Stopped Clock: It's Time
When I dropped in the other evening, I could tell right away something was up. Slightly more crowded than usual. Edgar eerily smily. Lots of folks conspicuously failing to hide the fact that they were talking about me. More than one drink bought for me, even by normally very skint travelers. (Since I don't usually drink much at the SC, I quickly found myself with a number of rounds queued up.)
Weirdest of all, I bumped into someone I knew from the outside, from objective time, my buddy Andy from the old talk.bizarre days. Only, he looked like he'd gotten about fifteen years ahead of me in age.
"What are you doing here?" I asked him, after I'd picked my jaw up from the floor.
"I'm a time traveler, obviously," he said matter-of-factly. "Been doing it for years."
"And you didn't tell me?" I tried not to sound hurt, but he knows how into time travel I've always been.
"I *am* going to tell you," he said with a what-can-you-do shrug, "just as soon as I start, which hasn't happened yet from your normal point of view, my old one." Then he scowled: "Anyway, how come *you* never told *me* you'd been sneaking into a time-traveler bar for over a year?"
I had to admit, he had a point. But:
"That's not really what I meant about being here, anyway. I mean, why here, tonight?" ('Tonight' still being a really slippery and evasive concept to pin down about the bar, but once you're in there it makes perfect sense.)
"Oh," he said. "Yeah. Well… tonight's the night!"
"For what?"
He pointed: "For you!"
I could feel my face pinching up in a sort of strained, confused shape. Then, suddenly, a breeze of comprehension blew it all away and my eyes went wide: "I'm… going to time travel?"
At this point, the topic having been broken, lots of nodding went about the room. Everyone looked excited.
"Singularly rare event," Andy said. "You're going to leave tonight and the exit door is going to drop you in the wrong time and place, and you'll be on your way."
"Is the door… broken?"
"It doesn't mess anyone else up," Andy said, shaking his head. "It's doing exactly what it's supposed to. It's just that you never shifted its link before. You'll be able to do it every time, after this."
There was a vicious struggle happening in my head, between rising excitement and growing disbelief. This wasn't actually about to happen, was it?
"So… I'm really about to travel through time?" I wobbled my head as if to clear it. "Where… I mean *when*… do I end up?"
Lots of grins around the room. "It's a surprise," Andy said sheepishly.
"A… what?"
"You made us all swear not to tell you. That was a condition of knowing which night to be here to see you off. I mean, you're *going* to make us swear and that *will* be a condition. But," he reached under the table and pulled out a heavy wool coat that looked like it had been made a hundred years ago, "you're going to want this."
"Am I going somewhere cold?"
Chuckles. "Oh, yeah," said Andy. "Not for long, though."
"Is it… dangerous?"
His face clouded a bit. "Would be if you were staying. But you're not. You're one hundred percent guaranteed to be fine. But really, I shouldn't say any more. You should get going, get this done."
"Can I at least finish a couple more of these?" I asked, pointing at the whisky shots on the table that I hadn't gotten to yet. No way I was going out that door while my judgment remained sound.
"Oh yeah, by all means!"
I put a couple more ounces down the hatch and let them settle into my bloodstream, then pushed back a bit roughly and shouldered the coat on once I was feeling sufficiently cavalier about the whole thing.
I gave a wave to the assembled crowd in the bar and lurched toward the door. "See y'all later!" Then I more stumbled through than anything else.
Outside, it was morning, in a ruined city buried in snow and ice.
By ruined, I mean war-destroyed. The burnt-out hulls of a couple old-timey tanks were nearby. World War II? Beyond the tanks, half a still-standing wall… covered in Cyrillic.
Oh, shit.
Travelers sometimes experience a sort of… "preja-vu". The atemporal, counter-causal, paradoxical nature of what they do can cause memory from their own future to trickle backward through their minds. Sometimes, those memories are very complete, but often it's just a sort of… sense of topic. One finds oneself dwelling heavily on subjects that seemingly come out of nowhere, because at some future point in one's life those subjects are going to have directly relevant consequences.
