A World Deferred

Image Credit: Marc Smith
by Andre Infante



It was a good job, everyone said so.  The pay was good, I'd be making about seventy thousand dollars a year.  It wasn't a fortune, but what with the latest economic crash, work was work.   It was interesting work, too.  I was about to become one of a very few people to find out how Project Stopwatch, the fastest supercomputer in the world, did its thing.  The bus turned a corner.

It was a little scary, though. The security around there was paranoid.  I found out last week that they'd been drilling my kindergarten teacher as part of their background check, and they'd also made me sign an NDA as long and ominous as a tornado before they'd even speak with me.  A goth guy settled into the seat next to me.  I pulled the cord.  The bus shuddered to a halt and I climbed down onto the curb.  

Hot exhaust blew around my ankles as the bus pealed away.  I sighed, and straightened my jacket, again.  The suit was new and had yet to develop the comforting bald patches and creases that would allow it to sit comfortably.  It'd been fighting me incessantly since I put it on.  I loosened the tie a bit more, and started the walk to my new job.

The company was called Industrial Electronic Research, which was about as vague as 'chance of rain'.  They could have been involved in anything from cell phones to nuclear weapons.  The building was similarly nondescript - gray concrete, mirrored plexiglass windows, and a really sturdy door.  It reminded me of a bank, more than anything else.  I waved my wallet in the direction of the door sensor, and it obligingly unlocked.  I went into the lobby, which was empty, but filled with the low-level hubbub of people going about their business.  I'd asked about that on my third interview.  They'd said that the lobby had been too quiet, so they'd added in a tape of a busy office over the PA to make people feel more comfortable.  Frankly, it was creepy as hell, but I didn't say anything.  I could sort of see why they did it, though.  They couldn't have employed more than thirty people, and the building was massive.  They didn't even have a receptionist, just a moderately helpful touchscreen terminal.

I checked the terminal first.  I touched it, there was a brief pause, and then it informed me that I was to report immediately to the Royal Blue lab for orientation.  At a few touches, it politely displayed a detailed, extremely clear map to the relevant lab.  It then gracelessly crashed.  I checked the error code it gave.  Yep.  Built on Vista.  Gods, you'd think they'd have learned their lesson by now.  

I shook my head, and headed off down the escalator and through a maze of winding corridors, working from memory.  After a couple of wrong turns, a close call with a jumpy rent-a-cop, and a trip down a long hallway, I finally found the lab.  It wasn't very big.  The area you could actually get into was a low, oppressive concrete room with fluorescent strip lighting that felt like a vault.  A sheet of plexiglass separated the front part from the rear.  The rear room was filled with racks of high-end supercomputers.  At the end of them, a single data cable led into a long blue rectangular apparatus which was unfamiliar.  All the computers were solid-state, so far as I could tell.  I heard no noise at all from them, though I did noticed what appeared to be a borderline-fission generator humming quietly at the end.  Christ, I could see planning for blackouts but what were they planning for, the Rapture?  On my side of the glass, there was a single computer terminal.  

Dr. Henley was sitting in a folding chair, looking bored and annoyed.

"Mr. Wells, finally.  Can we get started?  Or shall I simply sit here until I develop a blood clot in my arse and die?"

I looked meek and stood towards the back.  There were four other graduate students, and another man who looked like he was supposed to be there.  The grad students looked at me with attitudes ranging from pity to cold analysis to rank suspicion.  I got the impression that they were not to be counted on as allies. 

Henley turned rapidly towards the server room.  I was trying to note the make and model of the servers.  As far as I could tell, this computer was about, oh, eighteen billion times less powerful than the big one, give or take a decimal point.  I frowned.  Why was he wasting our time with this?  Get to the real deal.  Based on the expressions on the other grad student's faces, they'd come to the same assessment some time before, and were not happy.  

Oblivious, Henley spoke.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Royal Blue, our star supercomputer.  Or, as you may know it better from the nosier technical journals, 'Project Stopwatch.'"

He paused for effect.

"Now, as you can see, Royal Blue is not capable of the specs that we have generated.  In fact those of you with a sharp eye will note that it is not even top the the line.  For the amount of money we sunk into it, it could easily be twice as fast.  What Royal Blue has, and pay attention, is durability.  If this room were to be sealed tomorrow, and all access to the outside world disconnected, it would run on its own for a full ten years."

I blinked.  In a few years, all the hardware in here would be cheap as hell to replace.  Why did it matter?  I got the horrible sense that something very strange was going on here, and I was being left behind.  I glanced at the other grad students.  They all looked bewildered as well.  I composed my face and tried to look like I knew what was going on.  

Henley looked at us, a touch smug.  

"The miracle worker here is the blue box at the end of the room.  It contains, so far as we can tell, a stable quantum wormhole, a naked singularity, and some other things that I don't pretend to understand.  It can establish a stable wormhole between any two points in time."

There was silence.  One of the grad students, an Asian girl started to speak, and he interrupted.

"Don't ask how it works.  We don't know.  It does work, though.  So, when we enter a problem into the computer, the vault seals and it runs for five minutes or three weeks or ten years, or however long it takes to finish the equation.  Then, it feeds the output back to moment the problem was entered.  So, essentially, our system can deliver ten years worth of computation in a microsecond."

He smiled.  We stared.  No fucking way.  I mean, I'd known they were doing something clever, but fucking time travel?  I shook my head.  This didn't make any sense.  

"Sir, respectfully, I have to call bullshit.  Time travel?  You claim to have a fucking time machine - why not use it to play the stock market? "

He shot me a disparaging glance.

"We prefer the term 'Closed Timelike Curve Transmitter,' or CTCT.  To answer your question, there are two reasons.  First, we talked to our legal department, and that's technically insider trading.  Second, this is actually more profitable in the long run.   Next question."

A scrawny Jewish kid with a clipboard peered at him, and asked,

"How did you build the, uh, CTCT, if you don't know how it works?"

"We didn't build it.  Beyond that, I'm not at liberty to discuss that.  That's enough questions.  Shall we get to a practical demonstration?"

He walked to the terminal.

"Now, as it happens, I have in my hand a bid from a large research institution, which is offering us several billion dollars to run an algorithm to generate a proof of the Pointcare conjecture."

He put a CD into the tray, and put it into the computer.  He tapped a sequence of commands into the terminal, which appeared to be running Ubuntu 10.2.  He brought up a command line, entered a series of commands, and pushed the return key.  There was no visible change.  After a second, a light on the terminal came on green.  The screen displayed a line: 

Royal_Blue:_ Job done!  Render time = 34,642.455 hours.  See output below:

Beneath it, an equation displayed.  Henley pasted it into an OpenOffice document, and printed it.  He put the piece of paper into a manila envelope.  He passed it around.  I inspected it.  I couldn't be sure without a calculator and a couple of hours, but it looked like a valid proof.  I shook my head.  This was nuts.  Somebody tugged the envelope out of my hand.  I stared at the wall, trying to wrap my head around the idea.

