Timecaster: Supersymmetry (2 page)

TEV
– Tachyon Emission Visualizer. A timecaster’s viewfinder into the past.

TG
– Transgender.

Timecaster
– A peace officer who uses TEVs to record past events and solve crimes.

Trafficipede
– A ten meter long robotic centipede that issues speeding tickets. Possibly evil.

TTS
– Tesla Taser Satellite.

UFSE
– The universal search application for the intranet, aka
uffsee
and Use the Fucking Search Engine.

USAC
– The United States of America and Canada.+ TTck

Utopeon
– A tax-paying citizen.

Van Damme
– Slang term for a timecaster.

VP
– Virtual Prosecutor.

WTF
– What the heck.

WYSIWYW
– What You See Is What You Want.

Michio Sata blinked
his new eyes twice and initiated the magnification mode, which allowed him to zoom in on the circuitry of his modified tachyon emission visualizer without the need for a microscope. He quickly spotted the problem with the prototype—a burned out capacitor—and pinched out the defective part with a pair of soldering tweezers.

“You said you were gonna give me a hundred duckets.”

Sata stared up at the dissy, but he hadn’t blinked his vision back to normal and was rewarded with an unpleasant close-up of the pores of his nose, which resembled the pitted skin of a strawberry. This man—homeless, jobless, one of the disenfranchised living in Milwaukee’s dissytown slum—had enough blackheads to grease the chain of a biofuel scooter.

“In a moment,” Sata said. “I’m almost finished here.”

The man scratched himself in an unattractive place. Sata made him stand in the corner of his lab; the dissy had an apparent aversion to bathing. Still, the smell wafting over made Sata’s new Peeper 3000s water. Either that or the lubrication nanomotors in his tear ducts were malfunctioning.

“Can I have another sandwich?”

Sata sighed. It was a waste of food, but if feeding him shut him up for a minute there was no real harm. Besides, the dissy wasn’t ever going to get the hundred duckets, so he might as well get something for volunteering.

“Go ahead,” Sata told him. “But don’t touch anything.”

“How am I supposed to make a sandwich without touching anything?”

“Don’t touch anything other than the food and utensils required to make the sandwich.”

“How should I open the refrigerator? With my mouth?”

Sata definitely didn’t want that. The man had a questionable sore on his lower lip, and something hanging from his beard that looked a lot like a rat toe.+

Tthere waset

“Just try to keep it clean,” he said.

“Clean is my middle name,” said the dissy.

As the man left the room, Sata caught sight of the stains on his torn pants and added, “Don’t sit on anything either.”

Sata rubbed his temples. His head hurt. Possibly from the back-alley operation to install his new eyes, less than three hours ago. Possibly from the exhausting, and very disappointing, day he’d had. It had begun with so much promise and potential, and now he was back to square one.

No matter. The prototype would be fully functional soon, and he’d make good on his threat to destroy the earth. And after that, a nice dinner. Possibly Italian.

Or perhaps it made more sense to grab a bite to eat before annihilating the planet. Then he’d have more options.

Sata stood up and walked to his medicine cabinet, taking bottles of aspirin, morphine, and a vial of anabolic steroids, a brand called
Juiced.
The pills went into his mouth. The roids went into a syringe, and he gave each of his twenty-two inch biceps a squirt of several ccs.

“You got any ham?” the dissy called from the kitchen.

Sata winced at the interruption, accidentally poking his arm with the needle an extra time. “I only have what’s in there.”

“What’d you say?”

Louder this time, Sata repeated, “Only what’s there.”

“What flavor is this bologna?”

Sata sighed. “What does it say on the package?”

“Turkey and sweet potatoes.”

“Then it’s turkey and sweet potato flavor.”

“Oh. What flavor is the bread?”

Sata couldn’t wait to send this guy to a parallel universe. “It’s bread flavor.”

