Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

by K. A. Bedford

Spider nodded. “I hope you’re using your powers for good, Dickhead.”

  Dickhead smiled. “Of course!” he said, and laughed.

  “That’s good to hear.” Spider didn’t believe a word of it, but remembered what Soldier Spider had told him, that it had been Dickhead’s people manipulating Spider’s timelines. “So, what? You’ve been living here, on this ‘timeship’” — He used giant air-quotes to emphasize the weirdness of “timeship” as an idea, and hoped he wasn’t overdoing it— “all this time? What about your wife?”

  Dickhead hardly blinked. “Sarah’s fine, thanks. I’ve got a condo in Perth. She lives there, and I can use time-travel in such a way that from her perspective I’m a regular businessman, taking care of things. Anyway, I pop back here from time to time to touch base, update everyone on what’s going on, upcoming projects, that kind of thing.”

  “Okay, right. Hmm. So where — um, when? — are we, exactly?”

  Dickhead consulted a panel on his control display, then looked at Spider. “I don’t want to alarm you, Spider, okay?”

  “Okay. Not alarmed. Not too much, anyway.”

  “This is the, um, ‘far future.’ The way, far future.”

  Spider did his best to look suitably shocked and impressed. “Oh. Okay. So, um, how far is ‘way far?’”

  Dickhead folded his hands together, thought about it for a moment, scratched his chin, then looked Spider in the eye. “It’s hard to say, exactly, in terms of years.”

  “Um, what?”

  “It’s difficult, all right? There comes a point when you’re so far uptime that numbers no longer cut it, that’s all.”

  “I see,” Spider said. He was having no trouble faking how impressed and even scared he was. The first time round, when Soldier Spider had introduced him to all this, it had been bad enough, but even on this, his second exposure, it was still a freakish thing to try to handle. “Okay.”

  “Spider,” Dickhead said, “I could probably get someone to give me a figure, okay? If that would help. It’s just that any such figure would have to be expressed with scientific notation, it’s so far from your own time.”

  “Oh. I see. That’s…”

  “Alarming?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding, “yes, very alarming. It’s also making me wonder just how in the hell you’re able to get a time machine to reach so far. Translation engines, um, back home, the best recorded time displacement is, uh, almost three thousand years? Something like that?”

  “We’ve got time engines that would make God envious, if you’ll pardon me saying so, Spider.”

  “Right. Of course you have. Typical, even.” Good old Dickhead, always having to have the biggest, the most powerful, the most obnoxious, even when it came to timeships! Spider was impressed, sort of.

  Dickhead added, “It’s very peaceful, though. Very quiet. Spacious, you might say. More coffee, Spider? Something stronger, perhaps?” He had his finger poised over a tab on his control display, ready to summon his assistant again.

  “You could tell me what the hell’s going on. This is all very impressive and, frankly, shiny, Dickhead, but so what? What’s the point?”

  “The point, Spider, is simple. There’s a war on. It’s a bad one, stretching across the end of the universe, the end of time itself. Every timeline, every alternate or parallel world, it all winds up here, at the end of all things. It’s been a long war, but then again, it’s barely started, depending on your perspective. Everybody who’s ever thought about it has tried to get here, the Everest of the Cosmos, if you like, the ultimate summit, the deepest abyss of the ocean. Everyone wants to be here, because from here you get the best bloody view, Spider. You can see all of history, gazillions of years, whole epochs like blinks of an eye. And from here you can fiddle with all that’s gone before, pulling the strings of the past, making things the way you want them. It’s strong stuff, my friend. The strongest. The urge to fiddle, well, it’s unbearable…”

  This was not exactly what Soldier Spider had told Spider. “The end of time? How can there be an end of time? Surely it just goes on and on, endlessly. Are you saying there’s a Big Crunch, and we’re circling the ultimate drain, or something like that? Is that it?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. Space-time turns out to be flat. Just flat. No ‘Big Crunch,’ no ‘Big’ anything, in fact. The universe, all the universes, just spread out forever and ever, amen.”

