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Subject: Saving the Future – Part 16: One Moment In Time - version 2


Saving the Future – Part 16: One Moment In Time


    The heavy industrial robots dug without ceasing under the blazing desert sun until they broke through into the long-buried chambers below. “Hold there,” Grubber Daggitt instructed the mechanoids in his charge. “Stand down and let the microdroids get in there to clear away the rubble.”

    Three dozen hand-sized utility machines came in with brushes and scoops to clear away the small rocks and dust until they were down onto the ancient pitted plascrete.

    “Carbon dating,” Grubber ordered the analysis drone, and held his breath until the result flashed up on its belly-screen. “Twenty-fifth century,” he breathed ecstatically. “The motherlode. I am going to retire on this bonus.” He keyed the recorderbots to scan the area for posterity. “Call through to the boss,” he instructed the communications relay. “Tell Mister K that we finally found the Institute.”

    The utility machines were carefully cleaning the surface so that the heavy machines could cut through the long-buried building to uncover the treasures inside.

    “Tell the boss that at long last we’ll be able to know what happened here all those years ago.”

***


1,517 years earlier:

    It was 3.45 in the morning and everyone else in the Inferential Particle Physics Lab had long since gone home. The young man with the unruly hair took another sip of his now-cold stimucaf and popped another two Reddiwake tablets (“keeps you going when you’re slowing”). His eyes still blurred on the hologram desk where he was working.

    “Come on,” he told himself angrily. “You can do it. You can do this. It’s possible. Just prove it!”

    The calculations on his holo-display were in four dimensions, and they represented two years of diligent work. The young man’s professors predicted a brilliant future for him. But the calculations didn’t add up.

    “I’m missing something,” he growled. “What am I missing?”

    He reached for his mug again and found it empty. He thrust back his chair and stalked across the cluttered high-vaulted room of glass and steel towards the drinks dispenser. He knew another stimucaf was going to be bad for him; but if he hadn’t cracked this problem by 9 a.m., when his final thesis was due to be handed in, his life was over anyhow.

    “You’re supposed to be brilliant,” he told himself. “So brill.”

    The route to the vending station took him past his creation. It was a sleek brass and wood sled with a large padded chair and some manual controls. He’d argued that the low-tech approach was best. Mechanics weren’t as affected by electromagnetic fluctuations as electronics or quantum cards. But secretly he’d just liked the look of the thing. Hadn’t anyone else ever read The Time Machine?

    “Begin recording,” he told his desk computer. “It’s, oh drokk, 3.52am on Thursday the 11th of Reagan, 2460. I’m still trying to crack the Kamamoro Limit. I don’t know why my calculations aren’t working. I’m running out of time.” He snorted. All kinds of things seemed funny after three days without sleep and little to eat but Reddiwakes. “I can almost see it. Almost. Why can’t I see it?”

    He checked the readouts again. There were eddies in the timespace continuum. Surf was up. There was just now way to get onto the ocean.

    There was a sound from the cupboard beside the drinks dispenser. The door slid open and a girl climbed out.

    The student glanced at the tablet bottle on his desk. “Visual anomalies,” he breathed. “That’s new.”

    “Hello, Callum,” the girl greeted him politely.

    “And auditory. Full sensory hallucinations. Fascinating.”

    “I’m not an hallucination,” the girl told him. “I’m real.” She paused for a moment then added, “Dammit.”

    “Oh.” Callum Endar seemed disappointed. “Then why were you hiding in the closet?”

    That question seemed to catch the girl off guard, so the young man took the time to check her out more closely. She was very check-outable. She was Zhonguan, with glossy black hair and high classic cheekbones, dressed for some reason in an old-fashioned silk cheongsam. She was very pretty. He decided that he didn’t mind if she was an hallucination or not.

    “I’m here to talk to you,” she answered at last. “I’m Liu Xi Xian.”

    “Okay,” the student agreed. “Um, I don’t suppose you’re here to tell me the solution to the Wrichards-Day-Vincent Conundrum so I can crack the Kamamoro Limit?” Sometimes people’s subconscious told them things in the most remarkable ways.

    “Yes, I am,” Liu Xi told him. “As long as you agree to help me afterwards.”

    Cal frowned. “Is this the part where I have to sell my soul?”

    “No. This is the part where you agree that if I show you the final piece that will help you solve the secret of time travel you’ll take me through time to a specific moment and a particular place so I can save a life.”

    “Ah, hold it. If I change the past I might change the present too. You’d need to tell me when and where so I could try and predict the vectors.” He reached for his hand-calc. “According to the old accounts, time’s pretty good at absorbing any small changes a traveller might make, even the saving or taking of a life. But sometimes these things can cause cascades that would alter the whole of history, and that’s usually when the time traveller just gets erased themselves to stop that happening.”

