Gotta be honest- this is going pretty well so far. No one’s tried to shoot me, which is fun. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you guys actually wanted to listen to my side of the story, and not just come up with a pretext to arrest me.
...You gonna say anything?
Officer J: I’ll only be asking clarifying questions.
Cool. Fine. So, what, I just talk? You’re gonna transcribe it, make it public somehow?
Officer J: The transcript will be available at the Department of Records.
Gotcha. No one’s gonna read this. That’s kind of a load off, I guess. So… you want me to start from the beginning?
Officer J: That’d be appreciated.
Well, tough cookies.
1 - The End
It all started when the planet exploded.
Well, no, let me back up. It all started when something else exploded, but I didn’t really realize it started then. I only realized when it actually started after the planet exploded.
So, the actual beginning… there I was, minding my own business…
...Wait, no. Hang on. I should actually start in the middle, which is where things, uh… “start”. Technically. It’s… listen, it’ll all make sense.
So- honestly, who hasn't woken up in a hospital bed with no memory of how they got there? Like, that's a universal human experience, right? It's not weird? I’m asking because my life has gotten weird enough that I really don’t have a frame of reference anymore.
Anyway, I could describe this hospital room, but it’s a thousand kinds of not important. Hospital bed. I’m hooked up to IVs and stuff. I could describe the nurse who was there, too, but he wasn’t important either. The hospital really isn’t important except for how it gets in the way of important stuff later.
I wake up, and this nurse is there checking my vitals, and he’s like, whoa, he’s awake. Apparently, I’ve been in a coma for three months, and this is a problem both because of hospital bills, and because of how I definitely don’t still have my job at the Massive Mart to pay those hospital bills with. I get out of bed to grab my phone, which is in a little bag in the corner, and the nurse guy is like, no don’t move, and I’m all hey no sweat, but… okay, there’s like an hour where I agree not to move, and some doctors fuss over my vitals and stuff. I’m skimming over this part of the story real fast because it’s really not gonna matter.
Anyway, while they’re doing that, I think back to why I’m in the hospital. When I say I didn’t know how I got there, I didn’t mean that I had amnesia or anything- I mean I didn’t know specifically how I got to the hospital from the place I got knocked into a coma.
That place was the middle of the woods. And you might be asking, Dave, why were you in the middle of the woods? Which is a good question! It was the same question I was asking the whole time I was out there, actually. Couldn’t really tell you the answer to that question. I know exactly the cause of me being out there, but a reason didn’t really come into it.
Let me tell you about my sister, Ashlynne. Ashlynne is out of her god damn gourd. Ashlynne likes photography and long walks amidst pristine natural beauty, which is why she spent all her savings buying a busted log cabin in the middle of Country’s biggest and most remote forest, so she could live out there with her huge dog and smoke all kinds of crazy forest herbs and take pictures all day. No human contact, no civilization, just her and her camera.
You see the problem, right?
The problem with her hippie paradise plan was that she is a human being who needs to be alive, and it’s hard to do that in the woods. Specifically, hard to do that while so far out in the woods that you can’t drive to go buy necessities every week. Even harder to do that without electricity, and harder still to do all that while sticking to her latest paleo-aether-vegan fad diet. S’especially hard to juggle all that when- much like groceries- buying film and mailing stuff for her “job” as a freelance wilderness photographer requires driving for like a hundred miles. She’s like a neverending font of bad decisions.
(Runs in the family, I know.)
Officer J: I didn’t say anything.
Yeah, whatever. So Ashlynne’s got this… let’s call it a lifestyle, to be generous, and it’s not easy for her. So, when she gets a call from her latest bosses, inviting her to a full-time position taking photos for a prestigious nature magazine, she jumps at the chance. Really, any sane person would be over the moon about getting to leave the woods and get paid to do what they want, and wouldn’t think twice about abandoning that musty shack.
But remember, I said she’s out of her gourd. So she can’t just leave it behind and meet some execs in Marina City for a week. She needs someone to take care of her dog, and her garden, and her crystal arrangement that needs to be attuned to the constellations every other night. So she gives me a phone call. Her dear brother would love to help her out, right?
I wouldn’t, by the way. I could not be any less inclined to spend a week in the woods taking care of a monster dog that weighs more than I do. I told her that, but… uh. I’m not gonna- I’m not gonna say specifically what I did in high school that she helped me cover up, once, because even today I’d never live it down… but, well. She called in a favor.
And then I still wouldn’t do it, because I wanted so badly to not be doing that, and then we had this long long long long long argument about obligations and the meaning of family and yada yada yada that I eventually caved on for reasons I still don’t really understand. Maybe it had just gotten so late that my willpower had collapsed, or maybe my job sucked so bad that I was willing to do anything to not be there for a little while. Some exhausted part of me just decided… fine. Fuck it.
Fast forward to me arriving at her cabin, and her giving me a few pages of diagrams about how to align the crystals, and a few more pages of what to feed Baldur.
Lemme give you the cliffnotes on Baldur:
Ashlynne handed me this whole page of personality profile detailing his whole personality, his likes and dislikes, the depths of his soul- all of which, as far as I could tell, were entirely based on wishful thinking. Ashlynne’s Baldur was a sensitive soul in tune with the energies of nature, with a wry and poetic sense of humor. He was on good terms with Gaia and Apollo, loved traditional ballads, and was a staunch protector of hearth and home.
Actual Baldur, as far as I could tell, was a big and hungry dog who did not want to be there.
That last part turned out to be the sticking point. It wasn’t even two hours after she left (which I spent familiarizing myself with her crystal setup and trying to teach myself to use her sitar, to no avail) that Baldur crashed through the gate of Baldur’s Heaven. (Baldur’s Gate, I had called it in front of Ashlynne, who didn’t get it because video games were a symbol of the modern materialist world’s attachment to meaningless spectacle.)
So, yeah, the dog escaped. Which was, like, the one thing I was supposed to prevent from happening, so I wasn’t too happy about that. In my defense, though: he straight-up smashed down the gate! I just assumed that the gate would be fine! How did she keep that monster contained, if not by keeping the damn gate closed?! It was 100% not my fault!
Still, I couldn’t just tell her “sorry, I lost your dog”. So… that meant going and getting the dog. In the woods.
Tracking down Baldur… well, I’d never been in the scouts, and I’d never really learned any survival skills, but… this was a dog the size of a small horse. It didn’t exactly make its trail difficult to follow. It’d rained recently, so it actually left visible footprints in the ground! I’d always assumed that footprints weren’t really enough to track anything- like, eventually the ground would be too hard or there’d be leaves in the way, and you’d lose it. And I thought, looking for snapped branches and disturbed foliage would be a crapshoot, because forests are full of broken branches and disturbed foliage, and how the hell are you supposed to tell what stuff got disturbed by the thing you’re following and what stuff is just standard forest chaos?
But… Baldur was very big and moving very fast, so I actually had a pretty good idea of where he’d been. I was feeling pretty good about myself! I was like a ranger or something! Total natural!
Which was why I got overconfident. I probably should’ve, like, kept carefully examining the trail he left behind, instead of assuming I was on the right track. Instead, when I reached a clearing cut in two by a stream, and saw Baldur on the other side of it, I figured- oh, hey, I found him! Awesome! Score one for my kickass naturalist skills that I apparently had!
Now, two things happened when I reached the edge of the stream.
Here is thing one: Baldur turned around. And it wasn’t Baldur. It just looked like him. Remember I said Baldur looks like a bear? It was, in fact, a bear.
The bear turned around and saw me, and I froze in place and began being very afraid, because that is what you’re supposed to do when a bear spots you in the woods a hundred miles away from anyone who could possibly help you.
Here is thing two: there was a loud roaring noise.
No, thing one and thing two were not related. I thought they might be at first, but the bear actually hadn’t opened its mouth. It was looking at me- no, past me- at something behind me, up in the sky.
I sort of decided to multitask at that point. I started running, to get away from the bear, which was one of the multiple tasks. The other of the multiple tasks was trying to identify what made the roaring noise- which turned out to be a massive green fireball in the sky. Headed straight for me.
Now- things in the sky, which are far away, heading straight for you- it’s hard to judge the angle. I was already running (away from the bear, because duh), and I figured that if it was headed straight for me when I was at the stream’s edge, I’d be fine if I ran in any direction, including the direction I was headed. So I kept running, thinking the odds of it actually hitting me directly were small.
I still don’t know if I was right about that. It was moving very fast, and there was an impact, and that impact was so powerful that I was completely unable to figure out if it’d actually hit me or if I’d just been caught in the blast.
So, that brings us back to hospital funtimes. Three-month coma, and all. Specifically, 94 days.
I’d love to tell you that I investigated, but I didn’t. The most I got was that Ashlynne had arrived home the next week and went looking for Baldur. She didn’t find Baldur, but she did find me, out like a light by the stream and surrounded by signs of a forest fire.
Which- I guess I should mention, because it failed to strike me as important at the time, but actually was important and I should’ve been paying attention: I’d apparently been unconscious for a week. In the woods. Without being eaten by any wild animals, like for example a bear. And… the thing about being unconscious for a week is that you can’t drink for a week. And you die of dehydration after three days without water, usually. So… me being alive was some kind of medical miracle.
Most I thought about that at the time was “huh, cool”.
Anyway, the next 33 hours, 20 minutes, and 16 seconds- and I’ll get into how I know exactly how long that was- were pretty boring. I got discharged. I got crazy medical bills, obviously, but I managed to call up Massive Mart and explain my absence, and I actually got my job back just like that. Nobody working the night shift there actually gave a shit, including me. I got scheduled for a shift the next night, so I spent my post-discharge free night playing an old RPG and then went to bed at the crack of dawn. The next night, I went into work, and I was stocking shelves in the cosmetics department when the planet exploded.
Officer J: Right, that. You said that earlier. How does that square with…?
The planet not being exploded? Yeah, I’m getting to that.
2 - The Beginning
So, the planet exploded. Let’s analyze that.
The thing is, I doubt most people noticed the planet exploding. It sorta happened really quickly. Maybe you’ve seen planets explode in sci-fi movies- it looks normal, right? Like maybe you might have a split second to wonder “wait, what’s that loud sound” or something? Star Wars would have you believe that millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, but that’s just not how it works.
Like, think about the rotation of the planet. It takes, what, 24 hours for it to turn around? Which seems slow, but it’s like twenty five thousand miles around, so really it’s spinning at a thousand miles an hour, which is super fast. If something whooshed past you at a thousand miles an hour, you wouldn’t notice it except for how you just had your bones liquefied from the shockwave. And speaking of bones being liquefied from the shockwave: that’s apparently what happened. To roughly everyone at once.
So, obviously the planet isn’t currently exploded. Someone, namely me, lived to tell the tale. Kind of. It’s more like I died to tell the tale.
Let’s get a little more concrete. What sort of sensory experiences did I have that led me to conclude the planet had just exploded?
Well, I was in the cosmetics aisle, taking bottles of nail polish out of cardboard boxes and lining them up in rows with the little spring-loaded plastic dealies that make sure the stuff stays pushed to the front of the shelf. I had just put a bottle of nail polish- this weird swirly two-tone red-and-teal stuff- on the shelf, and I sort of turned to the right, where the box was sitting, to get another bottle out of the box. Conveniently, something caught my eye at the end of the adjoining grocery aisle, though- there was a coworker walking down the far aisle there.
I don’t know what was up with the coworker being there- probably just stocking some breakfast cereal or something. I never got the chance to really find out. See… it was that instant, when I sort of looked over at the coworker, that everything stopped.
I couldn’t move my eyes anymore. They were focused on a point slightly to the coworker’s left, unable to swivel in their sockets. I don’t know if you know about how eyes work- there’s this thing called saccadic movements? Even when you’re looking directly at something, your eyes are kind of darting around slightly, on an unconscious level, focusing on different points to help your brain put together a complete picture of what you’re seeing. If you held your eyeballs completely still, you’d have a lot of trouble actually visualizing what’s directly in front of you- normally, those saccades do a lot of work to create… what you’re used to as “seeing something”.
With my eyes completely frozen in place, all I could really see was what they were directly focused on- the top left corner of a box of what I could only assume was oatmeal. Everything else in my field of view was… not even blurry. Even though nothing was moving, everything I could see apart from the focus point was jumping around, shifting, the visual cortex of my brain trying to decide what it was it was seeing without any saccadic input from the eyes.
Of course, that’s not even exactly what it was. But… well, I’ll get to that.
So- I could see this oatmeal box, and I could see- in blurry, shifting detail- everything around the oatmeal box. Above the oatmeal box were shifting shapes that looked like more oatmeal, and probably granola bars and toaster pastries if I remembered the layout of that aisle correctly. To the right of the oatmeal was the coworker. To the left was… I think breakfast bars? I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was seeing, but it’s been a while since then, and there was a more important detail to focus on.
Below the oatmeal was the floor. Which, yeah, duh, but no, I mean like, the oatmeal was on a high shelf, about chest height. And the floor was directly below it. It looked sort of like… a clipping error in a video game, almost, like the floor plane had just been raised a few feet.
I’m five foot four, so the exact measurement was probably… something like four feet nine inches?
The floor- which had very quickly shoved everything above the floor out of the way, compressing the shelves and air and all that into a pancake with immense force- stopped somewhere around my nose. One of the many things that was shoved and compressed into a pancake was my entire body below the nose. I could just about make out the coworker, who was a few inches taller than me and had his whole head sticking out of the ground, with the rest of his body sort of puddling out from him a little bit. (The human body is mostly liquid, and I learned in school that liquids are incompressible, so that confused me, but I looked it up later and “incompressible” just means “you need a lot more pressure to compress it than normal”, so I think that checks out.) Presumably I was in just about the same situation, as was everybody, everywhere, because the ground had decided to move upwards at several thousand miles per hour without warning.
So- okay, the planet had started to explode, and then time froze, right?
The thing is, that didn’t exactly make sense. If time were frozen, I shouldn’t have been seeing… anything, right? Because vision is a stream of photons hitting the eye, and the eye sending electrical signals to the brain, and the brain processing those signals and creating an image. So if time were frozen, I couldn’t be thinking about how weird it was that time was frozen.
Maybe time was just really slowed down? But- no, that didn’t make that much sense either. The speed of thought is fast, but not that fast. By the time I’d finished thinking about everything that was happening, my brain should’ve been pulped like the rest of me.
I’m gonna tell you right now- as far as I can tell, there isn’t a simple explanation for what I was seeing and thinking at that point. There’s a complicated explanation, but I don’t think I totally understand it and the parts I do understand are mostly guesswork based on a lot of trial and error. So… for now, just, uh, reflect on the weird mystery of why I was able to see and think and all that good stuff.
Eventually, I started trying to move. I didn’t really have a body, because it’d been squooshed by the planet exploding, but I realized I could sort of… still feel it? Like, my brain still expected me to have a body, and I was trying to tell it what to do like usual. Y’know phantom limb syndrome? I’ve never had it, but I bet it was kind of like this.
I tried moving my legs, and… something happened. Not leg movement. Just… sudden return of real physical sensation throughout my whole body, for a split second. And then back to nothing.
Then I tried moving my arms. I tried moving my right arm first, and… the same pulse of physical sensation. It felt like something had slammed into my entire body from the inside.
Then I tried moving my left arm, and that’s where things got wild.
The floor receded the instant my nonexistent left arm twitched. Stuff that had been flattened in its path sort of uncrumpled before me, and the focus of my vision drifted slightly rightward, focusing on a slightly different part of the box of oatmeal.
Not to beat around the bush or anything- I’d just rewound time. Just a little. I froze for a moment, considering the implications of this. The implications were as follows:
So, there’s your answer to how the world isn’t exploded, in a nutshell. Time travel. I went back in time and stopped it from exploding. That’s what this story is about. It’s about why the planet exploded, why I could time travel, and more importantly: how I did all kinds of cool badass time travel stunts to stop the planet from exploding.
...You don’t believe me. That’s normal. I could do the usual trick to convince you, but-
Officer J: The usual trick?
-but I’m so sick of doing that, it’s really tedious and I don’t really need to convince you to do anything for me. You’re already writing all of this down, so… just sit tight.
...What’s with that look? Was that too condescending, Gloria Flora Jackson?
Officer J: Wh- how did-
Asked you for it and then went back in time with the answer. Obvs. Course, I guess I coulda just looked that up beforehand somehow, so if I want to actually prove it there’s this whole rigmarole to-
Officer J: No, that’s…
You believe me? Cool.
Officer J: No, I don’t believe- what in the…?
Whatever. Clarifying questions only, right? Let’s get back on track.
So, trying to move my left arm made time rewind. I tried moving my right arm again, and that made time go forward again- right up until the point where the floor reached seven inches below the top of my head and I felt that sensation again- the sensation of slamming up against the end of my personal timeline, is what I eventually figured out it was. There was only so far I could keep going into the future, because I could only continue being alive so far into the future.
I felt kind of… in a daze, not entirely convinced what I was doing was real? It didn’t really stop me from messing around with it, though.
So- left arm, waved it around a bit. Rewound to just before the planet exploded. And then…
Well, I got stuck there for a minute trying to wiggle more body parts, before I finally tried my legs again. And apparently “move legs” was the command for “drop back into real time” the way left arm meant “rewind” and right arm meant “fast-forward”. All of a sudden, I was standing there in the cosmetics aisle again, halfway through turning to face my coworker.
And then an instant later I slammed up against the end of the world, because I hadn’t rewound far enough. The floor stopped… right before reaching my brain, apparently.
I don’t know why I decided to start experimenting, right then. I don’t think I was convinced what was happening was real, and I didn’t really conceptualize myself as being in danger, y’know? I felt weirdly high on it all, so the next time I rewound, giving myself a couple seconds more, I leaned all the way over and put my head close to the ground. Because, I guess, I wanted to know “what happens if I just frickin’ die?”
Officer J: That’s-
Hey. Hey. Don’t start questioning my mental health now, officer. I’m about to give you way more reasons to do that.
So, time stopped earlier that time, the floor rising to squish my ear a bit and no further. My brain, it seemed, was an immovable object. Destroying it would kill me, and me being dead meant I was- for whatever reason- ejected into Weird Disembodied Time Travel Mode.
Okay, so… experiment successful, right? So I’m feeling real pleased with myself, and try rewinding a full minute before floorpocalypse.
The next thing I do is really dumb. First, I finish putting the nail polish bottles on the shelf, but way faster this time, because I’m in a rush. No, I don’t know why I did that. Shit was bigger than nail polish at that point, but the actual stakes of the situation hadn’t properly caught up with me, and for some reason “don’t get yelled at by the shift manager for leaving a job undone” was still a priority in my head. Like, hey, Past Dave, why do you think that’s gonna matter?
I guess I was sleepy or something, I dunno. I’d woken up like half an hour ago and ran to work without coffee, so… whatever. Anyway, then I do dumb thing number two, which is run over to where my coworker was headed, and intercept them.
And I’m like, “Hey! There’s no time to explain, the world’s gonna explode in like, ten seconds!”
And he’s like, “Haha, what? I don’t get it.”
And then I stammer something about how we have to… and then I trail off because what do we have to do? Evacuate the building? And he looks at me like I’m crazy, which frankly is totally fair because I was being a real idiot there, and then the planet explodes.
So, uh, it’s not going great, there. I take a little while to compose myself in whatever timeless ghost zone I go to, and I realize I’m less sleepy there. Like, in real life, I’m super tired, but once I’m no longer in my actual physical body, I’m… not sleepy anymore? It’s weird.
There has to be a plan. I have to figure out how to make the planet not explode. And the first thing I check is… wishful thinking. What if it’s not the planet exploding? What if it’s just a bomb under the Massive Mart? So I rewind… like, five minutes before explosion. (Sidenote: when I rewind past my conversation with the coworker, I hear it sort of play back in reverse- apparently I can hear while time-traveling.) And then- ignoring the manager shouting at me (there you go, Past Dave, that’s what you’re supposed to do), I run outside and as far as my legs will take me before the damn planet explodes again.
This time, I only rewind a little bit. Just long enough to turn around and take a look around over the whole shopping center. I have a pretty good view, from where I’m at halfway up a hill, and I can see…
It’s weirdly beautiful, actually. I mean, I don’t see it in actual real time, I have to rewind and slowly fast-forward to see it in progress, but… the ground just rises up, perfectly smooth as it consumes all the features around it. The parking lot is especially striking- when it hits the cars, the fuel in their gas tanks ignites, and it turns into a short-lived fireworks show before the rising tide of earth shoves all the oxygen out of the way and they’re extinguished. The three-dimensional shopping center just… squishes directly down, becoming a two-dimensional painting, a life-size satellite photo.
It’s pretty, but also it’s the planet exploding, and as the hill I’m on starts its own journey upward, it’s over, and I need to go back a little further.
This time, I don’t even bother punching in to work. I go back hours, hours, rewinding past the run to work, past the day’s sleep, and finally back to the night before, where I’d…
Well, I’d been playing that RPG, remember, and first I fix this mistake I made. There’s this one boss in the game that you can only fight once, and it has this rare drop? You can pickpocket it with the thief character, but I forgot to bring them to the fight, and the drop didn’t drop, and I missed out on it forever, so I made sure to correct my mistake.
...So. Now I was back in my apartment, right before I would’ve normally gone to bed. It was almost 10am, which meant I’d gone back… about fourteen hours. I could go back further, probably, but fourteen hours was probably enough to save the world.
3 - The Part After The Beginning, Where I Die
Saving the world, though. Whoof. That was a tall order. Sure, I could time travel, but, uh… you can’t really time travel the world into not exploding. I tried waving my arms around to cast some secret magic that I apparently could do, but after like five minutes of looking like an absolute moron in my apartment, it became clear that I needed to find a mysterious old wizard to teach me about my new magic powers.
That stayed clear for like, a full three seconds before I realized I was just being an idiot, and I needed to take this seriously.
So, okay, coming up with a way to stop the world from exploding. That was the kind of task I’d never really set for myself before. How do you break that down into smaller, more manageable pieces? It was a problem literally the size of the world, and the fact that said world was in the habit of getting broken down into smaller more manageable pieces was exactly the problem.
Step one, then, was answering the big question. Why was the world exploding?
Was the world exploding? It kind of seemed that way from what I’d seen, but what if it was a more localized problem? A volcanic eruption, or the world suddenly accelerating really fast in my general direction? I had to get a better picture of what was happening, first, before I could make it stop.
So, experiment design. Welcome back to science class, kids! This semester, we’ll be turning on Hard Mode. You’ll have to design an experiment that could distinguish between these multiple competing hypotheses:
So, 4 could probably be discarded on the basis of my attempted escape up the hill earlier. I could see the effect suddenly start happening at a lower elevation, not affecting stuff higher up. If it were just supergravity, I and the hill I was standing on would’ve started flattening at roughly the same time as everything else. Instead, it all seemed to move from the bottom up.
The easiest one to test, though, was number 2. All I had to do was go somewhere other than Town, and see if the world still exploded. Depending on how far away I could get, I could even falsify 3- if I were on the other side of the planet, and the ground suddenly just fell away really fast, it’d be consistent with 3- but if it were still moving up, that’d mean 3 was false.
...Unless, I guess, the world were accelerating straight “up” towards me, specifically, which would mean no matter where I was, I’d observe the same phenomenon. That was, um, less likely, but my existence in general was starting to look less likely. My thinking was: most people aren’t the targets of sudden planetary accelerations, but also most people can’t time travel, so… who the hell even knows?
Okay, but it was still worth ruling out 2. How far away could I get in fourteen hours?
...Well, pretty far. I could get on a plane.
So that’s what I did.
I could tell you all about my epic journey to empirically verify my theories about the world exploding, but… it really wasn’t an epic journey. It was actually really boring, and I doubt you care. Unless, like… well, you’re the police, so you tell me: is it illegal to pay for a last-minute international flight with a credit card when you know you can’t afford it, if you know the world is going to end before the bill comes due? Is that crimes? If you’re looking for crimes to pin on me, then, well, hey! There’s…
Uh, actually, there’s a thing I didn’t do. Yeah. That… is what I will tell you. Given that it happened in- that it didn’t happen in... an alternate timeline... that never existed… or something. Not crimes.
Officer J: Okay.
Anyway, crimes aside, I got on a flight to Nation that I paid for in a totally legitimate manner even though I could’ve totally just maybe-crimed my way aboard. You’ve been on planes before, yeah? It’s boring. They figured out how to take the miracle of humankind’s show of dominance over the confines of nature, and… make it boring, somehow. You’re literally looking down at the tops of clouds from like forty thousand feet up, and you can’t wait for it to be over. It’s bananas!
Speaking of looking down at the tops of clouds: I kind of missed the world exploding the first time around, because we were in the clouds and the damn ground snuck up on me. And… it’s not like I could rewind and try again, because I wasn’t the one controlling the plane.
...Okay, I see the way you’re looking at me. No. No, I didn’t- how would I have even done that? They have so many things in place specifically to prevent crazy people from hijacking planes! It wasn’t an option! You can’t just walk in there and say “hey, dude, can you do me a solid and lose some altitude, or veer off course to somewhere without clouds?” It doesn’t work! No amount of banging on the doors and making a fool of yourself in front of the first class passengers makes it work! Like- okay, maybe there’s a way to make it work, if you trial-and-errored your way through that awkward conversation, but some of us don’t like to make a scene! ...More than three or four times.
...Look, I got better at that kind of thing later. But right then, after failing to convince the pilot to give me a good look at the planet, I went back and rescheduled for a slightly different flight, after checking the weather. And on that flight, I…
Well, I also missed it, this time because I fell asleep on the plane. Remember, I work the night shift at Massive Mart. I’m nocturnal, plus my sleep schedule got all fucked up by the coma. I don’t know why I managed to stay awake the first time- it was my same body, eating mostly the same airline food, with the same preconditions… whatever. The world ended while I was asleep, that time, which is when I learned some weird new stuff about time travel.
See, as soon as the world ended, I was jolted into that sort of disembodied time travel state. And- remember how I said I wasn’t sleepy in the timeless ghost zone? That remained the case this time. Even if you’re woken up really abruptly by a loud noise or something, that’s peanuts compared to not even going through the physical process of waking up, and just suddenly being an awake consciousness outside of your body. I’d been dreaming about snakes at the time? And suddenly there were no snakes and I was really concerned about where all those snakes had gone for a while, before I realized I’d woken up. It’s already a dreamlike state, so it’s… disorienting doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Anyway, then I tried to just rewind a few seconds and jump back into time to wake up. Which… didn’t work. Because if you’re asleep at the point at which you insert yourself into time again, you don’t just stop being asleep. Suddenly being asleep after being awake in a weird mental representation of stopped time is… it’s super wack. Your lucid conscious memories suddenly try to integrate with your totally nutso dream consciousness, and it’s… not exactly getting chocolate in peanut butter. I was suddenly very surrounded by lots of terrifying venomous snakes, and it took a second for the dream logic to take over and smooth the experience.
Whatever, long and short of it is: I finally managed to finagle my airline plans and sleep schedule to be looking out the window when it happened. And… it turned out to be basically the same thing, even though I was almost halfway around the planet at that point. It looked… well, I got to see more of it, a much wider view with a lot more distance between me and the ground. The ocean flattening out and rising up to meet you is… it honestly kind of looked like I was being killed by bad CGI. Water acts weird under immense pressure.
With that experiment, I was left with Hypotheses 1 (world blowing up), 3b (world shooting at me specifically) and 0 (shrug emoticon).
With that worked out, I erased that whole airplane misadventure and wound back to my apartment. To figure out if it was a problem with me, I needed to research, uh… my condition.
Obviously WebMD didn’t have a section on time travel. I checked. But, uh… well, there was sort of an obvious place to start when it came to researching why I, personally, was all metaphysically fucked up.
You remember how this story started, right? I was in the woods and got hit by a green fireball from the sky, and then ended up in a magic coma I shouldn’t have survived? That part was weird. Like, clearly out of the ordinary, probably connected to the apocalypse or time travel somehow. That was the first thing to check out.
First move: check it out directly. I could time travel now, right? So, I figured, I could just time travel back to three months ago to when I got space-blasted, and see just what happened there.
There, though, I kind of… ran into an obstacle. Like, really hard. There’s sort of a physical sensation to impacting the end of the timeline when I die, and that exact same sensation- which it turns out is stronger the faster you’re rewinding time- was there when I hit a wall. The… beginning of my personal timeline. I was in a hospital room.
...You’re not reacting. Don’t you want to know how it went?
Officer J: It was when you woke up from the coma, right?
Wh- okay, yeah, but- I mean, how’d you…?
Officer J: That’s the only hospital room you mentioned.
I… damn it, Gloria, that’s- you were supposed to hear “beginning of my personal timeline” and be like, oh shit, did you accidentally rewind time all the way back to when you were born? And I’d laugh and be like, no, stupid! It was just when I woke up from the coma!
Officer J: Which I figured. You said you hit a wall before reaching that time in the woods, so you couldn’t have-
Gah, okay, that explains why retrying the delivery five times didn’t work. I’ll just go back and rephrase that without mentioning the-
Officer J: You’re going to go back in time so you can trick me, and then call me stupid?
Uh… I mean…
Officer J: Please continue the testimony.
...Yeah. Okay. So. Hospital room. Again, really boring hospital room. Apparently I can’t go back further than that- I stop being a person who can time travel if I go back before then. Lined up pretty well with the idea that the fireball thing was the start of me having death-activated time travel powers, I guess. Inconvenient, though, because it meant I only had… under two days to work with. Anything I did would have to fit inside that timeframe.
Anyway, they kind of fuss over me being awake, but this time I remember how long it takes the nurse to go get the doctor, so I take that window to grab my phone from the bag in the corner. That’s what I use to start looking stuff up.
So what was up with the fireball? I looked up “green space fire” and got a bunch of crap about responsible forestry and clearing space for controlled burns, so that wasn’t useful. “surviving coma without water” just sort of brought up stuff about how that’s impossible, as expected. It didn’t seem like anyone on the internet had exactly my set of problems.
I decided to broaden (or narrow?) my search a little bit, and started looking for news stories about meteor showers and meteorite stuff- specifically, on the date when I’d been hit out in the woods.
That was the jackpot. Turns out? There had, in fact, been a historically huge meteor shower the day I’d been knocked out. It hadn’t really been noticed by the general public because it’d happened in the middle of the day, and hadn’t been super visible, but… it’d been noticed by astronomers at various universities all over the world, and was actually the buzz of that corner of academia.
From what I could put together, there’d been some object in orbit around the planet- something pretty darn large, which they’d somehow missed, mistaking for a satellite or something. That object had suddenly… exploded, or something? Only a couple people actually had telescopes on the event, and not especially powerful ones, but it went kafoom and sorta fell out of orbit, breaking up into a ton of little pieces. Because it was orbiting so fast, it broke apart over a huge geographical area, scattering meteorites all over the world.
Luckily for the sort of people who are really into that thing, the bits had mostly gone down over land, meaning they could be retrieved. During that first month of my coma, there’d been a huge meteorite rush, where various academics (highly trained in the field of wanting to know about space rocks) ran all over the place trying to collect the debris from this weird space explosion.
Sidenote: those academics should be called meteorologists, but unfortunately that’s taken by weathermen who want to sound way more badass than they actually are. The poor saps who actually study meteors are called “meteoriticists” instead, which is just about as clunky but you don’t get to say you’re an ologist of any kind. If you weren’t aware, science sucks ass at naming shit.
(Well, except when they called humans homo sapiens, which will always be the funniest thing in the entire world. Great work, science.)
Anyway… this was exactly the paper trail I needed. I just needed to get in contact with these guys!
...Which turned out to be weirdly difficult, actually. There were a lot of them, but for some reason almost none of them had publicly listed contact information. At least, none of the ones who spoke Language. And… like, their colleagues did, mostly. These guys were listed on university websites, right alongside loads of other scientists who totally had contact information. It was meteoriticists specifically who had their contact information completely blanked out. Why would that be the case?
It really looked more suspicious the more I searched around. These were mostly unaffiliated institutions, and as far as I could tell there wasn’t any organized body of these guys who could organize some kind of… voluntary silence pact. It was weird as hell, and massively inconvenient for me specifically. Who else in the entire world was looking to contact a meteoriticist, any meteoriticist? I just needed one!
