Time A-Flyin’: An AI Chatt Novel by Anita Brake, AKA J.D. Robbed

Chapter 13

“Would you like a little extra time?” Finney Turtledove posed.

That took some nerve. Cojones, I mean. My continued transition from cozy New England cupcake artisan to hardboiled, hard-lovin’ paranormal investigator had been tough, and I was taking a night course in anatomical slang at the Atlanta Learning Annex that had just moved into the restroom wing of the former Atlanta Bus Station next to the new public library that had replaced the vending machines.

I stared at my former client through a thick gray cloud. I’d told Fin to quit smoking five times during his appointment, but the necromancorcist had just come from a job in the fashionable Haunted Atlanta Tour district, and he reeked of ectoplasmic cremains.

“I’ve already given you three months,” I growled. “How would you like me to do a decantation and let those creeps I locked up have another go at you?”

“Incantation, you mean,” Finney corrected.

“I know what I said.” When I’d unexpectedly confronted the ruthless Albanian genies who’d targeted Turtledove for wish-scalping in an alley off Simpson, all I’d had handy was a Fijian containment spell and a discarded bottle of Schweppes, and now I was stuck with djinn in tonic in a high kitchen cabinet as well as a fat IOU. “You’re all out of time, Finn.”

“I think you misunderstand,” Turtledove stammered. “I don’t mean time for me. I mean, I’ve sunk everything into a new business venture, and I’m strapped. But I could give you some time.”

“I’m a one-woman operation. What could you do for me, anyway? Resurrect dead deadbeats?”

“I mean I could offer you some literal free time.” He handed me a card. “You know how necromancorcism works, right? You hire your fly-by-night guys who simply either reanimate or exorcise, and then what have you got? Demented stiffs who, let’s face it, are going to either get wiped out by the first cross-town bus or make sushi out of you in your sleep.”

“Sashimi, unless your zombie has a rice cooker.” My lover and paranormal soulmate Dvlknish and I were also taking couples cooking classes at the Annex. My little hacker hunk had had a recent run-in with a merman hit-squad dispatched by a disgruntled, reanimated Danielle Steel, whose 15 new posthumous fall releases he’d plagiarized for a rogue AARP cabal, and Dvlknish now had an insatiably vengeful taste for raw fin.

“By cutting out the middle man, or bringing him back if that’s your thing, I’ve developed a proprietary new method for storing and when necessary retrieving souls in rifts in the temporal continuum – what I call wrinkles in time. I recently resurrected Madeline L’Engle to sign a deal with Peacock and the Quantum Leap people, and she agreed to let me have the domain and trademark rights. The point is, time travel exists, and I have the franchise rights. And I can pay you back in installments. Of three minutes at a time, any time but Jurassic, the Third Reich, or November 1963. The Spielberg people bought the rights in 1972, last week. I thought they wanted to make some script changes, fix the Luke and Leia attempted incest glitch, the bastards. You could try to kill Hitler as a baby or get the Dallas Book Repository rezoned for a Shakey’s Pizza in 1962, but my guess is, unless you also tossed young Stevie into a live mechanical shark’s jaws, you’re looking at some massive litigation.”

“Not to mention the potential damage to the fabric of time,” I added.

“The what?”

This was all getting too close to the wrong genre for comfort. “What am I going to do with three minutes besides getting back the last three minutes? I think I’m going to go to the kitchen and rub one out. Or maybe the whole bunch of them.”

Finney turned pale – an occupational hazard in his line. “Wait. How about I let you have 10 – 10 free time jaunts anywhere, for anything, but not all at once.” He reached into his jacket and whipped out another card. “And once you’ve spent your time allocation, you get five-dozen bone-free extra-crispy wings.” I glanced up from the punch card. “Cross-promotion. I let ‘em go back and whack the guy who came up with the Double Down sandwich.”

But left The Bowl. I should have known right then there was going to be trouble.

**

Dvlknish finally grunted. He’d appeared busting to say something all through dinner, but we’d had seven pages of torrid and discreetly descriptive pre-prep lovemaking, and I assumed he wanted to explore his feelings, such as they were. But when I looked in his eye – the good one that was looking back at me – I could see my Knish had deeper issues in mind.

“I know, I know,” I sighed, reaching for his gnarled hand, which was growing back nicely after the assault by Simon and Schuster’s bioengineered maneditors. “Cash only, or bitcoin. But think of what we could do with 30 minutes of free non-consecutive time, or what we could undo. A word in Bill Gates ear, and we save mankind five system updates that only fuck things up worse. A drugged-out Frito-Lay taste tester ‘falls’ onto a subway track, and Lay’s Million-Dollar Flavor Latte Potato Chip never exists.”

Dvlknish grunted drily.

