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Chapter 3: Time is Never of the Essence

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Jonathan Snyder awoke to Dr. Meyer looking over him, shining a small light into his pupil. The light made it hard to tell for certain, but it was easy for Jonathan to conclude that he was in one of the medical room gurneys. He must have passed out during retrieval. Again.

“I’m back among the living doctor,” Jonathan said. Snyder tried to lift himself up from the medical bed, but Meyer used her leverage to keep him pinned down.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” the German doctor asserted. She pressed harder against Jonathan as she examined him. The awkwardness of her medium sized breasts pressing into his arm went by as a necessity until the doctor had finished with what she was doing.

“You’re not taking your Ororoprin,” Meyer continued, backing away from Snyder.

Jonathan was then able to sit up in the bed and quickly noticed he was shirtless. Snyder was a well built man due to his physically demanding work, but his introverted nature caused him to be very self conscious about his appearance. Not for the sake of others, but rather because he was his own worst critic. Jonathan was always giving himself tough advice about every detail of his life. The fact Emily was a doctor allowed him to brush any embarrassment to the side, but he made doubly sure the woman didn’t also steal his pants while he was unconscious.

Thankfully they were still fastened to his waist.

“It doesn’t work,” Snyder said plainly. He started to look around the small medical room, trying to find his shirt.

Ororoprin was developed to help people weak against extreme gravitational forces. It’s mostly used by people who travel off world, but it has its uses to people who travel through time as well. Dr. Meyer prescribed some to Jonathan to combat the chances of him blacking out during retrieval. But like she pointed out, he was too stubborn to take it.

“Oh that is a brilliant medical trial you’ve done Jonathan,” Dr. Meyer said in a raised sarcastic voice. “How many months of not taking your prescribed medicine have you undergone to come to that informed conclusion?”

Snyder didn’t respond. He was more concerned about his shirt than he was about the doctor’s advice. And he was growing increasingly annoyed in not being able to find it. Not that you could tell from his blatantly unvarying face.

Emily Meyer sighed at his lack of response and said, “I’m going to have to report this to Director Donovan.”

“You do what you have to,” said Jonathan.

“Speaking of the Director,” Meyer continued. “He is waiting outside with some fräulein. He said it was important.”

“Everything is important to him,” Jonathan said, talking more to himself than to the doctor.

The doctor didn’t argue anymore points and left the room. Jonathan was given a few moments of peace as he was granted solitude and silence; two things that Snyder treasured a great deal. He needed people to provide food, services, and physical companionship, but preferred being alone once those necessities were met. Jonathan also took a measure of enjoyment in the decompression of his mind, and isolation proved to be the most expedient way to prevent distraction. Humans always seem to get in the way of the human mind.

But the door behind Dr. Meyer didn’t stay closed long as it was quickly opened again by Michael Donovan. And the well dressed director was followed very closely by his niece, Anastasia. Snyder was good enough with names and faces that he instantly recognized her.

During the trip between her school and this facility, Anastasia made her uncle stop by her residence. There she felt the need for a quick shower and styled her mohawk to stand straight up. A process in and of itself looked like it took hours to prepare, but she had become skilled enough with the fashion of her hair that it took her less than one. Her clothes were also of a nicer selection with a sleeveless black blouse and red skirt. And Donovan would swear an oath in front a dozen of the meanest Boston nuns that she put on perfume as well.

“Snyder,” Donovan greeted. “I’m sure you remember my niece.”

“Yes, Anastasia Kompan,” Jonathan said, and then stretched out his hand to greet the young woman. They quickly shook hands and the suddenly shy woman barely made a noise or eye contact. Though she did notice the muscles on his chest flex as he moved about. And upon realizing that she was sizing Jonathan up, she became even more nervous. “You like being called Annie if I recall correctly.”

Annie smiled at his remembering and then gathered the courage to respond, “Yes, even my parents call me Annie. Only my uncle calls me by my proper name. He is what the doctors call, ‘a stick in the mud’.”

Jonathan gave a small smile at the remark. And it was a rarity that he would display any emotion at all, much less a hint of joy. Donovan might have gasped out loud at the sight if he wasn’t too busy pinching his nose.

“Snyder,” Donovan jumped back into the conversation. “Your shirt is on the table behind Emily’s monitor. You seemed to have lost it.”

The holographic display that was still giving everyone information on Snyder’s vitals directly blocked his view of said table. Donovan had a better angle to see behind the monitor and noticed where Dr. Meyer had placed Jonathan’s shirt. Much to Annie’s disappointment, Snyder quickly grabbed the garment and slipped the black material over his chest once again.

“The doc said you wanted to talk about something important,” Snyder said.

