Temporally Out of Order Read online

  “What’s our status?” I asked the Captain quietly. The danger in talking was that I had no idea how the person I was “riding” actually spoke. I decided to channel Hollywood and just sound brisk and somewhat pompous. It seemed to work.

  “They’re waiting on you, sir,” he replied in kind. “Your points yesterday were well made.” As he turned towards me I finally saw his nameplate—Katt. Katt didn’t look like he approved of my points, whatever the hell they’d been.

  “I’ve spent some time … considering options.” I thought about his name. I knew a high ranking Marine very well. He was Kitty’s uncle. And he’d have been about this age when the A-Cs arrived. “What are your thoughts … Mort?”

  Katt looked shocked at the familiarity, but not at the name. Always nice to be right. “I’m sure your thoughts are far more valid than mine, sir.”

  “Speak freely, man. It’s why I asked.”

  He nodded. “Well then, sir, I think that your concerns about the general population’s reactions are well founded and correct. But, at the same time, these people came to our country as refugees, just as most of our ancestors did. They can help us in so many ways, and we can, in turn, help them.”

  “You don’t think they should phone home, do you?”

  “Ah, no sir. They can’t. They’re exiled remember?”

  Damn. That phrase wouldn’t be around for an easy twenty years. I had to be more careful or I’d screw up the timeline even worse than it might already be. “Sorry, a little joke that wasn’t funny. So, what about my suggestions from yesterday do you disagree with the most?” Katt looked worried. “Again, speak freely, man. You’ll never get anywhere pussyfooting around.” This was an exact quote that Mortimer Katt had said to me, more than once, when I was growing up.

  But it appeared to be the first time he’d heard it. He grinned. “Yes, sir. Well then, I think sending these aliens ‘home’ isn’t the answer. If they leave the solar system, who knows what will happen to them, or us, frankly? And we don’t want them going to our enemies. Russia would welcome them in a heartbeat, especially if they knew we’d refused to house them.”

  So whoever I was, I’d argued to kick the A-Cs to the curb. Other than feeling like a time traveling Forrest Gump, I didn’t have enough data to be able to guess who I “was” and no time to do the research.

  Based on the last two stops on my time travel tour, my guess was that I was body jumping into someone who’d negatively affected the timeline, meaning that the giant telescope didn’t exist and we were headed to the End of All Things. Meaning I had to once again fix things in a way that wouldn’t come undone tomorrow. Or whenever this time’s tomorrow was.

  It’d been easier at the first two stops. But here, I was surrounded by people, and whoever’s body I was borrowing was going to have to live with the consequences of whatever I did. Then again, I knew that what had to happen had happened before.

  Whoever the hell I was, everyone in the room was looking at me. Meaning they were waiting for my response to the situation.

  “Gentlemen, I’ve had some time to ponder.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It’s hard to admit that I might’ve been wrong … but I believe I was. These people represent a bold new age for all of us. I still believe the general population should remain unaware of their presence. But they look like us, and as long as the highest security clearances are obtained, they should be able to blend in with us well enough. In bases we keep hidden and secure, of course.”

  “Are you suggesting that we be prisoners?” Richard asked in a pleasant tone.

  “Far from it. I’m suggesting that we protect you and you protect us. A win-win, so to speak.”

  Richard nodded. “We would appreciate a mutually beneficial relationship. We would also appreciate not being put onto a reservation, so to speak.”

  “You’ll need to become citizens, but still hold your autonomy. You’re royalty, are you not?” I asked Alfred.

  The three A-Cs looked surprised. So they hadn’t played that card yet. “Ah, yes, yes I am,” Alfred admitted. “And so is my cousin.” He put his hand on Stanley’s shoulder.

  The reactions in the room were what I’d expected them to be. Instantaneous interest. Americans might’ve fought for independence from a crown, but we loved royalty in all its forms.

  Richard noted the change in the atmosphere and jumped on it. “I’m so sorry that we didn’t explain that. Prince Alfred is, understandably, trying to keep a low profile.”

  Kitty always said that Richard was the best diplomat the A-Cs had. As he smoothly turned the conversation towards the royal situation and also pointed out that the A-Cs had vast scientific and technical knowledge Earthlings didn’t, I felt the atmosphere shift towards friendly positivity. Good.

  “When will the President meet them?” I asked Katt softly.

  “Now that you’ve approved, sir? Probably tomorrow.” Katt cleared his throat. “Do you plan to stay to oversee their acclimation?”

  “No. Please arrange for me to leave this evening, if it’s possible. However, I’d like you to take charge. Be sure they’re treated right, no funny business.”

  Katt stared at me. “Me, sir?”

  “Yes, you. I’m confident you’ll do a good job with it.” There were advantages to this time hopping thing. I knew Katt would do a good job because he’d already done it. “Besides, you’re close to their ages. You’ll have that in common.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Make sure the proper orders are filed and all that.” I had no idea if this was a good enough order or if, tomorrow or in a few minutes, the real person I was pretending to be would be asking what the hell Katt thought he was doing.

  Katt nodded, and was called away by someone else of high rank. I chose this time to turn and leave. No one tried to stop me.