  “Then I don’t see how the universe can just end, you say yourself it goes on forever.”

  “Yes, Spider. That’s right. And I’m trying to tell you — and forgive me for trying to dress it up a bit to make it interesting — the thing is, hmm, okay, think about protons, okay? Protons last practically forever, right?”

  Spider nodded, thinking hard. “Ten to the power of 35 years, plus or minus?”

  “Exactly. And what I’m saying is, we’re well beyond the Proton Age here. It’s just an infinite void, only the void itself is flinging itself apart: every bit of space-time hurling itself the hell away from every other bit, stretching it all out in every direction, all at once. You’d think sooner or later the rate of expansion would make it rip itself, and you’d get a whacking big hole, and the whole universe would flutter and whiz about in higher-dimensional space like a deflating balloon — but it never does. It never tears, it never rips, it just constantly expands.”

  Spider had heard about this accelerating expansion, and heard that it was likely to do with a mysterious force known colloquially as “dark energy” that was bound up with Einstein’s “cosmological constant.” It was one thing to read about such things in the pages of New Scientist, or on the tubes, but quite another to find yourself in a timeship in — he was told — the midst of that void. He found himself looking down at his own body, checking his feet, legs, arms and hands. Everything seemed okay. He didn’t appear to be stretching apart at impossible speeds. “Uh, Dickhead, small problem.”

  Dickhead nodded. “The stretching apart thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s happening to us as we speak.”

  “It is?”

  “Oh yeah. Nothing to worry about. Your subconscious mind handles the whole thing behind the scenes.”

  “But I look… I look exactly the same. You look the same.”

  “It’s all in the mind, Spider. Relax.”

  “But—”

  Dickhead cut him off. “Mind over matter, Spider. It’s not that you’re exploding, Spider, or anything like that. It’s that the space-time in which you’re embedded is itself stretching. This means that everything embedded in it stretches with it. In reality, the atoms and molecules of your body are being pulled every way from Sunday, and mine, too — but our minds, Spider, our minds present us with the illusion that everything is perfectly fine.”

  “Holy shit!” Spider said.

  Dickhead went on, telling Spider most of the same things Soldier Spider had told him on the Masada, which was fine, and Spider did his best to look all amazed and troubled and dizzy at the thought of it all. But Dickhead told him things Soldier Spider had not said. “The End of Time, Spider, is like the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches. There are things alive here, uniquely adapted to this most extreme of environments—”

  “Uh-huh…” Spider said, thinking about what his future self had told him. For one thing, Soldier Spider had told him there were odd things living on the outside of the universe, feeding on the exhaust of the Vores. “Go on.”

  Dickhead said, “So this is the Great Abyss. Things adapted to live here are not actually from here; they started as things brought here by other time travelers, and left behind, like waste ballast water dumped by container ships that turns out to contain all manner of nasty parasites that take over and destroy local ecosystems.”

  “You said there’s no matter, though.”
>
  “That’s right. No native matter. These other things, they were, as I said, brought here. They’re fine. They’re cold, of course, and they grow slowly, do everything slowly. But they’ve been out here, growing, adapting, changing, for, well, pardon the unscientific turn of phrase here, but they’ve been out here for zillions of years.”

  “Oh, zillions. That impresses me,” Spider said, folding his arms and leaning back, and trying not to panic.

  “Look, the point is, Spider, that ‘the End of Time,’ like the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean, is far from an arid wasteland. The place is alive, Spider! Things are going on, civilizations are rising! It’s a land of opportunity, sort of!” Dickhead was staring off over Spider’s head, his face full of rapture, a convert, a true believer.

  Spider knew he was in big trouble. “This is all great and all, Dickhead, but, um, like I said, so what?”

  Dickhead blinked a few times, came back to himself, and looked down at Spider, a little disappointed. “You can’t see it?”

  “See what? All I see is bloody sunflowers!”

