The Woman Who Died a Lot

There followed an argument in which the more moderate members of the group thought it insane that anyone would go any closer than the thousand yards we were at present and some other members who thought we should do as we wanted, then a third part of the group who didn’t know what they wanted but just liked to argue.

“Hang on,” said another, who had just noticed that Lori two hundred yards away was now frantically waving a yellow flag. “Gravity wave coming our way.”

And we hurriedly moved to the other side of the road as the wave moved past, bending the shadows cast by the fence as it went and drawing dirt and debris from the road closer to the fence.

“You don’t want to meet the Manchild,” said one protester, whose name was Ken. “He’s—”

“Everyone should know what has happened here,” interrupted another. “If you see him, take a picture so we can use his suffering to advance our own agenda—No, hang on, what I meant was so we can get him the help he deserves.”

The arguing continued with increased vitriol until Friday said, “I would have become the sixth director general of ChronoGuard.”

The protesters all fell silent and looked at one another nervously. When the leader spoke again, it was in a quiet, respectful tone.

“You’re going to need gravity suits.”

28. Wednesday: The Manchild

The D-H 87-B Mobile Localized Temporal Field Generator, colloquially known as a “gravity suit,” was developed and built by Dover-Percival Aerospace, one of the main contractors for ancillary equipment to the time industry. The first suits were introduced in 1938 but were prone to leaks and malfunctions. They could function only at a limit of Dilation .32 and had a limited range due to their clockwork mechanism. Later suits greatly improved upon this, and the D-H114 of 1978 was the last improvement upon the line and could increase the variable-mass substrate to a staggering .88 of the infinite.

Norman Scrunge,

Time Industry Historian

They kept the gravity suits in the abandoned school, and we were measured precisely for size, as an ill-fitting suit could give you “old feet,” which was not recommended. After we were weighed, had our density checked and then our center of balance ascertained by being made to lie on a tilting bed, we were helped into the hardshell suits after first having to remove anything of greater than bone density from our pockets. I’d worn a gravity suit once before, but a long time ago. It was when Dad was still at the ChronoGuard, before the regrettable Sarah Wade stretching incident brought the SO-12 Bring a Child to Work Days to a rapid end.

The suits looked old and worn on the outside but almost brand new on the inside, which was at least some comfort. Friday pointed out that the suits had been built in 1992 and had long surpassed their four-thousand-year design limit, but I simply shrugged. The dilation level inside the facility was a life-frittering D=.31, and if we didn’t wear gravity suits, we’d be lucky to get out within ten months. Once the suits were sealed and tested for leaks, the helmets were latched in place and the power-supply and life-support units placed on our backs.

“Comfortable?” yelled the protester named George.

“Not at all!” I yelled back. “Bloody heavy, in fact—I can hardly move.”

“Totally normal. It’ll weigh less than nothing when they power up. Don’t forget that the Tachytalk™ intercom has a range of only forty-seven seconds, so don’t stray too far from each other. The batteries will give you an hour’s suit time at anything up to D=.5. Skirt any hot spots and you’ll get longer, but don’t venture inside the main engine room—we think it’s at D=.82 in there. You’ll need these.” He handed us each a marker pen and a whiteboard the size of a legal pad. “Okay?”

“Sort of.”

“Good. You’ll feel a slight thump when you flip the switch, but wait until we get to a safe distance, won’t you? Gravity Suits have an eight percent chance of explosive fragmentation on start-up.”

“Nice to know,” I murmured.

Friday and I exchanged glances and smiled nervously at each other.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” he replied, and I turned my backpack toward him so he could switch it on.