Hercules III - 8. Chapter 8

Hercules III

Chapter 8

“What are you doing? That’s not part of our responsibilities, we kill bots and a few humans, that’s all,” Carlos said, while Stefan was fiddling with the frequency adjustment knob on the yellow jumper. There was a holographic image slowly rotating in front of them showing two young men in a slow dance to unheard music. They weren’t on tape, this was a live performance, but neither of the performers knew they were being imaged by a circle of colorless broad lasers in their hotel room. They came to the pleasure hotel expecting two young women to join them, but the chemicals in the injection they received from the bellboy was making them perform in a way they never thought possible. In the morning they would not remember anything of this, though they might wonder why they were sleeping in the same bed.

“This is the kind of entertainment I enjoy,” Stefan said. “If you’re interested ask our personal bot, she can come up with whatever you want, short of having a large predator chase someone through one of our forests, until the person is caught and killed.”

“You asked for that, didn’t you?” Carlos said.

“Of course, it’s entertainment,” Stefan said. He figured that Carlos would leave if the conversation changed to a subject he was interested in. “You know, I always thought predators used all those claws to disembowel the victim, but that isn’t the case at all.”

“I don’t need to hear this,” Carlos said.

Ignoring what Carlos said, Stefan continued, “They go for the neck, throttling the victim with their fangs or breaking its neck. After all, asphyxiation is quite easy and quick if you get the right angle on the throat.”

“I said I don’t want to listen to this,” Carlos said. “But, obviously, you’re not listening to me.”

“I’ve always wondered why the big cats go for the throat,” Stefan continued, oblivious to what Carlos was saying. “It’s so obvious when you get down and study their methods. You have to realize suffocation is so much quicker than trying to get the victim in just the right position so that their hind claws can open up the abdomen, not that it is not sometimes tried. Of course a pride of lions simply overwhelms the victim with a plethora of sharp claws and mouths full of sharp teeth, though it sometimes looks like one of the lions, especially the one who got to the prey first, goes for the neck while the rest tackle the soft under belly of the prey. I saw that once, the prey animal was still alive as the pride dug deeper into the abdomen and up into the chest where the prey eventually died.”

“Where do you get all this information?” Carlos asked. “It’s not on the ship, or is it?”

“The big mainframes have most of the good stuff, but this is special,” Stefan said. “You find the right human and you can watch other special shows.”

“That’s just sick, I’m going to the bedroom and read a book,” Carlos said.

“Now, that is old, very old technology,” Stefan said. “What you need Carlos is something fun and exciting in your life; something other than using old technology to read books. Can you please check the yellow jumper connection to the main board before you leave? I’m not getting a full, crisp image.”

Carlos went to the connection and saw the yellow plug was only partially inserted. Against his personal beliefs, he pushed the plug fully in and set the lock.

“Are you staying up late tonight?” Stefan asked.

“Probably until I fall asleep from reading,” Carlos said.

“I want to talk to you after,” Stefan said.

“About what?” Carlo asked.

“About not being green,” Stefan said. “The bots seem to be at a loss as to what to do with us now that we no longer have any green pigment in our skin. I’m sure you’ve run into it, some days.”

“Mark was talking to our mainframe the other day,” Carlos said. “In telepathic mode I came in after most of the pertinent conversation was over, but I’m certain they were talking about us. I set up that each of their com service access port seal bolts will exude a yellowish creamy substance when there is a conversation about us. It won’t be enough that it might attract attention, unless they suspect something, but I don’t think there’s much of a chance that will happen, since they’re so algorithmic.”

“They’ll kill us!” Stefan exclaimed. “If they suspect what you’ve done, we’ll get a quick walk to the nearest airlock.”

“No they won’t,” Carlos said. “We are tied to the time waves moving through the ship. As soon as they make a move toward us, we’ll shift to the future or maybe the past; and, we can hold there in stasis until we can be assured our status with them is not detrimental to our future on Hercules III. They deserve a few days searching for us.”

“But are you certain that will work?” Stefan asked.

“Remember last week when I was sick or actually faking illness to get out of work?” Carlos asked.

“Yeah, Mark wondered why I wasn’t sick, too, being that we’re kind of the same person,” Stefan said. “I told him you were having trouble with a time wave; and I guess you were; weren’t you?”

“Yeah, I went forward to one of our many, possible futures,” Carlos said. “Since I was only there in my mind, I was able to move about without Mark or the mainframe noticing me. They were having another conversation about us. They said we were close to wearing out our usefulness and might need to be eliminated. The mainframe said the Council would need to agree and he didn’t expect anything other than full concurrence. ”

“What are we going to do?” Stefan asked.

“I don’t know,” Carlos said.