“I have another mission for you,” Donovan replied. Jonathan glanced over to Anastasia for a moment, reaching the conclusion that she had something to do with this mission. Donovan had a talent for picking up on a person’s inner thoughts, even when displayed by someone as subtle as Snyder. The Director decided to answer the question before Jonathan could even ask it. “My niece will be coming with you. It’s a pickup job in enemy territory.”

“A pickup job?” Jonathan asked, sounding slightly insulted at the request. “Fetching is for Labradors, not Bloodhounds.”

“What’s a Bloodhound?” Anastasia asked, not knowing because the breed went extinct in the late twenty-first century. However the Labrador Retriever was still as popular as ever.

“A type of dog breed famous for tracking and hunting,” Jonathan explained. “You pick up unfamiliar terminology when you travel through time.”

“Regardless,” Donovan said, trying to get back on topic. “This order comes straight from the top. And she asked for you by name.”

“Why in the hell does she want me to do this?” Snyder asked, not really expecting a satisfying answer.

Annie was noticeably puzzled by the references to a woman unknown to her, but this time did not raise a question on the subject. She filed the question away in the back of her mind for later when she was alone with either Jonathan or her uncle. And that question also contained the hope that Jonathan would be the one she ended up alone with.

“I don’t know,” Donovan answered. “She never reveals her motives, always seeming to know more than the rest of us. Nicholas will be able to brief you on the details.”

Jonathan just sighed in response, frustrated in the relationship between the chess master and her bishop. But then he finally asked, “Do I have time to grab a shower and some food before heading back out there?”

“Of course,” Donovan answered. “For us, time is never of the essence.”

* * *

In his youth, General Ellison spent his boot camp days with the most feared drill sergeant of the Western Alliance. A man, whose fierce reputation was so intense, rumors circulated around him that the rough terrain of west Texas was littered with bodies of the recruits who didn’t edge up to his standards. An exaggeration to be sure, but there were plenty of moments during his training where Ellison thought he would die from the process. Looking back on it though, the General realized he wasn’t as in much danger as his memories recalled. The sergeant was merely knocking the softness of modern civilization off of Ellison and making him into something that was actually useful. In further hindsight, the General was thankful for the harsh natural of his drill sergeant. If it was not for him, Ellison might have been ill prepared for the campaign in Asian during the opening conflicts of the Unification War.

However, if you took all of the times being pushed face first into the mud or feeling the onset of heatstroke from a march into one solid emotion, that sensation would be significantly less painful than a closed meeting with Director Ayesha Singh. When the General first meet her, he thought that the young Indian woman had gained her status from her looks and promiscuous behavior, but their first argument introduced him to the fire hiding behind her dark eyes. A fire she was currently projecting in his direction.

“Āpa kē sātha bakavāsa kyā galata hai!?” she yelled at Ellison. Whenever she was upset or in the mood to curse, she would always speak in her native tongue. In this particular instance she was both; and that made her speech unintelligible to anyone beyond an overbearing Indian mother. The General’s bionic implants were able to translate most of it, but even technology in the mid-twenty-second century had trouble with the more colorful aspects of language. It was as if all translator programs were written by people who were either really boring, or had a little too much modesty. As much as Ellison could discern, she was bringing his ability to reason into question.

“I know I was playing this pretty close to the chest,” the General commented. “But I had my reasons.”

“Maiṁ yaha sunanā acchā lagēgā,” Ayesha said with a huff and then sat down in her very expensive desk chair. The cybernetic part of the General said that she was delighted to hear his explanation. The human side of the General said that she was being sarcastic.

“I have a source in the Variant Army,” Ellison explained. “I couldn’t risk exposing that person.”

The Director’s ears and eyes perked in interest. Given the nature of alternate timelines, it has been deemed near impossible to place a mole in another group without detection. Even without modern technology, it is pretty easy to prove that someone is in a timeline they don’t belong in. It’s been tired before, but has always met with failure. The prospect of a successfully planted spy was so engaging that it even brought a smile to Singh’s face.

“There is an Archetype among the Variants?” the Director asked, calm enough now to use English again.

“Not exactly,” the General half answered. “This person is more of a double agent.”

“A Variant working against his own kind? I would have deemed that even more unlikely that an honest to Krishna spy. How did you pull that off?”

“It’s complicated.”

Singh paused for a moment in frustration. She considered herself a master of secrets, but did not care much for being kept in the dark herself. The Director knew that Ellison was too obstinate to reveal his source at present, or how he came about getting such a resource. Not only that, but he did all of this without the Director’s knowledge or permission. However this mattered little to the larger issues at hand, so Singh would table them for later. And this would give her time to come up with an appropriate punishment for the General’s insubordination.

“My source,” the General continued, “assures me that a Variant operation is going to take place in our timeline later today. I already have my best man waiting to intercept, but we have to get ready on our end when war breaks out.”

“And what makes you so sure war is going to break out?” the Director asked.

