PSEUDOTIME - Revised Version Circa 2001
(The Book)
**Jacobs ladder type unreality?**
**PREDECISION:On-the-Run Start**
The trees were bare, stretching their skeletal fingers towards the cold grey sky. The grass below them was brown and dead looking. The park was almost devoid of life on this dreary winter's day. Except for a lone man in a long black coat and dark hat sitting on a bench. The dark man stood up and put out a cigarette. He glanced towards Ian before he turned and walked away, down the sidewalk, back towards the street beyond. Ian pretended not to notice. They weren't sure of him yet. He still had time, perhaps several minutes. He smiled grimly. All the time in the world.
Ian stood just off the sidewalk. He was on a low hill above a pond framed by bushes below. A few scattered ducks floated silently on it. He just stood there. There was no hurry yet, although he was sure that his appointment would not now be kept. He wondered if the person he was to have met was still alive. He would have a harder time finding another contact after losing this one. They would be suspicious of him after this and afraid to take another risk.
Moving slowly, acting as if he still were awaiting a friend, Ian wandered aimlessly, but with purpose, towards the bushes nearer the pond. Across the pond, Ian saw a couple of men walking casually his way. Glancing about he saw a few more men, singles and groups of two, all moving in his direction, as if by chance.
Ian saw a flicker and where there had been nothing between two trees, there was now a man standing. He blew out his breath in an icy cloud. Time to go. He casually walked into a cluster of bushes, disappearing from the view of the advancing watchers. The bushes swirled in a sudden gust of wind. After a couple of minutes, when he did not emerge from the other side, several men in dark coats rushed in after him. One came out and spoke into a small radio. The park began to swarm with men in dark coats.
Eight blocks away, across town in the business district, Ian walked sedately down the crowded sidewalk. He had cut his escpae close to watch, briefly from a distance, as the park came alive with the dark men. Then he had rapidly moved. Nowhere close would be safe once they realized their trap was sprung. The grey sky and buildings around him matched his mood. The sky was always grey these days, he mused, even in the summer. Then it only got warm and muggy. He walked for a time gazing blindly into windows, as if shopping. He needed a new plan. Just when he thought he might have some hope, they'd closed in again.
Ian saw the local rail coming and hurried up the stairs to catch it at the landing. He wanted to get off the street and back to his flat. The monorail would be much faster than walking, he thought. Then, he laughed to himself. Faster was a relative term. Still, he got onto the car when the doors opened on the platform and found a seat among the other passengers. His companions on the rail were all working class and carefully quiet with downcast eyes. They were a uniformly dull and colorless crowd.
All except for a gang of young thugs who were being boisterous and unruly just to spite their elders. The gangs all dressed in bright colors. This group was dressed in bright reds and yellows with patterns meant to clash. It matched their intent. Ian matched the demeanor of the workers around him and ignored the thugs.
That was one thing all the cops and narcs and skads couldn't seem to even make a dent in. The youth gangs seemed more prevalent than ever. It was the times, Ian told himself. The kids had nothing to lose by being wild and nothing to gain by being an upright citizen. In a few years most of them would become mirror images of the silent sullen workers around him. Ground down by the daily grind into frictionless pieces of the social machine. Or ground up and tossed aside as scraps that could not be assimilated. The lucky few might get a labor contract on the Mars colony or one of the moons.
After a time, the rail swooshed to the stop Ian had been waiting for. As he started to step off he felt something brush his back pocket. The startled youth stared at Ian open mouthed. Ian held the kid's own butterfly blade under his throat with one hand and gripped the other like a vise. Ian's wallet was in the kid's hand he now held so tightly.
"Hey. Lemme go." Ian kept the knife at the kid's throat, but released his grip and took his wallet back. "You should be more careful of your mark. You'll end up dead someday." Stepping back he turned and strode rapidly away before the other gang members came to the kid's aid. Ian tossed the knife aside. He didn't want a scene with the skads after him. Behind him, a small trickle of blood ran down the kid's neck.
He could hear them behind him. "Hey, wha hoppin'ed? Ya shit head. Too fast? Yoo gonna let 'em go? I wouldn't a let 'em do that ta me." Keep talking Ian prayed, just a bit longer. "D'ja see 'em move? Whut are yoo, 'fraid to stomp some doosh bag? Not me! Hell, let's get 'em." Then the rustle and clomping of feet as they started after him. Here they come, Ian thought. He kept his pace to a fast walk and turned the first corner he came to. Seconds later the gang of thugs came around the corner...to find no one there.
