“They came to me, while I was inside.”
“What, just like that? They just walk in and tell you they’re, what? Crypto-spooks from the far, far future?”
“Not at first, no. No, at first they led me to believe they were lawyers from DOTAS. Said they were concerned about my case, that there was an ambiguity in the evidence against me. Was I interested in appealing the verdict?”
“Were you?”
“What do you think?”
Spider, his whole head wracked with pain, nodded minutely. “Listen, you wouldn’t have any painkillers, would you?”
Future Spider had been looking out the side window as he talked, keeping an eye on the kids out front of the fast-food place. Now he turned and looked at Spider and he swore. “Yeah, sorry. I had to get you the hell away from Molly’s as quick as I could.”
“It’s just,” Spider said, “you know, ow!”
The other Spider powered up the car and told it to find the nearest all-night pharmacy. The car swept out of the parking area and back onto the road. The head-up display said they should reach a pharmacy in two minutes. The other Spider apologized profusely. Spider, his eyes pressed shut, let him go on in this vein.
Soon they pulled into the pharmacy parking area and Future Spider went into the shop and came out with, he said, “The most heavy-duty shit they had.” He also had a small bottle of water. Spider took the water, and used it to wash out his mouth as best he could. The coldness of the water on exposed nerve tissue made him jump and cry out involuntarily. He took a handful of the caplets, and hoped for the best. The drugs took their time kicking in — and then there was a strange tingling, burning sensation in his injured teeth.
“What the hell?” he said, looking at the box. The label indicated that the caplets contained reconstructor agents for minor tissue damage. Spider stared, astonished. He knew very well that you needed a doctor’s prescription to access drugs like this. You didn’t just pop into a pharmacy in the middle of the night and buy it over the counter. Meanwhile, his mouth felt alive, full of activity. He imagined tiny builder ants erecting giant skyscrapers in the bloody ruins of his teeth.
Future Spider said, “Least I could do. Sorry.”
He didn’t want to say anything, lest he somehow damage the rebuilding effort in his mouth, so he sat in silence.
The other Spider got the car to take them to the beach, and they wound up in the parking area adjacent to a Surf Life Saving Club building, with a dim view of Trigg Beach. Spider could see kids wearing psychedelic and glowing wetsuits on surfboards out there in the churning water — at this hour, in the rain. Mad buggers, he thought.
By the time the sun started to rise behind them in the east, Spider’s mouth was feeling better, even if the long night had left him feeling like he’d been awake three days. The images showing what had happened to Molly would not leave the front of his mind. It was as if he was living in an old-fashioned movie house, with those images blown up to unthinkable size and clarity on the screen, while he tried to go about his business down in the stalls, lit by the glare of all that blood and horror.
They found a place open for breakfast not far from the beach. Future Spider was paying. Spider ordered a giant-sized, all-day breakfast, with sausages, bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. He sipped the coffee, and felt weak and a little dizzy from hunger and exhaustion. There had been something very surreal about this endless night on the road with his future self. He wondered if he wasn’t dreaming. Molly would still be alive. She might still have a problem with her toilet.
But thinking that only reminded Spider that he was living in that theater, with Molly’s death lit up behind him, a million times larger than life. He drank a lot of coffee but, faced with all that food, didn’t think he could keep anything down, even if he was now prepared to risk his brand new teeth.
In hesitant blurts between mouthfuls, Future Spider tried to explain about Zeropoint. “They got my sentence reduced, which was great, but not the verdict itself, which was bullshit.” He paused a moment, staring out to sea. “But then one day one of them, let’s call him ‘Mr. O’Brien,’ took me aside and said that while DOTAS was very pleased to help me out the way it had done, there was such a thing as, as he called it, ‘mutual obligation.’ They were looking for me to help them.”
That breakfast smelled fantastic, Spider was thinking dreamily, only half-awake. He was tempted to try a bit of toast, and if his teeth didn’t like it, he could take some more reconstructor agents, right?
Then, Future Spider was saying, “And all this time, you’re thinking, what the hell does DOTAS have to do with a straightforward murder, right? To say nothing of all the other stuff, you know, the—”
“‘The End of Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime!’” Spider said, in a comically spooky voice.
“You really are gonna get your butt handed to you, Spider.”
Spider slumped in his chair, holding his bristling face up with one hand, realized his other self was still speaking to him. He nodded. “Mmmm,” he said. “You were saying this is all to do with…”
He couldn’t quite bring himself to say Molly’s name. He thought his brain might burst if he said it, as if saying it would make it real, would make it more than just a couple of gigantic shining images on a screen — and if it was real, and she was really dead, well… It was a point beyond which he could not think. Not right now, anyway. He remembered Molly’s voice on the phone yesterday afternoon, just as he was planning to head home for the evening. So long ago. It felt as if — as if it had never happened, as if he had always been out tooling around with his shadow self. Maybe he was crazy, he thought. It would explain everything. Insanity was good that way.
“Yes,” his future self was trying to explain, doing his best to be patient with his former self. “It’s like this, now listen up, all right?”
Spider did his best to keep up. He felt himself drifting off.
