“Okay, it’s just, I’m a bit tied up at work right now,” he said, checking his watch. It was nearly three p.m. “I can get over to you by, I suppose, maybe six? If the traffic gods are kind?”
“And what am I supposed to do for the next three hours until you get here?”
“It’s the best I can do. I’m busy.”
Molly swore at him and hung up loudly. He winced and touched his patch. Rubbing his face, trying to manage his breathing and his blood pressure, let alone the stupid time machine out in the workshop, he felt as if he might explode at any minute. Molly had always been the kind of woman who exasperated him, and then charmed him, and made him believe all the exasperating behavior was just “the magic that was her,” and not at all something toxic and manipulative. He didn’t care. He was still in love with her. The trial separation had been her idea. He’d gone along with it because it had seemed better than a divorce, less final. From a trial separation, he thought, he could still try to bring her around, negotiate, and have some semblance of a relationship with her. He was well aware that he was being an idiot. He knew she was bad for him, and that he should draw a line under the whole sorry mess and move on, maybe find someone actually compatible.
Even if he did all that, even if he did find someone “compatible,” he knew that in his heart he would always be comparing the new, compatible woman with Molly, and that Molly, for all her vexatious ways, would always seem more exciting, more passionate, more alive. He’d never be able to leave her alone. It was a hopeless thought. Maybe, he’d even thought here and there, he should get some help. Wasn’t there a word for this kind of thing? Codependency? Something like that. It wasn’t healthy, of that he was sure.
Molly was an artist, a sculptor. He’d met her at university: he was doing an English and communications degree; she’d been doing fine arts. They hated each other on sight, and kept hating each other, sometimes to an alarming degree, for over a year before they realized it was just too exhausting. These days Molly worked with semi-intelligent 3-D fabricators, producing articulated, moving “sculptures” that looked distressingly like living things, the products of complex genetic algorithms given millions of generations to develop and refine themselves. The results were definitely unearthly. Alien beings from a world that could never exist in our reality, was a description Spider remembered from a gallery catalog. She called it “HyperFlesh.” It gave him the creeps.
Not that any of this rumination was helping his blood pressure. He forced himself up, tapped on the face of his watch, causing it to unfold several lightweight panel segments which, when the arrangement was complete, formed an eight-centimeter-square flat screen no thicker than a stiff sheet of paper. He found all the pending calls he ought to return in the phone interface, and started to return them. Most were “simple question” calls. He knew what to expect. “It’s just a simple question … a quick question … not meaning to bother you, but just one more question.” Thank God he had the answers. Not, he knew, that they would do any good. Most people, no matter how often you explained things to them, simply couldn’t be made to understand. There was also the problem that time travel itself was a downright spooky subject. Many never quite felt comfortable with the thought that their personal time machine was being hauled away by Spider and Charlie only to be delivered moments later by the same but future versions of the two technicians! There were times when even Spider himself forgot about this aspect of things, and unexpectedly saw his future self driving the same vehicle, going the other way. So, he did his best, when delivering fixed units, to take different routes back to the customer’s home from the routes he’d taken the first time.
Malaria knocked on his office door. “James at DOTAS said to tell you he can’t get the Bat Cave out here until tomorrow a.m. Is that okay?”
“That’s just fine. Thanks.”
She went back to her desk, and Spider went out into the workshop to see what Charlie was up to. With a little luck he’d have a problem that really needed a fresh pair of eyes to sort out, something that might call for a lot of overtime. He knew Molly, when she heard, would want to jam a grenade in his head, but, as he had often told her, the life of a time machine technician is, by its very nature, unpredictable. Or at least he certainly hoped so.
CHAPTER 3
Much later that night, sometime past one a.m., Spider parked his recumbent bicycle in the locked garage next to his current home, The Lucky Happy Moon Motel. He’d been living here — no, wait, “living” was too strong. He’d been sleeping and bathing here for nearly a year. The management did their surly best to ignore any wild stories about “cleanliness” and “hygiene” they might have heard about, but it was cheap and not far from the workshop. Less pleasing, it was also only a few minutes from the airport, where flights to and from Southeast Asia flew over every five minutes. Spider logged himself in at the door, which buzzed open, and a great waft of the nasty stink of the place washed over him. The odor of hundreds of lonely, broke, and nearly homeless people, most of them men, plus a distinct undersmell of stale instant noodles and another, more elusive reek that Spider had always assumed was the stench of personal failure. He went in, nodded to old Mrs. Ng, who was hunched behind the reception desk. She was knitting, she once told him, a model of a hyperspace manifold. In bright, festive colors. The thing was really coming along. “Any messages for Webb?” he asked her.
Not missing a stitch, Mrs. Ng glanced at a screen and shook her head. “Sorry, Spider.”
“Thanks,” he said, patting the ceramic Buddha on the desk.
