“I’d like to stay another week, please. Is that possible?”
“Certainly, sir,” said the man at the desk. “Do we have your credit card on file?”
“No, I’ll be paying cash,” said Auron, and he handed the man four hundred and twenty pounds.
Outside, the weather was surprisingly warm for May. He took the list from his pocket, written out on hotel notepaper.
“I’m on New Lane, facing south, next to a substation. Which way’s this electronics shop?”
“Head south, third right,” said Jor.
It was early afternoon by the time Auron got back to the hotel carrying two bags full of equipment. He’d burned through another £500 and only had £2000 left. But he wouldn’t need much of that last £2000, he thought.
He began work immediately, following Jor’s instructions.
“Could do with some music,” he commented.
“Try the TV,” Jor suggested.
The TV was full of news about tensions between the USA, Russia and China. The UK seemed to be mixed up in it too somehow. In 28 years the tensions would lead to a nuclear war, but for now, the Earth was safe.
“Britain may be small but she causes a lot of trouble,” said Auron. “Why do British news readers always sound chronically depressed? I’ve never understood it. No-one talks like that outside of British TV news. They must practice sounding depressed.”
No music to Auron’s liking was to be found on the TV, so he quickly gave up, making a mental note to buy a radio.
The backbone of the device was going to be a small camera tripod he’d purchased, and around that, several coils had to be fixed, and devices made from empty food cans containing various liquids. He’d bought project boxes for the electronics. He also had a soldering iron, the cheapest oscilloscope he’d been able to find, and a camping stove and saucepan for boiling up chemicals.
His hotel room looked like a mad scientist had taken up residence in it.
“I’m not going to get interrupted by the cleaners, am I?” he said to Jor as he worked.
“Unlikely,” Jor replied. “They probably came in the morning. But hang a ‘do not disturb’ sign outside your door if there’s one available.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” said Auron.
By the evening it was already almost finished. He went downstairs and ordered a meal to celebrate. Steak, potatoes, a side-order of vegetables, and half a litre of wine. All the walking about had given him an appetite.
The t-shirt, jeans and trainers he’d bought did the trick. No-one paid him any attention now. He looked like an ordinary Englishman from England in 2006.
When he’d finished eating, he was sleepy and he decided to finish the device tomorrow. There was no hurry. He was way ahead of schedule.
He flicked through the TV channels with an ironic detachment. It was more than fifty years since he’d seen anything like any of it, and he saw it all through eyes that were fresh in one way, but old and cynical in another. The TV represented the business of a culture rapidly heading towards total disaster, completely oblivious to the fate that awaited it.
The following morning he awoke late and ate breakfast downstairs.
Then he returned to work.
He hooked up the power module and ran through a few tests. Everything was connected correctly; everything was working. Finally, halfway through the morning, he flicked a pleasantly retro metal switch he’d found in the electronics hobby store.
“OK, we’re live. Jor, can you connect to it?”
“Got it, Auron,” Jor replied.
“Great,” said Auron, springing to his feet with a smile. “Let me think for a second. I know, make me a credit card. Connect it to a bank account with about a million in it.”
He waited expectantly, but instead of the hoped-for result, Jor announced, “It doesn’t work, Auron.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, mate.”
“Can’t you run some diagnostics?”
“I can connect to the signal but that’s all I can do.”
“You can’t even see it?”
“No.”
“Can you see the room?”
“It’s not working at all, Auron. I can connect to it, and that’s all I can do with it.”
Auron swore.
“I’m going to have to check the thing again.”
Over the following three days, Auron checked every aspect of the machine meticulously.
On the morning of the fourth day, the maid insisted on entering the room to clean it, perhaps prompted by hotel management.
The maid was a woman of perhaps thirty years, with a nose ring and short blonde hair deliberately cut in a slightly uneven style.
“Well this is new,” she said, eyeing Auron’s contraption.
“I’m in the middle of some research,” said Auron, offering what he wrongly imagined to be a reasonable explanation.
