“Let’s talk about this Kasper. Don’t know what the hell’s happening but I think we’re the only ones left to fix it,” I say between sharp breaths. “Let’s you and me just figure this out.” He raises the gun, points it at my chest, and reaches with his other hand for the slide lock. Then his brow furrows. The slide is stuck? Without thought and the time that that would waste, I launch myself at him and he topples backwards, the battered bookshelf collapsing under our weight. I grope for the fallen lamp and grab it by its arm, then swing its base into his face. He’s pushing back on my chest, looking around himself for the pistol. I bring down the lamp base on his face again. And again. He has stopped struggling, a steady stream of red gushing from the bridge of his nose. And again. I’m panting but I seem to be as steady as a rock. No shakes. No panic. When you’re about to be finished-off, it seems a sharp sense of pragmatism descends on you. Have I killed him? No, he’s breathing, but he’s out cold. I get to my feet and see that the gun is right by his chest, too close for him to have seen. I take deep breaths, exhaling slowly through pursed lips. That needs to go with me. I pick up the gun.
I back away from Asmus’s body, extend the handle of the roll-on bag, unzip a compartment and slip the pistol into it. The bloodied Kasper Asmus is motionless. “Block mathematical notation,” I whisper. “Asshole.”
SEVEN
I’m sitting just by the bar, or where I think the Thai restaurant bar would have been if it hadn’t been replaced by a park. The warm Risley sun gifts me a moment of serenity, painting a vanilla glow on my closed eyelids. The roll-on case is by my knees and I sit on the park bench feeling like I’m waiting for my flight to be called. And this will be an epic flight.
I try to reconstruct the last hour. A middle-aged Kasper Asmus tries to kill me in my house–a version of my house, anyway. If there was ever any doubt we’re dealing with temporal acceleration then the middle-aged Kasper Asmus removed it. Right? Of course. But where does a middle-aged Kasper Asmus come from? He could have accelerated back from a time twenty or thirty years out where he is middle-aged. Or maybe he accelerated backwards from here and just aged his way back to 2021. Or maybe one of another hundred variations. And this all begs the question of why he wanted to shoot me. Sure, we never got on, but ...
A white ball with red spots rolls up to my feet and small girl looks up for permission to take it back. Her mother smiles at me apologetically having mistaken rumination for irritation. I smile and hand the ball back. Now, my house. I’d say that what that house was, was a house with no sign of Bess. None of her clothes or other stuff was there, and the decor was what had made her weep when she first saw it. It looked to me like the house it would have been if untouched by Bess. Okay, so that’s the beginnings of an explanation. But why? How? I’m rapidly discovering that thinking is not the help I thought it’d be.
I get to my feet. My plan is a dizzying violation of all that TMA stands for. My plan is to change history. It’s to commit the evil of going back, but to do it to undo a bigger evil. That’s my rationale. It’s a rationale that temporal logicians–TLs–have long rejected. They say, benevolent tinkering can only make things worse in unpredictable ways. Good intentions are no defense. Don’t do it. And furthermore, DON’T DO IT. One second per second is the only tick rate that’s acceptable. Period. But in reality, TLs are philosophers of the most clueless kind. Anyone who’s seen Back To The Future more than once has as much understanding of temporal logic as any TL. I’m going back, and if in future, or past, I need to face the music, then so be it.
The privacy I need is a short walk down to the Columbia riverbank. I arrive at a clearing in the middle of a thicket of wild olives trees, unzip the main compartment of my roll-on bag and take out the ribbed metal case about a foot squared and half as high. I lay it on the ground, flip open the latches and remove its content: a temporal accelerator. It looks like a chunky, old hand-held programmable controller resting on an oval container attached along one side to three metals bulbs. It looks like this because that’s exactly what it is. Not going for the elegance a Steve Jobs might have insisted upon, TMA made a few of these years ago with the idea that human temporal acceleration might be a last resort fix for some big problem caused by dumbass nature. The least of all evils argument still held sway back then, before the TLs weighed-in. When TMA saw the error of its ways it ordered the accelerators destroyed. Problem was, they hadn’t thought ahead to carefully count how many of them had been assembled, and this one, via a lineage of TMA staff, had made its way to me and to my bedroom safe.
Each bulb contains one of the three offending chemicals that, when combined in the correct proportions, and in the right order and at the specified addition rates, conspire to mock the very laws of physics. 6-phenyl-5H-pyrrolo[4,5-a]pyrazine-5,7(6H)-dione is one of them. I committed this to memory just
