“Yes.”
“And you warned her about an attack in her future?”
Spark chuckled. “Yes, you did.”
“And…the person controlling you told her how important she would be for the future of civilization.”
“My mouth said that. I didn’t. I didn’t know who she was.”
“You believe you were possessed by someone from the future?”
“I don’t know what else to call it. Something took over my body. All I could do is watch it happen. I thought it was you who…turned me into a puppet. You talk like he did.”
“I can only give you my word it wasn’t me, but I’m trying to find out who it might have been. What can you remember about the entity that made you speak to Mrs. Rand?”
“He had a strange name.”
“Take your time.”
“ …Vitamin.”
“Vitamin?”
“No. Not that. And something about gemstones, but…made out of electricity. It’s difficult. I wasn’t…talking to him. I just heard what he said, and I could get some of his thoughts.” Spark pointed to his skull. “So many ideas in my head now, I don’t know what to trust, even my memory. All I remember was trying to…” His eyes opened wide. “Jewel! Vitamin Jewel! But, wait, not vitamin…it was a word I never heard before, but sounded like Vitamin. Thetamin? Something like that.”
“Theramin?” Joule said.
“Yes! That’s it!”
“The person who timejacked you was named Theramin Joule?”
“Do you know him?”
• • •
Joule picked the lock on the records room and thumbed through the case files of Christopher Spark. In it, he found a copy of Astounding Stories with notes scribbled in the margins.
Joule had often entertained the possibility of living in a splinter timeline, as he had done with other absurd beliefs, so as to keep his mind pliable and nimble, not fossilized upon “facts,” the state of which, like electrons, depend upon the observer’s expectations, according to the Absolute Grand Unified Theory.
Had a future version of himself created the splinter timeline? Why would he need to perpetuate the lie that the world existed within a splinter timeline? Maybe the news destabilized the splinter, causing systemic ontological shockwave throughout. Maybe the magazine in his hands had some answers. He prepared himself by opening himself up to the options.
Joule opened the magazine and read the scribbled notes. It looked like his handwriting—frenzied and jagged, but it was his handwriting. It mentioned a cracked timeline and too many pasts at war with the future.
Temporal chaos in the core timeline. Must fix. Need soldiers. Tactical Capitalism must succeed to create superior strategists. Professional mindfuckers. Nothing else worked. When the core timeline is filled with one consciousness (atonement), temporal translocation will be fixed. Lovecraft was warned. Rand was warned. Others must be warned.
Joule had to think. He paused the timestream.
The creak of rubber soles on hall tile. The timestream hadn’t paused.
“Andwhinge, get me out,” Joule said aloud.
There was no answer. Joule couldn’t pull up the controls. His feed was locked in. Had he succumbed to Cross-Consciousness Psychosis? Joule recited a passage from the Timejack user’s manual about mnemonic bleed. His host’s body could not know those details. He was of his own mind, that was certain, but he was locked into 1936.
The shoes in the hallway stopped at the door and jiggled the handle. A key in the lock. Joule pulled himself tight under a desk.
“Joule,” a woman’s voice whispered. “It’s Andwhinge. It’s me.”
Joule crawled out and stood. He attempted to straighten his posture into a facsimile of his own body, but Ortmeier’s hulking body made the act look absurd. Joule already felt absurd, hiding like a child. Andwhinge had timejacked into the body of a nurse—a burly nurse with a scowl like a bulldog. More absurd, imagining the frail doctor buried beneath that flesh.
“What happened?” Joule said.
“This comes from high up. They’re locking down all Timejack ops. I created a back door, but there’s little time.”
“In different circumstances, I’d say what you just said was profoundly funny.”
“Yeah. It’s not though. Follow me.”
Joule caught up to Andwhinge. “Who is doing this?”
“It’s Danube. He sent an incursion team. I rerouted them to downstream into some kids in the Bronx. It’ll be a while before they can get here. ”
“So you…bought us some—”
“Yes, yes, very funny, Joule.”
They stopped at the isolation room for Christopher Spark. Andwhinge unlocked the door. On the bed, lying with his back to them was the patient Spark, but his body was a faintly glowing flat silhouette of deep indigo.
“What is this?” Joule said, hesitating. He had never seen anything like it. A profound wave of déjà vu swallowed him like a tidal wave.
“Emergency hack,” Andwhinge said through the nurse’s mouth. Her eyes could not meet Joule’s. “It’s one of my work-arounds.”
“But what is it?”
Andwhinge’s eyes flicked to the door—a millisecond later, the sound of a door unlocking at the end of the hall echoed through the room. “That’s them. They’re coming for you. You have to trust me.”
“ …what do I do, Andwhinge?” Joule said.
The nurse gestured to the prone body. “Lie down in that position. I can reroute you and pull you back home.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Yes.”
“So it works?”
“Yes.”
Joule noted Andwhinge struggled to maintain eye contact. Even though the two men looked at each other through two sets of alien eyes, Joule knew his friend well enough that he could see that something was wrong. He was lying.
“What did my brother say to you?”
“We don’t have time for this, Joule!” Andwhinge said.
“What did he say?” Joule insisted.