Thankfully, whoever had scrubbed the web of all meteoriticist-related contact information hadn’t counted on me having basic web literacy. Surely these people had at some point had contact info listed- in many cases, the fields even existed- Phone, Email, Mailing Address- just without anything following them. So, I just visited the faculty websites on the Wayback Machine- and bam- if I went back two months, the contact info reappeared!
So I called the first number I found. A guy at Western Area State University, whose name I’m not gonna dish because you’ll probably just drag him in for questioning when you really don’t need to.
Ring ring, ring ring. Rang for a little while, and then… the line just went completely dead. No answering machine or anything.
I was kind of suspicious of that, but I had other numbers I could call- and so I did. I tried three more places, and got the same result. That was scary. Someone had scrubbed the contact info, and then… disabled those points of contact directly, too? Who the hell was disappearing meteoriticists? The government? The illuminati? Aliens?
I had to get kind of creative. Looking these guys up on social media, finding alternate numbers, that kind of thing. Eventually, I actually got through to one! A local one, actually- right here in Town at State State University. I’m gonna call him… Steve. He wasn’t named Steve, but again, don’t want to tell the cops about people who sorta helped me with the crimes I totally didn’t do.
So Steve picks up, and he says “Hello?”
And I say “Hey, you’re Steve, right? From the astronomy department?”
Steve goes “Yeah, that’s me. Can I help-” and then the line goes dead.
I try calling back, but I get nothing, which is extra scary because it means that… whatever this was, it was something someone was actively doing- someone who’d been listening in and cut me off.
I didn’t have too much more time to contemplate that, though, because that was when the doctor and nurses got back to do that fussing over my vitals I mentioned earlier. It was a little later than when they’d come back the first time, which was weird. The only thing I’d done differently this time was wait for the nurse to leave before trying to get my phone. Maybe the nurse had told the doctor to hurry, before, because the patient was being all freaked out and uncooperative? Whereas this time, I’d just sort of gone with the flow until I had my window?
As they were attaching electrodes to me, though, I noticed that wasn’t the only thing that was different this time. Something else was different.
There was one extra nurse, who hadn’t been there before.
I noticed this extra nurse when he looked directly at me with really intense blue eyes, and told me to hold still. I probably shouldn’t have held still, but I was too confused about what I was seeing to move. In that few seconds, he injected me with something from a needle, which definitely hadn’t happened before.
Then I blacked out. Not ideal. Sometime later, I got kicked out into timeless mode.
I scrubbed back and forth along the timeline a bit (making literal scrubbing motions with my nonexistent arms, even), and got sort of a sense of how long it’d been. It had not been the full 33:20:16, that was for sure. It felt like I’d died… something like a couple hours after I’d been knocked out.
Okay, so- I went back to before he stuck me.
“Hold still,” he said, and I didn’t. I backed up.
“That guy’s not a real nurse!” I shouted, scrabbling out of reach.
Having failed to scrabble all the way out of reach, he managed to lean over a little further and stick me anyway. Hurt, that time, since he wasn’t properly applying the injection. The actual hospital staff panicked a bit, but I didn’t get to see how that resolved, since I was blacked out.
Take three, then. Wound back a little further, to before they even entered the room. Got out of bed. When the door opened, I pointed directly at the guy, and shouted “That guy’s not a real nurse!”
He looked as surprised as the rest of them to be accused, but for a shorter period of time. It didn’t take long for him to shove his way into the room, slam the door shut, and lock it. I could hear confusion and protest from just outside, but he ignored it, and came straight for me.
Thinking fast, I went out the window. Not thinking well, I went out the window and got caught on broken glass, which was excruciatingly painful before it finished tearing through the meat of my legs and I fell four stories to the pavement and died.
Okay, here we go again. This time, I open the window in advance. I go out the window, and fail to find a convenient flagpole to grab or bush to land in, and die. Window apparently not an option.
...Or is it? I get fancy, going out the window and going sideways, climbing along the edge of the building to the next window over. Or, I try to do that, but fail because there’s not really anything to hang on to besides the window itself, and there’s nowhere to go but back inside or down to my death.
Fake nurse decides which way to go for me, demonstrating the fact that he is apparently not above straight-up shoving me out the window and killing me.
New tactic: talking. I let him lock himself in, and then…
“Why are you trying to kill me?” I ask.
“Classified,” he says, and charges me.
“No, please explain, actually,” I say, before getting stabbed with a needle and blacking out.
Back up a bit. “I’m about to die, why does that matter?” I ask, before he attempts to stab me with a needle but I move out of the way of where I know he was about to lunge.
“Exactly,” he says, changing his stance and following up with a straight-up knife, subtlety abandoned. He stabs me in the eye.
No he doesn’t. I move my head out of the- oh, okay, he adjusted his aim mid-swing. So he does. Um.
Okay, he doesn’t, because this time I lean back, and oh god damn it he adjusted for that too. Um… okay, so with the arc he’s swinging that at, I can probably dodge by… ducking, and sort of falling backwards. That time it works, but he’s fast, and after dodging his second attack he immediately kicks me to the ground and stabs me mid-fall.
The ways I’ve died up until this point have been… pretty weaksauce, as deaths go. I’ve been instaflattened by exploding planets before I can even feel it. I’ve been injected with knockout poison. I’ve fallen four stories and cracked my head on the pavement. I’ve been stabbed through the eye, the blade hitting my brain before I could register the pain. All pretty instant and/or painless ways to go.
This time, there’s a knife in my heart. And the problem with that is that the heart is, while a vital organ, not part of the brain. Getting stabbed in the heart doesn’t kill you instantly. (Or, at least, it doesn’t trigger the time travel thing that happens when your brain gets fucked up.) It’s definitely crazy painful, worse than getting your leg torn open by broken glass, but you don’t die. When you get stabbed in the heart, it takes a while to die. Your respiratory system is broken, so you can’t breathe or speak or do anything besides gurgle blood and die, but…
...Y’know, I haven’t been decapitated by a guillotine before. It never came up. But… you remember the guillotine was invented as a way to instantly and humanely execute people? Off with their heads, quick and clean? I actually seriously doubt it was all that humane.
When you die, it’s because your brain function ceases. It ceases pretty quickly without bloodflow, without oxygen, but not immediately. If you’re cut off from the rest of the body, your support system is gone, which means you’re immediately locked out of doing things like talking or crying out that require functioning lungs- but you’re not dead. You’re just suffocating to death. It’s not a lot of time, but when all you can feel is the sensory hell of your whole nervous system sending emergency failure signals at once to a machine too starved of oxygen to process them, it sure feels like a long time.
Basically, getting stabbed to death sucks. A lot. I probably could’ve kept fighting, but I really didn’t want to go through that again. Eventually, I’d have figured out how to kung-fu this weird assassin to death through trial and error. Or, hell, maybe I’d have even succeeded in talking him down, convinced him not to kill me. I had infinite retries to win that fight. I could practice as long as I wanted. But… every round of practice had a good chance to end like that.
I decided not to keep doing that. That would suck super bad. Instead, I figured I’d just hop out of that situation a little earlier, before he could even get to me.
You know how people make escape ropes out of bedsheets in cartoons? That’s actually way harder than you’d think. Remember I said I’d never been in the scouts? Well, in the scouts, you learn how to tie knots, so that, uh, is not a thing I learned how to do. So, my bedsheet rope instantly came apart when I put my whole weight on it, and I went splat on the pavement. (Made sure to turn in midair so it’d be headfirst, and I could die on the spot.)
This happened two more times, because what the fuck, what’s the deal with knots? How do you even… there’s not even a way to- it’s just always going to unravel, right? I eventually got it probably right, but…
Oh, okay. If I take too long climbing down, another assassin outside the building notices me and shoots me in the head. Awesome.
So, question time: why the hell were there assassins? Could I stop there from being assassins? There definitely weren’t assassins the first time around. What was different about-
...Wait, duh. I’d stumbled upon a weird conspiracy to silence meteoriticists and then been noticed by someone when I tried to get around it. Clearly these guys were the meteor conspiracy. If I went back to right before I called Steve, and then didn’t, would they still show up?
Tried it. Didn’t work. He was still there. Still killed me, with the needle this time because that was easier than getting stabbed. Which… I guess made sense. The assassins probably weren’t already in the hospital when I woke up- they probably had to travel here at some point. Except… I thought they’d noticed when I called Steve, right? But if they actually noticed some time before that, when had it been? Would it have been… I guess, the first time I’d called one of the numbers and failed?
Okay, so I tried that. And… damn, it worked. No assassins, as long as I didn’t call any restricted numbers! And on top of that, I had more information: I’d called the first dead number about seven minutes before I got through to Steve, which meant that was how long it took assassins to get in position to murder me. That was how long it took for one of them to disguise himself as a nurse and prepare a syringe of poison for me. That was… not a very long time. These guys were either prepared to hit the hospital ahead of time, or they worked fast.
So… alright, making phone calls was out. Instead, I figured I could get to Steve in person. This time, I called him first- maybe they’d take longer to shut me down if I called him earlier. Or… if I didn’t mention his job. He didn’t seem to be dead or captured or anything- he was asking if he could help me. Implying that was possible, and that he didn’t know about any weird conspiracy to keep people from contacting him.
“Hey, Steve,” I started, acting casual. “You in right now?”
“Am I- sorry, who’s this?”
“Uh, just a student. I’m looking at taking your class next semester, so I wanted to drop by and ask some questions.”
“Oh- uh, sure! I’m actually not that busy lately, so- yeah, I’m in my-”
Whoops. There it went. Dead air, and probably assassins on their way. Um…
I went out the window and smashed my head open, and then went back and called Steve again.
“Hey, Steve,” I started again. “Are you at your office right now?”
“Huh? Yes, but- can I ask who’s calling?”
Officer J: Sorry- that voice you’re doing, that’s Steve?
Oh, uh- yeah, that’s Steve.
Officer J: So, you remember his exact words?
Oh, that’s- no, actually. I mean, I’m paraphrasing on that one. Once I get to, uh, this timeline, the one where the world didn’t explode, I can just sort of… rewind and listen to exactly what people said, but otherwise, yeah, I’m just giving you the gist. Skipping stuff that doesn’t matter, y’know?
Officer J: Wait- I thought you had to die to rewind.
Yeah, I do.
Officer J: But you said- you got my name by asking, and then-
That one took me a while to get right, actually. Do you have any idea how hard it is to snap your own neck? Like- don’t try this at home, obviously, because even if you can’t do it all the way, you’ll totally hurt yourself super bad in a way that could even maybe kill you later, but- if you try, you can’t just do it. Your body has like, built-in reflexes against it, and you can’t really get torque with your shoulders the way they are. It’s crazy difficult.
Officer J: Oh, god.
Haha, yeah. It’s the sort of thing you have to practice a lot to get good at, and for obvious reasons most people can’t practice a lot. Before I got good at it, I spent a lot of time doing stuff like jumping out windows or failing at backflips or whatever I needed to do to just smash my head really hard. I got my hand on a gun, once, I’ll get to that later, but that was way more convenient. Except, obviously I can’t have a gun down here at the station.
Officer J: So, wait, you asked for my name, then you just reached up and-
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, hanging up and looking up Steve’s office address on the Wayback Machine faculty page. Once I had that, I went out the window and then back to before I’d even started looking into any of this stuff. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been making them suspicious, but it was safest to play it the way I did the first time around. I knew that if I didn’t investigate at all, I was allowed to make it at least to my job on the night the world exploded. And that would give me enough time to interrogate the guy in person.
4 - Back 2 School
You know State State University?. Pretty nice place, actually. It doesn’t look nice, because their groundskeeping budget is basically nothing and broken stuff just stays broken, but they nail the important stuff. High density of student convenience stores and vending machines, plus high-speed internet everywhere. Kinda makes me wish I hadn’t dropped out.
Anyway, there’s no Department of Meteoritics or anything. There’s an astronomy department, which according to the website is basically three people, two of whom are mainly physics department. Steve was…
...actually, shit, I probably shouldn’t tell you which one Steve was. He was one of the three, and- crap, okay, uh, one of them’s a woman, so that really narrows it down to two… um. I guess it wouldn’t be hard for you to track them down with the information you already have, but, uh, don’t? Technically, none of them have ever done anything wrong and they’ve never even met me.
Whatever, codenames are fun. So I go looking for Steve, and I figure if I see his colleagues I’ll ask them too, even though meteorites aren’t really their department. What kind of surprises me is… they have this guy’s phone under surveillance, but I don’t run into any assassins on the way to meet him in person. They don’t want anyone contacting him or anyone else in his field, but it’s fine if you just walk in? It’s super easy- even if the building weren’t open, I notice empty classrooms with open windows.
(There’s actually a perfectly good reason they were doing it that way, but I’m gonna wait to tell you so I can build the suspense.)
Officer J: Thank you.
There’s that sarcasm! Cool. Anyway, I seriously don’t have any trouble just walking into the astronomy department and finding Steve’s office on the top floor of the building. The door is covered in, uh… y’know that webcomic with the stick figures and the science jokes? With the unpronounceable consonant mash name? He printed out a bunch of those, mostly the ones about space, and taped them to the door.
So I knock, and I’m like, “Hey, I’m here for office hours?”
“Sure, come right on in!” he says.
We both take a second to look at each other when I walk in the door. First I look at him, and… he’s like, one of those late thirty-something guys who’s noticed that they don’t look young anymore, so they try to go all in on the distinguished older gentleman thing, except they still look too young for it to really work, y’know? Super obviously dyed gray hair.
He looks at me, and his conclusion about me is “...uh, sorry, are you not one of my students?”
“Yeah, no,” I say. “I’m just… I’m looking to take your class next year, and I want to ask some questions first.” Reusing that lie I told earlier.
He gives me this look that makes it clear this has never happened to him before, so he’s kind of excited. “Take a seat!”
I do, and… it’s sort of hard to figure out what to ask. I figure I should start with just… exactly what I want to know, and make excuses for why I need to know on the fly.
“So… well, one thing I’m interested in is… you know that meteor shower incident a few months back?”
I couldn’t really read his expression at the time, but in retrospect it was probably some kind of disappointment? Fear, maybe? “...Oh, right. Um… I’m afraid there’s not a lot I can say about that.”
The thing about talking with Steve was that he was… insofar as he bought my story about being a potential student, he was really friendly and eager to share information. I learned a lot about his upcoming course in atmospheric thermodynamics, at least as much as I understood anything he was talking about. But what I didn’t learn about was anything related to the question I was asking about. He deflected every question about the meteor shower, though I did learn its name- they were calling it the Vulcan Event.
I must’ve crossed a line at some point, though, because… well, I asked him if he’d recovered any of the Vulcan meteorites, and he responded with a deep sigh.
“...Is this what they were talking about?” he asked.
“Uh,” I said, because that was as much as I could answer the question.
“They said not to talk about it. They didn’t say why, and they didn’t say what they’d do if I did.”
Ooooookay. Obviously the meteoricist-silencing conspiracy assassins were involved, here. I was suddenly walking on eggshells.
“...Okay, uh, who’s they?” I asked.
“The… god, I really don’t know if I should be telling you… anything. I don’t know what the whole… I don’t even know what I’d get in trouble for.”
I nodded. “So- you learned something important about space, and then the men in black told you to be quiet about it?”
He laughed nervously. “Um… no. That’s the thing, is that we didn’t learn anything important about space. There’s nothing to tell. They took it away before we even figured out what it was.”
I snapped my fingers. “So you did recover something!”
He groaned. “What are you- you’re not a student. What do you want? I’m not supposed to be involved!”
“Listen, Steve,” I said- I mean, I didn’t call him Steve, because that’s not his name, but… whatever. “I, uh… have reason to believe that… um, crap, how do I…?”
I had to make a decision. Was it better to try and keep the whole time travel world blowing up thing a secret, or just… not? Would he believe me? Ugh, if he decided I was crazy, what would that mean?
...Then I realized, no, I didn’t have to make a decision. Duh. I could time travel. If I couldn’t convince him the world was on the line, I could just try again.
“...Um, okay, how receptive would you be to, uh, me telling you some weird hard-to-believe sci-fi shit that sort of explains some things?”
He gave a nervous chuckle. “You’d, uh… you’d be surprised.”
“Okay, so… you know time travel?”
He laughed really hard, for like a good ten seconds, so that wasn’t a great start.
“I can do it,” I said, when he was done laughing, which made him laugh for another fifteen seconds.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m- ahahaha- I’m prepared for this exact scenario. Go ahead and tell me my code, okay?”
I had no idea what he meant, and told him as much.
“My code. The code I have for if a time traveler needs to prove to me that they can actually time travel. Do you know it?”
I… that’s almost exactly what he said, it really stuck in my head. Because- what kind of total headcase just… has that? Just has a secret code ready in case they meet a time traveler? What kind of giant nerd…
Okay, yeah, giant nerd. Obviously. Of course. I told him I didn’t know the code.
“It’s ‘my eels eat hovercrafts’, okay? So go back in time and tell me the code before I told it to you, and I’ll know you’re the real deal. Does that work for you?”
I’ll tell you right now: this is the single most convenient thing that has ever happened to me. If everyone had one of these, it would make my life so much easier. Like- I can’t just tell you to come up with one, though, is the problem, because you have to know it before I tell you. I can like, sort of read your mind by telling you to think of a number and then have you tell me the number and then I snap my neck and go back in time to after you think of the number but before you tell me, and then tell you the number. But, uh, that only works on the spot, and it’s really irritating how often people will tell you that you just got lucky or tricked them somehow, even if you asked them to come up with a number between one and a million. I have to kill myself so many times to puzzle out a way for the average joe to believe me.
“Wow, uh… yeah, that works for me! Let me just, um, go get my… time machine,” I said, and excused myself from the room.
I went a couple doors down to an open classroom and went out the window, to where… let’s say my invisible time machine was parked. Sure.
“My eels eat hovercrafts, Steve,” I said, opening the door without knocking. There was a subtle difference between the alarm on his face when a stranger barged into his office, and the alarm on his face when he heard his time code. “The planet is going to be obliterated in less than two days, and I need your help.”
He sat there gaping and looking for words for at least as long as he laughed before, which was extremely satisfying. The look on his face was incredible.
“Specifically, I need you to tell me about the Vulcan Event, and what you recovered from one of the impact sites.”
...Okay, the stunned silence was getting less satisfying.
“...Even more specifically, I need you to tell me in words, and not in what I can only assume is an attempt at communicating telepathically,” I clarified.
“Buh,” Steve offered.
“Okay, buh. That’s a good start. Let’s talk about buh.”
“I… oh, god. Um. They… they said not to tell… anyone… about…”
“And you decided you were going to tell me anyway,” I lied. Well, not lied. Sort of skipped to the point. Obviously that’s why he gave me the code, to prove I could be trusted.
“...unless you, uh. Tortured it out of me. Which would be…”
Holy shit, torture? This guy was skipping straight to torture? What the hell was his thought process there?
“I… didn’t? Look, these ‘they’ guys who told you to keep quiet, what was their deal?”
“I- I don’t know. Oh my god, you’re a time traveler.”
“Yes,” I said. “You have that code specifically so that I can skip over the step where I convince you I’m a time traveler. We’re past that.”
“Time travel is real,” he whispered, mainly to himself. He seemed distracted.
“You have a code for time travelers but you’re crazy shocked that time travel is real?”
“It… I didn’t think I’d get to use it, it’s- it was a what-if, so…”
“Oh my god. Dude. The Vulcan Event. Can we focus?”
I kind of felt bad for taking advantage of his confusion to intimidate him, but… intimidating him was fast? And I’m impatient? Or, I was impatient, back when the clock was ticking down to the end of the world. Steve, if you end up reading this, sorry for, uh, badgering you like that.
Anyway, he agreed to take me to see what they’d recovered from the impact site. It was in one of the basement workshop rooms the building had- what used to be a big empty space, before various science people filled it with whatever big pieces of equipment needed a place to be set up. He didn’t lead me to any equipment, though- just to a table in the corner, where there was…
It was some kind of… it kind of looked like a big sheet of peanut brittle. A big, orangeish sheet of metal, about a meter wide, warped and blackened and covered in bubbles. It was sort of curled up at the edges.
“This… doesn’t look like a meteorite,” I pointed out.
“Right,” Steve said. “This is what the meteorite looked like after we unwrapped it.”
Unwrapped. Yeah. According to Steve, what they found- out in Desert, where he and the other two people in Astronomy went out to claim it- was this thing, but in sort of a capsule shape. Not round or egg-shaped, like you’d expect from something that’d just burned up in the atmosphere. And it wasn’t really that charred- the material it was made of was a weird tungsten alloy, and it’d more melted and bubbled than burned, apparently. This was something that seemed designed to survive re-entry.
(The more interesting part of that idea was the “designed” part. Most things from space are just rocks, not designed for anything. The implications are obvious.)
Officer J: Obvious?
Aliens. The implications are aliens.
Officer J: Oh.
So, they’d taken the thing back here and used a machine- he pointed at a giant lathe type thing with a nasty-looking twisty hook dealie on the other side of the room- to take a look inside. Then they’d broken their lathe, because it hit something inside that the lathe couldn’t cut. Which… is why the lathe now had a nasty-looking twisty hook dealie, instead of an intact cutting surface.
Inside the meteorite wrapper had been…
Well, that was when he got spooked. Even if I was really a time traveler, he didn’t want to tell me what was inside, because he was worried they’d be mad at him.
So… well, first, I fished for more information. Who would be mad at him?
He told me that… a couple weeks after they’d found… whatever was inside the meteorite, which he didn’t want to tell me about? They’d received a request from Prestigious University to transfer certain research materials. The researchers at Prestigious apparently wanted that meteorite, and were just sort of… demanding it. Politely, but not offering anything in return. “Please give us the thing.”
Obviously Steve and co were like, uh, no way, this is ours. And that’s when the men in black showed up. They ignored Steve and went straight to the dean, and the dean ordered them to comply with Prestigious’s request. No explanation, just… firm orders, or else they were fired. There was nothing they could do.
Then they’d followed up a week later, contacting the Astrophysics department at Prestigious. They had no idea what they were talking about- they’d never submitted any request. Or- the person on the phone hadn’t. That was what they claimed for about four minutes of confused conversation, before the guy on the other end let out a yelp of terror, went quiet, and then slowly recited a statement as if read from something else. The statement contradicted everything the Prestigious guy had just said, claiming that yeah, they’d totally requested the sample, thank you very much for your contributions to science.
Steve wasn’t a moron, and was aware the guy on the other end had been reading it under some kind of duress. So… he took the weekend to drive down to Prestigious and talk to him in person. And when he arrived on campus, before he could set foot in the Prestigious guy’s building, the men in black showed up.
The men in black told him that the Prestigious researchers weren’t taking visitors, and that he should go home, right now, and not ask any more questions or talk to anyone about what had happened.
Steve complied, because the men had guns and he didn’t want to die. That reason was the same reason he didn’t want to disclose what was inside the meteorite.
“Well, uh, I have an idea,” I said.
My idea turned out to be bad, so after I did my idea (dying and buying a fancy suit and some sunglasses and demanding he tell me what he knew, which didn’t work because apparently you have to get suits fitted and also shave first or else you look less like a secret government assassin and more like a homeless conman and he didn’t believe me), I basically redid all that stuff I just told you- confirming I was a time traveler, having him take me down to the workshop, telling me the stuff about Prestigious and how it was all super fishy.
“Well, uh, I have another idea,” I said. “Just… tell me the stuff, and then I’ll go back in time and know the stuff without you ever having technically told me.”
He frowned. “Hang on- how does that work? If you go back in time, what happens to me?”
I… hadn’t actually thought about that yet.
“Let’s say you go get in your time machine, and go back in time so that you never asked me anything… what happens to the me who didn’t get in the time machine? The one who did tell you? Me, right now?”
“I… um. I don’t… know? I guess you… never existed?”
“That sounds an awful lot like dying, uh…”
“Dave.”
“Dave. You’re saying if you go back in time, I die?”
I shrugged. “I dunno, man! I’m literally not there anymore to find out what happens to you, so…”
He looked skeptical. “You don’t know. You built a time machine and you don’t know how time travel works.
“I never said I built a time machine, dude! I didn’t! I, uh… it’s not even a machine, I just do it! How should I know how it works?!”
There was a change in Steve’s expression that sort of indicated… that he had stopped thinking about me as the important and knowledgeable time traveler who could be trusted, and started thinking about me as… probably something closer to what I actually was.
“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to backpedal. “I don’t- let’s say you don’t cease to exist. Maybe you just, uh, you’re in this timeline, and I’m not there anymore, and you just… whatever. And you’re fine. That’s possible, right?”
He shook his head. “Possible, maybe, but that doesn’t solve the problem of me getting… killed? Me maybe getting killed by those men in suits, if I tell you anything.”
I sighed. “Steve, there’s a piece of information I gave you that it doesn’t really seem like you were paying attention to.”
He didn’t look like he knew what I was talking about, so I repeated myself. “The planet is going to be obliterated in less than two days. If I don’t do something to stop it, you’re gonna die anyway. Because you get blown up, by the planet being obliterated.”
He adjusted his glasses. Clearly, this was his first time actually grappling with that assertion.
“So, like… no matter what happens, unless I save the world, you’re dead. And… I dunno, do you think you can help me save the world in… thirty-one hours?” I asked, checking my watch. “Without me having to use time travel and leave you alone in a timeline where the planet explodes?”
Steve, uh… he kind of… panicked a little about that. I don’t want to get into it- the gist of it was sort of an existential horror thing, at how he was going to die. Asked a lot of questions about how I knew for sure, and why it was happening, and I told him about as much as I could to calm him down. I’m not gonna go into further details, because it was kind of undignified and he said a bunch of really personal stuff.
Officer J: Are you omitting anything important?
I don’t think that’s any of your business, actually? If you’re, for some reason, super into the life story of Steve, and all his hopes and dreams and fears, then tough shit. Guy deserves a little privacy. You wanna get to know Steve, find his online dating profile and ask him out. I might be scum, like your boss says, but I’m not gonna put an innocent man on blast for the cops to get into his head.
Officer J: The captain is-
I don’t want to hear it, Officer Jackson. Make excuses for your boss some other time. I’m here giving you the record on what I did, not the record on a bunch of other people’s personal lives. It’s not a story with a damn ensemble cast.
...Anyway. Where was I?
Right, so… Steve asked me to see this timeline through to the end in case we could do it together, and pretty much spilled the beans about the meteorite. The thing that was inside… was another, smaller meteorite, it looked like. Made of a completely different material, one they actually hadn’t been able to identify. Remember they tried to cut it with the lathe, and the lathe got all fucked up? That was the best cutting tool they had, and it couldn’t even chip whatever it was made of.
It was… a cylinder, kind of like a tall thermos, made of some kind of weird rock. Like, obviously not regular rock, because it went clang and wouldn’t chip and messed with various imaging tools, but it had the texture of rock, a mottled black. Black except for some wiggly stripes of glowing yellow, which sometimes pulsed or briefly changed colors when they tried magnetic imaging or x-rays. There was a bit near one end where something had carved a circular groove into it, some lathe made of a material stronger than this stuff.
That was… pretty much all they knew about the object. They put pictures online, got in touch with some other schools who’d recovered similar stuff, and then… all that correspondence disappeared off the internet. Plus then the suit goons showed up.
So… there was sort of an obvious first place to check in on this situation. Who’d ordered the sample sent away? The dean. Where was the dean? In his office.
Well, then. There we were.
5 - Let’s Call It A Car Chase
So, I’ve only ever been to the one college. I don’t know what kind of stereotypes there are about deans. All I know is what I heard about this dean, which is that he didn’t exist.
I mean, obviously he exists, no one’s doubting that Vincent Brickton (no reason to withhold the name, there’s only one dean there) is a person who lives and breathes and occupies the office of Dean, but, uh. No one really ever saw him, and you only ever heard about him doing anything when what he was doing was refusing to do anything. Brickton is of the opinion that State State University is perfect as-is, and so refuses to greenlight new departments, buildings, resource acquisitions… the SSU budget is always exactly the same every single year.
Or, well, that’s what I heard from like, a couple student union people with clipboards once. What, you think I paid attention to that crap? I couldn’t pay attention my way out of a paper bag.
Anyway, Steve took me up there to the dean’s office, which was… an old building. Like, probably existed before the college old. It was entirely possible that J. Isaiah Woodcock was a primeval giant who shaped the J. Isaiah Woodcock Administrative Building out of solid stone in the era before humanity walked the surface of the planet. SSU had presumably just slapped windows and a wheelchair ramp on it and called it a day.
Officer J: Is this relevant to-
Look, I know why you want to know why the Prime Minister is dead, but… I’m just trying to get across the degree of stodginess we were dealing with, okay? Centuries of tradition were working against me. I’m pre-emptively making excuses for how many tries this took.
So- okay, first, there was a receptionist. He was of the opinion that we needed an appointment, and that his next opening would be in three weeks (which there was no way was true, there weren’t enough people who’d even met the guy to fill three days of his schedule), and… that was just a brick wall of bureaucracy. We weren’t getting an appointment before the world ended.
That was when I pulled a classic maneuver I like to call “absolutely not giving a fuck”. I agreed to an appointment in three weeks, thanked the receptionist, and then walked away… in the direction of the dean’s office. The receptionist seemed so goddamn pleased with himself for successfully ensnaring us in the web of bureaucracy that he completely didn’t notice that we were bypassing him.
The dean was not so easy to deal with.
Vincent Brickton- christ. I honest to god don’t remember a single fucking thing he said to me, you know? That guy had a voice like a white noise generator. I remember the general proceedings of that- let’s call it a conversation- but if you played back a recording of his exact words, I probably wouldn’t recognize them. That’s how hard it was to even register that the man was speaking. I’ll do you a favor and just… punch my man Vince up a little, okay?
So I’m like, “Vince, how’s it hangin’?”
And he’s all “Bro, I totally didn’t expect to see you all up in my hizzity-hizzouse today! ‘Fraid now ain’t the time, my guy!”
And I’m like “Buddy. I know, I know. You got junk to not do, s’fine. I just need the 411 on some spooky space shit, dig? Make it quick.”
So Vince is all “Man, it would be extra wicked gnarly if I told you jack, so-”
And I interrupted like, “No no no, like, why’d you send the space shit away?”
(And Steve was like, “oh, David, you simply must be more diplomatic” and I wasn’t having it ‘cause the world was about to blow up and we didn’t have time.)
Vince goes all “Reasons? I don’t gotta have reasons for shit, I’m just total bros with Prestigious and if I wanna send ‘em space rocks I totes can!”
And then Vince calls in the reception guy to see us out, and I’m like, hell no, and I rough him up a little bit, like not a lot because I’ve never really roughed anyone up before, I just sorta literally twist his arm, and then he calls the police, and Steve’s losing his mind, so… at that point I’ve totally fucked it up. Which was fine, I could try again, but...
Problem was, I promised to see this timeline through with Steve. He didn’t want to be consigned to oblivion, or whatever. And, uh…
Look, I’m… impatient. And I kind of felt for Steve, but… I mean, dying in a parallel timeline so another you can survive in a different one, it’s like… basically equivalent to him getting a few hours of amnesia, yeah? I didn’t think it really mattered.
So… I broke my promise, and jumped out a window. Steve was wailing in horror, and uh… I dunno. Should I have regretted that?
Officer J: ...That’s not something I can answer.
Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Point is, if I should, I didn’t. And I don’t. I don’t think it would’ve helped to spend hours arguing with Vince and the police, and… I dunno. Keeping promises isn’t me.
...Don’t look at me like that. I’m scum, okay? The captain’s right. I’m not some kind of… “good person”. Just because I saved the world doesn’t make me some kind of… paragon of… whatever hero shit, okay?
If you want to know why I saved the world… well, just think about it. If I didn’t save the world… well, I live there. That’s it. That’s the only reason. I didn’t want to explode. Okay?
...Okay.