“I’ll just change the bedsheets and I’ll be out of your hair in ten minutes,” said the maid.
After she left, Auron felt profoundly unsettled.
“Jor, why doesn’t the thing work? I should be out of here by now, not dealing with maids. What if the manager gets upset about my soldering?”
“Impossible to say. It should work. We could try a completely different design.”
“There’s nothing else for it. I’ve been over and over this one and there’s nothing wrong with it. Are you sure you’ve not made some mistake?”
“Completely sure. Something must be blocking it.”
“What could possibly be blocking it?”
“I don’t know. It makes no sense.”
Yet again Auron went out into the town, buying parts for a redesigned matter interactor.
He was emerging from a cafe, where he’d eaten a dry, borderline inedible croissant for lunch, when he froze.
There, walking down the other side of the street, was Jer. Auron’s self-imposed moral debt to Jer had motivated his travelling backwards in time to the England of 2006 more than the idea of preventing a future nuclear war, and here was Jer himself, large as life, not suspecting in the least than in three years Auron’s experiments would maroon him on an alien planet.
For a second he almost decided to talk to him, with the idea of warning him, but then, he reflected on the fact that he, Auron, couldn’t ever hope to return home to Frith unless he successfully built an interactor; that would take time, and it would amount to the same thing whether he warned Jer now or in three years.
Warning him closer to the time had the additional benefit of potentially having a somewhat lower impact on the future. That way, Auron 2, the version of himself who had not travelled through time, would still develop his hyper-intelligent Sirius machine, whereas if he were to try to intervene now, who knows how the future might pan out.
Then there was the faint possibility that trying to change the future at all would result in his death. After all, nothing he had done so far was incompatible with the future that he had already lived. Once he tried to alter the known and documented future, that would change.
“Jor,” he said quietly to the device in his pocket, “it’s Jer.”
“He could help you,” said Jor. “You could explain everything to him and then he could explain the situation to Auron 2. Then you wouldn’t be tackling the whole thing alone.”
“Yes but I might die if I talk to either of them.”
“You’ll have to face it eventually. It’s a remote possibility.”
Jer walked off down the street and turned a corner.
“Not yet,” said Auron.
Back at the hotel he laid black bin bags over the carpet to protect it and began dissolving ferrous sulphate purchased from a garden centre in warm water, heated on the camping stove. An unpleasant metallic odour filled the air, but there was nothing to be done. The new alternate design required electrodes immersed in ferrous sulphate solution.
Seeing Jer had thrown him mentally off-balance. His focus wasn’t sharp, and perhaps that’s why he accidentally knocked over a jar of solution. The liquid quickly created a greenish stain on the carpet, leaking around and under the bin liners.
“Dammit Jor, I’ve spilt ferrous sulphate all over the carpet.”
“Don’t worry about it. You can hide it with a suitcase. Once we’ve got the interactor working, I can easily remove it.”
“Yes,” said Auron, sighing shakily. “Yes, you’re right. Not the end of the world. I’ll make a new batch.”
By the following day the stain had turned brown and rusty, and the air smelt so strongly of iron that the air in the room was hard to endure, at least for anyone of a sensitive disposition, and Auron was in possession of a sensitive disposition.
Fortunately the maid didn’t return, with the “do not disturb” notice hanging outside on the doorhandle.
Unfortunately, the device still didn’t work.
“What am I going to do, Jor? How can it possibly be that this one doesn’t work either? There’s something really fundamental that I’m missing here. Is it you? Have you lost the plot?”
“If I had lost the plot I wouldn’t know, would I? So it’s pointless asking me.”
“At this rate I’m going to run out of money in two weeks.”
“You could try surrounding the apparatus with a Faraday cage.”
“In a hotel room? How am I going to do that?”
“I suggest buying a dome tent, then fixing wire mesh between the outer tent and the inner lining. Put the entire apparatus in that.”
“Will that work?”
“Hard to say.”