“You also liked Beet Newtons,” I noted. He shrugged, and I heard the familiar rattle in his cervical vertebrae – the result of a chokehold delivered by an outraged Celeste Ng after Nyetflix ran an eight-part miniseries based on Dvlknich’s Tiny Blazes All Over The Place.

And then I knew how I’d spend my 30 free minutes.   

2015

At mid-afternoon, the Budapest Holiday Inn Express lobby was virtually empty — an ideal time for an ambush. The discount hotel was in the sketchy Goulash District, so no one sated on beef and paprika would notice one more commando execution of a shady, thug-ish literary bootlegger/hacker.

But knowing the layout and the resolution, things would end far differently this time around. The five brutes in their shades and dusters were clustered about the desk, and I pulled the pearl-handled automatic with suppressor, extended magazine, bump stock, and silicon comfort trigger a grateful Susan Wiggs had given me for wiping out a colony of were-sand crabs.

The elevator clonked, and Dvlknish stumped out, headed, as he’d told me, for a burger (he’d burnt out on pizza after five days wiping takeout goulash off his keyboard writing his latest Jacque Leecher novel on deadline for the Bordeaux Suspense Fiction Cartel).

I now had two minutes and 37 seconds left before the snap-back, so I took aim to spray the hit squad before spotting a flash of white, then five. I swept the lobby and desk; the clerk with the bad toup was an inch from his monitor.

“Your shuttle’s here, guys,” I sang to the “hit squad,” rapidly crossing the lobby. Dvlknish was just far off, if I acted decisively.

“Hey, Jeff,” I greeted. The clerk squinted up, and I fired a round into his shoulder before he could go for his own weapon.

“Why?” he wept, slumping against the back wall.

“Typical Deaver misdirection,” I grinned, jumping the counter (thanks, Curves!) and kneeling beside him. Dvlknish breezed through. “He’d see the CommieCon conventioneers and assume they were the hitmen, but the walk-on bystander would turn out to be the killer. It was The Cartilage Collector, wasn’t it? I read Variety — he hacked your new novel just as Universal was optioning it. But you gave yourself away with the fake hairpiece, which is tragic even by Eastern European standards, and by taking off your trademark glasses. Lucky I spotted those guys' name badges."

“They had Denzel all lined up,” Jeffery Deaver wailed. “Who are you?”

“His agent,” I deadpanned, and disappeared before I could deliver the kill line. But at least Dvlknish would no longer need femur replacement over his misplaced hostility, and the quintet of Socialist geeks would live to enjoy many more days of catered borscht and Leninist cosplay.

I was beginning to think Dvlknish might have impulse and judgment issues.

**

2007

Dvlknish was by my estimates 32^nd in line, and I was now second, to the momentary mystification of the mother and teen daughter who’d brought her behind me. He stood out, a six foot-three slab of Syburslovenian muscles, scar tissue, and faux titanium prosthetics amid a giggling estrogen sea that had flowed upstream from Claire’s Boutique, Abercrombie, and the food court to the Barnes and Noble with the word that Mother Stephenie was holding court on her way to a reading at Stanford.

The autograph kiosk was piled with the thick paranormal binge-fests that had put her on the shortlist for this year’s Pulitzer for Hormonist Fiction, including the ten-volume/26-inch two-year anniversary bestseller The Annotated Large-Print Illustrated Twilight With Introduction By K. Kardashian, Part 1.

“And remember,” Stephenie Meyer beamed up at the young woman ahead of me, diplomatically turning her signature so the perplexed girl could appreciate it more fully. “Hot vampires and werewolves do exist, as long as they exist here.” She patted her chest, and an employee gestured her toward the left side before one of her two bodyguards reminded the insensitive buttinsky that Meyer’s heart had never been in the right place.

The teen stumbled aside, and excused herself flirtatiously to a cardboard standup of Robert Pattinson. I stepped in quickly, if apprehensively – Stephenie was reputed to be Scottsdale Mafiya -- and placed my book before the icon.

“What would you like me to write?” the author chirped.

“I was thinking, ‘May all your shades be gray, Love, Christian,’” Meyer frowned and glanced down at the cover of my too-thin volume.

“Is this a joke?” She growled like Jacob after taking a shot in the were-nads. Stephenie snapped her fingers, and bookstore security – late of Mossad, I guessed – moved forward.

“Ms, James!” I gasped, and Meyer came howling over the table with the Montblanc pen that in another timeline had taken out my Knish’s right eye. Wielding a New Moon with both hands, I incapacitated both guards, then glanced over my shoulder to register both Dvlknish racing toward the crowded safety of the mall Sbarro and Anne Rice’s low-impact successor thrusting her Montblanc toward my carotid. I swung the classic sequel, and Stephenie Meyer went down like Kelsey Grammar off a lecture stage.

