In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Nathan Van Coops

  The most significant change to the populace I’ve noticed in this era is a trend of minimalism. Owning and carrying physical items seems to have gone out of style. The people in the plaza are dressed for warm weather, mostly shorts or lightweight trousers with loose-fitting cotton shirts over top. Hardly anyone is carrying a bag or a purse. Even pockets seem to be rare. One young man with long curly hair has his hands in pockets in his pants, but there are holes in the fabric where his fingers protrude back to the outside. It seems they are merely there as a place to put his hands and wouldn’t be capable of containing money or any other trinkets. The digital ether of the metaspace has freed them from debit cards, keys, and cell phones.

  While some here have gone to elaborate lengths to improve their looks—trans-human updates and cosmetic surgeries—other folks don’t seem to have spent a great deal of effort on their appearance at all. Their metaspace avatar identities have picked up the slack for their outward image.

  I wonder if my own attire of blue jeans with pockets, and messenger bag hung over my shoulder strikes them the same way I would view some medieval tinker or perhaps a Victorian gentleman newly arrived in 2009. I’m certainly out of place.

  There are a few people carrying bags of produce, and one wrinkled old man snoozing on a bench cradling a decrepit paperback, but for the most part, people seem to shy away from taking possession of anything that might weigh them down. Even the entertainment lacks physical form. A group of pedestrians are gathered around a man in the plaza, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over his performance, but when I finally catch a glimpse of the performer, he’s merely staring up into the sky with occasional faint gestures of one hand.

  The vendor stalls are perhaps the most perplexing. There are some collections of antiques and a florist that don’t seem out of place, but a great many of the spaces inside the market host either a human or a synth proprietor without seeming to have anything else to offer. This fact does not seem to be diminishing their business or the amount of traffic they receive. To the contrary, some of the most barren stations are the most active.

  Passing through the market, I do my best to decipher the different themes of the stalls. I know that if I were able to view them in the metaspace, I would see the full effect of their advertising. Even so, I feel like I ought to be able to identify the wares from the vendors.

  Some stalls are manned by characters I recognize, young, eager artist types whom I could envision selling homemade necklaces or optimistic paintings back home. Other, less inspired-looking individuals I could imagine manning mall kiosks full of mobile phone cases or gold plated jewelry, but, unlike in my time, there seems to be little need for those sorts of tchotchkes. There are no bumper stickers sporting humorous quotes. No magnets or key chains. The closest thing I can see that might fit in the category of tourist bait are a few colorful hand towels and blankets with screen printed slogans that a woman and her daughter are selling from their booth near the end of the row. Most booths are stark and bare, even though the conversation would suggest otherwise.

  “Ooh, I just love that one!” A woman exclaims, gesturing at thin air as I pass by. The proprietor of the space nods knowingly and begins to gesture animatedly as he describes the hard work that went into his non-existent bit of nothing.

  Tucket is smiling at the scene in the market, occasionally stopping to peer at a particular table or stand, but then wandering back to me. It’s clear that I am the odd man out once again, missing the majority of the happenings around me due to my handicap.

  I console myself with the knowledge that I am here for a purpose. Somewhere amid this chaos, we are getting closer to Doctor Quickly’s safe house. The directions he left me on Mym’s phone have guided us to this point, and from here we are supposed to make contact with someone Doctor Quickly trusts. So far, our mysterious rendezvous has not occurred, and I do my best to look casual as we wait.

  Catching a whiff of something salty, I spy a man with bushy eyebrows handing a foil wrapped packet to a woman in a yellow sun dress. He’s manning a pedal cart at the end of the row nearest the open plaza and evidently his cart is filled with potential lunch. My hunger guides me over to him and I study the outside of the silver-sided cart with interest.

  “What are you selling today?”

  The man appraises me with curiosity. His deep-set eyes peer over a slightly arched nose and a billowy, salt and pepper mustache only slightly less unruly than his eyebrows. “World’s best gyros. My own recipe. Best you’ve ever tasted.”

