Analog Time, Part Three free porn video

Analog Time, Part Three "Junk" by Sandy Man An hour passed, and Dawson returned. He and a fat man pulled a large metal crate out of the cargo bay. To me it looked like a freezer unit. "Bardo, how's our range?" asked Dawson. The fat man plugged some sort of meter into the unit and took a reading. "We're good," said Bardo. "At this range, the interference is negligible." They opened up the box, and Dawson looked behind me. "Now," said Dawson to Davis. Davis wrapped his arms around me, pinning my arms to my sides. I struggled against the vicelike grip as he lifted me up and carried me toward the box. "No fucking way!" I howled. "You are not putting me in there." "It's easier this way," said Dawson. "No!" I kicked my legs, thrashed my neck, did everything I could to keep out of that box. The effort was useless against Davis's size and years on a weight bench. Clearly I wasn't the first person he'd had to carry around against their will. I was tossed into the box, and the lid slammed onto my fingers. I squealed in pain, pulled my hand free, and the lid slammed shut. I barely had enough time to get my head down and avoid a concussion. Immediately the lid popped back open, as if they'd forgotten something, and white light flooded in. I hopped out of the box, barely registering the fact that the sound of the engines had cut out. I found myself on a concrete floor, and the light that was blinding me was the light of a morning sun. It was cold. I blinked and my eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness as I looked around. The plane had been replaced by a dusty garage filled with parts and machinery. Dawson and his cronies were still here, but they were dressed differently. Gone were Dawson's fatigues; now he was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. My first thought was that I had lost time again. But my hand was still aching from where the metal lid had slammed it, just a moment ago, which hadn't bruised yet. "Right, the hand," said Dawson, seeing me favor it. "Elizabeth, would you wrap that for her?" "How long?" I asked. "Excuse me?" said Dawson. "How long was I in the box?" He smiled, but otherwise ignored the question and pointed at a large wooden chair with restraints for the feet and legs. "Won't you have a seat?" "No, I will not fucking sit down for you, motherfucker. Where am I?" Beyond the open doors of the garage was an endless row of junk and broken cars. I considered making a break for it, but Elizabeth never had delivered the shoes. I didn't imagine bare feet would do better on broken glass and jagged metal than they had on jungle shrubs and stones. **** "It will just be easier if you sit," said Dawson. "Where is the bathroom?" I answered. Dawson sighed and gestured for Davis to escort me outside. His stare was unbroken as I squat-pissed behind a late seventies Buick Skylark, giving me no chance whatsoever to grab and hide a weapon from the piles of junk. Without even basic self-defense training, I didn't think I could handle him, even if I bolted and managed to score a hunting knife. We returned to Dawson and the inevitability of the chair. Not wanting further abuse from Davis, I sat in the chair. Elizabeth was kind enough to strap down my arms and feet. She brought a small first aid kit, presumably for taping up my probably broken fingers, which were starting to darken and swell. After looking back at Dawson, who was fiddling with some machine behind me, she winked at me and put the plastic kit in my lap. "You're really bad at helping me, you know that?" I said quietly. Bardo, who had been watching the monitors of surveillance cameras, turned to Dawson and said, "Police." "God damn it," answered Dawson. "Alright, put her back in the box." Davis knelt by me to loosen the arm restraints, and over his shoulder I could see the cloud of dust formed by a police cruiser as it entered the lot. When both of my arms were free, I somehow managed to scuttle through Davis's legs and dash towards the cop, bare feet be damned. There was a commotion in the garage behind me, and then Dawson quieted it with a loud "Shut up". Before I had taken ten paces, my spine seemed to collapse and my legs turned to jelly beneath me. I crumpled to the dusty ground, trying to get my legs to work, trying to crawl towards the Police cruiser and the freedom it promised. My arms worked but my legs and lower back didn't respond. Had I been shot in the spine? I hadn't heard a bullet and I saw no blood as Davis hustled over and scooped me up, much more easily now that I'd been half-paralyzed. As I was carried back into the garage, I saw Dawson locking something in a metal cabinet. Back into the box I went, and no sooner did the lid close than it popped back open. Dawson was holding coffee, and the sun was higher in the sky. No more was the garage filled with brilliant light. "Okay, let's try this again," said Dawson. I was lifted out of the box and more easily plopped into the chair, now that my legs were mush that wouldn't respond to my commands. "What did you do to me?" I asked, my voice hoarse from the dust clogging my throat. "Why can't I feel my legs?" "Your legs should be fine in a couple of hours," answered someone new: a thin, middle-aged man with glasses. "A single use will result in permanent paralysis in less than five percent of cases, but that percentage goes up the more often you're subjected to it, so I would recommend against forcing him to stun you again." "Great. Who are you?" "I'm... Doctor Kreitz." He looked at Dawson, confused. "Are you sure this is him?" "Am I supposed to know you?" I coughed up some dust from my lungs. "And can I get water?" "Elizabeth," said Dawson. "No," I said, holding up a finger. "Not her. She'll throw it in my face." Dawson laughed and brought me the water himself. He had to hold the cup for me to drink, and pulled it away when I made a little grunting sound to indicate my need for air. Then he pulled up a chair and asked me a question in a calm voice. "Where is The Machine?" I could hear the capital letters in his voice. I heard Bardo and the Doctor fiddling with something, flicking dials and making adjustments. "Isn't it behind me?" Dawson sighed and hung his head in frustration. "Look," I protested, "I don't know who any of you people are. I don't know what you all have against me. And I definitely don't know where this Machine of yours is." "Okay," said Dawson, raising a hand to cut me off. "This amnesia bit might be real and it might not be. I'm willing to bet that it is. But I think that even if it is, you probably know some things that you don't think you know. So we're gonna hook up-" "No," said Elizabeth forcefully. "Not you. Not. You." Dawson held up a hand to quiet her. "But if you are faking it, then you might be getting some ideas about putting bad commands in my head. So, cue the incentive." He gestured, and a box was wheeled out in front of me, identical to the one that I had been trapped in. They opened the lid and a woman sprung out of it like a jack-in-the box. She climbed out, looking nervously around the room with a confused, hysterical expression. She was twenty years older, thirty pounds heavier, and her black hair was streaked with grey, but I recognized her immediately. She was Cassie. "How did I get here? Who are you people? What do you want?" "Fuck you, man," I hissed through clenched teeth Dawson gestured again, and Davis did his thing. She was back in the box in less than a minute, and the box was silent. Dawson leaned over me. "Get the picture? If I do anything... out of character after the hookup, then she doesn't come out. The critters will have a fun time with her, I'm sure." Critters? "You hear that, boys?" Dawson shouted to the ceiling. "Woman flesh for the eating, only three months away." He looked back at me, and smiled. "You really