaborate plan,” she said chuckling. “Took me three months to set it into play and for everything to come together. But he’s rotting in jail to this day thanks to me.”

  “You were just seven years old. Quite the prodigy.”

  “So what does that prove?”

  “That you were either going to be a master criminal in the vein of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, righting social injustices how you may, or you were going to be a copper. Either way, society would be well served.”

  “That was just one incident.”

  “There were many more just like it. No doubt you can’t remember those either without a little prodding. To remember them would just ruin your whole image of me. Surprised you never plotted and schemed to see I ended up behind bars the way you did the others. Maybe that’s because deep down you knew you had no good reason for hating me.”

  “I had plenty of good reasons!”

  “Yeah, I suppose you did,” he said, letting his hand drop from caressing the engine for the first time. “I guess I couldn’t resist the opportunity to nudge you in the right direction by turning my parenting into a type of injustice with criminal neglect. But you were so talented, you could have been so many things, a child like you needed a nudge in the right direction, or so I thought. Figured without it, you’d just spin your wheels, be another dilettante, maybe a writer writing stories because she could never commit to any one role in life, easier to live them all in her imagination in a virtual world.”

  “Would that have been so bad? Maybe I was meant to be more than just an investigator? Maybe there was a career that allowed me to utilize all of my aptitudes, not just some of them. And if that just happened to translate into being a writer, who are you to say it was the wrong thing for me?”

  He rolled his joint in his hand, perhaps to provide the tactile stimulation that was missing now that he was no longer touching the engine. “You’re right, of course. Didn’t consider it at the time. But then I’m more a man of the world. Couldn’t imagine someone willingly losing themselves in virtual reality the way most do today. I thought I was saving you from a kind of hell.”

  “And why is it you can’t get through a day without being high on pot if your life isn’t a kind of hell?”

  “Maybe if I had more of what you had, I wouldn’t need to look for a way out. Maybe the truth lay between our two extremes. I, with more of a willingness to stray from the life my father showed me, might have set down the drugs in time. You, if you could see how much the real world had to offer. Maybe if we could have met each other half way we could have saved each other. But it wasn’t in the cards. And nowadays, you don’t need to make amends with me to heal, our world is as much virtual reality as it is something tangible you can get your hands around,” he said, resting his hand on the engine again. “So everything you say I deprived you of in your childhood, the present has given to you ten times over. Me, it’s just continued to squeeze more to the sidelines. Until today, anyway. Now I have my own heroes to worship and emulate.” He stepped back to eye the big picture view of the engine. “Maybe they’ll adopt me if you won’t.”

  “We’ll continue this conversation some other time. For now I need you to tell me how to get the moon back where it belongs, and how to break the hold this ship has on it.”

  “I might be able to do that, providing there was something in it for me.”

  “No. No emotional blackmail. You get to have another father and daughter talk in the future, at a time and date I set. That’s the only deal.”

  “Now who’s guilty of emotional blackmail? Fine,” he said, with a sigh. “I’m going to need a pencil and paper. The physics is a little too much to do in my head. I’m older now, but I doubt I could ever have done it all up in my head.”

  “A pencil and paper, Dad? We’d have to travel back in time. One problem at a time.”

  He picked up a laser pen that was part of an engineer’s toolbox of implements for keeping the engine in tune. The engineer being a sleeping robot, he had to slide the thing out of its safekeeping without waking the slumbering giant. Instead of using the laser pen for welding, he etched the first of his equations in the floor with it. “Yeah, this should do it. This should do nicely.”

  ***

  “I must say, this really beats the last cruise ship we were on, by a country mile,” Evelyn Zealton said. She regarded the ring shape of the spaceship with its many decks and lights, the hollow center with stars shining through, the stars at the periphery of the ring. “When do we get to go swimming in the pool, dear?” she asked her husband of many years.

  Elliot held her tight from the side, enjoying the view alongside her, and kissed her on the head. “Maybe later, dear.”

  Torin just shook his head slowly at the sight of the two of them. “Just let her jump in already.” Torin knew she was confusing the sight of stars inside the ring of the ship with a swimming pool reflecting the night sky above.

  His father craned his neck to give him a nasty look then just as dismissively went back to sharing the view with his wife.

  “You haven’t smiled in thirty-five years on account of her Alzheimer’s. Just wore your badge of courage with grim determination to get through the day.”

  “What do you know about love?” the old man said.

  “Yes, what do I?” Torin returned nastily. “Don’t put this off on love. It’s got nothing to do with that and everything to do with your philosophy of life. It’s supposed to be brutal and harsh. No matter what era we’re in. Things never get better, they just get worse to test what you’re made of. And if you endure enough hell, then, when you die, maybe you get to prove you’ve earned your way into heaven.”

  “That’s right. You want to live your life some other way, fine by me.”

  “What you’re doing is not living. Gotta have a heart for that. You don’t have a heart, just a sense of duty. Gotta have an open mind for that. You can’t even think from within your philosophy, which does your thinking for you. Gotta be able to squeeze a drop of joy out of life for that. If you tried to laugh now, one single chuckle is all it would take to give you a heart attack or a stroke. You probably set it up that way unconsciously as final vindication for a life well lived.”

  His mother turned around. “I thought that was you, Torin. But yo
u’re dead. This can’t be.” She struggled to get out of the old man’s arms, he just barely strong enough to hold her tight.

  “It’s all right, sweetie,” he said. “It’s just a ghost. I see him too. His soul isn’t at rest. Just pray for him.”

  “Dead? That’s rich. Is that what you told her?”

  “You didn’t come around for so long, it was just easier,” the old man blurted. “She couldn’t deal with the grief. And now her mind isn’t flexible enough to process this new reality anymore.”

  “What a pair you are. You deserve one another. She probably brought the senility on herself just to torture you. How else could you martyr yourself to your god? Probably just been one big act all this time just so you wouldn’t leave her for some other woman who was an ounce more torment.”

  “Go on, get out of here. You can see you’re not helping.”

  “That moon you see being dragged away from Earth,” Torin said, pointing to the rock in the center of the “pool.” “That’s the end of all life on Earth unless someone with an open enough mind, someone with an agile enough mind, can solve the problem. That’s why my science trumps your religion. And if I couldn’t laugh amidst all this absurdity, I doubt I could shockproof my mind enough to contend with the reality. If I didn’t have a heart that could actually love, I doubt my mind would be big enough to contend with the crisis. If there’s a way out of this it’s because I’m everything you’re not.”

  “Glad to hear I did something right.”

  “I am what I am because I rejected everything that you are. You had nothing to teach besides the negation of all that’s holy.”

  “You think God gave me you by mistake? He gave me you so you could be the supreme challenge to all that I am. So we could see in one another the limits of our vision, our self-righteousness. I may have failed the test, but it’s not because I failed to see the sense in it. You, you failed because even with that big brilliant mind of yours, you couldn’t see the writing on the wall.”