    “Yes,” agreed Liu Xi, who’d been briefed. “My grandfather explained it all to me. It’s apparently to do with hedgehogs. Anyway, I want you to take me to 1988, to Laguna Beach, California.”

    “1988?” Callum ran some hasty calculations. It was crazy, because without the solution to the Kamamoro limit time travel of more than thirteen seconds was not possible anyhow. But he ran them. “That’s pretty close to the Turbulent Years,” he noted. “Only a decade before the start of the Radium Age Heroes. Very close to the Parody War and the Resolution Event.”

    “That’s where I need to be. Please.”

    Cal pointed to his time sled. “I can only get you there in thirteen second jumps,” he told her. “And that’s assuming we don’t just kind of get sprayed across the continuum curve. But that only happens about one time on five now.”

    Liu Xi pointed to a stool. “Callum, just sit down and listen for a moment. This is very important.”

    “I have a final paper due in less than six hours…”

    “Please, Cal. Hear me out. I’ve been sent by my grandfather to save a life. More than one life, actually. I can’t explain how I know or how he knows because that might interfere with your own future timeline. And when I leave you won’t even remember ever meeting me. But you will remember the breakthough I can give you, the vital missing piece in your research calculations. In return you’ve got to take me back in time so I can do what I need to.”

    Cal rubbed his aching head. “This is crazy,” he said. “How would you, or your grandfather for that matter, know how to travel in time? And if you can travel in time why do you need me and my sled?”

    Liu Xi had asked the same questions. “I can travel to all kinds of places,” she answered, “amazing wonderful terrible places. My grandfather can actually go further. But he can’t send me to a time where I’m already alive without causing bad side effects.”

    The young student looked up sharply. “Already alive? You’re saying that you’re from five hundred years ago?” He snorted.

    “Yes,” agreed Liu Xi. “I am.”

    Cal sceptically turned his hand-calc to scan the girl’s biochip. “You… don’t have a biochip,” he read. “You’ve never had a bio-chip. How could you buy things or travel or use the commsweb without a biochip?”

    “I don’t even know what a biochip is,” Liu Xi answered. “I’m really not from around here.”

    “Your rad-levels are so low!” Callum continued. “And you’re carrying thousands of obsolete bacteriforms! Oh my drokk, you’re from the past!”

    “That’s what I told you. And apparently if I hitch a lift with you I can slip into a year where I was already alive as a baby for a short time without negative consequences. I just need to attune my aura to yours to fool the timestream. I’ve been practicing during my convalescence.”

    “Convalescence?”

    Liu Xi made a shooing motion with her hands to dismiss the query as irrelevant. “The last thing I did to help my grandfather was a bit dangerous. I’m fine now.”

    “And you know how to beat the Kamamoro Limit?” Cal wanted to believe, but it all seemed like a stim-dream.

    Liu Xi pushed her hair back from her face. “Actually no. But I know how you can. Do we have a deal?”

    Cal looked at his papers, at his holodesk calculations, at the spiking graphs on the temporo-spacial monitors, at the inert time-sled that might never truly fly. “Sure, why not?” he said. “As long as we don’t endanger time.”

    “Deal,” agreed Liu Xi. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to go back to your sums and try again to solve the problem. I’m going to massage your temples while you do it.”

    The young man looked nonplussed. “That’s it? That’s how you’re going to help me crack time travel? Therapeutic massage?”

    “You’re turning down massage from a hot girl?” Liu Xi challenged him. “Actually, what I’ll be doing is shielding your body from external influences. Specifically, the external influence of the Celestians.”

    “Those giant Space Robots? The unstoppable ones?”

    “Yes. You see, what you don’t know is that they radiate a standing wave across the whole Parodyverse designed to prevent anybody from ever being able to solve the Wrichards-Day-Vincent Conundrum. They implanted alterations into pretty much all life in creation long ago, so they can… edit us, I guess. You’ve probably solved the problem a hundred times and had it automatically wiped from your memory.”

    “I’ve certainly run the math a hundred times,” Cal agreed. “But what you’re suggesting…”

    “I have certain elemental gifts,” Liu Xi went on. “I can use these to shield you for a short while. Long enough for you to complete and record your equation… I hope – Celestians are very powerful. All you need to do is be brilliant, okay?”

    Callum decided to just go for it. What had he to lose? “Okay.”

    He sat down at the holodesk and began to run the numbers again. He was very aware of Liu Xi’s soft fingers on the sides of his head. He could smell the spicy citrus of her body. He felt the warm pressure of her chest against his back.

    “The calculations,” he told himself out loud. He forced himself to go back to first principles and he derived the formula again.

    Liu Xi tensed. Her fingers became icy cold. She bit back a whimper.

    “Are you okay?” Cal asked her.

    “Just hurry,” she told him, biting her bottom lip.