have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?" I glared at him and said nothing. "Never mind. I'll find out soon enough. You guys ready?" "Yes, sir," said Bardo. The Doctor added, "Normally I would say no more than three minutes to prevent erosion. With... her - I wouldn't go past one." "Alright," said Dawson. "Let's get started." He strapped on plastic headgear with a chin strap, and a similar apparatus was placed on my own head. Each had a bundle of multicolored wires leading back to some central machine behind me. Dawson inserted a plastic mouth guard with a small tube to breathe out of, and the Doctor appeared by my side with a thick wooden reed to bite down on. "You don't have to do this," I said to Kreitz. "Whatever it is that you think I know-" "Take this so you don't bite off your tongue," he said. I opened my mouth and accepted the wood. It was made out of dust that had been glued together, and in the warmth of my mouth it was breaking down into its component pieces. I coughed again as Bardo hit a switch behind me. I didn't feel any different. Certainly I didn't feel someone poking around in my brain. Maybe they hadn't actually turned it on yet. Gradually, though, I felt a massive frustration and hostility towards... well, me. Except that I wasn't me. I was somebody else. There was no sensation, only emotion. Dawson spit out the mouthguard, which dangled on a wire from the headgear. "What do you have it set at?" "The lowest level," answered the Doctor. "We want to take this slow. What are you getting?" "I don't know. It's all emotion. Fear, and embarrassment, and something..." I got a flash of Keith's face as he orgasmed, and Dawson pushed it down. "Something he's trying to suppress. Take it up a notch." "Alright, but I want to be careful. Remember what happened to Simmons." Something about my perspective changes, and I get a flash of memory. A bald, fat man, lying on the floor, convulsing, blood coming out of his nose and ears, the headgear connecting him to the Brain Box, and the Brain Box connected to a chair that holds one of Them, his face a mask of stone. "Shut it off, god damn it," I shouted. Except that it was actually Dawson that had shouted it, in the memory. I opened my eyes and realized that I had shouted that, just now, and so had Dawson. "You want me to stop?" said the Doctor. Even though I wanted to say yes, I shook my head no, and Dawson said, "No, it was a memory. Don't remind of things any more. Let me focus on him." I am waking up on the beach. A dog is licking at my puddle of vomit. Now I'm in a bathroom, pulling a secret message out of my vagina. I am pulling the plug on the end of the applicator tube. Wait a minute. This is important information. I burned this so that it wouldn't fall into enemy hands, and now I'm giving it up. Something else, quick. I am in a club. Loud music is playing, too loud to here my own thoughts. Someone gropes my ass. "Not that," I hissed through the wooden stick in my teeth. "He's fighting me," said Dawson. "Turn it up one." "You're going too far!" protests Elizabeth. Our brains merge closer together. I flash back to a phone call from Elizabeth. "Barney is dead," says the voice in my ear. It's so hoarse from crying that I hardly recognize it. "What?" Dawson's voice out of my mouth. I'm standing in Times Square, looking up at an enormous red sign. Enjoy Coca-Cola. The sign has a digital clock, which reads 6:30. It then switches to the date, June 20, followed by 1985. "How can he be dead? What happened?" "Somebody killed him." I look across the street and see a man in a jogging suit, wearing sunglasses. He is staring at me with binoculars. I hang up the phone, head for the subway. This is worse than I thought. "He's bleeding too much into my shit," said Dawson. "Reset, same level." The memory snapped off, jarring like a filmstrip breaking in the middle of a scene. There's a momentary pause where I am myself again, but in no time our minds are blending again. I am in a diner, eating a bagel. I have to pee. I ask the waitress where the bathroom is. Something else, quick. I'm standing on a wooden stage at twilight, playing the bass to Tom's rhythm. His drums sound awful. I sound awful. Eddie's singing is awful. The people in the audience look bored, and start to drift away. The part of me that is Dawson gets mad. "Stop fighting me," I say to myself, using Dawson's throat. "Or I swear to god I'll take a lead pipe to her skull." I picture myself grabbing Cassie by the hair, forcing her to the ground. The pipe is in my hands. I'm not bluffing. I back off, and find myself back in the bathroom of the diner. I open up the little message and it says, In Case of Panic, Refer to Left Arm. I peel the bandage off of my left arm. Inside is a fresh tattoo. It says Fuck You. "Turn it up," we say together. I open my eyes and look at Dawson. He is staring at me, confused. His words out of my mouth. "Wait, something's wrong. Reset, same level." With Dawson's eyes, I look over Josie's shoulder and see Bardo hesitate, unsure as to who to take orders from. The Doctor is more certain. "Do it," says Kreitz, and hits a knob. For a moment I am myself again, and in the second that I have before we merge, I know what I have to do. The merger begins. I'm sitting uncomfortably in a school bus on my way home from a field trip to Hershey Park. I'm not cool enough to be in the back, but not lame enough to be up front with the teachers. I'm sitting next to Ricky Heller, who I normally don't get along with. Today he is being nice to me because he wants to play Fire on my Game & Watch. I am holding in a bowel movement. We won't be back at school for another two hours. I sneeze, and shit squeezes out of my ass and into my underwear. I say nothing, staring at the floor, hoping no one will notice. Ricky is in a particular intense phase of Fire, but stops to sniff the air. He looks over at me. "Aw, man, Joey shit himself!" The girls all make Ewww sounds and the boys start laughing. So does the bus driver. I wish I had a Time Machine. I'd come back and change this. "Come on," I hear myself saying out of Dawson's mouth. I sound frustrated. Now I'm Dawson, sitting in a darkened bar, showing Eric Ferris newspaper clippings about his video game company going bankrupt. "Now the good news," I'm saying, in Dawson's voice. I nod at Bardo - a younger, thinner, fresher Bardo - and he pulls a twenty-first century laptop from underneath the table, opens up a window with DOOM gameplay. "This can be yours," I say to Ferris. "All we want is forty percent." "Forty percent of this game?" I smile. "Forty percent of everything. Forever." Ferris laughs, but we let him keep the paper. He'll be calling tomorrow. Now I'm Josie, opening up a plastic applicator tube that I just pulled out of my vagina. There's a little message inside. I unroll it and at the top of the page is an address- "Reset!" I hear myself shouting with Josie's voice. "Same level!" The page is gone and I'm myself again, but only for a moment. When we merge again, Dawson's mind is a steel trap, and I'm back in the bathroom, pinned. I open up the applicator tube, look at the address on the top of the page. The head of Dawson says, "Reset-" "No," says the head of Josie. I feel the words tumbling out of my mouth and am powerless to stop them. "One... five seven. "Main. H.... H fifteen." Dawson is watching Bardo scribbling on a notepad behind Josie's head. "Where?" says Bardo. "I don't know. The beach, I guess," says the head of Dawson. "Wait, there's something..." "Something else," says the mouth of Josie. Dawson is on the beach, watching me pull items out of my utility belt. A small locker key. "Where is that?" says the mouth of Dawson. I am laying on a bed in a motel room, staring up at the key as it bounces off of Keith's chest, over and over again, as he thrusts deeper and deeper into me. I hear glorious surf