After the paper had circulated, Henley smiled genially at us.  He took back the envelope, and gave it to the other researcher whose name, I believe, was Patterson.  He patted the computer.  

"Roy has got us through some hard times, make no mistake.  Now, a few guidelines:  You are not to enter any halting problems into Roy, under any circumstances.  If you do, you'll be fired, sued, and probably shot.  Further, you are not to enter any problems into Royal Blue at all without a sign-off by at least two senior staff members.  And, finally, if I catch any of you trying to install Crysis on it, you'll be out on your ass so fast you'll have road rash.  Do I make myself clear?"

I tried to nod without looking either insubordinate or over-enthusiastic.  

"Good.  Now, as for what we're paying you for, I'll explain.  Two of you, Zu and Halevi, will be in the maintenance lab to monitor the internal space of the blue box.  Follow Patterson to your offices.  Be careful, the last time we had a solar flare, we ended up getting radio from 2040 for about ten seconds, and then the singularity exploded."

I blinked.  I wasn't sure if he was joking.  I took a step back from the plexiglass all the same.  

"As for the rest of you, Wells and Kim I believe, you'll be handling the technical side of things.  You'll be screening the algorithms for possible exploits, viruses, or other malware.  You'll also be actually entering problems into Roy.  You start immediately.  We've got a stack of applications on your desks.  Come with me."

We followed, and walked a long distance down the hallway outside, came to a door, passed it, came to another door marked "Analytics," and went inside.  It wasn't a big room, but hell, sharing a small office beat the hell out of a cubicle.  There was a desk in the middle that took up a solid quarter of the room, covered with stacks of CD's.  There were two modestly expensive computers on the desk, a telephone, and a camera in one corner.       
He showed us how to use the tools available, and explained in detail what constituted an illegal operation.  For one thing, if the operation took longer than about ninety thousand hours, it would throw a 'Containment Breach' error, and return nothing.  He wouldn't explain why this was, but told us it was imperative that the processor not consume more than ninety thousand hours of clock time.  If we thought there was a better than 50% chance of the algorithm running over, we were to deny the bid by default.  There were all kinds of other conditions.  We were supposed to make sure that it didn't muck with the system files or try to send data back out, or try to run illegal operations to crash the machine.  The computer hardware field was highly competitive, and spending a few billion dollars to spy on or cripple the leading company would be well worth it.  In my first day alone, I found three worms, a piece of spyware, a hardware exploit, and a forced divison-by-zero hack that would have raised hell if it'd run.  

I also found out what people did with virtually unlimited computational resources at their disposal.  There were weather simulations, asteroid impact simulations, mathematical proofs that I didn't even understand, and a large-prime factoring algorithm that I'm pretty sure was intended as a bank-account attack (which I rejected without further consideration).  As a charity project, they calculated the pi to 400 trillion digits.  Of course, you needed three petabyte drives to transport the number, so it was a bit of a moot point.  Still, the mathematical community got excited.  Easily impressed, that lot. 

Emily Kim was nice enough.  She was somewhat less suspicious, though she still clearly viewed me as competition.  That was alright, I felt the same way about her.  She worked well, though, it was clear they knew what they were doing with their hiring practice.  The time went past pretty fast.  I was thorough, worked hard, running back and forth to the lab to run programs (getting Henley and Patterson to sign off each time).  By the time I got done, I was very, very excited.  I caught the bus home, pulling my tie down and rolling up my sleeves on the way there.  I walked a block from the bus stop to my apartment, tore my jacket and socks off, and flopped down on the couch, my head buzzing with possibilities.  

The air conditioning was broken, the windows were painted shut, and after a couple of minutes, my head was just buzzing.  I threw some lukewarm water in my face, undid the top couple of buttons on my shirt, and walked across the street to the park.  I bought a shaved ice and sat down on a bench to eat it.  The sun was falling, but the layer of flat, hot air over the ground had yet to depart.  It was pretty out, though.  The trees were cut to orange ribbons by sunset, and the air smelled like hot grass and asphalt.  I saw Amy across the park and waved.  She grinned at me, and walked over.  She was wearing an orange tank top and blue jeans, and had her hair done up.  Her face glowed with sweat, and she looked nice.  

"Hey, company man, how was your first day?"

"Oh, you know, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."  

She grinned.  

"That bad, huh?"

"I think they got MI5 to do their security.  I'm serious, Amy, they're totally paranoid."

She laughed, and sat on the bench next to me.  

"Was it everything you hoped it'd be?"

I shrugged.  

"I dunno, it's odd.  I didn't expect what I got at all, but I'm coming around to it."  

"Oh?  How so?"

I shifted uncomfortably.

"Well, actually, I wasn't completely kidding about the having to kill you thing..."

She raised an eyebrow but didn't comment.  

She just looked at me lazily, looking hot and tired.  I felt an urge to lean towards her.  I fought it down, smiled, and spoke instead.  

"But enough about me and my sordid corporate affairs.  How go renovations on the apartment?  You ever find that smell?"

She nodded.

"As a matter of fact I did.  A family of squirrels wandered into the air conditioner and died horribly."

I winced.  She winked, and continued.

"Eh, furry little bastards had it coming.  Anyway, this'll give me an excuse to replace that piece of shit air conditioner for something big and shiny that punches a hole in the ozone layer the size of Australia."  

I laughed.

"I might join you there.  Mine finally died Tuesday."

She shook her head.

"I never thought we'd finally leave the dorms and end up in apartments that are worse.  Hell, I don't think you've ever lived in a decent house.  Even back in high school, you were living in that camper van."

I shrugged.

"Eh, I'm a simple man, simple tastes.  So long as the roof doesn't leak and the mold in the fridge doesn't pass the Turing test, I'm happy."  

She smiled, but didn't laugh.  She reached out, and put her arm on my shoulder.  I stiffened, and then relaxed.  She was being friendly.  She peered at me.   

"Seriously, though, Herb.  You happy?"

I smiled, and looked her in the eye.  

"Hey, I've got a cool job, and a friend who'll move halfway across the state with me to live in an apartment complex occupied by ten generations of rodent ghosts.  What more could I ask?"

She grinned.  

"Happy to hear it.  Hey, I was going to throw a movie night tonight at my place, invite Dan and Emma and watch the Army of Darkness remake on DVD.  Wanna come?"

I stared at her in disbelief.