So. I go back. Steve’s none the wiser. Time for take two of convincing Vince to talk. Oh- oh, by, by tricking him somehow. By conning him. Con Vince. Get it?
Officer J: I’d prefer not to.
Cool, that’s cool. So, this was still- I hadn’t rewound past buying the suit, so I tried putting that back on to see if it’d work better than it’d worked on Steve. (Steve was like, why do you have a suit in your backpack, and I gave him some excuse about being prepared for sneaking into parties, and I think he bought it.)
It didn’t work better the first time. Vince was like, whaaaaat, and I was like, that’s a nice window you’ve got there, I really love windows, I’m so glad your office is on the third floor of this building.
After that, I stopped Steve before we went in, and I stopped by one of those campus convenience stores and bought a cheap razor to shave with. The stubble-bordering-on-scraggle going on there was… I mean, it meant the T was working, but it also made me look like the aforementioned homeless conman, so I had to do something about that. The suit wasn’t fitted, but maybe if I cleaned up real nice then the dean would buy it, right?
Anyway, I, uh. Wasn’t… good at it. I kind of messed up and cut my neck a bunch, and I was all bleeding, which wasn’t a good look. Thankfully, though, I could try again pretty easily.
...Or, with some difficulty, because I was on the ground floor and in a bathroom with no window, whoops. Remember I said I spent a lot of time doing things like failing at backflips? This was time number one I tried failing at a backflip. It, uh… didn’t go great. I sort of… failed at failing it properly? And just got lightly concussed and really fucked up my shoulder? Steve asked me if I was okay in there, and… I didn’t actually manage to get out a “I’m fine”, and it just sort of came out as a groan. Because… ow. Head wounds that don’t kill you are… I mean, I got pretty acquainted with them, but that was when I learned how not fun they were.
I managed to get to my feet, and sort of… throw myself headlong into the wall, which had some nice hard tiles on it. It was really hard to do with my head already spinning, and it wasn’t properly fatal- there were like twenty minutes of blackness to scrub back through before I actually died- but it worked.
And then I fucked up at shaving again, and had to do that again. Managed to land the backflip that time- but not the third time, that one I had to charge into the wall for again. The fourth time was good, the fifth time I actually landed the backflip to see if I could, which was fun, and the sixth time I actually managed to shave without cutting my dang neck open.
So, Steve- who wasn’t at all alarmed, and was in fact somewhat impressed at what a smooth job I’d done- helped me sort of adjust the suit a little to look less dumb, and I gave Vince another try.
This time, he totally bought that I was one of the goons, at first- but then I kinda failed at bluffing my way through it, contradicting some stuff they’d said about when they’d be back and what he was supposed to do. Had to go out the window again.
Third try didn’t go much better. The problem was, the idea was to get information out of him that the person I was posing as should’ve already known. It sort of… gave it away over and over, and giving it away meant mainly… him assuming more or less the truth. The truth being that I was one of the goons’ enemies, and that I was trying to trick him. Annoyingly sharp, for someone that old.
I think it was on try… eleven, I want to say? That was when I finally got what I wanted- I was doing, uh, I think it was threats at that point. He mentioned his granddaughter’s name at some point, and then on the next go I was like, “we have Kayla”, and what he said was something like “so the federal government is resorting to kidnapping its own citizens, now?”
No wait, I’m punching it up, so what he said was “Dude, it’s hella bogus that the feds be bogarting they own peeps, yeah?”
That… okay, it was useful information. The highly-trained and extremely resourceful group of assassins were, in fact, actually on the government’s payroll, or they were at least claiming to be. A couple more sessions of guessing later, I managed to get him to confirm my made-up recap of events with a minimum of “Say whaaaa? Naw, dog, that ain’t what you said” interruptions.
The thing was… the dean wasn’t really in on it. They’d come to him, demanded that he do his civic duty and carry out an order for the sake of national security, and he was just… basically okay with that. He’d tried to bargain and ask if it was really necessary, and that’s when they’d gotten forceful and sort of threatened him, but he’d talked himself into thinking he’d more or less done it of his own volition.
Also, he had no idea where they were really taking it. He figured it really was going to Prestigious University, and telling him that it hadn’t happened… he actually wasn’t surprised. Maybe he was just pretending not to be surprised, because I framed it as like, “yeah, we didn’t really do that, we sent it somewhere secret”, and he didn’t want to act upset, but he basically said that he figured as much, and he didn’t need to know.
So Vince was totally useless. What else could we do?
See, the problem was… to track this thing down, and figure out what sort of conspiracy may or may not have been behind my ability to time travel, which may or may not have been related to the world exploding repeatedly, I needed to know where the shadow government had taken the weird cylinder. And… I couldn’t just follow him, because it’d happened almost three months ago, and that was outside of my range.
Well… had all these guys gone to ground, or were some of them still out there? Was the trail totally cold, or could I look for them? Who would know where they were?
The most obvious place to check was with other meteoriticists across Country. Was SSU the only place targeted like this? Probably not, what with the trouble I’d had earlier contacting anyone in the field. And… oh, right. That trouble was still trouble.
So- new idea, I told Steve after I excused myself from the dean’s office. We get in touch with anyone else who might have been in contact with the evil space rock police. But- and I take a minute to fill him in on the whole contact info situation- it’s tricky. I figure, maybe we call from different phones, see how that works?
Steve has a better idea, though. Have I mentioned Steve is pretty smart? He’s like a PhD science guy, so he’s full of all kinds of good thinking. He’s like… what if we don’t call them? What if we call someone else who works right next to them, and ask them to put their coworker on the line? The government probably isn’t listening in on every single phone in their buildings.
So, that’s the tack we take. Steve looks up the office numbers of the faculty at various universities he’d been in touch with before the silence, and we’re able to get a list of people who’re unconnected to the targets but who’re physically close enough to make a connection. Then, we start calling those people up.
It’s… pretty slow going. A lot of them would respond, like, “oh, they’re not in right now”, or “no, Room 315 is technically in the other building, we share a numbering system”, or whatever. The question “why are you calling me and not them” comes up a lot, but thankfully the feds who erased the contact info gave us a perfect excuse. “No, yeah, there’s nothing on the website, so we figured…” It’s still a pain, but we do manage to get a few of them on the line.
What we get from them… is that they had the same situation. They were ordered to send their finds to Prestigious by their respective deans, or department heads, or whatever authority figure was in charge. Guys in black suits showed up to take them.
And what we get from one guy- I’m gonna call him Dave Hater because he would talk to Steve but was a big asshole to me, the lowly non-scientist- is that he still has one. Apparently his team recovered two samples from the same site, and kept one in reserve that they’re still researching in secret. Dave Hater said it was fine if Steve wanted to drive over and check it out (he emphasized the “you” in “you could drop by”, ugh), but, uh. We had a problem there, which was that he lived on the other side of Country. It would… take some time.
Time, though, I had. Steve- at this point not doubting that the world was going to blow up- was willing to drop everything and get on a plane, which again I purchased tickets for in a totally legal way, insofar as our feeble human linear-time code of laws is concerned.
...And then the plane got delayed. For twelve hours. And there were no other flights out going to where Dave Hater’s office was.
At the airport, I told Steve that I had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to wait twelve hours just to assuage someone’s worries about dying in a parallel timeline, so… y’know. Broke my promise again, backstabbed him, wrote him out of the story. Because I suck.
Back at the hospital, I sat through an hour of tests, then got in my car and called Dave Hater’s number. (Being in a car, I could just stay on the road and not have to worry about assassins converging on my hospital bed.) And… here’s the thing: it didn’t go through. Steve’s was the only number I tried that did go through for a minute, before being cut by whoever was listening in.
Then I called Steve’s number.
“Hey,” I said. “Dave Hater has another sample. He’s hiding it in the old engineering building, where they didn’t look. We’re going to need to-”
Then it cut off, before I could even hear Steve answer. Perfect.
I tried to make another phone call, there, looking up the number of Dave Hater’s coworker again. (Sam? Sarah? Sa-something.) I, uh… didn’t keep my eyes on the road, though, haha. Accidentally rear-ended a guy, had to throw myself in front of an oncoming semi to get back on track. When I finally got the call through (this time looking where I was going), I got her on the line, and warned her that there’d be suspicious guys in suits looking for Dave Hater, and could she keep an eye out and tell me if he was okay?
She was… actually pretty busy and couldn’t, so I tried again with some other people in the building. Most people who actually had contact information listed in the faculty website were, uh, faculty, who were busy, and couldn’t do that. I eventually ended up asking for like, student teachers and assistants and stuff, and eventually got this nasally-sounding guy who believed me when I promised to pay him for it.
Nasally- I’ll just call him Graham, sounded like a friend of mine from high school- Graham pretty much confirmed it. There were guys coming for Dave Hater, but then… well, actually, he told me most of them weren’t going for his office, they were continuing down the road. And then I realized, oh, right, they weren’t going for him, they were going for his hidden sample at “the old engineering building”, wherever that was. I asked Graham if he knew where that was, he was like, yep, and he agreed to follow them and see where they went.
Graham tracked them to… yeah, the old engineering building, he said. I can’t really give you a lot of details here, because I heard it all second-hand, but they came out of the building lugging a “big lump of rock”, and I told him I’d double his cut if he followed them. I had to crash and rewind and tell him to get his car ready in advance, though, because he hadn’t been ready with it the first time around.
Meanwhile, I, uh… had some trouble on my end. These guys apparently had goons all over the country, because there were some on my tail already. Identical big black shiny SUVs, like every MIB goon in every movie had. Apparently they could track my phone?
...Okay, anyone could track my phone, every other app these days asked for access to location data and odds were at least one of them had been compromised by the government. Crap.
So, Graham was following their car- which was also one of those SUVs- while I was myself being followed by their cars. Sometimes he’d lose them, and I’d crash and give him direction on how to stay ahead this time. Hey, here’s another one for my rap sheet: backseat driving! Totally blind backseat driving from the seat of a different car entirely!
So I was like- fwsssssh! Screeee! Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, vrrrrrRRRROOM! Like that! Around the corner like-
Officer J: What are you doing?
I’m reenacting the totally sick car chase? Like- after that I was all, whoosh, and then I slowed down, and took this really sharp corner, and-
Officer J: I, uh… this visualization isn’t really helping.
I, uh… well, see, it’s like, I wasn’t that good at driving or anything, I just kept trying again every time I messed up a sick stunt, y’know? The nice thing about car crashes is that if you don’t wear a seatbelt, you can die almost instantly, so I just tried all the tricks over and over, so-
Officer J: No, I mean, you can’t really narrate a car chase. It doesn’t…
Let me have this, Gloria!
Officer J: …
So- alright, this whole time I’m doing these sick stunts, and I’m coaching Graham through following those guys, and eventually… uh, Graham’s car starts to run out of gas.
I ask Graham does he trust me? And he’s like… been listening to me give him prophetic driving instructions for the past five minutes, and he’s basically in awe, and I tell him okay, if he trusts me, then look for the fastest-looking car on the road and drive them off it.
He doesn’t trust me that much, so I have to try again by first identifying that car and then telling him that that car specifically is super important. I have him do exactly that, he muscles it off the road and causes a big accident. In fact… he dies the first time, so I have to go back and remind him to stay safe. After that, I tell him to get me the guy’s insurance information and phone number. And also I look up the exact time of day to the second.
So then… I go back a bunch. Graham’s out of the picture completely, I don’t even call him. I know exactly where the SUV is going to be and when, and I have the phone number of someone who happens to be on the road behind them in a fast car.
Fast car guy isn’t as easy to win over as Graham is, because he’s rich and doesn’t jump at the chance to get loads of money from a stranger who’s probably lying, but after like five tries, I managed to pretend like I’m the guy in the SUV ahead of him, and I’m a talent scout for a super cool underground street racing syndicate he’s probably never heard of. This fast car guy is… exactly the kind of guy this tack works on, is what I learned from the first four tries.
So Fast Car is chasing the SUV, I’m still leading the other SUVs on a crazy car chase- and they even start opening fire, which is super exciting and great because getting shot in the head is like the easiest way to go. There’s one part where I get… almost completely stuck, though. One of the assassins is a crack shot, and no amount of rewinding and swerving is enough to throw her off. She’s just got perfect aim, so I have to rewind a bit further and make sure there’s another car between me and her at all times.
Anyway, Fast Car is, uh… this really full-of-himself type, and he’s sort of got a timer built into him. At the end of that timer, he decides I’m bullshitting him and it isn’t worth it to keep playing along. And that happens to be when the SUV pulls off the highway and into a pretty dense suburban area.
This is where it gets tedious. I’m talking, like, this part takes hours. I get my half of the car chase down pat, but I basically need to identify where this guy got off, and then just… look up every house in the area in the phone book, call the people, and ask them if they see a black SUV driving down their street. After what’s probably the hundredth iteration of this two-minute questioning loop, I finally get this nice old lady who sees it go by.
Nice old lady isn’t really someone I can convince to pick up a car chase, though, so instead I have her flag down a pizza delivery guy who’s delivering a pizza to the house across the street. She gets the guy’s number, and… then I rewind a bit and call up the pizza delivery guy before the SUV comes down the street. I make sure to get the name of his boss and some details about his workplace from the pizza guy, and then go back again and set up the story.
Right now, corporate espionage is in progress. Someone’s stolen the secret sauce recipe! We’ve managed to track them, but we’re about to lose them, so we need a hero to carry the torch and not let that recipe thief get away! Hurry, drop those pizzas and drive! There’s a big raise in it for you!
It takes like seven tries to get the delivery of the concept believable, but eventually I get the kid in hero mode. SUV drives by, the pizza guy is in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, I’m all like rrrrrrrrrreow, swoosh-
Officer J: Yeah.
-but they’re closing in. There’s only so much longer I can stay ahead.
Pizza guy tells me he’s lost them, but it’s weird- they took a right into this neighborhood, and even though he was right behind them, there was a bang, and they were gone when he turned the corner. I tried coaching him through a few different approaches, but every time, as soon as the street came into view, the SUV was gone.
Okay, so I went back a bunch. To before I called pizza guy. Called him up again, slightly adjusted the story. This time, we knew where the espionage guy was heading- the street there- but we didn’t know which house he was hiding out in. Instead of having him chase, I just had him head straight there and park in one of the driveways, and wait to see what happened.
And… that was it. As I dodged a ram by swerving behind a Dodge Ram, pizza guy told me that before the SUV showed up, the whole road just… lifted up, forming a ramp. And then… he was able to see it come around the corner, and drive right under that ramp, heading down into a secret street below the street. Then, the ramp section of street fell down with a bang and looked to be ordinary street again. No SUV in sight.
...Then, he said, it opened again, and the SUV backed out, and it closed again, and the SUV was there, and people in suits were getting out of the SUV, and were those guns? And then there were a lot of bang bang bang noises.
Soooo. They’d seen him. I had an idea, and rewound and had him check something for me. Sure enough, on having him knock on the doors of that neighborhood… no one answered. At any house. They were all unoccupied. Decoys, probably, bought out so no one would live on this road and have the opportunity to see a street lifting up and dropping down with a bang. So… they’d probably been like, “why is someone delivering pizza to a decoy house that has no listed address? Better kill them in case they’re a spy.”
Anyway, that was, uh, all I really had to go on. Secret streets in abandoned neighborhoods. This place was too far away for me to really check out on my own without getting on a plane to exactly the place I couldn’t get on a plane to, so… well.
I had options of my own. I had SUVs to follow over here, right? If I could get them to turn around and go back, I could follow behind them to whatever section of secret tunnel road they’d come out of.
Of course, getting them to turn around and go home was easier said than-
That’s when I had an idea.
I rewound to the beginning of my own car chase, to where I first saw the SUVs. And then… a little further. And this time, I didn’t take a right and drive the way I’d gone- I turned in the direction they’d come from, and was able to see them a little bit in advance. A little closer to where they’d come from in the first place.
You see where I’m going with this?
About a minute after I figured out where I was going with this, I smacked myself, because- duh, I could’ve done this from the start, instead of bothering with Steve and Vince and Dave Hater and all the rest. All I had to do was alert the assassins to my presence, then be there to meet them on their way, a little earlier each time. “Where did the assassins come from?” I’d been asking myself! “Oh well, I guess there’s no way to find out unless I get a bunch of random scientists involved for no reason!”
...I guess it wasn’t a total waste of time, though. I might not have ever realized I could pull that reverse-tracking bullshit if I hadn’t first gotten on the idea of trying to follow behind their cars in linear time. Because my brain is full of moron juice.
Anyway, whatever. Wasted time didn’t exist for me, so I just sort of made things easier on myself and went all the way back before I started making calls. I drove over to where I’d first seen them, except this time they weren’t on the way. They had no reason to suspect me of anything, this time.
Then I called Steve to sic the goons on Dave Hater. Now, that might not have been totally necessary? They might’ve traced my initial call to Dave Hater and decided that was enough reason to come after me- but probably not. After all, they let me talk to Steve on the phone as long as I didn’t say anything suspicious about meteorites, so they probably needed some reason to believe I was involved in their conspiracy before mobilizing the assassins. As for whatever horrible fate was in store for Dave Hater, well… a) he’s a dick and probably deserved it, and b) it either never happened, or it did happen in a parallel timeline but then the planet exploded so it stopped being a problem for him real quick.
Officer J: You didn’t experiment?
I didn’t screw around making phone calls and then waiting for several minutes repeatedly on the off chance I could find a way to summon assassins that didn’t put Dave Hater in danger? Yeah, that’s right.
Anyway, they showed up right on cue- coming down the street straight for my car. As soon as I saw them, I rewound a bit and drove in the direction they’d come from, this time meeting them a little earlier.
This plan was… kind of tedious, because I had to drive a little longer each leg to meet them. Eventually, to shortcut it a little, I undid the phone calls and then drove up to one of their waypoints, then tried again. It took… probably a couple hours, it felt like, to actually get all the way to the point where I could see where they came from. I went past, like… okay, so the chase started on one of those… what do you call those roads that are like, really long and have a ton of stores all along them, but they’re not downtown? Is there a word for those?
Officer J: Commercial districts?
Maybe? I dunno. Point is, there were a ton of lights, and it was kind of dense, but then I followed them back along that one state highway- uh, 89?
Officer J: This is- wait, 89, this is near the Massive Mart?
Yeah, that’s the one. You’ve been to Town?
Officer J: We’re in Town right now.
No shit? I figured you guys had your own secret interrogation cells in Capital. You took me all the way back home? This the Main Street station?
Officer J: That’s right. You were remitted to our-
Yeah okay I don’t super care why. I guess because the only crime I technically committed this time was the speeding here, and that’s your jurisdiction?
Officer J: You just said you didn’t care why.
Fair! I guess I was curious. Whatever. Uh, so, where was I? The- right, the tracking them down. I should, um… probably not tell you exactly where I followed them to, come to think of it. Like… it’s not like the Secret Service isn’t still a thing. I think their secret lair type thing is a federal secret I’m not supposed to tell you about?
Officer J: The number of things you’ve already discussed that constitute federal secrets-
Yeah, yeah, okay. But this one specifically, I’m gonna, uh, lie about, because these guys are the local division and they’ve probably got this place bugged and they might make trouble for you if they think the local police know where to find their hidey hole, y’know?
Officer J: It’s not bugged.
Sure it’s not. Anyway, I guess if I’m lying about where it was… I’m gonna say it was on the road next to Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium. You’re welcome in advance, whoever’s transcribing this! You get to type “Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium” however many more times I say it! Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium! Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium! Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium! Disco Dan’s Dunk Enformi- god damn it.
Anyway, I see the road open up, and they’re actually surprised to see I’ve noticed them, and open fire sooner than usual. Actually getting into that place when they’re being sent out to kill me is… not super doable.
So, unfortunately, I have to go back in time and not send assassins after myself and Dave Hater. Instead, this time, I just go to right after I’m let out of the hospital, and drive straight over to Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium, which is definitely a real place.
6 - Stealthy Infiltration
I check out the road, and…
Well, here’s the thing about secret entrances to underground lairs: they don’t just open for anyone. There was no button aboveground conveniently labeled “open secret passage”. I could see the break in the asphalt where it would open, but trying to wedge my fingers in there and pull it open manually was, uh, let’s call it ineffective. I tried yelling for someone to open it, but… no one even came out to shoot me for being a trespasser. It didn’t look like they had consistent surveillance at the exit. Turned out, to get in and out, you just radio whoever’s in control of the gate, so having a doorbell or something would be pointless.
If I couldn’t get it open myself, that meant I needed to get them to open it somehow. I knew opening the the road happened, when I called up Steve and said ominous threatening meteor shit, so…
Beep beep boop boop beep beep boop. “Hey, Steve?”
“...Hello? Who is this?”
“Oh, I’m asking about, like, space rocks, government conspiracies-”
Yeah, that did it. They were quick on the draw- probably had someone whose job it was to just listen in on tapped lines and cut them if someone said stuff like that. So, they’d hear that, trace the call, track my phone, find out I was right outside, and...
Um, well, what actually happened was… okay, so, the new version of what happened was that Disco Dan himself flung open the door to Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium and noscoped me with a sniper rifle.
Officer J: Noscoped?
Y’know, no-scoped. Shot me in the head without using the scope. Like in video games. You tellin’ me you never noscoped any noobs in cod?
Officer J: Any what?
What, you actually don’t- seriously? Have you never been on the internet?
Officer J: I don’t see how that’s relevant.
I- ugh. It’s not. Point is I got shot. Guy had the decency to shoot me in the head, though, so where it froze was where the bullet was just hitting my brain. I got a good look at- uh, Disco Dan. Who was wearing just, the most fly duds, and bodacious threads. And stuff. I don’t… I don’t actually know what disco clothes look like. Afro wig? Bell bottoms? Something like that. The physical details don’t matter because I’m lying.
So, this time, I rewind a few seconds and dodge out of the way. Or, I try to. The thing about using time travel to dodge bullets is… it depends a lot on how good the shooter is. Most of the time, they’re just guessing, and they don’t have the reaction time to really track your head. They shoot at about head level, and you can just kind of decide to be a few inches off. It’s normally no problem.
Disco Dan, though, he was one of those highly-trained crack shot assassin hippies. I couldn’t just dodge the bullets- he only took the shot once he was sure I was in a position where I couldn’t really move out of the way. I could rewind a bit and try to twist and contort myself to throw him off, but any weird movement, even if I could pull it off, just caused him to hesitate before waiting for me to reach a point where I’d shifted my weight such that I didn’t have the right leverage to move in more than one way.
Actually- maybe I should back that up and explain a little. I’m leaning on this concept of, uh, dead movements, and it’s probably not obvious to someone who hasn’t tried to use time travel to fight people.
You think of your body as something you control, right? Like, you want to move your arm to the left, so you do. And you think you could’ve moved your arm to the left in any way you pleased, right? Except… that’s not exactly how it works. The body is… a lot more of its own thing than you think it is. Your brain tells the arm “hey, move left”, and your arm responds. Your muscles do a lot of fuzzy unconscious things to make that movement happen- you really aren’t aware or even in direct control of each little muscle contraction involved. It kind of feels like the way your arm moved was something you were doing, but that’s because your brain is super used to working in concert with the feedback from the arm to understand the motion.
Basically, your body does a lot of stuff sort of autonomously, with your conscious mind being there to sort of suggest movements. Martial artists spend a lot of time training moves so that their bodies build muscle memory to do specific things in really precise ways on the fly. That’s kind of why you can’t just learn that stuff from a book- even if you understand, like, exactly what all the moves are for a kata or something, you can’t just go and do it right off the bat. You have to build that muscle memory, otherwise your body parts don’t really know what to do with the vague conscious instruction of “do a kick”.
I’m… still not getting at exactly what my point is, though. The thing is… you have no idea how many parts of basic locomotion are unconscious. Your brain isn’t built to make distinctions between parts of itself like that, so it does tons of work to really quickly justify all of the body’s decisions on how to move as… having been its idea, basically. There’s this illusion of continuous control over your movements, and normally that illusion never breaks down.
The problem is, when your consciousness goes back in time, that illusion shatters, hard. The state of your brain that adjusted itself to be in sync with the command it gave to move your arm- that state has moved on to a point after having finished that movement. When you find your body operating on instructions that your conscious mind gave seconds ago, instead of microseconds ago, it becomes incredibly obvious how much it is not under your control. Reflex and instinct are way more powerful than you give them credit for.
What this boils down to is… a lot of the time, I’d find myself dead from a bullet that I could’ve dodged by twisting my body a little bit in advance, but I straight up couldn’t do that a little bit in advance, because whatever motion I was in the middle of making was what my body decided to do based on instructions it’d received earlier.
It’s… it’s fucked up, is what it is. Time travel makes you painfully aware that your conscious mind only pretends to be in control- that there’s some animal you’re inside of, moving on its own in ways you can’t possibly notice unless the lies your brain tells you are shoved aside by time travel.
And I realize I just made that sound mondo spooky, but really it’s just an annoyance. Like, I’d spend a dozen cycles telling my legs to move that way, damn it, no, why are you doing the exact same thing again for fuck’s sake! If you move that way, we get shot in the head! Why aren’t you listening?!
Like, it’s not as huge as I make it seem. You’re still the one telling it what to do- it’s just that the implementation details are kind of automatic, and you need to back up a little further than you’d think and figure out how to tell it to do it slightly differently. If you just think “no, bend up a little further than last time”, it’ll do the exact same thing because the muscle memory for what “last time” was… got erased from time.
You have to sort of… get a really intuitive sense for the commands your brain gives to your body, and figure out exactly how many different ways you can tell your arm to move at any given time. I don’t even think there’s words for this, because normally your brain adjusts between actions and you never feel any sort of distinction between the ways you could’ve told your arm to move. You only start noticing the patterns after you’ve had to work them out from scratch while trying to dodge the same bullet with the same body-brain-state like a hundred goddamn times in a row.
...Anyway, Disco Dan. The way I approach this guy is… I couldn’t even figure out how to describe it until after I’d gotten a ways in and tracked back and forth along the timeline to get sort of a playback. There were gaps in his aim, places his own body didn’t have the reflexes to aim at despite his training. Through hours of trial and error, smoothed along by his propensity to shoot me in the head even after he’d already incapacitated me with a painful and fatal wound elsewhere, I managed to find a way to move that didn’t get me shot.
What it probably looked like to him was that I’d dropped to the ground, and started doing some kind of seizure breakdance. Just… this tangle of flailing arms and limbs bouncing around like no living thing should move, somehow dodging every bullet in an improbable streak of ridiculous bad luck. The writhing freak on the ground got closer and closer, until it finally launched itself at him with unexpected force and grabbed the gun out of his hands.
He quickly pulled a combat knife, but didn’t get to see any of the seven agonizing times he managed to successfully stab me in the gut before retrieving his gun and killing me. Instead, the man-thing attacking him managed to break his arm and take the knife, too. Then the man-thing pointed the gun at his head. Must’ve been really surprising for the poor guy.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m kind of mad at you for killing me like a hundred times.”
Then I shot him, which, uh… wasn’t actually that satisfying. Partially because, uh, all the gore of putting a bullet in his head… I got shot in the head a bunch, but I never really got to see my own head getting shot, because I died once the bullet hit my brain. But… yeah, it’s just, not pretty.
Anyway then I shot myself in the head, which was tricky because sniper rifles are long and hard to operate especially when pointed in the wrong direction. I kind of had to take my shoes and socks off and use my toe to do it while holding the barrel in place with my hands. Anyway, then I went back to before I shot him.
“But I’m not going to shoot you,” I said, which was true. Future tense, and all. “Do you mind answering a few questions?”
Spoilers: he did mind that. I had to deal with some more of him attacking me while prone, mainly with his legs, and then eventually I went back and took back my remark.
“So I’m going to shoot you in the head if you move a muscle or disobey me, okay?”
He was still. Cool. “Now- I’m going to ask you some questions before your backup inevitably arrives, and then I’ll surrender. Sound good?”
“No,” he said, but didn’t attack me or anything.
“Okay, well, whatever. I don’t care if it sounds good. Question one: why’d you start shooting me? Actually, question 0: why do you people in general want me dead?”
“Classified,” he said, which was not what I wanted to hear.
“No, no, like- if I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t kill me, right? You only want to kill me because I’m here and I shouldn’t be, and I know some stuff about a conspiracy, right? Why is it so important that I die immediately without trial, instead of, like, being arrested?”
“Classi-” he started saying, so I kicked him.
“It’s not that classified. I’m about to surrender, so why don’t you tell me?”
And he said: “You could be wearing a wire. I don’t know who I’d be telling, or where.” That was information! Sweet, sweet information! That’s why the guy with the needle hadn’t told me even as I was dying!
“No wire.”
“No liar?”
“Fair. But-”
That’s when his backup, Disco Dan’s Three Funketeers, showed up and gunned me down. So… I didn’t have a lot of time.
Take two, from the top. Threatened him real quick, and gave him a new “question one”, which was really question 2. Had to experiment before I got a line short enough and convincing enough- I forget exactly what I went through before I landed on “I don’t have a wire. I’m acting alone. Tell me why extrajudicial killing, and not arrest.”
“No chance you’re tracked, no chance you feign unconsciousness, no chance you escape.”
“You need to be 100% certain I can’t stop… something?”
“No margin for error,” he said.
“Something really important is about to happen, long-term consequences don’t matter, nothing matters but this one thing going right?”
He looked a little surprised before he looked angry. “Yeah.”
I frowned. “Well, it doesn’t go right. Probably. You guys don’t mean to blow up the world, do you?”
Then I got gunned down. Had to think of a new Question 1. Actually- it wasn’t a question, so I think I wound back a little bit further.
I tried the truth. “I’m a time traveler, and the project you’re protecting blows up the world. What’s the fastest way I can help you stop that from happening?”
He laughed, and… augh, I wasted so much time with Disco Dan. I’m not gonna walk you through it all, I’ll just kind of give you the rundown on what I learned by trying a ton of different approaches.
Most important thing: Disco Dan didn’t know jack anything. He was Secret Service (which secretly has way more Secret Servants than you’d think), but there was some kind of organization they were protecting, which was vaguely sciencey, from what he was implying. His job was to guard the entrance to the local facility, and… the annoying thing was that he was good at it. At least, good enough to stall for fifty-five seconds before his backup arrived. There was no reasoning with those guys- the first I could see of them was their muzzle flashes.
There also wasn’t much reasoning with Disco Dan. He was, uh… like, I couldn’t convince him I was a time traveler. He was already under orders to assume intruders were enemies of the state who were lying and trying to threaten national security, which made it tricky. Plus… those fifty-five seconds I had to talk to him weren’t long enough to get the concept of proving I was a time traveler through his thick head. I couldn’t convince him to even wait and see and call his guys off to give me more time to explain. Like…
I go “think of a number between one and a thousand”, and he’s all “why should I?” about it. And even if I manage to get my intonation right- Dan responded well to me sounding pathetic and afraid- he just got so confused about what it meant when I went slightly back in time to give him his number after asking for it. He just… didn’t get the basic logic of it, or he did and was too busy grappling with the implications to call off the Funketeers.
I… probably could’ve figured out a way to crack him in time, or at least get more information out of him, but I was getting so bored, and I’d had a better idea.
I rewound past all my crazy bullet-dodging stuff, which was kind of a shame considering how long it took me to get it right. Went to before I made the call, and then a little bit before I got to Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium. I rewound to… right about when I’d seen a homeless guy on the side of the road earlier.
“Hey!” I called out. “You there! Can you drive?”
He looked me dead in the eyes and said “I am the best driver in the entire world.”
It probably wasn’t true, but whatever. I pulled over, got out of the car, and handed him the keys and my phone. Then, I wrote down a number on a scrap of paper. “You can have my car. All I need you to do is: drive away east, and in, uh… ten minutes, I want you to take my phone- which you can also have, fuck it- and then call that number and start saying some crazy nonsense about meteorites. Can you handle that?”
This guy- let’s call him Greg- was a little suspicious of the offer, because apparently when you’re homeless it’s not that uncommon for people to come and try to get you to do crimes for them on the cheap. He had… a lot of questions, and I had to retry the conversation a few times because he’d eventually get fed up and sit back down with a knowing smile. (Wasn’t too hard- busy street right there, just headbutted whatever bus or truck was nearest.)