  “Gyros, huh? What kind of options?”

  “You didn’t read the specials?” He gestures to the side of the cart. I see nothing. “One hundred and one regular options and a gyro of the day.” With his last comment, he stabs a finger toward the empty space above his cart.

  I’m about to explain that I don’t have a perceptor, but Tucket jumps in for me.

  “He’s eyeless. No meta.”

  “Oh. Sorry to hear that,” the vendor replies, shaking his head. “Tough life for you. You sick? You know, up there? Got an infection?” He taps his forehead.

  “Um, no. Just not up to speed on technology here.”

  “Not from the commune are you? Regressionist type?” He appraises my blue jeans cynically. “You look like a regressionist.”

  “He’s actually from the past,” Tucket explains. “Time traveler. I’m showing him around.”

  “Ah. Are you now? Never seen one of you up close.” The man looks me up and down again, then apparently deciding I’ll do, reaches into his cart and hands me a foil packet with a bar coded label affixed to it. “Welcome to the future. That’ll be fifteen quid.”

  I fumble for my wallet, knowing full well I’ve got nothing remotely resembling British currency. I’ve got my wallet out of my pocket anyway, when Tucket pats my arm.

  “I took care of it for you.” He collects a foil wrapped packet for himself and smiles when he peels back the wrapper. “Oh, these are the best.” He then wanders off toward the next stall.

  It’s only then that I recall that physical money has gone out anyway and I wouldn’t have been able to use cash if I wanted to. I catch up to Tucket as I’m unwrapping my gyro. “Thanks, man. I’ll pay you back.” Looking inside the packet, my heart sinks.

  The pita is barely warm and the contents look nothing like gyro meat or tzatziki sauce. What I have instead, is a greenish looking solid, flaked into pieces with a splatter of brownish paste. I take a whiff, and it smells nothing like a gyro either.

  “Hey man, what is this?” I hold my foil-wrapped mystery food out for Tucket’s inspection.

  “Oh, yeah. You’re only going to see the texture base. His special recipe is all meta toppings and flavors.”

  “What does that mean? There’s no gyro to this gyro?”

  “No. That’s a plant-based protein patty. It’s pretty much the staple base for all the simulated meta meat textures.”

  “What happened to real meat? I mean, I know gyro meat was always kind of questionable anyway, but it was mostly beef and lamb in my time. At least that’s what they told us.”

  Tucket takes a bite of his meta gyro and chews thoughtfully. He wipes away the bit of sauce from his lips with his napkin and nods. “Most people are on a plant-based diet now. More sustainable and better for your health.”

  “You’re telling me the world went vegan?” I frown and stare at the odd-looking veggie patty in my hand. “Did people forget how delicious meat was?”

  “It was more complicated than that,” Tucket explains. “There were always people claiming that plant-based diets were healthier, and no one really argued, but that wasn’t changing anyone’s minds. It wasn’t until later, when the same research company that made the perceptor—Third Eye—ran a bunch of food simulations in the metaspace, that people started considering switching diets.”

  “Imaginary food?” I ask.

  “Sort of.” Tucket replies. “Third Eye invented some custom food app algorithms and gave them away for free t
o developers. People started making their own meta recipes, and if you used them, you could make almost anything taste amazing every time. There were some really famous blind taste test competitions where people would pit their meta recipes against famous chef’s dishes and see which ones people would pick. It was really popular entertainment for a while.

  “Using food apps got so routine that people began to prefer their favorite meta food recipes over restaurant food. Of course certain recipes got copyrighted by chefs and restaurants who could afford to keep them proprietary, and they keep customers coming that way, but lots of amateurs gave their food apps away for free or sold them cheap. Made cooking healthy way easier.”

  With both hands full of his gyro, Tucket gestures toward the people around us with an elbow. “After that, people didn’t really care whether their food was plant-based or not. It all tasted like what they wanted to eat anyway. In the metaspace you might be eating a bunch of chili fries or a pile of nachos, and in reality you actually ate a dish of kale chips. People got a lot healthier from it.”