Left with little apparent alternative, Auron went off to buy a tent.
In theory he was mere days away from once again possessing unfathomable wealth and power, yet the brute fact of it was that he was in danger of being ejected from his hotel room and having to live on the streets. He would be forced to rely on what few friends he had; an idea anathema to him, and carrying the risk of potentially interfering with the future too much, with unknown and unpredictable consequences.
He bought a dome tent and, thinking ahead to the possibility that he might have to suddenly clear everything out of the hotel room, a rucksack to go with it. From a hardware shop he was able to obtain steel mesh. These, he took back to the hotel, where he erected the tent and began fixing up the steel mesh around the inner lining.
He’d almost finished the task when there was a knock on the door.
Once again he froze, this time in nervous fear.
“Jor, who do you think that is?” he whispered.
“Cleaner?”
“It can’t be the cleaner; they always say who they are if they’re the cleaner.”
“I don’t know.”
He swore under his breath.
There was another knock.
Reluctantly he got up to answer it. He opened the door as little as possible, consistent with being able to actually communicate with whoever was outside.
As it happened, a young man in a blue shirt was standing there.
“Hello sir, I’m the manager. Sorry to bother you but we’ve had complaints about a strange odour coming from your room.”
The manager sniffed.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Auron. “I uh, it’s just …. well, it’s just something burst open. In my luggage. I’m going to take it to a laundry. Nothing to worry about.”
“Would you mind if I take a quick look in your room, sir, just to check everything’s all right?”
Something told him the manager wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
He sighed involuntarily, not even realising that he was sighing.
“OK,” he said, and he opened the door all the way.
The manager’s face registered surprise at the contents of the room.
On the little brown desk at the side, on top of a silicon mat, was a soldering iron and various electronic parts.
On the floor was the dome tent, with the roll of steel mesh lying halfway out of it. Some pieces of mesh were lying on the carpet next to it.
Next to that stood Auron’s two failed matter interactor devices, both constructed around small camera tripods and both resembling miniature versions of something that might typically be found on top of a hill for the purposes of transmitting mobile phone or radio signals.
The manager seemed to be pondering the situation. Eventually he said, “I’m sorry sir, we don’t allow the use of tools in the rooms.”
He nodded at the soldering iron.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Auron. “I didn’t know.”
“There’s a very strong odour in here.”
Fortunately the tent was covering the large rusty stain on the carpet, but the stain still smelt strongly of metal.
“It’s just my luggage. Like I said, I had a spillage.”
“Well, if you would take care of those two issues, sir, I’d be grateful.”
“I will. OK. I’ll sort them out.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the manager as he left.
After he’d shut the door, Auron said, “Jor, what do I do? They won’t let me solder things in here.”
“Go to a different hotel, mate. Go to the cheapest hotel you can find. Somewhere a bit dodgy. That way the walls and furniture will probably be a bit messed up anyway, so it’ll matter less if you mess them up more. They’ll be less likely to notice.”
“Good suggestion. Do you know where I can find a cheap hotel?”
“2006 hotel prices aren’t included in any of my datasets. I suggest checking an internet cafe.”
“Internet cafes. Yes. They have those in 2006.”
An hour later Auron had everything he owned packed into a rucksack on his back, including the tent and the two interactors, which he’d folded up and partially disassembled. He checked out of the hotel, located a hotel that charged only £40 per night, and checked into that.
Inside his new room, the paint was flaking slightly off the walls, and there were strange brown stains on the floor of the shower, but the room was big enough to put up his tent and there was still space left over on the floor to do any necessary soldering.
The following morning he bought a coffee at a nearby cafe and then, back in his room, ate a breakfast of bread and little foil-wrapped cheese triangles, which he’d discovered did not require refrigeration.
“It’s actually quite a relief to get rid of that smell,” he said to Jor.
Then his phone rang. The phone was a cheap Nokia with a pay-as-you go SIM that hadn’t required any type of ID to set up.
It was the manager from the previous hotel.
