The Paradox Paradox, page 17
‘Sounds like something’s going on,’ nodded Jack, returning to his horizontal position.
‘Something is,’ nodded Kez, as she slumped back as well. ‘I’m going to find out what.’
For a moment, the pair lay there in silence, watching the cables sway gently as somebody moved about on the floor above. With a grunt, Jack got to his feet and offered Kez a hand.
‘I’m in.’ Kez took his hand and flew up to her feet. ‘Thanks, Jack.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ he smiled. ‘Now, I’m off to find my bedroom. Goodnight.’
With a stiff nod he began to slalom around the boxes between himself and the exit, eager to put this day behind him.
‘Jack?’ Kez called after him.
‘Yeah?’
‘I don’t think we get individual rooms,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a dorm situation.’
Jack froze. His shoulders slumped as he sighed and nodded, accepting his fate.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘there is a school of philosophical thought that says the human consciousness ends at the moment of sleep. We die every night, and are replaced every morning by an entirely new life.’
‘Bit of a scary philosophy,’ said Kez.
‘Aye,’ nodded Jack, ‘but there is one significant improvement with this system. If I do indeed die tonight, some other arsehole has to be me tomorrow.’
With that, the two of them left the room, moments away from discovering the awful beds that lay waiting for them on the second floor of this fucking space station.
Chapter Fifteen
Day One
LUCAS | 2783
The room that Kez and her fellow travellers had been assigned to onboard Lucas really put the emphasis on the ‘quarter’ part of ‘living quarters’. Two sets of bunk beds flanked a carpeted area that you’d have trouble getting a drinks trolley through, as a single window perfectly framed the dark eye at the centre of the black hole. Kez’s nanobot allowance, normally enough to furnish an entire room, allowed her a replication of a single photograph of her with her dad, housed in a cheap-looking frame. Between the lack of her things, Eureka’s snoring, Theo’s whimpering, Jack’s fidgeting, having to steal a power cell from the closest panel to her bed, endless searches for news stories about Ipricus, and the existential crisis on the other side of the glass, Kez hadn’t slept much when Osheen burst in with a wakeup call the next morning.
‘Rise and shine, campers!’ he exclaimed as Bea played a trumpet sound effect. Kez noticed that the joviality in his voice was countered somewhat by the fact he looked exactly as tired as he did yesterday.
‘Morning, boss,’ Theo said, spryly leaping out of his bottom bunk, Affinity pyjamas hanging off his spindly frame like a duvet thrown over a javelin.
‘Five more minutes,’ Eureka mumbled, rolling over in the top bunk above him. ‘The past will still be there when I get up.’
‘Shower?’ Kez asked hopefully, unsure if her eyes were blurry or Osheen was.
‘Down the hall behind us,’ Bea said. ‘In use at the minute though.’
Kez spotted that the duvet on the bunk above hers had been thrown aside already, its occupant most likely stealing all the hot water.
Judas, she thought.
‘Uniforms are here,’ said Osheen, dumping a pile of frighteningly expensive fabric onto Theo’s bed.fn34 ‘We’ll meet up in, say, ten minutes?’
‘Sixty,’ groaned the voice of Eureka from under a duvet. ‘Forty-five if I can turn up in this duvet.’
‘I’ll see you in ten,’ smiled Osheen, leaving with Bea.
‘Fantastic,’ said Theo, snatching up a uniform and noticing that the disguise strip was already attached around the neck. ‘For decency’s sake, I’ll change outside.’
‘Do you mind if I … ?’ Kez asked Eureka as Theo left.
‘I won’t peek at your skivvies,’ Eureka mumbled from beneath several hundred togs.
‘Thanks,’ said Kez, one foot speeding down a leg hole. ‘I was going to have a water shower, but I can’t be bothered.’
‘A water shower?’ chuckled Eureka. ‘What else can you shower with?’
Kez zipped up her uniform and poked Eureka’s duvet cocoon. Eureka emerged, less a beautiful butterfly and more a down-on-its-luck moth.