So… Greg eventually goes along with it, I think the framing I landed on was that I was rich and pulling a prank on my friend Steve, and that I was trying to get rid of the car anyway.
...Oh, you haven’t seen my car, have you? It would’ve been impounded in this timeline, right?
Officer J: No, I haven’t.
Okay, well, if you’d seen it, you’d know that I wasn’t stretching the truth all that much. It’s like… this ancient banana-yellow thing that I got from one of those used car dealerships that’s exactly like the cartoonishly sleazy used car dealerships you see on TV, y’know? It was super cheap, and actually didn’t break down all that much, but it guzzled gas like crazy and didn’t have air conditioning OR heating. I was actually saving up to buy a new one, before all this happened.
So- anyway, I’m sure you get the idea. The issue last time was that when they tracked my phone, they saw I was right on top of them, so they sent out Disco Dan to kill me, instead of opening the road. This time, they’d track my phone and find it on the road driving east, so they’d send out their SUV guys. The ten minutes was to give me time to hoof it over to their base on foot, and get ready to slip inside while the road was open.
You, uh… you picked up on the pattern with my plans, yet?
Officer J: The pattern?
Yeah, the pattern where they’re bad and don’t work until I brute-force them with time travel.
Officer J: Oh, that pattern. Yes.
...woulda liked a more reassuring reaction, but that’s totally fair. Anyway, this one was no exception. Main problem was… once the road opened, there were Secret Service assassins there, who would notice me and see me trying it and kill me. That damn road had a habit of snapping shut a second or two before they were out of sight. I couldn’t just hide behind a tree and dash over before it closed- there wasn't any cover close enough, and no amount of time travel can make you run faster.
Plan one to get around that was… you know how the road lifts up? I figured, okay, I can lie flat on the edge of the road there, and the incline will hide me from sight, and then right as it’s about to close, I could do like a cool flip around the lip and cling to the light fixture on the underside as it closed.
Plan one got me crushed by a closing road a few times, because actually swinging around and under the lip wasn’t… really… something I had the upper body strength for.
Plan two involved addressing the “no cover close enough” problem. And plan two worked, eventually, even though it really should've worked sooner.
Like… I never figured out the logic behind what they thought was suspicious. An out-of-place cardboard box? Must be a terrorist! Random lump under tarp? Better check underneath and shoot it! Giant novelty football helmet? I don't even know why I even tried that one. But a hedge, that's just-
Officer J: Sorry- where did you get all these things?
Purchased legitimately from a retailer. It never happened, so it's completely impossible for you to prove otherwise.
Officer J: Otherwise being…?
Stolen from some dude who left his garage open, for instance. Big fan of the Province Bulldogs, that guy.
Officer J: And- you said a hedge? How did you steal a hedge?
I didn’t! I purchased one legitimately from a retailer!
Officer J: That sells hedges.
Yep! That’s what it was, and I didn’t steal a bow saw from his garage and use it to just cut one of his hedges clean off the roots and carry it with me all the way to the Secret Service base. That’d be completely crazy. Plus, it shouldn’t have even worked- why would they ignore the hedge? If they knew enough about the surrounding area to tell when there’s a tarp or a cardboard box out of place- and it was like, kind of a barren place, it’s not like there were a ton of hedges around- they should’ve known the hedge sitting on the sidewalk was not a normal hedge!
But, uh, they didn’t. So… yeah. That worked. I managed to roll underneath right after they got out of sight and right before it snapped shut, and I was lucky enough to not run into any guards or anything right underneath the closed road.
So then, I, uh… just sorta went down in there.
7 - Even Stealthier Infiltration
I ran down this underground road at full speed. It… actually went down a ways, and the cool part was that it didn’t have security cameras or alarms or anything. I guess they figured… it doesn’t need to be a highly secure facility, if it’s staffed entirely by people who are vetted to themselves be highly secure? I dunno what management choice was behind the general lack of people noticing me there, but I wasn’t gonna complain.
Actually, maybe they didn’t have security on the road because the road wasn’t important to secure, because it got a little tougher once I reached the end of the road. It sort of opened up into a big garage area, with a few cars on standby. One wall of that garage had a checkpoint door, which I walked right up to.
Security on that door was… mercifully, a keypad lock. I would’ve been totally stopped in my tracks by, like, a normal lock with a keyhole that you need a key for, or one of those things where you have a keychain fob thingy that sends a radio signal. I’d have had to, like… find some way to stop one of their cars, find an agent with the key, and then somehow take that physical object from them and down to the door without getting killed by anyone in the meantime. Finding out a code, though- that could come with me back in time.
First, I figured I’d brute force it. It looked like a six-digit code, plus the little star and hashtag signs you see on phones sometimes. Since I didn’t know what the protocol was for, like, beginning and ending the code entry with the little control signs, I’d have to test all the ways of doing that, too. That’s twelve different symbols, so… six of those would be… I don’t have a calculator on me, and I didn’t then, either, because I gave my phone to Greg, so… crap, what’s twelve to the sixth?
Officer J: Well, twelve to the fifth is 248,832, so… twelve times that much would be… close to three million, so… 24… 360… 9,600…
Whoa, what?
Officer J: Shh- 96,000, 480,000, 2,400,000, add… that, and… two million, nine hundred eighty-five, nine hundred eighty-four.
Holy shit, what was that? Did you just do that in your head?
Officer J: It’s just one multiplication.
No, it’s- you just knew twelve to the five off the top of your head?! Who the hell memorizes that?
Officer J: Someone who… studied math in school?
No, that’s- that’s definitely abnormal, god damn. You’re like some kind of human calculator. Why are you in the police, and not… uh, doing… math… job?
Officer J: Math job is a highly competitive field, and is irrelevant to your testimony.
Oh, right, the testimony. So- yeah, three billion combinations-
Officer J: Million.
Whatever, it’s an illion. So… even if I just plugged in one combination every ten seconds, it’d take me years to crack it. And that’s if I was right about-
Officer J: Just under a year, actually.
Wow, okay, thank you math police. That’s still a long-ass time- and that’s if I was right about how to open the thing! What if there was a secret button or lever or something I had to use at the end, and trying combinations was useless without it? I’d have wasted a year of my time pressing buttons!
So… I mean, I could do that. Like, that lock couldn’t stop me forever, I totally could just bore myself out of my skull for ages and hope I didn’t… run out of time travel juice, or something. But, uh, I super didn’t feel like doing that, and I had other ideas.
See… eventually, those guys were going to come back and open that door. And… I could watch them put in the code. Which is what I did, although it was kind of tricky because, uh, they would kill me on sight when they got back, so I had to hide again. And… there weren’t a lot of hiding places in that garage. There were a few idle cars, but hiding behind them… I got seen a few times before I found a good spot, and then that spot turned out to suck because I couldn’t see the guy putting in the code from that angle.
One thing I noticed that was kind of worrying was that they didn’t come back with Greg. I kind of hope they just interrogated him and found out that someone else had told him to say that stuff, but… given how they treated me, that wasn’t too likely.
Eventually, I found a place they wouldn’t notice me- I think under one of the cars on the left, where the garage was kind of dark- and managed to see one of them put in the code. It was kind of hard to make out from a distance, and there was one bit where it could’ve been a seven or an eight, his finger was in the way. But... it narrowed it down enough.
Also, I was totally right about the secret lever they had to pull, so like, good thinking on my part there.
Anyway, with the code, (which I won’t tell you for the same reason I had to make up Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium,) I was able to get inside.
Inside was a little reception desk thing with a security guy sitting at it. He saw me, and… didn’t kill me instantly. Instead, he pulled down a shutter and triggered an alarm, which was ultimately just as deadly when some guys with guns showed up and shot me again, but… I appreciate it, security desk guy whose name I didn’t get.
So, second try, I dropped to the floor and scooted past the desk, which didn’t work because the door swung shut behind me and he noticed and triggered the alarm.
Next try, I opened and closed the door very quietly before crawling past, but… I dunno, he must’ve had some way of knowing the door had opened, even though he didn’t have a line of sight on it. Shutter closed, alarm triggered. I tried again a couple times, in case it was a fluke and he’d noticed me some other way, but as far as I could tell, he triggered that alarm before he could even see me. Even if I just opened and closed the door without going inside!
After that, I, uh… gave up on trying to be sneaky with him, and just ran inside, and… dove through the window and tackled him to the floor. And… I kind of figured out why he hadn’t killed me immediately. Which was because… he was super bad at fighting. I didn’t even have to reset and trial-and-error fight him- he just went down with a really hard punch to the head, as soon as I managed to get my feet under me.
...Which might’ve killed him? There was a snapping noise from around his neck, and I didn’t know how to check his pulse, so I don’t know. I remember being really freaked out about having maybe killed this guy, which… wasn’t the first time I’d killed anyone, because of that time I shot Disco Dan in the head. Still, there was something different about killing someone who’d shot me to death for hours and whose death I undid immediately, and… this.
Part of it was that I was hoping I wouldn’t have to reset after this whole breakin, and I’d find a way to save the world inside the secret government facility in that timeline, but… well, that turned out to be no dice, so presumably that guy’s still alive.
Aaaaaanyway, I had a look around this reception desk area after… hopefully just knocking him out? It was, uh… well, mostly papers about vehicle registration and equipment stuff. Apparently this wasn’t the front entrance, and he wasn’t so much a receptionist as… the guy in charge of making sure they kept track of the cars and guns and stuff they kept in this wing. I looked through a bunch of electronic requisitions forms on his computer (an old, old computer, as might be expected from someone working in the government) and found that this particular “Reach Station” hadn’t seen much activity in a couple months.
Actually, uh… frig, I don’t remember the timeline exactly, so- wait, wait, no! Most recent attempt, she gave me the remote login information… did I check? Hang on, let me check if I checked.
Officer J: Wait, no, don’t-
Too late! Or, uh, too early. Because I already killed myself in the future. Just checked, and I totally did click past the requisitions page when I was double-checking the address of the conference center. There was this embedded spreadsheet thing, and, uh…
So- the requisitions page had a ton of records about various objects that had been checked in and out by different agents. Three months ago- about the time of the, what’d they call it, the Vulcan Event, y’know, with the space rocks- there was actually nothing. They hadn’t investigated, apparently. Nothing besides “General Munitions 3” for “firing practice” a couple times a day for a whole week after that. But then, you start seeing the cars go in and out a bunch. For about a week, “Protected Vehic.” 1 and 2 were going in and out, plus more general munitions for “active use”. Then, you see this thing added to the registry, labeled “Unk C.”
“Unk C.”, which doesn’t stand for Unkle Carl, is checked in and out like a dozen times a day for variations on the abbreviated reason “study” by the same three ID numbers for the next few weeks, with almost no Protected Vehic or General Munitions changing hands. At a timestamp about a month ago, Unk C. becomes “Geo C.”, which catches my interest, because- hey, Geo! Geo as in the planet! Geology! The planet exploding, maybe! That sounds relevant!
There’s a bunch of checkout reasons attached to Geo C over the next month. Mostly “development” and “presentation” and variations of those, eventually turning into just stuff like “three guesses” or “yeah, again”. And then… the second-to-last entry for Geo C puts it at checked in about a week ago, with the note “store for deployment”.
The last entry for Geo C is a scheduled entry for something that hasn’t happened yet, which says that it’s scheduled to be checked out tomorrow. Or, uh… I mean, I guess, what would be today. The reason just says “transit to deployment”, and it’s accompanied by the scheduled checkout of all the cars and all the General Munitions, plus a bunch of stuff I hadn’t even seen on the list- surveillance devices, “Advanced Munitions”, and loads of things with indecipherable codenames.
So… I’ve got this hunch, which is that maybe Geo C is a space bomb that blows up the planet, and it’s a pretty good hunch, kind of. I’ll get into that later. Point is, I figure- maybe if I steal the space bomb, I can figure out how to, uh, destroy it or disarm it or whatever. Like, sure, I’m no bomb squad guy, but what’s gonna happen if I fuck up? The world explodes? Gee, that’d be just terrible.
So I go looking for where Geo C is supposed to be stored, which is, uh... the “Crappy Lighting Room”, according to the spreadsheet. I don’t actually know where that is, so I have to go and explore the secret underground government facility until I find a crappily-lit room.
First thing I do, though, is walk over to General Munitions Rack A, which is in this sort of waiting room type area right past the requisitions desk, and grab a pistol. I test out by shooting myself in the head, which doesn’t work right away because I have to figure out how to use a gun first. But then I shoot myself in the head, and then don’t shoot myself in the head.
Can I make something up here? Because I really want to tell you that this place was chock full of traps for me to bypass to get around. Like- oh, there was one of those laser hallways, y’know? With all the scattered invisible laser beams, and you have to like, ninja backflip through them? Because I would totally crush one of those. Or, I mean, let’s say I did. There was a hallway full of lasers, right? And I didn’t need to know where they were, because whenever they set off the alarm- or, no, let’s say they’re the super deadly kind that chops off your limbs like invisible lightsabers- whenever I got my body parts chopped off, I’d just die and try again until I found a safe way through. It would be so cool.
Oh, or the swinging axe blades! Classic! Got the timing on those down perfectly. Took a few tries, but, y’know, I’m badass like that. Buzzsaws coming out of the floor, just backed up and jumped over them like woosh. It was rad as hell.
Also, the place totally wasn’t mostly empty because most of the Secret Service counter-assassination assassin guys were out chasing Greg who they thought was me. No, there were like, loads of guards, still. Guarding shit all over the place. I learned the sickest kung fu fighting those guys. Like, one of them, his name was Rip Van Muscle, eight feet tall, but no matter how many death punches he tried on me, I could always just keep dodging him, and striking at all his weak points to fuck up all his chakras. It was so cool, you wouldn’t even believe it.
There was even, like… this one bit where a bunch of guards started shooting me at once, but since I had the gun, I could just time it so I was shooting all their bullets out of the air, because I knew where they were aiming, yeah? So I shot all their bullets, and they were like, oh shit, how did he survive that? And then suddenly I run up and then execute a perfect spin kick, and kick all their heads off-
Officer J: This is all extremely impressive and exciting.
I know, right? So then I-
Officer J: Can you tell me what actually happened?
Uh… well, all that, obviously. You can’t prove it didn’t. I totally didn’t just… walk down some boring-ass office hallways with no deadly traps and almost no guards. Well, one guard, who wasn’t really a guard, I don’t think, just a guy who happened to be walking down the hallway who I had to fight. Which- I won that one holding a gun to my own head the whole time, which I’m serious about, was pretty badass, and really the only way to fight if you don’t want to spend most of your time bleeding out or suffocating or whatever. He just… wasn’t very fast or cool with his moves, and it was easy, so. Whatever. Punched him in the head. I mean, I didn’t, I punched lots of people in the head and it was totally sick, not just him, so…
Uh, where was I going with this again? The- right, the Crappy Lighting Room. On my way there, I was checking every unmarked door. Behind one of them was like… well, a well-lit room with three people in it who didn’t look like Secret Service guys. They had a bunch of desks, with new and modern computers, and they all turned and looked at me as I opened the door, so… shot myself.
Sometimes I imagine what it must be like if Steve is right and those timelines where I die don’t just get undone. If they continued on from there… imagine what that would’ve looked like to them. Crazy, right? They’re minding their own business, when suddenly this random intruder shows up, instantly shoots himself in the head, and then that’s just it for a while until the planet explodes with no warning. Maybe they look into who I am, find out I just got released from the hospital, and can’t find any reason for me to be down there.
...Actually, I kind of wish I’d asked them about that. I could just ask “Hey, doc, if I hadn’t said what I did when I showed up, and instead just shot myself in the head with no explanation, how would you have reacted? Can I see what the look on your face would’ve been?”
Whatever. So, I don’t go in that door, and it’s a few doors later that I find what’s probably the Crappy Lighting Room.
First thing of note: It’s small and it’s dark. There’s big… machines, I want to say, along the walls? They’re just these huge metal things that look like wide filing cabinets with no drawers, I don’t even know what they’re for. There’s some tables covered in papers, and those are lit by like, standing lamps that have been plugged into the walls, to compensate for how there’s no lights in the ceiling.
The reason there’s no lights in the ceiling is that there’s something else coming out of the ceiling. It’s like… you know those terraced cone things that one weird band wore on their heads? Kind of like that but huge, upside down, and hanging from the ceiling. And then another one that’s not upside down, on the floor, so they’re both pointing at each other with a gap in the middle. And the top ring on each one is, like, glowing? This weird purple light?
Basically, it’s like the sort of thing you might expect to see in a fantasy comic, where there’s the Gauntlet of All-Dominating hovering ominously between them, or whatever super-magic relic the hero is looking for. Realistically, it’s probably some kind of weird science-y imaging equipment, but basically that’s what it looks like.
Anyway, all that’s hovering ominously- actually, not hovering ominously- is some sort of weird spindly metal thing. I try to figure out what it is- maybe some kind of advanced space antenna for picking up alien signals? Or a sensor array, or a polarity reverser, or a quantum hydrofloogler? I’m really confused by it until I realize what it actually is.
It’s just… a rack. A metal rack, that you’d put something else on top of, to hold it up. And whatever it’s supposed to be holding, it’s not, because that thing is missing. Even though the requisitions spreadsheet said it was supposed to be checked into storage in that room, and no one should’ve even looked at it since it was put there.
...Actually, now that I remember it, I didn’t really put those pieces together at first. I actually figured it was just somewhere else in the room, first, and looked around for a while. Inspected the papers on the table, which were… seismology readings? Not for Country, but for Nation, on the other side of the planet. And- I don’t know a lot about seismology readings, but they seemed weak. Also, there were notes written on them that said that they were unusually weak. Which is why I thought they seemed that way. Because I don’t know a lot about seismology readings.
Anyway, I did all that searching before concluding if Geo C was there, somehow, it was probably inside one of those big metal machine dealies that didn’t seem to have an obvious way to be opened. I’d have to go get someone to help me with this, because I was super out of my depth, and that whole search had been a waste of time.
I kind of got in the habit of making sure I didn’t waste any time, though, once I had a gun to make it easy.
That scene was probably even more confusing and scary. Like, the next day, they hear a weird loud bang, they go to check on it, and they find their mysterious object missing and a random stranger dead with his brains all over the ground. Hell, if target practice with General Munitions happened often enough for them not to question unexpected loud bangs, maybe they only find my corpse on the day they’re supposed to take Geo C out of storage! It’d be like a closed-circle murder mystery except that it’s straight-up impossible for them to solve before the world blows up for no apparent reason!
So I go back to… the room with the non-goon-type-people.
“Hey, can someone give me a hand with this?” I ask. That’s not something you expect to hear from an intruder who doesn’t want to be caught, so they don’t look all that confused.
Officer J: Who doesn’t look confused?
Y’know, the government scientists. Not gonna provide too many identifying details because the big bad secret popo would probably kill me, but there’s three. Three scientists, the ones who kept checking Geo C in and out. Not Secret Service, but apparently being protected and/or sequestered by the government, because of secret doomsday project reasons.
Officer J: Oh, of course.
8 - Maybe Science Is Helpful
So… let me see if I remember how this went. I bust into the room, and I ask if someone can give me a hand, and… they all kind of look at me like I have two heads.
“Are you… new?” one of them asks, this old lady with super-short hair.
“Uh, yes,” I lied, because, hey, a good excuse!
“I don’t know,” a tall guy I’m going to call Dave Hater 2 says. “We didn’t hear anything about this. Who are you, exactly?”
I weighed my options. Fake name, maybe? What would my fake name be? I could’ve used, like, my legal first name, Huntyrr, but that didn’t sound like a serious science doctor type name that they would take seriously. It didn’t sound like a name anyone would take seriously, really, which is why I gotta thank Dad for the foresight to make my middle name David in case I decided I hated the name Mom came up with.
“I’m Dr. Dave Microcystis,” I said, telling them basically the exact truth. Except for the lie where I said I was a doctor. What were they odds they’d try and look that up?
Dave Hater 2 tried to look that up. “...Nothing coming up for that. The only Microcystis I see is-”
“-Dae-hyun Microcystis, yes. People have trouble pronouncing that, so I usually just introduce myself as Dave. Plus it’s more, uh, casual, y’know?”
Dave Hater 2’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t look anything like this photo,” he said, showing me an image search for my dad. Which- come on, yeah I did! People were starting to get me and my dad confused for real!
“No, yeah, that’s my colleague Dae-sung. Something about the names must’ve thrown the algorithm, I dunno.”
“Right,” he said, not so much satisfied as having found a different thing to be suspicious about. “So- why exactly did they send us a microbiologist?”
The third one- a younger, sorta heavyset blonde woman- snatched Dave Hater 2’s phone and shoved it back in his pocket for him. “Dave Hater 2, give it a rest! This is a deeply interdisciplinary project!”
So… crap, after that introduction, I forget what stuff happened in that timeline versus excuses I made in different ones. Uh… I think the first time around… I just told them their thing was missing? They were all pretty alarmed at that, and they followed me straight down to the room where-
No, wait, first they followed me out of the room and looked to their left and saw the guard I’d punched in the head just lying there. Whoops. I, uh, shot myself and rewound to before I went in the room, hid the guard, and went through Dave Hater 2’s easily-foiled interrogation again. Then they followed me straight down to the Crappy Lighting Room.
The CLR was like I left it, because- well, yeah, of course it was, I hadn’t been in there, so yeah. I was all like, I can’t find the sample, and they all just freaked. Turns out- yeah, there was totally supposed to be something on that rack, and now there wasn’t. Dave Hater 2… I can’t really blame him for immediately accusing me of stealing it. He was kind of exactly as paranoid as he should’ve been about me, because I was totally an intruder who was lying about his identity.
Thankfully, it seemed like these scientist people hadn’t really been briefed on the whole “if anything unexpected happens, KILL KILL KILL” directive the Secret Service guys had going on. Even Dave Hater 2, who thought I was up to no good, seemed to be more concerned with demonstrating how intellectually superior he was for seeing through my lies.
“Wait- when was the last time it was here?” I asked.
After a brief coughing fit, the old lady shook her head. “Just… we haven’t checked on it in a week.”
“We’ve been going over the seismograph feeds from the initial experiments, mostly,” Blondie said. “We’re pretty sure it’s ready to go, so there hasn’t been any need to check the sample itself.”
I nodded like that made sense. “Hold on- I was told to come here and examine the sample. I…”
Then I spun a bunch of technobabble about what I was supposed to do with it. It was completely made up, I don’t even remember what I said, and apparently it wasn’t very believable. I’ll, uh… skip over Dave Hater 2’s gloating over how I was a big faker, and over the part where they called in agents and they shot me.
So, uh, take 2 of that was… I decided to go light on details. “They didn’t really give me any specifics about the project- only that they really needed my expertise, for some reason, and that the three of you would fill me in on what exactly I was supposed to do.”
That… got them started on the technobabble. I’d summarize, but…
Well, no, actually, even though this is the biggest deadly military secret, it’s all sort of a moot point now, since they’ve all been, uh… well, I don’t know what that thing did with them, but they’re gone now, and the planet isn’t exploding, so we’re probably cool.
So… the Geo Charge was a weapon.
More specifically, the Geo Charges were being used as weapons. I couldn’t really follow along with exactly what the experiments they’d done were, but… somehow, using some sort of setup with a seismograph and a bunch of weird instruments that did funny things to… fields? They did some stuff to the thing with their funky secret government tech, and found out what it did. Kind of.
The Geo Charges, aka the heat-shielding-wrapped cylindrical rock thingies that fell from the sky during the Vulcan Event, seemed to do one specific thing. You could do… technobabble thing I can’t remember, and what they would do is hover in the air for a second, orient themselves downward, and suddenly shoot straight through the planet, emerge on the other side almost instantaneously, and then shoot back to where they were hovering. Sort of… phasing through the ground without touching anything. They’d do this in a loop, until you did a different technobabble thing to turn them off.
Also, if you did… something with… the resonant surface pattern on the… if you did yet another technobabble thing, you could affect how much it affected matter when it passed through. And if you timed it so that it would start affecting matter just a little, you could make it cause earthquakes where it emerged. Just little ones! Just teeny tiny earthquakes you could barely detect! But they could vary the strength, so if they wanted, they could hypothetically cause a huge earthquake on the other side of the planet.
And, of course, since we’re in the middle of a trade war with Nation, on the other side of the planet… that sort of explained why the government was doing all this super-secrecy stuff. Remote weapons of mass destruction, to be used as a threat against the enemy. Holding the entire country hostage with a superweapon.
I, uh… I had to look at these people a little differently as they explained. Because… the scary thing wasn’t the superweapon they were talking about, which was very obviously the thing that went horribly wrong somehow and blew up the world. I was used to that. That made total sense.
The scary thing was the looks on their faces as they explained what they were doing. They were beaming. They were so proud to show off what they’d accomplished, and explain how clever they’d been in figuring out exactly how it all worked and how to use it to kill millions of people. These were not “now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” superweapon scientists. These definitely weren’t “now we are all sons of bitches” superweapon scientists. These were “isn’t this the coolest?” superweapon scientists.
And there were more of them. There were loads. These weren’t the only three people on the project- they were the three people on the project who lived here, studying one of the Geo Charges. They had teams in Reach Stations all over Country- all of them selected for their expertise, and presumably for their total blindness to the reality of what they were doing.
I couldn’t stop them here. Their superweapon was already gone, and even if I could get it back and convince them not to use it, there were dozens just like them. Even if I took a high-speed jet to every location, figured out how to speedrun the infiltration… I didn’t have that much time. I had, at most, 33 hours, 20 minutes, and 16 seconds until the world exploded.
Except… okay, no. I could do this. All I had to do was hope they were like Steve.
“Hey, could you all do me a favor? Think of a number between one and a thousand.”
“Six hundred and forty,” Blondie says.
“No- think of a different one, and don’t tell me.”
“...What kind of trick is this? What’s this got to do with anything?” Dave Hater 2 asks.
“Just… do it,” I say. They all seem confused, but agree, and then after about ten seconds, I ask them what their numbers were.
So after they give me their numbers, they see me pull a gun and shoot myself in the head and fall down dead. They’re… probably pretty confused by this, but I don’t get to see that, because I’m ten seconds ago now.
“Your number is 999,” I say to Blondie, who gasps.
“Oh, come on. That was… some kind of trick. Lucky guess. You made her guess the highest number somehow.” Dave Hater 2 says.
“It totally is some kind of trick, yeah. You- your number is 902,” I say to the old lady. Her eyes go wide and she nods, and everyone’s starting to get a little freaked out.
“And you,” I say to Dave Hater 2, “picked negative five million, which isn’t even close to being between one and a thousand, but that’s fine. Kind of makes my point for me, actually.”
Then, uh… I tell them everything. Starting with how I’m a time traveler, eventually getting back to the planet exploding and how it’s probably their fault somehow. It’s pretty much all the same stuff I just told you, minus some of the honesty about, uh, killing people, and other alarming or embarrassing stuff that might’ve thrown them for a loop.
So… the weird thing is, they believe me. And this isn’t exactly great at first, because they’re scientists, and one of them is an advanced particle physicist, and they want to run tests. And, uh… well, I tell them that they can test all they want later, after the world doesn’t blow up anymore. If they try some test to see if I can still time travel after they do some kind of fucky quantum thing, and the result of the test is no, I can’t, then… that would be the end of the human race, is the thing.
In the interest of the human race not getting exploded to death, they… well, first they go on for like twenty minutes about what could possibly cause this to happen, and conclude that it’s basically what would happen if you switched one on to full matter-interaction while it was still moving through the planet’s core- at near lightspeed. It takes twenty minutes for them to figure this out because oh my god they use so many fucking words I don’t know. Every time they start talking in plain Language, fucking Dave Hater 2 insists on correcting them so that they start using the standard terminology, wherein standard means “crammed full of extra nonsense syllables so Dave can’t understand us”. None of them have any problem following, but I’m totally locked out of the conversation for a while.
Their brilliant solution to this is… they’re going to send a memo to all the other researchers on the project, and tell them to be extra-careful with their Geo Charge settings. Which, in fairness, is a pretty good idea. Wouldn’t it be great if that was all it was? The government mass murder program just got its wires crossed and mass murdered a few more people than it intended to mass murder? Fix it with just an email to remind people to double check their mass murder settings?
So… at this point, I’m willing to check and see if it works out. Problem is… this is still, like… five-ish? Six? Two or three hours in? I have over a day to wait, and I’m sort of… in the middle of a secret government facility mostly full of people who want to kill me. If I want to survive long enough to see if it worked, it’ll take some doing.
They… well, old lady has a plan. I… honestly don’t remember it. They do some computer stuff? Doing some computer stuff requires logging in to their network, though, and they do it by straight-up logging in to a website, as in http, on the net, plugged in. I kind of dropped out of that cybersecurity class I was taking, but even I know that’s, like, a staggering amount of incompetence for a top-secret organization. What this whole situation has taught me more than anything else, I think, is just how bad the government is at security that doesn’t involve shooting people to death.
Anyway, I figure I might as well have that login information. There’s probably a timeline or two where they’re just typing in their login, and suddenly their time traveling informant shoots himself in the head without warning because he lost track of the fingers moving, and needed to go rewind a bit. So… that’s how I got that information on the requisitions page, remember?
So, then… they walk me straight out the front door? There’s a front door, it turns out, because the scientists don’t live there. They go home at the end of the day, and it’s a lot easier to leave without security noticing than it is to enter. Not totally trivial, but they just needed to create a couple distractions for the people who usually watch the exit, and it’s fine.
Before I leave, though, I have to ask them a few things. Specifically- if it doesn’t work, and I need to get back in, how can I do that? For that… I just get some of their direct contact information, which I make sure to ask about. Bringing up, y’know, how calling other scientists even tangentially involved in this project led to me getting assassinated.
They say it’s fine.
They’re super wrong about this, which is a problem later, but for the time being I just count my blessings and leave through the public entrance of Disco Dan’s Funk Emporium.
So… crap, what did I do then? I… kind of forget, since the plan there was just “wait until the end of the world, see if it worked or not”, and I didn’t really go around doing stuff. I think I just… went home?
Oh, right, yeah, I walked home! Because that’s where I was when the guys broke down my door and shot me! I was in the middle of catching up on a let’s play series when… bang!
I… well, before I looked into that, I wanted to finish what I was watching, so I went back a couple hours and this time skipped to where I’d been in the video playlist. Rinse and repeat… uh, six times, I think? It was a long one, because they kept getting stuck on that one part of the game where there’s a supposed-to-lose fight, but they’d keep thinking they were supposed to win it and they’d hit the force reset button instantly as soon as their health hit zero. That went on for like, four straight episodes, it was agonizing.
Uh, where was I? Right the- so, they kill me, and I want to figure out how they found me. I do basically the same thing I did before with the cars- rewind bit by bit, walk to where I can see where they’re coming from, yada yada yada. Unfortunately, they… sort of got there by car, and I couldn’t follow them back far enough on foot. I had to sort of… learn the Town bus schedules, and make some guesses about where they’d be. Took a lot of wandering around before I got to the point where I could actually get my eyes on them before they got in the car.
That point is… my car, run off the highway, with Greg’s corpse slumped over the wheel. That sort of… clarifies everything, when I see that. Obviously, they just checked my car’s registration and looked up my address. So… home wasn’t gonna work out. Plus… I started kind of hoping the plan wouldn’t work, because if this was the timeline where I saved the world, that meant Greg was gone for good.
I think after that, I… went to the library, for a while? They didn’t find me there, but then I decided to try going in to work. That… didn’t work, because they totally checked there and left someone there to shoot me.
Which- can I complain about that a little? It’s completely unreasonable that every single one of them just shoots me! They’re the friggin’ Secret Service! They’re not supposed to be assassins! If they think I’m in on some scheme to fuck up their earthquake plan, why didn’t any of them ever try to just fucking capture me and interrogate me and try to figure out what I was up to, or whether I had co-conspirators they should go and shoot? What the hell kind of crazy justification did they have for their extreme murder orders?! I never figured that part out!