And I've… been thinking about Stalingrad in '42 a lot lately, for no real reason that I could discern. But, as a result, I've been digesting a lot of photography from the battle, looking at maps, piecing it together, reconstructing some of the key events. Why? Why? Well, apparently because I was going to need to recognize that I had stepped out between the river and the foundry of the Red October factory, and needed to get the hell out of sight of those second story windows right over there before a sniper shot my ass.
I shuffled, practically tumbled, to the right as fast as I could in the heavy coat, went around a higher piece of busted wall, and just threw myself down behind it, every sense waiting hyper-aware of the shot that would surely kill me. Seriously? Stalingrad? How the fuck was I going to be safely away from here? Other side of the planet, four years before my own mother will be born. No American GIs to help me out here. Probably not even a single native English speaker within… shit, probably not within hundreds of miles. Fucked, so fucked. Panic rose… or rather, shot up like a rocket. Good thing I had already dropped myself to the ground, as I felt a black-out come at me like a thrown rock. I closed my eyes and let it roll over me as I tried to get my breathing under control.
And then, suddenly, it got warmer (though not really warm), and the light shifted and dimmed and then darkened, and I opened my eyes to find myself in the alley alongside the Thai place that C and I went to lunch the other day. Night, a bit cold and wet, but walking distance from my home and a far cry from certain death in the frozen ruins of a Soviet city under siege. I actually made it home, by the objective clock, before I went into the bar in the first place.
Good trick; I'm going to have to practice that, if possible.
Anyway, maybe there's more to this whole time-travel thing ahead of me still, but so far over the last few days, it's looking like my lot in temporal life is pretty limited. I can only transit time as I exit the bar; I haven't figured out quite how to fine-tune that control but it seems to be linked to stuff that's on my mind a lot. Which, judging from the stuff I've been thinking about this past year, probably means I'm prepping to see a lot of robot singularities and end of the world scenarios, which isn't great. Definitely need to work on the exit control.
But it's largely moot, because it looks like after exit, I get to have pretty much exactly one and only one minute in the "time zone" and then I black out and come home. Every time, no matter how hard I try to stay focused, stay in the time, even when I'm sober, the world quickly goes spinning and I fall back to "objective time".
Not much of a time traveler, as these things go, but I suppose it's better than nothing. And sometimes, even a minute in another time is more than enough to do what you'd want to do, I'm sure. "Twice a day", right?
------
For consideration: probably not my last S.C. tale but nonetheless, a handing off of the torch, of sorts
Weirdest of all, I bumped into someone I knew from the outside, from objective time, my buddy Andy from the old talk.bizarre days. Only, he looked like he'd gotten about fifteen years ahead of me in age.
"What are you doing here?" I asked him, after I'd picked my jaw up from the floor.
"I'm a time traveler, obviously," he said matter-of-factly. "Been doing it for years."
"And you didn't tell me?" I tried not to sound hurt, but he knows how into time travel I've always been.
"I *am* going to tell you," he said with a what-can-you-do shrug, "just as soon as I start, which hasn't happened yet from your normal point of view, my old one." Then he scowled: "Anyway, how come *you* never told *me* you'd been sneaking into a time-traveler bar for over a year?"
I had to admit, he had a point. But:
"That's not really what I meant about being here, anyway. I mean, why here, tonight?" ('Tonight' still being a really slippery and evasive concept to pin down about the bar, but once you're in there it makes perfect sense.)
"Oh," he said. "Yeah. Well… tonight's the night!"
"For what?"
He pointed: "For you!"
I could feel my face pinching up in a sort of strained, confused shape. Then, suddenly, a breeze of comprehension blew it all away and my eyes went wide: "I'm… going to time travel?"
At this point, the topic having been broken, lots of nodding went about the room. Everyone looked excited.
"Singularly rare event," Andy said. "You're going to leave tonight and the exit door is going to drop you in the wrong time and place, and you'll be on your way."
"Is the door… broken?"
"It doesn't mess anyone else up," Andy said, shaking his head. "It's doing exactly what it's supposed to. It's just that you never shifted its link before. You'll be able to do it every time, after this."
There was a vicious struggle happening in my head, between rising excitement and growing disbelief. This wasn't actually about to happen, was it?
"So… I'm really about to travel through time?" I wobbled my head as if to clear it. "Where… I mean *when*… do I end up?"
Lots of grins around the room. "It's a surprise," Andy said sheepishly.
