The mystery of the eternal artifact

I was playing the shots when a new case came through. Time to pack the sticks and take the first shuttle to lowtown. I surveyed the facts on the way. A body fresh in, found in the alleyway. Cards in its pockets and threads in its lungs. I shuddered. Joanie died that way. The whole thing made me uncomfortable. I peered at the news over a fellow traveller's shoulder until the klaxon alerted me to my arrival.

Information was sparse. The attendant opened the chiller in morose silence. Okay so it was gruesome, but I've seen worse. Much worse. Her expression read an enigmatic fear. The eyes were dilated and fixed upwards. Beside her was a standard container of artifacts. Mostly the usual stuff; a handful of discs and ciphers, some physical tools. One artifact stood out: a statuette done out in grey. I examined it briefly, before pocketing it whilst the attendant's attentions lingered elsewhere. It looked like a publicity thing. The name of a club was etched on the base. A lead to follow elsewhere, but first I had business here in the post-mortem unit.

"Tell me what you know," I instructed the attendant. He shifted his goggles.

"What I know is nothing more and nothing less than the usual. It's a rare form of mortality but not that rare. Probably a territorial thing. Not that it's my business. If you ask me it's a shame; she came from promising stock."

"That's your business neither."

Sensing my expression he genuflected slightly. "Apologies. By any road, difficult to see what the importance is. No money, no power, no obvious value involved. Just one of those things. Why are you in on this?"

Again not his business, but I indulged him. "Orders from above. Not for me or for you to question. What else do you know? Something about her destination?"

"Scanners were unclear. Her chances were as good as anyone else's I suppose. No previous records of her activities. Benefit of the doubt, perhaps. Wrong place at the wrong time." He sighed. "None of my business, right? See, there's not much I do know. The cadavers are my trade, and hers is like as all others."

I thanked the attendant for his time and expertise and made my way back to the outside. Not much to ponder over, but it was a start. She was uninvolved in criminal activity, but why then this fate? For a while I thought of a time when nobody worried about such things. There was little time for such self-indulgences, though. I retrieved the artifact from my pocket. It was the only solid clue I had. I examined its features more closely. It resembled a human figure, one hand pointed ahead at the sky, the other holding a sphere aloft. I read the base. "Club Balthazar". It was time to go there.

The club was decked out in an ancient style. Flame-topped pillars lined the doorway. I glanced askance at the doorguards. The two of them stared out impassively. I expected to be stopped as I passed through the doors, but it was not to be. Inside, I set off towards the serving bar to ask questions.

Halfway across the club floor I was stricken. I wheeled around, trying to identify the perpetrator, but my vision was blurring. In any case it was immaterial, as I realised the problem was not externally inflicted. I was having an attack. I cursed inwardly. It had been over six months. The only thing to do was ride it out.

A wave of sensations both familiar and unfamiliar. The club, a new environment in itself, seemed multi-dimensional in its newness. Squinting, I observed the varying essences of its patrons. Most of them appeared negative. The standing torches suffused the room with an unearthly glow. The texture of the carpet against my face felt impossibly distant. The ringing in my ears approached a crescendo.

As quickly as it had arrived the attack was over. Standing up, I brushed the dust from my coat. In darkness I glanced around at the crowds. No one had paid attention to my plight. The people, who had seemed so distinct, were now hidden in a haze of smoke, sitting at secluded tables. They spoke to one another in hushed tones, and I heard for the first time the music coming from the ceiling. I returned to my original intention and stepped to the serving bar.

The servant approached me, cloth in hand. "What can I tell you?" he asked.

I showed him the artifact. "Possibly you can tell me about this."

He narrowed his eyes. "I can tell you that it's strictly limited. Where did you happen upon it?"

"That's not your business. Tell me what it portends."

The servant was clearly unexpectant of such an attitude, but backed down. "Sir, that's not for me to tell you. Possibly you should speak to the Persian."

"If you think so, then I should. Where can I see him?"

The servant indicated the doorway to the right of the serving bar. "I can buzz you through."

He did so, pushing a series of buttons out of sight, and the doorway opened. He gestured silently, and I ventured into the corridor beyond. It was plushly decorated, and lit with a reddish ambience. There were three or four doors on each side, and one larger, trapezoidal door at the far end. It was as I was passing one of the doors on the left that the panel adjacent to it spoke out. "Enter," it said.

I pushed the door open and found myself in the Persian's office. Sitting behind a desk was The Persian himself, although how he came by his name was entirely unclear. A small window set high in the back wall allowed in some street light, and this along with the ambience from the corridor was all that lit the office. Consequently, I could make out few details: a plant in one corner, a cabinet, nothing out of the ordinary as far as I could tell.

