“Well at least you’re up in the mornings,” she replied.
I snorted. “Yeah, to live another day and fight to stay alive.”
She looked at me, letting me consider what I’d just said. “See what I mean?”
I sighed. I was frustrated, but not as scared anymore. Perversely, in a way maybe she was right. I was certainly savoring the little moments of time that I could get to myself now.
“Whatever. Anyway, it’s getting better, right?” I asked hopefully.
“We’re managing it the best we can.”
“The best that you can, huh?” I replied dejectedly, looking up at my task list for the day as it appeared in one of my display spaces. Something popped out immediately. “So I need to short the upcoming Cognix stock?”
“Nobody will know it’s you. Look, I’m setting up defensive perimeters,” explained Hotstuff, “and we’ll drop some intelligent agents into them to look for any cross-phuture scripting. We’ll figure this out, boss, don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry?” Was she serious?
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but…”
“But what?”
“I think we’re starting to see a pattern, hidden deep in the probability matrices that connect together whatever is chasing you. A pattern in the future, but that points somewhere far in the past.”
Finally. Perhaps some progress.
“Can you explain a little more?”
“It would be easier to show you…”
8
DAPPLED SUNLIGHT STREAMED down through the jungle canopy high above, illuminating the hard packed earth below; it was casting a patchwork of light and dark that stitched together scenes of smoke rising from cooking fires, laughing children darting between thatched huts, and women sitting and gossiping together as they stripped the white skins off sweet potatoes, carefully wrapping each one in banana leaves and depositing them into a stone-lined pit.
The men were all off hunting today, chasing pigs that had escaped from neighboring villages in the thunderstorms of the night before. Monkeys barked through the underbrush, their catcalls joining the symphonies of songbirds whose feathers lit up the steaming forest like splashes of flickering paint against a knotted green canvas.
Picking up a smooth stone sitting on the earth, I casually ducked my head as a poison dart snipped past, barely missing me. One of the children cried out to my right. A mother picked the child up by his arm and spanked him. He’d been playing with his father’s blow gun, not knowing what he was doing, probably imitating his dad. Even inhabiting someone else, whatever was hunting me down was trying to kill this body as well.
The mother looked towards me and shrugged, apologizing. I smiled back, returning my attention to the witch doctor. Dodging death was nothing I got excited about anymore.
“In da roond,” explained the tribal elder, speaking in a kind of English-creole-pidgin that was the lingua franca of the Papua New Guinea highlands.
The two most linguistically diverse places left on Earth were also the most culturally and technologically polarized: this place, still barely out of the Stone Age, and New York City, the bustling megalopolis tipping the world into the 22 century. Each retained over a thousand languages, but where almost all in New York were machine translatable, and thus part of the new global lingua franca, almost none of the New Guinea languages were. I was struggling to understand what this elder was equally struggling to explain to me.
“Round, like, like in a circle?” I stuttered back in my best attempt at native Yupno. Speaking through this body was difficult.
A giant tree frog watched me lazily from its perch in the branches nearby. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a frog in the wild. Of course, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in the wild.
To get to this remote and rugged place, we’d had a portable communication base station dropped in, and then we convinced a nun running a nearby mission to come and persuade them to have one of the villagers drink a glass of water laden with smarticles, allowing my subjective to enter and control their body through the communication link.
It was the only way I could speak with this particular elder, the Yupna witch doctor and keeper of holy secrets. The smarticles hadn’t fully suffused into this body, so I felt numb and disconnected, and they would be soon flushed out, so I had to hurry.
The witch doctor shrugged and smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His eyes sparkled at me. I smiled back, my pssi filtering his body language into a form that made sense to me. My gaze shifted to a break in the jungle that revealed the glacier capped mountain ranges beyond, stretching upwards into the bright sky. He was trying to explain his perception of the shape of time, or rather, its lack of shape.
“Here and now”, “Back in the 20’s”, “Going forward”…the modern world was fixated on spatial metaphors for time, the idea of the past being behind us and the future ahead. Not the Yupno, though. In this remote valley it had forgotten, time had no linear form to its inhabitants. To them, it flowed uphill, backwards, in forms and in shapes. They laughed at our conception of its forward flow. This Stone Age culture experienced directly something Einstein had only glimpsed at through his equations.
The pattern Hotstuff had detected had led us here, and she was sitting on a log across the cooking fire from the elder and I, fetchingly dressed in tight safari shorts with her hair done up in a long single braid that she was playing with, nibbling on, and twirling between her fingers.
“He means time runs forwards and backwards, but not like a stream—more like currents in a lake,” she suggested. “No, like a reservoir, that’s more what he means.”
“Like a reservoir?” I asked the elder.
He nodded. With long arms, he reached up and circled his hands around slowly, finally coming to rest, ending at me. The Yupno had a way of pointing towards doorways when speaking about time, a curiosity I was just beginning to understand.
Inhabiting the body of this tribal member, I was trying to see if time felt any different for me. It didn’t, but something here felt odd.
Amazingly, the elders here hadn’t batted an eye at the idea of one of their own being magically inhabited by an alien spirit, nor the idea that I was conversing with an invisible ghost Hotstuff, in their midst. It seemed perfectly natural to them.
The witch doctor pointed to where Hotstuff was sitting.
“The spirit name?” he asked.
Hotstuff raised her eyebrows.
“Hotstuff,” I replied, shrugging to her.
“HOT stuff,” he repeated, “hot STUFF?”
I nodded, and he smiled ever wider.
“And your name?” I hadn’t thought to ask before.
He pointed at his own chest.
“Nicky,” he said proudly, and then added, “Nicky Nixons.”
I laughed and shook my head—Nicky Nixons the witch doctor.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Nicky Nixons. My name,” I said, pointing to myself, “is Vince Indigo.”
“Yes, in dee go…” he replied, nodding sagely, as if he’d always known, as if my name held a meaning he knew and I didn’t.
“Vince, this is all very touching,” interjected Hotstuff, “but we have to get going. We’re out of time here.”
She splintered some upcoming death events into my display spaces, one of them a bio-electronic Ebola- based retrovirus that ended with my internal organs almost instantaneously liquefying while I was brushing my teeth tomorrow morning. She immediately firewalled off the data tunnel from the jungle we were sitting in, just in
