People were everywhere. Relaxed men in linen suits and chatty women in flashy, oversized jewelry gestured with their hands through the noise. Beautiful women in bikinis and high heels flirted with shirtless, hairless well-tanned dudes in shorts.
I watched two of the guys carefully craft a long line of white powder around the edge of a grand piano. They stopped midway to argue something. Patiently watching them from an alcove was a huge tiger held there with heavy golden chains.
"Hey, do you want a girl?" Ed reappeared to pull me over to a small white engraved door. "Here. Go in here," he said and pushed me in.
Facing the door in a chair was a woman with her legs crossed. She was thin with short, straight dark brunette hair and wore a black lace dress and black hose.
She sat high on the chair and I realized she was in another woman’s lap. Seeing my recognition, she uncrossed her legs. The other woman’s legs moved precisely with hers.
There wasn't another woman. The two pairs of legs moved again, synchronized, recrossed and then opened and raised. She wore nothing under the dress; she had two genitalia, one on top of the other, both with neatly trimmed straight black hair.
The woman undulated her hips, grinding on the chair. The legs spread wide then bent sharply at the knees. Her mouth opened showing teeth while her eyes locked onto mine. She extended a long finger and curled it inward beckoning me.
*
"Is that cocaine?" I asked a muscle man. He and his friend had completed and were admiring an even line tracing the gilded edge of the grand piano.
"Yeah. Dive in, man." he said. They were proud of their work and were excited that I had acknowledged it.
I managed to take in about three centimeters and pulled back. My head went entirely numb and swelled, the room went dark and quiet... and then came back. My hair burned at the roots and was quenched in ice. They looked at me with knowing smiles and giggles then became vibrating orange lumps. I stared up at the white and gold Rococo ceiling to get away from them.
Ed came up from behind and hugged me to his side,
"Not bad, Cap. Just wait, just wait, it gets even better.”
“Better?”
“We’re finally home, bro."
*
I found Walter on a sofa by himself in a corner of the mansion. He was drawing patterns of letters and numbers on a table from a mound of cocaine.
"Hey, new guy," he said. "So what do you think of this place?"
"It's insane, everything about it." I said.
"Yeah it is. But you’re still here. I've actually never seen anyone leave."
"I’ll be leaving soon. I'm afraid of what will happen if I don’t."
"Maybe you should. You’ll still have access lots of places, I would think. Maybe go east." He pinched a bit of the powder and sniffed it up hard.
"We tried this Miami theme party once before, I don't know, a while ago. Well before your buddy Ed got here. We brought in a whole roasted alligator, a big one, 16 footer - head, tail, everything - the hollowed out parts were stuffed with soft-shelled crabs. Laid that sucker out on this huge platter and surrounded it with roasted, garlic-roasted iguanas. All kinds of fruit and vegetables, whatever, around the platter, you know, a real spread and a bunch of live iguanas, too, for decoration." He paused to take another pinch.
"So, we all got wasted, as usual, and we forgot all about it. Everybody was in the other cars at the other end. I guess time... when you're having fun...” He blew his nose into a napkin and continued,
“Well, when we finally got back around that way, I think Yuri was there first, it had been about a week. You can't imagine. The smell. Hordes of flies everywhere. Some of the iguanas were still alive, too. They were sick, dying, crawling all over everything. But the worst part - there was also a girl trapped in the room. She was dead. Overdose, maybe intentional. She couldn't be saved, too far gone at that point. You see, I turned off the control system for that car. All the background automation was disabled. I meant for it to be temporary, to add a bit of edge to things. And I just forgot about it."
Richelieu and a tall, nearly naked girl joined us. He leaned in close to talk to me and she giggled and whapped him in the side of the head with her bouncing, pumped up breasts.
"Have you met Penny yet? She is really something. Different. Very different." Richelieu said and was whapped again.
I shook my head.
"She’ll be at one of these parties. But she's well read like you are, interesting to talk to..." The girl whapped and giggled.
Walter was lost in his own thoughts. His eyes had gone glassy. He was starting to get morose and muttered quietly to himself.
Richelieu changed the subject, "These rooms were inspired by the tesseract. Are you familiar with it? It is an extra dimensional concept."
I told him I’d never heard of it. For lack of a better way, he used the pile of cocaine to sketch out the basic idea.
Richelieu drew out a large square. He connected lines to it to illustrate a cube. From the cube he scrapped out fine little lines connecting to another cube inside it.
"You see, it is a space within a space. For every dimension you have other dimensions adjacent to it, like this room here. Only here it feels like a real dimension, but it is not real at all. It's just a trick, much like the dimension of time is a trick."
"I know what you mean. Time doesn't mean much anymore." I said.
