bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2008) — Summer 2008 // Été 2008, pp. 36–41
Memphis, 1958. The club was smoky, the liquor strong. The Weavers were butchering Blame it on the Bossa Nova, hoping the crowd wouldn’t blame it on them. Seeger’s tux sported his lucky kumquat and raw oyster boutonniere, but a rabbit’s foot the size of Chicago wouldn’t have helped them tonight.
Uncle Waxter took a sip of his rye and ginger. “You got that newspaper sent you Monday, Shamus?” nodded and unfolded it. The Globe and Mail — but for August 11, 2058. “It must have cost a fortune to fake. Although it feels too metallic.” He said, “It’s the real McCoy. The paper feels wrong because that’s the e-print version.”
“But Waxter, come on, look at the headlines. Hilary Clinton Announces 14th Run for the White House, Locks Bill in Closet. Gene Mod Hot Dog Bites Customer, Demands Ketchup. China takes EU to World Court, Claims Back Royalties on Compass, Gunpowder. Sea Level Up Another Metre, Japan, Big Oil Blame Growth in Whale Numbers. Political Crime at SleazeCo HQ, Thief Gets Results of Next Three Elections. Holy See is Surprise Victor over Israel in Olympic Kvetch-Off. There’s nothing here you couldn’t make up. And how did it get from the future, anyway?”
Waxter nodded. “I understand your scepticism. Turn to page 17, bottom left corner, the Tomorrow’s News, 50 Years Ago box. looked it over. “OK, lt talks about the startup of some science experiment in Switzerland and that big explosion in Hawaii. remember those.” He smiled, “I’m sure you do. But they happened on Tuesday the 12th. How could they be reported in a paper sent you the day before?”
That set me back. “The experiment, Shamus, was the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest atom-smasher to date. So powerful some people worried it would create a black hole that would swallow the Earth. Two guys in Hawaii even filed a lawsuit to stop it, since there was no environmental impact statement filed on the end of the world. On August 12, the LHC was fired up. No black hole appeared, but a double wormhole did, setting up a timelink 50 years in each direction. And wiping out the Honolulu courthouse which shows someone has a sense of humour.”
said, “Lets assume buy this. What’s the problem?” He replied, “It puts enormous pressure on the stability of time if anyone can just travel back and forth. Just one example, what if you go back and kill your younger self? Then you wouldn’t grow up to come back and kill yourself. But if you don’t kill yourself, then you do grow up and can come back — you get the picture. The paradox could collapse the entire time stream.” Did mention that Uncle Waxter is a mathematical physicist? “And the bottom line?” asked, hoping would understand the answer.
“Some viper named Sleazewagon got access to the timewarp and by 2058 had made himself the most powerful man on earth. He owned 41 countries, half the world’s GDP and a controlling interest in the UN. He had cloned Bill Gates and used him as his janitor. (Well, some of us still haven’t forgiven Microsoft.) He got there by going forward to find out next year’s hot stocks or tomorrows lottery numbers. He brought hyper-weapons back to eras with no defence and pillaged future patent files for inventions that put him miles ahead of earlier competition. And on top of making him the king of a very slimy hill, this was undermining the integrity of the whole timeline. Time can heal itself up to a point, but Sleazewagon went well over the top.”
sank a slug of rye. “So what can we do?” He looked grim. “I helped some guys at my agency work out what went wrong in the LHC. There’s a component called a flux capacitor, used to stabilise magnetic coils. What no one expected was that it also actuates a wormhole if enough power is localised nearby. There are other, safer devices that can stabilise the coils, so we decided to solve the problem by ensuring the flux capacitor was never developed. There were only two problems. First, we had only one keyhole of access into the past, this day in August 1958 via the back storeroom of this club — the end of the wormhole my friends pushed you through.”
“What was the other problem?” “The guy who invented the capacitor was me.” blinked and he went on. “I remember what was like here in 1958. was working on the gizmo even then — thought it would make a good turbo-charger for the hot rod was chopping. There’s no way would have listened to anyone who tried to talk me out of finishing it, even myself. It would have just made me more likely to push on. And the agency doesn’t kill people unless there’s no other way — it closes off too many options and makes us no better than the crooks and madmen we go after.”
asked, “So how are we going to get to this guy? To you, mean.” He said, “My boss — a guy calied Liebnitz — calculated that the only way was to nudge him off science altogether. Only two things besides physics and cars were important to me then. One was music. had this hot group called Waxter and the Dikktophones that was on the edge of taking off. And the other was girls, where struck out with a regularity that would have embarrassed the 63 Mets.”