guitar riffs, and a voice sings: "When you decided to knock on my door, did you remember what happened before?" I scream as my pussy explodes. "But he's-" says the voice of Dawson. "Shut it off!" I'm howling, and Dawson is howling with me. The connection is suddenly severed, and I am myself again. As close as I get nowadays, anyway. My head tilted forward. I was ready to throw up again, but there was nothing in the tanks. Anyway, I was doing too much of that lately. Somewhere in the room, Dawson was quietly sobbing. I hoped that this didn't qualify as "out of character". **** "We have an address," said Bardo. "We should just go there and see what we find." "She's holding something back," he said after he'd had a minute to calm down. "I can't get at it right now; she has it... protected. Might be a trap. Might be planted information. Her brain is scattered because of low blood sugar, and she's using that to her advantage. Give her food and sleep, and we'll try again tonight." "I don't trust her," said Elizabeth. "You want to leave her alone to sleep?" "Put her in the cage," said Dawson. He left the garage. I was left strapped into the chair while Davis opened a heavy trap door to a basement compartment. Must be for smuggling things past the Empire, I thought with a snort. Never thought I'd be smuggling myself. He disappeared down the stairs and started making noise, presumably preparing a cage for my arrival. Elizabeth disappeared into a small office and returned with a steaming bowl of ramen noodles. "You're going to trust me with a bowl of food and a spoon?" I asked as she loosened my arm restraints. "I'm sure not going to fucking feed you." "I'm touched. Is it poisoned?" "Eat it and find out, fucker." I devoured the noodles. Feeling had not returned to my legs or feet by the time I was finished. Davis reappeared and scooped me out of the chair, carried me down the ladder like a rag doll. The dungeon beneath the garage was mostly storage containers; one quarter of the room was indeed taken up by a large cage. At one end was a ratty old cot with a blanket. At another was a bucket. He dropped me on the cot. "See that?" Davis flicked a thumb at a closed circuit camera mounted in the ceiling on the opposite side of the room. "It sees in the dark. We'll be watching." He went back upstairs and closed the trap. I heard the sound of a chain being dragged across the floor; he was obviously locking me in. Then the lights went out. Gradually the paralysis in my legs was replaced by a numbness. I could feel things, but only faintly, and it would be a while before I was up and walking. I started to make plans for after I was able to stand: I would walk the perimeter of the room, get a feel for the space I was trapped in. I would find out where the lock was, and how long it would take me to get to it. I would pull the cot away from the bars after making a show of being unable to sleep with them so close to my side. I would bunch up the blanket to make it seem to the camera like I was still in bed. I would slowly roll off the cot, where the camera could not see, and lay on the ground underneath it so that I could begin pulling at the springs. When I had enough wire to work with, then I would worry about whether or not I was capable of picking a lock, and how I would attempt to do it without the camera knowing what I was up to. I yawned. Dawson was right; I did need sleep. I closed my eyes and thought about the woman in the Stasis Box somewhere above me, locked in a moment of time. I tried to think of the last time I had seen her... She's on the bed of the motel, joystick in her hand. "You brought the Atari in?" "Can't sleep yet." "Then why didn't you drive?" "I can't drive your car. It sucks." "It doesn't suck. You just have to know how to work it." "You're the only one who can drive it." "Lots of people have Cougars." "Not yours. Controls are isomorphic. One-to-one." "Yeah, sure. Alright, I got you Pop Tarts-" "Shh. Egg level." She's playing Joust, her favorite game. I've long since moved on to the NES, but Cass is a stickler for the old 2600. She's getting pretty good, but she still can't take me in Galaxian. Nobody can. Nobody that I know, at least. "Did they have french onion dip?" she asks. "No." "Soda?" "Too late for soda. Too late for Pop Tarts, really." "Baby, I've got a craving for soda and french onion dip." "That's a shame. Tomorrow's another day." "Oh... fuck a duck." I didn't know if she was cussing at me or the game. I decided to call it the latter. I went to the bathroom. Outside, there was a knock on the door. I woke to the sound of the trap being opened. It hadn't felt like very long. Maybe I'd been so far under that I hadn't realized how much time had elapsed. The lights came on, and Bardo came down the ladder. He unlocked the gate and left it open, then returned to the ladder. Halfway up it he stopped and looked back at me. "Coming?" I got out of bed and tested my legs. They were weak, but I could stand and climb a ladder. On the floor of the garage were the lifeless bodies of Elizabeth and Davis. "You killed them?" "No," said Bardo. "Just stunned." He pulled a device from what could only be a weapons locker and was making adjustments. "What are you doing?" "Setting the disintegrator to overload. It should blow his mainframe, which will hamper his ability to follow us." I shook my head. "No, I mean why are you helping me?" He looked over at me. "We can't all go in the Machine. Dawson means to take Elizabeth and leave the rest of us stranded." "Take her where?" He ignored the question while he made the final adjustments to his machine. "So you want me to lead you to it?" He put a finger to his lips and gestured at the bodies on the floor. His meaning was clear; even though they were paralyzed, they might be conscious, and their ears still worked. Bardo finished his work, opened the garage door, and grabbed a set of keys off of a rack. "Let's go," he said, and started walking outside. "No." He stopped, turned toward me with a surprised look on his face. "What?" I pointed to the box that held Cassie. "Not without her." "We have about ten minutes," said Bardo. He looked at me for a moment, weighing up the wisdom of arguing with me. Finally he nodded, and pushed the crate up to the edge of the garage door. He opened up a large white panel van and hooked a wooden ramp to the rear of it. I realized that this was the same one that had been following me at the shore. I guess it wasn't connected to Them after all. Unless this was all a trap. Either way, I needed to get Cassie out of here. I did my best to help him push the crate up into the van, but my legs were still pretty much rubber, and I don't think I was much help. Not that Bardo needed it. He slammed the van shut and we drove off into the night. "Where to?" said Bardo, once we were on a main road. There was a bang and a flash of lightning behind us, and I looked back to see a pillar of smoke rising from the junkyard. "Where to," he repeated, with only a momentary glance back at the destruction he had wrought. "First of all, we're taking Cassie to her mother's house." "We don't have time for that. Dawson's got the address; he'll probably put everything into a helicopter to beat us there." "He doesn't have everything," I answered, thinking of the key around Keith's neck. If luck was on my side, he would mistake the memory as an attempt to throw him off track and wouldn't make the connection until I had that key in my possession again. "Listen, we can drop her on the way somewhere. It doesn't have to slow us up-" "Enough!" I slammed a fist into the dashboard. "I have some questions of my own." He sighed. "Okay." "First of all, where are we?" "Allentown." Even before he answered, I recognized the market on Third Street. Technically we were in Fullerton, a suburb of Allentown. "Fine." I pointed. "Take Route Twenty-Two." "Which