"...with lots of alcohol."  she amended. 

I lowered my eyebrows and grinned.  

"I'll be there."    

We just sat there for a while after that, watching the sun set.  When the sky was coal grey, we said our temporary goodbyes, and I went home to get changed, and take a cold shower (which ended up more of a room-temperature shower).  I pulled on a T-shirt, and some blue jeans.  I went without socks entirely, switching to sandals.  I left my door cracked when I left.  It wasn't like I had anything worth stealing except my laptop, and that was padlocked to the desk.


As a last thought, I grabbed a bottle of peach brandy that I'd mixed up in the closet of the chemistry lab the year before.  I'd misplaced a decimal point when I was doing the math on my still, so what I ended up with was a concoction that would, quite literally, take the paint off of a fence.  We knew this because I'd spat the first drink I'd taken of it onto the wall, and it'd eaten through the paint and a good bit of the drywall as well.  Given what we were watching, it would probably be necessary.  

I walked down the porch to the stairs up to the second floor, and around the corner to her apartment.  She smiled happily, and waved me in.  I stashed the brandy behind a potted plant.  She'd set up two big box fans in front of the door, and had a bucket of water behind each one.  She was filling plastic bags with dry ice pellets.  Don't ask me where she got the dry ice, I don't know.  She threw me the bags, which I juggled carefully and dropped into the buckets of water.  Clouds of vapor rose out, and I felt the temperature in the room drop a couple of degrees almost instantly.  

I poured a bowl of chips on the coffee table in front of the TV, and she broke out a bottle of coke and a bottle of rum.  She then threw every pillow, chair cushion, and thick blanket in the house into piles around the TV.  After about twenty minutes, Dan and Emma showed up, bearing more drinks.  

We flopped down on the cushions for a while and just shot the breeze, and then somebody suggested we put on the movie.  

"So, anyone look at any of the trailers for this?  Is it going to be as bad as I think it is?"  

They looked at me.

"What?  I don't even have a TV."

They looked at Amy.

"Don't look at me, I've been ass-deep in my thesis for months.  I just grabbed it from the dollar bin on Netflix."

Emma and Dan glanced at each other, shrugged, and we put in the movie.  Ten seconds in, there was a frantic grab for the liquor.   Forty five seconds in, Amy was staring bleakly at the computer.

"Is that Toby Maguire with a prosthetic chin?  God, Herb, I don't think we have nearly enough alcohol here.  We need, like, crystal meth or something."

By thirty minutes, drinking games had begun.  Dan and Emma had tried to make out, but kept having to split up to exchange horrified glances.   

"Okay, so every time he refers to his penis as his 'boomstick,' take two drinks.  And, every time his black sidekick is on screen, oh, fuck it, give me the bottle."  

By an hour, all pretense of drinking games had been abandoned, and we were just staring at the screen in open-mouthed horror.  

"Is he... did he just say?"

I silently stood up, walked to the corner, grabbed the peach brandy, pulled some shot glasses out of the drawer under the silverware.  I quietly poured everyone a shot, and we drank.  We kept drinking. By the time the final credits rolled, everyone was pretty thoroughly gone.  

"Oh god, I think I'm going to have flashbacks.  Hey, neuro major, how much do I have to drink to erase my memory?"

Emma shrugged.  

"Not really sure.  A good electric shock would do it, I think."   

Amy straightened up suddenly, and very carefully walked off.  

"One minute.  Going to go stick a fork in wall socket."

After a minute, Emma rose unsteadily.

"I'm going to go make sure she doesn't kill herself.  Or join her.  Whichever seems faster."

She wandered off.  Dan turned to me, squinting critically.     

"You bastard.  What was that stuff, agent orange?"

"Hush.  It couldn't have been more than a hundred and fifty proof.  Maybe one sixty."

He shook his head.

"Listen, dude, I know, I know we discussed this already, but you really need to do something about this situation with Amy.  Look, shutup, listen.  She's been making 'fuck-me' eyes at you all night.  I know for a fact that you haven't had a stable dating life since you met her. You want her.  Don't even lie.  So what's the problem?"  

I shook my head.

"No, dude, this isn't a topic.  You know how long we've been friends?  She's estranged from her parents because of me.  She moved across the state for me-"

"-and that doesn't tell you something?" 

"Fuck you, Dan.  Look, you know about that shit that went down back in high school.  Okay?  I can't do that to her.  I owe her way too much to try anything.  I don't want to hurt her because I fucked up."

"It's been five years, dude.  I mean, I know it's not the kind of thing you just get over, but I cant think of a better person than you to try.  Um.  Look, I just mean there are risks, yeah, but everything has risks, and sometimes if you want to get something done, you gotta be an asshole. 'Scuse me."

He burped, then stood up.  

"Gonna go worship the porcelain goddess.  Think about it, dude."    

I watched him topple over the couch, get up, and wander off down the hallway.  I stood there for a minute, pushing him out of my head.  It was pretty easy, since I was drunk, but pieces of thoughts kept sneaking around.  After a minute, Amy came back, looking a bit better.

"Electrocute yourself?"

"Nope.  Repressed the memories.  Butterflies!"  

She flopped down, missing a pile of cushions.

"Ow."

I squinted at my watch.

"Oh, wow, I have work tomorrow, too.  I've got to go, Amy."

She nodded.

"Think you can find your apartment?"  

"Um, actually no."

"Eh, you can stay here."

I looked at her for a long moment.  She glanced towards the bathroom.

"Em and Dan should probably stay too.  I don't think Dan would make it out of the parking lot in this state, but still."  

I nodded.  She stood up, and I helped her push the blankets and pillows into some semblance of beds.  I got a tall glass of water, drank it, got another, drank it, took two aspirin and set two more out, rolled up into the blanket, and passed out.

I woke up, feeling like.  Well, actually, I can't think of a good metaphor.  I had a really bad hangover, let's leave it at that.  I glanced down.  Amy was wrapped up next to me, head leaning against my stomach.  Emma and Dan were on the opposite end, curled up into some kind of kinky human pretzel.  I gently slipped out from under her head, and set it down gently on a pillow.  I took the two asprin, drank a glass of orange juice from her fridge, ate a slice of cold bread and a breakfast sausage, and ran out the door.  I ducked down the stairs, pulled on my suit, locked the door behind me, and ran to the bus stop to catch my bus, which I didn't.



I got to work fifteen minutes late, ran all the way down to my office, hoping I could sneak in without Henley noticing.  He was waiting for me.  

"Mr. Wells.  Late again?"

I groaned inwardly, head still throbbing.  

"Sorry sir, I think I have the cat flu.  I got out of the house late.  Did you need me for something?"