Anyway, apparently I was in shock after getting shot in the chest, so I couldn’t even get my shiny new handgun out and shoot myself in the head, so… after some painful bleeding out, I went back to the library. Which was… not open 24 hours, so I couldn’t really just lay low there until the world maybe exploded.
Is what I thought, but then I figured, hey, maybe I’ll just try, and just hide somewhere whenever closing time happens and sleep there overnight! Which… was kind of tricky, because they had this guy who would do a night sweep to kick out anyone who didn’t leave on time, and he was weirdly good at finding hiding places. I managed to evade him on like, my tenth try, I think? So there’s like nine timelines where this poor guy gets traumatized by a random library patron shooting himself in the head in front of him out of nowhere. I’d feel bad, except that he didn’t have to live with the trauma for long.
Oh, right, spoilers: the world still exploded. However careful they told their colleagues to be, it wasn’t careful enough.
9 - If You Thought Aliens Wouldn’t Be Involved You Were Wrong
Zhweeew-wew-wew-wew-weep!
Officer J: What was that?
That’s- that’s a rewinding sound effect. Because I went back to visit the scientists. This time, I went to like, right after they proposed telling people to be careful.
“No, that doesn’t work,” I say.
“It might!” Blondie protests.
“No, I mean I literally just went along with that, and then waited, and it didn’t work. Whatever being careful entails, it’s not enough to stop the planet from exploding. We need a new plan.”
Dave Hater 2 wasn’t too happy about that, but we kind of worked together on coming up with a new plan anyway. And that new plan was… well, kind of simple, actually. See, we sort of landed on the idea that, hey, probably if something unusual happens with our planet bomb, it’s because of the unusual thing that happened with our planet bomb- specifically, the one that just went missing. Maybe priority one was figuring out where it went, and who had it.
First thing we did was… checked if anyone else had missing Geo Charges. They had a mailing list for all the people on the project, which… I guess whatever works. I guess group chats weren’t secure enough? Anyway, they had people check on their Geo Charges, which were mostly in the same condition- in storage, ready to be deployed for some operation.
The emails came in slowly, because I guess these people weren’t always checking their email, but one at a time they replied. And… every single researcher who replied said that theirs had also gone missing, oh shit.
Now… this is weird. Because… these are all stored in varyingly secure secret underground research facilities, sealed away in locked rooms, guarded by lots of people who like to shoot first and ask questions later. And there’s dozens of them. They are… hard to steal from. And all of them have been stolen.
One of them has very recently been stolen. A reply to the “check on your Geo Charges” email comes in with no introduction, typed very hastily. It reads “it saw me it took it mcallister is dead send help”, which is not super reassuring. Blondie, Oldie, and Dave Hater 2 start panicking and wondering what to do next, but for them there really isn’t anything to do next. There’s something to do previously.
So I shoot myself and go back before we send the email. I’m like “Wait, we just did that, and they’ve all been stolen, call up Dr. McAllister and start a video call”. Because, like… what the hell was that all about? We should see firsthand, right? After I explain in a little more detail, and they finish panicking, we get that call set up.
Picture… this one’s an aboveground facility, clean and well-lit with ceiling-height glass windows. Dr. McAllister is this kinda stressed-out looking guy, who doesn’t look happy with anything, period. Could be he has a conscience he’s violating, instead of just being totally happy-go-lucky about the whole superweapons thing? He’s carrying his phone down the hallway, towards where they’re keeping their Geo Charge in suspension.
And he opens the door, and…
The thing that we see is… not super easy to see. It’s invisible, sort of. Like it’s made of glass. The first time around, there’s a little flash of light from somewhere and then the feed goes dead, and we can’t really make anything out. The second time, we set Dave Hater 2’s phone to record the video call as a file so we can play it back, and… slowing down the frames, we get a slightly better idea of the shape of this invisible thing.
It’s… like, imagine a tongue depressor, but eight feet tall and flexible, with a bunch of tiny little arms and hands all along the edge of it like… like a centipede! It’s like a giant centipede! Except smooth and featureless and mostly invisible and not very insect-y. And it’s got this thing on its back- a big huge backpack sort of thing, almost like a snail shell except for how it’s clearly got pockets. We also see that... the flash of light? That’s the thing taking some device in its hand and using it- probably whatever “got” Dr. McAllister.
Rewind a bit, and this time I tell him not to go inside. Instead, I tell him to just open the door a crack, and slide the phone into the room so we can see. And… he slides it in upside-down, so all we see is black. I go back again, and this time after telling him to slide the phone into the room, I tell him not that way, the other way from what he’s about to do.
And then he slides it in the same fucking way, because apparently he was wracked with doubt over which way he was going to slide it in, and mistrusted his gut or something. I try phrasing it differently two more times before I think to just say “with the screen facing up”.
This time, we get a slightly better look. It doesn’t regard the phone as something to shoot, at first- in fact, it mostly ignores the phone. It takes the Geo Charge from its weird pedestal, slides it into a loop of its backpack thingy, and… the Geo Charge turns invisible. Then the thing steps over the phone towards the door, out of sight. Then we hear a sound kind of like running water, like if you turned the sink on and off really quick, and then screams from the other doctors with McAllister. Those screams are quickly followed by more sink noises.
“So… that thing just disintegrated them, right?” I ask, which kind of freaks out the scientists because they have way less of a stomach for murder when it’s happening to people like them, and not nonspecific masses of foreigners.
So, I go back to before McAllister died, and save their lives by not having them do that. Dave Hater 2, when I tell him what happened, doesn’t believe me, and I’m forced to prove it to him. What I do is… you know the number trick? I have him come up with a number that he’ll only tell me in the event that he sees what I just described happen with his own eyes. Then we get McAllister and co killed again, and then Dave Hater 2 gives me his number (it’s “horse trampoline”), and I go back and save McAllister again.
So, to recap: glass centipede alien has apparently been sneaking into government facilities and stealing their world-exploding superweapons. None of this is directly related to why I can time travel, except that presumably the green space fireball that made me able to time travel came from the same explodey alien thing that all the superweapons came from, and it’s not like there would be two separate unrelated explodey alien super-things.
Officer J: I think I’m following.
Okay good. So… it’s sort of a matter of tracking down this alien and following him, right? Because probably the alien blows up the planet? Doing that is… hard, though. We tried it with like, literally having McAllister and his people follow behind it? Except… well, it never left the room in a way they could detect.
Like… depending on how early we had them check, there were three outcomes. One outcome was that they’d catch it red-handed, in the room, like we already saw.
A second outcome was that the Geo Charge was still there, not stolen. In that outcome, where they’d take the Geo Charge to try to keep it safe directly, they’d, uh, get killed and the thing would take it from them by force, after about ten minutes of weird sounds and horror movie tension as it presumably figured out that they knew of its existence and needed to be removed as witnesses.
The third outcome, if we delayed telling them to check, would just be that it was already gone with the Geo Charge, and it was already too late.
None of the outcomes involved anyone ever seeing the door open or close. There was no way to track the thing, because… well, it could just turn perfectly invisible, apparently, and the part where it looked like glass sometimes was when it… wasn’t trying, I guess? I dunno what kind of cloaking device shit it was using, but it apparently didn’t have it on at… full strength, or whatever, when it was taking the charge.
I’m not gonna keep this part a mystery- the reason it was able to not get noticed was probably just holograms. It had a hologram projector dealie, which I only learned about later, and that would make a lot more sense than like, teleportation or whatever. Just… kind of like the security camera trick from every heist movie, where you record some footage of an empty hallway and loop it? It just sort of did that in real life, I think. Or maybe it teleported or some shit, I don’t know what kind of stuff aliens can and can’t do.
Anyway, following behind wasn’t an option, so, uh… well, we had to just infer where it was headed. Which, luckily, we sort of did correctly on the first try.
What we figured was… this thing had a big backpack, and it was going around stealing Geo Charges. It had kind of an obvious M.O., and they’d probably have noticed what was up a long time ago if they hadn’t been ordered to stop active research on the samples and stow them. Security for most of the places these things were stored boiled down to “there was a security camera”, and it could fool those, so… yeah.
Anyway, it wanted more. Were there any it hadn’t taken yet? To answer that question… well, I sat around the scientists’ sort of lounge/lab/office situation they had going on there, hiding under a desk any time one of the murder agents came to check on them. Took a couple hours for people to respond, but we eventually got a few people who were like “What are you all talking about? We totally still have our sample!”
We put those people on a map, and… found that basically everywhere in Country had been robbed, except for a group of Reach Stations that were arranged roughly in a line. To be precise: a line between Rural Village, where Dr. McAllister was, and Capital.
Officer J: It was making its way towards Capital?
Yeah, you get the idea. We couldn’t really establish when everyone else had been robbed, but- y’know, Country’s sort of long and narrow, it made sense that it’d be working its way from one end to the other. Capital’s right there up against Neighboring State, though, so I wasn’t sure if it was going to continue on from there.
The scientists were pretty sure they weren’t, though. Because… okay, I said everyone either had their shit missing or didn’t, but there was another category: people who didn’t know what the status of their sample was, because the government had already claimed their sample and shipped it off to… see if you can guess.
Officer J: The Two-Hemisphere Trade Conference?
Yeah, if you’re wondering how I ended up involved over there, that’s pretty much why. We figured- okay, the government is bringing the Geo Charges to the trade conference in Capital to, like, somehow use them as a threat in negotiations. Which means there were going to be a bunch of them in one place, which meant the alien was probably going to collect the ones he’d missed at that stop.
Anyway, long story short, that guess was right on the money. That’s totally where the alien was going. And… so, fixing the problem was pretty easy! We just called up the people on the next stop, told them about the alien and to be ready for it to try to steal the thing, and then… well, a couple hours later, we got a call saying that that they’d shot it to death.
It’d been immune to bullets, they’d said, so they got out some rocket launchers and just went to town on it. Chunks of the thing went everywhere- when it wasn’t cloaked, it was sort of a brown, scaly lizard-type thing, from what they could tell. They couldn’t really make heads or tails of its anatomy- for one thing, it didn’t have, uh, blood. Like, it was an organism that didn’t rely on liquid circulation for… whatever it is blood does in species on our planet. Carry nutrients? Put oxygen in places? Something like that. It just didn’t need to do that.
Anyway, they’d recovered the Geo Charges, and confiscated a bunch of its equipment. And I’d love to tell you all about the other interesting things they learned from investigating its corpse bits and stuff.
Officer J: But?
But they didn’t tell us any of it, because it was super classified and secret and stuff. So… I didn’t really learn anything from that.
Not to skip ahead too far, but… I mean, I met that thing in person later. It’s… it’s really weird how it moves. I think the no blood thing was related- it wasn’t squishy the way you expect living things to be. Not because it had an exoskeleton- just, because the stuff that made up its body didn’t need to flex, really. It was brittle, except I guess when it didn’t want to be, like when it had to bend or move. Some kind of weird way that it could… sort of go between being soft and hard at will? It definitely seemed a lot like a living thing, not a robot.
Also: no eyes. No head, even- I think it… absorbed light through its body, or something? Like all of it was one giant eye? That’s what I figured, anyway- you can’t sneak up on it, it doesn’t have a “behind it” or anything. It could be sticking half a foot out from behind a corner and that foot would still see you.
It was just like, this sorta… I said it looked like a tongue depressor earlier, and that’s the best comparison still, I think. The only difference, besides the scales, was how the sharp corners of the tongue depressor were rounded off, and of course all the creepy little baby doll arm-looking arm hand thingies all along the sides. Like a big tongue depressor centipede. Not a lot in the way of markings or facial features or identifying anything. Carrying a gun.
But yeah, I didn’t know any of that at the time because government secrecy shit. So instead of learning anything about the alien, I just went home. Or, uh- not home. To the library, to hide out. I figured, okay, I saved the world, time to just sort of hide out and figure out how to use time travel to evade the feds and get super rich and stuff. And also time to feel bad about how Greg got killed in my place, but… I mean, I saved the world, I figured it evened out.
Officer J: So… how did you end up at the Two-Hemisphere Trade Conference?
Well, I ended up there because it turned out I was super wrong. The alien didn’t blow up the world. Something else did, and whatever it was, the planet still totally exploded. About fourteen minutes later than it was supposed to, but still- boom.
So… okay. Clearly, if it’s not the alien, then… it’s probably the government fucking up with their superweapons at the trade conference somehow. That’s where all of them are, or at least it’s where they’re supposed to go if their incredibly-insecure-against-time-travelers private website is any indication.
Here’s the problem: if I want to do anything about this, I need to get to Capital, or get in contact with someone else in Capital. And guess where else had the relevant flights from Town grounded? That’s right, Capital. I couldn’t just take a plane there- even if I got out of the hospital in time, I’d need to get to the airport all the way in Borough first, and that’s a long drive, considering how far out in the sticks we are. That’s probably… like, five hours, by car? Then the next flight I can get even over there is a four-hour wait, and then a two-hour flight to a transfer in Marina City, which is another two hours, and then another hour in the air and another two-hour layover in Metropolitan Area, and finally another four hours to the capital. That’s like, what, 20 hours to get there? I’ve only got 33 total, which leaves me with a little over thirteen hours to save the world.
Which- hey, that’s probably enough, right? Yeah. You’d think that.
10 - Getting There
So, you know that flight I mentioned hypothetically? It was as miserable in actuality as you’d think. There is nothing you can do, as a time traveler, to make a plane flight not take so goddamn long.
I could’ve maybe tried to get myself involved with… I dunno, the plane scheduling, try to hack the whole… whatever system they have for deciding these things, so they’d redirect a flight to go where I want? But, well, going on an airport hacking adventure would probably have taken more subjective time than just not doing that- plus, resetting in that case would be a serious pain without a gun. So… I just put up with it.
Since I’d be waiting four hours anyway, I didn’t try to escape the hospital or anything. I had that part down to like 40 minutes, since the tests and fussing and whatever all the doctors were doing could take some shortcuts if I provided some medical information from when they’d run tests before. Other stuff, I had no way of plausibly knowing on my own- or, rather, they weren’t legally allowed to take my word for it, and had to do the tests because everyone has to do the tests because if they don’t do the tests then they could get sued, and like 99% of what hospitals do is about not getting sued.
Anyway, then… there was that five-hour drive, which was boring and nothing really happened there. Then a bunch of time waiting at the airport, where nothing really happened. And a bunch of time on a plane, where nothing really happened, and-
Oh, crap, hang on, technically this is the current timeline! This is stuff that actually happened! I don’t think I ended up resetting any further than landing in Capital, so I could totally rewind and check on exactly what happened!
Officer J: Wait, please don’t-
Hey, don’t worry about it. Snapping my own neck works, and I’m sort of used to the slow asphyxiating brain death thing by now. It’s not as bad as getting shot in the heart or the lungs or whatever, since when you snap the spinal cord it fucks up a lot of your sensory processing. I think what happens is technically blinding, agonizing pain, but it’s bad enough that you can’t even tell that’s what it is. It’s just… whoosh, a bunch of brain static and then you get kicked out to time control.
Officer J: Still, that’s-
Yeah, I’m not gonna, at least for this. Like I said, nothing really happened. It was a super boring trip. I don’t need to check on, like, the specific wording of what the ticket taker said when I got on, or anything. It was a trip totally devoid of government assassins, tongue depressor aliens, meteor chunks, or mortal peril. When things got interesting was…
Well, let’s not skip ahead. Or, well, obviously we’re gonna skip ahead, but first I guess I should tell you what the plan was. The plan was- I’d get the prime minister’s attention, tell him about how his plan doesn’t work and blows up the planet, and then once he cancels the plan I find out how to not die or get arrested.
Officer J: But you decided it’d be simpler to kill him, instead?
No! I didn’t- okay, wow, I shoulda really cleared this up a lot earlier, but- I didn’t kill the prime minister! He just… sort of… died… as a result of my actions.
Officer J: That sounds a lot like killing him.
Okay, no, that’s not true at all. I- listen, I’ll get to that, okay?
So- okay, I figure, the easiest way to get to the prime minister is just… sort of, walking up to where he’s gonna be, and talking to him, right? That probably won’t work, because he’s got guards and stuff responsible for preventing that from happening, but that sort of thing I can trial and error around. That’s plan A- just head directly for the guy, and improvise my way past whatever’s in the way.
First, I have to find out where that is, so- remember I said in this attempt, I checked the spreadsheet? I used those login credentials I stole from Blondie, checked the requisitions page, and found the address the Geo Charge was being sent to. Or, where it was supposed to be sent to before it got stolen by an alien. Maybe that wouldn’t go directly to the prime minister, but it’d probably get me closer to where I needed to be, and I could sort of puzzle it out from there.
I get off the plane no problem, and head towards… this big hotel. You know the one?
Officer J: The Accordion?
Yeah, that one. The one with all the concentric U shaped buildings and gardens and stuff. Big, prestigious five-star deal, totally bought out for all the foreign dignitaries and corporate bigshots there for the trade conference. One of those places that basically only exists for rich people to totally buy out, because it’s way too fancy and expensive for normal people. Sits empty except when there’s a big event.
(Also there’s a secret reason it sits empty, which is that they have one of those secret lab Reach Stations underneath it and don’t want people finding out, but I’ll get to that.)
So, yeah, I just call a cab and… go there. Is what I try to do, before the cab stops. The driver isn’t expecting this, so we get out and she pops the hood and tries to figure out, hey, what the heck is going on with her car?
Then, uh, the scariest thing happens to me. The thing that happens is that a dozen tiny, invisible hands all grab me from behind at once, and something cold wraps around my mouth.
Officer J: The alien?
Yeah, that guy. He’s all- well, I dunno if aliens have gender or whatever, but I sort of started calling him “he”, because he sort of reminded me of this one classmate Jake, and-
Officer J: How did he remind you of…?
Oh, Jake was this guy who led this study group, and he was ridiculously bossy about it, but also really bad at communicating with anyone? Kept getting mad at people for not keeping to obligations they didn’t know they had? Which… y’know what, yeah, tongue depressor alien is Jake now.
So… Jake had me, and he, uh… well, first he ripped my ears off, which wasn’t great. I think he was just trying to… pull my head apart, and thought my ears made good handles? When that didn’t work, and I started screaming and bleeding and writhing in pain and all that, he just… well, I didn’t get a good look at it, because he sort of had me from behind, but I felt cold metal against the back of my head. And then some sort of scratchy thing came out of whatever it was, and started scratching the back of my head, and then scratching it a lot faster, and then I sort of lost track of what that felt like because it started burrowing into my head and causing a ton of pain.
Anyway, uh… that should’ve just killed me, is the thing. But… it didn’t. Not immediately. It, uh… well, it did, but… I didn’t get kicked out to the time state thingy. I felt my consciousness sort of separate from my brain, which-
Did I go over that already, actually? You know how when I’m tired or asleep or dying of brain deoxygenation, I’m fine as soon as I’m dead? It’s pretty weird, because I’ve definitely killed myself in ways that should’ve caused serious brain damage. Whatever sort of altered mental state I’m in at the time, dying just sort of… cures it.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, actually. Like… what is my mind? It’s my brain, right? But if my brain gets destroyed, I’m fine, my mind gets to time travel. But I remember stuff my brain experienced. It can’t just be that it copies my brain at the time of… whenever it decides I count as dead. Otherwise I’d be… even more fucked up in the head than I already am. And it can’t copy my brain from some earlier point, because I remember everything. Whatever it’s doing, it’s not just saving and loading- it’s like I’ve got a second, time-traveling mind that only sort of mimics what the real mind does, and knows how to ignore the parts that are dangerous.
And even if that’s the case, how does that make sense? I’m a human being, yeah? So how should this… alien time travel fireball or whatever it is, how should it even know how to mess with the human brain at all? Shouldn’t it be set up to work with alien brains? Or are the aliens so advanced that they’ve figured out not only time travel, not only the inner workings of their own minds, but also how to understand minds in general? Advanced enough to have some kind of time machine that, even when it’s on fire, can embed itself in a totally unknown lifeform’s head and give it a natural-feeling interface that near-perfectly preserves brain function?
Honestly, the idea that aliens have technology like that, but are also big enough dumbasses to not try and figure out any way to communicate before coming here and pulling off some kind of globetrotting bomb heist… scratch that shit I said about Jake attacking me being the scariest thing. This is the scariest thing. They leave things like that in the hands of total morons who maybe accidentally blow the planet up repeatedly? Makes you think- whatever’s out there, maybe we should be glad we haven’t met them yet.
But, uh, right, where was I going with this tangent? Jake killing me, right. Jake killing me didn’t, uh, kill me properly. Because… like I was saying, there’s sort of a disconnect between my brain when it’s being destroyed or fucked up, and my brain when I’m time traveling. Normally. Jake… made that sort of not happen so cleanly. I felt what he was doing, partially unstuck in time and partially very much stuck in time, which was slowly moving forward as he drilled into my fucking head.
I think my thought process there was… “oh shit, he’s stealing the time machine out of my head”. Doing something to stop me from just rewinding and escaping. Which… as far as I can tell, is actually what was going on? Except… he fucked up, and I was able to start rewinding before he could… actually get it out.
When I got back to the airport, I, uh… kind of had a laughing fit of sheer relief. I’d survived that- and not only had I survived that, but it never even happened! Whatever mistake he made, he’d probably make it again next time! He almost killed me, but from now on, he’d always almost kill me!
That’s how I convinced myself not to curl up in a ball of terror, anyway. More realistically, it was possible whatever he was doing there was something fiddly and easy to screw up, and I’d just gotten lucky. Or maybe Jake was, uh, immune to time travel or something, and next time he’d get it right. So… I really didn’t want to go through that again, if I could help it. I needed to find a way to make that not happen again.
Thing is, I wasn’t sure, like, how the fuck I’d gotten in that situation to begin with. Jake sorta… came out of nowhere, there. I wasn’t sure when he got the scent of me, or why he- well, no, I kind of guessed why, it was because he wanted to collect whatever time thing was in my head- but I was in the dark about how I’d given myself away.
I had to think- like, okay, he’d been going around stealing Geo Charges for a while, including from Town, but he hadn’t noticed me for the whole three months I was in that coma. And… I hadn’t done any time travel during that cab ride, so he probably didn’t twig to it just then.
Actually, wait, I don’t think I ever figured that out for sure. My best guess was… he had something that could track the time thing in my head, but only after I’d, uh, activated it when I got out of the coma? And by that time, he’d moved on from Town, so… the only time he’d have been in… range, of me? Would’ve been when I flew to Capital, where he was? It probably didn’t take him too long to notice me after he landed- I’d been in the cab for a good ten minutes or something like that.
In order to actually figure out what Jake’s deal was, I was going to have to experiment. Problem was, I didn’t want to risk him getting at my head again- what if he somehow didn’t fuck up the process next time? That’d be my goose 100% cooked. So… what I needed was an emergency exit, for if he caught up to me again. A way to die on the spot, if he got close enough to grab me.
First thing I did was get a gun. Now, Country is a civilized place, not like Nation, or god forbid Federation, so that wasn’t… easy. I couldn’t just walk into a store and buy one, so I had to get creative. I remember trying… a bunch of stuff, but the one that finally worked was a variant on my first idea. I just… well, first I found a brick, and then I found a police squad car. The original idea was to lure a cop into an alley, knock him out, and then take his gun, but… did you know they always drive around in pairs?
Officer J: No, I have no idea how my job is done.
Oh, right. Fair point. Anyway, that one didn’t exactly… work? It might’ve worked if I was persistent, because I did manage to get them to get out of the car and follow me into an alley, or at least a deserted area near the airport, but the actual knocking them out part didn’t go real smoothly. I figured that part would be easy, with the brick, but they’re sort of… trained to deal with people attacking them? And they kept doing it… not always nonlethally, but never with a headshot, so every time I failed was super painful and difficult. One time I actually couldn’t find a way to get myself killed at all, and only died after they arrested me and Jake stopped their car and killed me again. Terrifying, but sort of reassuring, in that it meant it wasn’t a freak accident that he screwed up.
Anyway, I tried a slightly different tactic after that. You know how there’s patrolling officers in cars, but there’s also like the undercover plainclothes people?
Officer J: Not normally. We only go undercover when we’re trying to expose something. Was there-
A sting operation? Yeah, but I had to find it first. I went to the same cops I’d tried to attack, and started spinning a bunch of wild stories about sting operations gone wrong. Like, I guessed there was a drug bust downtown, and they hadn’t heard anything about that, so I ran into the nearest building and went out the window. I tried, like… probably a couple dozen stories on them?
Officer J: No matter how many lies you try, you’re not going to trick them into believing in a sting operation that never happened.
Hahahaha! No, no, that’s sort of the problem! That’s why I had to try so many times! They totally did believe me a bunch of times, and went and asked me for more information. But that wasn’t the point, right? The point was to guess correctly about a real operation that I didn’t know anything about, and get them to ask something like “you mean Officer Bob, who’s down the road trying to bust a human trafficking ring?” when I guessed enough details right.
Anyway, I basically got that, although a few leads didn’t work out right. Like, one was a dramatic drug bust, but it was on the other side of Capital more than ten minutes away. I didn’t have that kind of time! I eventually landed on a spill about someone they’d sent in to investigate health code violations at the overpriced airport restaurants, because I guess the police are in the health inspecting business nowadays.
Officer J: That’s part of the Expanded Civilian Well-Being Ruling from the parliamentary-
Yeah, I don’t-
Officer J: -committee on public safety. Standby police personnel can be requisitioned by the Department of-
I really don’t give a-
Officer J: -Disease Prevention, in the event that sufficient evidence is found to suggest-
Yeah yeah yeah yeah okay, whatever. Cop stuff. All I knew was that there was someone at the airport who was poking around employees-only areas alone, a short distance from where I got off the plane. I thanked the really confused officers, jumped out a window, and found her in pretty short order after that. I had to reset a few more times after I followed her into places with witnesses, but pretty soon I, uh, let’s say talked her into giving me her gun behind an understaffed Quesadilla Chime.
Officer J: Talked her into.
Yeah, totally. I figured, if I didn’t want a repeat of the Greg thing, I should do it nonlethally. You know how hard you have to hit someone in the head with a fire extinguisher to knock them out without killing them?
Officer J: I can’t say I do, no.
Yeah, I didn’t either. That’s why I took her gun and, uh, did some studying. Hypothetically, I could’ve done that studying by hitting her at varying strengths and then just checking for a pulse afterwards. But, instead, I, uh, just talked to her.
Officer J: What did you say?
It’s not important! Words, and stuff! Whatever!
So, gun in hand, I went back and got the cab again. This time, I decided to switch things up one at a time, see what it took for Jake to get me. First thing I tried was, uh, just sitting in the car instead of getting out when the driver went to check the engine. That didn’t work- he totally just popped the door and went for me. With the gun and forewarning, though, I managed to shoot myself before he could grab my head.
Second experiment was, uh… I told the cabbie to take a different route. I don’t think cabbies are used to customers asking them to take longer and more expensive routes to their destinations? She was really confused at first, trying to tell me that, no, she already was taking the shortest route, honest. I’m not sure she bought it when I explained that no, I wasn’t being sarcastic, but she didn’t really question it much further.
That third time, Jake didn’t show up until we turned back onto the original route, really close to the Accordion. It was like a twenty minute drive, then- I’d bought myself more time. There was a problem though, which was that, uh, Jake got me that time, for real. Snuck up on me before I could ready my gun, and then my hands were bound.
I played around with some way to do it more efficiently, so ultimately I had to bite the bullet.
Officer J: Bite the bullet?
Right, literally. Or… the cartridge, anyway. I finagled a way to sort of… hold the cartridge in place with my teeth, and then bite down hard to make the cap thingy hit the powder and fire the bullet in my mouth. It took me a bunch of fumbling around to get the hang of it, because biting down hard enough and fast enough without it just slipping out of your teeth is tricky, but I eventually gave myself, like, my own cyanide tooth sort of situation- just with a bullet in my mouth.
So, fourth experiment- instead of taking a cab, I just waited at the airport for him to come to me. And… he didn’t. He only got me when I took a cab again- except that time, he got me about fifteen minutes into the route. That was taking the shortest path, the same one he originally found me on- and it was really close to the Accordion.
I had a theory, so I tested it by using a sequence of events that would take me to the Accordion unmolested. First, I waited at the airport for about twenty minutes, then I took a cab the long away around. That one took me longer than any of my previous tries, and… worked. I was there, and he wasn’t sneaking up on me and killing me.
The theory was… Jake wasn’t after just me. What else did I know he wanted? The Geo Charges, over at the Accordion. If we were both headed to the same place from the same direction, and he noticed I was nearby, attacking me was probably an attack of opportunity. If he got to the Geo Charges before I got close enough to be worth attacking, maybe he’d be distracted.
I don’t think that was quite it, but it’s hard to tell with fuckin’ tongue depressor aliens who can’t talk. Either way, it worked. I was outside the hotel.
11 - The Diplomatic Approach
So- hang on, you got a phone?
Officer J: Not in the interrogation room, no.
Dang. No way for you guys to start playing the Mission Implausible theme?
Officer J: I’m afraid not.
Okay, okay, fine. Fine. But it was playing in my head the whole time, okay? That’s a really important detail that you gotta get down.
Officer J: Noted.
So… step one was just walking straight in. Through the front door. This was… surprisingly not that big of a problem. It was a hotel, and strictly speaking I could’ve gone in and asked for a room. They’d have told me it was all bought out, but… they still had to have the front desk available. I went in there, and- you been there before? The lobby is one of those really… it’s like, someone wanted art deco, but someone else wanted minimalism, you end up with very fancy minimalism. Lot of white marble and empty space, plus patterns in gold trim everywhere.
Actually, whatever. Who cares? I’m not here to give you a hotel review. I walked in there with my bullet in my mouth, and asked the receptionist where the prime minister was. He didn’t know, and then as soon as he said that he reached under the desk and a guy in a suit and sunglasses stepped out of a nearby door, because I guess the front desk guy had instructions to call a Secret Service whoever if someone tried to get to the prime minister.
The guy proceeded to stand there and not shoot me. Which was… weird. They were all about murdering me, earlier. Here I was, this scruffy-lookin’ dude with piercings and a metal band t-shirt, asking to see the prime minister, and the Secret Service guy is like… “this is probably fine.”
I figured the main thing there was… I hadn’t mentioned anything about the Geo Charges yet. They had no idea I knew about their big genocidal mass destruction conspiracy thing- I was probably just some crazy person, and they’d make a lot of trouble for themselves if they ran around murdering every crazy person who wanted to meet the prime minister.
I tested that theory by telling the receptionist “The prime minister needs to know about how his earthquake superweapons are going to blow up the world”, and then the shades guy pulled a gun and shot the receptionist and then me. So… I was sort of on the money there.
Going back to before I talked to the receptionist, I just wandered off down a side hallway. I figured… they wouldn’t try to stop me, right? Not unless I got close to where the prime minister actually was. If I ran into someone trying to stop me, that was a good thing.
So, uh… trying to think, did anything happen before I found him? I went past, uh, this one hallway that was full of mingling dignitaries. Y’know, all the people who were there from whatever country they were from, for the Two-Hemisphere Trade Conference? You could tell it was all the ambassadors and stuff, because it looked like a really racist Halloween party where everyone was dressed up as people from other countries. Except, y’know, they were actually people from those countries, wearing what counted as fancy clothes from wherever they were from. I just sort of… went around looking for the prime minister, because maybe he’d be there, right?
Anyway, he wasn’t, and I was starting to get weird looks from people, on account of how I obviously didn’t belong and also wasn’t talking to anyone about trade policy. So… I just sort of kept going. A couple of foreign security people sort of followed me for a while, but once I left the hall and turned the corner they stopped caring. Apparently this wasn’t the sort of thing where you needed, like, a badge to get in? Or maybe it wasn’t the actual conference yet, and the people there weren’t really high-profile enough to be assassinated anyway. I dunno, but the long and short of it was that I was able to walk into this big room full of ambassadors and not get stopped by security despite totally looking like the sort of punk-ass mess of a creep who might be there to assassinate someone. Go figure.
So I left, but… wait, no, I’m forgetting again. I didn’t just leave- I asked a few people where the prime minister was, but like half of them didn’t speak Language and the ones who did didn’t really know. They did know that he was supposed to actually be in the hotel somewhere, though, so I was in the right place.