    Cal raced through the calculations. After all his previous preparation it was so simple. “Computer, save and log this and give me a hard copy!” he barked excitedly.

    Liu Xi kept gripping him until the machine confirmed a directory save and the printer whirred plastic sheets into its out tray. Then she staggered back, pale and panting. “Celestians… powerful,” she gasped, leaning her hands on her knees. “Even when they’re just broadcasting on automatic!”

    Cal hardly heard her. He was staring at the calculations on the holomodel before him. “This is… so simple!” he breathed. He downloaded the equation onto a microcrystal and took it over to the sled.

    As he uploaded the data into the sled the machine started up with a turbine whirr.

    “It works!” Callum Endar cried, amazed with himself. “Unbelievable! It works!”

    “Good,” Liu Xi smiled, recovering some of her former calm. She climbed up onto the seat beside him. “1989 please.”

***


    The proprietor of Napoleon Solutions arrived in his personal bubblepod to personally inspect what Grubber and his workteam had found. That was more than the seedy Ozblock engineer had expected.

    “Mister K!” he swallowed hard, slipping away his flask of synthilager and rushing across the heat-hazed sands to greet the quadrillionaire. “I thought you’d… send someone.”

    “Not for this, Dagitt. Not if you’ve really found what I’ve been looking for all my adult life.” The thin-lipped man stared at his employee. “And if it isn’t what you reported, I wanted to be here for that too.”

    Grubber felt the synthilager struggling to come up from his stomach again. “It’s… the genuine article, Mister K! I swear it. The scannerbots have been over every byte of data. It’s a match in proportions, materials, configuration… everything. The genuine pre-holocaust Institute of Nonsequential Physics at the university of New Los Arachnos. It has to be.”

    Grubber watched anxiously as his employer reviewed the data. “So it is,” he agreed at last. “Well done, Daggitt. There were times I doubted I would ever see this day. There were moments when I lost faith in my destiny. But now all that is passed.”

    “Do you… do you want me to inform Sol-Gov, sir? So they can send in an appraisal team?”

    His employer’s glance answered that one and sent a chill down his spine. “Sol-Gov has lost its way, Daggitt. All humanity has lost its way. In these long centuries of peace we have become indolent, unambitious, quiescent. We have ceased to improve, to strive, to triumph. What lies within that building will change all of that forever.”

    “Good, good,” Grubber answered nervously. “So I’ll be taking my payment and leaving, is it?”

    The quadrillionaire didn’t even look at him as he handed over the payment chip.

    “Thank you, sir. I’ll just be going then, and leave the rest to you.” Too late the engineer realised that his boss had come entirely alone, without even any security. “Mister K?”

    His employer touched a glove stud and Grubber’s heavy duty industrial robots turned and blew their handler to tiny pieces.

    “Yes, you can go now,” Mister Kink answered absently. “Thank you for your assistance.”

***


Close your eyes, give me your hand, darling
Do you feel my heart beating?
Do you understand?
Do you feel the same?
Am I only dreaming?
Is this burning an eternal flame?

    The Bangles’ newest hit blared out from the speakers along the Laguna Beach boardwalk where the beautiful people jogged and danced and dated. The sun had just set over the ocean and the sky was a dappled purple. The day people were going home and the night people were coming out.

    The time-sled shivered into phase with an electric crackle and a shower of peripheral sparks – Cal was going to have to work on the interstitial dampeners - bounced a couple of times across the beach itself, narrowly missed a concession stand, then ploughed to a halt in one of the dunes.

    “Ouch,” said Callum Endar. Maybe he’d better work on the grav-plate navigation system as well?

    “You’re definitely improving,” said Liu Xi Xian honestly. This time they wouldn’t have to pick bits of dinosaur off the front of the sled before proceeding. She removed her hands from the cobbled-together elemental interface that she’d used to power this latest temporal jump; the transmundium power core that Cal had installed had proved unable to stand up to the rigours of temporal hopping and had evaporated after its first use. Liu Xi rubbed her aching arms. “Where are we this time?”

    Cal tapped the glass on the barometer-style readouts on his mahogany dashboard and waited for the sled’s internal diagnostics systems to catch up. Some electronics were essential, especially the sensor equipment that calculated location and time from a range of environmental and cosmic factors. It just meant that the system had to reread the hard-encoded program data every time and reboot from scratch after each jump.

    A number of people watched them curiously from the boardwalk.

    “It’s coming. It’s coming…” Cal assured Liu Xi. “But look, no Cretaceous jungles, no post-Resolution wastelands. This looks just like the history vids.”

    Liu Xi looked around at the people with the strange haircuts and the headbands. Long moustaches and mullets and hot pants were in.

    “Yes!” exalted the young student, tapping the dash. “23rd November 1989, as requested! 1840 hours local time! We did it! Seventh time lucky!”

