Knot in Time, Tales of Uncertainty #1
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialog are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright
©2012 by Alan Tucker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address MAD Design, Inc., 212 Fair Park Drive, Billings, Montana 59102.
ISBN: 978-0-9885047-1-4 eBook Edition
*****
1
I had no idea what was chasing me, but I did not like the look of its tentacles.
Okay, it wasn’t just the tentacles, but the whole four-foot amorphous mass that glided effortlessly two or three inches above the ground that really creeped me out.
And the tentacles.
It was late and I had just stopped at Jerry’s Cafe, looking for work, or maybe a meal.
Jerry himself had answered my knock at the service door. “Hey, Dare,” he said with a tired smile, wiping his hands on his apron-covered belly. “I’m sorry, I don’t have anything for you tonight. Been kinda slow lately.”
I sighed, but put on a smile for him. “It’s okay, thanks.” Pickings had been slim recently. Everyone had felt the pinch from a bad economy.
Jerry nodded and closed the door. A chill breeze blew down the alley, taking an old flyer from a local band for a short ride through the light shining from the cafe’s back entrance. I wrapped my overshirt tighter around my lean frame and shivered. Autumn nights were often cold in Colorado.
I had walked away from the light, thinking of somewhere else I might try when I saw what I thought was the end of a wet rope, lying near a mound of trash.
The rope moved and I froze.
When the whole trash pile had begun to shake, I yelled and sprinted away into the dark, deserted street.
Somehow, the hideous thing had kept pace.
I turned a corner and jogged down another littered alley, my lungs heaving. Streetlights struggled to penetrate the gloom the farther I went. My foot hit an empty beer bottle, sending it skittering loudly across the pavement. I cursed and looked back at the mouth of the alley. Sure enough, my gelatinous stalker had noted the sound and turned to follow.
Heart pounding and out of breath, I continued blindly onward. I was familiar with many of the back streets in downtown Denver, but darkness and fear had caused confusion. After a sharp turn to the right, I found myself in a dead end with a row of imposing metal dumpsters. I spotted a door to my left, but a sign read, “Exit Only,” and I saw no handle.
In the movies, back alleys are usually filled with metal fire escapes and other stuff to climb so the hero can escape danger. My life had never been Hollywood material and modern buildings don’t generally come with handy getaway equipment.
I grimaced and contemplated hiding in one of the dumpsters, but then the blob silently slipped into view. Considering the smell emanating from the closest bin, I actually felt some relief my pursuer had found me before I’d mustered up the courage to dive in.
The creature stopped about twenty feet away, floating just above the pavement. Its body the color of moldy cheese, two of its many worm-like tentacles held small metallic devices of indiscernible purposes.
The last thing I expected it to do was talk to me.
“Dare, please stop,” it, or rather one of its little machines, said in a neutral tone.
My name is Darius, but my friends call me Dare. I had few friends and I was reasonably sure none of them were giant amoebas. “What are you? And how do you know my name?”
“We work together — or rather, we will. In the future. It’s complicated.”
“I bet,” I said, looking around for cameras and bracing myself for someone to jump out and yell, “You’ve been punked!”
A ripple passed over the thing’s backside. “You told me to be honest with you. I should have listened, but everything in our training instructs us never to do that with lower species.”
“Lower species?” I wasn’t sure, but I thought I’d just been insulted by a slug.
“Now I’ve offended you. Again. This is hopeless.”
I didn’t know what it meant by “again,” but something in its tone made me feel sorry for the sack of jello. “Why are you chasing me?”
“My mission is to recruit you to our organization. But, I’ve failed.”
“Failed? How do you know?”
The tentacle carrying the device it used to speak waved spasmodically. “Because, in thirty-seven seconds, another human will come out of that building.” It indicated with another appendage the door I’d seen earlier. “If it sees me, this thread could unravel irreparably.”
“This door?” I said, pointing. “In thirty-seven seconds?”
“Twenty-nine.”
