The End of the Line
Sep. 12th, 2011 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolThe Director of Marketing called Timmers into his office. "We need something," he said.
"Okay," replied the genius behind 99.4% of Arclight Industry's profits. "Is it a machine to switch the direction of Earth's rotation? Because if so, I am way ahead of you."
"Um… no." The director peered at Timmers to try and figure out if he was joking, then decided he'd rather not know the answer. "No, I'm looking to address a consumer need that focus groups have identified."
"Okay. That's cool," said Timmers, scratching his stubbly beard. "I like consumers. They eat things."
"Specifically," continued the director doggedly, "people are tired of being scared…"
"Drugs!" interrupted Timmers brightly.
"… and confused…" added the director.
"Drugs!" said Timmers, spreading his hands.
"… and generally feeling like they've lost their way in the world."
"Oh," said Timmers glumly. "Well, how about religion? Everybody likes a nice God. I could grow you one."
The director frowned. "One what?"
"A God," said Timmers. "Could be a Lightning God. Chicks dig that."
The director grimaced and massaged his temples. "Timmers," he said, "what we want is the ability to send people back in time. The world has changed a lot since 9/11; things have become more complicated, and people perceive that they are in greater danger. Everybody has a generalized low-level feeling of anxiety that they can't shake, because it comes from living in these times. So, we have determined that we could realize substantial profits by making it possible for people to emigrate, one-way, to a time fifteen years in the past. This will be highly attractive to those especially sensitive to the aftermath of the attacks in New York City and Washington D.C."
"Huh." Timmers leaned back thoughtfully and put his feet up on the director's desk. The director hated that. Timmers knew and didn't care.
"Okay, I'll do it," he said after a moment's consideration. "I'll need two million dollars, five hundred megawatts and a lot of beef jerky."
"How much beef jerky?" the director wanted to know.
Timmers leaned forwards. "Do you think," he asked, "that there might be some beef jerky on the shelves of the Walmart down the street?"
"Yes," replied the director.
"Then you haven't given me enough beef jerky," said Timmers triumphantly.
"But you hate beef jerky," Cho protested.
"I know, right?" said Timmers. "Sticks in your teeth. Disgusting stuff." There was a vast heap of the leathery strips of dried meat occupying a solid quarter of the laboratory's open floorspace.
"Then how come you asked for all this crap? And what am I gonna do with it all?" Cho picked up a piece and sniffed it, then dropped it again.
"Sometimes you have to ask for stuff you don't need, just to see how much of your shit they're willing to put up with," Timmers explained. He had one of the access panels open on his prototype time-gate and was fiddling with coils of multi-colored wiring. "Well, I'm pleased to say that they're apparently still very, very willing to put up with my shit. That's good news; it means I don't have to leave this dump just yet."
"Are you thinking about going someplace else?" asked Cho. He couldn't imagine Arclight Industries without Timmers. "I could look over your resume if you wanted."
Timmers flashed Cho a disgusted look. "When I leave, I'm beaming my biography directly into the brains of every recruiter on the planet," he said, "and I'll edit the memories of everybody in this company to forget I ever existed."
"Oh," said Cho forlornly. He went to find a push-broom to do something about all the jerky.
"No no no, leave that for the test rats," said Timmers impatiently. "They'll like that. A little gesture from management. Good for morale. No, get over here. I need you to hold something."
Cho reached into the guts of Timmers' machine and held two wires together while Timmers spliced them. When the crimping connector was applied, a glass chamber deep in the heart of the apparatus glowed an ethereal cerulean.
"Yes! I knew it!" crowed Timmers. "The time circuit is activated! It'll work now!"
"Really?" Cho peered into the recesses of the enormous creation. "What did you fix to make it work? You've been stuck for like a week on this thing."
Timmers raised an admonishing finger. "I wasn't 'stuck'," he said. "I was thinking non-productively. But that's all better now. No, I realized that it wasn't working earlier because the universe was making time travel impossible."
This was incomprehensible even compared to most of the other things Timmers routinely said. "Huh?" asked Cho.
"Paradox," said Timmers. "The universe is scared of it. It's afraid some dumbass is going to go back in time and change something in the past and muck everything up."
"Yeah, like going back and killing your own grandmother," said Cho.
Timmers glared at Cho. "That's sick, man," he said. "Nobody does that. Kill your own grandmother. What's wrong with you? Is everything about the killing with you?"
"No," replied Cho, hurt.