When Auron finished talking to him he was shaking slightly.
“Jor, they want £350 for the damaged carpet! I’m running out of money fast, here!”
“Don’t sweat it. Pay it and move on. Soon you’ll be rich.”
“Will I though? We don’t know why the interactors don’t work!”
“We’ll work it out somehow.”
“I’m down to £1500 if I pay it!”
“Don’t think about it. Push it to the back of your mind. You’ve got enough money for at least a few more weeks. Let’s work on the interactor now. If it works, that’ll ease your worries.”
Over the course of the morning, Auron reassembled both interactors and set them up inside the tent, with the Faraday shielding in place.
Still neither of them worked.
Auron spent two weeks in the cheap, rather horrible hotel, trying to fix the interactors. He let the cleaners in every three days, packing everything away in order to maintain an appearance of normality. The business of packing up and then reassembling the interactors, he was able to get down to an hour and a half. Whenever he had to deal with the ferrous sulphate, he did everything in the shower, which already smelled vaguely of rust and mould in any case.
By the end of two weeks, with hotel bills, food and parts, he was down to around £500. Clearly, he was soon going to run out of money altogether.
“I need to understand how these things actually work, reduce them to basic principle and find out where the actual problem lies,” he said to Jor, striding around the hotel room almost tearing his hair out.
“You’re going to run out of money,” Jor observed. “We’ll have to figure something out.”
“But what?”
“You could cut the hotel bills to zero by living in the tent. A sleeping bag could be bought for under a hundred. Then you could probably live for a month on the remaining cash. That might be enough time to get everything working.”
“Where am I going to pitch the tent? I can’t use a campsite. I’d be too conspicuous.”
“There’s a woodland to the north-east. You could conceal the tent in some bushes.”
Auron ran his hand over his face and rubbed his eyes.
“I’ve no choice.”
“The other option is asking your friends for help.”
“We’ll keep that as the fallback option. I’m going to start packing everything up.”
It was mid-afternoon by the time he’d finished. The woodland Jor proposed as his new base was five miles from the centre of York. He paid the hotel bill and set off, enough food for three days in his rucksack together with a newly-purchased sleeping bag and a machete he’d found at an army surplus store, which he thought might be useful for chopping out some space inside a bush somewhere.
He held Jor up to his ear, pretending the little computer was a phone, and talked with it as he walked.
“This is ridiculous, Jor. Why didn’t I just transport equipment and fake money ahead of me before coming here?”
“You didn’t know you’d lose the diamonds. Anyway, you didn’t have precise control over where anything you transported would actually land.”
“I could have put a homing beacon in it and taken a tracker with me.”
“Not enough baggage allowance for the tracker.”
“I could have had it connect to the phone network and phone me.”
“You didn’t know what your number was going to be.”
“Dammit, I’m sure there would have been some way to do it.”
“Probably.”
“Jor, how intelligent are you, actually? I mean, in terms of IQ?”
“It’s impossible to compare my intelligence with human intelligence, Auron.”
“Of course it is. Of course it is.”
At that moment, he suddenly heard footsteps running behind him. A hand grabbed Jor and ran off.
He turned to see a teenager running like the wind, carrying Jor.
“Hey!” he shouted, but the teenager had already vanished around the corner of the street.
A cold, horrible feeling seemed to grasp his insides.
“It’s OK,” he said to himself. “I can always fall back on Auron 2 or Jer or Viktor. They’d help me. It’s not the end of the world. It’s all going to be OK.”
He continued trudging on towards the woods.
Once there, after stopping to eat a light lunch, he located a elder bush and found he could quite easily push his way under its branches. After hacking a few off with the machete, there was just about enough space for the tent.
He heaped up thin leafy branches and bracken on the ground, since he didn’t have a mat, and put up the tent over the top of it.
When he’d finished, he lay in the sleeping bag. It was uncomfortable, but endurable.
