Adrijan Zlatá was beginning to wonder if someone wasn't playing a prank on him.
For the first few minutes, he managed not to panic. It was easy; too easy. Everything was hazy, and the suitcase in his hand was heavy as an anchor, rooting him to the spot. He raised his tablet, tried to dial up S&C, and got no response. He opened up the I&T ticketing system, and got no signal. Something was wrong.
BOOM.
He checked the time on the tablet. Still just a little after six.
Something occurred at this moment which had never occurred before, at least not in his presence.
Two men appeared out of thin air.
One, he recognized. The one he didn't flashed a penlight in his eyes, and suddenly everything made sense. No, better than that. Suddenly nothing needed to make sense.
The bald one leaned in, and said "It's on the tip of your tongue. Tell me."
Without knowing what it meant, Zlatá responded. It felt like a weight had been lifted from his soul. Or a hole had been carved in his head.
His confessor patted him on the shoulder, grinning ear to ear. He managed to make it a sad sort of grin, somehow. "Same time next year?"
The man with the moustache flashed the pen light again, and the haze returned in a mass of unsatisfied compulsions. Zlatá immediately checked his watch. 6:23.
He blinked, and both men were gone.
He went through the motions like he'd done it before: failed to run, threw down his tablet, saw the sights, heard the voices. Felt rueful.
Died.
2020
8 September
You weren't meant to have a 'favourite' anomaly.
Anomalies, the logic went, were bad. There was the way things ought to be, and the way things were, and where those ways didn't match, an anomaly made up the difference. Sokolsky liked to do things he wasn't meant to do, however. 'Meant' was a verb with an owner, always. God never meant for this to happen. The police meant to prevent you. When the Overseer Council told you what to think, they meant it. Nothing was 'meant' without someone doing the meaning, and so he always found such truisms… well, demeaning.
So he had a favourite anomaly, and it was 5109. A string of letters and numbers you couldn't forget once you'd heard them, and couldn't remember once you'd told someone else. A secret only one person could possess at any one time. Useless in itself, but a cornucopia of sideways uses existed if you had the creativity to conceive them.
He swung his office door shut, and swooped over to his desk. Another thing he loved about 5109 was that it let him subvert something else you weren't meant to do. You weren't meant to, absolutely were required not to, create more anomalies, or duplicate existing ones. There seemed to be no end to the number of ways he could supply himself with an additional 'copy' of the password. He'd just exercised one. He was building up quite the stockpile.
He sat down, and spun merrily in his chair until he had a little motion sickness. This stockpile of secrets, his backlog of passwords, really ablative armour around the one that everyone else knew existed, the currency he could spend many times before bankrupting himself, was… well, okay, it was meant for something special. In this case, he was the one doing the meaning. He was a memeticist. He could mean a mean meaning.
He just hadn't thought of anything sufficiently grand yet.
But he would.
The password was one of the stranger children of time. Time at Site-43 was an endlessly generative force, where elsewhere it merely destroyed. The breach would breach, year after year, and Sokolsky would hide in the Archives, time after time, and the universe would bestow on him yet another copy of the same anniversary gift. That this resource had its origin in temporal mechanics suggested he ought to go to the TAD with his plan to use it, once that plan actually existed. Well, not the TAD. They were a bunch of sticks in the mud, and he could already hear the Director's complaints about 'messing with the timestream' and 'abusing recursion' and 'threatening the existence of space-time' among other tedious things. No. Definitely not.
He'd go to the TAD instead.
They wouldn't ask as many questions, and they'd be much more amenable to his means — ha, ha — of acquiring answers. Xyank, at least, could keep a secret. And Sokolsky did want this kept secret, because Sokolsky did play for keeps.
But do you even know the rules?
He sat up straight.
Yes, that's right. It's me again. How are we keeping?
Sokolsky didn't have an eidetic memory like Lillihammer. What he did have was total recall of his own thoughts. Other people had notebooks. Other people had vulnerabilities. Sokolsky had his steel trap.
If he acquired the ability to speak to himself, from the future to the past, he would exploit this ability to break into his own thought patterns, thereby proving his own identity. That hadn't been what had happened the first time, but the first time, the voice had been in a hurry.
Exactly, the voice agreed. So, remember what I was saying about the REISNO Cannon?
"You were saying it sixteen years ago," Sokolsky reminded… himself.