"Good," answered Timmers. "Slapping your grandmother, sure. I'd slap that witch in a heartbeat. But, you know what, slapping her won't tangle up the universe. The universe is not scared of somebody going back and slapping your grandmother. First, she deserves it, the bitch. Second, it's not going to change much important. It wouldn't even be that bad if somebody killed her. What would happen? The worst that would happen is that you'd become a paradox and would cease to exist."
"Hey!" whined Cho.
"Sorry, that's not a crack at you," said Timmers, making a last few adjustments. "Nobody's all that important. In the grand scheme of things, even if your being paradoxically eliminated vaporized a few million of your descendants spread out over the remaining duration of the human race, it's just not that big a deal. Now, information – that's big."
"What, like, who's going to win the Superbowl?" Cho asked.
"The SuperWhat?" Timmers peered at Cho. "If this is a sports thing, you know I'm not all that interested in primitive anthropology. Now, knowledge of groundbreaking technology – that could be a big deal. Take the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Now suppose that Yankee was actually Richard Feynmann. Suddenly we've got the atomic bomb before we've invented the flush toilet. That could be a game-changer."
"It might be bad enough to just bring with you the idea that there's such a thing as an atomic bomb," Cho mused.
"Exactly right," said Timmers, closing up the access hatch. "And in the absence of doing something about that, making a machine that sent people back in time couldn't work. It wasn't that the physics was wrong; there was no troubles with the engineering; the problem was strictly metaphysical. The universe didn't want any part of taking a chance that somebody could go back and screw up history with a bunch of filthy ideas."
"So how did you get around that?" asked Cho impatiently.
"I built in a scanner that finds and destroys technology, and a brain-scanner that finds and detunes concrete memories of the future," said Timmers. "Anybody who goes through this machine will have only a dim recollection of what the present day is like, and they won't be able to bring any modern-day toys with them. That's all hard-wired into the system's operation; those functions can't be turned off. Now, suddenly, the universe is copacetic with it all. It was all just about making the universe feel safe and comfy-womfy."
"What kind of technology does it destroy?" Cho asked. "Could I wear my clothes?"
"Depends on the time you're going back to," Timmers replied. "If you wear stuff that's readily available in the target age, the clothes can go. But if you try to go back to 1 million BC, you'd come through naked."
"I'd probably lose my fillings too," Cho considered.
"Well, it's worse than that," Timmers said, closing up his toolbox. "Language is a pretty good technology. I can't imagine the machine would let that get back before it was invented."
Cho shook his head. "This is a useless machine," he said.
"You don't have to convince me," said Timmers. "Me, I don't think anybody will use it. But I do what I'm asked to do. That's why they pay me the big jerky." He dusted off his hands. "Well!" he said brightly. "Should we turn it on?"
"I don't want to go back to 1996 and forget everything I know about the present," said Cho.
"Yeah, me neither," agreed Timmers. "Well, let's just energize it so we can say we did, and then see what Marketing wants to do with it."
"Okay," said Cho. Timmers seized two big red breakers on the front of the time-gate and pulled them down to the ON position. The lights in the lab dimmed as the apparatus charged its capacitors, and then the machine hummed happily in a steady-state.
There was a knocking on the rolling doors of the lab.
Cho and Timmers exchanged glances. "Were you expecting a delivery?" asked Cho.
"No, and neither were the rats," replied Timmers. Eyes narrowed, he stalked towards the doors and pulled one open a few inches. "Whaddaya want?"
"We're ready," said a voice. "We're ready to go. Let us go!" A chorus of agreement joined in, voices pleading, demanding.
Timmers threw the doors wide open. A line of people stretched down the alley, across the street, and out of sight around a bend.
**
"So where are you from, originally, exactly?" asked Timmers. The crowd wanted to go through the gate, but Timmers wanted to satisfy his curiosity, and nobody was going to use his gizmo until he said they could. The guy at the front of the line had consented to be interrogated.
"I don't know," said the guy. "That information is gone now too. The far future, I think. Your time-gate is a big hit; we've built a lot of them along the timeline of humanity, all allowing us to jump back fifteen years or so. It's…popular."
"Why?" asked Cho.
"Because the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," said the traveler. He smiled suddenly. "Wow, I guess that little truism, at least, wasn't taken from me!"
"We've got that saying here already," Timmers explained. "What do you mean, the grass is always greener?"