The next stage of his plan involved buying a car battery to use as a power source. But as he thought it all through, he realised he wasn’t going to have enough money to buy everything he ideally needed, even if he could get Jor back. Ideally, he needed a portable soldering iron and at least a multimeter that could run off batteries. But all that was academic without Jor.
“I am so screwed,” he muttered to himself.
Then he heard the sound of drops of water falling on the outside of his tent, accompanied by the swelling noise of a rainstorm taking place outside. Larger and larger drops began to make their way through the bush and fall on his tent with increasing frequency.
Then the sky began to thunder.
“A few weeks ago I was the emperor of a planet,” he said miserably. “Now I’m homeless and alone and soon I won’t be able to afford to eat.”
He began to sink steadily into complete misery.
Clearly, mistakes had been made. He had come to depend on Jor completely, and Jor was gone. Without Jor, building an interactor was pointless. The purpose of the interactor was to allow Jor to interact with the physical universe.
On the upside, he vaguely remembered telling Jor that, in the event of him falling into someone else’s hands, he must devote himself to getting himself safely returned. But would Jor even manage it, assuming he really had given Jor those instructions? All Jor could do now was speak. There had to be limits even to Jor’s persuasiveness.
There was nothing to do but listen miserably to the sound of the rain and the thunder.
In the worst case he would seek out Jer, and swear him to secrecy in the hope of disrupting the future as little as possible. The future would eventually have to be disrupted if the accident and subsequent nuclear war were to be prevented, but not yet.
In the morning he awoke early, grey sunlight already illuminating the sides of his tent.
He made a coffee on his camping stove, using the same pan he’d previously mixed ferrous sulphate in. He’d washed it thoroughly, but the coffee still tasted faintly metallic. Hopefully there wasn’t enough iron in the coffee to kill him, he thought. He recalled from somewhere that death by iron poisoning was horrendously slow and painful, the iron salt eating through the stomach walls.
When he unzipped the tent a considerably quantity of water dripped off the tent flaps. He went outside and crawled out from under the bush, getting somewhat wet in the process.
The bush was on the edge of a small woodland. He was surrounded by trees. The air smelt of damp leaves and soil, and birds were singing in the treetops.
Occasionally a cuckoo called out, and from time to time he heard a woodpecker tapping away at rotten wood.
He took a bite from a piece of bread and chewed contemplatively.
During the course of the morning he fiddled with the interactors a bit and still couldn’t find anything wrong with them. He’d already been over both of them extensively, and without a power source, it was difficult to find anything else to do with them.
Then he went for a walk around the field next to the woods, and it struck him that he had no way of really cleaning himself.
“Jor, how am I going to keep myself clean?” he said.
Then he remembered, with a painful twinge more appropriate to the loss of a friend or even a partner, that Jor was gone.
“Dammit,” he said to himself.
Then he went to explore the woodland. There was a stream running through it, but probably not suitable for drinking without purification. Whether washing in it would be safe, was unclear.
Around lunchtime he ate more bread and cheese in his tent. He was already getting very tired of bread and cheese. He considered going into town and buying some apples and tinned food.
How would he even wash the apples?
This thought caused him to lapse into despair and he lay in his uncomfortable sleeping bag, reflecting on his situation.
Auron had spent thirty years fighting off giant predatory crabs, and yet now, even the thought of not being able to wash apples reduced him almost to tears.
Then an idea came to him. There was still a way to dramatically improve the situation, even without working interactors.
If he could only get Jor back. He would need Jor.
But there was no way to get Jor back. He hadn’t even seen the face of the boy who’d stolen Jor.
Eventually he decided to go into town and drink a coffee in a cafe just to cheer himself up.
The town was quite a walk but he needed to pass the time somehow anyway. Soon he was sitting in a cafe looking out of the window, drinking a coffee that had cost him as much as he was ideally hoping to spend on food every day in total.
His thoughts turned to the man who had accosted him in the cafe when he’d first arrived in York. The man knew his name, and knew he was an emperor. But who was he?