He didn't look convinced, though he did lean backwards slightly to avoid breathing my air.  

"I was going to inform you that, as a bonus for your department's excellent performance yesterday, we were going to let you run your own algorithm.  Given your tardiness, I gave the honor to Kim, exclusively.  Fortunately, she already had a proposal all worked out, to do glial emulation, I believe.  You'll be running it today."

I let a string of expletives race around the inside of my skull until they vanished into the fog of hangover, smiled, nodded, picked up the CD he handed me, and turned to go.  Kim gave me a look that was halfway between smug and apologetic.  I shrugged, and walked down to the computer.  Henley followed me.  Oh, nice, like I was going to try to sabotage it or something.

I opened the door to the Royal Blue lab, went inside, and pushed the CD in.  I brought up the command prompt, and entered the run sequence.  Henley stood behind me, staring at the back of my neck.  Patterson came in, stirring some coffee with his fingers.  

I hit the return key, and the program ran.  

The light on the panel turned red.  I blinked, confused.  Patterson dropped his coffee.  There was a loud alarm noise, and suddenly, a thick metal wall that I hadn't even noticed slammed down from the ceiling on the other side of the glass.  It severed the cables leading from the terminal in.  It was at least two feet thick, and kept sliding for a good four seconds.  It looked like a blast door.  I turned around, staring at Henley and Patterson, who were both very pale.

"Oh, fuck me..."

Patterson backed against the wall, staring at the gray on the other side of the plexiglass.  Henley looked at him, looking more tired than anything.

"Well, it was bound to happen eventually.  Come on, off your ass, James.  We've got to go explain this to the board of directors without scaring the hell out of them."

He turned to me.

"How long a job was this?"

I popped the CD out of the now dark terminal.  I glanced at the sticker on the back.

"Five hundred hours.  So, uh, about three weeks I guess."  On impulse, I set a timer on my watch with one hand, while trying to make eye contact with either of them.

"Look, sir, what's going on here?"

Henley avoided my gaze.

"It's a problem with the reactor.  The shielding is broken."

He seemed to get his balance back.

"We'll need to bring in containment crews to clean up the radioactive waste.  Go home, Wells.  You look like hell."  

It was incredibly obvious that he was lying through his teeth, and it was equally obvious that he really, really wanted to sell the lie.  He looked awful, like something deeply personal depended on me believing it.  So I drummed up a sickly little grin, pointed it at him, and then nodded and left.  On my way out, I tripped over my shoelace, and paused to tie it.  I could feel a few loose ends of an idea floating around my skull, but I didn't like them at all, and it was hard to think with this kind of hangover.  

I continued down the hallway, climbed the stairs, and walked to the bus stop.  I got home about half an hour later.  It wasn't even eleven.  It was still relatively cool, and I took most of my clothes off and lay down.  After some thought, I called the air conditioner place to have them come fix mine again, then took a couple of ibuprofen, and went to sleep.  I was woken up a couple of times, once by a neighborhood dog trying to get into my apartment, another time by the air condition guys, who I paid and waved in the general direction of the ailing machine.  The last time I only half-remember, which was when the air conditioner kicked on, blowing cold air down on my bare legs and back.  

After that, I slept for about three hours.  I had a dream, in which I was running down the length of an infinitely long corridor, running and running, and the end never got any closer.  A wave of cold water was pounding down a few feet behind my back, throwing flecks of icy water onto my back.  I ran and ran and ran, getting more and more tired, the wall of water growing ever closer.  I kept wishing that the hallway would end, and then suddenly it did, and I pounded my fists on the flat white wall in a sudden panic.  Then the wall of water slammed me violently against the wall, and I clawed for the surface, digging my nails into the plaster ceiling, trying to find air, any air.  And then I was in bed, staring out the window at what had to be sunset.  I felt considerably better, especially after taking a piss and drinking a couple of glasses of water, but I was starving.  

I got up, and checked the fridge.  Not much to work with there, unless cold sardines, moldy cheese, and bread-ends appealed to you.  Time for fast food.  I pulled some pants on, and started to head out.  Then a thought struck me.  Without being quite sure why I did it, I found my cell phone in my pocket, and called Amy.  

"Hey, Herbie, how'd your second day go?"

"Weird.  They sent me home early.  Some kind of accident.  Hey, do you want to go get something to eat?  I never had lunch."  

There was the slightest hesitation.

"Sure, I'd love to.  Got something in mind?"

"Uh, I was just thinking hamburgers and stuff.  Maybe Benny's.  Sound good?"

"Sure.  I'll meet you by the front gate in five minutes."  

I suddenly realized that I still looked like hell, so I grabbed a toothbrush, turned the shower all the way up to hot, danced around inside for a couple of minutes, dragged some halfway clean clothes on, and ran out to meet her just in time.  She had her hair in a pony tail, and was wearing a nice floral dress.

"You look nice."  

"Thanks!  I got this dress for two dollars the other day; goodwill is awesome."

She nodded down the sidewalk.

"Shall we go?"  

I nodded, and we walked.

We dragged ourselves into Benny's ten minutes later, gasping, soaked with sweat.  We curled up in an air-conditioned booth, and then I dragged myself to my feet to go order.  After a minute, I came back with two hot greasy bags.  She had recovered enough to come and fill up the soda glasses.  She got the same thing for both of us, fifty-fifty sprite and pepsi.  We got back, and tore the bags open.  I wolfed down my bacon cheeseburger, while she made significant inroads into hers.  After I no longer felt like I was about to die, I leaned back in the booth, taking a look around.  The place was pretty much deserted.  I bet we were the only ones brave enough to be out on a day like that.  Something seemed to be following me around, the dark shape of an unacceptable thought, just beneath the surface.  I forced it down, and turned back to her.     

"You get Dan and Em out of your apartment alright?"

"Yeah.  At least, they weren't there when I got back.  I had to leave not long after you did.  I told them I had feline flu at the library so they'd get off my case."

I winced, and nodded.

"Yeah, me too.  My boss looked like he was going to call a bio containment unit on me."

She laughed.  

"I haven't spoken to either of them since last night, so it's quite possible they're dead in a ditch somewhere.  Ah well, I'm sure they're fine.  What the hell did you give them?"

"A bottle of apricot rocket."

She blinked.

"Is that what that was?  That explains a lot.  The last time we drank that, we-"

She stopped talking, started, stopped, and then took off on a tangent.

"I thought we used up the last of that, though, in our going-away party."

I shook my head.

"Found a bottle at the bottom of a suitcase a couple of weeks ago.  Thought I'd better use it up before the police came by to arrest me for possessing biological weaponry."

I yawned, and glanced out the window.  It was getting dark.