The wanderer sighed. "You have no idea how it is," he said. "I don't really remember the future, but I know that every generation it gets a little more complicated; the problems get a little direr; prospects for living a life as free as your mother and father did seem increasingly dim. Everybody wants to go back, hoping to find a simpler time. But when they go, they find that the jump before that looks even better, so they take that step, and then the next, and then the next."
"Is this stop any better than the last one?" Cho asked.
"Oh, definitely," said the vagabond. He frowned. "At least – I think so. I don't really remember. There was something about spores from space, or maybe it was radioactive dust. It's all very fuzzy. I don't know, maybe that was the jump before. Regardless, I remember thinking about 2011 and going, man, wouldn't it be great to go back to that time period, when the only thing we had to worry about was a few extremists and a slow economy and a couple of medium-size wars. That would be the life."
"But you're moving on down the line anyway," Timmers said. "Holy Cow, the Marketing Droid was right about something for once."
"Sure," said the traveler eagerly. "I mean, in 1996 you won't even be worrying about extremists and a bad economy. You'll be worrying about how to find porn on the internet, and which stocks you can buy that could make you a millionaire overnight."
"Then what's to stop you from going back to 1996, living to 2011 and then going right back again?" asked Cho.
"What do you mean, 'stop us'?" demanded an old lady. "This is my fourth trip!"
Timmers shrugged. "Hey, I don't care; you can all go through as far as I'm concerned. There's a lot of you lined up out there, though, so it might take awhile."
"Oh, this is only the first wave," said the first wanderer. "There was a lottery to see who could show up today, the first day that the time-gate was activated. We're the winners. We're the luckiest people on earth!"
"What do we do?" hissed Cho to Timmers.
"What we don't do," replied Timmers, "is stand here and take tickets. That's somebody else's job, ideally somebody unimaginative and stupid. What we do do, is we go through the gate."
"I told you I don't want to go," said Cho obstinately.
"Then stay," Timmers said. "But look: I invented the time-gate, right? So it didn't exist before me. That means there isn't a time-gate in 1996. It's the end of the line. I expect 1996 is piling up with people from the future right now, and some of them are going to be sick of the overcrowding."
His eyes gleamed with avarice. "But if I go through," said Timmers, "I might forget a lot of what I know now – but it's nothing I can't think up again. I am, after all, a genius. And if I can make a window back to 1981…." He rubbed his palms together.
"EASY MONEY BABY!" Timmers bellowed.
"Okay," replied the genius behind 99.4% of Arclight Industry's profits. "Is it a machine to switch the direction of Earth's rotation? Because if so, I am way ahead of you."
"Um… no." The director peered at Timmers to try and figure out if he was joking, then decided he'd rather not know the answer. "No, I'm looking to address a consumer need that focus groups have identified."
"Okay. That's cool," said Timmers, scratching his stubbly beard. "I like consumers. They eat things."
"Specifically," continued the director doggedly, "people are tired of being scared…"
"Drugs!" interrupted Timmers brightly.
"… and confused…" added the director.
"Drugs!" said Timmers, spreading his hands.
"… and generally feeling like they've lost their way in the world."
"Oh," said Timmers glumly. "Well, how about religion? Everybody likes a nice God. I could grow you one."
The director frowned. "One what?"
"A God," said Timmers. "Could be a Lightning God. Chicks dig that."
The director grimaced and massaged his temples. "Timmers," he said, "what we want is the ability to send people back in time. The world has changed a lot since 9/11; things have become more complicated, and people perceive that they are in greater danger. Everybody has a generalized low-level feeling of anxiety that they can't shake, because it comes from living in these times. So, we have determined that we could realize substantial profits by making it possible for people to emigrate, one-way, to a time fifteen years in the past. This will be highly attractive to those especially sensitive to the aftermath of the attacks in New York City and Washington D.C."
"Huh." Timmers leaned back thoughtfully and put his feet up on the director's desk. The director hated that. Timmers knew and didn't care.
"Okay, I'll do it," he said after a moment's consideration. "I'll need two million dollars, five hundred megawatts and a lot of beef jerky."
"How much beef jerky?" the director wanted to know.
Timmers leaned forwards. "Do you think," he asked, "that there might be some beef jerky on the shelves of the Walmart down the street?"
"Yes," replied the director.
"Then you haven't given me enough beef jerky," said Timmers triumphantly.
"But you hate beef jerky," Cho protested.
"I know, right?" said Timmers. "Sticks in your teeth. Disgusting stuff." There was a vast heap of the leathery strips of dried meat occupying a solid quarter of the laboratory's open floorspace.