way?" "East." "Alright." "Now. Who are you and how do you know me?" He glanced over at my face as we merged onto the highway. "You really don't remember anything, do you?" I didn't answer. "Okay, um... you are - well, you were - the owner of a multinational corporation that developed cutting edge weapons technology. The largest, actually. We all worked for you. Dawson is - was - the CEO." "How... what?" "Alright, I guess I have to back up. This isn't stuff that you shared, but we found it out gradually over the years. "You were in a car accident. Cassie was with you. She died. You went into a coma. This was back in nineteen eighty-seven." "What? But she's-" I pointed at the box in the back of the van. "Yeah, I know. Just bear with me." He checked his rearview, then got satisfied that whatever he saw wasn't following us. "You were in a coma for... I don't know, maybe a year. And when you came out of it, you were different." "Different how?" "You were smarter. Smarter than... anyone. Ever. There was literally no way to test your intelligence. No quiz could sufficiently gauge how smart you were. IQ tests were meaningless relics to you." "How? Normally people who wake up from a coma are damaged, aren't they? Shouldn't I have been stupider?" "I don't really know how. You covered that up, and pretty effectively. But we suspect that there was some procedure done to you, something new. As hard as Dawson tried, though, he couldn't get any information on it. We couldn't even find staff records for the hospital you supposedly recovered in. "Anyway, when you woke up, you were smarter than anybody else, and you were completely driven by something, some secret project. Nobody knew what it was at the time, in fact nobody knew for years. But whatever it was, you would need money to fund it, so you went to Wall Street. You worked the market like nobody had ever seen. The name Joe Skocik was on the lips of every financial guru in the world. In one year, you turned seven grand into forty-three million dollars." My head was spinning. None of this sounded familiar. None of it made sense. "So with that money, you started your own tech company. Juno Engineering. And then, you just started... inventing things." "What kinds of things?" "The neural whip, for one thing. What Dawson used to paraylyze you. That one was for the army. So was the heat cannon; you saw that one at the beach." "I invented these things? Why?" "To pay the bills. The company needed to expand, and to keep expanding. Otherwise you wouldn't have the resources you need for The Machine." "What is this Machine?" He looked me in the eye. "The Time Machine." I didn't speak for a full minute while that sank in. "I invented a Time Machine?" "Not by yourself, but yes. And I helped. We all helped." "Why?" "Isn't it obvious?" He pointed his thumb at the crate. "To save her." I was dumbstruck. "I invented a Time Machine to save my dead girlfriend? How long did it take?" "Almost forty years." "Forty years? But it's only- oh." "Yeah, you got it. We're from the future. Twenty twenty-five is when you finally got the back gear working." I didn't even ask. He saw the expression on my face and elaborated. "Traveling forward is easy. All you need is a Stasis box with a timer. Back there is a crude model, the best we could do with nineties technology. The field will start to collapse in about three months because of the interference." "What interference?" "That's hard to explain. And we're not exactly sure ourselves. First you need to understand how time works. This isn't something that anyone understood, not really, until you explained it to us. I still don't really understand how this works. I'm not a physicist. My job was computers. But this is how you explained it to me." "Okay. I'm listening." "First of all, time only moves because of the end of the universe." "Sorry?" "You know what the Big Bang is?" I rolled my eyes. "The universe was once packed into a superhot, superdense state, and then it expanded, and that's the universe. And it's still expanding. Am I close?" "Yeah, right. Anyway, it can't expand forever, at least according to you. At some point the universe will hit a critical density point, and the expansion will slow down and stop, and then everything will start collapsing. And then at some point-" "At some point the whole thing will get stuffed back into a little gravitational singularity until it gets so dense that it starts expanding again. Yeah, yeah, I get that. What does it have to do with time travel?" "Think of time like magnetism. There are two poles: one at the beginning, and one at the end. The beginning, the Big Bang, pushes you away from it. But its force is infinitesimal compared to the force on the other end, and you proved that mathematically." "Wait, wait. So the gravitationaly singularity at the end of the time is pulling us into it, and that's why time moves?" He seemed impressed, but wasn't shocked. "Yes, exactly. It's called the Big Crunch, and we're all falling towards it every day. Sort of like we're all in a great big bathtub that's going down a drain. We're all being sucked down and our lives are only a blink as we travel down the spiral." "No. No no." I shut my eyes. Different pieces of general relativity started bubbling up from my memory: a Nova special on Quantum Physics, an article in Omni in a dentist's office, a report that Tommy Feathers gave in fifth grade science. "Relativity states that time is affected by gravity, but that it slows as the gravity increases," I said. "This bathtub drain analogy doesn't really work because it implies that we're speeding up as time winds down." I didn't know how I was accessing this stuff; Bardo was obviously on to something with this story about a metamorphosis that made me smarter. "You're applying your own perception filter to the problem. Sure, general relativity says that the clock runs slower closer to a gravitational source, but that's only relative to things that didn't go with it. Sure, time slows down as the Universe ends - relative to things outside the universe, which means relative to nothing. "Anyway, I don't pretend to understand it. Suffice to say that you believed it, and you proved it mathematically." "So the time machine-" "Utilizes a back gear that applies positive, Big Bang energy to push against the gravitational force of the Big Crunch, and thereby push the occupant backwards in time. Actually, technically what it does is to generate a wormhole to another Universe, one that's created by the Machine." "What? What do you mean, it creates a universe?" "Well, nature abhors a causal paradox.You can't just go back to five minutes ago, can you? If you could, you might just try and prevent yourself from making the trip in the first place, and then how did you ever arrive back in time, right?" "I'm not sure I see your point." "Okay, let me use a different example. Say I'm wanted by the Police for murder or something, and I use my Machine to go back and prevent the murder in the first place. You with me so far?" "Yes." "Now, if I prevent the murder, and the murder didn't happen, then why did I go back in time?" "The grandfather paradox." "Exactly. Now let's take it a step further and say that I'm a sick son of a bitch, and I go back in time twenty years and kill my teenage self." "Why would you do that?" "A clean slate. Now there's no way that I can be traced, because there is no me. And whatever crimes I committed are now undone." "But if there is no you-" "Right. Who did the time travelling, who did the killing? You're starting to catch on. The universe prevents this in a real simple way. It just gives you a whole new universe to play with every time you jaunt back. So when-" "So when you make a backwards trip, you create a universe that is identical to the one you just left in every way right up until the point of entry. After which it's different