He waited for another inane question. When one didn’t come, Sata returned to the TEV. He replaced the capacitor, then put the prism shell back onto the device. Unlike a normal TEV, which allowed a timecaster to view past events in spacetime, this prototype did more. Much more. After losing his other TEV earlier today while falling out of a space elevator, he’d been working non-stop to get this test-version running perfectly. He just needed a few seconds of silence so he could tune in to—

“Is this mayonnaise organic?” the dissy called.

Sata rolled his new eyes. It felt weird doing so, like they were a bit too big for their sockets.

“Does it matter if it’s organic?” he answered, his patience gone. “You’re eighty pounds overweight, missing five teeth, and live in an appliance box next to a dumpster.” Rick Schieve.”

ed to ?” Harry askedet

“Hey, now. No need to be rude.”

Sata stood up, gripping his aluminum shinai. He raised it up over his head and tried to maintain patience until the dissy returned with his sandwich.

The dissy did return, but he was eating from a tub of synthetic chocolate ice cream.

“Sandwich was too much trouble,” he told Sata.

Sata clubbed him over the head with the Kendo sword. The man fell over, unconscious.

Satisfied he’d no longer be interrupted, Sata turned his attention to the TEV. He’d invented the device years ago, and in doing so had changed mankind forever. When used by a peace officer, it could tune in to the fabric of spacetime and record events that occurred in a specific location up to fourteen days previously. Once mankind was able to rewind, violent crime all but disappeared. Legal recreational drugs, plus the knowledge that you couldn’t get away with anything, also lead to a significant reduction in crimes of passion.

After millennia of fighting and conflict, the world was finally a pleasant and safe place to live.

This bored the shit out of Sata. With further brilliant revelations, he learned to tune into spacetime in parallel universes, and then to search these universes and create wormholes to travel back and forth through them.

Infinity tended to make everything a bit less important, when viewed in context. Knowing there were an infinite number of earths, with an infinite number of people on them, meant annihilating a few billion human beings on this planet was really no big deal. In fact, it was the perfect stress reliever.

Closing his new eyes, Sata let his mind stretch. He sensed spacetime around him, and synced his brainwaves with the TEV, reaching the octeract point on the eighth dimension, leaving this membrane and searching the limitless other branes for one in particular. Normally an impossible task, but made simple thanks to a unique search engine—a tweak of UFSE—built into the device.

Sata mentally rattled off the Boolean search terms, found the specific earth where the Chicxulub asteroid never hit the planet 65 million years ago, and opened up a wormhole.

Then he adjusted the focal length of the lens and aimed the device at the unconscious dissy, who, along with the dropped carton of ice cream and a small section of the floor, promptly imploded in a brief flash of light. At least, that’s what it looked like. Technically, it wasn’t an implosion so much as a spaghettification down to a molecular level, preceded by a reforming of matter in the parallel world several nanoseconds sooner. Since tachyons travelled faster than light speed, anyone going through the wormhole actually arrived before they left. This troubled Sata’s sense of logic, but quanta played by its own rules, and logic didn’t apply.

Satisfied the device worked, Sata searched for another earth. Before destroying this world, he had to find his apprentice, Talon Avalon, and feed the bastard his own teeth. Talon was chasing an alternate Talon, who had escaped to his alternate world with the first Talon’s wife. Sata had used Alter-Talon to frame the first Talon, but it all got screwed up andIt’s too late.”atIt’s too late.”G became incredibly convoluted, much like a bad sci-fi novel.

No matter. Sata had a back-up plan. Talon and his wife would suffer, billions would die, and then Sata would grab a bite to eat.

Or maybe eating now was smarter.

Speaking of eating, Sata smiled, thinking about the obnoxious dissy, who was probably in the middle of dinner right now…

• • •

The dissy, whose name wasn’t important because he only had ninety seconds left to live, woke up in the middle of a forest.

He stretched, rubbing the bump on his head while taking in his surroundings. It didn’t look like Milwaukee. While the utopeon section of Milwaukee was full of foliage, it was also full of buildings and streets and people. This forest was just a forest, with nothing manmade as far as his eyes could see.

He tried to remember how he got there, came up blank, and picked up the carton of chocolate ice cream that was on the ground next to him. He was spooning a large scoop into his mouth when he noticed the dinosaur staring from the bushes.