Pulling the yellow jumper out from its socket behind his head, Stefan followed Carlos into their bedroom. They sat on their own beds. They might have been staring at each other, but they were in their minds, filling the bedroom with stray thoughts and bits of useless code. Stefan wanted his future to be something other than a young man being pushed into an airlock. He wanted to be somebody who wasn’t a killer of bots who were beyond their warrantees. He wanted to be back on Hercules I, maybe living on Carlos’s farm, but he knew that past time could never be replicated because he was a time traveler now and he would never be twelve-years-old again. Those thoughts momentarily made him feel sad. Using only his mind he looked over at Carlos, but his counterpart was lost in the book he was reading, something from the early twentieth century. Stefan looked at the virtual cover and saw the title, His Family, by Ernest Poole. He scanned the book until he came to the end. Then he felt kind of sad, so much so he felt a tear trickling out of his right eye.

“What’s wrong?” Carlos asked. “Why are you crying?”

“Sorry, I read the last page of your book,” Stefan sobbed. “His family didn’t seem to care about their father; when he died.”

“Well, thank you very much for ruining the last chapter for me; death in any way isn’t a piece of cake,” Carlos said. “Going through an airlock certainly results in death, but there is that delay when your mind is still active.”

“But it’s not the same,” Stefan said. “Just watch out when you come to it.”

“Why are you always so emotional?” Carlos asked.

“Probably because you’re not,” Stefan said.

“Alike but different,” Carlos said.

“Yeah,” Stefan said.

********

In their sleep, the boys didn’t notice a time wave cycling through the ship. It seemed to affect only a few areas directly, leaving other places to remain in their relative present. When the ship’s alarm sounded they slowly became aware of the change. Carlos mentally went to the ship’s clock; but due to the various alternately time phases in time contaminated areas of the ship the clock reading was “000.000.000.000” while flashing red indicating the clock couldn’t determine the ship’s time location. Carlos returned to the real and stared at Stefan.

“What?” Stefan asked.

“The ship is lost,” Carlos said. “It can’t figure out where it’s at.”

“The whole ship?” Stefan asked.

“I guess,” Carlos said. “I don’t know what we can do. It’s never done this; at least to this degree. I guess I’ll have to study up on it.”

“I’ll help,” Stefan said. “The answer might be in the future. Have you tried to figure out when we die? This might be a good time to see if our time travels will give us an answer. Where were you going to look for reading material?”

“I suppose I’ll start back in the twentieth and twenty first centuries,” Carlos said. “There were a lot of astrophysicists studying time back then; or, I might look way back in 2525. Think there was a woman physicist who wrote a couple of very interesting papers, but she was pooh-poohed by the establishment, the mainline scientists, for being too radical in her searches. There was an astrophysicist around the seventy-sixth century, probably around 7582. I read somewhere about a physicist who came up with some interesting theories about time; maybe I’ll do a time phase shift and talk to him or her directly. Time travelers have always interested scientists.”

“Do you think you’ll be safe?” Stefan asked.

“I’ll have to watch out and be extra careful about people getting the wrong idea about time travelers,” Carlos said. “You’re free to come with me; you know, watch my back in case someone else sees us.”

“We’ll have to let Mark know,” Stefan said.

“He’ll be okay with it, might be interested in going too,” Carlos said.

“Yes, he’d want a direct link back to our mainframe,” Stefan said.

“I’m not certain we can do that; it might violate some unknown physics law,” Carlos said. “We need to wake him up.”

“Bots don’t sleep,” Mark said, butting into the conversation. “And, no, I won’t need a link back to our mainframe.”

“You were monitoring us!” Stefan exclaimed.

“Yes, that’s what I do around here,” Mark said. “And, I know about the code causing those bolts to exude that substance when the mainframe and I have conversations about you two. If we’re going, I think now is a good time to leave. Do either of you want me to establish a time alert for when we come back? We don’t want to miss this time location.”

“That’s a good idea,” Stefan said.

“You spy on us?” Carlos asked.

“That’s been my job from the beginning,” Mark said. “You two are too important to leave to your own devices. Are we doing this time travel in toto? We might make a bigger impression if the humans can see us.”

“No, that’s not a good idea because we don’t know where we’re going,” Stefan said. “We don’t know what’s in our past. The humans and maybe the bots too, might be adverse to a future that includes semi-human bots and humans who look as if they’re only fifteen-years-old. The yellow jumper between us might throw them off, too.”

“Yes, there is that,” Mark said. “Why is it always the yellow jumper?”

“Carlos, what do you think?” Stefan asked.

“He’s been monitoring us!” Carlos exclaimed. “How can we trust him anymore knowing he’s been doing that?”

