The Cross-Time Road Trip

<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><font size="3">ChapterTwenty-Nine<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
Erica looked at the woman. The woman looked back at her.

She didn't seem entirely human. Her skin was white, so pale as to be almosttranslucent. Her hair was as white asher skin, while her eyes were completely black, almost hypnotic. There was something subtly wrong about her body, as if theproportions were not quite right. Ericafound herself staring and looked away, embarrassed. The woman gazed back with an almost disarmingopenness, studying Erica openly. She didn'tseem dangerous...

“I’m not dangerous,” she said. Her voice was hauntingly soft. “Thank you for releasing me from myconfinement.”

Erica’s eyes narrowed. How the hell had she known what Erica had been thinking?

“My people can read minds,” she admitted. Erica stared at her, and then remembered allof the secrets she would have preferred to keep to herself. “I know your people can't – how do you live,being alone in your own heads?”

“We live,” Erica said, tartly. The woman didn't seem dangerous, but if she could read minds...no doubt she couldblurt out all of Erica’s secrets. “Andwho exactly are you?”

“Maybe I should put on some clothes,” the woman said,ignoring her. Erica glanced at GBW andsaw him staring, unable to take his eyes off the newcomer. “I don’t understand how you cope, all wrappedup with your guilty secrets and lusts you regard as sinful. Isn’t it much better to get it all out in theopen?”

She walked out and into the main room, past Kit andBruno. They both stared at her, evenKit. Her gait was more seductive than acatwalk model, yet Erica had the feeling that it was completely unconscious onthe woman’s part. She couldn't behuman...Erica glanced at her ears, expecting to see them end in points, butthey were as rounded as any normal pair of ears. The woman slipped into a side room and closedthe door behind her. A moment later, shere-emerged wearing a long black dress that clung tantalisingly to herbody. Erica felt another flicker ofenvy, which she ruthlessly suppressed. This wasn't the time or place.

“My people don’t normally have names,” the womansaid. “I was called Angel by some othertravellers from alternate timelines.”

“I bet you were,” Erica muttered. There didn't seem to be any point in hidingher feelings. “Why were you being keptprisoner in this place?”

Angel hesitated. “Mypeople are telepathic, all of them,” she said, finally. “We have no secrets from one another. If one of us hurts, we all know it. We cannot fight each other without feelingthe pain we cause. Accordingly, oursociety never developed the...social problems other timelines developed. Communism actually worked for us.”

“You couldn't have aristocrats,” Kit said, slowly. “They depend on dividing and conquering theiropponents and that wouldn't be possible if everyone knew what everyone else wasfeeling.”

“It stands to reason that you’d see the lustful thoughtsmen would have about you,” Bruno said. Erica couldn't understand how he’d said it without blushing. “How does thataffect your society?”

Angel smiled. “Idon’t understand why your society believes lust to be so bad,” she said. “It’s a natural part of humandevelopment. Of course I know whensomeone finds me attractive, just as he would know if I found himattractive. There are no secrets fromeach other in my world.”

She nodded at Erica, who had been wondering when Angelwas going to get to the point. “Mypeople...advanced much quicker than your people,” she said. “We never developed a religion to hold usback, nor did we waste time fighting wars with each other instead ofconcentrating on scientific development. By the time your people started to build civilisations in China, or India,or Greece, we had already headed to the stars. An experiment in creating an FTL drive accidentally showed us how wecould move sideways, into other timelines. And so we started to explore.”

“There are legends of elves and magical women,” Brunosaid, thoughtfully. “Early encounterswith your people?”

“Perhaps,” Angel said. “It surprised us to discover that not all humans were telepathic, andthat many of the non-telepaths lived in timelines that were...evil to us. Why do so many of you create dictatorshipswhere everyone hates the dictator, yet cannot raise a hand against him? You are so alone in your heads. We pity you.”

“We don’t need your pity,” Erica growled.

