The Woman Who Died a Lot

“There’s a loophole,” said Millon. “So long as they never leave the island of Goliathopolis, they’re quite legal.”

“Why would they have Day Players look like me?”

“A company in-joke most likely,” suggested Millon. “My sources tell me that Day Players have transferable skill adaptations, so you don’t have to teach them everyone’s name again and where the photocopier paper is stored. The technology might have advanced since then to a full Cognitive Transfer System.”

“Say that again?”

He did, and we pondered over the possibility of what a Cognitive Transfer System might potentially mean. At its most complex, eternal life in a series of hosts, and at its least complex a way to carry out potentially fatal repairs inside nuclear reactors.

“Krantz,” said Landen softly, “was probably a Day Player himself. It would explain why he’s down here alive and not up in Goliathopolis dead.”

“When precisely did he die?” I asked.

“Sunday morning.”

I looked at Krantz’s Gravitube ticket, the one I’d found in the Formby Suite.

I thought it over for a moment.

“Okay, how about this: He activates his own Day Player at least an hour before he dies of an aneurysm, so he achieves full consciousness and memory download, then the Day Player catches the midday Gravitube to Clary-Lamarr with five unactivated Synthetics in Tupperware sarcophagi on his baggage manifest. He checks in to the hotel and then activates the first Thursday this morning.”

“How did he know he was going to have a brain aneurysm?” said Millon. “It’s not something you can predict, is it?”

“You have something there.”

“And why is he on holiday in Swindon with five—now four— ersatz Thursdays fresh-packed in Tupperware?”

“You have something there, too,” I conceded. “But what we do know is that somewhere in the city is a Day Player who’s been going for two and a half days out of a maximum three. He’ll probably be in pain and a bit panicky and will certainly be dead by midnight—but he’ll have the answers.”

We all exchanged glances.

“Here’s the plan,” said Landen. “I’ll search hotels, Stig can check out boardinghouses, and Millon can put his ear to the ground. No one could move that amount of Tupperware around the city without arousing suspicions.”

“I don’t know,” said Millon. “This is Swindon, remember.”

“Agreed,” replied Landen, “but ask around nonetheless.”

“And me?” I asked.

“You’re accompanying Friday to his Destiny Aware Support group meeting.”

20. Tuesday: The Destiny Aware

After many years of employing operatives from within only a couple of hundred years around the end of the twentieth century, the ChronoGuard was forced by increased lobbying from the thirtieth and fortieth centuries to broaden its employment criteria. After threats of withdrawing transit rights through their time periods, the thirtieth and fortieth centuries successfully had the ChronoGuard implement an Equal Temporal Employment Policy. The success of this was short-lived, as the service was disbanded a few years later.

Norman Scrunge,

Time Industry Historian

Shazza and Jimmy-G had just finished setting out about a hundred chairs when we turned up, and I wondered just how many ex–potential employees might be coming. Although we knew that the ChronoGuard had employed about three thousand, it wasn’t known how many came from which era, and indeed the covering letter attached to the summaries indicated that the Letters of Destiny were only for the Swindon branch of the timeworkers union.

“This is Friday,” I said, introducing Friday to them both. “Jimmy-G, you would have worked together, and Shazza, you and Friday would have—”

“We know what we would have been. Thank you, Mum.”

They shook hands and looked at one another shyly. In another timeline they would have been lovers and inseparable, but in this one their future was considerably bleaker. Shazza marries a clot named Biff, and Friday spends his life in the slammer. It wasn’t the sort of circumstances in which romance could blossom, really—unless found in the pages of a Farquitt novel, in which case all would doubtless turn out well.

“We would have worked together closely,” said Jimmy-G, giving Friday a warm embrace, “on many exhilarating adventures, apparently.”

“Any idea what?” asked Friday.

“Nothing too specific,” said Jimmy-G, “just that we would.”

“Mine says the same.”

“And mine,” said Shazza, “but I like the idea of being known as the ‘Scourge of the Upper Triassic.’ ”