The Woman Who Died a Lot

The thump was anything but slight—more like seven idiots hitting you repeatedly all over the body with three-day-old baguettes. I felt the suit creak and flex as the variable-mass substrate started to increase its unidirectional mass to offset any dilation gradient outside the suit. Inside the helmet were a few gauges that could viewed from within—one that listed battery power, a second that was marked “External Flux” and was broken, two that just blinked annoyingly and an analogue clock with two second hands—a normal one and a sweep that rotated the dial once a second. There was an identical clock mounted outside the suit, and as soon as we powered up, the clocks started to run out of sync. I gave a thumbs-up to the protesters and was delighted to find I could move a lot easier in the suit than I could outside it, which was something of a relief, as I wouldn’t need my stick.

We waved to our new friends and walked across the road to the chain-link fence. We pushed open the gates and climbed aboard an electric crew cart designed for gravity-suit use. The old car park was covered in dead leaves and other detritus, and as we trundled toward the administrative buildings almost a mile away, the asphalt became older as the dilation gradient became more apparent. The closer we approached the source of the leaking flux, the older the surroundings became. In the two years since the abandonment of the facility, mature trees had grown up through the paving slabs. But the oddness of it all was that from an outside observer the facility had actually aged just two years—it was only as we walked closer did the aging occur. As we moved in, the trees grew and the building decayed, until by the time we reached the front entrance, the paint was mottled and cracked, the woodwork had rotted away, and the internal steel within the concrete had begun to rust, spall and fracture, leaving large areas where the concrete had fallen from the wall. As we stepped off the electric buggy, it almost corroded to dust beneath us.

“The building was only abandoned two years ago,” murmured Friday, sounding a lot like Jane Horrocks, one of the unavoidable consequences of the Tachytalk™ communication system. “It looks as if five decades have passed.”

We walked cautiously past a sign marked WARNING: STEEP _T-_GRADIENT, and the sun suddenly moved faster across the sky.

“I don’t get it,” said Friday. “Are we in the future now?”

“Yes and no,” I replied, once more reinforcing the strange duality of time. “If you equalize your suit,” I explained, pointing to the big red button marked PURGE on his chest, “you’ll stay at the out-suit time. If you walk back up the temporal gradient, we’ll stay on in-suit time. Watch this.”

I stopped, turned around and took a few paces back in the direction we had come. There was a shuddering in the suit, and my skin prickled as I walked up the gradient. I turned back to Friday and asked if he was okay.

He said he was, but I could see that his mouth wasn’t moving when he spoke. I was talking to him as he was now but seeing him as he would be in about thirty seconds. Conversely, he was hearing what I said now but seeing me as I had been half a minute ago. As I watched, he drew a picture on his slate and then showed it to me. It was of an elephant.

“Want to see a neat trick?” I asked.

“Go on, then.”

“Draw something on your slate.”

“Okay.”

I waited a few seconds. “It’s an elephant,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, “that was weird. How did you know?”

I walked back to him, and as I drew closer, I could hear his speech once more creep back into sync with his mouth.

“It’s a simple demonstration of instantaneous communication across a dilation gradient. A lot of the ChronoGuard’s work was done using that very effect. I saw the picture of the elephant after you drew it but spoke to you before you had.”

We stepped inside the main admin block as the sun set, and the internal lights flickered on in the rapidly gathering dusk. Two years before, there had been a staff of over six thousand working here, and everything had been left as it was when the building was abandoned. In one room we saw a map of Stalingrad, and in another was a pile of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Everything was old, decayed, dusty and corroded.

We pushed open some swinging doors marked MAINTENANCE and entered a vast hangar full of large machine parts with overhead cranes. I’d seen something similar in a power station. The C-90 time engines had been a major engineering project.

“I know the time industry was shut down because it was deemed impossible,” said Friday as he looked around at the long abandoned building, “but it seems pretty credible from where I’m standing right now.”

“I don’t think anyone ever truly understood it,” I replied. “What’s all this furniture doing here?”