  “Wow.” I stare at my gyro with new interest.

  “We used to have an obesity problem here. Not as bad as in the US, but it was getting out of hand. The metaspace really made a big difference. Made food cheaper, too. Maybe not here.” He glances around the trendy market. “But worldwide food prices have gone way down. And we can grow lots of the food locally without needing as much grazing land.”

  I take a tentative bite of the veggie gyro. Surprisingly, it’s not terrible. Tastes like a chunk of congealed bean salad, and nothing like lamb or beef, but it’s edible. After a few bites, I actually lose my trepidation. I jerk my thumb back toward the vendor we left behind. “Is his meta recipe any good?”

  Tucket gnaws off another bite and bobs his head. “Totally triumphant.”

  I smile and follow Tucket as we continue our way through the market, doing our best to look nonchalant while keeping an eye out for our contact. We wander toward the wall that adjoins to the next vendor space and I lean against a pillar to finish off my food.

  I’ve kept the directions in Doctor Quickly’s message discreet, letting Tucket use the public car to get us close, then walking the rest of the way here to the market. It seemed a bad idea to give the address of Quickly’s safe house directly to the car’s navigation system. It turns out Doctor Quickly was a step ahead. The address was a public market and we had another hoop to jump through anyway.

  True to form, Doctor Quickly has hidden his safe space somewhere in plain sight, but inaccessible. After I toss my foil wrapper in the nearby trash can, I pull the phone back out of my jeans pocket and consult the message, seeing if I can glean any more information from it.

  There’s a new message on the phone.

  This time I have more specific instructions for getting to Doctor Quickly’s safe house. I nudge Tucket and gesture for him to follow me. The directions tell us to head upstairs to a shop with a red door, called Glintings, and ask for someone named Masie. We locate the tiny shop and enter, setting a little string of glass bells to tinkling on the door handle. The musical chime seems out of place among the modern conveniences outside.

  The interior of the shop features a preponderance of glassware and mirrors. The shopkeeper greets us with a smile, and I’m surprised to notice she’s a trans-human. The woman’s voluminous hair and petite ears surround a face that defies age. If I had to guess from her hands, I’d think she was in her sixties, but the lines around her eyes have been smoothed away and her cheeks and forehead are devoid of wrinkles, leaving her in a sort of temporal limbo, somewhere between youth and seniority.

  “Are you Masie?” I ask, praying I got the pronunciation right.

  “You must be Alice,” the woman replies.

  I frown. “My name’s actually—”

  “Right this way, darling.” Masie steps out from behind the counter and gestures for me to follow.

  At the rear of the shop, she points toward one of the mirrors leaned against the back wall. It’s fitted into an ornate wooden frame. At the top, a clock has been set into the wood with the words “It’s Always Tea Time” inscribed beneath it. I notice the clock is broken. A yellow tag on a string has the word ‘sold’ printed in big block letters. Underneath is a check box marked ‘Ready for delivery.’

  “He said you’d know what to do,” Masie says.

  “Who did?”

  “Him.” She points to a smudge on the mirror. At first I think she’s pointing to my reflection, but then I realize the smudge is actually a fingerprint. Without another word, Masie turns and walks away, back to tending her counter.

  Tucket watches her go nervously. “Is she not going to help us find Doctor Quickly?”

  I run my hand over the edge of the mirror and pause near the fingertip smudge on the glass. “I think she did.”

  Tucket’s gaze flits around the mirror, searching for something to land on. “I don’t think her instructions were explicit enough. We need further guidance. Should I go back and ask her?”

  Staring at my reflection in the mirror, I notice I’ve developed a decent black eye from my bout with The Eternals. I’m looking rather rough altogether. It’s as though this experience has already added a few years to my appearance.

  “I don’t think it will help, Tuck. Doctor Quickly tends to do this sort of thing from time to time. I don’t think he means to be obscure necessarily, it’s just that he assumes the best of everyone and imagines they’ll be able to take the same leaps that his mind makes. It’s a problem scientific geniuses seem to suffer from.”