because of your arrival. So now you could go ahead and kill your grandfather and then hang around forever in a world where you were never born, and you don't fade away because for all intents and purposes, you're just a visitor from another universe. From an alternate reality." "Yeah." "Okay. Tell me about Dawson." "You managed to figure all this out, but you didn't share it with the scientific community. You only told a select number of people. You called them the Council of Twelve." "So were you -" "Me? God no. I only worked for Dawson. He was your right hand man, in charge of all the different little day-to-day projects that came together to form time travel research. Anyway, you finally put all the pieces together that nobody even realized were there, and you built the thing in secret. They didn't even realize that you had it up and running until you disappeared." "Disappeared?" "Of course. You had jumped back in time, and since we didn't live in a world where you had already done that in the past, you were gone to us. The only way to follow you was to figure out the backgear for ourselves and build a Machine of our own. Which we did, but when we arrived everything got completely fucked up." Something was starting to bother me. "What do you do for Dawson?" "I'm his computer expert for the trip. He chose me because I specialize in antiquated systems." "And why did you go along with it, when it meant leaving everyone you knew behind?" "Only from their perspective. But you're right - Dawson was planning to make significant changes and everyone I knew and loved would be completely different from the ones I'd known. And they wouldn't know me, at least not this version of me." "So why do it? Was the money that good?" "The money was very good up in 2025, and once we got the plan rolling, it was supposed to be even better. But that wasn't really it either." "What, then?" He snorted. "It was a chance to travel in time, man. How could I say no?" I thought about what my reaction would be if someone had offered me a time machine a week earlier. Which, as it turned out, was over twenty years ago. "So I disappeared. Where did I go? Why can't I remember anything? And how..." I gestured at my obviously female body. "Where you went was somewhere before the accident, in '87. We imagine that you ran into the same problem that we did." "Which is?" "The Time Police." "The what now?" "It's what we call them. The ones that had you on that island." "You mean the clones?" "The clones are just the footsoldiers. We don't know anthing about their higher-ups." "Where did they come from?" "We have no idea. We only know that they're here to prevent us from fucking with time in any way. So the first time through, you obviously failed." Things were coming together, but new questions were popping up. I pointed to Cassie's box. "So then how did-" "How did you save her, and prevent the accident? We're not exactly sure, but somehow Dawson caught on to this-" he gestured to my body, "Which isn't Josie Sparks, or whatever you call her. That's a fake ID. This is the other passenger that was with you in the car. Her name is Kelly." "So, wait, you're saying-" "I'm saying that it looks like you went undercover. Deep undercover." "People in 2025 can just put themselves into new bodies?" "No, they can't. You must have used Stasis to go further, and... I don't know, cloned her body or something." Something was bothering me, and had been ever since I woke up on the beach. "What if it's not a cloned body? What if I really am this girl Kelly, and I just think I'm Joe Skocik? I sure don't feel like a genius." "We considered that. It's theoretically possible with an advanced enough brain box, and if anyone could do it, Joe could. In fact, Elizabeth was sure that you were just a plant designed to mess with the enemy mainframe. But, I don't buy it." "Why not." "Because Cassie's not dead. That means somebody went back and changed things, and the most likely suspect is you. The girl that looks exactly like the one that was supposed to be in that car in 1987." "So?" "So, Joe would never pass off a job like that to anyone else. I only met him - you - a few times, but from all accounts you were the most hands-on and self-reliant person on the earth. Every department, every little sub- division of the Machine project was under your personal scrutiny. You had direct control over every part of it that you could. You devoted almost forty years of your life to it. I don't believe you'd pass it off to someone else so close to your goal, even if it meant becoming a woman." Hands-on. That didn't sound like me at all. Here I was, bumming a ride from a stranger. A stranger that had rescued me from certain doom. A stranger I wasn't at all sure I could trust. **** "So why can't I remember anything?" "Beats me. We tracked you back to your hotel room; Dawson found traces of a chemical in your bathroom that could possibly be used to induce amnesia. Why you still have memories from before the accident, I have no idea." I had more questions, but my head and eyelids were getting heavier by the second. I leaned my head against the glass to rest my eyes for a minute. Just for a minute... **** When I woke up we were past the state line, into New Jersey. This was less than an hour of driving, and exhaustion still hung heavy on my neck and shoulders. "We need to find a phonebook," I said. "Or a newspaper." "What do you need?" asked Bardo, as he got out his cellular phone and started typing on the screen with his thumb. I pointed at the road. "Look out!" Bardo swerved, narrowly avoided a collision with a little yellow Volkswagen Beetle in front of us. I wrenched the phone from his hand. "I'll do it myself! Just watch the god damn road, will you?" The little phone utilized touch screen technology, and was pretty easy to figure out, even for a country boy twenty years out of sync. Maybe there's was something to this genius brain thing. I used a search engine to look up tour dates for the Electric Monsters. "They're in Brooklyn. At a... knitting factory." I frowned. "That can't be right." "Why do we need to go there?" "We just do." "I hope you're not-" "Look, you're asking me to lead you to this damn machine, and I say we need to stop in New York first or we'll never get to it, okay?" He said nothing, but continued to drive. "Do you know how to get there?" Bardo took the phone and hit a button, and the phone transformed into a robo-navigator. "Bardo," I said. "What does Dawson want with me, anyway? I get that I was his boss and that I left him, but what's he so upset about?" "He's not upset. He's just desperate. We all felt betrayed when you just took off one day, without telling anyone. Made us all feel used, like we had served our purpose by helping you build The Machine. Once we'd served that purpose, you turned your back on us. On everything. Our life's work." "Where did you go after I had disappeared?" "Well, first we had to put one together. You took the prototype with you, remember. So that alone took us more than a year. We decided to build a big one, and install it in an RV that wouldn't attract too much attention in eighty-five." "Why eighty-five?" "Dawson came up with it. He had almost no control of the empire after you left. You left instructions that essentially broke the company into its two hundred or so subsidiaries, which left no centralized power for him. No empire. He wanted to go back to eighty-five and build a new one from the ground up." "With what? I mean, future money wouldn't be worth anything back in the twentieth century, right? What, did you take a ton of gold with you or something?" "No. Gold is heavy, and we couldn't spare the weight for something like that. Besides, in large quantities, you have to explain where it came from. While we did take a small reserve of precious stones with us, our primary currency would be