The Woman Who Died a Lot

“Room 101. Don’t be too harsh with Dr. Chumley. He’s our third shrink in as many years. The last one was taken away in an ambulance. They don’t make them like they used to. Let me give you a visitor’s pass.”

3. Monday: SpecOps

The recent smitings undertaken around the globe have caught many theological analysts by surprise, as this level of apparent interest in mankind’s affairs by the Almighty had not been seen since biblical times. The reason and purpose for the sudden reversion to Old Testamentism have spawned a thousand debates on late-night chat shows, none of which have so far provided a coherent answer. Traditionalists state that it was simply vengeance for sinful behavior, but of the eight confirmed smitings around the planet, only two locations could be described as “sinful,” leading scholars to muse on what being sinful might actually mean in the twenty-first century.

Eugene Plugg,

God, the New Interventionist

I took the lift to the first floor and trod along the familiar corridors. The SO-27 staff had taken other jobs or retired when the Literary Detective unit was disbanded. Victor Analogy had gone one further and was currently embracing his newfound eternity from a sunny corner of Wanborough Cemetery. I’d lost contact with most. Herr Bight had returned to Germany, where he came out in a spectacular fashion as a fantasy author, much to the shock of his classically educated parents. The Forty brothers ran an antiquarian bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, but Jim Finisterre was still local—he was the head of the prestigious Really Ancient Texts department at the locally Sponsored Swindon All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library. Even Bowden Cable, my onetime partner and closest work colleague, had found that running Acme Carpets suited his health better. The worst that could happen was laying an Axminster over someone’s budgie or handing out a refund.

Room 101, I discovered, was sparsely furnished. There was a small desk at which sat a receptionist, and against the wall was a row of hard chairs. On a coffee table were much-thumbed copies of the SpecOps Gazette, and on the wall were posters suggesting various help groups that overstressed SpecOps officers could attend. One was for an Odd Squad support group for those diagnosed with “dimensional fatigue,” and another for SpecOps accountants offered assistance to those who had become dangerously overstimulated by calculating tax exemptions for year-averaged pension deductibles.

I gave my name to the receptionist, and she asked me to take a seat. I said I’d stand, since I could maintain at least a pretense of good health if no one saw me try to get up, but after she said, “Are you sure?” and I’d walked round the office twice, I opted to sit on the windowsill, which was higher and afforded an easier transit to my feet. You learn to adapt.

Once comfortably perched, I looked around, having been in the office a number of times. This had once been the reception for the ChronoGuard, the division that had policed time travel, defending the Standard History Eventline from the rapacious plundering of the temporally mischievous.

Unlike most of the other SpecOps divisions, the ChronoGuard had not been disbanded because of budgetary difficulties. They had been shut down when it was found that the Retro-Deficit Engineering principle couldn’t be applied to time-travel technology. The deficit concept was simple: Use a technology now in the almost-certain knowledge that it will be invented in the future. Nanotechnology works this way, as do the Gravitube, thermos flasks, tachyon data streaming, and the wheel. The reason the concept as applied to Time Travel had once worked but now didn’t was simple: A courageous Time Traveler by the name of “Flipper” O’Malley had upstreamed his way to where time eventually ended and discovered that during that unthinkably vast swath of time no one had actually gotten around to inventing time travel. So with the technology now unsupported by the Retro-Deficit Engineering principle, there was nothing for it but to spool down the C-90 fluxgates and decommission the time engines.