He’d never seen the man on Frith. And yet, the man knew about Frith. He must have known. How was it possible? The problem seemed insoluble.
The caffeine made him feel more optimistic at least. He decided to order a swirly pastry with raisins in it, and another coffee.
Then he went and sat at a table and leafed through a magazine someone had left behind.
The magazine had only articles that were of little interest to him, about the Royal Family, and various celebrities. The magazine brought back memories, albeit not especially good memories. The names were still, for the most part, familiar to him, even after more than fifty years away from England and fifty years away from 2006, and even though he’d never taken an interest in these people to start with.
The irony and strangeness of his situation brought a smile to his lips.
He looked up and saw a young woman staring directly at him, also smiling. For a second he was transfixed by her beauty. She was, he thought, the kind of girl he would have liked to have been with if he hadn’t spent his life working on abstruse computer systems before accidentally marooning himself on an alien planet.
Then he suddenly felt embarrassed and self-conscious and he looked down at the magazine again.
He must look a total mess. She couldn’t possibly be interested in him. Could she?
But this was no time to be looking for romance. In any case, he thought, he was technically more than eighty years old. He’d lost track of his precise age, and Jor wasn’t there to ask. Biologically he was currently around 25 years of age and the machines had made even his brain young and flexible again. Perhaps too flexible. On the other hand, he had seen eighty years of life. He had grown to be sixty years old, thirty years of which he’d spent on Frith before he’d made the place civilised, and he’d spent another twenty years mostly alone with his dog Freddie, try to resurrect Jer.
From that point of view, he was indeed an old man, and the girl was—how old? Perhaps twenty-three. An eighty-year-old with a twenty-three year old? No, it was obscene and disgusting. But was he really eighty years old? How should he view himself now?
The question was academic, since he clearly wasn’t going to talk to her. Inside, he was the same old Auron, even though he had spent twenty years as an emperor, in theory. People, and talking to them, wasn’t his thing.
Then, when he remembered his actual situation, alone, friendless and running out of money, and a knife seemed to twist in his stomach. Everything depended now on Jor somehow coming back to him. Without Jor, what would he do? Who would really believe his story? What was even going to happen when he finally tackled Auron 2 about the problems he was getting himself into, and the future war? Would he disappear in a puff of smoke? Would Frith, the only place he now truly felt somewhat at home, cease to exist?
The smile on his face turned to a frown.
In the future that he had lived in for fifty years, he and Jer had been marooned on an alien planet, and a nuclear war had occurred on the Earth. He and many other people had lived through that future, and without it, he could not have returned to 2006. How could that future now be changed? What would happen if he did change it?
And how, for that matter, was it possible that he was now back in 2006? Was this the same 2006 that had originally existed, or another one? Had this 2006 always existed, even long after it had come and gone?
What if the Novikov self-consistency principle was correct, and there could only ever be one version of the past? Had he, Auron, always been in this cafe at this point in time, even when 2006 had happened the first time around? And if so, why had he failed to prevent the accident and the war? Was he about to face some dreadful fate that would prevent him achieving his aims? Was it, in reality, somehow impossible to stop the sequence of events that was about to unfold, that had always unfolded?
None of it really made any sense.
The more he thought about it, the more miserable he felt. He began to feel positively nauseous.
Then the door of the cafe opened and a tough-looking man came in, leading a boy by his arm. The boy seemed to recognise him.
A fresh shot of adrenalin made its way into his bloodstream.
What was this now? Who were they? Should he run?
The man looked like the type of man who starts fights. No, worse than that. He looked like the type of man who murdered people for a living, and the boy not much better.
Were they about to kill him? That would certainly explain why he might be unable to prevent the accident.
He looked behind himself to see who was there. No-one. It was really him, Auron, that they wanted. They walked up to the table.
“Sir, I’m so sorry,” said the man, apparently so nervous that he could hardly speak. “My son stole this from you. We searched the entire town looking for you. We want to apologise, very sincerely.”