Panting, I looked down at her. Her case, with the Breaking Dawn draft Dvlknish had hoped to hijack, was still tucked under the table. “Well,” I breathed, “I guess the pen isn’t always migh—”

And materialized in Finn’s office. I’d have to budget better for the tagline, I realized, as the necrocist stamped my card.

**

As I tossed my Hellstrom’s Rack puffy jacket on the foyer throne and breezed into the parlor, Dvlknish looked up from the set. With both eyes. I dropped to the couch and wrapped both arms around his sturdy, no longer dislocated shoulders (can’t say the same for the flock of fairydactyls J.K.Rowling had dispatched to take out the guy who’d lifted her new Harry Potter: The Early Years novel and used her VISA number to charge a deep-psyche massage chair and irregular Nikes on Blackest Friday).

After a romantic interlude marked by a strangely disconcerting lack of popping tendons and pained grunts, I transitioned quickly back to the parlor, where I was ready for an hour of NCIS: Branson.

“Tonight, on CBS,” the announcer announced pronouncedly, “The Season 15 premiere of Upstairs/Downstairs: Boston, followed by the reality hit Amazing Astronomical Discoveries, and a special 48 Hours – how art forgeries at the Metropolitan Museum caused a royal tizzy in the authenticist community.”

“More Cezanne?” Dvlknish groaned, and I jumped, my heart throbbing in the bad way. “Art theft and libel – that seems to be all that’s in the news these days. Maybe I’ll simply get back to the new novel. Going to be tough to follow Straight Outta Syburslovenia , but we must write what we know, what?”

What had I done?

**

“You tampered with the fiber of popular culture,” Finney theorized. “When you brained Stephenie Meyer at the Tacoma Barnes and Noble, you knocked something way out of whack. She went back to University of Phoenix Online for a masters, became the spokesperson for responsible teen sex and wrote that series of New Yorker pieces on toxic masculinity and romanticism of supernatural predatory eroticism. Then she axed the Twilight movies herself, which started a domino effect – from Hunger Games to the Fast and the Furious. Your action caused the American cinema to gain – or maybe just regain – an IQ. Eventually, the entire pop culture was, well, infected.”

“My God,” I murmured.

“My guess is, without wildly popular drivel to imitate, your boyfriend was forced to step up his game. Parodying parody for the global underground market is no big deal, but when you fixed Meyer trying to fix Dvlknish, you energized his creative muse, turning him into, what did you call him?”

“A pretentious Eurotrash twit.” It sounded so much worse saying it aloud a second time after thinking it about a dozen times over the previous week. The fact is, all the scars and burns and badly disinfected wounds and missing organs and mangled earlobes and pins and plates installed by former Soviet veterinarians and mysterious recurring hair in places where no human grows it and odd skull indentations and odder extra bones and prosthetic odds and ends are what make Dvlknish Dvlknish. “I ruptured the fabric of time.”

“Oh, fuck yes.”

“What can I do to unfix things?

Finney shrugged. “You got five more punches…”

**

Four of which I used up trying to restore Stephenie Meyer as a deplorable national treasure. Past me, it turns out, can be fairly single-minded, and time seems to want to self-correct, and in the end I was forced to use seduction to distract me from my appointment with destiny at the Tacoma Mall. I know it’s not adultery, but I’ve tried to put those 17 pages out of my mind.

The fourth time, I came home to find a new Sex and The City side-quel on MAX, five more NCISes and eight more Yellowstone spinoffs in production, John Malkovich hosting a nighttime adaptation of Connect Four, and six additional Kardashians I’d never even realized existed. Kelly Clarkson now hosted Jeopardy (renamed What Was That Question? and featuring ginormous CGI dice), and Dvlknish was feverishly and gruntingly toiling on a soft-core, gore-forward knockoff of Bob the Builder for a Balkan market entranced by Scorsese’s adaptation of the kids' classic.

I had put off-kilter what once had been right which previously had been wrong. And I had one temporal punch left. While watching History Channel’s Hitler Week, it came to me. To hell with the time-space continuum...

**

I slid Dvlknish’ steak before him, and he grunted in euphoric anticipation before ripping into the bloody rare slab and washing it down with the premium Syburslovenian vodka we ordered special from an exclusive New Jersey aviation fuel depot.

He looked up with an appreciative rumble and an inquisitive belch.

“Stegosaurus, organic swamp-to-table,” I admitted. Dvlknish regarded me reprovingly, or was wrestling a piece of extinct gristle. “Don’t look at me that way. Had a little extra time on my hands. It was stuck in a peat bog, and I could see the meteor already coming. Everybody still has lungs instead of gills and tentacles, and Sarah Palin isn’t emperor, so no harm, no foul. By the way, I was thinking chicken tomorrow night — and Wednesday and Thursday. Oh, and expect a letter from Spielberg’s lawyers.”