ideas." "What kind of ideas?" "In this case, gaming." "Gaming?" He made the turn onto 95 North, toward New York City. "After the video game crash of eighty-three, it wasn't hard to find a company that was desperate for the next big idea, something that would bring them back from the brink. The one we picked was Zebra Games." "What was the next big idea?" "Doom." "Doom?" "The first of the first-person 3D shooters that really worked, and had multiplayer. You run around, using different types of weapons to kill demons and shit." "So what happened?" "The fucking Time Police is what happened. They must monitor all media output, looking for deviations from the original history. Once Zebra published a full page spread advertising Doom, they came looking for us. Barney Ripp was the first casualty. He was my friend." After letting silence fall over the car for a sufficient length of time, I asked, "Do you blame me for what happened?" He took some time to answer. "No. I know you didn't create the Police. I blame Dawson for getting greedy, and for convincing me to go along with it." "So why stay with him? Why not leave?" "We were stranded. Jackie took off in our Machine to god-knows-when. If it's the past, we'll never see her again. We're hoping it's the future, because that means that we'll catch up to it with our stasis boxes eventually. There's only one good box left, and Dawson uses that; the rest are what we could put together with the materials availabe to us. We've been skipping through time since eighty-six, trying not to age too much over the last twenty-three years. I've only lived five of them, for example. "We found out the hard way, though, that there's some kind of interference that wasn't there back in our home universe. We have to constantly build new boxes because it's fucking up the stasis fields of our second-rate boxes, so that they only work for three months. After that, the field starts to disintegrate, and we run the risk of falling over to the other side." "The other side of what?" I asked. "I don't really know," said Bardo. "I just know that there's things living there, and they like to eat us." Oh-kay. "Where do you think they come from? The Time Police, I mean." "We don't know. Possibly they're from pretty far in the future. We've only seen the clones. No idea what's controlling them, besides the Operating Mainframe." Before long we came to the outskirts of Newark, and the skyline of New York City glowed like a distant oasis in the night. "Something's wrong," I said. "Where's the World Trade Center?" Bardo looked over at me, his jaw slack. "Damn," he said. "When that happened I was like, two years old." "When what happened?" He told me about suicide bombers in American jetplanes. He told me about fire and destruction. He told me about two thousand souls crushed under the weight of thousands of tons of flaming steel. He told me about hundreds more throwing themselves from the windows before they could be crushed by inevitability, their bodies smashing like eggs on the ground below. He told me about the two wars that followed, and how America shifted from a defender role to that of an aggressor. The story went on until we'd passed through a traffic jam in the Holland Tunnel, across the city and over the Williamsburg Bridge. It was after ten by the time parked outside the venue to discuss our next move. "Okay," said Bardo. "What are we doing here?" "I need something from someone inside." "Is it you? I mean, the other Joe? The one that didn't have an accident?" "No. But he'll be close. Unless he's on stage now. When is the gig supposed to start?" Bardo checked his phone for information. "Doors open at eight. But there are two opening acts. It's ten thirty now, so, yeah, the headliner's probably on stage. Probably." I looked up and down the street. "No sign of Them." "Them?" "Police." "Right. They'll be watching. You probably wouldn't recognize one if you saw it." "Why not?" "They come in a lot of varieties, you know. The ones you met are just the simplest ones. Anyway, they always watch your family pretty closely." "Why?" "Looking for you, of course. Somehow you changed time, and they want to stop you before you make it much worse." Something was bothering me. "So if Joe and Cassie were supposed to die in a car accident, why do They let Joe and Cassie live? Why not just destroy them, so that the timeline can go back to normal?" He shrugged. "Beats me. I've no idea where these people are from or by what rules they operate." "I feel like I need a disguise." A light bulb clicked on in my brain. Suddenly the Batgirl suit and the contact lenses made a lot more sense. "I doubt it will help," said Bardo. "They ran into you only a few days ago, so they'll be on full alert." He snapped his fingers. "Do you have a number?" "What number?" "A phone number. For whoever you're supposed to be meeting." "Oh." Right. Everyone in 2009 had a phone on them, at all times. "No, I don't have his number." "Well, maybe we can try-" "That one." "What?" "That guy. He's one of them." I pointed at a young man sitting on the curb, wearing extremely tight jeans and holding his phone rigidly in front of him and smoking a cigarette. "What makes you say that?" "First of all, there's a camera in that phone. I can see the little bubble of the lens on the back of it. He's got it pointed right at the entrance." "Everybody's phone has a camera. They don't make anything without cameras anymore." He showed me the camera on the back of the phone that I was holding. "Okay, but what's he doing sitting outside a rock venue when the headliner is about to hit the stage?" "He's smoking." "He doesn't need to be outside to smoke at a rock club." "Yes, he does. You're not allowed to smoke indoors now. Not anywhere. He's probably not that into the band. Might have brought a date or a kid brother or something. Maybe he saw an ex-girlfriend and needed some air. Maybe a lot of things." "He's been holding that phone rigidly in front of him for over five minutes without interacting with it." "He might be watching tv." "But he's not even looking at it. He keeps glancing up and down the street, looking for me. The camera is for someone else. Someone at headquarters. Can you do that? Broadcast a video feed for someone else to pick up?" "Quite easily. But I'm telling you, this guy's out here to smoke." "He was halfway through that cigarette when we got here, and he hasn't finished it yet. He's not here to smoke. He's here to look like he's smoking while he keeps watch." Bardo didn't say anything for a while, and we watched him together. "Maybe," he finally admitted. "What do we do about it?" I thought for a minute. "Give me the phone." He handed it over. "Police still 911?" "Yes." I dialed. "911 emergency," said a voice on the phone. I forced a frantic tone as I spoke. "Hello? Yeah, I'm at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, and there's a guy who's waiting for me outside. He's been following me all day. I think he wants to hurt me." "Ma'am, did he threaten-" "He said that if I didn't suck his dick, he was going to cut me. And now he's waiting for me outside! I don't know what to do. I'm so scared!" "Ma'am, what does he look like-" "He's about five ten, wearing a green jacket. He's bald, and wearing sunglasses, and he's got red sneakers on. He showed me the knife and said he was going to cut me! Now he's sitting on the curb, pretending to smoke a cigarette when he's really watching me with his phone. Oh my god-" I hung up. Ten seconds later Bardo's phone started ringing. He turned it off. "They might not show, you know," said Bardo. "This is Brooklyn. Cops probably have better things to do. They'll probably think you're a jealous woman looking to get her ex-boyfriend into trouble." "White woman in trouble," I answered. "Whoever made that call might end up in a dumpster without a head. Got some explaining