I hate it when they say ‘gotcha.’ It just rubs my nose in the fact that I’ve been cornered by someone I really should have been able to outsmart. I know, it’s a matter of personal pride of the sort that takes the chief position in any medieval parade of the Seven Deadly Sins. But, dammit, I take pride in my work, and a big part of my work involves not getting caught.
So, when the hulking gorilla of a first mate on the SS Dogturd, a ship that’s most likely doomed to sink long before it could reach Santa Cruz, let alone Panama, or wherever the next port of call might be. I hadn’t been paying too much attention to the particulars as the press gang manhandled me and Larry onto the boat. Now, Larry was gone, having popped back to whatever grunge-hole he’d come from, and I was dangling by my wrist from the first mate’s clenched fist.
Forgive the excessive gratuities in bouncing from tense to tense. When you’re a time traveler the particulars of when the hell you are in the context of telling your story can get a bit fuzzy in the best of circumstances.
This was far from the best of circumstances. I knew that there were some very lucrative business contacts waiting to be made, one, in particular was looking pretty good and only required me to meet a guy a few stumbles down from the waterfront bar back in Frisco. And now, thanks to Larry, I’d missed my appointment and was instead looking at the business end of the first mate’s cat o’ nine tails. Quite frankly, the circumstances sucked.
I’d been in the process of setting my watch, that family heirloom time travel device passed down from my great-great-grandfather to me and from me to my great-great-grandfather in a way that would challenge Stephen Daedalus’ algebraic reasoning concerning Hamlet’s grandson. Now, my left hand, which was holding the watch, was inconveniently far from my right, as the first mate stretched my arm above my head while my feet danced about looking for purchase on the deck below.
And I’m not a small guy, but any means. This first mate was a mountain.
“Right, lads,” said the mate. “Anyone want to tell the new crewman here what happens when someone abandons their post without leave?”
A discomforting mob of socially maladjusted seamen had gathered to observe the culmination of the previous chapter’s chase and my unfortunate capture.
“The cat! The cat! The cat!” they chanted. They were a depraved audience eager to watch every reddened stripe of flesh that promised to blossom across my back during the impending lashes.
The fact that that little bastard Larry had been able to so nonchalantly slip out of this situation by merely finishing a taco made my blood boil. It made me so angry that it eclipsed the extreme reluctance I felt toward taking the only action I really had available to me at the moment. I really didn’t want to leave 1885 with a new business opportunity left hanging, but I also have a personal policy against allowing myself to get flogged.
“Listen, gentlemen,” I said. “This has all been one great big misunderstanding.”
I added one of those nervous laughs tourists give when they realize they’ve overstepped their bravado in the wrong part of town. This was no mean feat, because the tendons straining in my left shoulder were sending signals to my brain that were not of the ‘laugh’ variety.
“Just what is it I’ve misunderstood?” said the first mate. The breeze shifted, and I became acutely aware that he smelled just as ugly as he looked.
“It’s a funny thing really,” I said, drawing things out as my left thumb found the right knob on the watch. “I was never really here.”
I triple-clicked the watch’s crown, activating the default emergency escape setting, and flashed right out of 1885 forever. Normally I try not to use my method in front of witnesses, but this was an acceptable deviation. No one was going to believe this bunch’s story of how they all stared in wonder as the new crewman they were about to haze suddenly disappeared into nothingness. There was minimal risk that any of those goons would be able to use the experience to disrupt the timestream.
Still, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to what I was flashing into. The default emergency escape setting jumps straight to the Cross-Time Coordination Agency Headquarters. In any case, I had a professional obligation to file a report on Larry. Communication with the CTCAHQ was definitely called for. But generally I like to bury a note a few years upstream and let them find it on their own. Face to face dealings with bureaucracy are not my strong point. I only hoped they would be more concerned with appearance of a new, undisciplined, random time traveler than they would be by my actual presence on the CTCAHQ campus.
* * *
CTCAHQ, and I do pronounce that like I’m bringing up phlegm, has their headquarters in what looks like a giant plastic eyeball on stilts overlooking the Olduvai Gorge. It’s about ten stories high, fifteen if you count the stilts, with the middle five floors an open floorplan office monstrosity. Those five floors are crescent-shaped galleries affording every desk a view through the giant window of the iris. The building has no stairways or elevators, just a set of long curving ramps that switchback along the retina wall and connect to different levels unpredictably. Above and below the iris are the more sensitive departments of CTCAHQ.
