The Commuter

What I'll ever do if they shut down the Portcullis, I don't know. It makes my commute so much easier.

Actually, I guess I should say the Portcullis makes my commute possible. "Easier" is the word for how the Portcullis simplifies the whole back-and-forth for others, making it possible to live in one locale and work in quite a different one. Like, say, if a fellow living in Hackensack happens to be employed as an ice hauler on the Outer Worlds, or if a woman residing in Vancouver works as thalassina harvester on the Saturnian moon Mimas. Better an instantaneous transition from here to there, via quantum reshift, than a three-year journey one-way to your Saturnian workplace, or a seven-year flight to get to Am-heh, Supray, Jabru, Tuoni, or any other large Outer Worlds in the Oort Cloud.

For the Earthbound workforce, people who commute from Adelaide to Mumbai, or from Reykjavik to Mexico City, it's less about ease of travel than resource conservation. You can get anywhere on the globe from anywhere else in under two hours just by using the Orbital Skipjack, but that costs a lot of fuel. Better to let commuters just step into the Portcullis in one city, and emerge instantaneously in another.

That's the way it goes for most working stiffs. But my commute is a little different.

***

You'd think the Executive Archivist at the Kehishian Digital Library would be paid a living wage, but, of course, were that the case, we'd be living under the all-feared Communist Regime. The laws of capitalism must be followed stringently at all times, the Economic Orthodoxy tells us, and that means that workers are only paid what the lowest common denominator will justify. Given that the planet's population has surged past 12 billion, resources are in sharp decline, and there are something like a half million applicants for every job in the so-called Culture Class, some economic theorists would say that I should be paying the Library for the privilege of working there rather than drawing a meager salary of $90K.

You heard me: $90K. That's a more than they pay busboys at fancy restaurants like Panegyre or Fest, but not by much. It's not enough to pay for a studio, even in the cheaper outlying district. A dormodule, maybe, but I'm a married man and a mod has got exactly enough room for an average guy of 6'4," a change of clothes, and his basic tech: PCD, Dentamic and DataGlas. Plus, Gregor is claustrophobic, and he'd rather sleep under a bin-tip than in a mod.

We had a tough time of it after Gregor's Aunt Myasha died. Aunt Myasha had an apartment... an honest to god three-bedroom apartment... in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in a building that had not yet been seized and demolished under the law of Corporate Domain. Once she was gone, a flock of rapacious relatives (most of whom had been long out of touch) descended on the property with flashing beaks to start the process of picking its bones. Gregor was named sole heir in Aunt Myasha's will -- Gregor had played caretaker to her and the property for years - but that meant nothing in the face of the facts: Some of those rapacious relatives were lawyers, and we had no assets to pay for legal counsel. Even if we'd been able to hold on to the place, the taxation rate would have made it impossible. Economic Special Privilege laws specify that you have to make a minimum of $4 million to qualify for exclusion from the estate tax.

Gregor was working as a teacher at one of the city's few remaining schools; between the home school movement, the decimated tax base, and the repeal of the child labor laws, there just weren't that many kids getting an education, and the supply still didn't meet the much-diminished demand. Gregor made even less than I did - around $60K - and that won't even rent a guy a sleeping bag at the Fleabite Flat and Cannibal Lounge.

We had some savings, but not enough to make a deposit on anyplace decent. We looked as far afield as New Jersey, but nothing doing. We stayed with friends, but because a lot of our friends had been forced by the latest market crash into mods themselves, our options were dwindling.

That's when my buddy Rashmil happened to clue me in on a little secret. Rashmil, being an extronics engineer, made a decent enough living; he more or less qualified for what they used to call the Middle Class, but these days we just call people like that Not Half Starving. Of course, Rashmil had started off with some advantages most Americans don't have. He was from West Bengal, a wealthy part of India, which is, of course, the world's last remaining superpower now that China's economy has melted down and that nation descended into chaos and civil war. Being from a first world nation meant that Rashmil had received not just an elementary education in math and science, but he'd gone on after than to earn advanced degrees. The political mandates of home schooling mean that every child in America who spends time learning instead of working can recite each and every line of the Old Testament; what they can't do is use the quadratic equation, prepare holofield-ready schematics, or perform a spectropic analysis of asymptotic magnetic force lines in a dual-core quantum computer chip, so the good paying jobs are pretty much staffed by immigrants like Rashmil.