‘Behold,’ grinned Kez, connecting to the station’s interface and running the cleanliness program. Kez selected her preference for the day and the matter couriers got to work, removing everything that wasn’t supposed to be there. Dirt, bacteria, and grease vanished within a few seconds, leaving a blank canvas for the nanobots climbing up her leg to work their magic. Eyeliner was applied to a tolerance of one nanometre, hair was trimmed and styled, and a skincare routine was applied. Thirty seconds later, Kez looked as though she’d spent hours getting ready. ‘It’s not as comforting as hot water,’ she said, flopping back onto the bed, ‘but it is cleaner.’
‘I want one,’ said Eureka, sitting up groggily. ‘I’ll never need to be wet again.’
‘Now that’s a hell of a sentence to walk in on,’ said Theo, beaming away in his uniform, his perfectly shaped hair revealing that he too had been styled for the day. ‘Oh no, Kez! We’ve worn the same outfit!’
‘Those uniforms comfortable?’ Eureka asked, forgoing the ladder and hopping down from the bunk onto ill-prepared legs. ‘Looks a little tight.’
Tight? E-NA complained internally. Bloody hell, it’s so far up your arse that I feel like I’m the one wearing it.
‘It’s alright,’ said Kez. ‘I’ve worn worse.’
‘Same,’ grinned Theo.
‘Oh,’ Eureka quietly said, glancing at her arm. She’d just noticed that something very dear to her was missing.
‘Everything alright?’ asked Theo. It wasn’t, but Eureka nodded anyway.
‘Bugger me!’ said Kez, having tapped her disguise and suddenly transformed into a supremely buff woman. ‘I’m huge!’
Theo grinned and joined in, transforming into an old man with an equally sized nose and chin.
‘I’m old!’ he giggled.
‘How am I this much larger?’ Kez asked, prodding her newfound bulging biceps. ‘I thought this was just a visual.’
‘The uniform has an outer layer that can expand at will,’ said Theo, having spent a few hours reading the documentation. ‘It can’t make you shorter or thinner, but it can—’
‘OW!’ yelled Kez suddenly, turning to Eureka while rubbing her own arm. Eureka looked back with wide, shocked eyes.
‘I’m so sorry …’ she said, looking as surprised as Kez was by the punch. ‘I just …’
‘You hit me!’
‘I thought it would feel like a bouncy castle,’ Eureka said, blushing. ‘I didn’t think you’d feel it.’
‘It’s artificial proprioception,’ Theo said, chuckling away.
‘Come again?’ asked Kez, rubbing her disguised arm.
‘External forces applied to the suit are simulated on your actual body, letting you know exactly where in space you are if the uniform makes you a different size. It’ll stop you tripping over or bumping into things all the time,’ explained Theo. ‘You really need to read the manual.’
‘It felt weirdly fizzy,’ said Eureka. ‘My whole hand tingled for a bit.’
‘Felt a lot more than fizzy to me …’ Kez grumbled.
‘Never meet your heroes, Kez,’ Theo said, tapping the other side of his neck. Silently, the wrinkles under the old man’s eyes smoothed out as his face was whipped backwards and away like a tablecloth. Kez flinched.
‘I really hate how that looks,’ she said, poking the folded face of the man that sat around the back of Theo’s neck. ‘Poor bastard looks deflated.’
‘What do you think, gang?’ asked Osheen, entering the room alongside Bea and a scruffy-looking old woman, complete with an ill-fitting cardigan. ‘An improvement?’
‘Bit tight,’ said Jack, his threatening tones somehow penetrating his artificially higher voice. ‘Every part of me that’s an outie is turning into an innie.’
‘The uniforms are tight to prevent interference with the projection,’ Osheen said, inspecting Jack’s disguise. ‘Some tightness is expected.’
Osheen tried to pinch some of the fabric hidden under Jack’s transformed arm, but couldn’t find purchase. He tried again, lifting some away, but based on Jack’s expression, quickly realised that skin had come with it.
‘Anyway,’ he coughed. ‘It’s time for the mission briefing. Who’s hungry?’
With that he and Bea left the room, with Kez, Jack, and Theo in tow. Eureka stayed behind, frantically trying to squeeze into her uniform without falling over, while inwardly cursing the very existence of morning people.
* * *
‘Morning, all!’ boomed Alphonse, slapping down a tray of brightly coloured fruit juices in front of Osheen and his travellers. ‘Today is an apple and pear classic, with a twist of cherry and a waft of lime. Enjoy!’