(Side note, like, who sends an ambassador to a place they don’t speak the language of? I guess maybe there’s interpreters who weren’t around for some reason? I dunno. Maybe everyone was just speaking National.)
Anyway, I think after that was just… a lot of wandering the halls of a huge empty hotel? It was kind of relaxing, actually. The Accordion is a real pretty place, especially the outdoor parts. Lots of gardens with hanging flowers and stuff. The place I ended up in was… mostly red ones? Roses and stuff? It’s the one in the middle, surrounded by the smallest of the U-shaped buildings. All terraced and stuff.
To actually… go there, I had to get past a Secret Service guy. To get to the garden from the inside bit- and you can’t get there from the outside, it’s sort of elevated and I’d have to climb a big wall- there’s just a couple archways at the ends of the U, and those were both guarded.
Plan A was to just go up and ask the guy if the prime minister was there, and if I could see him. I’d’ve felt pretty stupid if that worked and I didn’t try it until after I got myself shot like a gazillion times.
So, uh… lemme try and remember. This guy was… um, older, super tall, super buff, really intimidating. I think that’s why I had the luck I did with him, though- a lot of those guys aren’t the most imposing, and they’re trained to consider everything a potential threat. Their kill orders aside, they were afraid, or at least on edge. This guy… I guess he was more confident. Didn’t think he was in danger, so he thought he could take his time talking things out.
I forget exactly what he said after I asked and he laughed in my face. Told me something along the lines of “no, you can’t just walk up and talk to the prime minister, that’s not how it works.”
I rolled the bullet around in my mouth. I had as many tries at this as I needed. I’d never properly been in a position to talk it out with one of these guys- their indiscriminate killing policy made it kind of impossible to tell them what I needed help with. The prime minister, though- if I could talk my way into getting an audience with him, I could talk to the one guy who knew about the plan but wouldn’t shoot me if I mentioned any important information, and who could call off the dogs who would.
I didn’t have to try too many times, though- I just did the number trick. He picked 545, and since I never got his name, that’s what I’m gonna call him. I proved to 545 that I was either a time traveler or a mind-reader, and that for incredibly urgent but unspecified reasons, I needed to speak with the prime minister about time stuff.
545 told me that the prime minister was busy right now, actually, and couldn’t take an audience right now- but that he’d be able to talk later. I asked him when later was, and he said he’d probably have a few minutes free before the conference itself. And I asked when that was, because if it was after midnight, there could be a problem. I mean, I didn’t tell him that reason, that’s just why I asked when it was.
Anyway, apparently I had time. The conference was pretty late at night by my clock- it’d run from 10pm to 1am- but right before then, 545 could… not take me to the prime minister, that was too big a risk, but have me radio him. I couldn’t think of any reason that’d be a problem, so… I agreed to wait.
(By the way, if you’ve been keeping track of the times, you might notice that the planet blows up in the middle of that conference. 00:28:40, specifically. Probably a connection there!)
Anyway, 545, with some severe-looking lady with big eyebrows he called over to help him, took me to a hotel room to wait. It was pretty nice, actually. Not like the standard hotel room- bigger, with high ceilings and a kitchen unit and a balcony that looked over the central garden that I wasn’t allowed to approach. Kind of made it obvious that the prime minister was in there somewhere, but at that point I didn’t really care where he was- because, hey, everything was taken care of. Nine or ten hours, and I’d be able to talk to the man himself.
So… I just watched let’s plays on my phone for about an hour, while Eyebrows stood guard by the balcony and 545 whispered stuff into the radio in the bathroom. After a while, 545 finished talking to whoever he was talking to, and started keeping an eye on me and my phone. Apparently he wasn’t really hip with the kids and their video games and stuff? He had a lot of questions about the mechanics of Urban Crime Simulator 4.
It went on like that... until we heard the sound of the door to the room opening and closing. And, uh, it wasn’t like we weren’t looking in that direction. I was sitting on one of the huge beds, but I was facing the door, and 545 was looking over my shoulder, so… I mean, we weren’t looking directly at the door, but we looked up when we heard the sound, and we could totally tell that the door hadn’t opened. The only indication that anything had happened was the sound.
Officer J: Wait, isn’t that what happened with-
Dr. McAllister and Jake, yeah.
“Hey, gun dude?” I asked. “I kind of forgot to mention, uh, one of the things I need to tell the prime-”
“Ah, shit on my tits, I fucking died!” the let’s player on my phone said, as there was a flash of light from near the door and 545 disintegrated before my eyes.
I was panicking pretty hard, and I think the next thing I said was… “Eyebrows! Shoot me in the head! NOW!”
I felt invisible hands wrap around my arms, and then- boom, kicked out to time control. Eyebrows apparently didn’t need telling twice, when her coworker had just been vaporized and I was the only visible suspect in the room.
So… I rewound to about a minute before that happened, and put down my phone.
“Hey, uh… I really need to mention, one of the things I need to tell the prime minister… is probably something you guys should know about.”
“Is it a security threat?” he asked. “Because otherwise, it’s not really my concern.”
And I go, “Is, um, an invisible assassin with advanced cloaking technology lurking around the hotel, like… that’s a security threat, right?” I figured mentioning that said assassin was an alien wasn’t super duper necessary.
His expression got… uh, well, his expression was always kind of serious, so it was sort of imperceptible, but his expression got serious. “Yes, it is. Can we have more information about the security threat?”
“The security threat is immune to bullets, but vulnerable to rocket launchers,” I told him, relaying pretty much the only intel I had about its vulnerabilities. “Also, it can project holograms, and it’s going to invisibly walk through that door in, like, less than ten seconds.” I could tell how soon it’d be because the let’s player was just about to run out into a clearing that had several snipers covering it, which meant they were about to die and so were we.
“We don’t have rocket launchers,” he told me.
“Then we have to run,” I said, as the door clicked open. “If anything goes horribly wrong, shoot me in the head, and I’ll fix it.”
So… this was one of those things where a lot of shit happened really quickly, over and over again. First, I tried just shoving past and fleeing the room, which got me grabbed, but not gagged immediately, which meant I could tell 545 to shoot me, which he did. Then I tried just… kicking Jake? A bunch of different times? Trying to fight him? That was how I found out that hitting him felt like hitting solid steel and didn’t work. Wriggling away from his grip didn’t work- there were too many hands and they were all way stronger than you’d expect. Then I tried circling back into the room, having him chase me in and then going out once he wasn’t blocking the door, but… well, that’s how I found out that his disintegrator had multiple settings, and he could disintegrate the lower half of my body without destroying the head where the time thingy was. That one stung, but thankfully Eyebrows had my back and shot me in the head. Really reliable, ol’ Eyebrows.
Eventually I had to back up a little further and get some more time. I went over the situation with 545 again, and tried leaving the room before Jake showed up. It, uh, worked, sort of, except that apparently he’d got the scent and followed me. 545 got disintegrated a lot, and Jake seemed capable of following pretty much anywhere we went. He was…
Well, here’s the thing: he wasn’t fast. While fully invisible, he couldn’t really move very quickly- in fact, we could outrun him. Maybe some kind of computational limitation of his hologram projector dealie? Like, his invisibility thing is just projecting holograms of him not being there, but for it to be smooth, he needs to scan and model the environment and calibrate the holograms? I’m just making wild guesses, here, but basically he wasn’t going at full speed while invisible. Hopefully he couldn’t.
On the other hand, while sorta visible, in that glass-like state, he could move just fine, and that meant that as soon as we were out of anyone’s line of sight, he could just close the gap. Plus… he had that ray gun. Big range advantage. Running from him was tough- the only thing we could really rely on was that his aim was worse than, say, Disco Dan’s. With rear support from Eyebrows, or sometimes my mouth bullet, I could reset over and over to make sure we could dodge those shots. Still… even doing everything perfectly, it was getting to be a pain in the ass.
It was after a few rounds of that that I came up with a better plan, back in the room.
“He’s going to come from that way! Is there a back way out?”
They both looked around the hotel room to confirm that- no, there wasn’t. Just the balcony, which led out to the garden, where I wasn’t allowed to go, because the prime minister was there, probably.
I think the line I ended up using was… “if we’re going to escape and warn the prime minister, we need to go, now!”
No- wait, that’s one of the ones they didn’t believe and thought was a trick. Um, was it… “you go out the window and warn the prime minister, I’ll hold it off”? No, that’s not…
Oh, right! Right, duh, I remember. We pushed a dresser up against the door, and then when Jake tried to open the door, they both got freaked out by how it was stronger than 545 and could push past him and the dresser, and that’s when both of them agreed that panicking and jumping off the balcony with me was a good idea.
We were only… a couple floors up, so it wasn’t actually that bad. There were these big hedges and flower bushes and stuff below, and after some trial and error where I landed on a couple unexpectedly woody ones and got moderately impaled, I finally hit one that broke my fall properly.
Oh, also, I should mention- while I was up on the balcony about to jump, I took a quick look around first. Got a good view of the gardens as a whole, including the locations of all the Secret Service people positioned all around it. Actually- I had to reset that one a few times to get a long enough look to memorize it, because Eyebrows kept shooting me if I took too long, but… basically, I had a picture of where the people with guns were, and who’d be able to see me.
Most of the people with guns were in the center of the gardens, at the lowest point of their terraced structure. There were about five of them standing guard around this conspicuously large rosebush in the middle, up against a wall, which… I had a hunch led to a secret prime minister hideaway or something. My hunches tend to be pretty good, and that one was no exception.
So… on landing in a thorny but otherwise non-injurious bush, I tried to group up with 545 and Eyebrows, who’d presumably have some idea of what to do. Unfortunately… their idea of what to do was “tell everyone to start shooting at the thing standing on the balcony”. Which I’d already warned them wouldn’t work.
The plus side, though, was that with everyone looking up at and shooting at Jake, their attention was diverted. It only took me… I think eight tries to get down to the lower levels of the garden without getting noticed and shot by a trigger-happy and rightfully panicked goon.
Unfortunately, there were like five guys down there. Less unfortunately, they were standing in front of a bench, under which cowered none other than Prime Minister Lloyd Pretorius.
“Don’t shoot!” I said, and-
Officer J: Promptly got shot?
No, actually! That’s the crazy thing! They all looked to Pretorius, and he- the actual prime minister- looked me in the eyes and said something to me. I was literally face-to-face with the most powerful person in the world, and he said…
“Caveful of Demons!”
Officer J: ...your shirt?
Yeah, it took me a sec to process that. My wardrobe was kind of the last thing on my mind at the time, y’know?
But… yeah, so, Pretorius recognized my shirt. He made some kind of gesture for the guys around him to chill, and they did- or, they chilled as far as I was concerned. They super weren’t chill about the invisible thing that was running around the garden disintegrating their dudes, and were firing a lot of gun at it.
But yeah, leaving Jake aside for a minute, one of the bodyguard guys was like, what do you mean, sir? And he…
Man, I have conflicted feelings about Pretorius, suddenly. Like… on the one hand, he definitely had a plan to hold Nation hostage with a crazy earthquake bomb, which is pretty horrific. But… the thing is, horrific war crimes are sort of par for the course with prime ministers here, y’know? A lot of the time they just sort of inherit horrific war crimes in progress, and stopping them isn’t something they can technically do without pushing a hundred military staff reallocation bills through the parliament, so they have to pretend like it was their idea and it was justified, or else they look weak and can’t get reelected?
And… you ever listen to Caveful of Demons, Gloria?
Officer J: I haven’t.
Okay, well, I’m gonna pretty much just rehash what Pretorius said when his bodyguard asked, because it’s like, exactly what I thought but I never articulated, y’know? Which is- they have so much to say, y’know? It’s not just music- there’s a message!
Officer J: Sure.
No, no, I see that look. You think that’s not special. But it’s not just the message- it’s the way they get it across, y’know? Like, in Bleeding Martyrs from the Depths, they have that whole section on the 1862 Battle of Border, and they use imagery from classical poetry to frame the whole thing in relation to the military sanctions, so it teaches you about current events and links them to history! And it’s like that with all their stuff, y’know? Bloody Hell-Devils Will Rip You Apart is obviously an allegory for the Botha administration!
Officer J: Pretorius said all that?
Wh- no, I was just pointing out- I mean, he told the bodyguard guy how it’s full of literary references and educational stuff, y’know? And how they know how to tone down the good crunchy guitar stuff when the song needs to say something important, without sacrificing the musical integrity of the song!
Officer J: Okay. I believe you.
You don’t have to believe me- just, look them up after this, okay? Promise me. You won’t regret it.
Officer J: I’m not allowed to promise things to suspected felons.
Aaaaaa, fine. Whatever! Just, keep that in mind.
Anyway, like I was saying, Pretorius had good taste, so that meant that when he saw me, he knew I had good taste, and I guess he figured nobody with good taste could be an assassin, so I was probably safe. Which was… unbelievably good luck, really. I was expecting him to be a tough nut to crack, but getting a friendly audience with him turned out to be a piece of cake.
Uh, a piece of cake except for the homicidal alien heading right for me, anyway. So… uh, I told him we needed to get somewhere safe, fast. Unless he had a rocket launcher on him, anyway. Or maybe a grenade? Or maybe a taser could… disrupt his shielding, somehow? I was sort of mentally kicking myself at that point for not experimenting to find Jake’s weaknesses when I had the chance. I could go back and do that, but there was a fucking 20 hour plane trip in the way, and… ugh. No thanks.
Anyway, he said he had a safe place, and to follow him, and all his bodyguards were like, are you crazy, you can’t let this guy down there! And he was like, it’s fine. And… they couldn’t actually tell him no, so…
The rosebush opened up to reveal an elevator, and we got in the elevator, and also a couple of the bodyguards, and then… we went down. More or less ignoring the carnage happening outside.
Lloyd Pretorius’s number from one to one thousand was 950. I forget the bodyguards- one of them was, uh… somethingteen? And the other I think just picked a thousand. Let’s go with, 17 and 1000 for them, because I didn’t get their names either. Except… actually I don’t think they said or did anything important from there, so never mind, don’t bother having names for them.
The thing Pretorius got stuck on, with my explanation of the time travel thing- before I got into the whole Geo Charge plan- was, wait, if I could time travel by dying, what would happen if someone just imprisoned me without letting me die and escape? Which… was kind of an ominous question for him to ask, actually, since it sort of implied he was planning to do that, but he didn’t, so I guess I don’t have to learn the answer to that. But, I guess what would happen is that the world would blow up later and I’d get free then.
...Actually, come to think of it, I guess I do have to learn the answer to what happens if I get imprisoned and they won’t let me die. Like… I mean, you’re not restraining me so I can’t hurt myself right now, but maybe you’ll do that when I’m done? I’d rather you didn’t, but… I dunno, now that the world isn’t gonna blow up and I can rewind time when I die, it’s hard to care too much about what happens to me.
So… uh, where was I? In the elevator with Pretorius, right. Okay, so… lemme sort of go over how that went.
“So… uh, okay, before I fill you in, I, uh… the stuff I need to talk about, your guys there…” I gestured at 17 and 1000, “have a habit of, um, shooting me if I talk about? So before I can start saying stuff, I need you to, uh, have them put that on pause. The whole ‘killing me immediately’ thing they’ve been doing.”
“No, yes, of course. That order, that’s to make sure nothing disrupts the plan, and… well, as you can see,” he said, chuckling, “that ship has sailed.”
Officer J: What’s that voice you’re doing?
It’s my impression of the Prime Minister! I thought that was obvious!
Officer J: ...Continue.
What, it’s no good? I thought it was fine!
Officer J: It’s fine. It’ll do.
“It’ll do,” great, sure, how polite. I mean- I can’t go down to that guy’s bass, cut me some slack! It’s not like I’m one of those Sunday Evening Live impersonators!
Anyway, I laughed nervously. Because I was super nervous. Can’t stress that enough.
“Right, so… I assume you know about the whole… use the space rocks to threaten Nation with earthquakes if they don’t agree to negotiate, thing? That goes all the way to the top? You’re not in the dark about that?”
He grimaced. “It does, yes.”
“Okay, cool, that makes this easier. So, uh… basically, you know how I time travel when I die? I found that out because, uh, the world blew up.”
He looked… pretty surprised, I remember. “The world blew up?”
“Yeah, it just… bam. And it keeps happening, and I’m trying to make that not happen, and my best guess is that it’s something wrong with the space rocks that shoot through the planet real fast. I got killed, like… a lot, trying to figure out what was up with that. Also, uh… wait, hang on. You know some of them are missing, right?”
“Did… you take them?”
“No, no, no, it’s- uh, okay, do you know anything about aliens?”
“Aliens?”
“Uh, going by the tone of voice there… I mean, they’re crazy space devices, so you know they’ve gotta be from aliens somehow, but, uh… there’s one specific alien. Or maybe more than one, I actually don’t know, but… one of them is here, and he’s the one who’s been stealing those. And… if you’ve got any here…”
“We have a number of them, yes.”
“...then he probably wants those. Also, he wants to kill me, too, because I think he thinks the reason I can time travel is a time machine in my brain, and he’s probably... right? But, uh… we killed him in a different timeline, me and some of your research people, and… that didn’t stop the world from blowing up. So… I figured it’s probably something else that happens here. You have… any idea what might happen that would make the world explode?”
“Nope! I’m the prime minister, and I’m a big idiot who blindly trusts what one military advisor tells him about this experimental space technology that we don’t know how it works, and I literally haven’t thought about any of the risks until this very moment because I just assumed no one would ever exaggerate how safe it was!”
Officer J: ...He said that?
Nah, I’m just paraphrasing, but that was basically it. He seemed totally surprised that anything could go wrong, here- or rather, totally surprised that “this going wrong” could mean something other than “we don’t succeed in causing an earthquake”.
On the plus side, he totally believed everything I said. I think… mainly because of how I lucked into wearing a t-shirt with his favorite metal band on it? It should really not be that easy to get a world leader to change their fate-of-the-world plans, but… well, it worked out.
What he agreed to do was… well, first, he’d instruct the people to double-check what they were doing first. I’m… not exactly sure why they weren’t doing that already, and didn’t think it’d really help, but the plan was he’d try that, see if the world still blew up, and then if it did, I’d come back and tell him it went wrong, and he’d see about trying to make the threat without substantiating it with a demonstration, see how that went.
It sounded like a good plan, but the problem after that was, uh… there was a homicidal alien running around trying to kill me. I couldn’t check if the plan would work unless I first survived, which I made clear to him.
That’s when the elevator stopped, and we stepped out into a big room full of people in suits and/or lab coats. Everyone snapped to attention and saluted, and then a few people ran up and started asking him a zillion questions I could barely follow. Pretorius started answering them rapid-fire, filling people in on the basic situation- Jake upstairs, trying to get the Geo Charges, bullets not working, total emergency. Some of the people down there were in contact with the surface, and knew what was going on up there.
What was going on up there was… Jake was trying to break down the door to the elevator shaft. Scratch that- Jake had broken down the door to the elevator shaft. We heard a “clunk” from the elevator shaft.
It was time to… GTFO, as the saying goes. They were going to try to divert Jake long enough to hold the trade conference, which- oh, right. There was a whole other line of conversation I forgot there.
Like- this situation’s a clusterfuck, right? Except… the thing is, remember way back when, I was trying to find out why the world was exploding, and I was looking stuff up on the internet a bunch? I was looking for anything, any breaking news or current events that could shed some light on things. Like… “space aliens invade, threaten to blow up the planet” type headlines. And… there hadn’t been a whole lot. I’d actually heard about the Two-Hemisphere Trade Conference, and had dismissed it because all the article said was that it was about to happen and people were there for it.
Except… Jake was normally there. In all the timelines before the world blew up, before I traveled to Capital, he presumably made it to his destination just fine. He’d clearly been there for a while, laying low and biding his time, but… he’d have done something, probably. And whatever it was he normally did, it didn’t change the fact that the world blew up at 00:28:40.
So… what we figured was, whatever Jake was up to, it wasn’t a big enough deal to make headlines, despite the conference being pretty big news. Whatever happened seemed to happen all at once at the appointed time, so…
Well, it was all a good excuse to be optimistic and assume that this relentless alien murder machine wouldn’t fuck up the trade conference any more than it already had. They were gonna go for it.
Pretorius shook my hand, and then handed me off to an old man in a suit, who he instructed to take me to a safe location. I wasn’t sure how capable he was of actually doing that, if this secret underground military lab thing didn’t count as a safe location, but if it wasn’t enough, I’d be able to come back and say so.
Everyone started evacuating the room as more clunks came from the elevator shaft. Some Secret Service guys grabbed Geo Charges- oh, there were a bunch of those around, by the way, this was like their superweapon lab- and ran every which way, down different corridors and stuff. Pretorius ran off in some direction, and the old man took me to… a different elevator.
This one didn’t go up as far, and when it stopped, it took me into a very dark room. Inside that very dark room… were some cars. Actually, it was a lot like that underground garage from the Reach Station in town. And- actually, yeah, I think the old guy checked out the car from a lady at a desk, so… probably the same setup.
Anyway, we got in a car, and… onto… a weird strip of road? Which pointed straight at a wall?
I was really confused until suddenly the car accelerated super fast and shot straight towards the wall, which opened up to reveal it was the wall that you’d have to climb to get up to the gardens from outside. And… it had a special little road that went onto the highway, and then boom.
We received radio confirmation that the assailant was in pursuit, and then the old man put on some showtunes that we listened to all day until 12:27 am, on the highway. Man, he was a cool old man, as far as people belonging to a mass murder conspiracy went. Had a huge collection of showtunes. We got through like three entire musicals on that trip, and stopped at this nice restaurant on the way after everyone was pretty sure we’d lost Jake, who’d eventually given up on the thing where he was chasing us on foot, on the road, totally not invisible at all.
At 12:27 am, I got out my phone, and started counting down the seconds. It hit 12:28, and then we had 40 seconds left, and I thanked the old guy for a pretty sweet road trip all things considered, and then… it hit 00:28:40.
And the planet didn’t blow up.
And then the old man and me cheered and laughed and put on more showtunes, and two minutes into Dancin’ Down Dandelion Drive, the god damn planet blew up.
“Oh my god, no, hold on!” I told Pretorius, rewinding to the elevator. “It didn’t work. Blew up again.”
“Wh- you just… what?”
“Hang on, we- actually, no, try that again, but this time… you gotta tell me what’s going on. You gotta… we need to be on the phone at the exact moment it happens, so you can tell me if something weird happens.”
And, uh, zwoop zwoop zwoop zwoop, past a car ride where the showtunes are a little more singable because I’ve heard them before, and then the prime minister calls my cell phone and puts me on speaker during the conference. I’m in his pocket, muted, so I can’t speak up and disrupt anything, but this is… 10pm? Or, it’s 10pm on my phone, but of course I’m all the way in Capital, so really it’s like four in the afternoon. Except we’ve been on the road for like ten hours, so… I think it was like six where I was at? Whatever, I’m gonna stick with Eastern Country Time for this so it doesn’t get confusing.
Anyway… it starts pretty boring. When Pretorius gets the chance, he sort of paints me a picture of the room, which is like… one of those big round rooms where it’s like, an auditorium, but it sort of wraps around on all sides? What do you call those? Stadium seats?
Officer J: Like an in-the-round theater?
Sure, probably. That name sounds like what I mean. Pretorius didn’t know either, and I didn’t look it up because my dumb phone hangs up calls when I try to look stuff up.
Anyway, it’s big and round and there’s a bunch of desks where all the ambassadors and minor world leaders are sort of sitting around. The first part of the conference is for, like, official mingling? Like they were all mingling in that one hallway before, but this is the part where you’re scheduled to just go around and have conversations with people, before the actual proceedings.
Then, uh… he has this conversation with President Austrese from Nation. And… Pretorius speaks National, and I don’t, so I don’t actually know what they talk about for like, a half hour there. Judging by the tone, though, it’s a bunch of like, really tense intimidating sort of stuff, where they keep pausing to think and then pausing for effect when they’re actually saying the stuff. Some real Game of Thrones type shit.
Pretorius whispered to me after that it was sort of… Austrese just reiterating that he didn’t plan to back down, and that he hoped things didn’t come to direct conflict, because blah blah blah vague threats. He told me it took some serious effort to keep a straight face, knowing how much better he was about to be at threatening them.
After that was… some more stuff in foreign languages with random ambassador people, which I didn’t understand and which Pretorius assured me was pretty boring to the layman. A couple hours into this mingling section, there’s suddenly this loud banging noise, which I think is someone with a gavel calling everyone to attention? Lot of sounds of people moving around and sitting down in chairs.
Then, Pretorius addressed the room. He gave this speech about, like… international unity? Putting aside differences? Peace and cooperation and all that jazz? It got some polite applause, and then he moved on to part two of his speech. Part two was… pretty much just a callout post for Austrese and Nation. Something something unfair business practices tariffs market distortion isolationist thieving yada yada yada. He made “their import taxes are too high” sound like this really dramatic list of crimes.
After that, he granted the floor to… this other guy? Who I think was from Small Principality? And he had similar stuff to say about Federation, who- y’know, they’re right next to Nation and Nation makes exceptions to their tariffs for them, so they’re basically in bed. And then it was Territory’s turn to make an indignant speech about their enemies, and so on and so forth for like twenty minutes of totally contradicting the spirit of Pretorius’s opening speech.
Then… there was some noise in other languages, and I don’t know exactly what was happening, but suddenly Austrese was the one talking- in Language, this time. He had some stuff to say about how this conference was a joke, and how they’d been trying to keep him from speaking because the real point was to try to put pressure on him to loosen tariffs? Like, apparently everyone who’d been talking before was part of some kind of trade alliance thing, and they were all ceding the floor to each other and not letting the other trade alliance talk?
And then, about four minutes before the world was scheduled to end, Pretorius called someone into the room, which made everyone gasp. Referring to them as “my associate”, Pretorius said some stuff to say on the subject of… the international community holding Nation and their trade alliance accountable. And then, about a minute before the deadline, he instructed his associate to double check “the device” to make sure it was calibrated.
I could hear this uproar of a ton of people acting super shocked in a bunch of different foreign languages, and then sounds of a struggle as Pretorius assured me that no one was going to get close, and that his men had this covered.
Ten seconds before the deadline, there was a weird humming noise, and a lot of gasps.
“You thought you were the only one?” Austrese said, and Pretorius whispered “he’s got one too,” like I couldn’t tell from context. Then there was the same humming noise, and Austrese threatened to use his- from the other side of the planet- if Country tried anything.
The deadline passed- two minutes to the new deadline. And then... the humming noise repeated a bunch of times. Shouting in a lot of different languages. Phones ringing. Total pandemonium- I couldn’t really get a lot from Pretorius because I was muted and couldn’t ask questions, but…
Look, the long and short of it is… everyone had the Geo Charges. Everyone had the exact same plan. The Vulcan Event had dropped meteorites all over the world, y’know? Most of the Nation-affiliated trade alliance people had their own, which they showed off and then sent over to their people in Nation’s embassy on the other side of the planet. And…
Well, the reason the world blew up is that… apparently if you send two of these things through the planet at the same time, even if they’re in their intangible mode thing, they can still crash into each other at the speed of light, and that… makes the planet explode.
You remember the nuclear crisis, a while back? When we all found out about nukes, and there were years of standoffs before we sort of figured out mutually assured destruction and all agreed not to use nukes? This was… basically the same thing, except nobody realized the stakes and they were all making decisions during a single panicky meeting where people were openly threatening each other. One thing led to another, and…
Well. Kaboom.
So… I had to stop this. Simple, right?
Officer J: Kill the prime minister so he can’t set this off?
No, uh… no. I… uh, the thing is, I just explained all that to you, but I sort of… didn’t really get what was going on at the time. In fact, I don’t even know that’s exactly what happened. I’m honestly just guessing. It was all over the phone.
So… I went back in time and warned him, and… the thing about Pretorius is that he’s the same way in real life as he is in his campaign videos. Really… confident. Really sure that he can handle stuff. Really… hard to make him decide not to do something just because it could go wrong. And also… not really cognizant of the difference between “could go wrong” and “will absolutely definitely go wrong, I’m a time traveler and I’ve seen it go wrong repeatedly, you stubborn fuck”.
He was hard to talk to, and I got… mad.
You know, it’s ironic? Someone was too difficult to talk to, so that’s why I gave up on trying to find a diplomatic solution, even though I could’ve kept going until I found out how to break through his walls. It could’ve ended with…
Well, no, I guess it couldn’t have ended with the planet not blowing up. Looking back, the only way I was going to end the situation for good was to do what I did. I could maybe have delayed it, even, uh, indefinitely, but… those things would still be out there, and dangerous, and we’d have a problem.
So… instead of talking to someone who was difficult to talk to, I decided to try talking to someone who was impossible to talk to.
I bit the bullet and went back past all that getting involved with Pretorius and the Secret Service- back to the front desk of the Accordion.
The way I figured it, I was sort of… a target of opportunity. Jake was in town, Jake knew where I was, and if I was nearby, Jake would go a little bit out of his way to come try and rip my head open. So when the plane landed, he was on his way to the Accordion, going down that street, and if I drove down that street in a car, he’d realize I was nearby and go for me. But if I waited, he’d finish going to the Accordion, and I could just go down the road without worrying about it. He’d be there, at the Accordion, biding his time and confirming the whereabouts of… probably the whereabouts of lots of those things, since apparently half the ambassadors and/or suicide bombers at the conference had Geo Charges.
I’m guessing he was sort of invisibly scoping the place out, hoping to find stealthy ways to steal these things from the people carrying them. That sort of seemed to be his M.O.- be invisible and sneak around, but if you get seen, pull out your disintegration ray and eliminate the shit out of witnesses. He may have been resistant to bullets, but if the humans knew he was around, they might start carrying stuff stronger than handguns.
Whatever it is he wanted with the Geo Charges, he probably had no idea his plan had a timer. When shit started going down in the conference room, he was probably off snooping around someone’s hotel room, caught totally off-guard by the dumbass humans using his quarry to blow up the planet.
I figured… we sort of made natural allies. He wanted the time dealie in my head, but it seemed like he wanted the Geo Charges more than the time dealie, judging by how I didn’t become a priority for him to chase down until I blew his cover somehow. Like, I was just sitting in that hotel room with 545 for like an hour, a total sitting duck, and he was off doing something else. But then, after he did go for me and I survived and he had to kill a ton of goons and make a big scene, he was willing to chase me down the highway out of stealth for hours- because, I guess, he wanted the time machine to undo his mistakes.
But… I mean, I didn’t know what Jake wanted with those things, but considering he already had some, using them to blow up the planet probably wasn’t his plan. He wanted those things out of the hands of the politicians who were trying to blow up the world, and I also wanted those things out of those hands.
The problem was… he didn’t speak Language, and he kept trying to kill me on sight. So… the working together with him plan seemed sort of dead on arrival.
Actually- have I bitched about this yet? How fucking bullshit it is that there’s aliens with hyper-advanced brain-scanning time machine technology, but when their shit goes sideways, they’re too dumb to maybe learn how to fucking talk to anyone before spending months on an alien planet trying to stealth their way around? Like, what’s with that? They can make time machines that still work after exploding and burning up on re-entry, messing with brain biology they’ve never encountered before. They can make fancy rocks that phase in and out of reality and shoot around at the speed of light. They can turn fucking invisible and disintegrate people with ray guns! Why the fuck can’t they invent a tourist dictionary?! What the hell is with their priorities?!
Ugh. Whatever.
Anyway… oh, right. I suicided on the goon behind the reception desk door and went back a little further. I stopped by a craft store on the way to the Accordion and bought a whiteboard and some dry-erase markers, then headed into the hotel to go sell out humanity to a homicidal alien.
Finding Jake was… sorry, I almost said that was the tricky part, that wasn’t the tricky part. It was just a tricky part, but way less tricky in comparison to the part that came after I found him. The problem was… he’s invisible, right? Really hard to find an invisible person. I was kind of counting on him finding me, with me just wandering around the hotel and hoping I wandered into surprise attack range. Once he did surprise-attack me, I could do the thing where I follow stuff back in time to track it in reverse.
