by Stephen Cote
Part 3: Frix the Jolly Cat
Hart Lovely booted Frix the Jolly Cat across the room with a well-planted thrust from the metal-tip of his best pair of chromed business shoes. "I’m not happy!" he seethed. Frix coughed, wheezed, whimpered and then went still.
"Don’t kick the Jolly Cat," Stacia Lacey scolded Hart. She walked across the room, snatched Frix by the scruff of his limp neck, and shook him firmly. "Wake up, Frix." When Frix didn’t move, she pitched the carcass at Hart. "You can take care of it this time."
"Just get another one," Hart snapped.
"It’s your daughter’s Jolly Cat. She’ll know the difference. The serial numbers won’t match." Stacia waited for Hart to respond, then looked towards the door when he didn’t. "Gretch, call Jolly-Co. Tell them Frix died and is still under warranty."
A few tense moments later, a voice from the other side of the door responded, "The Jolly-Co tech needs to know if the Jolly Cat was punctured again like last time or emotionally abused in any way as that would violate their Fun-Time Jolly-Co Jolly Cat warranty."
"Gretch," Hart said just below a scream, "just tell them to re-animate Frix."
As Gretch’s Yes Sir subsided on the other side of the door, Stacia placed her hand on Hart’s shoulder and asked softly, "Would you like to tell me what prompted this latest outburst?"
Hart looked at her with a stern gaze, and then turned on the white noise. It sounded like pigs mucking through a feed trough.
"Our favorite record on the time line," he said very softly. "It finally came up for review and some Century GIX yokel punched a red-button."
"Julian L. Croft," Stacia murmured. "Every new executive at Time Tremble has reviewed the matter. Well, we knew this would happen and accounted for every contingency."
"Except the one," Hart said.
"That was only theoretical," Stacia scoffed.
He shook his head. "Julian Lovely Croft was diverted from his course of action by inducing another individual to follow the same course of action first. The change resulted in a major, galaxy-wide paradox, but one we avoided by first seeding the time line."
"And then the executives of Time Tremble Corporation, before it became a Galactic Industrial Exchange, took care of the replacement. The only contingency that was considered probable was that the replacement wasn’t taken-out. And, of course, he was because he conveniently died a week later."
"Unless there was more than one," Hart said after a lengthy pause.
"What?" Stacia exclaimed. "How is that even possible? It would show up in Century Information’s records."
"What is the nearest point in the past that Time Tremble GIX is capable of traveling?"
"Five years," she stated.
Hart rolled his eyes and gestured excitedly with his hands. "Really."
"Ten minutes," she whispered.
"I’ve been watching a small company very closely, attempting to figure out their secret methodologies for analyzing quantum mechanics. They have some very far-fetched albeit interesting ideas that could have significant impact on matter transportation as well as time travel." Hart looked evenly at Stacia, then continued. "About fifteen minutes ago, we detected that they opened an unprotected magnetic vortex on the edge of the known universe."
"Those crazy bastards!" Stacia swore. "Are they insane? They must know we’d notice, even way out there. Why bother?"
"Oh, it gets better. They brought someone forwards through time."
Stacia shook her head in disbelief. Then her eyes widened. "Who?"
"Klaus Reinhardt. Julian Lovely Croft’s replacement."
"Impossible!" Stacia stated. "If he was brought forward, whether the vortex was opened with paradox encryption or not, well, we would have detected that."
"This isn’t the same Klaus Reinhardt," Hart said. "It looks like a perfect copy."
Stacia fumed, but recovered her composure. "Still, I don’t see how it’s a problem. Reinhardt wouldn’t know anything, copy or original, and even if Century Information’s super-intelligent AI program figured out what happened and re-ran the time-series, it wouldn’t be able to hypothesize the results."
Hart nodded very slightly then narrowed his eyes and turned his lips into a mild sneer, "It seems to me it wouldn’t be that hard for the AI to figure it out. Covert non-terrestrials were discovered a number of years later. If Julian did whatever he was supposed to do in the toilet, and the government plan to track everybody in metropolitan areas through their waste picked up the non-terrestrial DNA, well, all of our skeletons would be pitched violently from the closet."
Stacia shook her head and consoled him. "The AI won’t figure it out. It can’t. I made sure it wouldn’t."
Hart smiled pleasantly.
And the Jolly-Co technical support re-animated Frix the Jolly Cat. He perked his ears, meowed, and vomited on the most expensive rug in the office.