“But you have it,” Angel said, turning her dark eyes onErica. “But it wasn't long before wediscovered something worse than humans who lived inside their own heads, hidingfrom the world for fear of its scorn. There was a force...interfering with timelines, breaking them downslowly until they collapsed into chaos. It was both subtle and gross; there were times when it interferedopenly, creating glitches in the timeline, and times when it was so subtle itwas impossible to detect until it was too late. This force is the enemy of the entire human race.”

“You mean the creatures who built the junkyard world,” GBWsaid. Erica remembered the bat-shapedcreatures and shivered. “What are they?”

“They are a power beyond comprehension,” Angel said. For the first time, Erica heard an emotion inher voice. Fear. “They are chaos personified, shatteringrational worlds as if they were made of glass, bending time into a pretzel orinterfering with the base code of the universe itself.”

“But why?” Brunoasked. “They must want something.”

“They are alien,”Angel said. “We cannot read theirthoughts, or understand their desires, and they have shown no interest in talkingto us. They are beyond ourcomprehension, acting on motivations we do not understand. All they do is spread chaos, contaminatinghundreds of millions of timelines. Theymust have a goal in mind, but we cannot understand it. What do they gain from tearing apart thetimelines and restructuring them at will?”

“Power, perhaps,” Kit said. He frowned. “Plenty of people will do damn silly things for power.”

“Or maybe they thrive in chaos,” Bruno said. “Or maybe...there was this book series I onceread, about a mysterious alien race that was pretty much all-powerful. None of their actions seemed to make sense,even when they doomed the universe itself. But they were fighting a race so alien that their presence was beyonddetection by humanity. No one knew whatthey were doing until it was far too late. Their enemies were killing stars.”

“The monsters killed stars too,” GBW said. Erica shivered, remembering the world doomedto endless light. “They must getsomething out of it.”

“We do not know,” Angel said. “We have tried to talk to them, but contactwith their minds leaves our best people incurably insane – or dead. There seems to be no choice, apart from tryingto stop them before they rip the entire multiverse apart.”

“So your people have been trying to fight them,” GBWsaid. “You built the technology here andtried to use it to stop them.”

“We had help,” Angel admitted. “Others who want to stop them as much as wedo. But even so, we were spread thin andso we started to recruit help from across the multiverse. One of the people we picked up was Eeean. We didn't realise how unstable he was, orwhat he would do once we gave him the technology to play games with this world.”

“You read minds,” Erica pointed out. “Why didn't you realise that he was a badchoice before he imprisoned you inyour own fortress?”

“I...I knew that reading minds makes people like youuncomfortable,” Angel said, reluctantly. “I didn't probe him as deeply as I should have done...and once he had alittle knowledge, he was able to imprison me within a stasis field. He couldn't actually kill me, or eject me,without the complex shutting down, but I was powerless. You were far from the only people who woundup in his net, forced to run through his little games.”

“Little games,” Kit repeated. “But we beat him.”

“You had one of our jumpers,” Angel said. “It gave you some measure of protection. But he would have killed you, given enoughtime.”

“Lucky for us,” Erica said. She looked over at GBW, who still seemed tobe staring at Angel whenever he had the chance. Bruno and Kit seemed equally affected, even though Kit was as bent as athree dollar bill. Angel had aremarkable presence to go with her faintly inhuman beauty. “So...you’re going to be more careful aboutwho you recruit to assist you?”

“Yes,” Angel said. “I will have to go home, explain what happened, and submit myself to thejudgement of my peers. They will knowwhat passed through my mind and judge me accordingly.”

Erica glanced at her, feeling an odd moment ofrespect. Angel was talking aboutallowing her judges to peer into her mind, exposing her thoughts and feelingsfor all to see. There would be no chanceof a mistrial. The truth would beexposed, and all it would cost her was her privacy. But then she had never had any privacy in thefirst place. Her world...it might becreepy, living in a world where everyone knew your innermost thoughts, yetmaybe it would be a more open and honest place to be. No dirty little secrets to spoilrelationships, or to come bursting out into the open at the worst possiblemoments.

