by Peter Ward
“Please state your destination,” a synthesized female voice said. Unless he was mistaken, this was the same voice Geoff had heard in the lift with Ruth before his interview.
“Take us to the Departure Lounge,” Tim said.
Six
The lift began to descend to its destination.
“These lifts,” Geoff said, looking around at the shiny interior. No buttons again. “They recognize your voice?”
“That’s right,” Tim said.
“Is it easy to confuse them?”
“What?”
“Is it easy to confuse them?” Geoff repeated.
“What do you mean, ‘confuse them’?”
“Let’s say we were talking about someone we knew in the basement. When one of us said the word ‘basement,’ would it think we wanted to go the basement, or would it know that we were just saying the word ‘basement’?”
“Is that important?” Tim said. “Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious.”
“The lift is programmed to look at the context of the word to determine if it is a command,” Eric explained. “It knows when it’s being spoken to.”
“So you can’t fool it?”
“I don’t know,” Eric said. “I’ve got better things to do with my time than try to trick a lift into going to a floor I don’t want to go to.”
“I suppose it is a silly thing to do, now that you mention it,” Geoff said. “Basement!”
The lift still didn’t seem to change direction.
“Maybe this place doesn’t have a basement,” Geoff said.
“Or maybe the lift knew you were trying to trick it.”
“How would it know that?”
“You’ve just spent the last two minutes talking about whether you could confuse the lift by saying ‘basement,’ and then you said, ‘Basement’. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that it’s a trick.”
“But that would mean that the lift can understand everything we’re saying!” Geoff said.
“Correct,” Eric replied.
“But … don’t you find that weird?” Geoff said, suddenly feeling a little intimidated. “I’d rather the lift wasn’t listening to our conversation!”
“I’d rather I wasn’t listening to our conversation,” Tim said.
“Now arriving at the Departure Lounge,” the elevator said, coming to an abrupt halt.
The doors opened to reveal another huge gothic hall similar in design to the arrivals lounge. There must have been tens of thousands of people here. Some were seated, looking up at huge glowing departure screens that appeared to be hovering in midair. Other people were in more of a hurry, barging their way through the crowds, luggage crashing around in tow.
“The Departure Lounge is the starting point for all time tourists,” Tim said, raising his voice over the murmur of the crowd.
It really was very busy with all sorts of strangely dressed tourists rushing off in different directions. Geoff found it quite entertaining to look at the various costumes in the room and try to guess which time period people were going to visit. For the most part, this was quite easy: the group dressed as cowboys were obviously going back to the Wild West and the World War II soldiers were obviously going back to 1940s Europe. Other costumes posed more of a challenge. Silver jumpsuits? Rubber dungarees? Either these people were about to join the circus or they were travelling somewhere later than the twenty-first century: a place where Geoff was not familiar with the fashion. Not that Geoff was familiar with the fashion of his own time period.
“We should try and tag along with the next group that gets called up,” Eric said to Tim.
“Agreed,” Tim replied, forging his way into the crowd. “Stay close to me, Geoff,” he said over his shoulder.
Geoff followed his hosts across the departure lounge, wading through groups of 1920s gangsters, astronauts and hippies.
“THIS IS A CUSTOMER ANNOUNCEMENT,” A voice blared over the loudspeaker. “WILL CUSTOMERS TRAVELLING TO 1666 AD. PLEASE MAKE THEIR WAY TO QUARANTINE CHAMBER SIXTEEN.”
A group of people dressed as peasants over the other side of the hall seemed to respond. They got up from their seats, had a bit of a stretch, and ambled their way over to an exit marked “Quarantine Chambers 0–50.”
“Here we go,” Tim said. “Let’s follow them.”
Geoff tugged on Tim’s sleeve. “Quarantine Chamber Sixteen?”
“All tourists are quarantined briefly before departure,” Tim said over his shoulder, “just to make sure they’re not carrying any diseases or viruses that cannot be cured in the past.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t want someone going back in time and spreading today’s cold virus,” Tim replied. “It’d be the plague all over again.”
The quarantine chambers looked a little familiar.
Frosted glass.
All the tourists were sitting patiently on frosted glass benches, looking aimlessly up at a frosted glass ceiling, leaning back against frosted glass walls. Everything was frosted glass.
“Frosted glass!” The words fell out of Geoff’s mouth before he knew why he wanted to say them.
“What?” Tim said.
“This whole place is made of frosted glass!”
“It’s not frosted glass,” Eric said. “It’s a special sensory material we use to detect any extraneous organisms. Viruses. Bacteria.”
“Just takes a few seconds to scan everyone,” Tim said, checking his watch impatiently.
“The door handles are frosted glass! The floor is frosted glass! There’s not one piece of furniture in here that isn’t made of frosted glass!”
“Yes, Geoff, everything is made of ‘frosted glass.’”
“Is your lobby a quarantine chamber, then?” Geoff asked. “The one I was sitting in this afternoon?”