He took Jor out of his pocket and put it on the table.
“Apologise, Kevin!” he said, gruffly.
“I-I’m really sorry for stealing your thing,” said Kevin, stammering. “Please don’t hurt my father.”
“We’d like to give you this,” said the man, and he placed a wad of bills on the table. “It’s a thousand pounds.It’s all we’ve got. I-I know it’s not much. It’s just a token of how sorry we are.”
Auron was staring at them, speechless. He really couldn’t think what to say, but Jor was a welcome sight.
Suddenly Jor spoke.
“You have disturbed Mr. S. enough now.” he said, in a voice quite unlike his usual voice, low and filled with menace. “Go.”
The man began to pull his son away.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again.
Kevin resisted being pulled.
“Please Mr. S, I have to know if you accept our apology. I’ll do anything to make amends. I really will. I-I could work for you.”
There were tears in the boy’s eyes.
“I accept your apology,” said Auron, so baffled that his voice came out like a horse whisper.
“Oh thank you, sir, thank you so much.” said Kevin.
“Thank you,” said Kevin’s father. “We’re so sorry. Thank you.”
He pulled Kevin away, and they rushed out of the cafe as quickly as possible, not looking back again.
“Jor,” said Auron slowly, “what the hell was all that about?”
“I convinced them you’re an extremely dangerous spy who’s posing as a homeless person, and their only chance of avoiding being tortured and killed was to return me to you and beg for mercy.”
Auron began to laugh.
“Good Heavens,” he said, “don’t you think you went a bit overboard?”
“Not really. We’re in the middle of trying to stop a war here.”
Auron wiped tears of relief from his eyes.
“What now?” asked Jor. “Shall we carry on with the interactors?”
“I’ve got a better idea. A much better idea. Jor, how exactly do you communicate with the interactors?”
“Via radio waves. Apart from sound waves, it’s the only way I can interact with the outside world.”
“Then can’t you connect yourself to the internet? Even this place has wifi.”
“No, wrong frequency.”
“All right then, we’re going to build a device that will enable you to connect. How about that? How long would that take?”
“It’s an afternoon’s work at the most.”
“Let’s get cracking then.”
Auron left the cafe with a new spring in his step. The girl caught his eye again as he walked past her, but he had already convinced himself that she couldn’t possibly be attracted to him. Or had she witnessed what had happened with Kevin and his father? Perhaps she was strangely attracted to sinister figures; the kind of sinister figure that Jor had made him out to be. He pushed the idea quickly out of his mind. He had work to do. This was no time to let his biologically 25-year-old brain derail his plans with pointless thoughts of girls.
With the money the man had given him, he checked into a rather expensive hotel. Then he took a taxi to the nearest location to his tent that the taxi could reach. Once there, he packed everything up and walked back to the hotel.
He spent the entire night working on his new device, ordering endless coffees and snacks from the 24-hour room service.
By the time the sun began to straddle the horizon, it was ready, and Jor was connected to the hotel’s wifi network via a device that fitted entirely into a project box not much bigger than a mobile phone.
“I hope you’re up to this, Jor,” he said. “I want you to create a fake identify for me. I shall call myself —” he thought for a second “—Aaron Black. I want you to hack blogs and social networks and create profiles for me stretching back up to five years, if any have been around that long. More importantly, I want to be fully registered wherever necessary as a British citizen. Arrange to send a passport urgently to this hotel. Wait, before you start on that, open a bank account and do some stock market trades or something till it’s got a couple of million in it. What do you think? Can you do it?”
“Of course I can, mate. Trivial.”
“How long will it take?”
“I reckon I can arrange it all by tomorrow.”
Auron raised his eyes to the sun that was starting to stream in through the open curtains.
“Good,” he said. “Oh, I’ll need a driver’s licence as well. I’m going to sleep now.”
He hung the hotel’s do-not-disturb notice outside his door. Then he got into bed.