“Sir? Excuse me, sir?” It was a woman’s voice.
Startled awake, he jumped a little, blinking, sitting up straight, looking around. The light was very bright, and hurt his eyes for a bit while he tried to get used to it. “Oh,” he said, squinting at the waitress.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Can I get you some fresh coffee?”
“Uh, wha—?” He was in a café near the beach. He could smell the sea. Before him stood a half-full cup of cold coffee. Looking around, taking in the aromatic wafts of breakfast around him, he saw that he was alone.
He said, “What happened to my friend?”
The waitress smiled but looked puzzled. “I’m sorry?”
Spider stared at her for a moment, then said yes, he would like a fresh coffee. He checked his teeth; they felt fine. He clacked his jaws together; his teeth appeared as solid as they ever did. His nose was sore, but that could just be the way he’d been sprawled across the table. Getting up, he felt very stiff and achy, but he stretched and took some steps across the polished floorboards, attracting a few odd looks from the handful of people who weren’t hard at work on their screens, taking care of business.
Outside, Spider checked the parking lot, and saw no trace of Future Spider’s car.
He did, however, find his recumbent bike, chained to a bike rack.
Back inside, he resumed his seat just as the waitress came back with a fresh mug of coffee for him, and left the bill. When he checked it, the bill was for seven cups of coffee, which cost thirty-five dollars. Even without checking his pockets, Spider knew he did not have that kind of money on him.
Confused, frightened, and now suddenly in debt, he tried not to panic. After a few minutes he got up, went to the counter, and asked to speak to the manager. The manager, who looked like he was having a bad day even though it was still very early, listened to Spider as he recounted his problem.
“So yo
u’re saying that you’ve consumed seven coffees, but now you can’t pay? Is that the gist of it?”
Spider felt tiny and vulnerable. He said, “That is indeed the gist. Um, can you help me out?”
The manager stared down at him, then looked out the windows at the morning ocean. He turned back to Spider. “You know, you should have thought of this little problem before you decided to guzzle down all that coffee.”
“I thought my, um, my friend was paying.”
“Right,” the manager said. “The friend who was never there. Okay.”
If he ever ran into Future Spider again, he was going to kill the bastard for dropping him in this situation. “Look, take my bike. It’s—”
“I don’t want your fucking bike, mate. Just pay the bloody bill.”
“I can come back with the money, okay? Just take my bike as collateral.”
Then the manager said, glancing at Spider’s wrist. “I’ll take your watch as collateral.”
Spider had never been offline before. The thought was terrifying. But he could see this was his only chance to avoid running into the police. He took off the watch and handed it over. “Thank you,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah. Just be back here before midday or I’ll be hocking the thing.”
“Okay. I’ll—”
“What, you’re still here?”
Furious, humiliated and ashamed, Spider left. He discovered he did still have the key to his bike’s security chain, climbed into the bike and took off, heading for Malaga, swearing loudly the whole way.
CHAPTER 8
Spider got his watch back and the coffee bill sorted out in time, but while he was pedaling back to work — for the second time that day — his mind was a storm of confusion, trying to figure out what was going on in his life.
He tried calling Molly, just to check; her phone told him she was in Bangkok, attending to her HyperFlesh exhibition. “What?” More surprising, her phone asked him if he’d like to contact her. Bewildered, wondering what the hell was going on, he said, “Yeah, put me through.” Soon he heard her voice in his ear. “Spider? What on Earth are you calling me here for?” He could hear a noisy engine, traffic, bicycle bells, and someone talking to her in what he guessed was Thai. Spider checked the screen to see if there was a video option, but there wasn’t.
“Molly?” His throat was tight; he could hardly speak. It was getting difficult to keep an eye on traffic conditions, so he pulled over to the breakdown lane.
“Spider, what is it? This is not a good time.”
He was starting to feel the effects of much too much coffee. He was getting jittery and feeling ill and strange and woozy, and there were thousands of thoughts in his head trying to get out all at once and his mouth wasn’t big enough — but most of all, it was Molly’s voice in his ear!
Like an idiot, he blurted, “You’re alive!”
That voice in the background was speaking to Molly in very urgent tones, and she was speaking back to him in what sounded like the same baffling language, in a mollifying sort of tone. At least it sounded that way to Spider, whose knowledge of foreign languages did not extend to Thai. He listened to Molly and the other guy going back and forth, then Molly said, “Look, I’ll call you later from my hotel, okay? Bye.”
And then she was gone, just like that. He peeled the phone patch from under his ear and looked at it, as if to see some faint remaining trace of Molly’s presence on it. Right this moment, he thought, his sort-of ex-wife was riding what sounded like a tuk-tuk through the streets of Bangkok, arguing with some local guy about who knew what.
So why would Future Spider tell him she was dead? That she had in fact been murdered by some shadowy outfit from the future?
He’d shown him photos, photos he now found he could only barely remember. He had a faint recollection of lots of blood on the body and on the floor, but he could not be sure the woman shown in the photos was in fact Molly.