The elevators, still not working, were now entering their third month of being broken, he noted. Muttering, he started up the six flights of stairs, watching out in the dim and flickering lights for deposits of human refuse left behind by residents too lazy to use the washrooms on each level. It was, he was sort of pleased to note, getting easier to make the climb to his level. When he had first moved in here these stairs had just about killed him. He’d thought he’d have to be medivac’d out. Now, even though he was puffing and sweating, he was doing better. His pulse felt merely very fast and hard.
He’d spent several hours trying to fix Molly’s network so she could send her construction scripts to The Queen’s Gallery, in Bangkok, where huge 3-D printers would start building her latest HyperFlesh creations. The Gallery’s exhibit of her work started in three days, and she planned to be there for the opening.
Spider spent much of the evening doing his best to diagnose the problem, even while several of Molly’s creations writhed and stretched and moaned quietly around him. It was unnerving, the way they looked so organic, so biological, and so uncannily alive, while at the same time appearing utterly alien. He was sure they were all looking at him with their unnatural eyes; it made the hairs on the back of his neck prick up. Molly herself started the evening being very nice, and even made him an actual cup of reasonable coffee without his having to ask her, but as progress proved elusive she started to release her inner monster, screaming — yes, screaming! — at him that she needed bandwidth and she needed it yesterday! Spider tried suggesting that she take her script to a commercial bandwidth rental shop — there were plenty around, including many that operated twenty-four hours a day — where they would be happy to shoot the bloody thing off to wherever she might want to send it, for a low, low price. This, Molly told him, was an “unhelpful” suggestion. Yes, she could go to some grubby little shopfront run by sleep-deprived uni students or worse, and trust them to upload her delicate and complex script to the correct destinations, and, maybe, hope for the best. But the designs needed to be available to the printers right now! Only she could supervise the upload process to the degree she felt was necessary for the integrity of the work. “And you do want me to be a success, don’t you, Al?”
Spider, depressed and staring hopelessly at the interior components of a router, looked up at her and deadpanned, “Oh my, yes. Your succes
s is the most important motivator in my entire life. I practically live for your success, Molly.”
She told him he could go fuck himself, but only after he’d sorted out the network.
At length, worn out, and fed up, Spider had a brainwave, the kind of blinding flash of inspiration he would have had much earlier, if he hadn’t been so fried with fatigue. He said, “Look, you’ve got a time machine. Why don’t you just pop back in time to before your system here packed it in, and upload your creepy thingies to your black, black heart’s content?”
She’d nearly kissed him, she was so pleased with this idea. “I should have thought of that myself,” she said, manifesting a genuine smile for his benefit.
So that was something, he reflected as he climbed the stairs. He yawned, dead on his feet, dodged around gray-faced shiftworkers, people coming and going from the filthy washrooms, and even some sullen kids sitting around with their heads plugged into cheap, portable game servers, lost to the world. Spider’s capsule was number 639. Each level of the motel featured racks and racks of these plastic sleeping capsules, three rows per level. And it looked as if most were occupied. The rent was cheap, providing you didn’t mind not having any space for storage, other than for toiletries and a few items of clothing. Spider kept the rest of his stuff in a self-storage unit in Osborne Park.
Once crammed into his capsule, Spider thrashed about, trying to squeeze his considerable bulk into a sleeping bag. He wished he could afford decent accommodations, but this was an age when modest and tiny mass-produced concrete tower-block apartments, modelled on those in Hong Kong and Singapore, required sixty-year mortgages. He was giving serious thought to the idea of maybe trying to find a second job. The pittance he got for fixing busted time machines, it seemed, was barely enough to buy decent meals.
Long ago, Spider had been a police officer, a detective senior sergeant, on the Major Crimes Squad. It had been a reasonable job, at first, before all the trouble started. His days as a copper were one of the many things Spider didn’t like to think about these days.
He lay there quietly sweating in his capsule for hours. Noise from nearby capsule occupants didn’t help; many of them appeared to have no concept that the thin plastic walls did nothing to block sound. Planes roared overhead, making the whole building shake. Spider tried folding the pillow around his head, to block his ears, without success. He knew he needed, at minimum, some noise-canceling ear-buds, but couldn’t afford them.
Meanwhile, his evening at Molly’s place — he had to try to not think about how that house had once been his, too — kept swirling round and round in his head, the way she drove him absolutely crazy, but somehow kept him coming back for more. That wasn’t right. And then there was the business with that idiot’s weird time machine today, the way it was neither here nor there, now nor then. Yes, it sat there looking very much part of “now,” but it wasn’t. It was flickering up and down its own timeline so fast you couldn’t see it moving. Even so, Spider thought as he lay there, there was no reason why Charlie should have felt so ill just from sitting inside it. And what was with its being somehow powered up while looking exactly like an inert, powered-down unit? How could that be possible? It wasn’t simply that the unit’s own internal sensors were wonky; their initial tests would have revealed something as simple as that. No, there was something very spooky going on with this one, and it bothered Spider more than he was prepared to let on. He was very pleased he’d arranged for the Bat Cave. That would be a big help.