"Come on, we should get home."

We walked back down the sidewalk.  I listened the popping, tinking noises of hot cans welded to the asphalt slowly cooling, and to the lethargic cries of a few birds.  Amy suggested we cross the street to the park, and I wasn't opposed.   I lay back against a tree, feeling tired, and she curled against me.  We just sat there, watching the sun vanish over the horizon.  It was nice.  Without being suite sure what I was doing, I reached out and put a hand on her arm.  She turned to look at me, confused.  I felt that gnawing, urgent thought at the bottom of my brain, and I felt confused and lost, and more than a little afraid.  I started to speak.

"-"


The automatic sprinklers turned on.  I yelped, and stood bolt upright, ice water running down the back of my neck.  She laughed, but was cut short by a jet of water.  Making a range of noises that would have surprised any naturalist alive, we limped, ducked, dodged and crawled across the park to the sidewalk.  It was a little too dim to actually see the streams, though, so by the time we got to the safety of the strip of brown grass around the edge of the park, we were dripping.  I felt a flicker of regret.  The moment, whatever it had been, was gone.  

"Come on, let's get inside.  You can borrow some of my dry clothes."

She crossed the street after me, and we went into my apartment.  I pulled a T-shirt and jeans out of the closet, and tossed them too her.  She headed into the bathroom.  I changed my clothes quickly, thought my boxers were still wet, and my ass was cold.  She came out a minute later, hair a messy cascade down her back, getting water out of her ear with a Q-tip.  The shirt was a bit too big for her, but she pulled it off.  

She grinned at me.

"You ever notice how it's perfectly acceptable for women to wear jeans, but not for men to wear skirts?"  

I considered this for a moment.

"Well, yes, but frankly I look terribly in garters, so I'm not willing to get all riled up about it."

She squinted at me appraisingly.  

"You know, I don't think I've ever seen you wear a dress, except for that one time in senior year-"

"Oof, don't remind me.  I've got a new rule just for that incident.  Never bet your dignity, and if you do, get the right sized bra, those things chafe."

We were sitting cross legged on the floor of my apartment, slowly drying.  I felt good.  I was full, I was happy, my hangover was gone aside from a few odd twinges.  Were it not for an oddly disturbing image of a humming server that kept popping up in my head, it would have been a lovely evening.  

We chatted about this and that, and then she noticed the time.

"Ah, hell, Herb- I've got an early shift at the library tomorrow.  I'm going to head home.  See you tomorrow."

I waved her off.

"Shoo!  Be fresh and chipper.  Get some sleep."

She smiled and left.  

I cleaned off my work station, surfed the net for a half hour or so, and then went to bed.  I lay in bed for a longtime, just staring at the ceiling.  The black epiphany was circling me, somewhere out there.  And then, there in the dark, beside the coal-glow of my alarm clock, I felt a sudden cold sensation in the bit of my stomach, because I knew.  I must've known for hours.  I knew that there was no problem with the reactor.  I knew that, in fact, absolutely nothing was wrong, that everything was working just as intended.  The problem had been entered, and-

                   -the servers were running.

I slept well that night.  When you know that everything in your life simply does not matter at all, all the stress kind of evaporates.  It's like being diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Once you accept that you're going to die, it's all very relaxing.  Those student loans?  Fuck them, it doesn't matter.  The thesis that's been stalling for months?  Burn the fucker.  Your job?  Quit.  The girl you're too fucking scared to... I stopped.  Was it really that simple, now?  I thought about it.  I had three weeks.  I had three weeks, and then the blue box would switch itself on and send its solution back, and all of this would be gone.  Erased.  From yesterday morning to twenty days from now, the entirety of that period of existence would simply be gone.  I woke up understanding this with disturbing clarity.  I had to be sure, though.  Before I went any further, I needed to be sure.  So I got up, put my clothes on, and went to work.

I got off the bus, and came into the lobby.  A dozen grad students, familiar and unfamiliar, and two security guards were standing around looking confused.  Some of them were whispering back and forth.  

"The Royal Blue lab and all the offices are locked down," someone told me, "we're stuck here."    

News had got around overnight.  You could tell who had worked it out and who hadn't.  The ones who had figured it out had a kind of dry, haunted look to them.  Kim came up to me.

"What do you think is happening?  Was there an explosion or something?  Are we fired?"

I just shook my head.

"I, uh, I don't know."  

After a couple of minutes, Patterson came into the lobby.   

He clapped his hands twice, and raised them for attention.

"Hello, hello, I'm sorry I'm late, Dr. Henley is in urgent care this morning.  He's badly injured, and I was unable to come right away.   I'm sorry to inform you that, following the events of yesterday morning, the company is being dissolved by the shareholders.  A trust has been created to maintain the premises for a period of time.  However, you are all being dismissed."

A babble of protest rose.

"Yes, yes, I know, I'm sorry, but it has to be done.  As per your contract, you'll all receive two thousand dollars for early mass termination.  Now, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you all to leave, and return to the hospital."

He looked terribly bleak and old, and his ash black beard was limp.  

"Except for you, Mr. Wells.  I need to speak with you."  

I walked over to him.

"Mr. Patterson, I know."

"Yes, I know you do.  So do some of the others.  Listen, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.  For ninety percent of the world, this will make no difference at all.  Their lives will continue unchanged either way, but for us, it changes everything.  Bill," and it took me a moment to realize he was referring to Dr. Henley, "shot himself in the head last night.  He'll have permanent brain damage, if he recovers at all.  Well, for a given value of permanent..."

He chuckled a little, then  shook his head.
 
"I know you probably want to try to shut down the computer, but trust me, we can't.  The room is sealed, and the blast doors could withstand a nuclear blast.  I know we can't, because every time we've used the computer, it's come up clean.  If it were possible for us to break it, we'd have done so already.  Look, son, just trust me, alright.  Keep your head down for three weeks.  In three weeks, it'll all be over. Royal Blue will finish up, send its data back, and this will all just go away."        

I turned, and walked out in a daze.  Behind me, the guards left.  Henley locked the building from the outside.  I didn't wait for the bus, but just started walking home.  By the time I'd got five blocks down to the next bus stop, reality had kicked in a little, and I felt like I was going to die.  I crashed under the sunshield on the bus stop, waiting for the next one.  An old lady sat down next to me.  I stared off at the horizon.

I could die here.  It'd be easy.   I could just throw myself in front of the bus so easily, and it wouldn't matter.  In three weeks, it would all be the same.  It was the end of the world, it really was.  