He liked to stop by the library on his lunch break, browse the light exhibits and check out the data digests, and chat me up. I used to wonder if Rashmil might be gay; finally, I figured out he was just sociable, and that's rare these days. I was receptive, and so he came back often.

"Hey Gasparyan," he said to me one day. "You believe this? The new Portcullis is a Model 640."

He was talking about the Portcullis on 45th and 7th. It was one of the newer Portculli... at least, it was supposed to be. But, Rashmil gleefully told me, it was simply retrofitted with a new exterior interface lifted from a Model 920. Underneath, it was a 640, a workhorse of a machine with old-fashioned components that never gave out. The Unitron Corp had been systematically demolishing the 640s for close to decade - not because they needed replacing, but because they didn't. Unitron's board of directors had evidently threatened some sort of coup against the company's chairman unless profits were guaranteed a 15% rise annually. The company had done booming business for decades, when Portcullis technology was new and galloping to replace old forms of commercial long-distance transport: Trains, ocean cargo ships, spaceflight, the earth-to-orbit Cable Tower. But once the market was saturated with the new tech, no one needed new units, and profits leveled off.

The result was that old units -- the 640s, which never broke down -- were destroyed for the flimsiest of reasons, and with the infrastructure they were embedded in forever crumbling around them, the old units were easy targets. Got a cracked foundation at the San Francisco Porterminal after that last big earthquake? Well, as long as you've got to rebuild the facility anyway, why not outfit the new and improved Porterminal with all-new Portculli? Introducing the Model 710! The Model 850! The Model 920!

Manhattan's infamous, six-year Rat Infestation finally having been conquered, a lot of the city's sewers, power conduits, megadykes, and HardGlas streets were being completely refurbished or replaced. The Portculli located around the city were slated for replacement as part of this push. It made absolutely no sense at all, but the average citizen is hardly qualified for anything you might call critical thought.

But the subcontractor had come up with a novel cost-saving tactic -- the one Rashmil had figured out. Just take old 640s, still in perfect working order, and stick them behind the glossy new interfaces of the 920s. Meantime, sell the shitty 920s to scav-mercs under the table, and let them disassemble the machines and resell the components and materials on the grey market. It was Capitalism in its fullest flower. The Founding Fathers would have approved, had they only been able to peer three and a half centuries into the future.

As soon as Rashmil imparted this bit of techno-gossip, I flashed on something Benni had told me. Once Rashmil left, I had the rest of the afternoon to reflect on Benni's words and fit the two disparate pieces of information together.

"Yah," Benni, an old German whose career in global government had ended decades before, had rasped one day after a service call to one of the Library's servers. "It's true you can reprogram the 640s to send you any distance at all for the exact same toll. You can go to Io or Rimposa for same cost as Tibet. All you need is the override code. You prefix the override code to the system coordinates and it tells the machine that this is a flat-rate trip."

He told me the code -- 6991 -- and I made a note of it.

"Only," the German added in a low voice, "don't get your numbers mixed up. I had a friend who entered 6961 and he went a whole lot further than he expected."

"For more money?" I asked, thinking Benni was joking with me.

"Not more money," he said, shaking his head. "No money! But not distance. Not kilometers, not AU."

"Okay," I said, trying to think of an excuse to end the conversation and send the codger on his way.

"He went to 1947."

The excuse I'd been formulating dissolved in the belly laugh that gave me. "Good one, Bennie!" I said, "Want to pull the other one now?"

"I'm not pulling on nothing," the old man said sullenly. "I'm telling you. Those machines, they were part of a Security Division scheme. You know that old saying, that the best way to secure the future is to invent it? Well, those crazy goons, they took it to heart. They created a program to install Portculli at different places and points across time: A Portcullis in Athens in 850 BCE. A Portcullis at Langley, Virginia, in 1950, or in the Tower of London in 1820. They had all sorts of crazy plans, it was verr�ckt. But they only got the one Portcullis installed, right here in Manhattan, in 1947."

"And they did that how?" I asked. "If you want to build a time machine that needs machinery at both ends, then you need a time machine to build your time machine. Right?"

"Stupid," he shook his head. "You think they don't got time machines? Of course they got time machines. They're hell-expense to operate, and very dangerous. I should know, I am former UN. In my day, we saw all those world-changing technologies coming out from the gate. PCDs. HardGlas. Liquid gel crystal information systems. Nano-sats. Quantum wormtunnel, that's how they got to quantum reshift, and that's how Portculli work. I knew I should taken out stock in UniCorp, but it would have been illegal. Back then, Europe had rules the United States didn't. In the United States, only Congressmen could legally do the insider trading. Many of my German and French and Belgian colleagues on the science panel, they did it anyway, but, so eine Schade, I was always too much der Ehrlicher, the honest man. And look at me now." He shrugged and shuffled off in his worn grey overalls, toolkit dangling from his hand.