Unless you’re there, in the time of chimpanzees, you won’t find it. The building doesn’t exist in any other timeframe, so don’t bother looking. It sits safely two million years in the past, at the dawn of humanity. The official line is that this is the best placement of headquarters because it’s the perfect spot to protect humanity from a nihilistic rogue time traveler intent on destroying the human race before it even gets started. Honestly, I think they chose the time and place because the weather’s fantastic. It’s practically a resort atmosphere.
One of the more frustrating architectural quirks of the building is, no matter how hard you try to fine-tune your approach, visitors always arrive on the entrance mat. The entrance mat is a platform cantilevered out from the central floor and into the focal point of the eyeball. There’s no way to unobtrusively slip in and make a report without every-damn-body in the Agency knowing you’re there.
And, to make things just a little bit more annoying, the floor covering on the entrance mat is the same as the old carpet from the Portland International Airport. I have no idea why, but it makes every trip to CTCHAQ feel like stepping into a hashtag.
So, there I was, arriving on the entrance mat with great-great grandpa’s watch in my hand and a strong desire for some prescription strength pain relievers. Not only did my shoulder ache from where I had been dangled, but I could really use something to take the edge off. I felt a building ennui at the thought of dealing with the kind of people who have no problem wearing formfitting cerulean jumpsuits.
Everyone working at CTCAHQ wears a cerulean jumpsuit. They say it’s because the color reduces chronometric friction. I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical of any group of people over the age of five who dress up in matching pajamas.
Just off the entrance mat I saw my first CTAHQ jumpsuit. It was filled with a particularly uptight agent named Hastings. Early on in my solo career, Hastings had taken it upon himself to be a personal thorn in my side. Whenever one of my business activities veered even remotely close to the grayer areas of the Laws of Time, Hastings would be there to bust my balls.
With a smarmy, crap-eating grin.
Just like now.
“Greetings, Ishmael.”
Smarmy...
...crap-eating...
...grin.
And I’ll be damned if his jumpsuit didn’t have white piping and epaulets now. I regretted my earlier haste. Re-growing the skin on my back would have been much preferable to being in the same building with these fashion-impaired timecops.
I managed to grunt a response at Hastings.
“Likewise, I’m sure,” said the cerulean-clad prick. “I would say that it’s a pleasant surprise to see you. But, to be honest, it’s not. The Orb had placed my meeting your arrival on the day’s duty roster. Neither pleasant nor a surprise, actually.”
“No surprises in the CTCAHQ,” I said.
“Please don’t spit, Ishmael,” he said. “We must set a good example for the hominids.” He pointed out a vast circular window, the iris of the crazy eyeball building, to a family of hairy proto-humans lounging in the lush greenery nearby.
“Try just a little bit harder, Hastings,” I said. “I can almost smell that smug sense of superiority you’re trying to exude.”
“This way,” he said. “The Orb wants to debrief you personally.”
The Orb. That was another guy who really creeped me out. Basically, in time traveler circles, anyone who has given up their actual name for an aggrandized combination of a noun and a definite article is someone to watch out for. Some of them can be pretty interesting, some of them downright fun, but the Orb...
Let’s just say that time spent with the Orb does not come in doses small enough for my liking.
Hastings led me through long, looping ramps and corridors to the Orb’s office. Along with my reluctance toward any conversation that can be described as a ‘debriefing,’ the architecture itself was messing with me. No corners anywhere and all the surfaces gradually curving into each other wherever they meet. The place always gives me vertigo.
“Any chance we could stop by the infirmary for some Dramamine?”
“Sorry,” said Hastings, “but you’re not on the Agency health plan.”
“There’s and agency health plan?”
“If you’d come to the fortnightly public meetings you would know these things.”
“Does anyone else come to these meetings?”
Hastings’ face wrinkled. I took his lack of an answer for a no. We walked in silence the rest of the way through those polished, organic, ramping hallways.
After some time, we reached the apex of the eyeball-shaped building, the severely acute angle of the exterior wall implying a shallow dome. Half the dome was taken up by a reception area furnished with the height of 1960’s post-modern uselessness. Chairs in which it was impossible to sit upright and tables with legs that seemed to be designed based on conic sections spun at random angles. Cerulean shag carpeting. A bee-hived receptionist sitting at a desk formed from an S-shaped curve of Lucite.
Hastings led me right past the receptionist, through one of those science fiction dilating doors and into the darkened, secluded chamber from which the Orb kept track of all of time.