“As a matter of fact, it is,” Tim said. He sounded surprised that Geoff had made the connection. “We’re all scanned before we go into the outside world.”
Geoff thought about this.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Was I scanned before I went up for the interview with Mr. Knight?” He felt a little offended. “Did they think I was diseased or something?”
“I doubt it,” Tim said. “Unless Ruth thought you looked really ill, she wouldn’t have bothered with a scan.”
The room flashed green for a split second.
“Looks like this group are safe to travel,” Eric said.
A large set of double doors clicked open at the back of the quarantine chamber. The tourists got up from their seats and shuffled through in a semi-orderly fashion.
“Customs next,” Tim said, following the last few people through the double doors, down a brightly lit corridor.
“Customs?” Geoff said.
“Yep.”
“But didn’t we just go through customs?”
“That was for arrivals. This is for outbound tourists.”
The corridor opened out onto a large room. All the tourists were queuing up to go through a tall square arch, which to Geoff looked a bit like an airport metal detector. One by one the tourists passed under the arch and made their way over to a group of customs officials who were adding a few finishing touches to various costumes as they saw fit—a little more mud rubbed into the cleaner outfits, hair being messed up if it looked too styled. The attention to detail was amazing.
“This should be quite familiar to you,” Tim said.
“People having their hair messed up and mud rubbed into their clothes?” Geoff was sick of Tim making fun of his personal hygiene.
“That’s not what he meant,” Eric said. “This is quite similar to the kind of checks you have before you board a plane in the twenty-first century. If I recall, they used to check for potentially dangerous items like sharp objects and cigarette lighters along with the usual bombs, guns and other things it’s probably best to stop someone taking on
a plane. Here, we make sure everyone is dressed appropriately to blend in, and we screen everyone to make sure they are not carrying any technology that doesn’t exist in their destination time period.”
“Think of it this way,” Tim said, sensing Geoff’s confusion. “Ever been to Australia?”
“No.” Geoff said. He hadn’t even been to the bottom of the garden.
“Course you haven’t,” Tim muttered, remembering that he probably knew more about Geoff than Geoff did. “Well, when you visit Australia, you’re not allowed to take any foreign biological materials into the country that might upset the balance of the ecosystem. Travelling through time follows the same principle: anything that does not exist in the time period you are visiting must be left at your departure time. We certainly don’t want a stray piece of technology changing the course of history or exposing the time-tourism industry to the past.”
“Does it really make that much of a difference?” Geoff said.
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” Eric said. “Last week we caught someone trying to take a bottle of Viagra back to the Battle of Waterloo. If they’d left it there by mistake and someone had worked out what it was, we think the world population would have doubled by the year 3000 …”
“Wow—that would have been an almighty cock-up,” Geoff smirked.
Eric ignored him.
“Hang on a minute,” Geoff said. “If you’re so strict about making sure everyone blends in when they go back in time, how come I was able to go back to 65 million years BC without going through all these checks?”
“That’s different,” Tim said. “A tyrannosaurus rex isn’t exactly going to come up to you and say, ‘Excuse me sir, but why are you wearing those strange clothes?’ And everything was about to be vaporized anyway, so if you’d left anything behind like a watch or a phone, it would have been destroyed.”
“Besides, that was a one-off trip,” Eric said. “It’s not a destination we offer to our regular tourists. However, if you want to go back to any point in human history, the only piece of technology you’re allowed to take with you are the earphones you need to get back again. Apart from that, you’re not allowed to take anyth …”
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Eric was interrupted by a loud beeping sound. As beeping sounds go, it was fairly polite but piercing enough to suggest that someone should probably go and find out what all the beeping was about rather than just ignoring it in the hope that it would eventually turn itself off. It was the square arch. The beeping got louder, and a few lights began to flash for good measure. The tourist who had just walked through the arch had obviously triggered something. He stopped and looked sheepishly towards the customs officials, who had all snapped their gaze in his direction.
“Jesus,” Eric spat under his breath, gripping the top of his walking stick a little more tightly. “Another idiot.”
“I was hoping you’d get to see something like this,” Tim whispered to Geoff. “Looks like this guy might be trying to smuggle something back in time …”
The other tourists stared at the man, some nervously backing away. Parents squeezed their children’s hands a little tighter. One of the more senior-looking customs officials approached cautiously.
“Excuse me sir,” he said, “but are you carrying anything on your person that may not be indigenous to the time period you are about to visit?”
“Me?” The man said.
“Step over here, please sir,” the official said, grabbing the tourist by the arm and pulling him over to one side. Another official made a few adjustments to the arch to stop it beeping and motioned the remaining tourists to continue through.
“It infuriates me that some people still try and get away with this,” Eric said to Tim. “How many more adverts do we need to run warning people of the implications?”
“I’ll ask you again,” the official said to the tourist. “Are you attempting to take something back in time that won’t have been invented in 1666?”