  “Spider, I’m trying to do you a favor.”

  “Well, do me a favor by telling me what the hell is going on!”

  “All right. Fair enough. You’re right, you’re right. It’s just, well…”

  “Complicated?”

  “Yeah. Complicated.”

  “Okay,” Spider said. “Here we are. End of Time. Creepy-crawlies. Woo.”

  Dickhead sat down again. He touched a control on the desk. The scene around them changed: from the middle of a sunflower farm in rural France, to the deepest of deep space, deep time. Blackness that had to be seen to be believed. A lack of color, lack of anything at all, that defied description. An emptiness that hurt the mind, that seemed to cry out for something, anything, to fill it. Spider, confronted with it, seeing it all around him, felt his mind revolt. It was the sort of overwhelming emptiness that makes the worst kind of darkness: the emptiness that your mind cannot help but populate. Before you know it, it’s not empty at all, but teeming with all of the things you’ve found terrifying throughout your entire life, dating all the way back to things that scared you in your mother’s womb. Just looking out at that darkness panicked Spider. He could hardly breathe. His heart boomed and pounded in his throat. He wanted to run and run and never stop, and it was only the obvious fact that there was nowhere to run that kept him sitting there — and the fact that he could still feel the solidity of the desk and his chair that kept him anchored to reason.

  “Okay,” Spider whispered, terrified, “this is freaking me out. Can we go back to the sunflowers now?”

  “This, Spider, is a representation of the view outside. It’s more complicated than it looks, because of the expansion and so forth, but, just for the sake of argument, this is it, the End of Time. We call it that because there’s nothing really to measure time against. There’s no heat, for example; out there it’s absolute zero. The cosmic microwave background radiation, the fabled evidence of the Bang, well, it’s gone, it’s over. Think about that, Spider. Absolute fucking zero. It’s a breathtaking thing to contemplate. It’s like, even though it’s a vacuum out there, it’s also like solid ice, ice you could never break.”

  Spider was gripping his chair so tight he had punctured the seat cushion with his thumb, and he hadn’t noticed.

  Dickhead was still talking, as if narrating a nature documentary, as if everything was perfectly fine. “Now, this is the interesting bit, Spider. You see, looking out at that, thinking about the temperature, you’d say to yourself, well, nothing can live in an environment like that, and you’d be pretty well right — except, you’d actually be dead wrong. If we adjust the colors, just so…” He touched a control. “You can start to see…” Gradations in the blackness became apparent. With those came what Spider first took to be dark points of some kind in what he guessed was the distance, but there was a large sphere in the foreground that had the same lack of color. After some more adjustments, the distant points and the nearby sphere turned a dull, brownish red, and he could see — what was it, texture? — on the surface of the sphere, some kind of stubbly, knobbly texture.

  “Is that some kind of dead star or something?” he asked, his voice barely audible. There was no earthly reason why something as ordinary as a dead star should even still exist in such extreme conditions, and he knew that, but he felt lost and petrified, and his mind reached for the familiar.

  “Actually, no. These are much smaller than stars. These are not much bigger than a clenched fist, or maybe a softball. These are colonies, like the colonies of bacteria you’d see in a petri dish, but on a much, much bigger scale. Each of the knobbly bits you can see is a lifeform, a tiny lifeform, and they huddle together like this to share what little heat they have. Over time, they circulate into the center while others rise to the outside. Not unlike penguins huddling against antarctic storms, actually. Now then…” He made more adjustments. The foreground colony turned bright red, with even brighter patches that shifted hues; in the background the other colonies grew brighter as well, but were joined by many more points, showing as a dull gray. There were far more of these gray colonies than red ones.

  Spider said, “Dead ones?”

  Dickhead nodded. “Natural selection at work.”

  It was a lot to think about. The gears of evolution still grinding blindly away, even here, Spider thought, at the end of everything. “It must take ages for anything to happen, though,” he said, watching, starting to feel less freaked out now that he saw something familiar going on.

