Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

[For part one of the story, click the "time detective" tag]

So I should probably explain what it actually is that I do, shouldn’t I? I’m a private detective, but I started out as a physics student. I was planning on a relatively dull career in academia, as a matter of fact – I was interested in doing some work in gravitational physics, which was hardly a cutting-edge whizz-bang area, and the Brian Cox career path had yet to be invented. My plan was to finish my Master’s, get a doctorate, then settle into a life of producing three or four papers a year which nobody would read.

But I made two big mistakes. The first was putting a chemistry module down as one of my optional modules, because I didn’t like the look of electronic engineering. The other was actually paying attention.

A chance remark in an organic chemistry lecture about an unusual property of thiotimoline caused me to think about what would happen to the shape of the molecule in a Gauss-Riemann geometry. I put that together with a couple of other things – which I’m not going to mention here, obviously – and suddenly found I had worked out a way to travel through time. And not one of those “build two black holes ten thousand light years apart and rotate one of them” jobs. This required practically nothing – you probably have most of the equipment to build a small time machine yourself, though you could probably only go back a week or so on a domestic power supply without blowing a fuse.

I posted something on USENET, not saying exactly what I’d done – I didn’t want to pre-empt publication and risk that Nobel prize – but posting a couple of the calculations in a different context, as a gedankenexperiment, just to make sure I hadn’t done anything incredibly stupid.

Two hours later, a man I didn’t know, in an immaculately-tailored suit, one that fit so well that the gun he had in his pocket was extremely conspicuous, showed up at the door of my room in Halls and asked me to take a walk.

As we walked through Sackville Park, he explained the situation to me.

“You’re not the first to figure it out, you know. Feynman knew the trick, and Von Neumann. Godel probably did as well, though by the end he didn’t know much of anything. We get about one undergrad every three or four years figuring it out now.”

“So why haven’t I heard of it before?”

“Oh for God’s sake, man, I thought you were meant to be clever. It’s too dangerous ever to be made public.”

“Dangerous? But I’ve proved that changing history and paradoxes are both impossible. This would only work in a universe with a single consistent history.”

“Exactly. Think about what that means, for a moment, man. Say you want my PIN number. You say you’ll try 1111, and if it works, write it down on a piece of paper and send it back to yourself five minutes earlier. If it doesn’t, you write 1112 and send it back to yourself.” He sat down on a bench. “The only consistent history where that works is the one where you instantly get a piece of paper with my PIN on it. All cryptography becomes useless. All national secrets are instantly open to anyone. The whole fabric of civilisation comes under threat.”

“So, what, you want me to stop investigating this stuff?”

“Not at all. We know that you can’t get the truly curious to ever stop experimenting. You want to build a time machine for your own personal use, we can’t stop you – the components are too easy to get hold of. What we want you to do is to sign the Official Secrets Act – you never tell anyone else how to do it, and any attempt to misuse the technology gets you convicted of high treason. Also, you quit university, today. We don’t want you slipping bits of these ideas out, even by accident.”

“Quit university?!”

“Yes. Drop out. Find another job. Whatever you want – the government will pay you thirty thousand a year to keep your mouth shut, anyway, and you can carry on your research in your own time, so long as you pass all your work on to the government. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.”

“You offer that to everyone who figures this out?”

“Yes, it’s our standard offer.”

“And has anyone ever turned you down?”

“Oh, one or two, one or two…” he stood up,“I’ll be round tomorrow with your copy of the Official Secrets Act.”

As he went, he patted the statue that he’d been sitting next to on the bench. The statue of Alan Turing.

I did as he asked.

So now, I work as a private detective. Not because I need the money as such, but just to give me something to do with my brain now that physics isn’t an option. Not that most of my cases require much of a brain. But a few require a little investigation, and that’s where I have the edge over my competitors. With my personal-sized time machine I can only go back in time a week or so, and I have to be careful not to give myself too much information about the future (the government keep a very close eye on trans-temporal communication – any sudden lottery wins and I’d be the richest man in the graveyard), but it does mean that if someone says their husband came home late last Wednesday, for example, I can go back and follow him and see where he went.