I glanced down at the bottom of the dumpster next to me. It sat on a set of metal wheels. Running to the end, I leaned in with my back and pushed it forward a few feet. Twice more and the heavy bin completely blocked the door. I moved to the side opposite the exit and braced against the dumpster. A handful of seconds later, I heard running footsteps from inside the building and someone slammed forcefully into the door, jarring the bin, but I held it firm. I heard the person inside curse and they tried a second time to push the door open, unsuccessfully. Soon after, the sound of hastily retreating feet reached my ears, followed by silence.
I relaxed and looked at my self-proclaimed recruiter. “Did that buy you some time?” I asked.
It sat impassively for a second before shaking its small machine again. “Yes. Four minutes and eighteen seconds from now, someone will enter the alley to perform biological functions.”
I smiled. “Well, then you have four minutes to tell me what the hell’s going on.”
“Do you have any idea what you just did?”
Puzzled by the question, I answered without a smart remark, which was unusual for me. “I blocked the door so that person wouldn’t see you.”
“But you gave no consideration to the consequences! You’ve altered the thread in complete ignorance of what repercussions might occur!”
“Well, you’re the genius from the future, and you’re still here, so I guess I didn’t destroy the world by moving a garbage can.”
“That’s not the point.”
“You’re right. The point is you’ve got less than four minutes to explain to me why I’m in a dark alley talking to a chia pet gone wild.”
The tentacled blob looked at me silently. At least, I assumed it was looking at me. Then it said, “Very well. I have no other options since this was the last safe insertion zone. I work with a group of beings that, for lack of a simpler explanation, act as custodians of time. As I mentioned before, I am here to ask you to join us.”
“Why me?” I had worked as a janitor in the last steady job I’d been able to find. Did these people need someone to scrape gum from underneath the tables of time?
“I can’t answer that directly.”
“Why not?”
“Partially because I don’t know all the reasons, and partially because any answer I could offer would influence your decision too greatly.”
“You’re not real good at this recruiting business,” I said. “I’m thinking the important part of the job is to convince me to join up.”
“Your decision must be made freely, and without knowledge beyond your current thread in the multiverse.”
This gave me pause. My current thread in the multiverse? Then I remembered something it had said earlier. “But you told me before that we work together in the future, so obviously I say, ‘Yes,’ right?”
“More error on my part. That thread can still unravel. No outcome is absolute. There are only probabilities.”
That word had plagued me my entire life. Probabilities. I had been adopted as a baby into a relatively famous — at least in scientific circles — family. My great, great uncle, Werner Heisenberg, had come up with one of the fundamental ideas of modern physics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Simply stated, it said that when looking at extremely small things, like electrons in an atom, you can only know for certain one of two things: where it is, or how fast it’s moving. If you know one, you cannot know the other. Confusing, I know. The point is, physicists end up working in probabilities rather than certainties. My life was a laundry list of them. Because of my last name, people thought I was probably smart. Because of my grades in school, my teachers thought I was probably lazy. Because I was often in trouble, counselors thought I was probably a delinquent, or on drugs, and I would probably end up in prison, or worse.
And they were all probably right.
“Do you have a name?” I asked the pile of goo.
It hesitated before answering. “Not as such, but you call me Bob.”
I smirked. My sense of humor tended to be somewhat less than politically correct. When he said, “Bob,” the joke about what you call the boy with no arms or legs in a swimming pool immediately popped into my head. I knew right then the floating paramecium had to be telling the truth.
“Okay, Bob. I’m in.”
His tentacles stiffened slightly. “Really? Just like that?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Amazing. Please consider this carefully. Darius Arthur Heisenberg, do you agree to join the Keepers and forsake your current thread in the multiverse for the safeguarding of all others?”
I had few prospects. I was a nineteen-year-old who lived day-to-day on the street, mostly because I was a smart ass punk who had a real problem with authority figures. But I was sure Bob, or his superiors, already knew all that. Beings who were concerned with such a little thing as preventing someone from exiting a random building, in a random city, on a random night wouldn’t pluck a person out of their timeline who was destined to do something important in the future, right?
Probably.
“I do.” Suddenly, I felt like I should be putting a ring on my finger.
“Thank you,” Bob said with relief, obvious even from an alien blob. Then I discovered the purpose of the other device he’d been holding.
He shot me with it.