I put the wild story out of my head. It didn't make sense on any level. After all, if Bennie knew of a conveniently located time machine, or a whole network of them, then why wouldn't he use one himself -- especially since he was so unhappy with the present day and always going on about his glorious youth in Germany and Geneva?

I eventually decided the answer was that Bennie yearned not for the past in general, but for his personal past - something I can understand, as I near the age of sixty. But there were other reasons as well, one of them being the year in question. If 1947 was a time traveler's only choice, he might very well decide to stay put in the present time. What was Bennie going to do in 1947? How did people even live back then?

Then there was the problem of the Security Division monitoring the units: How they were used, where people were going. Let's say a Portcullis really could transport you back in time. If anyone keyed time-travel override codes into a Portcullis, you think he'd actually go anywhere? He'd go straight to the black penitentiary in Livingston, Montana, or maybe the one in Amarillo, in American-held Texas. That's where he'd go.

And I think that's exactly where Bennie went, because a year or so later a new guy was doing his service route. He knew nothing about Bennie or where he was -- just that he was working a permanent route, he wasn't a temp filling in. I did my own search via the Darknet, using anonymity protocols I had picked up from some of my low-like hacker buddies. (Being a lifelong habitu� of poker dens and underground porno theaters will bring you cheek to jowl with the seedy and the powerful, and a surprising number of guys are both.) What I found out about Bennie made my blood go cold: He'd been remanded to the paramils by the downtown cops. The paramils had shuttled him off to the Lunar secure facility -- the place they send terrorists.

Bennie wasn't a terrorist. He was a bitter old man, but he was harmless. But say he'd decided one fine day to use his top-secret technical knowledge about a secret capability the 640s had. Couldn't that have gotten him a one-way trip to the Moon?

Still, I was piqued by Rashmil's revelation that there was still at last one working Model 640 in the city, and with renewed interest in Benni's crazy time travel claim I availed myself of the Library's comprehensive SolWeb access. I found a few conversation threads and a couple of links to interesting science papers that, it turned out, had officially been suppressed and scrubbed from the Terrestrial DataWeb; but SolWeb is big and convoluted, and it's hard to truly eradicate anything. Being an expert at SolWeb searches, I found my way to some choice data in a little-used Martian colony archive. Here's what I learned: Quantum wormtunnel phenomena could be used to bridge distances, of course, but according to certain theoretical physicists... particularly one Dr. Shirish Ramjay... they could also be tasked to move materials or even people across time.

I looked into the question of any special, black-ops, black-cops, or black-corps capabilities for the Model 640 Portculli, and got a minute and a half at a Darkweb site I'd only ever heard about -- the Necropticus Page, a repository of the world's most dangerous and inflammatory information. My security cutoff activated ninety seconds later, which indicated to me that deep-level Security Division monitoring had kicked in, triggered by my search. One the SD feelers started probing my queries, they disengaged and auto-scrub programs deleted my tracks -- which had carefully been routed and re-routed through extremely circuitous dataroutes. I spent a few sleepless nights after that, coupled with nervous workdays, but no assassin took me out and no extraction team plucked me from my bed to send me into the black hole of the Jurisprudence Authority, so my hair-trigger safeguards must have saved my bacon.

But that minute and a half I'd spent at Necropticus had opened mental doors for me I had never imagined. Evidently, under Director Admussen, the Security Division had begun the Temporal Policing and Entrenchment Program, or TPEP, also known by the code name Grandfather's Clock. This program was initiated and justified under the theory that temporal criminals and terrorists might one day use time travel to commit all sorts of atrocities. Temporal revolutionaries might even push America of the 1930s and 1940s into Red Communism. We'd all wake up some morning to find the world transformed into a state of godless tyranny. Admussen, of course, eventually went out of his paranoid mind and shot up the Avenue 10 office of the NSA, convinced that aliens had infiltrated the Security Division. Remember the headlines? The News Filter Agency couldn't keep the story away from citizen journos and bloggers. That was the end of Admussen's career -- and of his pet project, the TPEP.