Those are the neat cases, of course. This one was worse. This time someone was dead, and it was my fault, somehow. And I was going to have to go back and meet this man, knowing he was going to die, and knowing there was nothing I could possibly do to stop it.

It’s days like that that make me wish I’d gone for electronic engineering after all.

I’m too ill to write today (my blood pressure’s increased. giving me an awful headache), but I found this on my hard drive when looking for something else. It’s the first chapter of a science fiction detective novella I started writing. If people like it, I’ll write the rest. Let me know what you think:

Time Detective
I got into my office about ten minutes after I received the message from myself, letting me know the client was going to be coming. I could have got there quicker, but I like to leave a little bit of time to let myself get out of the way.

I’d not been in for a week, since getting the first message from myself, telling me to keep clear, but the place was pretty much exactly as I’d left it.

Work had been a bit light for a couple of months. There are only so many adulterous husbands you can follow or pet cats you can track down before you realise that the life of a private detective is staggeringly unlike that of a Philip Marlowe or a Sherlock Holmes. Unless there’s a Holmes story I’ve not read called “The Case Of The Drunken Arsehole Who Gave His Wife The Clap”, anyway. It’s an unpleasant, dirty, sleazy job, and not one I’d recommend to anyone else.

Of course, I have certain… advantages… that make me very, very good at it. And that was why I was heading to my office at the ridiculous hour of ten in the morning, to meet up with someone who would undoubtedly be asking me if I could add up the clues of the used condom wrapper she’d found in her husband’s pocket and the money that had been disappearing from their joint account and come up with an answer she might actually like.

So I got to my office and opened a bottle of whisky. The truth is, I don’t touch the stuff, but I found early on that clients want to see a hard-boiled hard-drinking Sam Spade gumshoe, even when you’re operating out of a rented office suite in a suburban industrial estate. The smell of whisky, like the five o’clock shadow, makes them think you’re a rule-breaking wise guy who kicks ass and takes names.

And of course there’s an element of truth in that – you have to be prepared to do a few things in this business that are, at best, dubiously ethical. Though not so much in the cases with the lost cats. And you have to be prepared to defend yourself. I’ve had a few newly-ex husbands come to see me to try to extract their alimony payments from me in the form of teeth.

But in general, that kind of thing is all about image. You can go down two routes in this business. You can either look like an actual thug – skinhead, broken nose, missing teeth, neck wider than your head – or you can go for the more sophisticated-but-still-dangerous look. Give the impression of a man weighted down by a great and terrible secret that means he has nothing left to lose. The latter is not only easier when you’re as skinny as I am, but it also gets you a better class of customer. I’m not really interested in the type of cases that require breaking someone’s kneecaps.

So I open the bottle, undo the top button of my shirt, loosen my tie, basically all the stuff that will give the impression that I’m a 1940s film noir macho man and not Bill Dobson from Wilmslow, who still shares a flat with a bloke he met at university, and whose reading matter tends more towards New Scientist and The Guardian than thrillers.

The client doesn’t know I know she’s coming, of course, which allows me to get into the perfect position for when she opens the door. I turn my chair round so I’m facing away from the door, put my feet up on the small filing cabinet I only keep for this purpose (I store all the information about my cases on my iPad, but that doesn’t really fit the image), and hold my phone up to my ear and pretend to be talking to a satisfied client.

“…No, no, that’s absolutely fine,” the door opens behind me and I raise a finger, in a ‘wait one moment’ motion, “there’s absolutely no need for a reward. You’ve already paid me handsomely…”

The phone is smashed out of my hand, and knocked to the floor, and my chair is spun around, knocking my feet off the cabinet and sending me flying to the floor.

“Shit, that’s all I need,” I thought to myself, “an angry husband.”

It’s at times like those that I really wish I’d been able to figure out a better way of warning myself about things like this.