"You know about relativity, I guess. That's not really what I mean, but it helps to show us the way."
"I’m not sure. On the mission we aged less, compared to on Earth, because of the craft’s speed and distance from gravitational bodies. That's the theory but it wouldn’t amount to much of a difference. Our craft wasn't nearly fast enough." I said.
"Yes, of course that's the classic theory, and it’s well established. But the trick is seen in what really did affect you. You wouldn't notice the relative time dilation from your voyage. But the pills that slowed you down, the aging treatments, the metabolic chip, that’s what was real for you."
"They took that chip out after we landed actually. Does everybody have one now?"
He ignored my question to finish his thought, "So you understand how time perception can be bent and manipulated. In classic relativity time must bend, it must give way. Otherwise you have a paradox. But this explanation leads to another paradox because time must then stop at the speed of light. And from this premise we find even more paradoxes."
"Some sort of experiment could explain it, I suppose. We’ll never know. Light speed is impossible." I said.
"But I already know the answer. The answer is there is no time. Time is a false premise, it’s a misconception and a misperception. There are too many paradoxes we encounter at every step of trying to understand it. Why can our perception of time be so easily influenced? Why does it only go in one direction? It doesn't because it doesn't go at all. It doesn't exist in any way we can understand. It’s perception is so easily influenced because it is an illusion to begin with."
"What about causality? If one event causes another to happen, doesn't that imply the passage of time?" I said.
"It does in some examples but not most. Where does causality begin? Could you tell me, for instance, how this table came to be here? To be designed, manufactured, selected, transported and placed here? Could you truly explain how you came to be here in this moment right now? It's too complicated to begin to explain everything that went into this one very simple and ultimately inconsequential occurrence.”
“Well, thanks.”
"No, I’m sorry, just imagine everything you know about the universe - all of your perceptions and memories, flawed as they are - think of this as your window into reality. Your window really is only a tiny peephole into the universe, not much more than a Euclidean point.
"Think of your window as being at the narrow end of a huge cosmic cone. On the wide end of the cone is all knowledge. Every scrap of information is on this side, essentially, the position and movement of every atom in t
he universe."
The girl had stopped whapping him with her breasts and now sat beside Walter who was whispering into her ear. Richelieu went on explaining,
"So what you can comprehend from your end of the cone would give you a very limited ability to predict cause and effect. Wherever you look, you can only see a tiny portion of the universe. True reality would be unknowable for any man or machine we can conceive of. Are you following me?"
"Yeah. But how does this mean that time doesn't exist? Cause and effect are impossibly complex but they still exist." I said.
"Because if we were to have total knowledge, then we would know everything: past, present, and future. Time would be irrelevant."
“Time is only for us mere mortals, then.”
"If we think from the big picture, from the other end of the cone, even if we can't capture it, there are truths to be discovered. Otherwise we’re necessarily hidebound by our perspective."
"You're saying if you knew everything you could predict the future because you'd know how everything would play out. But the future would still be the future, the past would be the past." I said.
"No, not if you had perfect knowledge. Free from the constraints of information, time would appear to not exist."
"So, the clock would stop, like it should, or like it might, when approaching the speed of light?"
"No, it wouldn't stop. That wouldn't happen...you're confusing things. It would just do what it was meant to do. A clock is only a primitive tool, useful for technologies but not much else."
"Not much else that leaves," I said. Richelieu's enthusiasm was fading. I thought the cocaine he had licked when cleaning his fingers might be wearing off.
"Consider this: no clock can ever be truly accurate except as needed for our simplistic technological purposes. As the calendars of the ancient Britons or Incas were imprecise but were still useful to them in anticipating the seasons and holidays and such."
"So what do you do with a theory like this? It undermines our entire understanding of everything. It's too much for me to even think about. Is there any application?"
"I am retired. I've surrendered, officially, and have been put out to pasture on this train. This theory is too much for me, too, and it's not my own - just call it drunk talk, my friend. None of this matters. Who would I share my work with? It's a concept with no end."
"What about this Leland guy?" I said.
Richelieu paused to think about what I said. I'd expected him to dismiss it automatically.
"I don’t see any application, really. But there is something from the theory that I think is useful to know. It helps us to keep the correct frame. What we normally and naturally think of as being the present is not the present. It is an impression of the past, a version of it, poorly remembered and poorly understood. This false present will always deceive you. The real present is the future, as it is unfolding.
"Humans by our nature get this confused. And so we will also confuse what the true present is with what the future will be. The tendency is to think, 'this what is happening now, so this is what will also be happening later' – the wrong assumption. If it's happening now it's the present. The future is defined by the fact that it always will be different but you can see it unfolding at any moment. The present we think we know is really the past and the future is in the present. To make things worse, we more often tend to deny the present in favor of the past, a false past which we may then also believe is the future. We exist in a state of permanent confusion.”