"Good evening, citizen," he intoned. "Sit down. Have you come far?"

"Quite," I responded, taking a seat. "I was told you could help me."

"Perhaps I can. With what do you require help?"

I produced the artifact and set it upon his desk. "Can you tell me what this is?"

He studied it closely in the half-light. "It's one of ours," he concluded. "I'll not ask how you came by it. From the circumstances of our meeting I surmise that there has been trouble. This concerns me but I will not apologise for it. It is in the nature of things."

I stared darkly. "It belonged to a woman," I informed him.

He sat back. "Well, there it is," he sighed. "It was not meant for her. Somewhere in the process there has been an anomaly, call it human error if you must. What's done is done."

Angered, I leaned forward. "You are not telling me what I wish to know."

"That is as it must be. Do you know why I am called the Persian?"

I shook my head. "No."

He smiled. "That is because it is not for you to know. This place is outside of your meagre jurisdiction. Know only this: that there are patterns in history. This item you bring to me is more than the sum of its parts. It is not the first of its kind. I suggest you leave it with me." Before I could respond, he added: "It could bring you trouble as it did its previous owner."

I scowled at him as I got up. "This is not as it should be," I told him. "Should I find anything else appertaining to this matter, in that instant I will be back at your door. I will not be so patient. Do you understand me?"

The Persian shrugged. "I understand you, but it will do you little good." He held his hands wider. "Please understand that I am not immoral. Blame in this case cannot be assigned to any one party."

I left, ignoring his words. I was sickened by the meeting. My feet took me back to the main room of the club. The taste of the air made me nauseous. Something about the whole place was amiss. Suddenly I realised a voice was hailing me.

It was the bar servant. "Did you get what you needed from the Persian, sir?"

I peered at him with suspicion. "I got what he felt I needed. Tell me, what manner of club is this?"

The barman smiled. "Simply a home for wandering souls, sir. Is there anything else I can tell you?"

"No, thank you." I turned away from him.

As I crossed the floor, heading for the exit door, I sensed again that something was amiss. I felt it in my peripheral vision. Before I was three-quarters across the room it came to me. Things were not as I had first perceived them. The design of the room had changed since I first came through. The standing torches were gone, and instead of carpeting there was a tiled floor. Surely this was an impossibility? Perhaps I had misinterpreted my surroundings during my attack a few minutes before. I tried to remember the exact sensations, but nothing came.

The doorguards again seemed about to stop me as I left, but nothing happened. I stepped out into the streets and vanished amongst the evening traffic.

Was this it, then? Another case leading only to dead ends? Forces were at work, stopping me at every turn. Nothing ever left any traces. Perhaps it was the way of the world now. I rode the shuttle home in silence, sharing my carriage only with a transient who slept across three seats. I peered out of the window at the cityscape. Perhaps it was time to give up. Suddenly very tired, I stretched out and fought sleep for the remainder of the journey.

That night I had a dream. In it, I found myself visiting the fabled city of Camelot. I met with the steward and presented him with the spoils of my quest. He congratulated me, and announced that with this treasure in the archives we need never go hungry. The city of Camelot would prosper for all time, and the age of Enlightenment would drive back the forces of darkness for good. And I was paraded through the city, and I was called a hero. But of course, it was only a dream.

(Annotation: I wrote this last year. I wanted to write something strange, otherworldly and with no discernible meaning. I just now edited it to make some of the speech patterns less jarring. But not much less.)

All the loose ends

1
It was horrible. He stumbled into the room, led by an orderly. Staring me in the face, he radiated a nameless existential terror. From his mouth spewed a series of incoherent exclamations.

"I can't... you... oh god... how can... I... uh... Christmas!? Why did..."

I stared at his face. It was me, all right. He was trembling uncontrollably. Finally he screamed.

"SAY IT!" he bellowed.

"Okay, he's seen enough." MacAllister rested a hand on my shoulder. "Come on," he said, and led me from the room.

2
"This is the dossier," MacAllister said, holding out a hefty file. "It's all in here. The exact times and dates of the attacks, contemporary maps of the locale. You'll be equipped with an outfit before transit."

I stared at the dossier. "How will I get back?" I asked.

"For agents travelling to the far past, there is a one-time use return beacon. You can activate it at any time and it will be detected by our facilities. You will be instantly returned to a point we specify - usually, the day after the initial departure."

"How does it work?"

MacAllister shrugged. "How does a microwave work?" he asked.

"It exploits the resonant frequency of water molecules to generate heat," I answered, even though it was obviously a rhetorical question.

"And our technology exploits the non-linearity of time. But I personally couldn't build one. Or a microwave."

I didn't press the issue any further.