Right. You do remember. You laid the groundwork, like we agreed?
He nodded.
You know I can't see you?
"I do not know that. I don't know anything about how this device is meant to operate."
Oh. Well, you will. Because congratulations! It's time.
"You've got a name for me?''
The voice had told him everything but that most vital detail already. He hadn't had to ask why. If he'd known who was to create this bizarre device, he would have sought them out immediately. It was comforting to know that in the future, his mind would still be sharp enough not to trust himself to do the right thing.
Not a name, precisely. Sokolsky could hear his own grin, through the haze of time. This is gonna get a little abstract, fair warning.
Sokolsky didn't hate pataphysics.
He didn't hate black olives or jazz, either. He simply knew they weren't for him. He fancied himself a teller of stories, or at least an arranger, but he saw no need to get all meta about it. The idea that there might be an angle from which he was merely the protagonist — or, heaven forfade, a side character — rather than the master of puppets himself was not particularly pleasing to the mind. He preferred to keep his mind happy. It had done such wonderful things for him.
It looked like he was going to have to disappoint himself, however, in order to please… well, also himself. The voice had told him to seek out Dr. Placeholder McDoctorate of the Pataphysics Department, Site-87; he knew enough about the second and third things to know that the first was on-brand for associating with them. He was going to have to check his calendar carefully before picking a date to visit, so as to avoid any civic holidays or otherwise portentous occasions. Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin was an endlessly-spinning cyclotron of stories, and he didn't want to get caught up in anything he couldn't see outlined ahead of time.
He walked a few laps around Memetics and Countermemetics, soothing himself with the dragon curve wall murals and Menger sponge hallway installations until he'd reached a sort of zen, at which point he called the switchboard at Site-87 and was immediately disappointed. After a fashion.
Dr. Placeholder McDoctorate was already at Site-43.
"He signed in last night." Xinyi Du led Sokolsky into the back corridors of Quantum Supermechanics, where the older labs his father had once used still stood unoccupied and gathering dust. "He hasn't left since."
"Is there a washroom in there?" Sokolsky asked as they approached an imposing steel slab door. "I just want to know what sort of smells I should be expecting."
"If he's pissed himself," the other man scowled, "it's not the fault of our plumbing." He removed his keycard from his spotted grey labcoat, and hesitated at the reader. "Daniil, we aren't friends."
"Absolutely," Sokolsky smiled.
"As one of my oldest and strangest not-friends, could you please do something about this insane person squatting in my father's lab?"
The room was a whirlwind of spare parts and empty coffee mugs — in addition to a washroom, there was apparently a break room. Qiang Du had also never been fond of taking long-distance breaks. A Rubik's Cube sat on a cleared and dusted counter, slightly spotlit (from where, Sokolsky couldn't make out). It was the only thing in the room which seemed to have been set down with intention.
On the floor, surrounded by hand-sketched blueprints, a kaleidoscope of pencil crayons in Klein bottles, and a panoply of snack bar items — some of them local favourites, some of them American — was a massive pile of apparently random components assembled into something spectacularly misshapen, a rolling floor cart, what the technicians called a 'skeleton', sticking out from under it. A pair of loafers was all that was visible of its occupant, who was presently pounding the underside of the alleged machine with his fist, and muttering "Yes, I get that, yes, I get that, but the thing is, god damn ontodynamics!"
Sokolsky knelt down in front of him. "Hey."
The other man didn't seem to notice, engaged in a pre-existing conversation as he was. "No, that doesn't— No, that does not work that way, because—"
Sokolsky reached under the device, and tried snapping his fingers around where he figured the man's nose would be.
The man sneezed.
After returning from the washroom and noting that the pataphysicist was still talking to himself, Sokolsky reviewed the tableau again and made a measured decision.
The skeleton rolled out and Placeholder scrambled to his feet, now shouting. "Put that down! Put! That! DOWN!" He was a handsome man in a garishly decorated purple jacket with wild, dark hair and wilder, less dark eyes. He presently looked like an auto repair student at clown college.
Sokolsky released the Rubik's Cube back onto the counter, but kept his fingers dangling over it, as though he might rotate the top row at the slightest provocation. Placeholder advanced on him like he was holding a gun to a child's face. "Who are you?" He pounded at his left ear, keeping his right hand pointed accusingly at Sokolsky. "I'm not asking you. I know who you are. I don't care if you know who he is. He's right here, and I am asking him already!"