“I still want to know one thing,” Bruno said. “With all this power, why haven’t you made abetter multiverse?”

“Interfering on a large scale is more difficult than youmight think,” Erica said, after a long moment. “And besides, working in your world – and the countless others withouttelepathy – is difficult for us. Yourpeople never quite say what they mean, even the ones who pride themselves onbeing bluntly honest. None of us cancope for long on your worlds.”

“But you could end hunger, stop wars...”

Angel pressed her fingers gently against Bruno’shand. “We are not gods,” she said. “Unlike the monsters, we are limited. Every little intervention risks causingchaos. We have to be very careful howand when we interfere, knowing that we may attract attention from the monstersand have them come to wreck our work.

“And if your people truly wanted an end to war andhunger, why don’t you demand it for yourself? We cannot save you if you don’t want to be saved.”

She shook her head sadly. “All you people, all alone in your heads,” she concluded. “I pity you.”

Erica stood up. “Well,it was nice meeting you,” she said, rubbing her hands against hertrousers. “But we have to be on our wayback home, before we set off on our voyagers again.”

“I should take you back with me,” Angel said. “The judges might want to hear what you haveto say too.”

The thought made Erica cringe. An entire world of people who would know herdarkest secrets.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Angel said, looking upat her with her dark eyes. “Everyone hassexual fantasies – I used to be bombarded with them from the day I grew oldenough to know the difference between male and female. My mother used to give me advice about how topursue orgasmic relief.”

Erica flushed. “I don'tthink I want to live there,” she said. “Ionce read a book where they were developing ESP and the mother sometimes peekedinto her daughter’s head. And there wassomething about a lunar colony.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Angel repeated. “There’s no reason to fear.”

“But I do fear,” Erica said. “And so would anyone else from ourworld. The inside of our own heads arethe only truly private place we have. Wewould be uncomfortable telling everyone our deepest secrets and even more uncomfortableknowing that they have been plucked out of our heads without our permission.”

“But what we do is natural to us,” Angel insisted. “It’s as simple as breathing.”

“I think that that’s the point,” Kit said. “It isn't natural to us.”

He stood up and walked over towards the RV. “Can we jump out of here without harming yoursystems?”

“I can open a portal back to your world and you can justdrive through, if you would prefer,” Angel said. She sat down in front of the console andtapped a few keys, before pressing one hand against a sensor and closing hereyes. “Eeean didn't realise that hecould interface directly with the machines and transcribe his imaginations intoreality. I can control this system farmore than he ever could, or GBW.”

“If Eeean was invited into here,” GBW said, “how didBruno’s counterpart get his hands on some of your technology?”

“We tried to fight the monsters on that world, but welost and we had to retreat,” Angel said, absently. “Plenty of our tech was abandoned there –someone with a working human brain could have interfaced with enough of it toget the rest to work. That whole worldis on the verge of breaking down, anyway. The laws of reality no longer function quite right.”

Erica remembered the darkness pressing in around them andshivered. “What will happen to thepeople there?”

“They will die,” Angel said, flatly. “The monsters tear through time and space;their victims are either swallowed by chaos or simply cease to exist. And if we don’t stop them, they’ll destroythe entire multiverse.”

She hesitated. “Onceyou get home, be careful what you tell people about us,” she added. “They may not believe you – or, worse, they will believe you. That may attract attention from the monsters.”

Bruno looked up at her. “If you need us to help in the future, just ask,” he said. “Not all of us are as weak-willed as Eeean.”

“Of course not,” Angel agreed, dryly. “Some of you might even be able to make thejump into godhood as reality collapses around you.”

Erica laughed as they started to climb into the RV. “Take care of yourself,” she said. “I hope that the judges won’t be too harsh onyou.”

“They will blame me for all the death and suffering that Eeeancaused,” Angel said, flatly. “Irecruited him, after all...”