Anyway… no reason to waste your time. I wasted subjective hours combing through the damn hotel hoping to lure the bastard in, until I finally got jumped at the ass end of one of the U buildings, fifth floor. Bullet saved me just fine- I had the not-being-killed-by-Jake thing on lock.
I mean, not being permanently killed. Being normal killed was still a problem. He was really quick on the draw, so I had to be quicker on the draw- holding up my sign so he could see it before he moved to grab me.
The first attempt was just… I put a drawing of me and Jake on one side of the whiteboard, with the other half full of a bunch of guys in suits carrying Geo Charges. Drew a smiley face between us, to indicate that we were friends in this scenario.
He stared at it for like six seconds, then knocked it out of my hands and tried to kill me.
The thing is… it’s really hard to communicate with a space alien with no exposure to human language. It’s not just that they can’t read words- you can’t even use symbols. Red circle with a diagonal line through it? Smiley face? Thumbs up? Xs and checkmarks? Absolutely useless. Why should any of those shapes mean anything to an alien?
Hell, even actual drawings didn’t really get through that well. I started with a cartoony sort of stick figure approach, but he didn’t really interpret that as anything. I actually ended up rewinding a few times to bone up on some online tutorials, draw some stuff that was less representative and more, uh…
Officer J: Realistic?
Yeah, but I think there’s a word for that, in drawing…? Maybe I’m just imagining stuff. Anyway, it was… agonizing. I tried like, juxtaposing a drawing of him drilling into my head with a drawing of him stealing a Geo Charge, that didn’t work. I tried just writing some words, in the hopes that he could read but didn’t usually care, and that was a no-go. Then I tried…
Uh, so- I’d seen these things before, right? The Geo Charges? They looked like cylinders of bumpy rock, but they also had, like, strips of luminescent color on them in weird patterns. I thought- hey, maybe that’s language! Maybe I could decipher that! So… that time, I took a detour to repeat the whole… teaming up with Pretorius thing, and getting down to his secret bunker with the scientists and the charges and stuff. I gave the closest ones a quick looking over, and memorized some of the layouts.
So then… I went back to dealing with Jake, and tried reproducing the patterns on the Geo Charges, to see if those words meant anything to him.
They didn’t, so I wasted, like, two hours scribbling variants on those shapes, to see if I might luck into writing down some words. I had infinite time, so… that could work, right? Infinite monkeys on infinite whiteboards, eventually reproducing the complete works of Jakespeare?
Well, uh, I only wasted two hours on that, because unlike infinite monkeys, I didn’t have… infinite patience. I think there was actually some effect, though- I was getting somewhere with it, because sometimes he’d pause and look at it for longer before trying to eviscerate me. Still, I was tired of trying to decipher the meanings of alien squiggles by interpreting the momentary body language of a translucent centipede, so I went back to just trying drawings.
The thing that eventually got him to pause and make speech-sounding noises was… a comic. Sequential art. I kind of wish there was any way to take pictures and bring them back in time with me, because-
-oh, shit, hang on! No, that’s- we’re in this timeline, now! Or, I mean, a part of the story that’s in this timeline! Shit that actually happened this time! It’ll diverge a little more later, but this is… I drew that comic, I can just die and go back and look at it!
...Wait, no, hang on! That- I ditched the- no, wait, that was an earlier… I erased it this time, damn. It’s not going to be lying around in the Accordion somewhere.
Uh… anyway, so… I worked super hard on this comic. It was tough to do realism with dry-erase markers, especially considering I’d basically never done art before and was teaching myself on the fly. It’d… I mean, I could go look at it and try and memorize it and copy it down, but that’d take a while, because I had to get creative with the different color markers to indicate light and shadow and stuff.
But… what it basically showed was, uh… there were different rows, and on the top row was a comic showing him attacking me and failing, and that row didn’t go all the way to the end of the whiteboard. The second row was the same, and so was the third row, to get across the idea that him attacking me didn’t work. I was kind of worried about successfully communicating that, because giving him warning that his drill thingy didn’t work might get him to fix his drill thingy, but… I figured that was the most obvious way to get him to try and stop, telling him it was futile.
Fourth row ran longer, and showed us walking over to a suit guy with a Geo Charge, and me distracting him while Jake stole it. Then, it showed suit guy noticing us and shooting at us, and then cut to the fifth row, where we moved slightly differently and got away clean. Sort of a picture of what I was hoping would happen.
So… when he saw that, he stopped being invisible, and tried saying something to me. Obviously, I didn’t understand a single… not even word, it was a sort of weird hissing that sounded like a teakettle boiling. But… it was a start.
A start that stopped really soon when I couldn’t respond in whatever he was speaking, and he made a sort of groaning noise and attacked me and we restarted.
I… had no idea how to speak his language. But… I could try? The sound wasn’t… it wasn’t some kind of impossible synth sound that I couldn’t produce. My guess was… maybe he was trying to confirm that he understood the comic. “You’ll help me get the Geo Charges?” Something like that?
So… if I answered back “you’ll help me get the Geo Charges”... well, he might interpret that as passive-aggressive. I’d need to sort of find a variant on that where I could say “me’ll help you get the Geo Charges”. Trying to pronounce his language probably meant that whatever I said would be slightly off from what it actually was, anyway, so… I just needed to try some different stuff. The scribble approach, but with more of an idea what the fuck I was saying.
“SssSssss sseeee sreeeeee,” I tried, and he attacked me.
“Sssssssssee ssseeSSs sreeee,” I tried again, and he hesitated before attacking me.
“Ssseesss, seeerssss seeee,” I tried a third time, and he recoiled a little before attacking me even faster.
Honestly, if he’d responded the same way all three times, there, I’d have probably given up. Or… no, I’d have probably tried like, eight or nine more times and then given up. But… he was reacting differently depending on what sounds I made! That was almost like communication!
So… after… god, I lost count how many tries, I finally got him to respond to my weird hissing with more hissing. And then… from there, that was even more tries. This whole thing… I’m skipping over it because it was totally mind-numbing, but… fuck, how many hours have I already gone over? There was waking up, the workday, making phone calls, jumping out windows, dealing with Steve and the dean, infiltrating Disco Dan’s, the plane trip, the whole thing with the prime minister… like, a lot happened, and it took a long time. Probably over a week, yeah?
This… part of the reason I have trouble remembering all that stuff in detail… is that it all happened days ago for me. This part… it was less physically painful than getting shot and bleeding out repeatedly, but it was way more frustrating.
You sort of… lose track of time, when you’re doing the same shit over and over.
You know how the time thing sort of… makes it so that when I’m outside my body and doing time stuff, I’m not asleep or brain-damaged or anything like that? Well… I dunno. I didn’t feel sleepy, it’s not like I was suffering from sleep deprivation. Trust me, I’m intimately familiar with that sensation. It’s more like… the opposite of sleep deprivation. I don’t know… exactly what I was, there. People, human brains, they’re designed to fall asleep sometimes. They do… important brain stuff when they’re sleeping. They gotta get their shit in order. If you stay up too long… it’s not like anything physical is happening, right? I’m not a sleep scientist, but I’d guess that the need to sleep is just a side effect of how brains work. You never hear about anyone who has the weird mental disorder of just never sleeping for their whole life. It’s built-in.
So… if that’s how we work, if we need to sleep because of what our brains are doing, what the hell was happening to me? I wasn’t sleeping, but I also wasn’t getting tired. Instead, I got… I guess, more focused. The time machine was somehow… substituting sleep with something else. Something that fucked with my head, made it sort of hard to keep a concept of how long I’d been at it. Whatever… automatic… brain-understander technology it had going on, it couldn’t totally just keep me operating at 100% at all times. Not without… changing some part of how I worked.
I dunno. The upshot is… I spent a long time hissing at that god damn tongue depressor. Trying to figure out his reactions, get him to decide something else. I started out totally blind, no idea what I was doing, but I got, uh… I picked up a few things. If you go “ssssss”, that’s sort of a modifier that talks about yourself, but if you go “ssssss”, that’s more talking about him. I think. It’s hard to explain exactly how I got there- just, like, he’d sometimes sort of look at himself and double check his own situation if I started with “ssssss” instead of “ssssss”-
Officer J: Sorry, wait. Those sounded exactly the same…?
No, it’s like- there’s “ssssss”, but then… “ssssss”. Get it?
Officer J: No, that’s… that’s still the same.
C’mon. It’s not that hard. The first one- you hear the “sss” in the “ssssss”? It’s different from the “ssssss”.
Officer J: I- no, I’m… going to have to take your word for it.
You’re going to have to get your ears checked, Gloria. Seriously. Ssssss.
Anyway, I… I mean, I still couldn’t tell you what the fuck I said. It was just… so, so much trial and error. I think he thought I was carrying on some kind of conversation with him, just in sort of an infinite Republican Room situation where I’d eventually make a sound that sounded like what he wanted to hear.
Officer J: Republican Room?
Y’know, that thought experiment? There’s a lady in a room who doesn’t speak Republican, but she’s locked in a room with a ton of Language to Republican dictionaries, sort of travel phrasebook situations. And Republican people would slip pieces of paper under the door, with questions written in Republican on them. And her job would be to just… look at the slips, find a book that has an answer to that question, and then write that down and pass it out through the door. So to the people outside, it’d look like there was someone in there hearing their questions and answering them, but really it was just someone sort of blindly picking responses out of books.
Officer J: ...hm.
That’s basically what I was doing, but with time travel. Instead of reading books with coherent answers to questions, I was just sort of blindly putting Republican letters in different orders until I hit on a sequence that made the customer walk away satisfied. I got like, a vague idea of how the parts of speech lined up- but no vocabulary, no idea what I was saying.
But… it worked. Somewhere after… I honestly don’t know how long, just forever in this fucking trance state of hissing, Jake made an annoyed noise and then walked away. And then… stopped and looked back, expecting me to follow.
Or… to lead the way? Because when I followed and stopped behind him, he made a sort of disapproving hiss noise, and I just sort of walked ahead. Dunno what I said, but I guess… he already knew I had the time thing, and if I’d somehow gotten across “I will help you”, then… it was probably just a matter of how he expected me to help him.
And that was… he wanted the Geo Charges, so I had to help find them.
Conveniently, I totally knew where they were. Or, most of them, anyway. I’d already led him down there- the Reach Station underneath the Accordion. At first I was like, crap, there’s only one entrance, and it’s guarded by loads of dudes.
Actually- well, I remembered the garage entrance, but after a whole lot of shit with the guards. Because I’m a dumbass. There was just that big fancy rosebush door, in the center of a whole wide-open area full of chest-high flowerbeds to hide behind… like, every video game I’d ever played trained me to recognize where I was supposed to go.
545 turned out to be pretty easy to distract. And, then, uh, for Jake to disintegrate when no one was looking.
…
Officer J: Is something wrong?
Nah, I’m just… that actually happened this time, huh? I guess… hm. He’s… dead right now.
Officer J: 545 being… the Secret Service agent who detained you?
Yeah. He’s, uh… I dunno. He was more chill than like 99% of those guys, and… I dunno. I guess it doesn’t matter. Jake killed way more than just him, so… whatever. Whatever.
Actually- can we be done? I think you sort of get where this is going. It’s… y’know, that’s how my actions led to the prime minister dying. That’s the joke, see? I didn’t do it, but I led Jake right to him. Isn’t that all you need to make a case?
Officer J: We’d like you to complete your statement, if that’s okay.
Sure, yeah, that’s my statement. I led Jake to Pretorius and Jake killed him. The end. That work? You required to keep doing this?
Officer J: I… no. No, if that’s your claim, that’s… all the police department needs to hear.
And… I can go?
Officer J: Nnnnnnno. No, you’re going to stay in custody until you’re called for.
Shit.
Officer J: Are there any more remarks you want to make?
No, no more remarks. I’m done, okay? I don’t want to talk about this shit anymore. I’m… god, I’m such a fucking tool, talking about all that like it was a cool achievement. Like I did anything worth talking about. I just… it’s all a crock of shit.
Officer J: That’s- a crock of- sorry, was that testimony truthful?
Yeah, it was truthful. I guess. Except for I guess any part where I pretended anything I did was a good idea. Like I didn’t just blindly fuckup my way through the situation until I accomplished the bare minimum not-dying.
Officer J: That’s-
Like- the shit I was about to say! What I did to whatshisface with the scar! I almost started talking about that like it was a big hero move! Fuckin’... with the ring!
I saw this guard with a wedding band on his finger, and I had an idea, right? I figured, okay, maybe I don’t need to fuck him up, maybe I can just talk him into giving up! So what do I do? I go “We have Claudia! Don’t move a muscle, or she gets plugged full of lead!” Like, seriously?! I was gonna make that sound all cool like I came up with a good idea?
Officer J: Wait, who’s Claudia?
No one! No one, that’s the idea. I figured he’d be like, who’s Claudia? And he did, that’s what he asked, and I said “your wife”, and he said “idiot” and shot me, which was exactly correct. I was hoping he’d say “her name’s not Claudia, it’s…” and then tell me her name, and then I could keep going with that on the next round.
Except obviously it didn’t work that way, and I went through like six variants on that. “She’s your daughter”, or “she’s your mom”, and I tried some other names, hoping maybe I’d land on it. Except he kept sneering at me and shooting me. Took me that long to read between the lines and start trying to threaten his husband, and then even more tries to make up details about him to “prove” that I really had him.
Finally he believes me, when I identify Colin as five-foot-six Caucasian male who practices the- fuck, shit, I need to stop giving you random people’s personal details. How many times have I slipped up on that? Probably more times than I caught it. God, fuck. You wanna know about Colin? Fucking Colin is a widower now, I guess, because guess what, all of that was a waste of time! Because as soon as I got him to stand aside, Jake just followed behind me and disintegrated him! God!
All this goddamn… tiptoeing through the tulips, sneaking past guards and getting shot by guards and then trying again, just as a total waste of time because Jake would brute force the situation as soon as I solved it.
Like, you know what I was thinking? I was thinking “we gotta get there without being noticed, because otherwise the lab coats downstairs might get warned and scatter with the Geo Charges”! I had a goddamn strategy for killing dozens of people! I was so fucking satisfied with myself after we breached the place and Jake gunned them all down at once! All those innocent people died, and I was like, “ho ho ho, I have outwitted you fools!”
Officer J: ...Wait, innocent- weren’t they part of the plan to-
God, don’t ask me! I don’t know who’d been told what about what! Probably some of them were innocent people who didn’t know what they were doing, or something. It’s not like I checked! Not like I even tried to find a nonviolent solution! I had all the time in the world to figure something better out, but noooo. No, I just had to go with Plan Alien Murder Spree!
Shit, shit, I am so sorry. You having to put up with me acting like King Competent for hours, I can’t imagine what a pain in the ass that must’ve been to listen to, god.
Officer J: Sorry, I’m- I’m curious, what… how did you actually stop…?
What, you want to hear more? Who cares! You want me to tell you how it happened, so you can go “Congratulations Dave! You only got a few dozen people killed instead of everyone! We’re so goddamn proud of you!”
Officer J: ...No, it’s under control. Yes. No, we don’t need- it’s fine.
What was that? Who were you talking to?
Officer J: It’s nothing. They- they’re just worried your shift in behavior could be a problem, but… you’re not getting violent, or anything, so…
Oh, cool, great, there’s more cops listening in. That’s fantastic. Just worried about the shift in my behavior.
There’s no shift in behavior. I left that shit out because it wasn’t relevant, okay? When you can rewind time all the time, you have all the fucking time in the world to rewind and spend a cycle crying in the corner and chewing yourself out for being an idiot. But it doesn’t help, okay? It doesn’t advance the goddamn plot. I didn’t think I needed to give you the lowdown on all the time I wasted.
Hey, if we’re doing full disclosure: maybe I made it seem like I was just running from place to place, doing hero work constantly? Because… no. This shit took weeks. Most of that time wasn’t spent on actually solving the goddamn problem, or anything. You wanna hear about the cycles I spent sitting in my apartment, playing through every game in my backlog? You want me to give you a ten-page report on every single time I gave up and let the world end? The days I spent treating the world like my personal- you want to hear about when I…
Fuck, no, no! No, that didn’t happen! It literally didn’t happen! I’d never do something like that, and I actually fucking didn’t, because it never happened! Fuck! Shut up!
Officer J: I didn’t say any-
Aaaaaaaaagh! You shut up, too! I-
Officer J: I said it’s under control, sir. I don’t need backup.
Fuck, fuck, fuck! If you’re just gonna keep me here until I tell you everything- god damn it! Fine! Fine!
So- we got down in there and killed a ton of people, and Jake took the fucking… whatever the hell they actually were, and arranged them in a big pile. Most of them had patterns in colors, all different colors. Not red, apparently aliens don’t paint shit red, but the rest of them. And then the rest were black. Shit, you think maybe those were just- fuck, that makes sense, they were like ultraviolet or some shit that only aliens can see, why didn’t I figure that out earlier? I’m such a dumbass!
Anyway, he had this- that backpack whatever the hell he was carrying around, he took that off his back and put it down on the floor sideways. It was like… this big ring, with a bunch of slots. Some of ‘em had Geo Charges in them, but most were empty. It was definitely fewer slots than there were charges, though. We’re talking like… twenty. He’d robbed more than twenty places, but he didn’t have that many on him. I dunno what’s up with that.
But… so, what he did was, he stepped over Pretorius’s ashes. Then he took the charges he’d stolen from the people he’d outright fucking murdered, because of me, and he sorted them by color. And then he sorta… pulled some of the ones in the ring out, and looked at their colors, and started putting the new ones in. There was some kind of pattern, I dunno. So he arranged them in his backpack ring device, then he looked up at me.
I didn’t have any idea what he wanted. I just shrugged. He made some sorta question-y hissing noises, and I just sort of looked confused, so… then he pressed a button on the ring.
It lit up and stuff. Super fancy. Beeps and boops and alien technology noises. Whatever. What happened after it lit up was that all the charges in the ring suddenly shooped out the bottom.
A couple seconds later, the planet blew up.
So… I went back, because fuck, even this guy didn’t know what he was doing. And when he looked up at me that time, I made some vaguely no, bad noises. First few times he just looked at me weird and did it anyway, but then I hit on one that made him react differently.
He pulled out one of the charges, and put a different-color one in its place. Then he looked at me and made the question-y noises again.
I think that’s why he wanted the time shit in my head. He didn’t know… what combination of charges would make the planet blow up or not. I don’t think he was supposed to know. I think that’s the point of the time machine- they don’t have any way of checking out what their fucking cylinder things will do without testing them first, so they just brought along a goddamn time machine to make sure they could try as many times as it took.
Because… I want to say a hundred-ish cycles later, it didn’t blow up the planet. From the white mark, it’s green-green-lighter green-blue-green-yellow-white-purple-pink-pinkish purple-black with a knobby bit on the end-green-cyan-black but weirdly smooth-black with a pattern of bumps-black with a different pattern of more spaced out bumps-purple-white-white-orange. That’s the pattern you need to use, if it ever comes up again. You put them in like that, press the button, maybe do some other shit I couldn’t see him doing, and that’ll…
Uh, make the Geo Charges shoop into the ground again, and then for whatever reason not blow up the planet. And then Jake’ll yell at you for a little while, and then just completely vanish.
And then you’ll have to go try and escape the hotel, which doesn’t really work, and then you’ll decide that now that the planet isn’t blowing up, it’s fine to just turn yourself into the police.
So there’s my big super-plausible explanation for why I broke into government property and then the prime minister disintegrated. Invisible alien. Blaming it on invisible alien. That work for you?
Officer J: I’m sorry- what did that machine do?
Who cares? It doesn’t blow up the planet, I know that much! And now it’s… however long after I took a nap in the police van and told that long stupid story, and the planet’s still not blown up, so I guess it solves the fucking problem! Magic backpack the alien had! Doesn’t make any sense, and I don’t give a shit at this point! It’s done!
Officer J: ...that’s it?
That’s it. It’s done. I’m not going back there. I’m a real piece of shit, remember? I could go back, I could spend ages working out some other way to save the world, but… I don’t care, okay? I got a ton of people killed, and I could do something about that, but I don’t care. I’m not a good person. I’m just a lazy idiot who only ever takes the path of least resistance.
Officer J: You’re not-
I am! I’m scum! That’s all there is to it, don’t try to- you’re a cop, not my goddamn therapist, okay? I don’t need to hear shit from you!
Officer J: If all of this is the truth, you saved the world.
Didn’t I fucking tell you already? I didn’t! I didn’t save the world. I didn’t save anyone! There was just this annoying shit where I’d never see the next episode of Reality Show, and I got mad enough to do something about it! After dragging my feet for days, too. I didn’t do this for anyone. I didn’t care about any of the people I got killed. I don’t! Still don’t! It was all just about me!
Officer J: ...Right. Well. I’m not your, um, therapist, so. If that’s all, if you don’t want to tell me anything else, I think I can take you back to your cell.
...Yeah. That’s all. You can take me back to my cell, and then probably have me executed for killing the prime minister.
Except no you fucking can’t, if you do that, I just- fuck! Fuck! It’s never gonna stop, is it? I can’t be done with this! I’m better than anyone else in the world at ending my own life, except I can’t end my own life. This is just another dead end, isn’t it?
Officer J: You’re awaiting trial. If you’re innocent, you won’t be sentenced to-
How could I die? I guess… man, I guess I could just let Jake do his thing. I always pulled away there, y’know? Rewound faster than he could pull the time machine out of my head. I could just do that. Be pretty easy, except that I’m a goddamn coward.
Officer J: Sir, that’s-
Or maybe I don’t have to! Maybe when you kill me and I go back, I can keep going! Figure out something else! I just gotta get the right color thingies to Jake, right? I could die over and over again until I talk my way into letting them give me the shit, bore myself half to death, do it without casualties. That’d only take another few weeks of work, I bet. Months, maybe. That’s the kind of shithead you’re dealing with, who doesn’t want to save dozens of lives because that’d be boring.
Or maybe, when you kill me… I don’t know! I could do anything! It’ll probably be some dumbass mistake, but who knows?
Officer J: We’re not going to kill you.
...Yeah. You’re right.
Officer J: Okay. I’m glad you’ve calmed down, so… your trial is scheduled for OH MY GOD! Oh god! Aaaaaaaaa! Oh my god! Oh my god! Someone- ambulance- oh my god!
[Transcript ends.]
Concerning the botched deployment of waypoint pylons through arm 4 of unclaimed spiral system M-23.
OVERVIEW:
Routine far-system infrastructure deployment was attempted in Spiral M-23. Failure to follow protocol resulted in the loss of all mission personnel and resources, including critical resources on loan from Central Governance. A contractor was hired to retrieve what resources were likely to be salvageable- the pylon seeds themselves, and the Guarantee Unit. Report will analyze points of failure along this course.
OBJECTIVES:
Primary objective was to perform pylon conversion on the cores of stable planetary bodies along arm 4, establishing Stage 1 cargo lanes through the region en route to Spiral A-4. A Guarantee Unit was requisitioned from the M-cluster outpost Governance branch’s Risk Mitigation Department, enabling blind pylon seeding.
The cryoship Xorblog was captained by Filbroz Xaxenpax of White Sky Deployments, and crewed by inhabitants of colony M-3-00032, trained primarily in stellar- not planetary- deployments of related materials. 3.08e13 credits were invested in the project under Mandate 12, and- to Xaxenpax’s credit- were spent efficiently on mass modulation processing for the requisite materials. Imperator Zilfroob-8 backed the investment on behalf of Central Governance.
Intended seeding path was lateral. See attached gravity maps.
PERFORMANCE:
Performance for the first eighty deployments along the arm met with no difficulty. Efficiency was high, as promised by White Sky Deployments.
Error reports preceding the cascade detonation of the Xorblog indicate that several factors led to the explosion. First and foremost, the Guarantee Unit’s failure was due to it operating in the presence of N-field emissions suppression, which inhibits its ability to identify the user reliably. Emissions suppression was being used at the time under Xaxenpax’s orders, as the Xorblog was orbiting a target inhabited by a Stage 4 emergent life-system.
Protocol for discovering emergent life-systems calls for making a report to Central Governance before any further action is taken. An evaluator is to be received by transmission and determine whether the life-system is fit for Governance incorporation given current uplift resources. In the event that the evaluator returns a negative result, or in the event that an evaluator is not available, X-field emissions suppression is to be employed to avoid causing an intergalactic incident. Xaxenpax violated protocol in not requesting an evaluator, and in using the incorrect field spectrum of emissions suppression.
The technician assigned to the Guarantee Unit’s operation, Quagzax Oooool, ignored error output from the Unit. It is unknown whether this was due to negligence on Oooool’s part, or if Xaxenpax fast-tracked xer training course in pursuit of efficiency in crew assembly, leading xem to skip the training with respect to accessing the error output feed. Error output was logged up until the moment of detonation- see attached failure notes. Settings for emergency user acquisition were likewise miscalibrated due to a failure to ever access the calibration toolbox.
The Xorblog’s core containment was breached as a result of a routine orbital pylon seed firing. With the Guarantee Unit’s failure to bind, the first-guess seed configuration resulted in a predictable blowback effect which broke the drive seal. Ordinarily, the reactor collapse would not have inhibited the functioning of the Guarantee Unit, but without a properly configured user, no field compensation could trigger, and Oooool could not shift to control mode. Error output shows no other protocol irregularities were present.
Protocol for hiring secondary contractors was violated in the hiring of mercenary Seeesssisee Geaacke, a Core World expatriate wanted for numerous emergent life-system statute violations. Further emergent life-system statute violations, including several first-class infractions, were committed by Geaacke in pursuit of asset recovery. See attached mission log.
OUTCOMES:
An incomplete set of pylon seeds was recovered by Geaacke, accounting for 7.12e10 of the invested resources- at the cost of 1.68e6 for xer fees, and a projected 6.85e9 in legal fees should we cover the cost of xer defense re:statute violations as stipulated in the agreed-upon contract.
The Guarantee Unit remains unrecovered, having auto-calibrated to a member of the life-system indigenous to the planet the Xorblog was orbiting at the time of its failure.
An incomplete Stage 1 cargo lane exists in Spiral M-23, fourth arm. No auto-inhibitors exist in the installed waypoint pylon, as it was intended as a connector, and thus a warning was posted to prevent drivers from shooting past the end of the incomplete track and becoming stranded past the threshold of Fast transportation. Such outcomes are judged unlikely, as without a jump connector to Spiral A-4, no incentive exists for travel to the system unless Central Governance sends an envoy to the affected life-system.
We recommend…
Oh, who am I kidding? We don’t recommend bupkis. We’re completely fired, no two ways about it. What the hell are we supposed to tell them? “Don’t put Filb in charge anymore”? Xe’s dead! Xe actually died. Xer ship exploded because we sent xem out on a “blow your own ship up repeatedly until the time traveler figures out how to not blow your own ship up repeatedly” mission and didn’t send a guy who actually knew how to work the time machine. We’re toast.
Hey, here’s a recommendation: how about we just tell Central next time? Just say “hey, our incredibly expensive ship blew up, dial up your insurance guys”? That probably would’ve worked out better! How about next time we don’t hire a freaking Seessees with a criminal record to try and clean up our mess? That would’ve been a great idea!
Oh, here’s another great idea: how about we don’t do the plan where we blow ourselves up repeatedly and rent a time machine to force it to work? What if we actually bought… I don’t know, calibrated waypoint pylons? The kind that you can actually check to see if they work before using them? The kind that only cost like ten percent more to manufacture, and aren’t practically guaranteed to not work?
Seriously, that’s how it works! I don’t know why they even let us rent those things. Just because we’re technically Governance doesn’t mean the technology itself isn’t literally the riskiest thing possible. Even if everything had gone totally according to plan, odds are everything would’ve blown up a bunch of times anyway, because that’s the whole point of bringing the time machine! Every planet they successfully turned into a Fast waypoint is like a hundred timelines where the ship blew up and Oooool hopped back to make a new one.
“Oh, but you’re wrong, it’s always worked perfectly every time before!” Yeah, no duh, we’d stop using the damn things if we’d been one of the timelines where it “didn’t work”. Ask literally anyone who’s used one. They can tell you about all the times it went wrong! Just because we’ve the one lucky timeline that has to exist doesn’t mean we’re not going to be one of the zillion unlucky ones the next time we use it! I don’t care what the party line is on temporal philosophy, these things really oughta be banned.
Actually- it looks like the lifeform it bonded to has already reached the end of its lifespan, if the clock readings we’re getting from the planet’s lightsphere are accurate. Must be some really short-lived little things. Either that, or it got itself killed being reckless with the stupid dumb time machine that we accidentally gave it. Fingers crossed it lucks into helping us recover more of the investment than that creep Geaacke, in whatever timeline it makes next.
Anyway, I’m cashing in my career chip. Someone else can edit this out and put in a “recommendations” section that we can actually send to Central, I’m completely done. See you jerks when we all get reassigned to waste processing or something.
Benedict: ^ That chapter is where the first draft ended, and is the ending as initially, uh, “published” by giving up and just linking this google doc on Tumblr. What follows is an unfinished attempt at improving upon the ending by not leaving Dave to twist in the wind, but it’s not done and I’m not actively working on it right now.
She heard a noise and turned around. She saw something. She saw some sort of animal. She wasn’t sure what it was. It was large, but not larger than her. She stood up and growled at the animal- she didn’t want to kill and eat it, or anything. She hoped it would just run off somewhere. She was already full of salmon.
The animal roared at her very loudly. No, that was wrong. She realized that she had made a mistake. The animal didn’t roar. Something else roared. What was it?
Oh, it was a very large plant of some kind. A very tall plant. Like a tree! But it didn’t have a trunk. It was just a very large plant, in the sky, roaring. She wasn’t sure what to make of that. Plants didn’t usually roar- but things that weren’t plants weren’t usually green. Weird. Some sort of green bird?
Wait, was it getting bigger?
The animal was running away, which was good. She had been hoping that would happen. The plant, though, wasn’t. In fact, it seemed to be getting closer. What did that mean? Plants didn’t move. Could a plant eat her? Probably not. She growled at the plant, but it didn’t stop getting closer.
The plant hit the ground, made a very loud noise, and then for some reason she fell asleep.
When she woke up, the plant was gone. So were most of the other plants. Had there been a fire? She hadn’t seen a fire. But there was burnt plant stuff all over the ground, and a big hole nearby. Weird.
The animal seemed to be dead (but too burnt to be appetizing) and the plant was nowhere to be seen, so she headed off to continue foraging for food.
Some time later, after eating a good number of berries, she happened across an extremely handsome bear. This was good news! She hadn’t seen a handsome bear in a long time. She peed on the ground and ran off a little ways, watching from a safe distance. The bear sniffed the ground and looked in her direction. That was it. He was hooked. She’d play hard to get, and then…
A week or so later, she was pregnant. Feeling the air get chilly, she found a nice cave, curled up, and went to sleep.
When she woke up, it was dark, and she couldn’t move. She walked around the cave a bit, unable to see or smell anything- and then bumped up against a wall. Suddenly, the cave was gone- and she wasn’t pregnant anymore. Hm. Had she accidentally given birth and forgotten about it? The leaves were on the trees, so it was possible she’d just slept too long. Dang.
Well, whatever. She’d give it another go. She ignored the blackened plant parts around her and wandered off.
Some time later, after eating a good number of berries, she happened across an extremely handsome bear. He looked familiar, actually, but didn’t seem to recognize her. Oh, well. She seduced him, found a cave, and went to sleep.
When she woke up, it was dark, and she couldn’t move. She walked around until she bumped into a wall and then was suddenly outside near a whole bunch of burnt plants. Weird. She found an extremely handsome bear, seduced him, and went to sleep.
When she woke up, it was dark, and she couldn’t move. She walked around until she bumped into a wall and then was suddenly outside near a whole bunch of burnt plants. She found an extremely handsome bear, seduced him, and went to sleep.
When she woke up, it was dark, and she couldn’t move. She walked around until she bumped into a wall and then was suddenly outside near a whole bunch of burnt plants. She found an extremely handsome bear, seduced him, and went to sleep.