The bus came.  I didn't jump in front of it, because I'd upset the old lady, not to mention my friends and family.  I guess Patterson was right.  There really was nothing left to do but wait.  I got onto the bus and sat down.  It was cooler inside, and I could hear the hum of the air conditioner from where I stood.  My stop approached.  I pulled the cord, and got off.  It was only about noon.  I grabbed a hot dog from a vender, and walked to my apartment.

Skydiving.  I could go skydiving.  Unprotected sex.  Bank robbery.  As I got past the horrible side of it, the possibilities were occurring to me.  There were no consequences.  There could be none.  Gambling.  Yes, definitely gambling.  Amy -

I stopped.  Then, moving past that, I kept going.  Amy.  There was nothing stopping me, now.  If I hurt her, it wouldn't matter in a few weeks.  There was nothing I could do to hurt her.  A sense of overwhelming release washed over me.  Suddenly, everything was simple.

I got out my phone, and opened Starling.

          H.G. Hey, I've been fired.  I'm going to order pizza and shots.  Want to help me drown my sorrows?

          A.M: Awww, man, I'm sorry Herbie.  I'd love to, what time?       

          H.G. Sixish?

          A.M. Sounds like a plan.  I'll be there.   

I went inside, and got dressed up.  I got out a nice white dress shirt, a tie, dress shoes, and black slacks.  It felt good to be in nice-looking clothes that actually liked me (or, at least, weren't actively malicious).  I combed my hair with a sparing application of gel, shaved, grabbed my fedora out of the closet, and came out the door looking halfway respectable.  On my way up to her place, I ordered the pizza.  I climbed the stairs and knocked.  

"Hey, look at you, Studley.  Got a hot date?"

I shrugged, grinned, and said.

"Eh, you know.  Come on, the pizza'll be here shortly if the pizza guy doesn't die of heat stroke."

She followed me down

"It's actually not too bad out here.  Sorry to hear about your job, Herbie.  What happened?"

I considered how much to tell her.  I then decided that I'd already altered her life, just due to my ambient presence.  It occurred to me that I had just altered the life of the pizza guy, the lady on the bus... I was getting off track.  I decided to tell her the truth, or some of it.

"They said there was a problem with the reactor, but I don't buy it.  Something weird's going on."

We got to my apartment, and sat down on the couch.  

"Interesting.  Well, good you got out, then.  How much'd you get paid?"

I shrugged.

"About twenty two hundred dollars, all told.  Not bad for three days work, I guess."

"Not too bad at all.  Think it'll last you until you can get another job?"

I shrugged.

"I dunno, I feel like it's time to take some risks, change things up a little."

She turned sharply to look me, eyes scanning the back of my skull.

"Herb, what's going on?  I know something's up."

I started to flinch, then stopped myself.

"Nothing's going on.  I just feel like a change.

She sniffed.

"Fine, don't tell me.  I'll get it out of you eventually."

I grinned, a little, in spite of a sudden thickness in my throat.

"You always did."

The doorbell rang.  I jumped up and opened it.  A surprisingly cool wall of air pushed in against me.  I blinked.  It was already dark out, like someone had turned out the light without telling me.  I blinked, and noticed the pizza guy.  He passed me the pizza, and I dug a couple of crumpled dollar bills out of my pocket.  I was a buck short.  Amy walked over, produced a dollar, and the pizza guy left.  We returned to the couch, and I left the door cracked.  Hot air began to seep away into the night.

I opened the greasy cardboard box, poured some shots, and we set to work.  

She snapped a string of cheese against her teeth.

"You think this kind of thing is going to come back to haunt us?"

I downed a shot.

"No, not really."

After we finished the pizza, I turned on a SyFy channel original movie with the sound off.  We yelled at the screen, improvised dialog and sound effects, and cringed at the CGI.  At some point, while we were laughing, it just happened.  I put a hand on her face, turned it, and kissed her.  She froze, her lips were like wood.  She put a hand on my chest, and pushed me back.   

"Herb.  I don't.  Oh, god."  

She looked like she was going to start crying.  All thoughts of Royal Blue vanished.  

"God, Amy, I'm sorry.  God, I'm such a fucking-"

She kissed me.  My guts jackknifed, and I just sat there and kissed back.  It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do.  Then she jerked back and looked me in the eye.  

"Herb, something's going on, and I want to hear it.  All.  Now.  You owe me that much."

I nodded.  I felt confused and hurt and turned on and generally like I was going to explode.  I nodded again.

"Yeah, yeah, you do."

We sat there, above the cold pizza box, a shot glass lying on the floor, and giant spiders tearing down skyscrapers on the television.  We faced each other in the flickering dark, and I told her what I knew, what I suspected, and what I had decided.  

"Oh," she said.  

"Yeah."

"How long do we have?"

"Eighteen days.  Maybe a bit less."

"And then what?  The world will just vanish?"

"No, it'll just be different.   Like none of this happened.  I'll still be employed, I won't have invited you over for pizza, I won't have kissed you.  Things'll just reset to business as usual."

"But we, I mean, this version of us, will die."  

"Yeah, I mean, I guess.  God, Amy, I don't know."  

She nodded.  

"Okay."

We sat there in silence for a while.   

Then, she said,

"It was you, you know.  Even back in high school, when things - when things got bad, it was always you.  Even my parents didn't believe me, but when it came down with them, you were there.  You've always been there.  But, look at me, damn it, this is enough.  If I'm going to die, it's not going to be alone."

I looked up at her.  Her eyes looked like they were on fire.  I hadn't expected this.  I reached out, and wrapped my arms around her, and we lay down on the couch, and watched the world burn on the television.

At some point we moved to the bed.  We were still drunk, and the world was ending, and it was complicated, and it was somehow still lovely.  After a long, careful, messy, exhausting time, we slept.  It was the best sleep of my life.     


The next morning, I woke up in my bed.  The sheets smelled like dried sweat.  I had a modest hangover, and it sounded like the air conditioner was broken again.  She was gone.  

I groaned, and rubbed my face.  I got up, and walked out of the room, trying to find my pants.  They were piled by the couch, along with a pair of her underwear.     

I reached in to find my phone.  I needed to call her and make sure she was alright.  As I straightened up, I saw her.  She was sitting naked, knees under her chin on a chair in the kitchen, staring out the window at the sunrise, which painted orange and grey stripes on her skin.  She looked beautiful and happy and sad and terribly serious.  

I pulled my pants on, walked over to the kitchen, and knocked on the wall beside the kitchen door.  She turned her head to look at me.

"Hey."

"Hey.  You okay?"

"Yeah.  It's just - complicated, you know.  That's the first time since."

I nodded.  A couple of flies made lazy revolutions on the ceiling.

"You want something to eat?  There's not much that can't be improved by bacon."

"Yeah, thanks, that sounds nice.  Listen, Herb, we should make a list."