    “Good,” Liu Xi replied. “Now we just need to find the fashion show. It should be happening somewhere along this boardwalk.”

    Cal blinked. “Fashion show? I thought we had to save lives?”

    “First we have to find a fashion show.” Liu Xi looked along the waterfront. “After you explain to the police why you have a time-sled on the beach.”

***


    The interior of the building was a wreck. Half the walls and ceiling were melted and distorted from the transnuclear bombs that had destroyed New Los Arachnos fifteen centuries ago. It had taken mankind a millenium to crawl back from the verge of extinction and to forge the new society that now sprawled across the stars.

    Mister Kink picked his way over the rubble, directing Grubber’s robots to shift away any debris that blocked his way. He knew what he was looking for.

    He found it after three ours of searching, a secured data terminal. The interface was long since shattered, of course, the power source destroyed. It didn’t matter. Napoleon Solutions’ hardware was more advanced now than anything that had been developed in those pre-holocaust days. A simple data jack from Kink’s glove was enough to restore the system. The nanobots and micronodes hastened to repair and reactivate long dormant systems.

    “This was an important research facility,” Mister Kink announced to himself – everything he said was automatically recorded by his survival suit for posterity. “This was where Callum Endar broke the time barrier. For a few brief years a fragment of humanity possessed the secret of chronal travel.” He keyed the systems to start a data sift. “That secret was kept here, jealously guarded by musty academics and sententious scholars. And then they lost it.”

    No records remained of how the war had begun. Some believed in a cosmic crisis. Others spoke of the wrath of the Celestians. More superstitious folks spoke of the Fairly Great Old Ones. But nobody knew.

    “They could have changed time and saved themselves, but they were too weak. They could have marched across the ages, but they had no spirit for conquest. And they fell, and all their work was for naught.”

    There it was: encrypted with all the ingenuity that brilliant minds could devise were the initial calculations of Cullum Endar. Mister Kink set his decoder algorithms to work.

    “I am no pale scholar,” he announced to posterity. “I shall conquer the ages.”

***


If I could turn back time
If I could find a way
I'd take back those words that hurt you
If I could reach the stars
I'd give them all to you
Then you'd love me, love me
Like you used to do.

    Liu Xi pushed her way through the crowd at the bayfront fashion show. The glittering exclusive event was held on the promenade beside the quay where the most exclusive party boats were moored. The tickets had been $75 apiece. Liu Xi was glad her grandfather had prepared her with some proper currency.

    “This is amazing,” babbled Cal. “It’s so real! And people… even historical people, they’re still like… people.”

    Liu Xi had been more impressed with their brief encounter with prehistory. She’d been chilled by the desolate fog-choked world of her near future – one of the near futures. “It’s strange,” she answered. “Like my time but just different enough to feel spooky.”

    Cal looked at her curiously. “But your era didn’t have time-travel,” he objected. “Well, maybe Wrichards and Harper and Meng, but not often and not easily. Heck, that’s why Wrichards and Day-Vincent posed their conundrum. So how did you get to me in 2460? And how did you know about the Celestian inhibition? And how did you overcome it?”

    Liu Xi found a good spot where she could watch the stage and she looked for the person she’d come to save. “I didn’t come from my own timeline. These past few months I’ve been living with my grandfather, in… somewhere else. Somewhere outside the regular timeline, I think. He’s able to open up pathways to all kinds of places. I think time travel is just one of the things he can do.”

    “Your grandfather?” Cal noted. “So you don’t live with your parents? Or, you know, a boyfriend or anything?” He managed to make that last enquiry sound quite casual.

    “My parents aren’t around any more,” Liu Xi answered shortly. She didn’t get into the whole sold-to-slavery bit. This was hardly the time, no pun intended. She wasn’t allowed to go back and change her own past.

    “And how does your grandfather know that somebody here is in danger? And of all the people in danger throughout all time and space why send you to this one?”

    Those were good questions. “My grandfather is… training me,” the elementalist answered. “To attempt something that is important to him. Something he’s been planning for a very long time, to the benefit of the whole Parodyverse.”

    “Oh, good,” said Callum.

    Seeing his blank face, Liu Xi relented and offered a little more background. “Some of my family – my lineage – have gifts to control the elements. We thought it was just hereditary, but we never suspected that our line had been bred for it over thousands of years. By my… well, many times great-grandfather, as it turns out. He needed someone who could help him to shape the fifth element in Chinese tradition, void.”

    “That’s… long range planning,” Cal admitted.

    “Now recently some friends of mine went missing,” Liu Xi pressed on. Behind her the first fashions for the 1989 season began to be paraded along the catwalk. “My grandfather believes he has located them, but he needs my void manipulation to enable the process that could salvage them. And before I can help him to achieve the breakthrough he needs to do that there are certain things that need to be done. Saving Tara Brookes is one of them.”