Sokolsky gestured at Du, who rolled his eyes and responded. "He's Daniil Sokolsky." Placeholder swivelled to face the other scientist. "He doesn't like introducing himself. He thinks it's trite. Not like making other people do it for you, which is somehow suave and sexy."
Placeholder looked back at Sokolsky, eyes narrowing. "Oh," he said. "Okay. Yes. It's you. Yes," and Sokolsky noticed the man's pupils dilated whenever he was carrying on his second conversation, "I know you said he'd be coming, you don't need to narrate my entire god damn day for me before it happens, that takes the joy right out of oh my god shut up."
Du glanced at Sokolsky, pointing at the third wheel. "Insane man." He pointed at the floor. "Dad's lab." Then he pointed at the door, raised his eyebrows meaningfully, and walked out.
Placeholder was staring at Sokolsky, leaning first on one foot and then the other. Sokolsky frowned. "This is going to sound strange."
"That's what he said."
"Is that a sex joke?"
Placeholder blinked. "What?" His pupils dilated. "Oh. Really? I've never heard that one."
Sokolsky took a deep breath. "I need you to build me a fake machine, for a scheme I'm working on. Going to be working on. Whatever. The point is, it shouldn't distract from your…" He pointed at the whatever it was. "Yeah. Because it does need to be plausible, but it's all for show. It doesn't need to actually work." This last was purely for the cameras. There were cameras everywhere; what some people thought of as an unwelcome violation of their privacy, Sokolsky preferred to think of as a tool for disseminating cover stories.
The other man snorted. "Yeah, fucking, right. If it didn't need to work, my life would be a lot easier right now."
Sokolsky stared at him.
Placeholder tapped his temple, first for emphasis, then in a passable demonstration of advanced trepanning technique. "Have you ever heard that hell is other people? I'll bet you have. I'll just bet people tell you that all the time. You look like the kind of guy who believes it, too. Let me tell you, that's not hell. Hell, buddy, guy, buddy, hell is identical people. Hell is an internal dialogue. You're going to ask me to invent a hell machine, and I know it's going to work, and I know it's going to work because I am already in hell because of it."
So much for the cameras. "Okay." Sokolsky nodded. "You're saying you're already using the device to talk to yourself."
"No." Placeholder waved a finger in his face. "No. I'm saying myself is already using the device to tell me how to make it."
"Oh."
They stared at each other for a moment.
"Yes," Placeholder finally snapped, pupils huge, "silences are always this long. They don't have silences where you're from? Fuck, I miss silence."
Sokolsky glanced down at his fingers, doing a little mental math. He reached a conclusion, smiled, and reached out to take Placeholder's finger in his hand. He shook it. "Keep up the good work! Maybe eat something. Find me later."
"I find you in two hours," Placeholder said flatly. He looked like he was about to cry.
Du was waiting in the hall. Sokolsky swept past him, offering his best attempt at a conciliatory smile. "He's gonna need that lab for a while." When the other man opened his mouth to object, Sokolsky pointed at the ceiling. "Don't take it up with me. It's a matter of causality."
9 September
Something Harry ate didn't agree with him, and he left the cafeteria early. She was going to make him pay for that later. Nobody left Lillian Lillihammer alone. If there was leaving being done, she was the one who left.
She wasn't going to stoop to finding someone else to eat with, though her tray was full to the brim with a challenge her metabolism would win, no contest. She wasn't even going to pretend that eating alone was what she wanted, because that would mean pantomiming for other people's benefit, a thought that made her sick enough that she almost had to stand up and find a washroom. No, the only thing for it was to glower at her food, and wolf it down.
It was getting late, but a few junior researcher study groups had wandered in over the past ten minutes so there was a fairly steady hum in the room. She liked that. It was like white noise with words, and sometimes the words set off her neurons in the right way. Language, Del Olmo and Euler had taught her long ago, was the catalyst of all good science.
Something rose just above the din, and she turned to see what it was. She liked outliers. Peaks in the waveform. The hammer ever sought the tallest nail…
The man with Sokolsky was fairly tall, though of course not nearly as tall as she was. He looked… well, he looked familiar, and not only because she'd been in a similar state once, long ago — his was the face of someone who had not slept, had not eaten, had not attended to matters of personal hygiene, and most importantly had not found a way to exorcise the demon of a very good idea. He was a scientist mid-labour, in both the professional and reproductive senses.