"Hmmm?"  

"We've got seventeen days.  We can't afford to waste any of them.  I'll make mine, you make yours, and we'll do them all."  
I frowned.

"That's not a bad idea.  What's the first one on yours?"

I pulled a thing of frozen bacon out of the freezer, found two eggs under a wilting pulp of lettuce in the fridge, and put some butter on the bread ends.  

"I don't know.  I need to think about it.  You mind if I take a shower?  I don't smell so great."

"Sure, go ahead.  Careful though, I think the water cooler melted."

"Thanks.  Whew, a shower wouldn't kill you either, stud."

She half-grinned at me, then walked off for the bathroom.  

I heated up the pan, threw the bacon in, and waited for some grease to build up.  While the bacon sizzled, I ran off to the bedroom and got a T-shirt out of my pocket.  I went back into the kitchen, pulled the bacon, now approaching crispiness out of the pan, and threw it onto a plate.  I then cracked the eggs into the grease, put the bread ends into the toaster over, and turned the burner off.  The eggs crackled and spat in the pan.  The doorbell rang.  I turned the eggs, walked to the door, and opened it.  It was Dan.  

"Dan!  What's up?"

"Oh, Amy called me and told me you got fired.  Thought you might want some company."

He caught sight of the pizza box and shot glass on the table behind me.

"Already drowning your sorrows, huh?"

I shrugged.

"Last night, anyway.  Uh, you want to come in?  I'm making some breakfast."

"Sure."

I stepped back, and he turned the corner into my kitchen, settling down on a chair.   The eggs had started to burn  I flipped them again, pressed the grease out, and flipped them onto the plate with the bacon.  I popped the bread ends out of the toaster oven.  In the background, a door opened.  
Amy stepped out of the bathroom, wearing a towel, digging water out of her ear with a Q-tip.  She caught sight of Dan, and froze, but he'd already seen her.  He raised his eyebrows significantly at me, then turned to her.  

"Hey Amy."

"Hey Dan."  

He looked back at me.

"Hey, look, I have to go anyway, I just wanted to stop by and see how you were doing.  Clearly, pretty good."

He smiled at Amy, gathered himself up, and struck out for the door.  Before he left, he turned around, smiled, started to say something, turned, and left.  The door clicked shut behind him.  Amy had turned an interesting shade of pink.  She looked at me.  

"He's going to gloat over this for months."

"Weeks," I heard myself correct.

She hesitated, and then nodded.

"Yeah.  Weeks."

"He's been bugging you about it too?"

"Oh yeah."  

I shook my head, got out another plate and two forks, divvied up the food, and passed it around.  We ate like that, in the quiet kitchen, listening to the dull whirs of cars passing.   When she pried the last strip of bacon off her fork and popped it into her mouth, she suddenly spoke.   

"I've got the first item on my list."

I paused chewing, swallowed.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah.  I want to burn a house down,"

I raised an eyebrow.  She colored.  

"Not an inhabited house.  One of the abandoned ones at the end of second.  I mean, if it doesn't matter..."

I shook my head.  

"No, no, that's good.  Write it down.   I assume we want to do the usual stuff, skydiving and all that."

"Yeah.  I've always wanted to go to vegas, too, and bet everything on one hand of blackjack.  We should do that last, though, or else we won't be able to pay for this other stuff." She paused.  "I always wanted to try heroin, too."  

I nodded.

"Hold that thought."  

I walked across the living room and down the hall to the study, grabbed a notepad and pencil, and came back.

We sat like that for the better part of an hour, just chatting.  In the end, we had seventeen items.  We'd had to leave some off, but that was okay.  She ran off to grab something.  I called the nearest skydiving place. 

I noticed her returning, and cupped my hand over the end of the phone.

"They can't get us in until Monday."  

She held up a gas can and a bag of marshmallows.

"Monday is fine," I said.  



We were in front of the house an hour later.  There was nothing out here, not a house for a mile in any direction.  We'd be good for a while.  The house was black with age and rain, and tilted north at a jaunty angle.  

"Right, you fill up the water guns, I'll go check for squatters."

She bent down and got to work.  

I got to the door.  It was locked.  I tried to kick it in.  My foot jammed against it, hard.

"Fuck!"  

"Try the window, grace."

I found a window that wasn't boarded up, broke the glass out with a stick, and climbed inside.  The inside looked like a surrealist nightmare due to the slant of the wall.  I checked the ground floor, and started up the stairs, which groaned ominously.  I shook my head.  If I got crushed by a house, I was going to be pissed.  

I checked the top floor.  There was still a bed in one of the bedrooms, though it had folded in on itself, and the mattress was a total disaster.  Some of the walls had caved in, and the plumbing was sticking out.  

Not trusting the stairs, I walked to the low end of the house, pried some boards loose, climbed out a window, skidded down the porch, and fell/jumped to the ground gracelessly.  I walked over to where Amy was standing.  She had finished filling up the water guns with gasoline, and she'd tied a rag around the nozzle of each one.  She passed one to me, lit both rags with a bic lighter, and took a step back.  After a long, contemplative second, she squeezed the trigger.  After a second, I joined in.  Ropes of burning gasoline splattered on the roof tiles.  

"Wow, you know, I never would have expected wood to catch so fast.  This is fun."

"Girl, you're a genius.  Careful, I'm going to get the back side."  

I circled the house, pumping as I went.  I took care to get the structural walls.  By our second revolution, my rag had burned away.  I walked back and sat down on the hood of her car, and watched.  After a few minutes, the leaning wall buckled, and the whole frame crashed to the ground with a tremendous rush of air.  We just lay there on the hood of the car, watching it burn.  We made out a bit, but the moment didn't seem to be right.  When it had burned down to coals, she broke out the marshmallows, we roasted them until we heard sirens in the distance.  We then loaded the gear into the car and drove off.   She drove around the country for a bit, then we headed back into town.  She slept at my place again that night.  


Snapshots:

Amy's face in the dark.

The landscape rolling away beneath a layer of clouds and rushing wind.  

A syringe full of amber liquid squirting into the air.  

A calendar, marred with red X's, counting down

A television broadcast, Emily Kim shot holding up a bank.  

A firing range, a few bullets on the target.

A slip n slide covered in a foot of lime jello.  Amy skidding naked down it on her belly.  

A slowly turning roulette wheel.  



We sat there, watching it turn.  It revolved slowly, slower, still slower.  The ball rolled and rolled and settled - red.  We lost.  I burst out laughing, and we walked away.  

"That was the rest of my tuition, you know."  

She scratched the healing track marks up her arm.

"If the world wasn't ending, we'd be so fucked."  