The Orb sat behind his desk, creepy and intimidating. He had a head the size of a prize watermelon and the ability to actually see time flowing around him. If he looked hard enough, and in the right direction, he could see the very ripples in the continuum as travelers pop in and out of the stream. He could figure out where a person had been and where they were going just by staring at them. It’s a neat trick, and one that he’d parlayed into a nice upper management position. But he was a very unsettling guy to be around. He knew everything everyone around him was about to do before they did it. The only thing he didn’t know was why.
I really hoped he wasn’t expecting me to answer ‘why’ questions.
“Good epoch, Ishmael,” said the Orb. I don’t care what the appropriate butt-kissing protocol is, I wasn’t going to respond to that ridiculously stilted, elitist salutation in kind.
“Sure. Good whatever,” I said.
“A good epoch to you, sir,” said Hastings, a man who adheres to ridiculous butt-kissing protocols like superglue.
“Go away, Hastings,” said the Orb.
“Right away, sir.”
“Leave!” shouted the Orb.
I have to admit, I really enjoyed hearing Hastings get yelled at. Maybe an audience with the Orb wouldn’t be so bad after all.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I realized, no, this would be bad.
The Orb’s head had grown since the last time I’d graced CTCAHQ. It was now the size of a Pilates ball. His office chair was rigged with a system of architectural scaffolding on which his head rested. His hair was so thin, due to his scalp being stretched over the enormity of his cranium, that it seemed a shame that it hadn’t been shaved off entirely. But, then again, that was a tremendous amount of surface area to drag a razor across. Just looking at the giant bulb of his head, with his tiny face seated at its bottom corner, set off another round of vertigo within me.
“What brings you here, Ishmael?” the Orb said.
“Oh, I had a little complication,” I said, trying to figure how best to word things so as not to accidentally pin any more responsibility on myself as necessary. Flashing out of the middle of a violent mob is something that, technically, the CTCAHQ frowns on. Too many witnesses.
As it was, I ended up giving the Orb an unembellished account of Larry and how he didn’t even realize he had been traveling. Not even in the end, when he rediscovered his method in that awful taco he found in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt.
“I mean, who eats coelacanth?” I concluded. “The main reason these fish were lost to zoology for so long was that they are not good eating. Madagascar fishermen have been throwing the ugly suckers back in the ocean for millennia. Whenever they get hauled up in the nets, it’s like, dammit, not this thing again.”
“Agreed,” said the Orb. “Our chef keeps putting it on the menu here for some reason. It’s truly awful and I usually take the vegetarian option those days. But I might suggest tacos to him. It could be that the seasoning is the secret.”
“It’s your funeral,” I said, relieved that the tone of the debriefing had turned conversational.
“Yes, funerals,” said the Orb. “So many funerals...” His eyes rolled aimlessly in his tiny face as he waited for just the right moment to drop the other shoe on me. “Which reminds me. This Lawrence is far too dangerous to be allowed to stumble through the timestream unsupervised. Hand me your watch.”
“What?” I said.
“Hand me your watch,” said the Orb. “Or do I need to call Hastings in here to manhandle it from you?”
Reluctantly, I turned it over. The Orb took the watch and held it to a place on his forehead a foot and a half above his left eyebrow. The watch and the forehead began to glow with the same cerulean color as the timecops’ jumpsuits. Several minutes of this glow, and a progression of positively inhuman facial expressions, passed before the Orb returned my watch.
“I’m deputizing you as Lawrence’s chaperone,” he said. “I believe you’ll find him in San Diego.”
“Hold on!” I said as the Orb, and the entire CTCAHQ building, dissolved around me, my objection echoing into the nothingness of an involuntary time jump.
The thing I hated most about the Orb was that, in any conceivable situation where you had to interact with him face to creepy little face, you were no longer in any position to make a choice about your fate. I suddenly, clearly identified the last moment I had anything resembling a choice in all of this: the first mate and his cat o’ nine tails. I really could have made a different choice. I really could have made the choice to stay on the Dogturd and face the mate’s lashings. That would have been a finite and transitory bit of pain that I would, in time, overcome. I’m a strong man. It was pride, really, that led me to bug out before the lashes came down. Pride in my ability to keep my ass from getting beaten. I could have made a different choice if it weren’t for pride. And now an entirely different part of my pride was injured. Pride in my capacity as a free agent in a world where most people are imprisoned in lives prescribed for them by forces beyond their control.
I had lived outside of all that for quite a while. I had known the freest of all free wills. Not even time could hold me down. Because I had always had the freedom to avoid true consequences and responsibility. And now, one stupid choice...
Who am I kidding? It was the way it had to go down. The Orb would have dragooned me one way or the other. Still, a part of me was beginning to regret that I hadn’t made a different choice.