‘Cheers, big man,’ Theo said, briefly raising his glass to a retreating Alphonse before downing half of it in one go. ‘Lovely stuff.’
‘Anything more … solid?’ Eureka asked Kez. ‘I’m not sure I understand this fruit juice thing.’
‘Me neither,’ shrugged Kez.
‘It’s the healthiest way to start the day,’ said Osheen, not looking up from reams of notebooks and paperwork. ‘Besides, the smell of cooking food in the morning makes me nauseous.’
‘You don’t like the smell of a fry-up?’ Eureka asked, genuinely shocked.
‘You forget that Osheen is a soulless husk,’ said Bea. ‘Anything that gives others joy is a pet peeve of his.’
‘That’s only partially true,’ Osheen said, pointing a pen. ‘In any case, I’m sure Alphonse will be happy to make you something else if you’d like. I believe there are some eggs on board, but I’m not entirely sure which species laid them.’
‘When in Rome,’ Eureka said, taking a sip of the nicest fruit juice she’d had in her life. ‘Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask. Why do you have a chef on board? I thought we’d have perfected the food printer by now.’fn35
‘We have,’ said Osheen, rolling his eyes. ‘Yet for some reason there are people who still prefer the analogue approach to cooking.’
‘My dad’s like that,’ said Kez. ‘He says if you got a hundred chefs to make scrambled eggs, you’d get a hundred different scrambled egg dishes. So, which one do you replicate?’
‘The food printers can make all of them,’ Osheen mumbled to himself before giving Bea the signal to kick the meeting off. Bea rolled to the centre of the table and began projecting a 3D model of a landscape in front of everyone.fn36
‘Lake Bosumtwi,’ Osheen said, pointing at a particularly stunning expanse of water surrounded by a thick green jungle. ‘It’s ten kilometres wide, almost four hundred metres deep, and located in the western section of the African continent.’
Osheen clicked his pen, causing the image to zoom in and start dramatically panning around.
‘On Earth today, it’s an Affinity-protected land thanks to its inherent beauty and cultural significance. The Ashanti people considered it sacred for hundreds of years, and they believed the souls of their dead visited this lake before moving on.’
Click. A small red dot appeared.
‘This is where our message was broadcast from,’ Osheen said. ‘Right at the heart of the lake of souls.’
Jack raised a hand, causing his uniform to audibly creak.
‘If you think I can swim with this on, you are sorely mistaken.’
‘Can these disguises even get wet?’ Eureka asked, inspecting the delicate materials that spread across her body.
‘No,’ Osheen sighed. ‘Water and that much delicate machinery do not mix. However, that’s not a problem, as you’ll be going here …’
Click. A new landscape, slightly familiar in some ways.
‘Lake Bosumtwi formed as the result of a meteor impact roughly a million years ago,’ he continued. ‘As you will be there a million and a half years before that, I don’t see much need for you to be able to swim.’
‘Hell of a coincidence,’ said Kez. ‘The broadcast point being the exact centre of a future crater.’
‘Good way of erasing any physical evidence,’ Jack said.
‘Speaking from experience?’ Theo asked, that shit-eating grin making another appearance.
‘He’s right though,’ said Osheen. ‘No better way of hiding your footsteps than atomising them with a meteor.’
‘So when we go back, we’ll only have a million and a half years to complete our mission?’ Theo asked, a little too cheekily for Jack’s liking.
‘No,’ said Osheen. ‘Your visit took one hour, fourteen minutes and six seconds.’
‘Took?’ asked Eureka. ‘As in, past tense?’
‘Of course,’ Osheen grinned. ‘Hold on, I need to give you something.’ With a flurry of in-pocket action, Osheen eventually found and extracted a metal bar, about fifteen centimetres long and a few thick, with hinges at either end. Carefully he unfolded it until it made a square frame. He placed the frame on the table, tapped a hidden button on its side, and enjoyed the gasp when it opened.
‘Portable portal,’ he said as his travellers gazed into the space that had opened up inside the frame. Instead of seeing a grubby tablecloth, the group could see a small cupboard, filled to the brim with unidentifiable technology. Osheen reached in, his hand now goodness knows how many lightyears away, and pulled out a mass of wires, ports, and metal, roughly the same size as a brick.