He was also a man she'd met in another life. He could be no other.
And he was also what she had heard; he was bickering with Sokolsky. "Calories," he continued as the two of them drew closer. Sokolsky was steering the taller man towards the kitchen window, where old Wyers was ladling late-night soup. Wonton, because nobody eating this late was interested in nutrition over satisfaction. "You ever heard of calories?" the stranger demanded of… no-one, apparently. "I'll bet you're snacking on Doritos while we do this. I think I can hear it when you crunch. Your voice skips a bit. You should crunch more. Eat the whole bag. I'm going to slurp as loud as I can." And he stuck a finger in his ear, and swivelled.
Lillian also swivelled. This now had her undivided attention.
Sokolsky made sure his friend (?) was supplied with a bowl of soup and some crackers, and then slipped out the side exit. He winked at Lillian as he went, and she waved half-heartedly. Under normal circumstances she would have waved him over, but he was merely insane. This new/familiar man was crazy, and that was so much better.
He was examining the napkin dispenser like it was some sort of foreign object, so she took the opportunity to stand up and walk over. Eyes turned to follow her as she crossed the lino, and she ignored them. This sort of maneuver took concentration.
"Dammit!" he shouted as the soup splashed over his thumb, just enough to scald faintly, not enough to make him drop the tray.
Not enough to splash her, and she danced elegantly to the side. "Sorry!" she said, sounding it not even a bit. "Meet cute."
He placed the tray on the counter beneath the kitchen window, where Wyers was rolling his eyes, and sucked his reddening thumb. "What?"
She pointed at herself with one of her own thumbs. "Me. I'm cute. And you are?"
He wasn't who she'd hoped he was, that was for sure. But maybe he would be, some day. He stared at her, which was fine. She had him at a disadvantage, more so even than usual.
"And you are," she continued. "But that's beside the point. I couldn't help but overhear your sineversation."
He continued to stare at her, but had to take the bait. She could see it in his eyes. "Sineversation?"
She leaned casually on the counter, letting him take her in. He was blinking rapidly, mostly at her. "Conversation. Latin root, meaning roughly 'to dwell with'. With, as in, someone else. You would appear to be dwelling without. As in, talking to nobody. Hence, sine."
A smile was creeping across his face. "More like within, actually. How would that conjugate?"
She fluttered her eyelids. "You come into my parlour and start throwing around words like conjugate, you'd better be prepared to buy me a drink."
He reached into his pants pockets, pulled out a few coins and a single screw, and presented it to her for inspection. "This enough for a soda?"
She picked through his palm with her fingernails, smirking. "You have no idea how many dirty jokes are running through my head right now."
He turned his hand upside-down, and poured the contents into hers. "As long as they have nothing to do with temporal mechanics, you can recite them all to me while I eat, and I promise I won't interrupt."
She picked up his tray, and carried it to her table without looking back. "You must not be from around here," she called over her shoulder. "Everybody else knows not to say the words 'temporal mechanics' to me in September."
She watched him eat for a few seconds in silence, hands folded in front of her, chin resting on her knuckles. He tried to make it look like he wasn't famished. She hoped he was better at conversation than he was at trying.
When he'd consumed the soup, and pulled open the packet of crackers — entirely forgotten in the interim between picking them up, and setting himself down — she asked him: "What do you do, that they let crazy people do it?"
"Pataphysics," he said, and she wrinkled her nose. "Oh, there it is."
"There what is?"
He pointed at her with his spoon. "The face. The I-just-said-pataphysics face. Every damn time." He sighed. "Oh, god, this is nice."
"People making fun of your job is nice?"
"You haven't made fun of it," he said.
"Yet."
"But no, that's not what I mean. I mean it's nice being able to actually recognize what's going on in front of me. A moment of god damn peace."
She nodded. "It's pretty good soup."
"It's not the soup." He frowned. "Is it the soup?" He waited for a response, which apparently didn't come. "I guess it could be the soup. But I think it's actually you?"
She smiled. "I have been described as a breath of fresh air, a welcome change of pace, and the pinnacle of human evolution. You're the first person to consider me calming."
"It's not that. It's…" He tapped his forehead with the spoon, thunk thunk thunk. "He shut up. He finally fucking shut up as soon as we saw you. I saw you. Uh."
"Uh," she agreed. "Who's we?"
"Me," he said. "And me."