He looked away. “So we came up with Chantilly,” cocked my head. “She’s an android, Shamus, but no one would know it. She’s a beauty and a real fine girl, one that any man would desire. She’s programmed to fall in love with my younger self, steer him into music, stay with him and make him happy. So he never gets around to finishing the flux capacitor.”
asked, “Why don’t you bring in a real woman?” He shook his head. “Nothing from another time can stay permanently in the past or future. Bringing additional mass from another time violates the conservation laws. You can get away with it for a while, drawing on vacuum energy fluctuations, but we’re talking about a lifetime. The size of the wormhole limits a time traveller’s stay — in this case, about a day. That was long enough for our engineers to bring in the plans for a Genimatrix chamber — something useful the good guys sourced from the future — and build it here from local materials, then use it to create Chantilly. Let’s go meet her.”
Until we got outside, hadn’t been really sure that we were in 1958. What made it sink in was all the men in narrow-lapel suits and hats, all the women in dresses and furs, children playing with hula-hoops, new-model cars with fins large enough to make you grab the shark repellant, gas at a quarter a gallon. And no one holding a metal box to their ear and shouting — that was the clincher. We walked a few blocks, then down an alley to a metal door. Waxter unlocked it and led me along a corridor into a small laboratory. Along one wall were cages, shrouded but smelling of ape, scientific gear all along other walls and a tall glass and metal cabinet taking up the centre of the room. Through the glass could see a beautiful girl asleep on a couch.
Waxter pulled up. “That’s her. All you have to do is enter the activation code on that key-panel and put her together with young Waxter inside a few minutes, so imprinting can happen.”
“But why me, Uncle? You could do all this yourself.” He looked down and sighed. “Two reasons. First, the endpoint of this caper is that disappear. There will still be a Waxter Dikk, and he’ll share my history up to 1958, but after that I’ll be gone and so will all memory of the last 50 years of what was my life. He and everyone else will live a new future from which the old me has been erased. In these cases, only one person remembers the old timeline — the one that makes the change happen. It’s a quantum effect — the change can’t take hold without an enduring witness. wanted that to be you, as my only kin.” He looked bleak. “It would be nice not to be forgotten altogether.” put my hand on his shoulder.
He shook off the moment. “The guys who set. up the Genimatrix couldn’t just leave behind the activation code, or it might fall into Sleazewagon’s hands. Similarly, they didn’t want to give it to me ahead of time, in case his people got here beforehand and captured me when arrived. So one of your people and one of mine worked to split the activation code into two puzzles. As far as the boss is concerned, you’re here because you’re good at solving that kind of thing.”
“The first part of the puzzle is this cipher sequence, written in invisible ink on the edge of my tie. It developed automatically when spilled a martini on it.” made out SKDDT CKDNXKW JRH IEWQ BAHFBIY KA FKWQ. “The second part is in this fake issue of Mad magazine. It contains a simple humour puzzle, with two lists of 26 phrases, labelled À to Z and a to z. You link up the lists in pairs, matching two halves of a phrase, or a word and its definition, or something similar. When you’ve done that, you’ve also linked pairs of corresponding CAPITAL and small letters. Applying these linkages to the cipher text gives the activation sequence.”
took the magazine and soon had the sequence. Waxter chuckled wryly. “Very appropriate quote. Apt to the moment and won’t be published until ‘69. A duty-dance with death indeed.” He looked at me. “Enter it.” Nothing more to say, punched the 32 letters into the pad. In the cabinet, the woman opened her eyes, stood up shaking a long blond pony-tail and looked around. “The glass is one-way mirror, so she can’t see out and imprint on the wrong person. should be coming in the lab door any minute, so let’s get out of sight. When it’s over, go back to the club and wait for contact. Give the ones who contact you this envelope.”
We hid behind a workbench. Soon, a young man knew right away — did mention the family ears? — came through the door calling, “Professor Farbenheimer? Dr Schmaltz? got your message and came as soon as could.” Catching sight of Chantilly, he stopped as if poleaxed, She began pounding on the inside of the door, shouting. Young Waxter rushed over and pulled the heavy latch. She fell into his arms. He made no move to evade. She started to babble about “those creepy Delta Phi boys” locking her in as a prank. Then she fell silent, gazing up at him with the look of someone who has been lost a week in the desert and just spotted a lake.