Bloody time machines. What the hell are they good for? He often found himself thinking this. No good came of them, none at all. Yes, you could do what Molly was planning, and use them for just bopping about in your local timeline, but every time you did something in the past that hadn’t previously happened, so to speak, you wound up creating divergent timelines: one where that change did happen, and left the original one without the change. Both went forward, for good or ill. And it was mostly ill. For every story you heard about some clown wanting to go back in time to save his father from dying in an accident, you heard plenty of other stories about said clown succeeding, only to inadvertently cause his father’s death from something else!
People had this stupid idea that a time machine was a magic wand they could just wave about and it would fix all the bad stuff that ever happened in the world; or even worse, they would take a reasonable, okay sort of life, and try to tweak it to make it better. The number of tragic stories Spider had heard about that kind of thing, and how it never worked out the way it was supposed to. Time travel was notorious for biting you when you least expected it.
And somehow it always turned out to be Spider’s problem. These sad idiots would turn up at the shop, complaining that fiddling with their personal timelines had wound up making things worse, or caused all kinds of other trouble, and nothing they tried could fix it, so clearly the machine itself was the problem, and Spider had to fix it. It was the kind of thing that could make a grown man weep.
The bitter truth was that the only good thing you could do with a time machine was to visit historical events, just to watch. For most historical events given a DOTAS Historical Significance Rating of more than 2.0, you could only go in so-called “ghost mode,” where you could watch everything, but you would not be visible, and would not be able to interact with the locals, even if you could speak their language.
Fortunately for the manufacturers of time machines, time tourism was enormously popular, far more so than anybody had ever previously suspected. Travel agents had to open separate businesses to cater for people with a passion for the past. There were companies operating luxurious time cruisers, catering for hundreds, or even thousands, of people at a time, conducting guided tours of history. As a consequence of this, these days the online world was choked with uploaded videos of historical events shot by tourists, often with commentary alluding to the fact that history was always so different from how they thought it would be. Not that personal access to history settled anything for the world’s academic historians. On the contrary: even when following in the footsteps of the great men and women of the past, observers still tended to see what they wanted to see, or interpret what they saw through the filters of their own preconceptions.
It also frequently turned out that what everyone thought of as capital-H “History,” and about which people had worried so much in the early days of mass time travel, was itself the way it was because of extensive manipulation by mischievous time hackers from the future who’d found ways of getting around the extensive and supposedly secure firmware blocks that DOTAS and their various international analogs bolted onto time machine translation engines to keep them from doing exactly that, and who always proclaimed that they only hacked history to “draw attention to its vulnerabilities.” Never mind that this also meant that many unfortunate developments turned out to be a consequence of some harmless-seeming time meddling that proved impossible to “fix.” This was referred to as the “Third Reich Problem,” after the most notable example of harmless tampering leading to dreadful outcomes. History, everyone was learning these days, was nothing more than an astonishing series of kludgy fixes, with one fix leading to terrible problems that in turn needed fixing, and so on. Time was frustratingly fluid and slippery, a truth known only too well to those poor bastards in charge of trying to fix everybody else’s meddling.
The next morning Spider pedaled through heavy bike traffic and cold, drizzling rain to the shop. Even while he was drinking his first double espresso of the day Malaria was telling him about all the people wanting to talk to him about how their time machines had screwed up this time, and how it was somehow his fault, or at least would soon be his fault. Malaria also said, “And, by the way, Mr. McMahon is coming by later this morning for a meeting.”
“Oh shit, that’s bloody perfect. What’s Dickhead want now?”
“Something about your key-point indicators not shaping up too w
ell, I think. Let me check. Ah. Yes, indeed. You’re well under the curve for this quarter. Mr. McMahon said—”
“Look. Malaria, you can call him Dickhead. Even to his face. Honest. Even his own wife calls him Dickhead — I am not lying about this.”
“I can’t call him Dickhead!” she said, horrified.
“You haven’t met him yet, have you?”
“Well, no. I’ve—”
“Trust me. Dickhead by name, dickhead by nature.”
“I see,” she said. “Oh, and Charlie wants a word about the, er, Bat Cave thing.”
“Problems?”
“Not sure. You’ll have to talk to him.”
Spider went out to the workshop, nodded at Charlie, who was on the phone with DOTAS, then went to look at the unit while he waited. It was baffling, he thought, it looked perfectly ordinary, perfectly inert. About as interesting as a dead car up on blocks in somebody’s front yard. It occurred to Spider that maybe their testing gear needed recalibrating, and he made a mental note to get Charlie onto that later. Then again, what was he to make of Charlie’s getting sick inside the thing? Since Charlie was showing no sign of getting off the phone anytime soon — when Spider got his attention, Charlie just rolled his eyes and clutched at his forehead — Spider thought he might just test the “makes you feel sick” observation. It was possible that it was indeed as a result of something Charlie had eaten, rather than something to do with the unit.
Spider hoisted himself up onto the unit’s trailer, popped the passenger side door, and hesitated for a moment. Do I really want to do this? The machine could explode, right? That was why they were getting the Bat Cave. All the same, Spider felt a strong need to get on with investigating it. He wanted to find out all its secrets — and then get the thing the hell off his property!
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 3