“Tell me about it.”
"This has plagued man for millennia. Complex predictions have been necessarily impossible. Only in the last 25 or 30 years has this been mitigated, you might say, but with technology so sophisticated it may be beyond our control. We’ve eliminated the surprises, the uncertainties, and the urgency of being alive. But the underlying cause of our problem, our misunderstanding the nature of time, has only gotten worse. This world may seem like the future and the present and the recent past because it all seems the same, but it won’t last. We just can't see why it won't last. Nothing has been cured or solved. Whatever our technology, we’re still just dumb animals."
“The cure has killed us from what I've seen. In the older literature, the men were so different, almost alien. They were vulnerable in so many ways yet they were fearless compared to us. Everything was a risk back then but they didn't care. Everything they did would have an effect on their lives in a significant way. And they all eventually failed and died and that was life." I said.
“Doing nothing back then was a risk, too.”
“It still is!” I said.
"We’ve become something else. Maybe it's only natural that we become like machines after living with them and depending on them so much. We’re mirroring them. It's sort of flattering if you think about it. Man created in the image of God."
"Are they mirroring us in kind?"
"I think they might be." Richelieu said.
"But who knows? Who knows anything anymore? On the Artemis craft we at least had a library. I'd kill to have that library back." I said.
"Well, promise you won't kill anybody until you talk to Leland. I should go now but it's been very nice talking with you. Don't forget Penny, either. She may have some way to help you."
Richelieu led his naked giggling girl away from the sofa and they dissolved into the crowd.
*
I searched the party for Tyndall but didn't find him. At the door to the next car Walter stopped me.
"Hey, kid, can you hold off on that? I need some help with something."
"Sure, I guess. I was just looking for someone."
"Don’t pay that little frog too much mind. He's nuts."
"I was looking for Tyndall, actually. Have you seen him?"
"Nah, I don't think so. He's nuts, too, anyway. C’mon and gimme a hand. It’s good for you."
Walter was having trouble focusing on me as he talked. He pulled his shirt out of his pants and blew his nose into it.
"Are you sure you want to do this now?" I said.
"Yeah, yeah, I'll be fine in a minute. Follow me."
We fought our way through the party. It seemed to be peaking with the tanned muscle dudes and bikini girls paired up in an apparent ritual, dancing like some lost primitive tribe. Some had fallen to the ground to fornicate in a wild throng.
We passed Ed. He was face down by the tiger’s alcove. The tiger laid beside him tenderly licking the back of his neck and hair.
Back in the Bavarian room, relief washed over me. It was cool and quiet. The main room was still empty except for one table near the opposite door.
We passed the waitress sitting with another girl who looked a lot like her. Both were wholesome looking demure blondes. They were more stunning than I realized the night before. They were drinking champagne and orange juice. I said hello to them but neither bothered to acknowledge me.
In Mexico, I found Tyndall. The party in the square had become more relaxed and seemed to be winding down. Tyndall danced eyes closed to slow music with a beautiful tall Spanish woman. It seemed too much of a shame to disturb him.
Coming into the dining car was a jerk back to reality. It was small and unforgiving compared to what I'd become accustomed. At least this time I didn't fall.
The weight of the past 72 hours hit me. The drinking and everything else was taking a toll. I told Walter as much and he suggested a remedy.
"Yeah, I saw you limping a little earlier and I was wondering. You’re gonna be a lightweight with no chip, no way around that. But let’s see what we can do," he said. I followed him to his berth where he rooted through an old bag retrieved from the tiny closet,
"OK: aspirin, vitamins, vitamin K, benzaprine, caffeine, fluorenol. That's a good start."
He gave me a handful of the assorted pills, "Too bad about the chip, though. It’d make things a lot easier on you." He watched me take them and hooked a finger into his shirt pocket in which he had stashed some cocaine. Th
at was for him.
Walter led me to the end of the last car where the loading area was. He pulled down levers on each side of the back door and flipped a toggle switch.
The back of the train clamshelled open to reveal BOB waiting for us, seemingly overloaded with a large box propped on top of him.
Walter picked up and dragged away part of the floor to expose four rows of little embedded wheels.
"Alright. Let’s do this. Grab a strap and pull."
The box, heavy as it was, moved easily over the wheels. Once the box was inside the back door shut on its own and we set to taking the quick release ties off of the corners.
"I know what you’re thinking. Why the hell are we doing this, right? Well, I like doing it. I even tricked the computer into allowing it whenever there is live cargo."
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