  Back to the bathroom. I was about to look in the mirror—to see who I “was” before I went back into the stall to wait to be pulled back, but I never got the chance. The time loop snatched me away the moment the outer door closed.

  oOo

  I’d expected to go back to the mountaintop now for sure, but that’s not where I ended up. I was backstage in a crowded theater and Aerosmith was playing. I was again glad Kitty wasn’t here—she’d have rushed the stage and found a way to tackle Steven Tyler, timeline be damned.

  Only it wasn’t the band as I knew it. There were two guys there who weren’t the ones on most of Kitty’s albums. Meaning this was the early 80’s and the band had lost two key members.

  I looked around and, sure enough, 80’s fashions filled the audience. Big hair, girls in ties, guys in open shirts with metallic kerchiefs around their necks. I managed not to wince—every era had clothes that looked cool then and didn’t look so hot a few years later.

  There was a girl next to me, bopping along to the music. Pretty and kind of funky. She reminded me a little bit of Kitty.

  “Hey, you ready to see if he’s here?” she asked me, as the song ended.

  “Who?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Come on. ‘Becky, I need to talk to Joe Perry. You’re tight with all those guys. Can you make it happen?’ As if you don’t remember that conversation that we had two hours ago?”

  “Oh, right. Yes, I’d still like to meet him.”

  “Then come on, he just got here.”

  Sure enough, as Becky led me near the back, there was Joe Perry. He looked uncomfortable. Not a surprise. “You going to introduce us?” I asked her.

  “Nope.” She grinned. “I want to see you sweat.”

  “Thanks for that.” Oh well, no time like the present. I went over to him. I considered what I could say, then figured I’d just cut to the chase. “Going to get the band back together?”

  He shook his head. “No, man, I don’t think so. We had a good run. Not sure we can handle being back together.” He shrugged. “You know how it goes.”

  I didn’t but, more importantly, I knew how Kitty went. Witho
ut this band creating Permanent Vacation, Kitty wouldn’t hear “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” and without that song, she wouldn’t dig through all of Aerosmith’s backlist. Without the backlist, Kitty wouldn’t have the proof she needed that there were cool guys out there who supported women. And without that spark, without her firm belief that the guys in Aerosmith were, despite any and all rock star activities, feminists, Kitty wouldn’t have the same confidence to be a feminist when it definitely wasn’t cool anymore. Meaning she wouldn’t be, well … Kitty.

  “It’s like family,” I said to Perry. “You fight, and sometimes you hate each other, and maybe you go years without speaking, but when it matters, you pull together. And it matters.”

  He laughed. “If you say so, but, man, our family’s messed up. And I don’t know that we matter all that much, I mean, as a group.”

  “All families are messed up. Look, I know that, if you guys get back together, you’re going to be one of the biggest rock bands in the world again. But it takes you and the rest, together. No substitutes. Only the five of you do it right, you and Tyler in particular.”

  Perry looked at the stage thoughtfully. “Maybe.” He shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”

  We listened to the rest of the show. Becky even made me dance with her for a few songs. The show was good, but it wasn’t the Aerosmith I knew and I said as much to Perry. “You guys are right together. Not perfect, but right.”

  He grinned. “Fine, fine, we’ll talk about it.”

  A thought occurred to me. Perry was the only one who didn’t seem to think he’d seen me before. “Did we, ah, speak earlier?”

  “No.” He laughed. “Well, that’s wrong. You were hanging around, but I was playing and I didn’t hear a word you said.”

  “Good. It was what I was saying tonight, anyway.”

  The show ended, and, as the band came offstage, Perry went to Tyler and they started talking. I heaved a sigh of relief and waited. But the tug didn’t come.

  The idea of being left here in this time period wasn’t really appealing. I was already born, so there was no risk of my becoming my own grandfather or something, but still, if I was going to be stuck somewhere, hanging out with the rock stars wasn’t really my place or my thing. Kitty would’ve killed for the opportunity, but I’d rather have stuck with Einstein or Ritchey.

  Becky hugged me, but then she went off with the band, and I wasn’t invited along. I left the theater and stood on the street. Maybe I’d died, decades from now, back on the alien planet. Maybe my mind was gone and this was the world I was living in now in some way. Who knew what, if anything, the brain-dead saw? There were worse options, especially since I could see, hear, touch, and smell. I could probably taste, too, but there wasn’t anything around to eat or drink.

  I hoped I’d fixed the timeline. Maybe I hadn’t. Maybe I had another destination and the time stream was waiting to see where to send me next. Maybe this was all some sort of bizarre dream. But my luck didn’t run that way.

  With time to think, I sat on the curb and, as cars and people passed me by, did just that. If I’d fixed the time stream, then the world, and the galaxy, wouldn’t end in a horrific implosion. But that meant that things would be as they were, meaning Naomi would still be dead.

  She would’ve loved this trip I’d taken. It would’ve been something special that would’ve been ours and ours alone. But there was no more “ours.” When it came down to it, the moment I saw what would happen, how many would die if Naomi didn’t make the sacrifice she had, I couldn’t ask for the time with her again. It was too selfish, too wrong. She’d given up everything to keep our world—our entire universe—safe. I couldn’t be less than her and allow it to be ruined, just so I could have one more day of happiness.