    Cal checked his programme. “That Tara Brookes?” he asked, pointing to a willowy young woman on the catwalk. She was in a leopard-spotted micro-sari with a head-dress composed of golf balls.

    “I guess. All I know is that she can’t die tonight. It would mess up the whole timeline forever.”

    Callum frowned. “I’m not sure if it works like that,” he advised. “Okay, I’m still kind of new at this. Temporal physics has been held back for centuries by that Celestian inhibition that we didn’t even know about, but my best math suggests that timelines can’t deviate from their causal chains without external influence. Does your grandfather have reason to think that there’s another time disturbance here that would knock local history off course?” A new thought cascaded after the first. “Hold it! The Space Robots were offline for a while just before the… were offline for a while at the start of the twenty-first century! No wonder Harper and the others were able to do some time-shifting that nobody’s managed since! No wonder that whole era’s a temporal muddle!”

    Liu Xi watched the lithe blonde model stalk back up past the investors. The music and lights changed as the next set of designs came on.

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world
And the seven seas--
Everybody's looking for something.
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused.

    The young elementalist frowned. Why did her grandfather want her here of all places? Why go to such bizarre lengths to send her?

    “That’s odd,” Cal noted, staring down at his calc-pad. “There’s a n-space fold nearby. That’s not usual tech for this era, is it?”

    “Certainly not,” Liu Xi agreed with him, uncertain what an n-space fold even was. “Where is it?”

    Cal refined the search parameters on his datablock. “Over there,” he said. “Front row of the VIP seating. That man in the… oh my drokk, that’s Leonard Day-Vincent!”

    Liu Xi peered at the young man in the tuxedo who was sitting uncomfortably amongst the glitterati watching the girls go by. “Who?” The name was familiar but the young elementalist wasn’t really up on particle physics celebrities.

    “Leonard Day-Vincent!” Callum told her in disbelieving tones. “The Leonard Day-Vincent, Mister Perfect? The Renaissance Man? Founder of Renaissance Man Research Inc, from Daedelus Discoveries? Played lead guitar with Schrödinger's Cat?”

    “Ah,” said Liu Xi blankly. The events Endar was babbling about had happened on the other side of the world when she was an infant in her cot.

    “Well of course he’d have a n-fold event tucked away in his pocket,” snorted Cal. “This is one of the finest brains of the twentieth century, at about the height of his fame.” Another thought occurred to him. “And that means… if he’s at a fashion show there’s only one possible reason for it…”

    “He likes fashion?” Liu Xi suggested. “He likes girls?”

    “Actually no, as it eventually turned out,” Cal admitted. “But at this time, in this place, there was one girl…”

    The lights changed again. A spotlight fell on the diminutive designer whose label had been on display. Sydney St Sylvain came forward to take a bow.

    “But I know her!” Liu Xi realised. “Years later, when she’s Dream’s friend. Fashion Accessory interns with her! She’s…”

    “The Fashion Fairy,” Callum completed with a goofy grin. “In this era she’s Day-Vincent’s future wife!”

    Sydney came to the front of the stage, beaming, and held up her hands for quiet. She wore a daring little silk tutu and a tasteful designer tiara. “Well thanks for coming to my little show!” she began, to hoots of laughter and rapturous applause.

    She didn’t get any further. The explosives in the speakers went off, and the neural coils snaked out to tangle her and Day-Vincent dropping them to the floor. The laugher turned to shrieks.

    A short man in a sinister green and purple outfit clambered up onto the stage. He had a hood over his head and a jetpack on his back. “Nobody moves!” he shouted. He pointed to the hovering silver and green spheres rising up round the audience. “Those grav-drones have particle liquidifiers built in! If anybody tries to escape then they’ll be reduced to soup!”

    The hovering drones hummed dangerously. A swipe of red light ran across the slit in their fascias.

    The man who’d interrupted the event jerked a thumb at his chest. “I am… Jack-of-All-Trades, the Gimmick Genius!” he announced. He looked down at the twitching Fashion Fairy in her neural coils and laughed. “And now I shall have my revenge against those who thwarted my brilliance!”

    “A super-villain attack!” Cal gasped, breaking into a huge goofy beaming smile. “A genuine early-era supervillain attack!”

    Liu Xi was less enchanted. “Yes,” she agreed, looking round carefully. Tara Brookes and the other models were backing away.

    “You won’t get away with this, O’Toole!” Day-Vincent warned Jack-of-All-Trades. “You think I can’t calculate the specific amplitude of your tangle-coils and work out a specific counter-wave to neutralise them and feedback into your main transmission bus?”

    “Not in time,” the villain cackled. “Not this time.” He turned to the models. “Take off those outfits,” he demanded with a happy leer. “I’m stealing them!”