Ian watched their confusion with a wry smile from the pedestrian walkway on the next level up. He turned and walked back towards his apartment. He'd decided to get off a couple of stops before his flat this time. Ian always picked a different way back to his place, just in case there was someone watching. He'd also chosen this run-down workers section, with its fairly high crime rate, on purpose. Everyone here watched each other, but only to protect against robbery or narcs. They never paid official heed to any comings and goings, especially those that appeared to be for an illicit purpose. Most of his neighbors were either into some illegal activity or on the border of it. The appearance of obvious police action would get around pretty quickly. Skads would be different, but they would stand out in their dark coats.
Ian stopped downstairs in the dingy lobby to buy his regular paper from the deskman. He rarely read them and bought one each time he came or went with a healthy tip. It was understood by both that it was insurance. This time the deskman was different. Ian eyed this new man warily as he stepped up to the counter.
"Gimme a daily." Ian said. Then, as the deskman handed it to him, "Keep the change. You're new, huh?"
"Yeah,...just here for a few days." Came the growled answer.
"Where's Joe?" Ian asked.
"Joe? You mean Emilio? Oh, he just got a D N D. He'll be in the slammer for a couple." As Ian turned away, the deskman called after him, "Hey, the lifts aren't working. Repairman's on the way but..." he shrugged.
Ian nodded as he walked away. D & D. Emilio hadn't looked like the drunk and disorderly type. The new doorman had known Emilio's name at least. Ian still felt uncomfortable, but he couldn't find anything wrong with the new man's actions. He looked grimy enough to fit into this place, and the deskman did change from time to time.
Still, Ian climbed the stairs warily. If he was being watched, he could make no unusual moves. His sixth sense was clamoring something was wrong. It could be just that the days events had him more paranoid than normal, he told himself. On the third level, he walked past his room, then knelt to tie his shoe lace. Ian looked the hall over, but there was nothing except the usual peeling wallpaper to be seen. Getting up he walked back the way he'd come and accidently dropped his paper in front of his doorway. As he bent to pick it up, he listened to his door. And heard voices inside.
{Do the bedroom scene.}
{then out again, to restaurant scene}
{thence to the monorail ride and to the girls apartment}
{she draws him out on what its like to be what he is}
Ian began to talk. "It all started with some new studies on how to replace damaged nerves. A researcher, named Morgenstern, I think, discovered that by replacing the nerves with fine silver wire and providing a power source he could repair nerve damage in mice. He was so successful with the mice that a monkey was used for his next experiment. Its backbone was severed, then repaired with equal success. The researchers were estatic. They continued the experiments with mice and monkeys, but a human patient newly paraplegic was available. Me.
"I was only 23 at the time, which helped, I think, in the recovery. But, just like the monkeys, their success was nothing short of phenomenol. Just like in the last experiments with the mice and the monkeys, my entire nervous system was completely replaced. There were some minor side effects noticeable, but I was more than happy to live with them. Like My left arm twitching for the first six months or so. I was a rookie cop before my accident. I took a bullet in the back. And being so helpless was about the most intolerable thing I've ever been through. I'd have volunteered for anything to avoid that fate. Even the risk of death during the operation was no threat, to me, compared to a lifetime lying in a bed.
"The research guys were doing more human nerve experiments and repairs on other patients, when I had my first experience with the psuedo-time effect. It was several months after the operation. I was undergoing therapy to restrengthen my weakened muscles and was extremely upset with my inability to instantly be fully recovered. I was frustrated next to tears as I struggled to walk holding onto a rail. When suddenly something snapped, or clicked, and the room seemed to change. Sounds dropped from normal down the scale past base to below my ability to percieve. The light in the room changed. It took on a sort of reddish cast. And everyone in the room slowed and froze where they were.
"I panicked. Which, I discovered later, only increased the effect. I thought I was having some kind of seisure. I tried to move, but the air seemed incredibly thick. It was like in a dream where the harder you try to move the less you're able to. In spite of my weakness, I forced myself on harder and harder. I was trying to get to the nurses station. There were phones there and in my panicked state, I wanted to call someone for help. I struggled till I made it there, but the desk was like styrofoam. It crushed as I fell against it in my rush. The phone was like an eggshell. When I grabbed it, it shattered. I passed out from weakness and probably because I was just scared shitless.