  I felt something around me, something warm and loving. It felt like a hug. It didn’t last long but at the same time, I could somehow still feel it, even when I knew whatever it was had stopped.

  But before I could try to figure this out, the pull I’d given up expecting hit me.

  oOo

  I was back. We were on the mountaintop again, but I didn’t feel the pull of the mind expander now. I wasn’t sure if this meant I’d been saved in reality or not, though.

  However, trapped or not, brain-dead or not, I could tell when we were, and, once again, we were thousands of years in the past.

  “Hey, everyone, where’s Boz and Turkey? King Benny? Fancy?” Kitty was asking about aliens we’d already met. Only, technically, we hadn’t met them yet and wouldn’t meet them for thousands of years.

  Polite looks of incomprehension or fear were her reply. Kitty forged on. “Look, I realize you don’t seem to know us, but we’re the Gods. Your Gods.”

  This was a lie, only not really. I could see what was happening. Kitty was creating a tradition that would shape this world for thousands of years. Because of the time loop.

  I opened my mouth to shush her, but pain hit so hard and fast that I slammed my mouth shut. The pain stopped. I decided to be smart and not try to interrupt, while Kitty shared all our God names that we’d been told about thousands of years from now.

  Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it all mattered. Maybe I’d never know.

  oOo

  We were back. On Earth. Where we belonged. Back when we belonged. I could feel it. And as we returned, time straightened itself out in my head. I still remembered everything, including how we’d been transferred back via a technique not unlike the beaming technology in Star Trek.

  If I tried, I could see time as the mutable thing it was. Later I’d sort through it all. At my leisure, when the fate of the universe wasn’t at stake. But as for now, we were all back, where we belonged, us and history, too, and things were right. Not perfect, but right.

  The others had felt something wrong, the other humans in particular, and they were asking about it. But I knew they needed to forget the déjà vu and move on. To live in time the way regular sentient beings did best—one moment after the other, in a linear progression from birth to death.

  “It’s just a side effect of the transfer,” I said reassuringly. “Nothing dangerous or long-lasting. We’re home, we’re all alive and most of us are reasonably well. Nothing to worry about.”

  I’m the smart one, so they all listened.

  CELL SERVICE

  by Chris Barili

  Harry Chambers stood back from the shelf in the musty mechanical room, crossed his arms, and thought about which box to go through first. There were about twenty, from shoebox size all the way up to the size of small televisions, and his instructions were clear: get rid of anything that didn’t work or wouldn’t sell.

  In the next room, television news blared, a female anchor speaking in a tone straight from a disaster movie.

  “One of the largest coronal mass ejections since the 1859 Carrington Event took place this morning, and has wreaked havoc across the northern half of the United States. Boston reports large-scale cellular outages, LaGuardia reports numerous air traffic control issues, and several small-scale power outages have struck the Northeast.”

  “Great,” Harry muttered. “Why couldn’t this have happened the day Celeste called her divorce lawyer?”

  His eyes settled on a shoebox on the third shelf, right at eye level. He slid the box off the shelf and flipped the lid off. Inside were five old cell phones, phones they’d held onto for backups. The two oldest were as big as chalkboard erasers, with flimsy antennas that slid from their sheaths, one marked with a silver “H” to show it had been his. Next came a flip phone with a small LCD screen, followed by a slider phone with a slightly larger screen. Finally, an early generation smart phone rolled around in the box.

  “One box of trash,” Harry said. He put the top back on and dropped the box in the garbage.

  He reached for a second box, but before his hand touched the dusty cardboard, a cell phone rang. It was an old-style ring, a pattern of electronic bleeps repeated three times before pausing and repeating. H
arry pulled out his smart phone, but its screen stared back blank and gray. Stuffing it back in his pocket, he grabbed the shoebox out of the trash. Sure enough, the one marked with an “H” was ringing.

  Something clenched in Harry’s gut. That phone had been inactive almost a decade. How was it ringing? The battery should have been long-dead.

  He thought about just removing the battery and throwing the phone away. This was insane, impossible. It should have been no more than a paper weight.

  And yet it rang again.

  Maybe he was losing his mind, but the ringing sounded urgent, as if pleading with him to answer. He had the feeling in the bottom of his stomach that not answering would be the biggest mistake he’d ever make.

  Against all logic, he picked up the phone, raised its antenna, and pushed the talk button.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, baby!” Celeste’s voice sounded chipper, happier than she’d sounded in months. “What you doing right now?”

  “Um, just cleaning out the mechanical room. How—”

  “Why are you doing that? You should be out getting a bottle of wine, maybe some champagne.”

  “Champagne?” Harry tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice, but didn’t quite succeed. “Why are we celebrating?”

  “Don’t you remember? Today’s the anniversary of the day we met. I thought we’d share a glass and reminisce.”

  Harry checked the date on his smart phone. Sure enough, she was right. Alarms rang in his mind, his logical brain screaming this was wrong somehow, but Celeste’s voice comforted him. She sounded like the old her, the girl he’d fallen in love with, so he decided to take a chance.