to do if you ignore it." Bardo then used his phone to buy me a ticket to the gig while we waited. Lucky for me, it hadn't sold out. It took more than twenty minutes for the cruiser to arrive, but the smoking sentry hadn't moved an inch. When the cruiser pulled up, it blocked his view of the venue, so he stood up to circumvent it, not realizing or perhaps not caring that the cruiser was for him. The cops obviously took this as a suspicious move and got out to have a chat with him. I seized the moment and got out of the van and kept my face away from the sentry as I crossed the street. Gave the ticket chick the proper numbers and entered the gig. The band was starting up a song as I walked in the room. Thumping bass, grinding Rotosound strings with a metallic Entwistle cheesegrater edge on them, and then the drums started up. No speed metal seizures here, and no sleepy sad bastard music. This was a surf beat in E minor, a crude Stooge- like proto-metal garage bassline. And then the drone of the guitar cut in, slicing through the sound of the thumping bass like a chainsaw. I made my way through the crowd, trying to get a glimpse of the band. At five foot two, this is a lot harder than it sounds. But being small and kind of cute (even if I was filthy) has its advantages, and one of them is being able to slip through the spaces between crowds with a sneaky grace. Not at all like being a tall fat guy with poor coordination. When I finally got to a position where I could see the band, Joe had his back to the crowd, grinding away at the bass while a smoking hot blonde beat up her guitar on the edge of the stage. Finally he turned, his eyes black holes of doom he approached the microphone. And she said, in a hideous cackle: "Explorers from Beyond the Grave, give us your report!" He answered her, in a growly voice so much deeper and more raw than I had ever sounded back in the eighties: "No bright lights or grandma's dog; nothing of that sort. Only endless emptiness, spinning through the void. Nothing there for us to fuck, nothing to destroy." And she said: "Explorers From Beyond the Grave, is there something more?" He told her: "Yes sir, I'm afraid there is: we can't shut the door. The portal that we opened up is stuck and will not close. Entropy is flooding in, the endless wave it grows." It was awful and somehow beautiful at the same time. Around me were serious, intense faces and dancing bodies, waving their arms as if they were circling a primordial fire at the dawn of history. The dance of the damned on a burning ship, squeezing what little joy from life that they could before they sank into the vortex that awaited them. She went on: "Explorers From Beyond the Grave, can't you give us hope?" He wasn't optimistic: "No sir, I'm afraid there isn't any way to cope. Soon enough there won't any be any one left here to save. Afterwards there's just the two of us to ride the wave. Let's go!" The melody changed now to a full-on, unapologetic surf solo. It was simple, but the crowd loved it. They switched from rhythmic tribal dancing to the Twist. At the end of the solo, as one the crowd raised their arms and joined the droning, wordless chant that took the song to it's end. The song ended all at once with a great thump, and the crowd erupted with their appreciation of the catharsis that they had just experienced. But I didn't clap. Instead of catharsis, my heart was filled with a great sadness at what I had just witnessed. I knew the singer more intimately than anyone else in the room, and I could sense the immense well of pain behind those words, behind the howl masking itself as the primal scream at the end of the world. I knew then that whoever had written that song was not a man who loved and was loved in return. Not for years. "Fuckin' fantastic," said the hippie next to me. "Fucking greatest cover ever!" Oh. It was a cover. Well. So much for that. I made my way to a curtain that led backstage. Security was too clever to simply let me slink on by, and once I tried, the game was up. I had been to enough concerts to know that no amount of fast talking would get me backstage, not now. But as luck would have it, Keith emerged from behind the curtain only moments later. "Hi," I said to him. "Oh," he answered, after studying my face for a few moments, as if he couldn't believe his eyes. "It's you." "Yeah. It's me." Guitar blonde hit a loud A chord that filled the room up with oppressive noise, and the drummer began a furious jungle beat. Keith waved me to a side door so that we could talk in the alley. "Didn't think I'd see you again," said Keith. "Where did you disappear to?" "Sorry," I answered. "That was... rude. I shouldn't have done that." "Which part? The sleeping with me or the disappearing?" Ouch. I looked at the ground, too ashamed to answer. The boy certainly was blunt. "I have to talk to you about something," I finally said. I looked up at him. His eyes were wide, and he had a look of shock on his face. He pointed at my stomach. "Are you..." "Am I pregnant? No. God no. No way." "Are you sure?" "Oh, quite sure." Which reminded me - I needed to change out that tampon, and soon, or risk toxic shock syndrome. "Listen, I need you to come with me. I need to show you something." He followed me down the alley to Metropolitan. The police were still hassling the alleged Time Policeman, but they were just talking tough, trying to scare him straight. After all, there was no evidence actually connecting him to any crime. I turned away from the scene. "You got my key?" "Huh? Oh, yeah." He fished under his shirt and came up with the locker key and the chain that it hung on. I strung it around my neck underneath the jumpsuit. "What is up with you, anyway? Is someone following you?" "What? What makes you say that?" "Well, only the fact that you seem to be the most paranoid person I know. You're always looking over your shoulder, watching for... I don't know what. Is it me? Do I make you nervous?" "No, man. That's not it." I looked him in the eye. "Believe me, there's nothing wrong with you. And I am so happy about that." He gave me his strangest look yet. Behind me the police finally managed to talk the sentry into leaving his post. I risked a quick glance and saw him strolling down the street, talking to someone on his phone. "Let's go." "Where are we going?" He followed me across the street. "Keith." "Yeah?" "When was the last time you spoke to your mother?" "What the fuck? What do you know about my Mom?" We arrived at the back of the van, and Bardo hopped out, with a nervous look on his face. "They're going to send a replacement any second," he hissed through clenched teeth. "That's if there isn't one here already. What is he doing here?" "Just a second, B." I turned to Keith. "What do I know about your Mom? "Cassandra Leigh Davidson, born May Fourteen, Nineteen Sixty-Seven. Five foot six inches, dark brown hair, allergic to shellfish and bee stings. Lactose intolerant. Blood type O Negative. Favorite color: teal. Two sisters, Eileen and Shelby, both younger than her. Enjoys the sound of locusts and British Sixties pop and the feel of plastic bubble wrap. Does not enjoy onions, green pepper, eggs, red meat, jazz music, excessive political talk, loud yelling. Am I close? Do I need to go on?" He was starting to get mad. "What is this? Who are you? Is this some kind of fucking stalker thing?" I sighed. "No, Keith. I have something for you. I just want you to know that I'm... that I never meant to hurt you. And that I'm sorry." I gave Bardo the signal to start the car, then climbed up into the van. Keith didn't follow, but stood on the street, his anger melting to a kind of desperation. "Seriously, who are you? What is this about?" I opened the box and Cassie jumped out, hit her head on the roof of the van. She scrambled out of the van anyway, screaming when she saw her son waiting for