“This is ridiculous,” the man said. “It’s the tiniest, most insignificant thing. What possible harm could it do?”
“I don’t know sir,” the official said. “Hand it over and I’ll tell you.”
The tourist dug into his pocket and removed a small metal disc. “See?” he said, handing it to the official. “It’s just a hologram.”
The official turned the disc over in his hand and pressed a small button on the side. Sure enough, the disc projected a small flickering image in midair of the man with a woman and two kids.
“My family,” the tourist explained.
“Lovely,” the official said. “Dangerous thing to try and take back with you though,” he said, switching the disc off again.
The tourist looked blankly at the official for a moment. “I don’t see how.”
“All it would take is for you to lose this in the past, someone else to pick it up and find out how to switch it on …”
“So what?” the man interrupted. “So I lose it. How would someone else finding it change anything?” He sounded frustrated.
“Are you some sort of moron?” Eric spat at the tourist from across the room, waving his walking stick in the air. “They still have the death penalty for practicing witchcraft in the seventeenth century!”
“Witchcraft?” the tourist said. “What has this stupid hologram got to do with witchcraft?”
“Oh, we don’t think anything of a simple hologram these days,” Eric said. “But can you imagine what would happen to someone in the seventeenth century if they were able to produce a flickering image in the palm of their hands? People would think it was magic. If that person was then accused of consorting with evil spirits, they could be killed. What if that person should have been your ancestor? Or my ancestor? Or anybody’s ancestor?”
“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” the customs official said, turning back to the tourist.
“I won’t drop it,” the tourist said impatiently, reaching out to try and grab the hologram back. “I’ll keep it on me at all times. Promise.”
“I guarantee the computer will never let you through with this,” the official said, tossing the device over to one of his assistants. “Now please—follow the rest of your group through to the paradox-scanning facility. You can have this back when you return.”
“Stupid computer,” the tourist said, reluctantly doing as he was told.
Stupid computer indeed, Geoff thought. This was the computer that thought he was less significant than certain types of mushroom. Said he was unpopular. Uninteresting. Unattractive. So what if it used a six-billion-character algorithm to reach this conclusion? Sunset Beach had loads of characters in it, and that was rubbish.
The paradox-scanning facility was a short walk from customs, leading the tourists down a dimly lit corridor past several advertisements for lectures and guidebooks designed to increase their chances of passing the scan. “Thirty percent of tourists were turned away last year because they lacked the knowledge of local customs needed to blend in,” said one billboard. “Those people should have read Tipping in Restaurants: 1950 to 2150.” Apparently it was a bestseller.
Geoff felt himself walking a little faster. He wasn’t sure why—it was as if some sort of invisible force was beginning to pull him down the corridor, like having an overexcited dog on a leash. And it wasn’t just him—everyone seemed to be breaking into a bit of a jog.
“What’s going on?” Geoff said. “I feel like I’m in that Olympic event where everyone walks like a cockney.”
“It’s the computer,” Eric said. “It’s actually a massive neutronium-encased lattice of artificial micro-black holes. Only one of its kind in the world. Unfortunately the side effect of its design is that it emits a mild gravitational pull.” He ran his hand along the wall to try and slow himself down.
“Sounds powerful,” Geoff said, humoring Eric.
“You can’t begin to imagine.”
“
But can it run Nascar Racing in full detail? Even on my old 486 DX4, that game chugged along like a bastard …”
“Nascar Racing?”
“Old computer game. You’ve never heard of it?”
“This computer is not used to play games,” Eric said sternly, clearly insulted at the suggestion. “Its sole function is to store huge amounts of information.”
“You haven’t tried any games on it?”
“It’s not that sort of computer!” Eric fumed. “Do you have any idea about the kind of temporal calculations this computer is capable of? Can you even begin to understand how difficult it is to read back information through Hawking radiation? We’re not going to waste that kind of processing power by plugging a joystick into it and playing Pac-Man!”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you—what exactly are these ‘temporal calculations’?” Geoff made no effort to hide the skepticism in his voice—he was determined to prove that this computer had made some sort of mistake about him.
“Simple,” Eric replied calmly, relieved that Geoff was beginning to ask some sensible questions. “The computer is effectively a simulator. It recreates a precise model of the space-time continuum in its memory banks.”
“And how precise is this ‘model’?”
“Precise enough to map out the vibration of every molecule on this planet for the next one hundred thousand years.”
Geoff blinked. “Reasonably precise, then.”
“You could say that,” Eric said. “The computer takes a snapshot of the final nanosecond of this model, one hundred thousand years in the future. Once it has that as a point of reference, it runs the model again, changing the appropriate variables to reflect who is traveling through time and where they are visiting. If the final nanosecond is different in any way from the original snapshot, the tourist is blocked from traveling.”
“Is that what happened with me?” Geoff said. “You ran a simulation of me being plucked from my own time, and there was no difference?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, there was one small difference,” Tim interjected. “But the computer decided it was well within acceptable tolerance levels.”