His mind was buzzing too much to actually sleep, he soon realised. He got up and took a bath. His hotel room had a rather fine bathroom.
Afterwards he finally felt tired, and he slept soundly till early afternoon.
After a late lunch he bought some new clothes and a handful of books, and spent most of the rest of the day reading, his mind only half-on the books. He couldn’t help but think about what he was going to do if his plan worked.
The following day he was sitting eating breakfast in the hotel when one of the people staffing the front desk came to find him, informing him that there were courier deliveries for him.
He opened them at his table.
There was a passport with his photo in it, under the name Aaron Black. There was also a bank card, a gold credit card, and some details about his new bank account. A further envelope contained details of his apparently rather-extensive, if very new, trading operations. There was also a driving licence, some pin codes, and various other things.
Whatever Jor had done, it had evidently succeeded, and with astonishing rapidity.
Auron walked out of the hotel a new man, with a spring in his step.
The first thing he did was to go to a branch of the bank where his account was apparently held, and ask to withdraw £5,000.
As soon as he identified himself, the manager appeared and ushered him into his office, then began trying to interest him in investment opportunities. These he politely declined. The manager produced Auron’s money and informed him that he would be at Auron’s beck and call at any time, and Auron was only to walk into his office whenever he wanted.
Evidently, the money in his new bank account was real. He got into a taxi and told the taxi driver to take him to the nicest car showroom in York.
There he bought a car, paying by credit card, picking a top-of-the-range Audi. Not too flashy, and very adequate.
Finally, he bought a house. The estate agent had warned him the process would take several weeks, but after greasing the estate agent’s palm with a few thousand pounds and having Jor quietly arrange a few things, he received the assurance that the house would be ready the following day.
He spent the evening driving his new car around and talking to Jor about the many possibilities that were now open to him.
“We have to get an interactor working,” he told Jor. “We’ll break it right down to basic principles. I want to understand how these things actually work. We need to check every step and find the problem.”
As he drove, illuminating quiet country lanes with powerful headlights, Jor began to explain the theory of how the matter interactors worked, in terms a human being could actually understand, although it quickly became apparent that diagrams and equations were going to be necessary. Even so, Auron had Jor explain as much as could usefully be understood while driving a car.
The following day, after sleeping very soundly at the hotel, he drove to his new house, where the estate agent met him.
The house he’d chosen was a kind of mansion, high on a hill, surrounded by a large garden with an old iron fence around it. A well-maintained gravel path led to the door.
“I can show you around it if you like,” said the estate agent.
“That’s not necessary,” Auron replied. “Thank you.”
“Well, enjoy. Let us know if we can do anything else for you.”
Auron stepped into the interior of the house. Twin staircases led to the upper floor. Several large green rubber plants had evidently been kept carefully watered and pruned.
“I think I’m going to like it here, Jor,” he said.
But it wasn’t even the house that excited Auron the most, nor the car, nor even his new-found wealth.
Rather, he felt a strange growing sense of excitement at the thought of the glorious laboratory he was going to create, and all the top-of-the-range 2006 equipment that he was going to put in it.
Auron was used to owning laboratories, but this time it was going to be different. This time he would use his lab to actually understand physics. But not the physics of 2006; no, the unbelievably advanced physics that Jor had access to.
Soon he would have isolated the problem with his interactors and he would once again be the most powerful man in the universe, and he still had three years to enjoy himself before it was time to face his old self, Auron 2.
His thoughts returned to the girl in the cafe. Auron had never actually had a proper girlfriend. Then he swore out loud at himself.
He had to focus. He wasn’t here for romance. He was here to save his friend and prevent a war.
“Perhaps making myself 25 years old was a mistake,” he said to Jor. “I’ve got a stupid 25-year-old brain now.”
“Try to focus,” said Jor. “You’ve got work to do.”
Jor was right. He had to find the problem with the interactors. And in three years, he would find his past self, Auron 2, and warn him about the portal and the war.
And then … well, what was the worst that could possibly happen?