Unfortunately, he was so startled by the look that he dropped her. She landed on an empty equipment trolley, which rolled across the room toward a shelf of acid-filled glass bottles. He ran after her but stepped on the teeth of a muckrake, which whipped up from the floor and slammed into his nose. nudged a heavy box into the path of her trolley, diverting it from the acid cabinet, but leaving it headed for the open door and stairs beyond. Clambering to his feet, the young Waxter pulled a cage of hysterical chimps down on himself, the door springing open. He lurched cross the room, slowed by having wedged his foot in a janitor’s bucket and dancing a particularly intimate tango with the mop. Beside me, Uncle Waxter covered his eyes with one hand, mumbling, “Did say the ‘63 Mets? Maybe even “62.”
One of the escaping apes swung on the lever that happened to make the lab door roll shut. The front axle of Chantilly’s vehicle got entangled in the strings of the mop that young Waxter had finally thrown off. The trolley tioped over just as he slipped on a banana left over from a simian dinner, ricocheted off a potted fig and wound up, gasping, bleeding from the nose and reeking of chimp, on the floor beside Chantilly. She looked over, gave him a smile that made my own toes curl and said, “I know you. You’re that cute guy in the Dikktophones. really love your music.”
There was an ochre twang like the one heard in the wormhole and the feeling that something large had shifted off-stage. looked at Uncle Waxter, but he had already faded almost to nothing. “Remember,” he whispered.
Later, back in the club, there’d been some changes made. The place was tonier — lots of chrome and all the slumming rich kids wore flowers — flowers for God’s sake — in their lapels. Some greasy-haired punk was on stage, singing about Jailhouse Rock, with a sneer like he’d been there and hip gyrations that were probably the reason. Behind me, a familiar voice sang, “It’s the pelvic thrust that really drives them insane.” My assistant Effie appeared in an off-the shoulder dress, accompanied by his paramour, Bugbyte O’Nanotek, in biker leathers. Behind them was Bugbyte’s boss, Ludwig Liebnitz. Last time I’d seen him, we were up to our asses in bodies at the francophone festival. Almost 50 years from now.
It had been a long and twisted evening All could think to say was “Who is that guy and where did he learn to sing?” Effie struck his forehead, “You don’t know Elvis?” Liebnitz interjected, “Of course he doesn’t. Closing off the old future has had ripple effects back as well as forward in time. He won’t integrate the memories of the revised timeline until he returns to the period he belongs.” He turned to me, “Just so you know, your uncle does make it big in pop music, after changing his name from Waxter Dikk to an even less likely Ethelbert Humperdinck. He and Chantilly have been happy together for a long time. Sleazewagon’s little empire was stillborn. Oh, and the Weavers are folkies not crooners in this timeline, while Blame it on the Bossa Nova doesn’t hit the charts until 1963.”
So guess it all worked out. In the revised timeline, Liebnitz said, the flux capacitor had been re-invented much later by a man named Emmett Brown. It never made it into the LHC, but the agency talked Brown into giving them his device, which it used for its own quiet-time missions. Which included this trip to pick me up, tipped off by the old Uncle Waxter’s report. So handed over that report before paradox set in.
Time to go. Effie took from his purse a plastic sheet with an opalescent sheen and a flickering golden “Y” in flexible LCDs. He smoothed it out on the table and we all put a hand flat on it. Bugbyte and Effie intoned together, “Dual voice activation engage.” Bugbyte added ’Saddle up the stove, ma” and Effie countered “Cause I’m ridin’ the range tonight.” As the lights went out, thought ! saw Elvis wink.
Can you duplicate Shamus’ feat by deciphering the activation code for Chantilly’s Genimatrix? bout de papier will decide the winner by drawing from a box containing all correct entries received by October 31, 2008. The winner will receive a book prize signed by A Aalto. Not necessary to win the contest, but can you also give the 26 pairings? And can you indicate which eleven of the resulting matches come from George Carlin, Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, Alice Roosevelt, Dorothy Parker, Maurice Chevalier and Mae West? There’s also one by the inimitable Mrs Aalto, By the way, the LHC is a real machine and coming online soon …®
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2008) — Summer 2008 // Été 2008, pp. 36–41. Read the rest of this issue →