She nodded again. "You know what? Sure." She sat back, and fluffed out the lapels of her dazzle coat. He was maintaining eye contact, in spite of what she was wearing. Another point in his favour. "I can relate to that."
"You can?"
"More than anybody. I talk to myself all the time."
He shook his head. "This is different."
"Hit me."
His brown eyes narrowed. "I'm probably not allowed to tell you."
"You're working with Sokolsky, right?"
"Right…"
"This is related to something he's doing?"
His brows furrowed. "I think I can say yes? Yes."
She clapped, startling him. "Then, good news! I will absolutely weasel it out of him at some point anyway. Your secret is already in danger with me. Why prolong the anxiety?"
He glanced around the room, eyes bleary, as though he wasn't even really sure where he was. "Okay," he grunted. "This is different because it's a different version of me that I'm talking to."
She whistled. "I would also like to talk to a different version of you."
He looked legitimately lost, which settled the only barely-open question of his identity. "What?"
She tossed her hair, as a creative means of brushing away the question. "Anyway, wow. What an interesting experience you're having. It certainly isn't different!"
"Right?" He nodded, then glanced back up sharply. "Wait, did you say isn't?"
"I did," she said in the same sing-song voice. "I did! That's exactly the problem I have. Don't tell anybody." He screwed up his face, and she laughed. "You don't believe me?"
"I don't know what to believe." He started stirring the remains of his soup. "This is the first chance I've had to collect my thoughts in… I don't actually know. I have no idea how long it's been since this started."
"You said you do pataphysics." It wasn't a question, but he nodded anyway. "Is that what this is about? Some storytelling tangent nonsense?"
He suddenly heaved a tremendous sigh, and pushed back from the chair. "This is what I'm talking about." The weakness drained out of his voice, replaced with something like rancour. "Everybody hears metafiction when I say pataphysics. Metafiction sucks. Metafiction is completely different. Okay, it doesn't always suck, but most people who work on it do, and it bleeds into what they produce." He started drumming on the bowl with the spoon; half of the cafeteria was staring at him in seconds. Lillian soaked it up. "They deal with anomalies where cartoons come to life and strangle their authors, that sort of nonsense. They give us a bad name. People think pataphysics is about, I don't know. Playing with dolls. I theorize strings in the fabric of reality."
He suddenly dropped the spoon on the table, picked up the bowl, and poured the remainder of its contents down his throat. When he lowered the bowl again, his pupils were dilated. "Oh noooooo," he said flatly, and squeezed his eyes shut, and stood up with a clatter of chair and cutlery. "Recursive what? Entity… identity? Stability normalization? What would that even… it doesn't oscillate," he was shouting now, "that's the most absurd excuse for a backronym I've ever I DON'T CARE IF IT'S CANONICAL WE ARE NOT NAMING IT THAT!"
And he snatched up a pair of breadsticks from her plate, stuffed them in his mouth, and stumbled past her to the door. Still mumbling furiously while he chewed.
She looked down at her still mostly full plate, then pushed off the table and stood up to follow him.
She considered telling him about their earlier acquaintance, but decided against it. The decision wasn't difficult.
After all, whether she remembered it or not, it had never actually happened.
24 October
"This had better be worth it." Du wasn't even looking where they were headed, so intent was he on his performative glare. Sokolsky considered walking him into a partition. "He's made the whole Section sound and smell like a college dorm."
"He's been showering." Sokolsky waited for the other man to unlock the lab door. Better that he believe Sokolsky couldn't open it himself. "That's a lot better than a lot of geniuses can manage."
On the other side of the door, a change had been wrought. Everything was still everywhere, but one of the things now looked like a thing, instead of a very complicated nothing. It looked, in fact, like a rubber octopus had been sucked into an aircraft engine. But it was shiny, and its design suggested something akin to rationality.
The Cannon's designer… its future designer… it had no designer, actually. Did it? Placeholder McDoctorate was standing to one side, staring at what he had wrought. At first Sokolsky thought the man was admiring his creation (?), until he got closer and the rambling became audible. "I'm already finished building this absolutely fucked machine they want." He paused. "Yeah, instructions that we came up with, asshole." Another pause. "No, we've been over this — WHAT? You're supposed to be the smarter one, how the hell can you be this asinine?!"