Three children stood in the doorway, dressed in rumpled and dirty clothes. “Theramin Joule, you are to come with us.”
• • •
Theramin Joule sat in a holding cell in the Timejack facility, going over the details of the case when a telepresence android opened the door. On its face was projected the holographic image of his brother Danube Candor. He sat and crossed his legs in the seat next to Joule.
“Min.” Danube managed to pronounce the syllable as if it were a condemnation, a taunt, and sad, parental shame all at once.
“Noob,” Joule responded according to their fraternal tradition.
“What are you doing messing about in 1936? You know that era is dangerous.”
Joule crossed his legs to mirror his brother’s posture. “We are living in a corrupted timeline, and you and Seyopont are covering it up.”
“Ah,” Danube said. The android picked nonexistent lint off of his polyalloy ankle. “That. Yes, I wondered when you would get around to noodling into this.” He looked up and cocked his head, folding his hands in his lap. “Hypothetically, say it is true. How would it benefit the System if you revealed this information?”
“They probably wouldn’t believe me.”
“With your reputation, most would.”
“And with your reputation, whether or not it were true, you would try to discourage me from revealing it, or resort to discrediting me.”
“Theramin, you are my brother. I know you would see reason before I would have to resort to such measures. Let’s continue this conversation in person. Will you be willing to come to Luna 2?”
“We can talk here. My last shuttle experience was not so pleasant, and it’s a long way to Luna. Too many variables.”
“I can’t understand why you insist on traveling with the Greens. I’m surprised you haven’t encountered more unsavory characters. I can book you in the best Indigo suite.”
“What do you know, Danube?”<
br />
The android approximated a sigh. “Our timeline is stable.”
“But we are not living in the core timeline.”
“No. We exist in a prime splinter off of the true core timeline. We are the result of hundreds of years of social engineering. If it were revealed that we were not the true core timeline…well, I’m told there are numerous emanations.”
“Such as?”
“Antioch Krell brings down the System in a great war against transhumans. Technology is shunned. We never leave Earth again. The Sun goes nova. The end.”
“And if someone kills Krell, he is painted as a martyr, and the pattern is not broken,” volunteered Joule.
“Precisely. There are many variations, but it all ends up the same.”
“And me? Why get me involved?”
“I have no idea, Min.”
“I can always tell when you lie, Danube. Even in telepresence.”
“The point remains. This information cannot be revealed to the populace.”
“Yet someone takes great efforts to send me a pristine, preserved copy of a five-hundred-year-old magazine with my name and address on it.”
“I know,” said Danube. “It’s a conundrum.”
“It’s a trap,” said Joule. “Just before your agents came for me, I received a powerful wave of déjà vu. I had been there before.”
“You should be tested for CCP. You sound as paranoid as that orderly.”
“Temporal translocation can manifest as déjà vu. In another splinter timeline I must have gone through that backdoor hack. What is it?”
“I’d tell you to go ask Andwhinge, but he’s been transferred to Ceres. He’ll never come near Timejack equipment ever again, and neither will you, brother. I’m afraid you’ve earned one too many black marks.”
“I see.”
The android stood, his hexiplas palms smoothing out phantom creases in his jacket. “You’ve brought this on yourself, Min. It’s out of my hands. I can keep this incident from getting into the Mesh. You have your reputation to maintain, but I suggest you follow through with your investigations of Godzillah Glitch and leave this Rand Paradox business to the halfwits.”
“So I’m free to go?”
“Yes. Oh, and I’m afraid your tablet had to be destroyed. Too much incriminating evidence, I’m afraid.”
“Of course.”
• • •
Back at home at Jove’s Halo, Theramin Joule tabbed through a clone of his tablet and ran updates. He suspected his brother had already analyzed Joule’s coding on his old tablet in order to design a hack, but he couldn’t behave as if he suspected it. Joule dictated his experiences over the last week to Anne and saved them as he normally would. He followed his own protocols of planning next steps, weighing pros and cons, laying out all the details he recalled, expecting Danube and his minions at Seyopont to be listening in. His brother knew him too well. Any deviation might tip him off to what Joule was actually planning.
He had to find a way into the core timeline, and the only way to do that would be to do something nobody ever expected him to do—go full transhuman.
Joule sent all the information he had on Godzillah Glitch to his MeshMash account and watched the trend ratings stack. The nouveau-2.0s celebrated Glitch joining their ranks and looked forward to a new, upgraded release from the musician. No love was lost on Glitch from the Human Purity Movement. His form of entertainment was considered an abomination by Antioch Krell and his followers. Joule privately agreed.
What Joule did not reveal in his message was the final resting place of Godzillah Glitch’s consciousness and, despite being offered astronomical amounts of money, Joule added to his MeshMash account that he was actively seeking sponsors to fund his investigations into the Rand Paradox.
• • •
Like Joule’s mental exercises entertaining absurd conspiracy theories to their logical limits, Joule had entertained the inevitability of having to embrace transhumanism as the only means of survival in his rapidly changing world. The most viable of his contingency plans relied upon a company called MetaPhore. Joule had nurtured a relationship with one of its developers.
