The Back End of Time

The man who wandered into the Back End Bar was obviously having a very bad day. His impeccable tailored velvet coat was stained, the lace of one sleeve unravelled almost entirely, and was missing at least two ornate brass buttons, with the third just barely hanging on. The viewscreen on the thing strapped to his wrist (watch? Health monitor?) was badly chipped, and the holster at his hip was empty (hopefully he’d broken the gun, and not just left it lying about functional somewhere). More telling than his physical condition was the expression on his face, eyes alert and fearful and badly hiding a wave of deep dread that threatened to crash over him at any moment.

None of this surprised Kennedy, who wiped down the bar with rote movements born of long practice and indicated the shelf of bottles behind her. “What’ll it be, stranger?”

The sheer relief in the man’s eyes at seeing another living person didn’t escape her notice. He half-collapsed into a chair and, with a little laugh, said, “What do you have?”

“We have Harold’s beer, and Mercy’s beer, and a bit of Kline’s beer. Also Berry’s wine, if you’re a wine person. I don’t recommend it, it tastes like shit. But that might just be because it’s wine.”

“Oh. The first one.”

She thunked a glass bottle on the counter and grabbed a second for herself. “That’ll be five Lukahs.”

“Oh. Um.” Sudden nervousness crossed the man’s face as he realised the problem. He patted his pockets.

Kennedy took pity on him. “Or that brass button, for barter.”

“Ah. Sure.” The man pulled off the remaining button on his coat and handed it over. Kennedy opened a drawer behind the bar and tossed it in, on top of dozens of other souvenirs. “So. This place.”

“Back End Bar. Didn’t you see the sign?”

“R-right.” The man glanced around the ‘bar’. It was, Kennedy had to admit, not the most upmarket establishment. This was mostly because she didn’t give a fuck. The bar used to be the porch of her house, until she got tired of having to invite strangers into her house once every five days, so a long table with chairs on one side and a shelf of booze on the other, a sign over her front door, and a second bathroom off the side so that strangers weren’t trooping through her living room to piss, and bam. Problem solved. There was rarely more than one customer at a time, unless visitors came together or Marie from the village decided to stay for a beer and a chat when she brought up supplies to trade, so the size didn’t matter.

And if customers were confused by the ‘bar’ being attached to a home and an enormous greenhouse, that was their problem.

“Y-yes.” The visitor said. “Of course.” He sipped his beer and, to his credit, barely even screwed up his face at the taste.

Kennedy gave him a couple of minutes to settle himself before knocking back her beer. “Well, let’s have a look at your time machine, then. There’s a good chance I can fix it.”

The man almost dropped his own bottle, but caught it at the last moment. “W-what… I’m not… how did you…”

“Don’t ask stupid questions.” She grabbed her workbag and headed out the door.

The bone dry breeze stripped the moisture from her eyes and lips almost immediately, but at least it wasn’t windy enough to kick up a whole lot of sand today. She hated repairing time machines in the wind. Get grit in the wrong place and the whole machine’s fucked up more than when you started. She pulls her scarf up over her face and heads up the road, uphill.

“H-how do you know which way to go?” the man asked, hurrying after her with his beer still in one hand.

“I said not to ask stupid questions.” The time machines always showed up in the same spot. The exact same spot, exactly five days apart, for as long as she’d lived there. It was just around a little dune, barely out of sight of her house. The road was covered in sand, like always, but it wasn’t too much of a chore to climb; traffic came down it from the time machine almost every five days, after all, and the supply cow from the town further up every two weeks. “It’s probably a simple fix,” she told him. “Judging by the fact you wear felt and brass, looking at the materials your society must have available and the tech level of that watch… you’ve probably got what I call a Brady engine.” There were seven ways to travel through time, in Kennedy’s experience; every time machine, from every timestream, was some variation on one of the seven. All the ones she’d seen, anyway. But then, since she only saw broken time machines, that might just mean that there were seven really shitty ways to travel through time. Maybe there was an eighth way that always works perfectly. “With Brady engines, it’s usually a wire issue. You conductance systems you guys use can’t stand up to the journey and the solder breaks down. I’ve got the stuff to fix that, don’t worry.”

“It’s not broken,” the man said frantically, “it’s fine, I, I just…”

Ah. One of those travellers.

Kennedy gave him another look over, taking in the frantic eyes, the shaking hands, the dread and fear in his expression as he gazed over the lifeless, ashy dunes around them. Interesting. He thought his time machine worked. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so impatient with him.