We walked to the parking lot, and got into her car in silence.  As we drove, I turned and asked her,

"If you could stop it, would you?"

"Yeah.  Yeah, I guess I would.  Whatever else has happened, I don't want to lose... this."  

She squeezed my hand.  I nodded.  

"Yeah, me too."



We lay in bed that night.  There were no more days left on the calendar.  Neither one of us mentioned it, but we curled together close.  After she went to sleep.  I slipped out of bed, pulled some clothes on, pulled the car keys out of the pocket of her pants, and walked into the kitchen.  I looked up the recipe on the internet, collected the materials around the house, and sat there in the dark kitchen.  It took a few hours, but I got it done.  

As I stood there, cleaning up the mess, Amy came out of the bedroom, and wrapped her arms around my chest from behind.  

"Honey?  What're you doing?"

"Go back to bed.  I'll let you know if it works."

She stepped around me, scanned the table, looked me in the eye, and then nodded, slowly.  She walked back the bedroom.

"Good luck."

"Thanks."  

I took the putty and an egg timer I'd pulled some wires out of, and set them in the back seat of my car.  I grabbed a hatchet I'd used to knock out some rotten wood a few months back, and a handgun I'd bought on the internet two days before.  Then I got into her car and drove.

When I got to the door,  I used the hatchet to break out the plexiglass.   It took longer than I'd planned, but I was able to hack a large enough piece out for me to squeeze through.  I walked into the lobby, and down to the Royal Blue lab.  When I got there, the door was open.  Patterson was waiting for me inside.  

I looked around.  The floor was covered with fast food wrappers and empty bottles.  There was a bucket in the corner with flies circling around it.  He'd cut through the plexiglass in a couple of places, and there were scars on the metal of the blast doors that looked like welding marks.  

I waved the gun at him halfheartedly.  He nodded at the block of explosive in my other hand.  

"It won't work.  The door's way too thick."

I didn't even look at him.  I set up the charge against the blast door, though one of the holes in the plastic.  I popped a bullet out of the nine, and pushed it into the putty.  I pushed two wired from the egg timer onto either side of it.

"James died two weeks ago,"

I hesitated, then set the timer for five minutes.  I left the room.  After a moment's hesitation, Patterson followed me.  I sealed the door, which had to be cranked locked, like a bank vault.   

I began to walk down the long hallway, passing the door of my former office. I stood at the end, after I felt I'd reached a sufficient distance.  Patterson stood behind me.  After an excruciating wait, ticking off the minutes, there was an impossibly loud thump, followed a split second later by a bulldozer of hot air slamming into my torso.  I stumbled, but didn't fall.  After a minute to recover, I walked down the hallway.  The door had been torn of its hinges, and was lying  in a twisted lump of metal.  I stepped around it, and walked into the room.  Everything in the room had been flattened.  I got a whiff of scorched shit.  The glass had been evaporated into a fine sand, and the plexiglass was simply gone.  A few burning shreds of paper drifted around.  A smear of molten plastic and metal and silicon showed where the terminal had been.  Well, at least the internet had been vindicated - you really cold make nitroglycerin.  Thank god Dan was a chemistry major.       

I looked at the blast door.  The metal was cracked and red, and there was a depression in it.  Not a very big depression.  I started to sink against a wall, but the surface was hot and slightly molten, so I jerked away.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck..."

Patterson walked in, examined the damage.  He put a hand on my shoulder.  

"Well, at least you tried."  

I shook him off, and started to walk out the door.   

"Wait."

I stopped.  

"The blue box is vulnerable to solar flares.  Any kind of strong EM radiation messes with it.  We have a closed radio lab that we used to experiment on it with.  If all the equipment still works, and it should, I may be able to use the bursts of static to send a short Morse code message."

I turned to look at him.

"I was going to use it to send a message to myself, but I couldn't think of anything to say."

I turned, and looked him in the eye.  There's wasn't even a hint of guile there.  

I reached into my pocket, and produced a list and a pencil.  I turned it over.  

"How long?"

"Um. Eleven characters, maybe?"  

I looked down at the sheet of paper.  Eleven letters.  Eleven letters.  After a moment's thought, I wrote,  

"SHELOVESYOU"

It wasn't a thousandth of what I wanted to say, but maybe it was enough.  He picked it up, looked at it, and nodded.  

"I'll take care of it."

I looked at him.

"Really?"

He stared at me through muddy blue eyes, looking terribly tired and terribly old and terribly sad and so terribly honest. 

"Yeah.  I have nothing else to do."  

The drive home was longer than the drive there.  By the time I got there, the sun was already rising.  My watch counted down the time.  There wasn't much left.  I went into my house, pulling clothes off.  I walked into my bedroom.  The wall painted dull salmon by the window.  She rolled over and looked at me.

"Did it work?"

"No, but it's okay.  I sent a message back.  We have this."

I smiled at her, and I suddenly realized that I was so very tired, and there was nowhere I would rather be than lying with her.  I crawled into bed and wrapped myself around her.  


"I love you," she said.  

"I love you too," I said.  

"This is forever," she said.

The alarm on my watch ra






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The light on the panel turned green.  After a moment, lines of text began to appear on the screen.  I ignored them.  Patterson drank his coffee.  Henley walked up to the terminal, waving me off.  I started to walk back to my lab.  I tripped over my shoelace, and bent to tie it.  As I did so, I heard Henley speak to Patterson.

"Goddamn it, the interference is still there.  That's two days, now.  Did it corrupt anything critical this time?"

"No, not this time.  Just some metadata.  That pi deal was a clusterfuck, though, make no mistake.  We're just lucky it'll be three hundred years before anyone can prove that it's wrong."  

Henley snorted.  

"I don't understand it Patterson, I really don't.  I mean, we've eliminated sabotage, tidal effects, electronic malfunction.  I just wish we knew how the thing actually worked.  Then we might have a chance at pinning this thing down.  Well, clear the metadata.  We'll be lynched if anyone finds out about this."

There was a clatter of keystrokes.  

"Done.  It's gone."     


I raised an eyebrow, and then set off at a rapid walk.  It wasn't any of my business.  I turned the corner of my office, sat down at my computer, nodded perfunctorily at Kim and began to get to work.  Maybe I'd invite Dan and Emma and Amy over tonight, though not too late.  I put the thought out of my head, and turned back to my computer.  Back to business as usual.    
          

undefined
Author's Note:


Yes, this is very late, and I apologize.  In my defense, this was originally intended to be done on Wednesday at 5000 words.  I got to five thousand words on Wednesday, alright, but it wasn't done.  

It finally is done, on Friday, at eleven thousand words.  It's a bit long, but I hope you enjoy it regardless. 

Yours,
A.