At a desk beside what could only be the prototype REISNO Cannon, Lillian Lillihammer was tapping merrily away on her laptop, foot bouncing up and down in tune with the pataphysicist's rambling. Sokolsky caught her eye, and she grinned sheepishly. "He's better than static," she explained. She meant it as high praise.
Sokolsky walked between the Cannon and Placeholder, and the latter shuddered as though a connection had been broken — but not the one that plagued him most. He looked absolutely blasted. Sandblasted. Time blasted. He was twitching, his eyes were hollow, his cheekbones stood out even more than usual, and he stood with a hunch and a slump. There was also a fire in his eyes, and the corners of his mouth kept quirking upward. "He says it's," he said, and then he shook his head, violently, and started again. "I say it's ready for a test run. Behold: the Retrocausally-Engineered Intertemporal Synchronization of Noetic Ordinality Cannon." He barely opened his mouth to mutter, under his breath, "Yes, it is. I've decided. Deal with it."
Across the room, Du was crossing his arms. Sokolsky couldn't see it, he just knew. He patted the pataphysicist on the shoulders. "Excellent. I say we—"
Placeholder suddenly grinned at him, and shrugged the hands off. "Just kidding, this machine creates time loops, there is no 'testing' it, we can literally absolutely only ever use it when we already know it has to be used."
Lillian whistled cheerfully, bobbing her head with the rise and fall of each syllable. Placeholder glanced at her, blushed, and looked back at Sokolsky.
"That makes sense," said Sokolsky.
"Does it?"
"No. Explain what you mean."
Placeholder took a deep breath. "So, you can't actually change the past. Right? Everybody knows that. Right?"
"Sure," said Sokolsky. Lillian pointedly looked the other way.
"So, if you use the Cannon to tell yourself something and Change The Past," he emphasized it like an axiom, "you immediately create a paradox, which immediately undoes itself, and temporality reverts back to before you tried to CTP so that something different, that doesn’t cause paradoxes, will happen instead. Ipso facto, the only way to successfully use the Cannon is to only make calls you already know will happen, because they happened in the past. In other words," he took a second, shorter much breath, "you are Not Changing the Past by using the Cannon. By which I mean using the Cannon is the act of not changing it. Not using the Cannon would be a CTP, and hence another paradox. Does that make sense?"
It made sense to Sokolsky. He knew it made sense to Lillian and Du. That was really all that mattered.
But Placeholder wasn't done. "This raises the question of how these causal loops even get created in the first place!" He was waving his hands in the air now; Lillian followed suit, as though conducting an orchestra, with her tongue stuck out of one side of her mouth. "If the loop is self-justifying when the Cannon is used successfully, then what determines whether or not a certain loop will exist? Do calls made with this device happen in every timeline where it exists? Or are these causal loops actually subtly dependent on other events? Would I have even gotten the call from my future self to create the Cannon if you hadn’t been thinking about your scheme?"
"Scheme?" Du interrupted, walking over. "What scheme?"
"I'd still like a test," Sokolsky smoothly brushed him aside. "And I know just the thing. Why don't you drop the call you're on, call yourself this past September, and—
"—do the future-me half of the endless conversation I've finally almost finished? No. Fuck you. I'm exhausted, and I'm procrastinating that shit."
Sokolsky suppressed a smile. "That's fair. Then why don't you boot the thing up for me?"
Placeholder blinked. "You got a call?"
"At least one." The suppression did not withstand that little jibe. "The eighth of September, 8:47 in the afternoon."
"Huh." The pataphysicist shrugged. "Well, okay. Give me a few minutes, and I'll do the calculations."
"You don't have a UI on this thing yet?" Lillian chirped.
Placeholder snorted. "You want this guy to be able to—"
"No," she interrupted him. "Yeah, I get you. Absolutely. Good call."
"The final iteration will have a UI." Placeholder was pulling the cables into a bundle; it was already almost too heavy for him to carry. "And a manual. Do you guys have an oriykalkos reactor here, by any chance?"
"What?" said Du.
Placeholder waved absent-mindedly. "Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. That's for more complex stuff. This is a local call." He was hopping from foot to foot as he dragged his load to the high-output wall sockets. "Your friendly neighbourhood operator has it sorted."
"—and I'm being dead serious right now, that's his name. You can look it up if you don't believe you." Sokolsky folded up the note he'd written himself, as instructed, and nodded at Placeholder. The pataphysicist threw a series of switches, and the spinning device spun back down with a receding whine.