But then I looked across, and from my admittedly limited vantage-point, it looked to me like this wasn’t an angry husband at all. While it’s not completely unknown for angry husbands to be wearing high-heeled shoes, most of them were in a larger size than this, and very few of them had the legs to really carry it off.

“You bastard!” the not-husband screamed at me.

I staggered to my knees and looked up. Definitely not a husband.

“You bastard!” the not-husband repeated, keeping to a theme she was evidently comfortable with, “You utter bastard! Paul trusted you!”

This was not how I was expecting the day to go at all, and if it weren’t for the fact that it’d have caused a paradox I’d have wished I’d stayed in bed and let myself deal with it.

“Excuse me,” I said, as calmly as I could with my head still at the not-husband’s groin level, “but would you mind explaining to me what you’re talking about?”

“Paul. Paul Bradshaw. Your client! My husband!”

Now, this was suddenly starting to make sense. I’d obviously let my client down in some way. The fact that this particular client’s name was completely unknown to me didn’t really matter – if you learn clients’ names, you only get attached to them, and the next thing you know you’re submitting accurate expense forms. Plus, of course, there are always those clients whose names I’ve not been told. From the sounds of things, Paul was one of them.

“Sorry, I’m not really awake yet. Would you mind telling me exactly how I let him down?”

“He’s dead! And it’s your fault!”

Well, as let-downs go, that’s certainly a big one. But I was still not sure exactly how this was my fault.

“What happened?”

“I found him last night, when I came home from work. He was hanging from the bannister, holding a note in his hand that just said ‘I’m sorry’.”

She burst into tears. By this time I’d finally got to my feet, so I pulled up a chair for her, and she sat down. I sat on the desk and handed her the box of Kleenex I keep for such situations, making a mental note to invoice her for it if she became a client.

“So he killed himself, then?”

She looked up at me, incredulously. “No, of course not!”

“But… but the note…”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that sign on your door actually read Private Defective. Of course he didn’t fucking kill himself. He was murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“Yes, merrderred,” she said, doing a rather poor impression of my voice. Under the circumstances I could, of course, understand her being less than friendly, but this was still not exactly the most pleasant introduction to a client I’d ever had.

“Do the police agree?”

“Of course not! If they thought he’d been murdered, they’d have to do some sodding work! It’s already down as suicide, case closed, end of story!”

“So what makes you so sure it wasn’t suicide?”

“OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE! If he was going to kill himself, he’d hardly have hired you as a bodyguard, would he? Arsehole.”

And it all snapped into place.

Poor Paul must have hired me as a bodyguard about a week ago, because he was in fear for his life. Obviously, I’d not done a particularly wonderful job of guarding his body, as it was no longer in the state he’d wanted me to keep it in, viz. breathing, conscious, etc.

All of a sudden, it became entirely apparent that the not-husband was, in fact, being rather more charitable to me than I’d thought. I’d taken her husband’s money, and promised to keep him safe, and he’d died. Under the circumstances, the fact that I still had the same number of teeth I’d woken up with was far more than I could have expected.

“I…I can’t apologise enough.”

“No. No you can’t.”

“I did everything I could, believe me,” though why she should believe me when I clearly hadn’t done everything I could, I didn’t know, “and I will never, ever forgive myself for letting your husband down like this.”

That, at least, was true.

She burst into tears. “I’m sorry. I know you did. Nobody could have saved him, by the end. It’s just… I’m sorry…”

I didn’t know what to say, so I ended up saying the worst possible thing I could have done, under the circumstances.

“Look, I may not be a good bodyguard – it’s not something I normally do, and I’ve no idea why I agreed to do it for Paul – but I’m the best detective I know of. I can’t bring Paul back. No-one can. Nothing can make this better. But I promise you this – I will hunt down the bastard who did this and bring them to justice.”

She looked up at me “Really?”

“Yes, really. In fact, you have my guarantee that I’ll have enough evidence to get them arrested and tried within two days.”

Shit.

I shouldn’t have said that.

Now I only had a week to get the evidence together.