  “But he didn’t give us enough data to go on,” Tucket says. “Even as a scientist.”

  I reach for my chronometer and dial the settings. “Actually he gave us just enough.” I point toward the top of the mirror.

  Tucket follows my gesture to the broken clock, that reads 4:15. “Ohhh. You mean the time is up there for us to use? How do we know if that’s morning or afternoon?”

  “I’m guessing afternoon, because that’s more likely to be tea time.” I nod toward the Mad Hatter quote. “Lewis Carroll not withstanding. Grab on to me.” I place my chronometer hand to the glass over top of Doctor Quickly’s fingertip smudge, wait till Tucket grabs my arm, and then press the pin on my chronometer. We blink.

  We arrive inside a dim, musty room and drop a couple of inches onto a carpeted floor. The mirror in front of us has been set on a stack of hardback books, allowing us enough clearance to arrive safely and not fuse ourselves into the carpet. The yellow sold tag on the mirror is still dangling from the corner, but I notice a new check box has been marked on it, saying ‘delivered.’ Though where we’ve been delivered to remains to be discovered.

  We’re in a sort of parlor. The room has windows, but the curtains are still drawn, leaving us in dusty twilight. The furniture is covered with sheets with the exception of the chairs around a dining room table in the next room. A single lamp above the dining room table has been lit, beckoning us closer. As I near the table, a door to the far side, presumably from the kitchen, swings open and disgorges perhaps the last thing I would have expected, Carson, bearing a tea tray. He spots me and smiles. “Hey, dude.”

  “Uh, hey, man,” I reply. “What are you doing here?”

  Carson sets the tray on the table and walks over to shake my hand. “Been with the Doc the whole time.” We slap each other on the back and he waves to Tucket. “What’s up, Tucket?” When he turns back to me his face is serious. “Hey. So sorry, man. I heard about Mym. Doctor Quickly told me—whoa, did they do that to your eye?”

  I brush my fingertips over the swelling, wishing I could wipe it away. “I’m fine. Is Doctor Quickly here?”

  “Yeah, he’ll be right in.”

  Footsteps sound in the hallway behind a second doorway and the door swings open to reveal Doctor Quickly, dressed in dark slacks and a tweed jacket. He immediately moves to me and presses both of his hands over mine. “Benjamin. It’s good to see you.” He rel
eases my hand and rests a palm on my shoulder. “It’s been a horrible day for you, I’m sure. Please. Come sit down. I had Carson whip you up some tea. Thought it might bolster you up.”

  “That’s nice of you, thanks. But I think I’m fine. I just want to talk to you about Mym. It was my fault she got abducted. I should have been more vigilant. We just need to find a way—”

  “We will,” Doctor Quickly says. “Don’t worry, Ben. We will.”

  I do my best to accept his assurances and sit down as he gestures to the chairs. Tucket and Carson likewise take seats.

  “Did you bring their message?” Doctor Quickly asks.

  I reach into my pocket and slide the small black square across the table to the scientist. Doctor Quickly scoops it up and holds it in his palm. Pulling a pair of reading glasses from his jacket pocket, he places them on his nose to further study the device. In that moment he seems to embody the past, a bespectacled man in a house full of dusty antiques, attempting to decipher a mysterious bit of high tech future gadgetry. But, disproving the image almost immediately, the device springs to life under his touch and he maneuvers his way through the contents without effort.

  I watch his expression, waiting to see if the news will evoke some drastic emotion, but after a moment he simply removes the glasses from his nose and slips them back into his breast pocket. He takes a seat and pours himself a cup of tea.

  “So what did they say?”

  Doctor Quickly slides his teacup toward himself and rests his fingertips on the saucer. “What I feared it would.”

  “Are they threatening Mym?”

  “Quite certainly.”

  “What are their ransom demands?”

  “Unfortunately, they are not asking for a ransom. Mym was their objective and it seems they intend to make use of her. They are asking me for something else that I’m quite reluctant to give.”