her outside. "Mom? Mom! What the fuck did you do?" The last part was directed at me, but I didn't answer. The moment she cleared the back of the van, I slammed shut the doors and told Bardo to gun it. Three blocks later, I climbed into the passenger's seat next to him. "Well, that was stupid," said Bardo, keeping a sharp eye out for police. "What else could I do? I can't talk to her. Not like this." He grumbled. "Fine. Where to now, Joe?" "Joe is back there, on stage. Call me Josie." "Fine. Josie. Where am I going?" ***** I hit a plastic overhead light and unzipped the top of the jumpsuit a little to get a better look at the key around my neck. Suddenly I could feel the crunching of gravel beneath me. I glanced up and saw that we were heading off the road. "Look out!" I shot Bardo a look, and he took his eyes off my cleavage and up onto the road in front of him. Frantically he jerked the wheel in time to keep us from colliding with a guard rail at ninety miles per hour. "Christ, Bardo!" I zipped up and pointed at a sign for an exit that claimed to have FOOD, GAS, and LODGINGS. "Get off here." "Why?" "Because I need some fucking real food, and you need to jerk off or get some caffeine or do whatever you need to get your head straight." I pointed at my crotch. "This shit is OFF LIMITS, motherfucker. Learn to control yourself." I took a deep breath. "Asshole," I added. "Alright, Jesus." He turned to make the exit. "Not like I saved your life or anything," he muttered as an afterthought. We pulled into the parking lot of a 24-hour greasy spoon, next to a tan Chevy Nova. As I walked past I noticed the rear window of the Nova was open a crack. I stopped and looked at it. "Bardo." "Yeah?" "How hard is it to track a cell phone?" "Not too hard for Dawson, if it's on. I disconnected the battery, so there's no power to transmit any signal." "Put it back in, would you?" "But then he'll-" "Put it in, and turn it on." He looked frustrated, but did as I asked. When it was on, but silenced and dark, I dropped it through the crack. "Hey, my phone! That was stupid." "Why? Now he'll track it and follow this guy instead." "I need my phone. The phone is useful to us. It got us to your boyfriend, didn't it?" I set my jaw, closed my eyes, counted to ten. "Don't call him my boyfriend." I started walking into the diner. The place was fairly lively, considering the hour, but we were able to get a table right away. I excused myself to take a piss, and promptly found myself standing in front of a men's stall without the proper equipment. Shit. I went to the Ladies' instead, had a piss and a shit and installed a fresh sanitary absorption dildo. When I came out of the stall and looked at myself in the mirror, I saw a mess. Hair beyond disheveled; now it was a ball of grease that stuck to my head. Dark circles of exhaustion under the eyes. And between scrapyard dust, sweat, jungle dirt, and some sort of engine grease from the plane, my face and every scrap of skin that I could see was filthy. I scrubbed until my hands were clean and my face was halfway presentable, though there was a black smear of something on my neck that wouldn't go away. I slid into the booth across from Bardo, holding my head in my hands. The menu didn't interest me. Conversation didn't interest me, even though there was so much to ask about the world that he described, a world in which I was Howard Hughes with a Time Machine instead of a Spruce Goose. Nevertheless, there was tension, and it needed to be alleviated. "I'm sorry. I'm... not myself." "Yeah, I got that." I ordered eggs for the protein, bananas for potassium. Last thing I needed now was a charlie horse from sleeping in the car. "Bardo, I don't have any money." "I'll pay." "You have cash?" "Some. Enough for some food, if that's what you mean." "I need to sleep. We should stop for the night. And I think we should ditch the van, too." "But the box in the back-" "I know. But they might have a tracking device in it. Or it might have been reported stolen." "It's my van. They can't report it stolen; only I can do that. And there's no tracking device, believe me." "I don't believe you. If Dawson's as clever as he seems, then he might have planted something in it when you weren't looking. And anyone can report a car stolen, man." "Regardless, we can't just leave that box in the van like that." My head nodded, and the void called my name. "Maybe we can rent a truck tomorrow, transfer it." "Maybe." The food came. I ate it mechanically, not even bothering to add ketchup. I needed to sleep and the sugar would keep me awake. I finished in two minutes and waited for Bardo to finish his pancakes. He obviously hadn't eaten in days, the way he was savoring every bite. "Baby you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me," said the speakers on a wallbox three booths over. "Papa-paparazzi." I played with the toy crane in the foyer, won myself a black Pez dispenser with Darth Vader's head. I sat back down and counted the number of ceiling tiles that I could see, then put together a formula for estimating the number of tiles in the entire restaurant. Then I started on the floor tiles. I moved on to cubic space in the restaurant using the metric system, subtracting what was taken up by furniture, fixtures, kitchen equipment, carpet, cleaning supplies, and current occupants. When I had solved for x I started over with the English system, and once I had solved that I started working on a formula for English-Metric conversion. When I finished, Bardo was still nursing those fucking pancakes. "Shit, Bardo," I said. "You gonna eat those hotcakes or fuck 'em?" He froze, but he didn't make eye contact. I could see the hornets buzzing around inside his head, but outside his face was a mask of calm. He resumed his meal, and instead of answering, started asking me a few questions of his own. "Why leave Cassie with that kid?" I had no interest in hearing anything from the jukebox, but started flipping through the selection anyway. "Don't want to talk about it," I replied. He paused, replaying the encounter in his head. "Did I hear him call Cassie his Mom?" Dire Straits. Walk of Life. The Beatles. When I'm Sixty-Four. Marilyn Manson. The Dope Show. "Don't want to talk about it." "If Cassie is his Mom, then that means you're the Dad, right?" Lady Gaga. Paparazzi. John Cougar. Jack and Diane. Modest Mouse. Float On. "Don't want to talk about it." "And if he's your son..." He shook his head disapprovingly. "You know he had a hard-on for you by the time he crossed the street, right? I mean, you could see it a block away." Violent Femmes. Blister in the Sun. Flaming Lips. Do You Realize. Edgar Winter. Frankenstein. I stopped flipping through the wallbox and glared at him. "He knew you from Asbury Park, right? Did you know he was your son when you met him? What did you guys do there?" Before I knew what was happening, my hand gripped the dinner plate in front of me and flung it into the window. Utensils and bits of egg went flying, and the plate lost the battle with the window and shattered into forty- seven pieces. I was standing in front of Bardo, looking down at him. His hand was frozen again, the very last piece of his pancakes dangling from a fork like a man on the gallows. "I'll be outside," I said quietly. *** We left the van in the lot of the diner and walked the half mile to the nearest motel. Not the brightest plan, admittedly, but our batteries were nearly worn out. If I went much longer without rest, I wouldn't care if I was caught. It was after two by the time we finally checked in. The room was a piece of shit with one bed and no couch, but at least it was clean. I made a beeline for the bathroom. "Man, I need a shower," said Bardo. I slammed shut the bathroom door and turned on the shower. Bardo slammed on the door and cursed my name while I waited for the hot water. I ignored him