She did this roughly eight hundred more times before she went to hibernate and had a thought.
Degenerate loop repeat condition detected, she thought. What? What had she just thought? That wasn’t a thought she had. What did any of those thoughts mean? That was nonsense.
Searching for auxiliary operator, she thought, which didn’t make any sense. Auxiliary operator detected. Shifting control apparatus. User unresponsive. Scanning immediate past for intact sapience pattern. Detected. Applying third-party life-support solver. Reregistering…
Then she woke up outside near a hole and a bunch of burnt plants. Weird. She wandered off to find that handsome bear again- maybe this time she wouldn’t accidentally give birth in her sleep.
-
Khalid peered at the intruder. Jennifer was still talking about the wave pattern casing, and it was clear this “Dr. Microcystis” had her totally fooled. She was giving her everything. And why- because she just wanted to brag? Because she didn’t care if this was some kind of spy, as long as she had an excuse to talk to someone else about her work? He could relate, but… but this was serious!
Obviously the real Dr. Microcystis was being impersonated by this unknown woman for unknown reasons. He could tell, there was no way he couldn’t tell. It was clear just by looking! Just- he didn’t want to be crass, but the shape of her body, it was- you couldn’t just hide something like that! And the artificially deep voice, and- it was obvious, right?
Unless- oh, hell, was that it? Were Jennifer and Dr. Ashberg pretending not to notice because- what, because it wouldn’t be PC to point it out? Was that it? They were so brainwashed by the new media establishment that they couldn’t call a woman a woman? What were they afraid of?
He’d almost have some sympathy for his brainwashed colleagues, except that he’d shown them the pictures of the real Dr. Microcystis. He obviously wasn’t the same person, he didn’t look anything like- well, sure, there was a resemblance, but- what were the odds? Something like one in a thousand people had transgendered delusions, but probably more than one in a thousand mysterious unannounced visitors with flimsy cover stories in secret federal research facilities were spies! This wasn’t some mentally ill person who needed serious help- this “Dave” was just wearing a disguise!
“...and of course, none of our enemies have the resources to forge a containment unit like that. Since we control the irirrium refinement industry, Country is the only world power that could possibly put it into production!”
“Oh, yeah, for sure. That’s cool, that’s cool.” The spy’s eyes had glazed over a little.
“It is, isn’t it?” Jennifer said, eyes sparkling. “I’m so glad to have a new colleague to talk about this stuff with!”
Dr. Ashberg smiled. “The poor girl’s been stuck talking to old fogeys like me and Dr. Mashhad, I’m afraid.”
“Hey!” Khalid snapped. “I’m thirty-three, dammit! Don’t lump me in with you!”
“Yeah, that’s cool, that’s cool,” the spy said. That phrase was some kind of nervous tic for her. “But- uh, weird change of subject, um- could you all do me a favor? Think of a number between one and a thousand.”
The hell? Wh-
“Six hundred and forty,” Jennifer said immediately.
The spy winced, rubbing her head. “N-no, um. Think of- I mean, that’s cool, but- think of, um, a different one. And don’t tell me what it is.”
...This was immediately fishy. It was some sort of trap- and like usual, Jennifer and Dr. Ashberg weren’t going to listen to a thing he said. He couldn’t expect them to listen to reason- he’d have to deal with the spy himself.
“What kind of trick is this?” he demanded. “What’s this got to do with anything?”
“Just- please. It’ll just take a second.”
“That’s-”
“Okay, got one,” Jennifer said, her curiosity unfortunately piqued.
“...I’ve got one as well,” Dr. Ashberg asked. “You don’t want me to say it?”
“Just a minute,” the spy said. “I promise, this is about to make sense.”
There were a few seconds of silence before he realized everyone was looking at him expectantly.
“What? You want me to do it too? Why? What’s the point?”
“Just do it, Cal!” Jennifer huffed. “What could the harm be in thinking of a number?”
...Hm. They were going to pressure him to do it… but whatever dumb magic trick this impostor was about to pull, he was going to subvert it. A number between one and one thousand… ha. How would she deal with this, then…?
“...Okay, fine. I’ve got a number. Now what?”
The spy nodded. “That’s cool, that’s cool.”
...And then she just stood there. Looking sort of lost and nervous. What the hell…?
“Um, Dr. Microcystis-” Dr. Ashberg started-
“It’s fine, it’s Dave, that’s cool,” she said. “I mean- fuck. Sorry. Just- okay, so now you can tell me the numbers. I’ll explain in a second.”
“Just tell you?” Jennifer asked. “Well, okay… mine was nine hundred ninety nine.”
“Nine hundred and two,” Dr. Ashberg said, sitting back in her chair.
Khalid didn’t say anything. He just folded his arms and looked at her. Whatever her trick was, he’d push it to its limits to figure out what she was up to.
“...Uh. Dude?”
He scowled. “You said I can tell you the number. You didn’t say I had to. So I’m not. Is that a problem, ‘Doctor’ Microcystis?”
The spy shot him an exasperated look. “Come on, dude. Just tell me.”
“Why should I? What’s the trick? What do you want my number for?”
“I said I’ll explain in a second, okay? Trust me, it’s gonna be cool.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Negative five million.”
The spy sighed and rolled her eyes. “Really? I said- wow.”
“Is that a problem? Why did it need to be between one and a thousand? Did I ruin your trick?”
She laughed. “No, it’s just- wow. You? You’re a real son of a bitch.”
Then, out of nowhere, she pulled a pistol and aimed it and fired.
His first thought, after the loud noise and the scream and the reflexive jump back, was I KNEW it, but as he was thinking it he realized he hadn’t been shot. Neither had Jennifer or Dr. Ashberg, after he took a moment to check. Jennifer was on her knees staring at the spy in wide-eyed horror, and Dr. Ashberg was frozen in her seat.
No, judging by the corpse on the floor and the chunks of brain all over his desk, the spy had shot herself- right in the head. For a moment he couldn’t breathe- because what the fuck? What the fuck?
“Aaaaa…” Jennifer started, her voice catching.
Dr. Ashberg still wasn’t moving. Was she even breathing?
“AaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!” Jennifer said, the second attempt a lot more successful than the first.
He stared at what was in front of him. He felt sick, seeing… what was he seeing? He’d never seen blood streaking down someone’s lifeless face before, or brains splattered across a desk. It… wasn’t supposed to look like this, right? That- the brain wasn’t supposed to be tied up in green meat netting like a supermarket ham. That wasn’t a normal thing for brains.
“God,” Dr. Ashberg finally managed to whisper. It was good that she was talking, because that meant she hadn’t had a heart attack, but…
Jennifer was still screaming, and in fact now running out of the room, but he wasn’t paying much attention to that anymore. Instead he was paying attention to- to the brains, and the green fibers binding them together. They… weren’t just oozing blood. The green stuff was moving, moving back into… the head. Oh, god, what?
“God,” Dr. Ashberg said, mirroring his thoughts exactly.
The green stuff- no, what? This couldn’t be… he was a microbiologist, he had been a microbiologist, or- no, she had been impersonating a microbiologist, right? Except her brains were being pulled back into her shattered skull by some kind of living mesh… was this another project? She wasn’t about to come back to life, was she?
No, the fibers didn’t seem to care about the brains. They were only pulling themselves back together, leaving bits of viscera and bone on the desk and on the floor. And... when the bits that’d been scattered had all been rejoined, it began to glow white.
“Gligzox,” the mesh said, which he had no way of knowing meant “Cleaning”. Subsequently, everything was on fire.
-
“No, no, no, NO, NO, NO, NO!!”
Dr. Nowak was leaning out the window, which was dangerous. That short fellow had broken it, and there was broken glass still in the frame. He’d hurt his hands.
“He’s… oh, gods. He left me.”
Gods? Was Dr. Nowak a polytheist? The younger faculty were a mess these days. They were either godless or had the wrong gods, never mind what their parents taught them. He’d always vaguely suspected Nowak was trouble- he’d had his hair dyed green at his interview, and that was never a good sign. Still, there hadn’t been any better candidates…
“He left me. He left us. We’re all… no. No, no!”
That was the problem with the younger generation. They didn’t have any faith in the institutions that’d served them for hundreds of years. Questioning God, as if their parents’ god wasn’t good enough for them. Questioning the government, as if Country would even exist without the government. Questioning the budget, as if the school hadn’t done perfectly well with the same budget every other year before that.
“What do we do? What do we do? I don’t even- he was the time traveler, now it’s just… we’re all going to die!”
They were alarmists, too. All that business about the environment being destroyed, even though things had been more or less the same for years and years and the environment still hadn’t been destroyed. Worrying about dangers from space rocks, as if the world hadn’t survived space rocks before.
Dr. Nowak sank to his knees and pulled at his hair. “What are we going to do…?”
Vincent Brickton didn’t move from his seat. What were they going to do? What a question. That was another problem with the younger generation. They always worried so much about what to do, as if hundreds of generations of their elders hadn’t already figured it out. That was the purpose of State State University- to teach the younger generation about the things their elders had already figured out how to do. What was the point of having on faculty that didn’t know those things?
“I’m… the other me, he’s… he doesn’t know, he still trusts Dave, doesn’t he? Oh, god- and he’s going to die, too! They’re all going to die! Two worlds- no, three, dozens, hundreds?! I- I have to warn them, but… no, I can’t, the time traveler is dead, we can’t…”
Vincent looked out the window. Where were the police? He’d called the police, hadn’t he? That was the problem with the police these days, always late.
“Unless… I mean, I have to… it’s just me, now! I’m the only one who knows, I have to… I have to warn… warn who, though? And what if they just… billions of lives…”
This was getting distracting.
“Don’t worry about all that,” he said. “The police will be here soon. Please leave my office and get back to work.”
Dr. Nowak looked over at him. “You… are you serious? He- Dave just died, he- you can see out the window, he’s there on- on the pavement, oh gods… we have to do something, why are you just sitting there?!”
“I already called the police,” he pointed out. “They’ll take care of it. Please get back to work.”
Dr. Nowak boggled. “Are you… even a person? What’s wrong with you? The fate of the world is at stake!”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” he said. He looked out the window- oh, there they were. The police, and the men in black cars. They would know what to do. Like that one- the one looking up at his window, and pointing in his direction some kind of gu-
-
“Jumping jacks.”
What?
Xe turned around to see a native. Had it just said…?
“Jumping juice?”
Okay, it was talking to xem. That… shouldn’t have been possible.
“Sorry, jumping- bug, helping jacks.”
Xe ignored the notification on xir HUD and focused xir sense on the native. “What in the fuck are you talking about?”
“Good! Good, good, help. Dumb. Geaacke?”
What the fuck. This random alien knew xir name?
It took a hesitant step towards xem. “Geaacke. Sorry?”
“You’re gonna have to start explaining fast, caveman.” Xe leveled xir demoleculizer at it.
It stopped. “...No? No? Hurt no no spaghetti no hurt?”
Xe scowled. “Are you retarded or something? Who do you think you are?”
Wait, who did xe think it was? There was a scanner notification on it- xe expanded it and looked over the readings.
“Baby juice,” it said. “No?”
Oh, crap. This was- this was the lifeform that the Bureau idiots’ Guarantee Unit bound to! That thing was expensive as hell… but they hadn’t technically asked xem to get it back. They probably wrote it off… but xe could probably take it, right? Xe’d just have to avoid using the demoleculizer.
...Shit, how was xe supposed to nonlethally incapacitate one of these four-armed freaks? They weren’t in the standard databases- which, duh, the Bureau had just encountered them. They looked kinda like Zuggs, but the odds of them having the same nervous system were pretty low.
“No baby juice hurt dumb Geaacke spaghetti?” it asked.
“Why are you talking. How are you talking.”
“Good! Sorry? Good. Helps good. Spaghetti helps grood.”
Xe approached the alien, careful not to look threatening. Except… this thing apparently didn’t understand basic body language cues, so it got scared anyway and backed off.
“Helps good or dumb Geaacke! Spaghetti-” it made a gesture with its handlike appendage- “helps good!”
“Don’t care about spaghetti, idiot,” xe said. “Just let me-”
“Buffalolo.”
“Shut up.”
“Buffaluffalo to the help or don’t. Don’t is spaghetti, again.”
...What the hell was this dumbass alien trying to say? Where the hell did it learn Seessees, anyway, Sweet Sseeaaajssi and Hella Sedssssisis?
“IF… spaghetti hurt… THEN fail time die. IF… surfbroard origami, THEN good gack strawberry spaghetti delp. If then?”
Xe balled a few hands into fists. Die? Was this gross thing threatening xir?
“Spaghetti deliberately help.”
“Why the fuck. Won’t you shut up. About spaghetti?”
It made a hand gesture again- one of its sort-of-fingers pointing at itself. “Spaghetti. Good.” It was kind of a leap to assume it knew what pointing was, but that… meant that was its name? Spaghetti?
Xe mimicked the hand gesture. “Geaacke.”
It pointed at xem- yeah, that was probably pointing. “Sorry, dumb Geaage?”
“Geaacke. Get it right.”
“Jeeacke.”
“Jesus fucking christ. Fine. And you’re Spaghetti?”
“Spaghetti. Dumb Jeeacke. Goob? Good?”
The alien held up… some sort of drawing, and mumbled in its own language while xe looked at it. The drawing… kind of looked like the kind of art that showed up in those dumbass museums where rich people went to congratulate other rich people on making meaningless garbage, but with less colors. Still, xe could kind of make out what it was supposed to be.
Like, that there? That was definitely a pylon seed. That was a picture of the alien handing xem a pylon seed. Was that…
“Spaghetti fuck dumb Jeeacke mothers to baby juice.”
Okay never goddamn mind about this retarded alien’s dumbass attempts to communicate. Xe wasn’t going to put up with this garbage, xe had a job to do.
Xe severed what looked like the alien’s central nervous column, and slapped an extractor on its top-mounted sensory center. If xe did this quick…
“Cleaning.”
...oh, fuck.
-
“TRUDGE BUDULES!”
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE SAYING!”
The other natives kept firing chunks of metal at xem. Most of them bounced off the shield, but occasionally they deployed incendiaries, which needed to be shot out of the air. This would’ve been hard enough just defending xirself, but keeping the alien with the Guarantee Unit alive was getting to be a real pain in the ass.
“REALLY BAD BUDULES!”
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT A BUDULE IS!”
“HORSE spectacular! HORSE songs!”
“I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU!”
“LEFT! LEAPT LEFT LEFT!”
Xe grabbed the alien by the arm and yanked it around the corner to the left, just as a really big incendiary device went whistling past. It exploded on one of the structure’s walls, blowing a hole in it. Would’ve been bad to get hit by that. One thing these cavemen had going for them: they didn’t get fancy with their weapons. Can’t stochastic point-defense a big fucking bomb.
“Okay, good! Good left! Pylon man green fur!”
Green fur- okay, right, there was an alien with green fur right there, carrying a container. Scan showed the pylon was there, just like Spaghetti said. Xe fired the demoleculizer with low spread, and the green-furred alien was gone. Xe snagged the container as they ran by- the armed natives were catching up.
“...Hurt,” Spaghetti said. “Cackalacky bad times.”
“Sure, whatever! Where’s the next fucking pylon, time idiot?”
“Bad times. Pylon puddlemeyer.”
“That doesn’t fucking mean anything!”
The alien suddenly looked up, pointing its light sensors behind xem. “Cask of babies, for a million sticks…!”
“What?”
It pointed. “BUDULES!”
Xe refocused xir senses, and saw flying towards them- oh, shit-
-
“White?”
“Whate. Good.”
Xe slotted the pylon into the firing ring, and clicked the pin into place. That was… pretty good. Two more.
Xe grabbed one of the other pylons from xir bag- this one yellow and vibrating ssseessSSesically. Xe held it out to the alien. “Yellow?”
Spaghetti made a weird gesture with its arms, where the joints by the sensory center rose up a bit. That… was probably a yes, right?
Xe took a step back, engaged the firing protocol, and the world exploded.
-
“Whate. Good.”
Xe slotted the pylon into the firing ring, and clicked the pin into place. That was… pretty good. Two more.
Xe grabbed one of the other pylons from xir bag- this one yellow and vibrating ssseessSSesically. Xe held it out to the alien. “Yellow?”
Spaghetti shook its sensory center. “Hurt. Die.”
“Crap. Okay, uh… it’s probably this one, then. Orange?”
Spaghetti made a weird gesture with its arms, where the joints by the sensory center rose up a bit. That… was probably a yes, right?
Xe took a step back, engaged the firing protocol, and nothing happened.
“...Okay. That did it. Thanks for making it easy, weirdo.”
It looked up at xem expectantly. Why, what did it want now? Wasn’t it going to say anything?
...Nope, nothing.
“...Oooooookay. I’m gonna… leave, now. I might be back if they send me to get the Unit out of you, but otherwise… bye, weirdo?”
It looked up at xem with unsettlingly wide light sensors. Xe hadn’t had long to learn this thing’s bogus alien body language, but it looked… sort of sad. Like it wanted to say something.
Which… wasn’t xir problem. Xe stepped over the ashes of a few dead aliens, and started to walk away. Xe kind of regretted leaving the poor dumb thing like this- it felt like there should be more to say.
As xe was almost gone, xe heard Spaghetti call out one last poignant farewell:
“Karaoke.”
Right. Yeah, okay, never mind. Xe was outta there.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Shit shit shit shit shit shit. Pointless, waste of time. What now? Maybe just die? It’s not like it could hurt any worse than all the other times I’ve died.
But of course I’m too much of a little bitch to die. Great. It’d be the easiest thing in the world, but Dave is a piece of shit. Cool, awesome, that’s cool.
Taking as a given that I’m a piece of shit and I’m not going to just die, even though that’s the obvious thing to do, what’s plan B?
Plan B is, I guess, save the world and don’t get anyone killed. Which sounds like an impossible pain in the ass at this point, but… there’s gotta be a way. Come up with a plan, even if it sucks and it’s tedious as hell, and then just do that and then stop worrying about it. You’re good at sticking it out with terrible tedious plans, Dave. You worked retail for three goddamn years!
Ugh. Okay. Where the hell do I start?
Well… okay, there’s a win condition. Win condition is that we get the Geo Charges in Jake’s ring in the right order. Green-green-lighter green-blue-green-yellow-white-purple-pink-pinkish purple-black with a knobby bit on the end-green-cyan-black but weirdly smooth-black with a pattern of bumps-black with a different pattern of more spaced out bumps-purple-white-white-orange. I should have an official-sounding designation for that. Like... GGLGBGY… giggle gubgee… WPPPPBWAKBOTE… pthbbbbbt whackboat… GCBBWSBWAPOB, uh, I’ll get back to that one... BWADPOMS… Christ, this was a bad idea. What am I doing?
The Pattern. The win condition is assembling the Pattern in the Ring. For some reason, that keeps the planet from blowing up. Fuckin’... why?
No, yeah, that actually doesn’t make sense. The working theory is that everyone has Geo Charges, and if they start firing them off at once they collide in the middle and blow up the planet. Except that… totally doesn’t fit, does it? Like… there’s gotta be less than fifty countries with earthquake hostage plans. Even if they’re all panicking and firing these things at “the same time”, the idea is that they go at near-lightspeed, right? What’re the odds of two Charges being fired at literally the exact same moment? Probably… not super high, right? Not so high that it’d happen every single time, butterfly effect be damned.
No, more likely one of them was just… miscalibrated, or something. Someone who hadn’t done very careful research, one of the foreign powers who panicked at the conference, went and set phasers to Kill, and didn’t measure it out right. Maybe more than one like that.
...Except, no. That doesn’t fit either, because…
Wait. No, you know what’s super weird? I didn’t even question it, but… the diplomats at the conference had Geo Charges. Like a quarter of the ones we got were in the hands of foreign dignitaries. And they just had the things sitting in their hotel rooms, or were carrying them around in briefcases, or that one guy who got disappeared by the Secret Service for just toting his around on the assumption that no one would know what it was.
But that’s not how it works, right? These things shoot right through the core and target the other side of the planet- which in this case is somewhere around Urban Sprawl in Nation. But half those diplomats were part of Nation’s coalition, so why would they bring Geo Charges to the conference? That’d mean they could only use them to blow up their ally!
Well, no. Probably most of them had charges at home and just called up their nuclear launch goons on the phone, and did it remotely. Charges were being fired from all over the world, probably- and that’s definitely beyond the ability of the airline industry to cover in 33 hours. There’s no way I could hop around and steal them all.
Except, wait, that’s weird too. Because… after Jake and I stole all the ones at the conference, and then did the thing… nothing blew up. Even though… like, surely with all the murder and panic involved, someone would’ve called HQ and had them fire off a charge. It took like two minutes from Pretorius announcing the threat to the world exploding from preemptive strike- these people had their fingers on the button and were ready to explode the planet in response to any little thing.
Meaning people probably did fire charges after Jake and I finished our work. But those ones didn’t blow up the planet! No earthquakes, either.
Whatever Jake had done with the charges- not even all the charges- it’d neutralized the rest of them somehow. I’d been sitting pretty in a jail cell without any seismic war happening around me, so clearly that worked. Why? Who the hell knows? They probably did… something or other to the planet’s core… maybe that was it? The planet’s core eats Geo Charges now? Or maybe once some charges finish their job successfully, they send a signal to deactivate the rest. Or...
Fuck, I don’t actually know anything, these are all guesses, aaaaaagh. I need… more information. From fucking where, though? Jake? Jake isn’t even talkative in his own incomprehensible hiss language.
No, there’s one question I don’t know the answer to yet, and that I don’t even have a guess about. And that’s… why did so many people actually bring charges to the conference? Why would it be a diplomat’s job to deploy an earthquake bomb during a conference- particularly one aimed at their own people?
That’s gotta be it. I’ll ask about that. In fact… yeah, let me just scrub back to…
-
The costume party-ass dignitaries meeting in the random hallway again. Yep, there they are. Okay, so… I know a little bit of Federal, so I can probably talk to the Federation guy, or at least get his attention and get the interpreter helping. I know he was one of the ones Jake disintegrated and stole the thing from. In fact… okay, yeah. That big suitcase, that has… that’s the cyan charge, I think. I just need to pull him away from the crowd and have a talk in private.
That guy next to him- that’s the interpreter. He’s still talking. I need to, uh… talk to the main guy.
“Excuse me,” I say, and okay nope he’s ignoring me. I obviously don’t belong here. Do I need a suit again? This guy probably isn’t as big a fan of Caveful of Demons as Pretorius. Maybe if I try it in Federal.
“Issho ni… mizuirazu de... kaban no naiyou tsuite… hanasu wo hitsuyoushimasu.” Shit, was that right? Together, in private, contents of the briefcase, talk about need. That much probably got across. I really should’ve kept up my Federal studies.
Oh, okay, it’s clearly enough to get his attention- his eyes go wide, so that’s good. I think. Hopefully he doesn’t kill me- he’s just a dignitary, I think, so if he killed a rando in a hotel on foreign soil he’d have some problems. He whispers something to his aide, and now the aide’s going…
“...My apologies. The representative needs to take a sidebar momentarily. Please enjoy the mixer.”
The lady they were talking to looks a little annoyed. Is she gonna be a problem? No, she’s walking off. Okay. And- okay, okay, he’s pushing me out of the room and around the corner, that’s cool. This is going pretty well for a first try. This hallway’s pretty long. Where’s he taking me? I don’t know where this guy’s room is.
Oh, wait, we stopped.
Aaaaand he’s saying something in Federal really quickly under his breath at me. I was never that good at understanding it spoken… uh.
“That’s cool, that’s cool- uh, sorry, I didn’t get any of that, I only know a little. Could you do the interpreter thing?”
The interpreter’s giving the representative a look, and- yep, little nod, okay- and he bows to me. “Of course.”
“Okay, that’s cool, that’s cool. Sorry. I’m nervous,” I’m saying, and there goes my stupid mouth just saying words without listening to me because I’m freaking out again. Dammit, dammit, I was on a roll with that police chick! It’s not like you can bomb a conversation in jail when the other person isn’t talking. Ugh. Pay attention. Words.
“I, uh. Okay, where do I start, here? It’s like… I know what’s in there, is the thing. I’ve seen it. I know it’s got a cyan stripe on it. And I know what it does, I think.”
Aaaaaaand the interpreter guy is repeating that back, and the guy’s getting progressively more alarmed. And he’s looking around nervously, maybe for a place to run?
“-uh, don’t worry. I’m not gonna tell anyone. I think. Probably. It’s a long story. I just- I need to ask some questions to stop the world from exploding.”
Now he’s repeating that back, and… and then the interpreter says “Sorry, you said ‘the world from exploding’? Just to be sure? I heard you right?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s- I kinda know the plan, and I have reason to think it goes really bad. But I, uh, need your help to make it go right.”
They’re, uh… going back and forth a bunch, actually. In Federal. I don’t know what the hell they’re saying now, but they seem really freaked out. Interpreter guy is definitely looking more nervous now.
...Okay, he’s looking at me again, finally. “Mr. Watanabe would prefer not to discuss the matter further.”
God damn it god damn it okay okay okay. New plan. Bullet in the mouth, bite down on the- nope, wrong way- okay, no, don’t slip off the tooth again dammit. Okay. That seems right-
-
Okay, floating in the time zone again. Need a new strategy. What the hell kind of response was that, anyway? What would he have done if I kept talking? Maybe I shouldn’t have bailed so early. Ugh. Stupid. Idiot. Whatever. Different idea. Don’t be so vague.
-
“I’m well aware you intend to use that as a weapon to destroy Country. That’s not my concern. What you don’t understand is that circumstances have changed, and using the weapon will backfire.”
Wait, what was that look in his eye when I mentioned destroying Country? It wasn’t fear, not like if I was on the money. Almost a smile? What, was I wrong?
“Mr. Watanabe sees no need to discuss flights of fancy with-”
-
-
Okay, maybe I guessed wrong. What if… I mean, if he’s here and he used it, it would... “I’m well aware that you intend to use that as a weapon to destroy Nation.” That’s not my concern, yada yada yada- but I saw very brief confusion and then anger.
“Mr. Watanabe would like you to know that you’ve been gravely misinformed, and to refrain from making baseless accusations.”
-
-
What about…? “I’m well aware you intend to use that as a weapon to destroy Republic.”
This time just outright confusion, not anger. The same line about being gravely misinformed, but with a more lighthearted delivery. Kind of what I expected, since Republic isn’t anywhere near here or the other side, and isn’t really involved here. The line being the same, though… maybe I was off-base. How about…?
-
-
“I’m well aware you intend to use that as a weapon to destroy Federation.”
...total confusion, this time. The “gravely misinformed” bit, except he’s totally lost and actually kind of laughing? Weird how the line keeps being the same- I don’t know if it’s rehearsed or if that’s just sort of the way the interpreter simplifies things.
-
Okay, up and out. So… it’s not that simple, probably. No way it would be that simple. The closest thing to “he wants to use weapon to destroy X” being right was when I touched a nerve accusing him of targeting Nation. But… Federation is one of Nation’s allies, so it doesn’t make sense that they’d attack them. Or that all these other diplomats would have the same idea. What am I missing? I’ve got something wrong, here.
Let’s look at my premises, here. What isn’t that reliable?
That… they can only target Nation from here? What if… they can sort of angle the thingies, sort of like a secant line through the planet? Hit somewhere without needing to be on the opposite side, not worrying about gravity? Maybe it’s not weird that they’re all here, if they all have different targets and can hit them no matter where they’re positioned.
...Except, no, that’s still not a good reason to send super planet bombs along with diplomats to a conference. The location has to be of importance, right? Or maybe it’s that having all these people with bombs in one place is important somehow, location not so much.
But… okay, put a pin in that. Let’s assume the location matters because of the geography. Right now, if you use a Geo Charge, it comes out in Urban Sprawl, Nation. Hit that, and it’s a huge deal. More destructive than a nuke. Wipes like 20 million people off the map. But it’s not, like… a strategic target. Nation’s military is mostly stationed around its borders, not in a big population center with no political or military function. More of a terrorism thing- if you Charge Urban Sprawl, all you have is a massive atrocity.
Atrocity. Hang on, that’s something, isn’t it? Assume that things go the way you’d expect, and what happens is a massive, massive atrocity- and anyone who knows about Geo Charges would know the attack originated in Country. But who would know… about…
Well. Everyone, apparently. “Diplomats” from all over the world came here with their own versions of the friggin’ things. The space rocks landed all over the planet. It’s safe to say that the major world powers know what these things are and what they do. All it’d take is one spy leaking the weapons research Blondie and Dave Hater 2 and the old lady worked on, and… yeah. Obviously what happens here if a diplomat sets off a Geo Charge is that Nation suffers massive casualties and everyone knows it was Country’s fault.
So the plan isn’t to destroy anything. The plan is to start a war. Maybe. Or maybe I’m an idiot and I’m making shit up. That’s always a possibility. Gotta check.
-
“I’m well aware you intend to use that weapon to start a war between Nation and Country. That’s not my concern. What you don’t understand is that circumstances have changed, and using the weapon will backfire.”
Ooooookay. This one’s different. I was expecting a repeat of the “misinformed” bit, but this time there’s nervous looking around and obviously tense body language. He goes back and forth with his interpreter for a bit, I think arguing about what to say? Which is weird. Is the guy really just an interpreter? He seemed totally stone-faced translating my super huge bombshells- better poker face than Watanabe, anyway.
Oh, wait, he’s saying something now.
“Who sent you? Mr. Watanabe cannot say anything more about these accusations without understanding your position.”
What’s with this guy and “Mr. Watanabe says”? That’s definitely not a normal interpreter thing, right? They’re supposed to talk like they’re the person they’re translating for. I think. Actually I’ve never talked to someone with an interpreter, so what do I know?
Anyway. Time for… a spin on the usual. Maybe…
“I can, uh, disclose further details if I’m provided with the passphrase.”
...nope. No dice, they’re asking “what passphrase”. I guess that gambit is something an actual spy might use… never mind. Just the boring way. No need to get fancy.
-
-
-
-
“108 and 444. What’s with the edgy numbers, guys? Calm down a little.”
Aaaand more frantic arguing in Federal. The looks on their faces are pretty fun, but they look kind of worked up. Maybe I should explain before they come to some inconvenient conclusion?
“Just to be clear, it’s time travel, not mind-reading. If you have other state secrets, they’re safe. I just need you to believe me when I start saying a bunch of really unbelievable things that can only possibly be true because I’m a time traveler.”
Oh my god. Would it kill these guys to talk to me instead of arguing for minutes on end to craft the perfect response? I don’t have all day, dudes!
...Okay, I literally do have all day, as many times as I want, but still. I’m bored! Why is saving the world boring?!
I could just go home again. I could just rewind back to the hospital, get discharged, and then just play Competitive Shooter for another two hundred straight hours. Remember reaching the top 500 by resetting every time I missed a headshot? Good times. Pure skill right there. I could sit in the tub and eat the same pizza two dozen times without getting fat again! That actually sounds really good right now. I could just do what my useless brain wants me to do and be useless forever. No one could stop me!
Or I could go back and team up with Jake again, and kill everyone, and get arrested. That could work. Or I could even not get arrested! Just sneak out of the convention center and evade the cops for the rest of my life. That’d be fine, honestly!
Like, I already saved the world, right? A bunch of people died, but they were all going to die anyway if I didn’t do that, so… fuck ‘em, right? If I do that, I’ve technically saved more lives than I took, so I’m net positive, right? I’m already morally in the clear! I don’t need to do this crap! I could just give up and be done!
I could be done right now. I just need to decide to be done. I don’t need to replay every minute of my goddamn life to save as many lives per minute as is technically possible- like, where does it end? It could end right here. It’d be so much easier than going through all this garbage!
“Please explain further.”
Sigh. Okay. Gotta give these guys the cliffnotes.
[note in case you forget: the truth is that basically all nation’s allies hate them and want them to go to war with Country so Country will actually fight them and get rid of their overbearing “ally”. They all had the same idea and were going to meet to discuss it after the conference, but too many of them saw a window of opportunity. all it really takes is one of them set to full blast to do it, and one of them probably does.]