"Now," he continued, "it is imperative that you are careful whilst on the mission. Do nothing to arouse suspicion amongst the locals. Above all, remember that if anything happens to you then you are on your own. We can't help you. There is no guarantee of safety at this point. We won't know if the mission is a success until the moment the return beacon is received, or isn't. If you don't return to that point, we'll know you never lived to activate it."

Hating to ask more questions, I did so anyway. "Why can't you set the beacon to return me to just before I set off? That way you'd know in advance whether to send me."

"Because maybe when you didn't come back it would just be because we never sent you in the first place. Because you didn't come back." MacAllister sighed. "Anyway, we try to avoid overlap because of the psychological implications. You should know all about that. We all know about it."

3
I couldn't find the strength to resist as the orderly led me out of the room. I knew I'd have to wait for MacAllister, as he was still in the other room putting me into the machine more or less against my will. I could see each footfall before I took a step. Everything felt distant.

Eventually MacAllister arrived for the debriefing.

"That was your first experience of time travel. Don't worry, it gets easier."

I opened my mouth to speak, and found that I was crying.

MacAllister tried to look reassuring. "Don't worry. I know it's hard because we've all been through it. But your psych screening tells us that you'll get through it. You would never have got this far otherwise."

I struggled to regain composure. "Why... why..?"

"Why do we do it?" he finished my question. "It's to teach, by example, something about the nature of time travel. What happens when you meet yourself? What you just experienced, that's what.

"You'd have thought, wouldn't you, that the biggest danger of time travel was the creation of a paradox? I don't need to tell you - you kill your own father, you stop an assassination, you change history somehow. Well, that would be the easiest way to do it - to meet yourself. Imagine, you meet yourself and have a conversation. Then you go back in time to have the other half of that conversation, only this time you say something different. A paradox - impossible.

"Only it really is impossible. The only possible outcome of that meeting was exactly what happened. You had no choice but to repeat the same sequence of words you had heard."

I felt sick. "But..."

"Why Christmas?"

"What?"

"You said it, back there. Christmas. Why?"

I stared back at him.

"Because you heard yourself say it. But why that word? What if it had been another word? House. Furrow. Guacamole. You would have had no choice but to parrot it. So who chose what you had to say, if not you?"

"I don't... I don't know."

MacAllister smiled gently. "That's what's you lose in time travel. The illusion of free will. I mean, it was never there. I mean, we all liked to imagine it was. 'Oh, if only I'd done things differently. I could have done this, I could have said that.' Well, you can't. How could you? There's only one possible reality, and that's the one that happens."

4
I was applying for a job in the police force when I got the invitation. They told me my psych evaluations suggested I might be suitable for work in a pioneering branch of forensics. It sounded intriguing, so I put myself forward. It was only as the application progressed that I learned more about the nature of the job. The idea was to use time travel to finally put to bed the great unsolved crimes of the past. Where, even in retrospect, with all the evidence at hand, no one individual could be unambiguously identified as the culprit. As a last resort, armed with the knowledge of where and when the crime took place, we could travel back and witness it for ourselves.

Of course none of it could be stopped from happening, but what a triumph of police work! An end, finally, to the mysteries that had tantalised generations.

5
For a moment, I could see everything. I could witness everything from the dawn of time to the end of the universe. But it was too big to see any details. Once time had regained its linearity, what I had seen became impossible to describe, and after a few seconds I realised I couldn't remember what it had looked like.

6
There were five people on the debriefing board. Dempster, MacAllister, and three others I didn't recognise - one man, two women. Their features were difficult to make out in the dim light.

"Deliver your report," one of them barked.

My throat was dry. "I... I arrived in time to familiarise myself with the area. I tracked down the victim at her house. It... everything was as it was in the dossier. She left the house shortly after eight in the evening... the last time she was seen alive." I paused. "Could I have some water?"

"Continue," Dempster murmured.

"Okay... I tracked the victim to the alleyway where her body was found. She took a shortcut by that route. And I waited at one end, presuming the murderer to be either concealed in the alley or lurking at the other end. My plan was to follow him after the attack until such point as I could make an identification, but..." I trailed off, feeling momentarily breathless. None of this seemed real.

"In your own time." A female voice.

"There... there was no murderer! She just carried on through the alley! And I don't know how, but I thought, no, I've read the file, you die here tonight! And so I ran down the alley after her, and she turned round when she heard me, but she couldn't defend... I mean, I've had all this training..."

It was as though I was watching myself. I felt bad, but I could only recognise this bad feeling inside myself. I couldn't really feel it. I was just reading a script, anyway. I was reading a script the whole time.

MacAllister nodded silently at the man whose face I didn't recognise. "I think we have enough," the unknown man said.

7
"What will happen to me?" I asked MacAllister as we walked down the corridor. "How much trouble am I in?"