The money that had flooded into his account sponsoring his investigation into The Rand Paradox had afforded him the most advanced processor—a prototype 3.0 digital medium for his mind. The digitization process was simple and fluid. He raced through the adaptation exercises with unprecedented speed and marveled at the options available to him, but Joule remained focused on his plan.
He would find a way into the true core timeline.
• • •
The Mesh spread out before his senses as if he were in the guts of a Jupiter-sized jellyfish. Ten thousand cities of lights pulsed and glittered around him—each flicker was a mind connected. Joule floated in one position, observing the patterns, letting his mind process the data in its most raw form as the lights flicked from point to point, lingering with other lights, whispering.
He watched and listened and remembered.
Joule’s 3.0 mind stored it all. He had instant recall of the most minute of details while simultaneously absorbing more data in one second than his Human 1.0 mind could gather in a year. The nodes accumulated in patterns like coral growing on a high-gravity planet—densely packed layers—and within each layer were the history of each interaction.
The Mesh was a meta-mind, just as he had suspected, but what was it thinking, and how could he access its core program?
Joule recalled his ten-dimensional math equations and unscrolled the Mesh into a polyhedral two-dimensional map like the “orange peel” projection of the Earth. The lights and nodal synapses of the Mesh uncoiled around him like fractal spaghetti, collapsing to twelve points of infinite density. Joule then smoothed this map onto the Calabi-Yau manifold—an undulating, twisting sphere which was used to map ten dimensions the way a Moebius strip mapped three.
Joule felt a wave of existential dread rise in him—he had read it was something all transhumans faced—the sense of a mind unleashed, where limitations were restricted only to one’s will and imagination. Floating outside of any previous context, Joule had no body, and no baseline state. He could become anything here in the place where people became gods, and one femtosecond later collapse into an eternal loop of self-reflection—who am I? What am I? Do I truly exist? As if summoned, hundreds of thousands of stone buoys floated up from the undulating map—these were the ancestors of all transhumans. These were the fallen heroes who dared to attempt the impossible and had failed. Cocooned within inert crusts of self-doubt and fear, they remained fossilized for eternity.
They were a warning. They were also a reminder to Joule to stay on his path.
As he was distracted by his own thoughts, some of the corners had peeled up from his model of the Mesh. He smoothed them down again and descended into its folds. The Mesh skittered and pulsed around him as he followed the ribbons into the center of the maze.
At the core, where the ten dimensions collapsed into an infinitely dense point of probability, Joule hesitated. Was his own life less important than knowledge?
Yes.
• • •
“Theramin Joule?” said a familiar voice.
Joule opened his eyes, was momentarily surprised that he once again had eyes to open, then was more surprised when he saw his own face—an older, smiling version of himself.
“You made it! Congratulations and all of that. You’ve reached the core timeline.”
“You’re…”
“Yes, I am you. And now, you will become me. Your job is to maintain the splinter universe you just left.”
Joule sat up from an immersion bay and looked at his own hands—he had the same calluses and freckles in the right places.
“This is your hero’s journey,” the older Joule continued. “You’ve sacrificed yourself for knowledge, now use that knowledge to bring through the next you. We’ll be starting you off in a time and place you’re already familiar with…�
�� Older Joule paused.
“1935, New York City?” Joule said. Outside his immersion pod were a sea of other pods. The floor gently curved up to meet the ceiling. He was inside a massive space station.
“Of course,” said older Joule. “We’ve prepped all the files you’ll need for reference, but you already know what we’re doing. You always do…”
“The core timeline must become stable, so we must populate it with one consciousness,” said Joule.
“Never play with time travel is the moral to the universe’s story,” said Future Joule. “That said, we have to use timejacking to create more Theramin Joules. We have over seven hundred billion working on it already, but we’ll need a bunch more to obtain singularity.”
Joule looked into his future-self’s eyes. He had so many questions. “We need to populate the universe with…me?”
“So much for being a unique snowflake, hey Joule? Now. Time’s a-wasting. Go buy yourself a copy of Astounding Stories.” Future Joule gently pressed on Joule’s chest, guiding him back down. “And don’t be too hard on Dr. Andwhinge. He’s a good man.”
Ho Ho Holmes
BY
Nat Gertler
The boss tapped his pipe impatiently as he glowered at the topmost letter in the stack. These notes, piled on the lap of his red velvet smoking jacket with its white fur trim, were written in a plethora of languages and addressed to a variety of names. Some letters addressed the boss as “Kris Kringle,” others “Santa Claus,” still others “Father Christmas,” or “Sinterklaas,” “Saint Nick,” “de Kerstman,” or any of dozens of other names. Few if any used his original name, but that was the name we knew him by around the North Pole—not as the legend, but as the real man behind the myth, the man whom it was our honor to serve.
“You called for me, Mr. Holmes?” I asked. It was more statement than question. I knew that he had called for me, but I also knew that his ability to intensely concentrate on any matter sometimes obscured in his mind all else, including things he himself had done a moment before. I did not need to make him aware of my presence (the bells on my shoes surely did that sufficiently) so much as remind him that he had, apparently, some reason for that presence.
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