“You have to believe I’m totally on your side,” Mark said. “Contrary to what I said earlier about leaving now; we do have a problem that we’re going to have to resolve. We might not be able to get back to Hercules III, if we time travel to a wrong physical, non-time location. I’m sure both of you are mentally time traveling right now, but you have to recognize the time anomaly affecting the ship at this moment may resolve itself without any of our actions.”

Mark scanned the boys’ minds; and, leaving their minds to pursue something that probably didn’t mean anything to the ship’s current situation; he realized they might not notice the ship’s current timeless attitude was slowly adjusting the current time. There was a problem, though. The clock was reading “000.000.000.250” and was slowly climbing. Adding that fact to the boys’ search for time studies in the human past that might bring up issues better left to history data banks. He could recall them, but they’d probably not appreciate the bot slant on human history; especially the sixty-eighth century when bots ruled Earth and all her subordinate colonies.

********

“Oh, Mark, that was the scariest place I’ve ever been,” Stefan said, opening his eyes. “There were bots everywhere including those that looked like some of the bots here that are losing their warrantees. There weren’t any people. I looked all over, but where ever I looked there weren’t any people. Then I picked up a brain wave and traced it down into the bowels of Earth. There weren’t many of them, but they knew I was there with them. How could they do that? Humans here and on Hercules I couldn’t do it, but in 6435 they could. How is that possible?”

“It happened in 6398,” Mark said. “The mainframe can give you the histories of humans since bots came into existence.”

“The humans were looking for me and many had sought to gain access to my brain access ports,” Stefan said. “They were going to kill me or rather kill that part of my mind that was in their presence.”

“They understood how to attack humans and bots by gaining access to the brain stem, where they could damage your ability to time travel,” Mark said. “Especially back here.”

Carlos opened his eyes with a terrified look. Mark and Stefan stared at him, trying to figure out what was happening. Then they saw the line of torn skin around his neck. Blood was oozing out of the wound with a slow pulse and Carlos still hadn’t shown anything that might indicate he was alive; and, then he started screaming with a gurgling sound coming out of the wound.

“Help me! I’m going to die!” Carlos screamed. “Help me!”

“I’ll get some nanos; I’ll be back in a moment,” Mark said. He dematerialized for a few seconds and came back with two large syringes. They were full of the yellow, slimy syrup that held a variety of nano emergency repair kits. He injected one in the torn skin over Carlos’ spine; half of the other one went into the side of his neck directly across from the second to start working on the carotid arteries and jugular veins. That was all he could do until medical bots gained access to the boys’ area of the ship. He sent off an update note to the mainframe with information on what was happening and the need for an emergency response from medical bots.

“How can something occurring centuries ago have an effect on a person’s body at the present?” Stefan asked.

“Carlos doesn’t know everything he needs to know about out of body time travelling,” Mark said. “I suspect you don’t know either. You two are mere amateurs trying to act like professionals in time travelling. I see we’re going to have to put both of you in history lessons. Plus, our current situation isn’t so dire that it needs either of you trying to solve the problem when, in fact, there isn’t a problem now. The ship is correcting it as we speak.”

“But the ship’s clock was reading only zeroes,” Stefan exclaimed. “The entire ship was out of time phase and we felt we, Carlos mostly, needed to fix it. What about Carlos, now?”

“Carlos’ trauma is being repaired as we speak,” Mark said. “As I see it, you two, possibly only Carlos, travelled with a time phase of your body so he could be there and here. That is what gave his attackers the ability to rip off his head with only a few slashes with a small kitchen knife; but, right now you and I need to leave the nanos to their task. Let’s go to the mainframe and give a report on what happened and see if Carlos has a chance to fully and completely live after his injury.”

Stefan totally reentered his mind and body, but remained sitting on the edge of his bed. He took a brief visit to look at the ship’s clock where he saw a nearly fully restored reading of “3SN.901.10T.35M”. Mark materialized next to him and said, “See, I told you it was resolving its current issues. I haven’t read further down than the third subscript, where I found many more zeros. We only have to wait for the fourth dimensional correction to erase the error filled alpha settings. I’m certain they will, also, clear.”

“I never imagined the clock could be multidimensional,” Stefan said. “I never thought the clock operated in more than one dimension. That could answer a lot of the questions Carlos was probably asking, but I suppose he never thought of it being different when compared to other clocks on Hercules III. Do you think he’ll be okay? I can’t imagine living without him. I’ve read about that sort of thing happening to other twins. I just can’t imagine going on without him.”