‘This is the temporal beacon,’ he said. ‘Without this you will not be able to return home.’
Instinctively, four hands shot towards it. Osheen slapped three of them away.
‘Theo will be in charge of the beacon, as well as the team,’ he said, sliding the beacon over to Theo, who picked it up and held it like it was a new-born Teffarg.fn37
‘I will only acknowledge those of you who call me “King”, “Master”, or “God-above-all”,’ Theo beamed.
‘How about “Twat”?’ Eureka asked.
‘Compromise?’ offered Theo. ‘“Twat-master”?’
‘I’ll go as low as “Twat-above-all”,’ countered Eureka.
‘Deal,’ said the Twat-above-all.
Osheen decided to shake off his instant regret and plough on.
‘Before we send you back in time, we’ll randomly generate a code on this beacon, nothing more than a little burst of data. Something that could be waved away as background radiation, but with a secret digital signature hidden within. When you arrive in the past, you’ll automatically broadcast it towards the Project Novus satellite. When you leave, you broadcast it again.’
‘So you know exactly how long we’re out there for,’ Theo said, wondering if his uniform had any pockets for this unwieldy machine.
‘Of course,’ smiled Osheen. ‘The trip was completed millions of years ago, after all.’
‘From your perspective, are we actually going to be away for that long?’ Eureka asked. ‘Or do we just vanish and re-appear instantly?’
‘Gold star for that question!’ Osheen said. ‘The way the time machine works is that it’s a single journey. It activates, we fling you back in time, it stays active, and then we pull you back after the allotted time. Think of it like a time tether, or a temporal bungee cord. You jump into the past and we’ll pull you back.’
‘Does this mean we’re immortal in the past?’ Kez asked. ‘If you know we come home, you know we survive, right?’
‘I know the beacon comes home,’ said Osheen. ‘The device has a fairly small range, about ten metres. If you’re not in that space when the time’s up—’
‘—we don’t come home with it,’ Jack growled.
Silence. Osheen nodded at the ground.
‘Can’t you kick that distance up a notch?’ asked Eureka. ‘Or maybe give us handcuffs so we don’t get separated?’
‘It takes an enormous amount of power to get you home,’ Osheen said desperately. ‘We could theoretically increase the range infinitely, but you’d need a power pack the size of a building to make that increased range useful.’
Silence. Someone coughed, making the silence that followed somehow quieter.
‘It also detects temporal anomalies down to a half metre!’ Osheen blurted. ‘That’s how you’ll be able to pinpoint where you’re going!’
‘I know where I’m going,’ mumbled Jack, eyeing the door.
‘Just stick together!’ Osheen said. ‘How hard is it going to be to stick together?!’
‘Have you ever seen any film?’ asked Kez. ‘Read any books? Seen any plays?’
Jack heaved up oxygen that had been sitting at the bottom of his lungs to fuel a particularly loud sigh.
‘Can we just get this over with?’ he grumbled as he stood. ‘We go back in time, we find the source of the signal, we report back, we fuck off and have a spot of dinner. Job done.’
‘For once I’m with Jack,’ said Theo, getting to his feet. ‘Eureka, Kez, you ready?’
‘Bit bored of it to be honest,’ Eureka smiled as she joined the group. ‘Time travel loses some of its lustre after the second time.’
‘Kez?’ Theo asked. ‘You ready to go?’
‘Of course,’ Kez said, following the group as they headed towards the time machine, each step highlighted by a small shot of pain, as the high-intensity transmitter she’d hidden in her hair scratched away at the same spot on her head, over and over again.
* * *
‘Could you hold still please?’ Osheen’s transmitted voice echoed around the time machine. ‘As Earth isn’t our origin point, Malcolm is having to account for all sorts of stellar drift to a tolerance of no more than a metre. If he’s a single second out you could be floating in space or embedded underground.’
Do you mind if I upload myself somewhere else for the next hour or so? E-NA asked internally as Kez watched the temporal focus point crackle and glow, illuminating the worried faces of the three other travellers standing around it. Only I’d rather not die today.