"You're not in trouble," he replied. "You weren't responsible for your actions. None of us are."

"But I killed that woman. And I've read the newspaper articles. I've read the books theorising who did it. And it was me."

"Listen," said MacAllister. "You know how many of the crimes we investigate are perpetrated by our agents? It's not all of them, but it's a lot."

"What I don't get," I continued, "is why you had to make me meet myself. To prove a point? What was the point? If I hadn't had to do that, then I wouldn't have this feeling all the time."

MacAllister shrugged. "I don't know why. Why do we do anything? But we had to do it."

"Why was this department set up?"

"Why did you say Christmas? Everything happens for a reason, but it's not for us to know why. How can we? We just play out the role apportioned to us. You should be grateful. At least we have the privilege of knowing how it all works. And that feeling you describe; it never goes away, but eventually you learn to live with it."

I said more words to MacAllister after that, and he said more back. There didn't seem much point, as we both knew what would be said. But we said them anyway.

The thing living under Manchester

As readers will no doubt be aware, there have been great societal benefits in many areas since the introduction of the thing living under Manchester. The thing's introduction three years ago was an unprecedented leap in modern infrastructural integration, made possible by the team of government scientists who spent so many years developing it. Our fair city was chosen as the primary test site, and since then the thing living under Manchester has set an example for all other major urban areas. Several cities have been quick to follow suit. Milton Keynes and Exeter have their own things, Birmingham city centre is home to a pilot thing, and, most notably, our close neighbour Liverpool was a quick adopter.

The thing living under Manchester now extends beyond the outermost suburbs of the city into nearby towns, living in the network of cavities laid three years ago and extended ever since. A branch of the thing goes through every single street, and its tendrils, occupying the spaces where once stood lamp posts, are a familiar sight to all residents. The scientists who developed the thing engineered it to meet many of our civic needs. The street tendrils absorb the sun's rays by day, giving the thing one of its primary sources of energy. During the hours of darkness, these tendrils become bioluminescent, providing plentiful, effectively free street lighting, in addition to attracting moths and other insects which the thing can devour as a secondary energy source. Further to this, a strand of the thing runs through every home in Greater Manchester. As the thing is warm-blooded, this provides an excellent source of central heating without the need for non-renewable fuels. This heating is automated and self-regulating, as the thing of course maintains its body at a temperature comfortable for itself (and thus also for residents.)

As has been explained in a previous release, the recent inconsistencies in service levels are due to the thing living under Liverpool. To be more precise, they arise from the situation brought about by the steady expansion of both things. As more tunnels have been excavated for the things to grow into, they have been gradually approaching one another. Last month, due to an oversight on behalf of the Organic Co-ordination Commission, a connection between the two networks was knocked through by workmen somewhere beneath the M6. The consequences of this action could not have been foreseen, as the genetic blueprint for the thing was not specifically designed to factor for an encounter between two organisms. On the 12th October, the things living under Manchester and Liverpool met, and immediately began tunneling into each other. This endeavour has commanded most of their energies, resulting in diminished street lighting intensities and intermittent domestic heating failures. Sadly, in the short term the situation is going to get worse.

At approximately 6:45pm last night, the thing living under Manchester died. The thing living under Liverpool finally found its heart, located beneath the city centre, and disabled it. Within minutes the city streets were plunged into darkness. The thing's body will shortly return to ambient temperatures, and is already being devoured by its killer. Residents of Manchester and its environs are advised to rely on more old-fashioned heating methods for the time being, and all drivers and pedestrians are counselled to exercise extreme caution when on the streets at night. (The motorways, being lit still by conventional means, are not affected.) In particular, more care than usual should be taken around the dead thing's street tendrils, as there is a chance that some of them may collapse. The council will do its utmost to see that the streets remain clear.

Despite the immediate hardship, there is good news. The thing living under Liverpool is now growing at a record rate. As it eats, it will expand to fill the area left by its predecessor. As the infrastructure is already in place, it should not be long before normal levels of service are restored. For this reason, citizens are asked to continue to separate their biodegradable waste, which will be collected as usual and stockpiled for the time being. They are also asked, in a sense, to welcome the thing living under Liverpool - or perhaps, the thing living under Manchester and Liverpool? Life goes on, and people will continue to enjoy the high standard of living they are used to. The outcome of this situation will be instructive for the OCC, as there are plans to develop further forms of organic infrastructure. It is speculated that a thing living under, say, London, could conceivably take care of additional needs such as CCTV, drainage or transportation. Furthermore, any new creature could be developed to be swifter at replacing its obsolete counterparts as its network is expanded. Indeed, there is no reason why Great Britain's infrastructural needs should not one day be taken care of by a single organism.