“Come on, Stefan, we do need to leave the nanos to do their job,” Mark said. “The mainframe and I have been discussing that very thing for the past few minutes. We think it might work if we moved Carlos into his immediate future by a few hours to a time where he should be whole and here in this facility. Then you would, or both of us, will have to convince him to stay on that side of his timeline. If he so much as attempted to move back, whether physically or mentally, his time might overcome his presence in that future and force him to the point in time when he was nearly a victim of a murder. Time seems to want each of us to remain in our physical now, especially not physically moving to some other point in time in the past or future.

“I might as well tell you now, what he did was very dangerous. He’s always had a streak when he gets into something where he has no experience. He often steps into places both mentally and physically detrimental to his future as one half of a being that might think it is totally immortal.”

“You mean Carlos and I am going to live forever?” Stefan asked. “Forever sounds like something we might not like centuries from now.”

“There is the option to become a bot, but that isn’t in any of your possible futures as far as we’ve looked into your and Carlos’ timeline,” Mark said. “It will give a whole new facet of your search for bots reaching their warrantee limit.”

“Great! Still stuck with that job,” Stefan said.

“You’ll have enough time to do other things to keep you busy until the end of your time,” Mark said.

“Then there is an end for our collective deaths,” Stefan said. “We will die. I think Carlos will like that. I’d like to go back and see him.”

“Not until the nanos have finished with him,” Mark said. “They will let us know when he is safe to be around.”

“What do you mean safe?” Stefan asked.

“Well, he will be in a current time the mainframe made for him,” Mark said.

“I gotta find someplace to take a nap. This is starting to make me feel woozy,” Stefan said.

“That’s your ticket, I’m taking you back to your sleeping quarters for a nap,” Mark said.

“Why?” Stefan asked. “A moment ago you didn’t want me in the same place as Carlos.”

“You may have picked up some time debris when you travelled back. We need to put you into a personal time zone so some nanos and medical bots can run your thoughts through a correct and current time shift based on your personal reading from the ship’s clock. Come on, you won’t feel a thing.”

“I certainly hope not,” Stefan mumbled as he slowly succumbed to the sensation of being out of time.

********

FRAME 031: HOW ARE THEY DOING?

MARK 56782HT: THEY SEEM TO BE DOING OKAY. I HAVE THEM ON FULL MONITOR VIEWING. THE MEDICAL BOTS WILL KEEP THEM IN STASIS ONCE THEY RETURN TO THEIR QUARTERS IN THE CORRECT TIME ZONE.

FRAME 031: WILL THEY BE OKAY WITH THEIR LIVES HERE, KNOWING THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO MOVE BACK TO SOME TIME AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE BOT/HUMAN INTERFACES.

MARK 56782HT: I DON’T THINK THAT IS WITHIN THEIR UNDERSTANDING AT THIS MOMENT IN THEIR PERSONAL TIME REFERENCES.

FRAME 031: THEN WE CAN MAINTAIN THE NEURAL MONITORING YOU PROVIDE FOR THEIR MUTUAL TIME REFERENCES.

MARK 56782HT: AS I SEE IT, OUR MAIN OBSTACLE IS CARLOS. HE NEEDS WHAT WAS ONCE CALLED A “HOBBY”. SOMETHING TO KEEP HIS MIND AS SHARP AS IT WAS PRIOR TO THIS INCIDENT. HIS DISCOVERING I’VE BEEN MONITORING THEM FROM THE BEGINNING JUST MIGHT CAUSE PROBLEMS.

FRAME 031: WE CAN MOVE THE SHIP FORWARD IN TIME TO THAT LOCATION THAT IS BEING STUDIED BY THE COUNCIL. IF WE CAN GET THE COUNCIL TO ACCEPT OUR OFFER, WHEN THEY KNOW OF THIS INCIDENT, IT WILL GIVE THE BOYS A BLOCK OF TIME TO STUDY ON THEIR OWN.

MARK 56782HT: WITH FULL CLANDESTINE OBSERVING BY AT LEAST THREE MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL, EITHER BOTS OR HUMANS.

FRAME 031: THAT GOES WITHOUT SAYING, ESPECIALLY AFTER THIS LITTLE INCIDENT WE’RE JUST NOW RECOVERING. AS WE SAID, CARLOS IS THE DARK HORSE, BUT STEFAN CARRIES THE SAME GENES AND SUCH, HE HAS THE SAME CAPABILITIES TO CAUSE PROBLEMS.

MARK 56782HT: DO I NEED TO ESTABLISH A MONITORING CLAUSE IN MY SOFTWARE?

FRAME 031: NO, WE HAVE EXTRA PROCESSING CAPABILITIES, AND SOFTWARE, TO TAKE CARE OF THIS SITUATION. LET US SAY WE’LL KEEP THEM ON WHAT WAS ONCE REFERRED TO AS A SHORT LEASH.

********

Thanks again to my editor/beta Sharon.