"When I came too, I was on the floor. They'd propped up my head and covered me with a blanket. I was relieved, everything was back to normal. Everyone was staring at me like I was going to explode or something. Then, I noticed the damage. A rail along the wall was ripped loose and the desk at the nurses station was crushed. I'd thought that was an illusion caused by my seisure. The nurse who'd been behind the desk was dabbing at several bloody spots on her face. It seems that when I'd reached the desk, and it began to crush, it knocked her backwards. She had some pretty bad bruises, I heard. The cuts were from the plastic of the phone. I was told later that it was even embedded in the wall in one place.
"My "attack" had obviously not been experienced by only myself. Later they discovered many of their patients experienced this altered time sense under certain conditions of emotional stress. About that time, the guys at the research lab realized their mice were not all that normal either. They found out that, when frightened, the mice vanish and reappear somewhere else. They used high speed cameras and discovered that the mice actually sped up. They would run to the other side of the cage with all kinds of accompanying effects. Once they were past their fear, the effect would stop.
"Other scientists were brought in to study the new effect. I ended up as the human subject for most of their tests. They put me into many different types of stress and found that the stress reaction sent the subject, me, into the false time sence, dubbed psuedo-time, as it is not the "real" time flow. They had a physicist, named Johnston, Jim Johnston, brought in. He never did ever figure out why it worked, but he began to understand the physical laws of this new phenomena.
"He explained a lot of what we saw. The sound that slowed down, dropping our perception of its wavelength to sub-baritones before it went beyond the human hearing range. The reddish cast to light, he said, was due to an actual red shift. The faster we would go the redder the light would become. The thick air was merely its resistance to the sudden change in its momentum. To move at those incredible speeds you had to move all that air out of the way. He explained lots of things to me over many a beer at the NCO club. He went on to formulate and even write equations to account for the time-dilation, mass increases, most everything.
"The exact rate of time differential experienced by the subject can be varied based on the effort the subject puts into his stress reaction. The greater his stress level builds, and the harder or faster he tries to move while in that time sence, the slower real-time passes for him. Air resistance becomes a major factor in this rapid movement, as well as air friction. Protection from the heat of the air friction is required for any prolonged movement. Mass has also been discovered to increase in the subject inversely with his perception of time flow. That is; the faster he goes, the greater his mass, and the slower time flows for him. The laws are similar to those effecting the speed of light, except the magnitudes and the constants vary.
"That's when the Military and the CIA, or some spook outfit, came into the picture. There were obvious applications for espionage, assasination, and war in general. At first, none of the scientists or their guinea pigs were aware of the Military's intentions. The Military brought in their own scientists and they begin taking over the project. They started converting espionage agents and military troops into Psuedo-time troopers. I was now fully recovered and they drafted me as well. They made it clear, they would tolerate no leaks.
"There was a lot of training in the pseudo-time environment. We took to calling ourselves Clickers. That was because of the snapping or clicking sound that we all heard as we entered the pseudo-state. We had our first casualties around then. Seems if you go fast enough your mass is too great for almost anything to harm you. But if you aren't going fast enough, or you run into something more solid than you, you lose. You resemble something between a road kill and splattered hamburger. Also, at the speeds you're moving you can't just stop on a dime. Momentum took its toll on us. Several, in our squad alone, either couldn't stop at the edge of a bridge or building, or ended up as hamburger.
"Then there were the ones that just disappeared. They'd go into pseudo-time and never come back. The Military geniuses discovered that one. They wanted to see just how fast a clicker could go. How slow time could be made to crawl. They lost dozens of clickers. At some point as you accelerate into psuedo-time, you go too far. The red shift gets greater and greater. No one knows where the exact limit is. Everyone experiences pseudo-time a little differently. There are some signposts that are common, but only you know how fast you've gone before and still managed to slow down.
"The rest is history. It was rapidly obvious no one could stand in the way of these newly augmented troops. There was the rapid series of assasinations at home. Then our president, Michael Kennedy, came to power. He was controlled by the CIA and the Military. Lightning strikes by our troops eliminated all global resistance and the New American Empire was born. Birthed by the thin silver strands replacing a few thousand nerves.
"The augmented troops are excellent at crowd control as you well know. With no wars to fight anymore, they have become the elite of the Police Force. The Security Korps of the American Democracy, SKAD, was formed. Skad! The dirtiest word in our language now. So what else do you want to know?
"My wife died in the same "accident" that left me crippled. There have been no others. No time, and little inclination.
{add "clicker" to vocab}
{Options:
1) Could have other worlds, but nearer to contemporary seems more appealing. This could require the changing of the reference to the Mars colony and the moons as places to work.
2) Should add more human touches, like him and the physicist were drinking buds.}