Had any of last night really happened? He felt his face all over for signs of the hit he’d taken, but found nothing. His head felt, well, not exactly fine, but all right. He sat there watching traffic whizzing by, feeling cold and damp, and trying not to think about the unpaid overtime he was going to have to put in to recompense Dickhead McMahon for all this time away from the workshop, and for the thirty-five dollars. Dickhead had told him to take the money out of petty cash. That wasn’t a problem. But Spider would absolutely have to pay it back, out of his own wages. And, if that wasn’t enough, he’d have to put up with Dickhead telling him off about it, telling him it was a “black mark” on his personal file, that he’d have a hard time finding an employer willing to take him on if he were ever to leave Dickhead’s zone-of-control. Not that Dickhead put it quite like that; he was quite unaware of his own zone-of-control, but Spider immediately saw it that way. Dickhead, he knew, was protecting him.
If last night had not happened, Spider was thinking, then how did I get stuck at that café? Then again, the café staff had no recollection of Spider’s “friend” being there. Could he have somehow sleepwalked — sleepcycled? — all the way from the workshop out to this café and sat there all night drinking coffee after coffee, alone? To the best of his knowledge he was not prone to sleepwalking. Molly had never commented on it, back when they had still lived together. Nobody at the capsule motel had ever pointed it out to him. Could this be a new thing? Should he now be worried that some nights he would get up in the wee small hours and go off tooling around the metroplex?
Had he dreamed that encounter with Future Spider? His memory of the whole thing was vivid enough. He remembered all that business about this so-called “Zeropoint“ outfit, and how they had supposedly murdered Molly, and that the dead woman in the time machine the other day allegedly worked for Zeropoint.
Why on Earth, he thought, would he make up stuff as specific, and as obviously nuts, as that?
He hunkered back down into his bike and eased out into the flow of traffic, being sure to stay in the bicycle lane. He made his way back to work, not sure what to believe — except that if he did run into his future self again, he’d bloody-well punch his head in.
The rest of the day dragged on miserably. He felt sick and weak and “fluttery” in his chest. Charlie asked him if he was all right, and Spider told him he was okay, just maybe coming down with the flu or something. Charlie nodded and said there was a lot of that going around at the moment, and Spider had better watch out. He’d heard it was a bad one this time. Spider nodded and got back to work on a Boron II unit that belonged to a certain Mr. Lee, who had brought the thing in two days ago, saying, “It just won’t go.”
When Spider asked Mr. Lee for a more specific description of the problem, Mr. Lee told him, with great irritation, that he “didn’t bloody know,” that the machine was “fucked,” and that Spider had better fix it for less than the five hundred dollars he’d been quoted by the Boron dealership where he’d bought the unit in the first place.
Spider would have told Mr. Lee to get stuffed, but he remembered what Dickhead McMahon had told him about his drooping key-point indicators, and how he had to pick up the pace. If this meant taking on annoying assignments like this, well, so be it. So he spent the whole day stripping the Boron down, testing everything, and eventually traced the fault to a circuit board in the translation engine. No longer preoccupied by mysterious visitors from the future, Spider inspected and tested each and every chip, module and component in the translation engine. After all, the fault might not be in the hardware but possibly in the control software that drove the hardware. Anything could be the case. But, of all the parts of a time machine likely to cause trouble, the translation engine was most often the problem. The translation engine took the quantum data gathered by the scanning engine, data reflecting not only the machine itself but also its passengers, and performed the necessary multidimensional “editing” of
that data, specifically the data reflecting a specific location in the space-time manifold. When it worked, machine and passengers shifted seamlessly from wherever and whenever they were to where and when they were going. When it didn’t work, the typical failure mode was to simply prevent the machine from doing anything, rather than risk transporting anyone to some random location and time.
Spider had been on this one repair for a long time. On five occasions he’d thought he was done, reassembled the unit, powered it up and attempted a dry run, going through the scanning process and letting the translation engine set up the coordinates for the jump. At which point the unit showed a red light, announced it was not going anywhere, and fed a bunch of annoying error messages into Spider’s handheld. Five times. Mr. Lee’s Boron II was a big, humming paperweight. So he had to take it apart and go through the entire process again. It was doing nothing for his mood.
Towards close of business with no end in sight to the Boron’s problems, Malaria came out to the workshop, all nervous and apologetic. “Phone call, Spider.” When he sighed and glared at her, she said, “It’s that Inspector Street lady. She wants a word.”
Spider sagged against the frame of the Boron II and dropped his digital multi-tool into his toolbox. He wiped his hands on a rag and threw it to one side. Looking up at Malaria, he said, “Thanks. I’ll take it out here.” She nodded and said something into her headset as he tapped his phone patch.
It was indeed Inspector Street. “Spider,” she said, “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“What’s up, Iris?”
There was a pause at her end as she registered his tone. He could hear phones ringing, people talking loudly. She said, “Look. Are you free this evening?”
He sat on the Boron’s fuel cell, closed his eyes, and rubbed his face. “Why?”
“We need to talk.”
“Talk to me now.”
“Right now is a non-optimal situation, Spider. I need to see you.”
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 9