"Then how come you asked for all this crap? And what am I gonna do with it all?" Cho picked up a piece and sniffed it, then dropped it again.
"Sometimes you have to ask for stuff you don't need, just to see how much of your shit they're willing to put up with," Timmers explained. He had one of the access panels open on his prototype time-gate and was fiddling with coils of multi-colored wiring. "Well, I'm pleased to say that they're apparently still very, very willing to put up with my shit. That's good news; it means I don't have to leave this dump just yet."
"Are you thinking about going someplace else?" asked Cho. He couldn't imagine Arclight Industries without Timmers. "I could look over your resume if you wanted."
Timmers flashed Cho a disgusted look. "When I leave, I'm beaming my biography directly into the brains of every recruiter on the planet," he said, "and I'll edit the memories of everybody in this company to forget I ever existed."
"Oh," said Cho forlornly. He went to find a push-broom to do something about all the jerky.
"No no no, leave that for the test rats," said Timmers impatiently. "They'll like that. A little gesture from management. Good for morale. No, get over here. I need you to hold something."
Cho reached into the guts of Timmers' machine and held two wires together while Timmers spliced them. When the crimping connector was applied, a glass chamber deep in the heart of the apparatus glowed an ethereal cerulean.
"Yes! I knew it!" crowed Timmers. "The time circuit is activated! It'll work now!"
"Really?" Cho peered into the recesses of the enormous creation. "What did you fix to make it work? You've been stuck for like a week on this thing."
Timmers raised an admonishing finger. "I wasn't 'stuck'," he said. "I was thinking non-productively. But that's all better now. No, I realized that it wasn't working earlier because the universe was making time travel impossible."
This was incomprehensible even compared to most of the other things Timmers routinely said. "Huh?" asked Cho.
"Paradox," said Timmers. "The universe is scared of it. It's afraid some dumbass is going to go back in time and change something in the past and muck everything up."
"Yeah, like going back and killing your own grandmother," said Cho.
Timmers glared at Cho. "That's sick, man," he said. "Nobody does that. Kill your own grandmother. What's wrong with you? Is everything about the killing with you?"
"No," replied Cho, hurt.
"Good," answered Timmers. "Slapping your grandmother, sure. I'd slap that witch in a heartbeat. But, you know what, slapping her won't tangle up the universe. The universe is not scared of somebody going back and slapping your grandmother. First, she deserves it, the bitch. Second, it's not going to change much important. It wouldn't even be that bad if somebody killed her. What would happen? The worst that would happen is that you'd become a paradox and would cease to exist."
"Hey!" whined Cho.
"Sorry, that's not a crack at you," said Timmers, making a last few adjustments. "Nobody's all that important. In the grand scheme of things, even if your being paradoxically eliminated vaporized a few million of your descendants spread out over the remaining duration of the human race, it's just not that big a deal. Now, information – that's big."
"What, like, who's going to win the Superbowl?" Cho asked.
"The SuperWhat?" Timmers peered at Cho. "If this is a sports thing, you know I'm not all that interested in primitive anthropology. Now, knowledge of groundbreaking technology – that could be a big deal. Take the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Now suppose that Yankee was actually Richard Feynmann. Suddenly we've got the atomic bomb before we've invented the flush toilet. That could be a game-changer."
"It might be bad enough to just bring with you the idea that there's such a thing as an atomic bomb," Cho mused.
"Exactly right," said Timmers, closing up the access hatch. "And in the absence of doing something about that, making a machine that sent people back in time couldn't work. It wasn't that the physics was wrong; there was no troubles with the engineering; the problem was strictly metaphysical. The universe didn't want any part of taking a chance that somebody could go back and screw up history with a bunch of filthy ideas."
"So how did you get around that?" asked Cho impatiently.
"I built in a scanner that finds and destroys technology, and a brain-scanner that finds and detunes concrete memories of the future," said Timmers. "Anybody who goes through this machine will have only a dim recollection of what the present day is like, and they won't be able to bring any modern-day toys with them. That's all hard-wired into the system's operation; those functions can't be turned off. Now, suddenly, the universe is copacetic with it all. It was all just about making the universe feel safe and comfy-womfy."
"What kind of technology does it destroy?" Cho asked. "Could I wear my clothes?"
"Depends on the time you're going back to," Timmers replied. "If you wear stuff that's readily available in the target age, the clothes can go. But if you try to go back to 1 million BC, you'd come through naked."
"I'd probably lose my fillings too," Cho considered.