  One of the “living” points in the background grew much bigger as Dickhead zoomed the image. Here was a colony visibly under attack: only portions of the surface showed up as alive; other areas showed the red much brighter, but blighted with something black, like a plaque. Dotted across the black plaque were dazzlingly bright points that looked like they were white-hot luminous vapors suspended in space. “Marauders,” Dickhead said, his eyes shining, again full of that worrying rapture Spider had seen earlier. “They’re something like the Crown-of-Thorns starfish destroying the Great Barrier Reef,” Dickhead said. “Only they’re conscious, intelligent, and very, very determined. They’re the dominant form of life in this environment. They spread by spores that take millions of ‘years’ to travel from one colony to the next, they land, and they take what they need, kill the weak, and move on. We think they’re kinda cool, frankly, Spider.”

  Spider was less impressed. “So you’re saying they’re sorta like ancient Vikings or something?”

  “They’re survivors. Faced with impossible conditions, they’re making a go of it, and they’re learning. Their tactics change over time. They’re starting to build things. It’s breathtaking!”

  “Okay, fine, no worries,” Spider said, sensing something wasn’t quite right with this picture. “So where’s the catch? What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong, Spider, is that all this is under threat.”

  “Something worse than these Marauders?”

  “These little guys are, in the scheme of things, pretty small beer. They’re starting to put together a uniquely adapted civilization. It’s taken them billions of years of hard work. Think of that. But something new is coming. Something bigger, and much more threatening.”

  “And these new guys, they’re not so cool as your pet Marauders here?”

  “They’re called ‘Vores’, Spider, because they eat everything. Space, time, energy, matter — the substance of the manifold itself.”

  “Fuck,” Spider said. He’d been wondering when the Vores would enter Dickhead’s strange universe.

  “We believe they are Angels sent by God Above to cleanse the universe.”

  Spider coughed. “I beg your pardon, Dickhead?”

  “Angels, Spider. They are burning the universe.”

&nb
sp; Spider’s mind reeled. He remembered, the other day, Dickhead asking him if he believed in angels. Remembered the way all those bloody motivational posters everywhere featured angels going about their ineffable work. Dickhead,” he said, hardly able to speak.

  Dickhead went on. “God has decided it is hopelessly corrupted and foul and it must be destroyed to make way for a new Creation.”

  “Cosmos 2.0? Is that it?”

  “Spider, listen to me. This is the important part.” Dickhead was getting a little sweaty, Spider noticed. He imagined Dickhead drumming this into his followers’ heads again and again until they Understood the True Importance of Their Mission.

  “I’m all ears, Dickhead.”

  Dickhead clearly didn’t care for Spider’s tone, but he went on. “We can’t attack the Vores directly.” He went on, describing the Vores in similar terms to the way Soldier Spider had described them to him not long ago. Higher-dimensional space. Hyperspheres. End of Reality as we know it. Where Dickhead differed from Soldier Spider was in his vision of the Vores as Angels of Destruction. “We believe, and I need you to take this on board, and make it part of your own beliefs, Spider, you mark my words, this knowledge will save your life, we believe that the Vores must be allowed to do their sacred work.”

  “Uh-huh,” Spider said, trying not to panic. “Do go on.”

  “Those who assist the Vores will be rewarded, Spider. I see you don’t believe me. That’s understandable. It’s a lot to take on board, but you mark my words, son—”

  “Dickhead, I gotta tell you, I don’t know about this.”

  The huge old bastard sat there, looking at Spider, dripping the sweat of great passion, his eyes red and weary. He loosened his collar, sat back in his chair, taking a breather, thinking how to convince Spider. At last, he said, “Have you heard of the ‘Final Secret of the Cosmos’?”

  He thought, I’m about to hear all about it. “I have to say, no, I have not heard of the Final Secret of the Cosmos. Why don’t you enlighten me, Dickhead?” He was wishing Soldier Spider had warned him in more detail about the extent of Dickhead’s craziness.