The dinosaur nodded and said, “Hello.”

It was about six feet tall. A biped, with a head like an alligator. It wore what appeared to be aluminum foil pants, and had very long arms that looked out of place on a dinosaur, though the dissy had to admit he’d never seen a dinosaur before so he couldn’t really judge body/arm ratio with any degree of accuracy.

“Hello,” the dissy answered back. “You want some ice cream?”

He offered the dino the carton. The lizard took it, and gave it a sniff.

“Chocolate?” the dino asked.

The dissy nodded. The dino passed it back. “I don’t really like that flavor.”

“What is your favorite flavor?” the dissy asked.

“Cardiovascular.”

“Cardio-
what
?”

“You know. Heart. Veins. That type of thing.”

“Oh.” The dissy scratched his beard and pulled a rat toe out of the scraggly hairs. “Well, sucks to be me, doesn’t it?”

“Seems like you made a lot of bad choices.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

The dinosaur leapt onto the diss
y, its foot talons digging into the man’s abdomen. Its large mouth opened and locked onto the dissy’s chest, tearing out an impressive chunk of ribcage. The next bite ripped out his still-beating heart.

“Oh, yeah.” The dino said, chewing the tough muscle like a big, bloody wad of gum. “That’s the stuff.”

ed to ?” Harry askedet>

When I first became a cop
, I figured I’d chase down murderers and rapists and assorted scumbags and make the city of Chicago a better place to live.

I never imagined someone would invent a device that could record the past, making my job obsolete.

I certainly didn’t imagine someone would then try to use that device to try to erase humanity from the planet, kidnap my wife Vicki, and then drag her through a wormhole into a parallel world.

But then I’m not really an imaginative guy.

I scratched the stubble on my chin and thought about the complicated series of events that lead me to this moment, beginning with…

No, screw that. I had no desire to do any sort of mental recap.

All that mattered was that I just left my earth by stepping through a wormhole created by a specialized tachyon emission visualizer, and I was now on another earth in a parallel universe.

This earth looked a lot like my earth. Seconds ago, I was in the abandoned remains of the Milwaukee Brewing Company. Now, I was still in the Milwaukee Brewing Company, but it was no longer abandoned. This one was brightly lit, sparkling clean, and bustling with people in full white uniforms, moving this way and that way with obvious purpose. I inhaled an exotic scent coming from a gigantic copper kettle, and realized they were actually making real beer.

I’d never had real beer. On my earth, in my universe, the United States of America and Canada was eco-friendly and green. All vegetation was used for either food or biofuel, and recreational uses were illegal. Our beer was synthetic, and tasted like ass sweat filtered through gym socks. If people wanted to get buzzed, they took drugs, or alcohol pills.

While trying beer would have normally been a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I wasn’t here on vacation. An alternate version of me had fled here with my wife, and I was determined to get her back.

I looked around the busy brewery for any sign of Alter-Talon and Vicki. All I saw were white uniformed figures hauling equipment, lugging thick hoses, squeegeeing the floor, and performing other mundane tasks. I ran to the nearest worker and grabbed his shoulder.

It didn’t feel like a shoulder at all, and my palm made a clanging sound.

The man spun to look at me, but he wasn’t a man. He had cameras for eyes, and a mesh speaker where a mouth would be.

A robot. Cool.

We had robots on my earth, but they weren’t this advanced. Twenty years ago, the government passed a law limiting robot ownership and prohibiting advancement in robotic technology. This came after the infamous VacuuMassacre; a faulty shipment of CarpetBuddy automatic floor vacuums were programmed incorrectly and mistook organic tissue for dirt. Thousands of people were minced and sucked up. Tens of thousands lost limbs. The number of pets killed in the tragedy was incalculable. It didn’t do much for CarpetBuddy stock, either. applause.

&Bci anymoreI pu

“I’m looking for a man and a woman who just ran through here,” I said to the bot.

I watched the cameras in his eyes zoom in and focus on me.