    Sydney St Sylvain shrunk to the size of Tinkerbell and flew out of the neural coils on tiny glittering wings. “None of those things would fit you,” the Fashion Fairy told the villain as she punched him in the gut; her tiny blows seemed to have normal-size impacts. “I could probably whip up some designer handcuffs if it makes you feel any better.”

    Liu Xi Xian’s first instinct was to help out, but Sydney seemed to be doing just fine by herself.

    “Get her!” Jack-of-All-Trades shouted to his flying drones.

    “I think not!” countered Renaissance Man. “I’m scrambling the command frequencies of your remote weapons packages, denying you control of them!” he thumbed a device from his pocket.”

    “No wait!” yelped Fashion Fairy; but it was too late.

    “Noo!” screamed Jack-of-All-Trades. “If the signal’s cut they default to their kill programming! We’re all dead!”

    The hovering silver objects changed their pattern of flight. Their buzz became an angry whine. Dangerous-looking electrodes protruded from concealed hatches.

    “Don’t worry,” Day-Vincent called. “I can over-ride their control circuits with a simple electromagnetic pulse as soon as I calibrate…”

    But there wasn’t time. The droids swooped to kill.

    One flew straight at Tara Brookes.

    Before Callum could even react, Liu Xi reached out with her elemental powers. A wall of earth burst up through the catwalk between Tara and the flying weapon, shielding her from the first lethal blast. The model toppled backwards with a surprised squeak, falling down into the lap of one of the buyers.

    Liu Xi worked out the elemental auras of the nearest robots and heated them to melting point.

    “Got it!” Day-Vincent proclaimed, sending out the over-ride pulse. The other remote units toppled to the floor.

    “This isn’t over yet, Mister Perfect!” Jack-of-All-Trades proclaimed. “Did you think I wouldn’t come… Oooff!”

    Fashion Fairy had decked him with one tiny punch. She shimmered back to full size and bowed to the audience. “And that concludes our show,” she said.

    “Except for those anomalous matter manipulation and thermal events,” Day-Vincent puzzled, checking his sensors.”

    “Time to leave,” Cal advised Liu Xi.

    She nodded and hurried away with him back to the sled.

I've been around enough to know
That dreams don't turn to gold
And that there is no easy way
No you just can't run away...
And what we have is so much more
Than we ever had before
And no matter how I try
You're always on my mind.

Where do broken hearts go?
Can they find their way home?
Back to the open arms
Of a love that's waiting there?
And if somebody loves you
Wont they always love you?
I look in your eyes
And I know that you still care, for me

***


    It took Mister Kink’s onboard systems more than four hours to break the finest encryption of the twenty-fifth century, but at last the data was revealed and the Endar equations lay before him.

    “Of course,” gasped the quadrillionaire adventurer. “How simple…”

***


    Time bent again and the steaming sled appeared back in the Inferential Particles lab, sliding across the floor and demolishing a workbench. The main tachyon buffer grid crumpled and fell off with a loud clang. Then one of the sled rails folded, toppling Cal and Liu Xi out onto the floor.

    “I may need to redesign that in the second version,” Cal admitted.

    “Perhaps you could get off of me then?” suggested Liu Xi. “Why do men always end up falling on top of me?”

    Callum quickly scrambled away. Liu Xi used her elemental gifts to freeze down the small fires their explosive return had caused.

    “What now, then?” Cal asked her. “You, er, saved that girl like you wanted to. And I discovered the secret of time travel, assuming I can find a sustainable non-organic power source and make the tachyon buffer system more robust.”

    “Now I go,” Liu Xi told him. “Back to the closet.”

    Callum’s face fell. “Right now? Only I was wondering if maybe you wanted to go for a cup of stimucaf or something?”

    “I need to get back to my grandfather.”

    Cal took a hesitant step towards the elementalist. “I’d like to see you again,” he admitted. “Maybe you have a comm-number? Or… some timespace co-ordinates?”

    “You won’t even remember me, remember?” Liu Xi prompted him. “All you’ll recall is that you cracked the problem that was stopping you. You can finish your thesis, get your doctorate, get funding for your experiments, remake your time sled. You have a whole future ahead of you.” She touched her hand to his face. “But I’m not part of it.”

    “That’s…” Cal tried to find words. “I want to remember.”

    Liu Xi kissed him softly on the mouth. “I’ll remember for both of us,” she promised. Then she parted from him, opened the cupboard door, and vanished.

    The young man with the unruly hair took another sip of his now-cold stimucaf and popped another two Reddiwake tablets (“keeps you going when you’re slowing”). His eyes still blurred on the hologram desk where he was working.

    “Come on,” he told himself angrily. “You can do it. You can do this. It’s possible. Just prove it!”

    He checked his calculations again. The answer was staring him right there in the face. “Of course!” he gasped. “Eureka! I’ve done it!”