But, now, let's speculate a little more. Let's say a Model 640... the models that feature the temporal quantum reshift... let's say they were being systematically slated for destruction, maybe because they didn't generate enough profits for UniCorp, but also because they were the last vestiges of a now-defunct program, and they really did enable users in the know to access a Portcullis located a century and a half in the past. And let's say that unscrupulous contractors, knowing nothing about any of this, refitted old 620s into the sleek housings of 920s, thinking they'd sell off the 920s and also pocket the proceeds from fictitious, never-needed "service calls" to the units. Once disconnected from their original locales, the re-tasked 640s would have lost their hardcon secure uplinks to the Security Division's specialty monitoring subsystems. If I were the original systems designer, I'd want any temporal usage to stay off the NSA radar. I'd want a subsystem parsing program to represent those trips as everyday transits or, better yet, scrub the records of those trips while still in the data buffer, before they were sent out in the form of the electronic reports Portculli automatically make to the central coordinating center every 800 milliseconds.

In short, if I were the systems designer, my paranoia would have ensured that the Model 640's software design -- and probably the hardware design, too -- guaranteed that top-secret capabilities, and the use of those capabilities, went through a very specific and rare-user formatted bottleneck. I'd have an extra wire, probably disguised as a redundancy report landcon. Since Double-R landcons aren't in use any more -- not for the last six years, since microarray high-cap lidar emitters tuned to autodrones replaced the landcons -- any technicians installing disguised Model 640s would have simply left the wire in question dangling, connected to nothing.

In other words, if no one who knew about the Model 620s special capabilities also knew that retasked Model 640s were being recycled and disguised as Model 920s... well... any old Joe Neckbone who did happen to put these facts together could input the access code and use his local Portcullis to travel to 1947, where $90K was worth a hell of a lot more than it does today. And if that Mr. Neckbone also put his mind to it, he could figure out how to launder his future money into 1947 funds. And then... well... the world of the past would really be his oyster, and that of his spoiled, happy husband.

And if hubby stayed in 1947 and tended the house while that certain tech-savvy Neckbone fella used his special trick every day to commute between centuries... well... that oyster could be savored for a good long time, no pun intended.

Of course, there would be certain things to work out, like wardrobe and breaking the habit of pulling out your PCD every three minutes to check sport scores, or make a countermove on your latest game of holographic 3D chess. But you'd be surprised how many of today's fashions aren't that different from what they were wearing in 2033, or 1978... or 1947, for that matter.

***

It's a lovely big pile of a house: Two stories, four bedrooms, and "en suite" bathrooms which, I've found out since buying the place, means that the facilities are actually located inside the house and not in unheated little shacks around back with no running water.

The front door is hardwood. It opens into a foyer. There's a little table where I put my car keys... the car making it easier to get home in a timely manner once my time-jumping commute is done. The car and the house combined cost less than half a year's pay.

I love 1947.

"Honey, I'm home," I called, striding through the door and breaking into a grin at the silly clich�.

But here, of all places, it was perfectly part of the place and time. And until 8 am tomorrow morning, so am I.

Gregor appears from the kitchen -- a sanctuary of blocky white appliances, where he does wonders with real food. I mean, real food! Meat that was, until recently, walking around and clucking or mooing.

Gregor greets me with a kiss. He's wearing an apron. He takes his cooking seriously.

"What's for dinner?" I ask him.

"Fish!" he beams, proudly.

I nearly shout at him -- is he trying to kill us?! Then I remember where... that is, when we are. The fish is okay. The mercury and strontium-90 levels are safe.

"Fish!" I say. "You really are expanding your repertoire." I smack him on the lips again and then follow up with a swat to his sexy rump. We've both been feeling much healthier, more energetic, and hornier since we moved here.

"I'll fix you a drink," Gregor says, and moves off to the living room where a cart with bottles stands at the ready. There's even a little cooler for ice cubes. He reaches into the cooler with tongs and plinks a few cubes, one by one, into a highball glass. The scotch is like nothing we have in the future -- it's made with grain, I think. Something like that. Something distilled, instead of conjured up chemically. And it gets it flavor from maturation in wooden casks. It sounds primitive and sort of nasty, but the results are sublime. Gregor tops it off with a squirt of soda water. I don't really even know how to describe this except to say it's water with bubbles in it.

"Any more rumblings?" he asks me as he hands me my drink. "Is Javert still hounding you?"

"Lt. Inspector Jonas is a decent guy. He did come around today, as a matter of fact, to say that they have no leads on your whereabouts."

