The Clock That Runs Sideways: Clock Chronicles, #2

By Adam Abels

An exile from a dystopian future is thrown back into the 21st century. A reluctant time traveler, he is determined to avert the catastrophic era that expelled him.  His best chance is a smart, beautiful geneticist.  She may turn out to be an enemy or a lover -- or both. It's a dangerous romance.

His only other ally is a time-shifting stranger who is trying to steer him around multiple disastrous possible futures. The conflict is turning into the exile's personal time war.

 

There are other strangers, crowds of them, some are trying to help him, most are trying to stop him. Dating is  hell when you're a villain, or a hero... depending on the timeline that counts you as part of its history. He manages to recruit  help from  a major corporation by force-evolving a defensive  software system. That same artificial intelligence computer will eventually count as one of his ancestors, since he is partly a product of human design.

 

The initial time anomaly is at an isolated beach on Puget Sound. The  final anomaly is a confrontation in the middle of the Seattle.

 

The well-meaning, time-shifting stranger is barely ahead of the complications. To say nothing of the dog.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. T. Walbridge
• Release date: Jul 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201561208

Adam Abels

Adam Abels is an example of a recently evolved hominid.  He is a  retired biologist who monitors artificial intelligence as it evolves to rise from  artificial stupidity.  He also tracks the evolution of alternate energy generation and  storage.  He suspects that most of those attempts will prove impractical.  Evolution  is blind: it doesn’t know what will work until something does. When in absolute ignorance; try anything. Workable tech will  emerge. The same may be true for social media. Adam has three biological children.  He has zero non-biological children, so far.  Also, a wife, who doesn’t try to run his life. As opposed the array of household  technical devices.  To say nothing of the dog. Never ask Adam what his favorite microbe is.  He’ll tell you at great length. His favorite (rare and endangered) animal is the Pacific Northwest tree octopus. Pandas get far too much attention. Octopuses are more huggy but less furry. Adam writes about near-future technologies and their complications. Mostly about people who misuse the tech.  And the people, and the tech itself,  who are (and which) are fighting back. 

Book preview

The Clock that Runs Sideways

Adam Abels

# # #

1  Exile

The prisoner was not dressed for execution. He was dressed for hiking. Under the soles of his boots was flat native bedrock. It was a surface that had been exposed to weather for millennia. Everything else in the bare concrete room around him was far more recent.  He was at the center of a circle of light.  Shadowless. The native stone pavement was three steps down  from a featureless concrete platform.

He would not be going back up those steps.

The prisoner hitched up the backpack, uneasily tightening the straps.

A chime sounded. He closed his eyes.

A fissure opened:  Not in the rock but in the fabric of time.  The exposed surface of stone shuddered as it resisted being rammed into the future.  As the prisoner was rammed into the past.

The circle of light was empty but for a low swirl of dust.

In an earlier era:

In a forested location remote from known fault lines, there was a monitoring station in a small wooden shed. The mechanism inside detected a microseism, an earth tremor barely above noise level. 

Some distance away:

For the prisoner, light flared beyond his closed eyes and stayed bright.  There was birdsong, and a whisper of distant surf. At the limit of hearing there was the faint growl of a passing container ship. He did not move, a breeze touched his skin. The smell of concrete dust had been replaced by the faint tang of cedar.

If there had been witnesses, they would been startled by the abrupt appearance of a tall broad-shouldered man.  He would not have looked out of place except.... he had not been there seconds ago. 

He had dark hair, a strong jaw, and a grim expression.

Cal opened his eyes to sunlight. The natural pavement he stood on was unchanged—except that it was marginally younger. The oppressive prison that had enclosed  him... would not exist for decades.

Here and now, there was a lighthouse sixty meters directly in front of him, with a building attached. Both looked abandoned. Grass and weeds had taken over the pockets of soil in the cracks at the outer edges of his bare rock landing pad. Far beyond the lighthouse he could see the soft blue of the Salish Sea. He reminded himself that in this era it was still called Puget Sound. He turned slowly to take in the new environment.

Inland from the lighthouse and behind where he had arrived was a line of stunted willows, beyond that a taller evergreen forest.

Moving slowly, he took off the pack and lowered it to the ground, then extracted an archaic wristwatch. He had not been allowed to bring any modern tech.  Even the tracking implant had been extracted. His left glute ached.

A far greater pain was knowing exactly where this present moment in history was headed.  And knowing that there was little he could do about it.

He had not liked his native era. More important: It had not liked him.

The watch connected to the available services and gave him the time and date. He was well and truly exiled. It was July, and he was deep into what he considered historical past. But for now, and for the rest of his life, this era would be his present.

His sole consolation was that he had the beginnings of a plan to extract some satisfaction from those who had ejected him....

It was a longshot.

Later, out on the highway, a bus picked up the backpacker. The driver figured the guy was a newbie hiker because of the overloaded pack and too-new clothes. The bus pass the man tried to use was years out of date so he had to pay cash. Battered bills.

Cal had the smallest  bills in the back pocket of the pack; twenties and below. The ten kilos in the main compartment was bundles of antique hundreds.  Formerly antique, that is.  A million dollars was almost a month’s pay for him, and it was an awkward physical bulk.

The bus was diesel, but Cal had expected that. Once seated he studied his co-riders more than the scenery. The other passengers used a pull cord to signal when they wanted a stop. Eventually he did so himself.