    He turned round as if he expected there to be someone to share his breakthrough with; but the lab was empty.

***


Epilogue 1:

    Liu Xi was distracted and tired. Those were the only excuses. She knew how to fold void through the corridor her grandfather had provided back to his eternal gardens. She just wasn’t paying attention.

    She opened her eyes in a place of cold mists and darkness. It had a horrible, familiar feel to it.

    “Liu Xi Xian?” a puzzled voice called.

    The elementalist turned round in surprise. “Lee Bookman?”

    “Yes,” agreed the Librarian. “So they got you too.”

    “Got me?” Liu Xi was puzzled. “What do you mean, got me? Where are we?”

    Lee Bookman clutched the lapels of his non-regulation coat. “Now that’s a fascinating question, and there’s plenty of speculative literature on the topic. Some scientific, some mystical, some theological…”

    “The short version?” interrupted the elementalist.

    “We’ve been captured by the Space Fandom,” Lee answered. “Or Fandoms. It’s not clear whether there’s a race of them or just one that folds back in time to be in more than one place at once. But what he or they does is always the same. He shifts people out of their usual place in time and space and assumes their identity and powers for his own ends. I suspect that’s why you seemed to be sabotaging the defences at the Lair Mansion, and how the person doing it had all your powers.”

    “I… see.”

    “And I was heading towards some strange alien city with Dr Harper when I was suddenly… here,” Bookman continued. “I hope Dr Harper is able to work out the problem before it causes too much trouble.”

    “Alien city?” It was clear to Liu Xi that she was missing a few chapters. “Where did the Lair Legion go to? What’s happening to…”

    Then she felt the dimensional tug upon her. Her grandfather had realised she’d got lost and was drawing her back to him.

    “There’s something very sinister afoot!” warned the Librarian. “And I think the person behind it has to be…”

    Then Liu Xi was safe back with her grandfather.

***


Epilogue 2:

    “What was the Librarian talking about?” Liu Xi demanded of the Void Scholar. “We have to go back and find him!”

    Liu Xi’s ultimate grandfather shook his head sadly. “You miscalculated your travel and slid into Comic-Book Limbo once more,” he warned the girl. “If I hadn’t snatched you out when I did, before the void-gap had fully closed, you’d have been lost there.”

    “Then get me back. We pulled that lizard girl out of much deeper in limbo that Lee Bookman is in!”

    “But we knew where she was. There is no way of charting where in that infinite plane the Librarian of the Moon Public Library is lodged.”

    “He’d been attacked! By a… he said a Space Fandom!”

    “I am aware of the creature, yes. A parasite, of sorts. Formerly a lackey of the temporal fluctuation calling himself the Cowled Criminal. He is dangerous in a limited sort of way.”

    “But he might know how to find the Legion.”

    The Void Scholar laid a calming hand on Liu Xi’s head. “There is no way for you to locate that creature,” he promised her. “There is no way for you to locate your missing friends. No way except the course we have already agreed.”

    Liu Xi controlled her temper. “But I don’t understand half of this! Why did I have to save a model called Tara Brookes? Not that I’m not happy to save any life, but why her? Why go to all that trouble with Cal to rescue that one person? And how did that mission prevent an alteration in the whole timeline?”

    “You misunderstand,” the Void Scholar told her, stroking her hair. “The mission did not preserve time as it was. It ensured time as it is. It ensured your existence, Liu Xi Xian. Your actions saved Tara Brookes, who is your own ancestor, many generations removed. If you had not gone back in time and saved her, you would never have existed.”

    “But… that’s a paradox!”

    “Who but a paradox could manipulate the void?” asked the Scholar.

    “So… Tara Brookes is my ultimate grandmother? The Celestian Madonna that you married… will marry… to begin the line that results eventually in me?”

    “Not quite,” replied her grandfather. “Tara Brooks is the mother of the Madonna. It is her daughter who will be my bride. And then your existence will be assured.”

***


Epilogue 3:

    Callum Endar checked his equation again. He’d done it. He’d cracked the Wrichards-Day-Vincent conundrum! He was going to be the most famous scientist of his age.

    But there was more. Cal looked carefully at the equation he’d typed out in his stimucaf-induced semi-lucid state. It seemed that he’s also appended a sub-channel.

    “Hello,” he said to the console (since there was nobody else to talk to, although it felt like there should be). “What have you to tell me then?”

    He was so intent on the message he’d left himself that he didn’t even notice the timespace continuum monitors spiking off the screens.

    “Remember Liu Xi?” he frowned. “Who or what is…?” And then it all came back to him. “Liu Xi! Of course!”

    She’d locked away the memories, using some strange influence of her grandfather’s, but now Callum Endar remembered everything. And if he remembered, he could look for her. With all time to explore, he could find her!