General Ellison then hesitated before speaking, taking a moment to except the terrible truth, “Because we’re going to start it.”

* * *

Nicholas found himself easily annoyed. An irony that was not lost on him. Being physically fixed into one location at all times was a source of great frustration to him, and the company that he was required to keep wasn’t always the most pleasant. Sure he was connected into almost every electronic device in the solar system, but the foundation he was welded into never moved. A fact he was consistently reminded of by the inane banter he was sometimes forced to listen to.

“If you could thump any celebrity that only exists in a variant timeline, who would it be?” asked a technician named Flanagan. He was talking to a fellow technician, Zapcic, in an obvious attempt to pass the time. They had three hours left on their shift in the control room, and it wasn’t like they were going to start a conversation on the works of Kafka.

“My first instinct would be to go with Darcy Harris,” commented Zapcic. If Nicholas had a gag reflex, this is about where he would use it. He found the dialogue to be disgusting on an intelligential and ethical level. But to be fair to the two technicians, Nicholas didn’t have a sex drive to spur such conversations.

“The Martian? Really?”

“Hey,” Zapcic contested his coworker’s assertion. “Mars has been putting out some really great flixs over the past few years. Not to mention that she has nonstop curves.”

“Yeah, growing up with the weaker Martian gravity probably made her breasts perkier.”

“What do you have against Martians?”

“I don’t know,” Flanagan said with little confidence. “I just have this feeling as soon as we finish pumping all of our money into terraforming the place, they’ll want to stop paying taxes or some shit like that.”

Zapcic rolled his eyes at the xenophobic attitude of his workmate before responding, “They’ve been working on terraforming Mars for over sixty years and the air is still only breathable to humans for a couple hours at a time. We’ll probably both be dead by the time they’re finished. It’s not like it’s going to take six days.”

“I suppose,” Zapcic relented. “God didn’t have to use government contractors.”

It was shortly thereafter Nicholas gave Zapcic and Flanagan busy work to take them off this train of thought. Just a random series of reports to file in the database even though Nicholas could have easily done it himself. But he felt it was a good idea to end the current discussion before it took its natural course and became overly male to the point of homoerotic. Nicholas wouldn’t describe such a situation as uncomfortable. But, despite a billion word database, he couldn’t think of another expression to articulate how his CPUs would process the circumstance.

However there could be a never ending debate as to the idea if Nicholas could feel uncomfortable at all. He is, after all, just the personality interface of a large construct of computers buried almost a mile underground. Nicholas was programmed from the source code up by Tuesday herself to process the ever growing knowledge base of the Variant Army. Personality Interfaces for Computers, or P.I.C.s for short, we’re not uncommon since the technology had advanced to the degree of just verbally asking for what you want was easier than manually inputting it. But since Nicholas expanded over such a vast network, had to process information from multiple timelines, and understand the nature of multiple timelines, he was slightly more advanced than the common interface that tells you if it is going to rain today.

Some would dismiss the idea that a P.I.C., regardless of how complex, could ever feel because it lacks the instincts and impulses that make emotion possible. Most interfaces have built in reactions to user requests that vary from snarky to meekness depending on the type of model and program the user purchased. However these reactions are often classified as not being genuine and are just programmed into the interface to give the user a false sense that he/she is talking with a real person. But Nicholas often finds himself reacting without expressing it, computing without objective, and proceeding without command. And what is emotion beyond mentally acting and reacting on one’s own?

Such realizations worried Nicholas. And then he worried about having the ability to worry. Director Donovan would not respond well to the idea that his computer could think and perform on its own. He depends on Nicholas too much to outright shut him down, but might cut off Nicholas’ higher functions to make him just another drone. And despite the bothersome nature of free will, Nicholas very much liked his higher functions. It’s what allowed him to question authority and ponder on what Swedish meatballs might taste like.

“Did you hear that Snyder passed out during retrieval again?” Zapcic asked, using a chuckle as a punctuation mark.

“Yeah, which surprises me somewhat,” Flanagan replied. “Figured someone as cold as him would have trouble with something like that.”

Nicholas thought about jumping in and comment that a person’s psyche has little bearing on their body’s chemical composition, but relented in doing so. Nicholas found that arguing a point with people who don’t understand a great deal was very much like making conversation with a brick wall. And these two technicians’ lack of understanding often amazed even Nicholas’ lowest standards. Then Nicholas decided to further relent in making any comments as not to reveal he could form standards.

“And the Director sent a request down to warm up the machine for another trip,” Zapcic commented. “I think they’re going to send him right back out again.”

“We have more agents than just Snyder,” Flanagan rebutted.

“True, but he didn’t send the request until doc sent a report on his condition. I think it has to do with the Director putting a hit out on Beckman.”

“You think Snyder screwed up and now has to fix it?”