When he dismounted at the ferry terminal there was no catamaran, just the passenger-and-car-hauling ferry. Slow but adequate. He realized this was another one of the changes he would have to adjust to. Living in the past would enforce a slower pace.  He told himself to be grateful for that small favor. But such a meager consolation did not help.  Nothing could weigh against the grief for what he had lost. What had been taken away.

# # #

2  Butterfly Touch

It took him a few days to find an apartment where he could deal with the landlord on a cash basis. But there were other needs that required cash transactions. 

As he stepped off the Seattle city bus his new mobile made an alert noise. He unholstered it. The signal was from an app that kept track of drones.  Typically, drones were consumer toys, but that particular app was popular with privacy fanatics. Cal had the thing set on its low-paranoia level. At the moment it was showing an above-typical number of drones operating nearby.  The app routinely dialed back its own sensitivity during non-work and non-school hours, particularly when the user was near a public park. Those were times and places where drones tended to be out in swarms, with amateur operators at the controls.  Maybe now there were too many of the hobby aircraft in the vicinity. 

The neighborhood was undistinguished city street, low-rise buildings with businesses that fronted on the sidewalks.

There was one business not entirely what it seemed to be.

The small alert sound had made Cal  sharply aware, again, that even the smallest change caused by his presence could cascade forward into major consequences that didn’t exist in his home timeline.  And subsidiary timelines would branch out at every change he introduced. 

He didn’t consider himself paranoid.  But he did have the drone app and several others based on the someone-might-be-watching-me-and-it’s-probably-the-government idea.  It was a popular conspiracy theory.

Walking toward his destination, it was an effort for him not to look toward the sky,  but over the rise and fall of passing traffic he could hear a faint sound like an angry bee.

At this moment in the past of his original, almost-identical, time, this stretch of sidewalk had not had him on it.  But now, the avalanche of events had just begun to divert.

The address on the door was 1229 B. The sign on the window:  Jay Cleaners.

Daniel Jay was a small man, in fact he seemed to try to be inconspicuous. That was cover for  his unofficial and illegal business.  His forgeries that were so good that he

he was not going to be caught for another 21 years. Cal’s pre-exile study of history had told him about  that particular business.

It was a dry cleaning establishment.  Apparently.

Jay silently led Cal through the cluttered back room of the shop to an inconspicuous door that led into a pristine office space with desktop computers and a rack that held a dedicated server. 

Jay gestured Cal to the visitor’s chair then settled himself behind a well-organized  multi-functional desk.

He walked Cal through the process of copying his journal off his current mobile and onto another one. There was little else that was worth saving. Several useful apps were quickly duplicated in the new environment - including the useful-to-paranoids drone detector.  The old mobile stayed on the desk.

After money and documents had changed hands the short man said: When you leave, I don’t know you. More important, my computers don’t know you. I don’t want any of those records hanging around. Neither do my clients.

Cal started to thank him.

The time for gratitude is when the paperwork... works. For example, when you go ‘home’ to Toronto. Not just the passport. For your part, familiarize yourself with your old neighborhood and the list of neighbors and classmates—who will not remember you of course, you must have been  an inconspicuous individual.

Cal’s English had the faint accent that was close to a Canadian Interior dialect.  Daniel Jay had fitted that detail into Cal’s new identity.

This is quite a list, Cal said paging through the file.

That’s so it doesn’t look like a list. It’s printouts of letters from old friends, the ones who stayed in touch.

New ‘old friends.’ Cal commented.

Jay nodded. "You printed them out when you changed computers, not wanting to risk losing them. In fact the originals were lost in the changeover to the new machine

I changed ‘puters, when? 

January.

He had indeed bought his computer in that month. Small and expensive, best available technology—but, to his mind, a clunky antique.

He checked the dates on the letters.  The most recent were Christmas greetings from the preceding December.  He left the folder empty but folded the stack of  letters and fitted them an otherwise empty computer pouch.

On the way out, Jay handed him what he called a plausibility parcel, it was a box that actually contained a dry-cleaned item. 

Six blocks away, the bus stop was just a bench but it had the Seattle-essential roof, for keeping waiting passengers dry. The three other citizens in the momentarily shared space were focused on their phones. So was Cal.  He was monitoring a particular drone. He could look across the street and through a row of trees where it  was moving against the sky.  Then it left, departing in the direction Cal had come from, toward the shop, but was soon back.  Hypothesis: It might be looking for him.

A bus arrived. Not the one he had been waiting for.

He got on anyway.

He found a seat and continued monitoring with the new mobile. The drone seemed to have made up its mind, or maybe it was just a coincidence: It was following the bus from 500 feet up.

If he had taken the right bus and he had gotten off near his apartment—that might give a not-quite-sure drone operator  a stronger indication that the figure it was tracking was indeed Cal.

He stayed with the bus into the midst of downtown, hoping that the buildings, and the local regulations, would discourage whoever was controlling the thing. But it was still following, like a giant bug. He decided that it must have an uncommon communication range and an extreme energy supply.

Near University Avenue Cal stepped off the bus and ducked into the nearest Starbucks. It was an era that seemed to have one of them on every block.

He got in line and ordered coffee.  He had studied that ritual. He paid and,

guardedly