"A… what?"
"You made us all swear not to tell you. That was a condition of knowing which night to be here to see you off. I mean, you're *going* to make us swear and that *will* be a condition. But," he reached under the table and pulled out a heavy wool coat that looked like it had been made a hundred years ago, "you're going to want this."
"Am I going somewhere cold?"
Chuckles. "Oh, yeah," said Andy. "Not for long, though."
"Is it… dangerous?"
His face clouded a bit. "Would be if you were staying. But you're not. You're one hundred percent guaranteed to be fine. But really, I shouldn't say any more. You should get going, get this done."
"Can I at least finish a couple more of these?" I asked, pointing at the whisky shots on the table that I hadn't gotten to yet. No way I was going out that door while my judgment remained sound.
"Oh yeah, by all means!"
I put a couple more ounces down the hatch and let them settle into my bloodstream, then pushed back a bit roughly and shouldered the coat on once I was feeling sufficiently cavalier about the whole thing.
I gave a wave to the assembled crowd in the bar and lurched toward the door. "See y'all later!" Then I more stumbled through than anything else.
Outside, it was morning, in a ruined city buried in snow and ice.
By ruined, I mean war-destroyed. The burnt-out hulls of a couple old-timey tanks were nearby. World War II? Beyond the tanks, half a still-standing wall… covered in Cyrillic.
Oh, shit.
Travelers sometimes experience a sort of… "preja-vu". The atemporal, counter-causal, paradoxical nature of what they do can cause memory from their own future to trickle backward through their minds. Sometimes, those memories are very complete, but often it's just a sort of… sense of topic. One finds oneself dwelling heavily on subjects that seemingly come out of nowhere, because at some future point in one's life those subjects are going to have directly relevant consequences.
And I've… been thinking about Stalingrad in '42 a lot lately, for no real reason that I could discern. But, as a result, I've been digesting a lot of photography from the battle, looking at maps, piecing it together, reconstructing some of the key events. Why? Why? Well, apparently because I was going to need to recognize that I had stepped out between the river and the foundry of the Red October factory, and needed to get the hell out of sight of those second story windows right over there before a sniper shot my ass.
I shuffled, practically tumbled, to the right as fast as I could in the heavy coat, went around a higher piece of busted wall, and just threw myself down behind it, every sense waiting hyper-aware of the shot that would surely kill me. Seriously? Stalingrad? How the fuck was I going to be safely away from here? Other side of the planet, four years before my own mother will be born. No American GIs to help me out here. Probably not even a single native English speaker within… shit, probably not within hundreds of miles. Fucked, so fucked. Panic rose… or rather, shot up like a rocket. Good thing I had already dropped myself to the ground, as I felt a black-out come at me like a thrown rock. I closed my eyes and let it roll over me as I tried to get my breathing under control.
And then, suddenly, it got warmer (though not really warm), and the light shifted and dimmed and then darkened, and I opened my eyes to find myself in the alley alongside the Thai place that C and I went to lunch the other day. Night, a bit cold and wet, but walking distance from my home and a far cry from certain death in the frozen ruins of a Soviet city under siege. I actually made it home, by the objective clock, before I went into the bar in the first place.
Good trick; I'm going to have to practice that, if possible.
Anyway, maybe there's more to this whole time-travel thing ahead of me still, but so far over the last few days, it's looking like my lot in temporal life is pretty limited. I can only transit time as I exit the bar; I haven't figured out quite how to fine-tune that control but it seems to be linked to stuff that's on my mind a lot. Which, judging from the stuff I've been thinking about this past year, probably means I'm prepping to see a lot of robot singularities and end of the world scenarios, which isn't great. Definitely need to work on the exit control.
But it's largely moot, because it looks like after exit, I get to have pretty much exactly one and only one minute in the "time zone" and then I black out and come home. Every time, no matter how hard I try to stay focused, stay in the time, even when I'm sober, the world quickly goes spinning and I fall back to "objective time".
Not much of a time traveler, as these things go, but I suppose it's better than nothing. And sometimes, even a minute in another time is more than enough to do what you'd want to do, I'm sure. "Twice a day", right?
------
For consideration: probably not my last S.C. tale but nonetheless, a handing off of the torch, of sorts