“Do you want to come with us, instead?” Bruno said. “We seem to be making a habit of taking people from world to world.”

Angel shook her head. “I have to go home and face judgement,” she said. “Besides, I’d be nothing more than a freak onyour world, one with the power to know exactly what people think of me. And then I will be dissected by yourgovernment to learn how my telepathy works. I don't think they can splice it into your DNA, but if they work away atthe problem they may manage to solve it.”

She tapped a button and a glowing square of lightappeared in front of the RV. “That’s theway home,” she said. “Just keep drivingand don’t stop for anything. Thereare...things in the gaps betweenworlds, some just as dangerous as the enemy. Whatever you do, don’t stop.”

Kit gunned the engine and the RV roared forward. There was a brief sensation of falling andthen the world seemed to twist around them. Erica struggled to comprehend what she was seeing, but it was too vastfor her mind to grasp. There was a roadahead of them and above...there was the multiverse. Vast creatures seemed to move all aroundthem, through a landscape that changed a dozen times in less than aminute. Her mind seemed to be trying toview their surroundings in human terms, but nothing quite made sense. It was stranger than the artificial world Eeeanhad created, very definitely not a human place.

“You’d think she could just snap her fingers and put usback home,” Bruno muttered, as something startedto uncoil in the distance. “Not verygod-like at all.”

“The jumper works at random,” GBW said. He tapped the device thoughtfully. “Choosing a precise destination is a littleharder. I’d keep your eyes on the road,if I were you. Some of the things outhere can jump into minds.”

Erica glanced at him, and then looked at the road. It too seemed to be changing rapidly, movingfrom an interstate to a dirt track that left them bouncing along and leaving acloud of dust in their wake. She lookedup, despite the warning, and saw what looked like a giant pair of eyes lookingback at her. The eyes were thousands ofmiles across...it was an illusion, it hadto be an illusion. There was no waythat that was real.

The world shimmered around them. She saw glimpses of a thousand alternateworlds, some understandable and some so strange as to be almost beyond her comprehension. The multiverse wasn't just larger than shecould understand, it was also stranger than she could understand. There were worlds where caped superheroesguarded the population from danger and worlds where lizard-like aliens kepthumanity in bondage, worlds ruled by men and worlds ruled by women, worldswhere humans were so different they could no longer be considered human andworlds where humanity had never existed at all. Her eyes started to water as the road twisted yet again and they found themselvesfalling towards one of the giant eyes. It opened in front of them, revealing a wall of bright white light...

Erica covered her eyes as the RV lurched one final timeand came to a halt. Outside, the sun waspouring in through the windows. Thecollege seemed to be intact, just as it had been when they’d left it, monthsago. It felt like years.

“Well,” Bruno said, finally. “We’re home.”

 

Chapter Thirty<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />



Home.



It seemed like an anticlimax after everything they’d beenthrough. Erica stepped out of the RV,tasted the familiar smell in the air, and shook her head, feeling an odd burstof depression. She’d seen the buildingsin ruins, walked through a library that had been looted by the tribesmen andwomen for fuel to keep themselves alive. Seeing the buildings intact, as they were meant to be, left her feelingnumb. They were home. The mundane world seemed to press in aroundthem, insisting that there were no such things as devices that could allowpeople to travel from one timeline to another. No one had even noticed their arrival.



“Home,” Bruno said, following her out of the RV, “Doesn't it look...boring?”



Erica nodded. They’dbeen gone for several months, yet it felt as if they’d never been away. She looked up at the apartment block andwondered if they’d been evicted for non-payment of rent, before rememberingthat the college authorities would have found it legally difficult to evictanyone. Perhaps they’d been reportedmissing after they didn't attend classes and the police were looking for them,on the assumption that they’d been kidnapped by criminals or terrorists. But who would want to kidnap four collegekids? It wasn't as if any of theirfamilies were particularly rich.



“But it’s home,” GBW said. “I kiss the sweet ground...”