"And is your favorite muttonchop still giving you the third degree?"

"He's invited me to share any further details that might come to mind regarding your disappearance, or any family stress, or your frame of mind," I tell him. "He seems to think maybe you headed to Mexico. Or ran of with a French surgeon named Giles."

Gregor looked confounded at this.

"Don't ask," I said, taking a grateful gulp of the drink. "I couldn't follow what he was talking about there. Some guy with a transcontinental practice, setting up a clinic in the Bronx somewhere... He pops over three days a week from Auvergne. Anyway, Jonas seemed to think you and he might have hooked up. Surveillance video at a Grounds and Sounds coffee shop show you and him chatting and laughing."

Gregor bursts out in guffaws. "Him? That French guy was a surgeon? I talked to him for about thirty seconds."

"Two and a half minutes," I say, sternly. "Slut."

We're still laughing over this when the doorbell chimes. I almost don't recognize it for what it is, but then Gregor says, "You gonna answer that? I should go check on the food. I'm not just cooking fish," he tosses over his shoulder, as he disappears into the kitchen. "I've got broccoli for you, too!"

I'm trying to remember what broccoli is -- I have some vague notion that it's a medicinal plant fed to children in the old days -- when I open the door to see two men in nice suits and fedora hats and hard expressions. One of them holds up an identification card mounted in a wallet. "Police," he says.

I almost feel like I'm back at the Library talking to Jonas about the last time I saw Gregor (four months ago; technically true: From the calendar date in the future, that is the most recent time I've seen him, even if from my personal vantage it's a complete and total lie), and where he might possibly have gone. Police attention to Gregor's absence was something I never anticipated. Once he quit his teaching job, who was there to keep track of him? But his PCD signal remaining stationary for days on end triggered an automatic police response. The cops got suspicious when they found the device -- and no Gregor -- in an alley on 46th Street (not even Gregor knows how it got there; he left it sitting on the roof of a parked helicar on 67th). Me being his husband and all, they tracked me down with questions, and I had to explain that I hadn't seen Gregor for almost a week; that I had come home to the latest short-term accommodation to find him gone, and figured he had headed off to have some time to himself for a while.

Had he done that sort of thing before?

No, I told them, never -- knowing, of course, that the cops would catch me in a lie if I said yes and they went back in the GPS monitor logs to track our respective PCD signals over time. Those signals gave me an alibi: The last time Gregor's PCD was on the move, I was at the Library in the middle of the work day. I was certain they had checked our financial records and so they knew I could hardly have hired anyone to do my dirty work even if I did want to be rid of Gregor.

But Jonas is in the future, so what do these muttonchops want?

"We've gotten reports about two men cohabitating at this residence," the taller, meaner-looking one says as the two tromp in uninvited.

Gregor comes flouncing out of the kitchen just then, still in his apron.

The muttonchop looks him over. "That ain't the kind of thing we put up with in this town. See? This is a nice town full of nice people." He shifts his mean, beady eyes to me. "We don't really like it when perverts and nancies come in."

"You won't find any around here," Gregor snaps hotly. "And a man's house being his castle, you want to mind your manners, officer."

He's been watching old movies on his DataGlas -- the one piece of future tech he brought with him, even though I asked him not to. But the crash course in mid-20th Century American culture seems to be coming in handy; I would have no idea how to talk to these two officious fangers.

Tall cop eyes Gregor with a nasty smirk. "Whatever you'd know about it. And it's 'detective,' not 'officer.' "

"Well, detective," Gregor shoots right back at him, "thanks for the word of warning. I'm sure you have many more homes to stop by with your advisory... or your insinuations... so we won't keep you." Gregor elbows his way between the me and muttonchop, and holds the door open with exaggerated politeness, but his eyes are stormy.

The detectives step outside and the tall one looks to be swinging around to fire off one last insult, but Gregor has slammed the door in his face before he quite manages it.

We look at each other for a minute until we hear their car start up and pull away.

"Cobscobbers," Gregor mutters angrily, heading back to the kitchen.

"Christ on a biscuit," I breathe, frightened and exasperated and, like Gregor, enraged. I mean, really? What's a guy gotta do? We can't afford to live in the future... and we're not allowed to live in the past?

If the Portcullis ever broke down or was deactivated, I don't know how I'd manage. But that's not saying I know how I'm going to manage, anyway.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK IN "THE HOUSEHOLDER"