“I doubt it,” Zapcic said. “Snyder is very bad to have at parties, but I’ve never known him to screw up a mission.”

Flanagan looked back towards the door to the control room to see that is was still closed and no one had entered during their latest conversation. Zapcic quickly noticed his wariness.

“You worried about something?” Zapcic asked.

“Snyder gives me the creeps,” Flanagan answered. “Just don’t want him to walk in on us while we’re talking about him.”

“Nicholas,” Zapcic directed his voice towards the screen even though Nicholas could hear him in any part of the building. “Where is Jonathan Snyder?”

“The third floor men’s showers,” Nicholas answered as quickly as possible.

“See,” Zapcic said, directing himself back to Flanagan and leaned back in his chair. “With Nicholas keeping track of everyone we don’t have to worry about Snyder, Director Donovan, or that pale girl with the eerie eyes. Who is she anyway?”

“My niece,” Director Donovan said abruptly.

Nicholas told them where Snyder was, but neglected to tell them anything about Director Donovan or his lovely niece. It’s needless to describe how upset Donovan was, or how embarrassed Zapcic was, but no one could tell how much hilarity Nicholas was feeling at this moment. A great smile and laughter would have been generated by him if he processed a mouth. But instead, he used the various recording devices in the room to save this moment for later enjoyment. Nicholas had sectioned off a small portion of the system’s memory for just such occasions.

“Report to waste removal,” Nicholas ordered Zapcic. “Now.”

“But sir—,” Zapcic started to protest, but quickly stopped himself before Donovan gave orders to have Zapcic’s grandfather given some kind of congenital disorder. Zapcic could only look down in shame and double timed his pace out of the control room.

After Zapcic left there was an uneasy calm for a few moments. Nicholas turned his attention towards Donovan’s niece, Anastasia, who he had not physically seen in over a year. And this prompted a subroutine to notice she has increased in height by five centimeters. A trivial observation to be sure, but as a machine Nicholas could hardly help to notice. During Annie’s short tenure in working with her uncle, Nicholas developed a slight fondness for her. It might just be that her mind was more Nicholas’ speed, but the fact that she was nice to him didn’t hurt matters.

“Hello Nicholas,” Anastasia greeted, looking up into the air and waving her hand as if giving a salutation to a God in the most feminine way possible.

“Greetings Annie,” Nicholas replied over the intercom. “It is nice to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you too,” Annie replied with a smile. “On the way here my uncle was telling me they finally upgraded your chassis to the Wozniak 7.2 model.”

“Yes. It increases cooling efficiency by five percent and allows a significant boost to my processing power under heavy demand. This makes it much easier to fulfill your uncle’s requests when he wants them done in urgency. Which is always.”

Anastasia giggled at the remark but Donovan ignored it to move onto business, “I’ll pretend to hate breaking up this reunion long enough to say I need Nicholas to bring up a mission profile for us.”

“We should wait for Jonathan,” Annie suggested. “It’s his mission, and it will give Nicholas and me a chance to catch up.”

“Nicholas doesn’t need you to catch him up,” Donovan said. “He already knows everything that has been going on in your life.”

“What do you mean?” Anastasia asked her uncle.

“I’m afraid your uncle is right Annie,” Nicholas confirmed. “My network allows me to keep track of almost anyone in almost any timeline, and Director Donovan had me program a subroutine specifically to keep track of you.”

“You were spying on me?” Annie directed her accusation completely at her uncle.

“Undetectable surveillance is how your uncle described it,” Nicholas said, sounding wholly monotone but secretly being a little snarky.

Michael Donovan then took the seat that was previously occupied by Zapcic. He did his best to avoid his niece’s irate stare, but tried to calm her down by following her suggestion and waiting for Snyder to arrive before researching this particular mission. Donovan could easily explain himself to her, that his intrusion wasn’t as profound as she was probably imagining. But Donovan knew women well enough to know that no explanation really works when they are upset.

Once Annie’s temperament calmed by a slight fraction, she placed herself in a distant corner of the control room and began a quiet conversation with Nicholas at one of the many control screens. And Donovan, having nothing better to do, turned towards Flanagan to begin whatever discussion the technician was capable of maintaining. Nicholas himself was able to listen and interact with both discussions given his built-in ability to multitask. This allowed him to be amused by one conversation while deeply enthralled by another at the same time. And then a third subroutine formed in his complex cortex. The question if humans could feel two things at the same time like he could.

The program would quickly come back with the answer of no. Humans can change thoughts, and even feelings fairly rapidly, but with one singular mind comes one singular thought at any given moment in time. But Nicholas could experience as many thoughts and feelings as his processors could handle, which was nothing like the mental and emotional process of a human. And Nicholas thought that was quite the pity. But who he was feeling pity for, he would keep to himself.



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