“Don’t do that or you’ll catch something,” Erica said,quickly.



“Because you don’t know where it’s been,” Bruno added, mischievously. “Shall we get on with purchasing supplies andthen jump back out of here?”



Erica hesitated. Did she really want to jump back into danger all the time? Her father had been a danger addict, a formersoldier who had kept pushing himself – and his daughter – to the limit. Eventually, it had killed him. Erica didn't want to die like that, but shehad to admit that the adventures seemed exciting – now. She wasn't sure that she’d felt the same waywhen Himmler’s cultists had been on the verge of murdering her to please Thor,a god who simply didn't exist. Notoutside the pages of Marvel Comics, at least.



She looked up at the college buildings and knew thetruth. The mundane life was boring. There was nothing new to discover on theirworld, no place that hadn't already been visited by explorers – and the peoplewho lived there, who didn't count. Shecould graduate, go on to become a successful lawyer or even follow her father’sdreams and go into the military, yet she would never do anything new. Travelling across alternate timelines, on the other hand, promised anendless series of new worlds to explore. How could she refuse to go?



“Yes,” she said. “Andthis time we’re bringing some proper medical supplies.”



“And guns,” Kit said. “To hell with the law. I wantsome proper firepower before we set out on our travels again.”



GBW frowned. “Don’tyou think we should tell someone?” Heasked. “Angel told us that there’s a waron, one that threatens the entire multiverse. Shouldn't we tell the government?”



“If we did, they’d either laugh at us or confiscate thejumper,” Bruno said. “It’ll go into Area51, alongside all the alien spacecraft that have crashed on Earth, and we’llget a pat on the back for being patriotic citizens of the USA. We certainly won’t be allowed to go hopping acrossthe multiverse at will.”



“And besides,” Kit added, “what could they do aboutit? You saw the power Angel’s peoplepossess – they can reshape entire universes. What could the government do that matches that sort of power? Crush the bats under a mountain of debt?”



“But we should tell someone,” GBW said, stubbornly. “We can't just leave them in ignorance...”



“Maybe you should write our adventures up as a book,”Erica suggested. “It might even earn ussome money.”



And so he did. Itsold remarkably well, but no one believed a word of it.



Which was, as Erica pointed out later, probably for thebest.

***​

“Well,” Bruno said, a week later. “Here we are.”



Erica nodded from where she was squashed against the wall. The RV had been emptied of most of the junkBruno and Kit had collected, to be replaced by medical supplies, guns andammunition. Erica had tried to talk Kitout of some of the more dubious purchases, but he’d pointed out that havingthem along might be very handy in the future. They wouldn't need to introduce gunpowder into a primitive society tofight barbarians, at least until the ammunition ran out. There was a limit to how much they couldstash in the RV.



“Yes,” GBW said. “Herewe are.”



Bruno reached out, one hand caressing the jumper. “Do you think it still works?”



“It should,” GBW said, reluctantly. Most of the knowledge Doctor What had dumpedinto his head was still there, even though he claimed that it only came outwhen it was needed. He’d tried to writedown some of the basic principles for his novel, but he had been unable torecall them. Erica had suggested that heput them down in a scientific paper, before Kit had pointed out that someonemight start asking questions. “Wecertainly didn't damage it.”



“Push it, then,” Kit said. “Let’s get out of here.”



Bruno grinned and pushed the button.



The RV lurched and vanished from the mundane world.

Not The End​

 

WOW , that took us on some wild adventures,and left the end wide open. thanks for this and all of your other stories

 

You're welcome.

More will be coming soon.

Chris

 

I think it's safe to say that many will be looking forward to more.

Thank you.

 

I've posted this book on Kindle at - The Cross-Time Road Trip: Christopher Nuttall: Amazon.com: Kindle Store

If you enjoyed reading it here, please consider posting a review or buying a kindle copy.

Chris

 

No. It's quite different, going by the wiki page.

Chris