    “I can do it!” he cried aloud. “I am a time-traveller!”

    His leg brushed against something. It prickled.

    Callum reached under the workbench. “A hedgehog?” he puzzled, “Why would…?”

    A mocking voice came from beside the coffee machine. “Well, you were a time traveller,” said a man in an all-over purple and pink combat suit with a strange plastic facemask. “But so were the other eleven hundred and thirty variants of you who made the same breakthough at this point in time.” The masked man tilted his head thoughtfully. “Nick O’Time was probably the most annoying,” he judged. “Or his sister Plenty.”

    “Who the hell are you?” demanded Cal. “And how did you get in here?”

    “I am the man who knows that to truly master time one must be a paradox,” answered the intruder. He raised an omni-diode gun and shot Cal in the chest. “I am Kink the Conqueror!”

    He set the transnuclear charges and vanished into the timestream before the holocaust began.

***


Epilogue 4:

    The buyer clutched the shocked young woman who’d literally fallen into his lap. “Are you okay?” he asked Tara Brookes.

    There was chaos up on stage as Fashion Fairy and Renaissance Man took Jack-of-All-trades into custody. Tara had nearly died and she felt the shivers running through her body. For now she was quite content to stay wrapped in the arms of the handsome rich man she’d dropped onto. “I don’t know. I’m a bit… shaken.”

    “What you need is a drink,” the buyer told her. “I know an exclusive place just down the strip where they do a wonderful martini. Will you accompany me there?”

    Tara checked the man holding her. Armani casual suit. Rolex watch. Gucci shoes. “What kind of car do you drive?” she asked him.

    “Porsche 911 Carrera Sport,” he answered, “207 bhp, 0-60 in 5.4 seconds, top speed 150 mph, electric windows and seats. Red.”

    “I guess you could buy my a drink,” agreed the model.

    “That’s wonderful, honey,” the buyer grinned at her. “I’m Martin Bonnington.”

Give me one moment in time
When I'm more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away
And the answers are all up to me
Give me one moment in time
When I'm racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time
I will feel
I will feel eternity

***


Continued…



Image from Dancer


***


The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse

Previous Chapters:

#1: “And just when did Danny find time to take over the Parodyverse?” by Dancer
#2: "Sometime you have to turn flammable again!" by Visionary
#3: That’s the Way the Story Goes by the Hooded Hood
#4: See No Evil by the Hooded Hood

#5: Whodunnit by the Hooded Hood, Visionary, Killer Shrike, and Jason
#6: Suspicious Behaviour by the Hooded Hood, Jason, Hatman, and CrazySugarFreakBoy!
#7: Accusation and Denial by the Hooded Hood, JJJ, Jason and L!
#8: The Final Solution by the Hooded Hood and Dancer
#9: The Land That Common Sense Forgot by the Hooded Hood

#9.1: Adventures in Parodyverse by Jason
#9.2: Chad and Ronnie by L!
#9.3: “In addition to cappuccino and personal hygiene these tribespeople have not yet invented underwear.” by Dancer
#9.4: Lone Lost Boy & Heroines Hanging Together by CrazySugarFreakBoy!
#9.5: From Dross into Gold by Killer Shrike
#9.6: Old Friends and New Allies by Visionary
#9.7: Taking a Swim by L!
#9.8: A Post-Swim Chat by L!
#9.9: Champagne and the Land That Common Sense Forgot by Champagne

#10: The Age of Villains by the Hooded Hood

#10.1: Adventures in Parodyverse by Jason
#10.2: The Baroness #55 by JJJ
#10.3: Adventures in Parodyverse by Jason
#10.4: Ewe Gotta Have Hart 1 by Killer Shrike
#10.5: Ewe Gotta Have Hart 2 by Killer Shrike

#11: An Age Undreamed Of by the Hooded Hood

#12: The New Lair Legions (And Other Heroes) by the Hooded Hood

#12.1: I Hate You by Visionary
#12.2: Champagne and the Tower of Laments by Champagne
#12.3: Adventures in Parodyverse by Jason
#12.4: The Hearing by Visionary
#12.5: Adventures in Parodyverse by Jason

#13: Exploring the Forbidden Valley, or Samantha Featherstone and the Crystal Goddess by the Hooded Hood

#14: Real Heroes by the Hooded Hood

#14.1: “I’d like to be clear that I’m a no-skewer zone, and have been since college.” by Dancer
#14.2: Catherine & the Danger Zone by L!
#14.3: “Do you know how much shaving I had to do to put this thing on?” by Visionary
#14.4: “Well we can’t just wait here till we find a use for Visionary. We’ll starve to death.” by Dancer

***


Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2008 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2008 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
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The Hooded Hood addresses one of his longest-running subplots

Fri Jun 06, 2008 at
09:15:12 am EDT
Posted from United Kingdom
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