Out of Time - Ryan Matthew Harker (short books to read TXT) 📗

I’m wearing my charcoal trench and matching fedora (not so new now), I smell like booze and cigarettes and except for the sidewalk all I see through my booze goggles are my boots.

Vaguely registering another’s presence I look up just in time to collide with a young man about my height. “Why’n’t ya (radio edit) wasch where ya’re (radio edit) goan, (radio edit)!” I swear at him loudly and stumble on my way.

At least I stumble a couple steps but something about the experience seems awfully familiar, causing me to stop. Sluggishly, like frozen licorice, my unresponsive limbs turn my body so I can peer through bleary, bloodshot orbs back at the other man. Unable to force my double vision to become one I shut an eye and become a human monocular. I have a clear view of my retreating back making a beeline towards a restaurant I know I’ve eaten at on one other occasion with… yep, there she is, Staci Chase.

“Davey, Davey Jones! Is that you?” she calls and I beat an immediate and hasty retreat.

In a way this strange coincidence helps galvanize me back into action. The lightless depths of despair reignite with the blazing fires of industrious activity. I’m not giving up, I WILL build a new SEAID, track down Adoc Raheem, and rescue TRU from his diabolical clutches!

I’m coming TRU.

 

I wake up the next day and spend it drying out. I eat thin crust pepperoni and black olive pizza while drinking sports water and sitting on my note paper strewn couch soaking in scripted dialogue as cheesy as the pizza is. After my prolonged binge my hands are way too shaky to solder any circuits. Precision is the key to their design and steadiness of hand is the key to precision. After a relaxing day of food and television I hit the hay at a decent hour. I enjoy a night tossing and turning to a plethora of wildly vivid dreams, perplexing of vision.

In one of my dreams it’s night and I’m in a giant rubber raft navigating the whitewater rapids of the timestream. The raft is way too big for me to maneuver comfortably by myself though and every time I begin to think I’m getting it under control a rogue current sweeps in and upsets it again. And for some reason the raft is TRU. She keeps talking to me, pleading like only a lover or close friend could, telling me how Adoc is abusing her power and begging me to save her. I try and my muscles strain, my blood liquid fire coursing through veins dilated to eight lane super highway size as I heave on the paddles.

Lost in a dark blanket of fog I can barely make out the shore, it’s a vague black strip and though I fight against the timestream for all I’m worth it seems to come no closer. “Davey, Davey please save me!” TRU’s cry ear shatteringly cuts across the roar of the timestream like a bow across a violin’s strings. “I’m trying TRU!” I yell back at her. “Hold on we’re gonna make it!”

Suddenly a sharp drop in the current sucks the raft under, dislodging me from my perch and I find myself submerged in the timestream’s cold, torrential waters. Flailing my arms wildly about I regain the water’s surface and spot the raft ahead of me, off to the left. “Daa-veey!” TRU’s shout fades as the raft gains distance on me.”Hold on TRU, I’m coming!” Swimming with more determination than an Olympic gold medalist my desperation builds as the gap between us grows.

My ears still ring with the fear in TRU’s voice when I wake to sunbeams streaming through the blinds, penetrating my skin with their warming protons. I partially open my eyes and watch dust particles perform a slow dance through the sunlight while my sleepy brain ponders the ramifications of my nocturnal wanderings.

Shaking off sleep’s tenacious cobwebs I get up from the couch and use the restroom. After my daily constitutional it’s off to the kitchen to rummage in a pizza box for breakfast. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that a man can’t function properly without breaking his fast in the morning, especially if his business of the day involves technical thinking.

On average, throughout a day, the human brain burns twenty times the amount of fuel as the rest of the body combined. I read this somewhere and firmly believe it to be fact. Usually I can work mindless manual labor for most of the day before I feel the need to eat. But when I’m sitting somewhere doing nothing but using my brain all day, if I don’t get something in my gullet by noon, I really begin to feel the mind crunch. And when the mind gets crunched it doesn’t take long for the body to feel drug down as well. There’s a connection between the two after all, mind and body. Same with the spirit and its nourishment requirements are even greater than the brain’s. If you’re low in spirit it’ll drag down the mind and body together and I sure have been low in spirit lately.

I’m not a hundred percent yet but I still get back to the task at hand.

 

For the next three weeks I labor diligently my levels of focus chemically enhanced for maximum results gained over prolonged periods. I’m close now and not about to slow down until I’m done.

The one thing my learned scientists, well structured engineers, and logic driven mechanics never could figure out was TRU’s seamless exterior. This is what finally balks me. We never did figure out how to open her without damaging her and I finally agreed to the, oh so, careful splitting of her hull. Even this proved harder than anticipated. Lightly clamping TRU into a vice and using a skull saw my hirelings attempted to cut an incision in the seamless black plastic encasing the lifeless SEAID.