"Does it need to spin?" Du asked.
"You're one to talk," said Sokolsky.
"Of course you made a crack about my name," Placeholder groused. "Everybody thinks they're so damn clever when they do that. Like I haven't heard them all a thousand times."
"Probably they can't actually make clever jokes about it." Lillian spun in her chair to face him. "The jokes get abstracted too."
"Abstracted?" Sokolsky repeated.
But Placeholder didn't seem to hear him. "I wonder if that's… hmm." A shy smile was creeping across his tired face. "I never thought about it that way. We'll make a pataphysicist of you yet."
"You'll have to fight me first," she sneered.
"It won't be a fair fight," he sneered back. "There's two of me, and one of you."
"That true," she mused. "I'll wait while you gather up a bigger gang."
"Are we interrupting something?" Du asked.
Both of them turned to look at him, both of them blushing. Neither responded.
"Well." Sokolsky tapped the floor with his shoe. "I've made the call. I no longer intend to make the call. Reality does not appear to have imploded as a result of this." He nodded at Placeholder. "You would appear to have successfully invented causality."
"Violated causality, you mean," said Du.
"No," said Placeholder. "He's right. I've invented causality as it exists now. The Cannon is part and parcel with the natural flow of time. It always will be. It always must be."
"Architect of the universe," Lillihammer swooned. "The lord of all time."
For the first time since Sokolsky had met him, Placeholder's eyes opened very, very wide. "Say that again."
Sokolsky excused himself to "take care of a few things," which was his way of saying his work was done, his people needed him, blah blah blah and he wouldn't be back. Du, apparently quite enamoured with the Cannon which had occupied so little of his space but so much of his resources for the past month, bent to examine the chrome contraption. That left Lillian with Place, which suited her fine.
He was wobbling back and forth on the carpet, which probably wasn't fine. "Hey," she said. "Hey."
He blinked, and looked down at her. "Oh. Uh."
She mimed a hanging-up gesture.
He frowned.
"They're serving wonton in the cafeteria," she grinned at him. "Lose the chaperone."
His eyes widened again, and this time he smiled so wide she thought the skin was going to split. "Oh," he said. "Oh, my god, my god." His pupils dilated, and he laughed out loud. "Yes. Yeah. Yes. Thank fuck. Disconnect right now, for the love of god."
And he pitched face-forward, into her lap.
Sokolsky swung his office door shut, and swooped over to his desk. Yet another thing to love about SCP-5109. The gift that kept on giving. He sat down, and spun merrily in his chair until—
—until suddenly, there was a man with a moustache standing in front of his very much still closed door.
Anything he could have said would have expressed surprise, so he just raised a brow instead.
"Do you understand what you've just done?"
Sokolsky pursed his lips. "Yes. Do you realize I don't know who you are?"
The man extended a hand. "Thaddeus Xyank. Department— JESUS."
"Tactical Theology?" Sokolsky palmed the syringe, now filled with a small quantity of the other man's blood, and dropped it into an open pouch in his open desk drawer, which he closed and locked.
Xyank was shaking his own hand now, vigorously. "If that was for a DNA test," he said, "you should know you're going to get some very strange results."
"That'll be confirmation, though, won't it?" Sokolsky slid his hands behind his head. "So, go on. Assuming you are who you almost said you are. What's this about?"
"It's about you," Xyank smirked.
"Isn't everything?"
"Specifically, it's about the stable time loop you just created."
Sokolsky shrugged.
"There are some who would consider that a very serious contravention of protocol."
"But they don't know it happened." Sokolsky closed his eyes. "Because this is the kind of shit they don't notice. The more apocryphal you get, the less your shenanigans show up in the tea leaves."
Judging solely by his tone, Xyank was at least a little intrigued. "Am I to understand," he said, "that you conducted this experiment to draw my attention specifically?"
Sokolsky snapped his eyes open. To his satisfaction, the other man immediately blinked. "Yes," he said. "You, specifically. We both know what you've been up to."
Xyank's moustache bobbed up and down. "Do we?"
"We do. Or at least, I do. Maybe this is you behind the curve. It's so hard to guess where someone is on their personal timeline from context clues. But suffice to say, I know enough."
"Enough for what?"
Sokolsky told him.
After a moment, Xyank inclined his head. "Alright," he nodded. "Let's talk."
25 October
Place awoke in a strange bed.