"Well, it's worse than that," Timmers said, closing up his toolbox. "Language is a pretty good technology. I can't imagine the machine would let that get back before it was invented."
Cho shook his head. "This is a useless machine," he said.
"You don't have to convince me," said Timmers. "Me, I don't think anybody will use it. But I do what I'm asked to do. That's why they pay me the big jerky." He dusted off his hands. "Well!" he said brightly. "Should we turn it on?"
"I don't want to go back to 1996 and forget everything I know about the present," said Cho.
"Yeah, me neither," agreed Timmers. "Well, let's just energize it so we can say we did, and then see what Marketing wants to do with it."
"Okay," said Cho. Timmers seized two big red breakers on the front of the time-gate and pulled them down to the ON position. The lights in the lab dimmed as the apparatus charged its capacitors, and then the machine hummed happily in a steady-state.
There was a knocking on the rolling doors of the lab.
Cho and Timmers exchanged glances. "Were you expecting a delivery?" asked Cho.
"No, and neither were the rats," replied Timmers. Eyes narrowed, he stalked towards the doors and pulled one open a few inches. "Whaddaya want?"
"We're ready," said a voice. "We're ready to go. Let us go!" A chorus of agreement joined in, voices pleading, demanding.
Timmers threw the doors wide open. A line of people stretched down the alley, across the street, and out of sight around a bend.
**
"So where are you from, originally, exactly?" asked Timmers. The crowd wanted to go through the gate, but Timmers wanted to satisfy his curiosity, and nobody was going to use his gizmo until he said they could. The guy at the front of the line had consented to be interrogated.
"I don't know," said the guy. "That information is gone now too. The far future, I think. Your time-gate is a big hit; we've built a lot of them along the timeline of humanity, all allowing us to jump back fifteen years or so. It's…popular."
"Why?" asked Cho.
"Because the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," said the traveler. He smiled suddenly. "Wow, I guess that little truism, at least, wasn't taken from me!"
"We've got that saying here already," Timmers explained. "What do you mean, the grass is always greener?"
The wanderer sighed. "You have no idea how it is," he said. "I don't really remember the future, but I know that every generation it gets a little more complicated; the problems get a little direr; prospects for living a life as free as your mother and father did seem increasingly dim. Everybody wants to go back, hoping to find a simpler time. But when they go, they find that the jump before that looks even better, so they take that step, and then the next, and then the next."
"Is this stop any better than the last one?" Cho asked.
"Oh, definitely," said the vagabond. He frowned. "At least – I think so. I don't really remember. There was something about spores from space, or maybe it was radioactive dust. It's all very fuzzy. I don't know, maybe that was the jump before. Regardless, I remember thinking about 2011 and going, man, wouldn't it be great to go back to that time period, when the only thing we had to worry about was a few extremists and a slow economy and a couple of medium-size wars. That would be the life."
"But you're moving on down the line anyway," Timmers said. "Holy Cow, the Marketing Droid was right about something for once."
"Sure," said the traveler eagerly. "I mean, in 1996 you won't even be worrying about extremists and a bad economy. You'll be worrying about how to find porn on the internet, and which stocks you can buy that could make you a millionaire overnight."
"Then what's to stop you from going back to 1996, living to 2011 and then going right back again?" asked Cho.
"What do you mean, 'stop us'?" demanded an old lady. "This is my fourth trip!"
Timmers shrugged. "Hey, I don't care; you can all go through as far as I'm concerned. There's a lot of you lined up out there, though, so it might take awhile."
"Oh, this is only the first wave," said the first wanderer. "There was a lottery to see who could show up today, the first day that the time-gate was activated. We're the winners. We're the luckiest people on earth!"
"What do we do?" hissed Cho to Timmers.
"What we don't do," replied Timmers, "is stand here and take tickets. That's somebody else's job, ideally somebody unimaginative and stupid. What we do do, is we go through the gate."
"I told you I don't want to go," said Cho obstinately.
"Then stay," Timmers said. "But look: I invented the time-gate, right? So it didn't exist before me. That means there isn't a time-gate in 1996. It's the end of the line. I expect 1996 is piling up with people from the future right now, and some of them are going to be sick of the overcrowding."
His eyes gleamed with avarice. "But if I go through," said Timmers, "I might forget a lot of what I know now – but it's nothing I can't think up again. I am, after all, a genius. And if I can make a window back to 1981…." He rubbed his palms together.
"EASY MONEY BABY!" Timmers bellowed.