I almost expected the powered down AI to awake with cottage cheese screams but as the high speed surgical saw bit into her casing her silence abated my fear. The researchers didn’t stay silent however. As the saw made its incision everyone close enough to see gasped as the incision closed itself behind it. So we placed her in an electric hydraulic vise with separate clamps on either side and my scientists attempted once again to split TRU's casing. The vise pulled, applying slight pressure as they cut. This proved the only way to gain access to TRU's innards.

My engineers concluded her outer shell must be made with some kind of self-replicating nanotechnology, this was never verified though and I'm kicking myself now for not exploring the theory.

So my new TRU has a traditional black plastic cover with a seam around the center of the exterior edge and a clear plastic screen that sits dark on the table before me.

I’m hesitant to use it for the first time. All I can do is stare at it. This new SEAID is an inelegant, squared off box. In comparison with TRU it looks like you could put an eye out with one of the corners. I haven’t even touched it since tightening the last screw and setting it on the table last night.

I don’t have a clue where to begin. I’m at a loss as to where to find Adoc and TRU. Other than her capture I really don't know what motivates him, what his plans were once he had her. It’s obvious since he already had a TRU in his possession that he wanted mine for her unique ability to navigate not only temporal avenues but dimensional pathways. So he wants specifically to be able to travel to alternate realities instead of being randomly dumped in one just by back and forth transportation across the linear timestream. But why? What does he desire? Socrates once said, “Know Thyself.” You’ve got to know your enemies as well and I don’t know Adoc nearly well enough.

I do have one clue though, the vague but dire warnings of another man who I don’t know nearly enough about. It’s a decision I don’t feel entirely to make but I don’t really have another choice and so, I know where I have to go. But terrible indecision keeps gnawing away, digging its needle sharp little teeth deep into my psyche with nagging persistence. Like my mother’s constant griping to wash behind my ears this indecision eats away at my selfish need to rescue TRU. Turning over every detail of that temporally distant conversation I have to ask myself, what if Wolfman’s right? What if that strange man told the truth and I’m responsible for the future extinction of the human race?

I get up from the couch and leave my new SEAID sitting on the coffee table along with my unanswered questions. I need to take a walk, get my mind right before I embark on what may very well end up being the most exciting adventure of my surprisingly unordinary life. Slipping on tattered hemp sandals I head out, locking the door behind me. I know I’m destined to steal TRU from me about five weeks ago, I'm not sure how this is possible exactly, yet, but I’m not about to let anyone stumble in and steal my new SEAID now.

Unwillingly I find my thoughts slipping back to time travel, the affects of such on the multiverse, and the inherent paradoxes unavoidably created in said ‘verses across the board. I travel from one moment to another, either into the past or the future, somehow leaving my universe of origin and entering into a completely different one along with the new time period. My own circumstances seem to proof of this as I’m living my own John Connor scenario. I stole a time machine from myself, where I must have left it in an apartment I rented after having stole it, and then having it stole from me many years later so that I didn’t even have it in my possession at the time of my original theft for me to even steal it from me.

Whew! I take a deep mental breath at the sheer mind numbing impossibility of the situation and wish I’d been at my apartment laboratory during the day in mention instead of pickling my internal organs with mind numbing spirits. Of course if I had been a uniquely different scenario would have arisen, and actually, according to theory, somewhere there’s a universe where I was and one did. I shake my head. A person would have to be truly insane to understand how it all works: time, the multiverse, the paradoxical interrelationship, the strange bond between the three, all of it.

This brings me back to Adoc’s motives. If my mad gunman stalker wants to travel to another reality then it’s safe to assume he’s looking for one with a certain set of circumstances, one where life has taken a particular turn and created specific conditions. What circumstances and what conditions my mind struggles to conceive, mired in an endless quagmire of quantifiably unknown possibility. In all my years of hobby researching physics and the temporal states of reality I would never have guessed actual time travel would be so maddening. Whichever all powerful being designed this Gordian knot of insanity ought to be drawn, quartered, and left as an example to other gods as to what not to do!

Eventually my walk leads me back to my apartment building; back to the beginning it could be said, and I make my way upstairs to my lab. I enter and sink wearily into the soft cushiony embrace of the couch and stare once more down at my creation, the new SEAID, TRU's salvation. My tiredness stems more from the mental aggravation I’m putting myself through trying to understand the darkly suffocating inner workings of a certifiable sociopath such as Adoc. He’s tracked me back and forth along the timestream with the dogged perseverance of a rabid bloodhound,