There was a strange ceiling overhead. The walls were strange. The curtains were strange. He was in a strange infirmary, and there was a strange doctor fussing with a clipboard near his feet. She noticed him, gave him a strange look, and disappeared behind the strange curtain.
That was probably all normal.
There was a bouquet of breadsticks in a Klein bottle on the bedside table; a balloon was tied to the handle, emblazoned with the legend YOUR SENTIMENT HERE. There was a little card hanging from the ribbon, and he reached up to pull it down. The balloon bobbed as he opened the card. It contained what looked to be a personal phone number, in Foundation directory format.
He had no idea what any of that meant.
A man in a grey labcoat walked out from behind the curtain. Place blinked. The grey looked a lot like cosmic background radiation. Things were getting strange again.
"Confused?"
Place nodded.
The other man nodded back. "You told yourself this would happen. Luckily, Sokolsky also told himself. But only because you told yourself. I don't want to get stuck in another of these equations right now. The point is, we knew you'd need debriefing."
Place reflexively checked under the covers. He was wearing casual clothing roughly consistent with the norm.
The other man continued, explaining the unlikely project Place had apparently just completed, its wild scope and wilder origin. The explanation was short on specifics, and yet still very technical. It was mind-boggling. It was thrilling. It was giving him a migraine. But one detail stuck out most of all, and as soon as the explanation ended, he pounced on it.
"Wait," he said. "I'm in CANADA?"
2021
8 January
It didn't seem too much to ask.
She'd assumed a week at the outside. More likely a day or two. He was due back at 87 to report on his Canadian vacation, she understood that. But everything had been sanctioned, it had all gone through proper channels, so that should have been the work of an afternoon. Probably he'd have to sleep it off; probably they'd send him home, or to his dormitory, or whatever arrangement they had in Sloth's Pit for accommodating their high-value researchers. Then, absolutely.
Absolutely he would call.
But he didn't.
He didn't call in October. He didn't call in November. He didn't call in 2020 at all. He didn't call after she almost died, after she and all of her friends almost died in Sokolsky's mad scheme on the first day of 2021. She had it on good authority that he'd been a vital part of orchestrating that scheme. That the Cannon had been involved again. That Sokolsky had seen him, had spoken to him.
That he hadn't said a word about her.
In an act of unprecedented generosity, she gave him one more week after that.
Then called him herself.
"Hell—" he began, and that was what she gave him.
"I fed you," she shouted. "I had to bum toonies off everybody I know just to get those fucking cheese whatevers you liked so much. I kept your ass company while you talked to yourself and tried not to drool, you self-centred son of a bitch! Do you know what you've got in your fucking hand right now, genius? You spent a fucking month building a big spinning dipshit machine to place calls across time and space, but do you know what you have in your hand? Because buddy, I don't know if you know this, I don't know if there's room for this in the cosmic gulf of your intellect while all that unmitigated gall is floating about, but people have known how to place ordinary fucking telephone calls for approximately one hundred and fifty years, you selfish prick!"
There was nothing on the line for several seconds, aside from the long-distance buzz.
Then: "Sorry, who's speaking?"
"Oh, no." She was shaking her head, as if he could see her. "Oh, no, you don't get to pull that one. Not on me. Not on Lillian S. Lillihammer, you do not. You didn't forget me. Nobody fucking forgets me. You left me once before," god dammit, "and buddy, I do not get left."
"I… what?" She could picture him rubbing his temples, eyes shut tight against the gale. "I think you must have the wrong guy?"
It was her turn to pause. She used it to take a deep, deep breath.
"I'M SORRY," she screamed. "WAS IT MAYBE THE OTHER POLYMATH WITH THE TIME-FUCKING CANNON AND THE ABSTRACTED GOD DAMN IDENTITY I WAS TALKING TO?!"
"Is this about 43?" He almost sounded angry, which made her even more furious. "Look, I still have NO IDEA what happened when I was in Canada! I don't know you from a hole in my head! As far as I'm concerned, you're just a disembodied voice shouting at me, and apparently that doesn't make you particularly unique!"
Her mouth worked up and down until she thought she might chip a tooth. Finally, she slammed the receiver down, threw the phone across the wall, and stomped over to the door to snatch up her dazzle coat.
"You want a body," she growl-spluttered as she fumbled for the door handle, perilously close to snapping it off. "I'll show you a god damn body."