“What did you change?” she asked.

“You know Kelterman?”

“Nope.”

“Oh. I suppose it must have worked then. He was a dictator who wiped out almost four million – ”

“You went back to kill the most evil guy you could think of.”

“W-well, yes. The suffering he caused…” the man glanced around the lifeless environment once more. “But I suppose that the effect of my actions are worse, huh. If this is the result – ”

“This isn’t your future,” Kennedy told him as the time machine came into view. It was about what she’d expected; a big smooth shape of bulky shielding, with a door in it. She hopped in, quickly identified the panel likely to cover the faulty wiring (people laid out these machines all pretty much the same, she could find the various critical parts first go a good ninety per cent of the time), and levered it up, not caving that she was bending it out of shape and ruining the smooth, unblemished look of the cockpit.

“It’s not… what?”

“This isn’t your future. You won’t see the results of killing Evil Guy What’s-his-face here.” Yep, it was the wires. She reached into her bag for her soldering kit. “About sixty per cent of the time travellers I meet try what you tried, by the way. Kill whoever the Big Bag Evil Guy from their history class was.”

“Then were am I?”

“I call it the Back End of Time. It’s where people end up when we fuck up time travel.” She got to work.

“We?”

“I got here twelve years ago. Don’t ask.” It had been a lifeless place when she had. Nothing but ashy sand and sky; even the few scraggly desert plants clinging to the dunes hadn’t been present. She’d been travelling for research, not to kill someone, and had been prepared – enough food and water to last until she’d found a tiny trickling spring beneath the sand and gotten a measly crop of root vegetables started. “What on Earth is this insulation? Did your timeline never invent plastics or what?”

“The insulation is fine!”

“It clearly isn’t, because your machine’s broken. Hand me the little red wires. Front pocket of the bag.”

He handed them over. “So, my timeline…”

“What about it?”

“It might have worked? Killing Kelterman?”

“Maybe.” Kennedy doubted it. World-changing evil events weren’t generally the work of one person, in her opinion. Very likely, he’d changed the date and the circumstances of the slaughter and there was a new name and face attached to it in the history books. But whatever.

“You said about sixty per cent of the travellers you see do this, right? Does it usually work?”

“No idea.” Job done, she slid the panel into place. She’d bent it levering it off, so it didn’t sit right, but that wasn’t her problem. “I only see people whose time machines are broken, remember? People who either haven’t accomplished their goal yet, or who haven’t made it home to see the results yet. The machine should work now, if you want to try and find out how yours turned out. I’m guessing you don’t have any seeds or anything on you?”

“Seeds?”

“You know. For the greenhouse. Everything here except sand, air and water was brought by time travellers. Have you got any fun new crops to add?”

“N-no, sorry.”

“Yeah, figured. You went back to kill, not garden. I’m guessing you didn’t bring any tech manuals or whatever either, then.” The ‘time kings’, as Kennedy liked to call them, were always the best hauls. People who invented a time machine and decided to fill it up with modern goods, collect as much entry-level scientific and technological data as they could, and then go and live in luxury as benevolent sages in the past were idiots, of course, but it was fantastic news for the stranded travellers. They usually brought new seeds, and sometimes a new method of power generation or water purification or material building or something that the town could use. Six years ago, someone had brought three live cows and a whole lot of frozen cow embryos – Kennedy had never figured out what their plan was with those, but it meant meat, milk, and the townspeople being able to carry goods with something other than their own hands. Life had improved a lot with the introduction of cattle. She glanced about the cabin and saw several long wooden handles topped with big silver knobs. (Time machines were often full of fancy embellishments. If you were going to put the work in to sail the timestream itself, you might as well to it in style.)

“The knobs on your levers. Any sentimental value?”

“Uh. No? They’re just levers.”

“I’ll take those in payment, then.” She started unscrewing the knobs. Metal was hard to come by at the end of time, and while silver didn’t have the value of iron or copper, it still had its uses.

The man looked ready to protest, but seemed to think better of it, which was a smart move. Instead he asked, “What did you mean, if I want to try?”

“Hmm?”

“You said, if I want to try to find out what happened to my timeline. Of course I want to.”

“Great, you’re all set then. If that’s your choice.”

“Do people… choose otherwise?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“Well, yes. But you… you’re… I mean…”

“A crazy old lady living alone in a shack in the middle of nowhere? That’s not the only option. There’s a town up the road where the others live.” That had been her home, once, up where she’d first discovered water. But too many time travellers in one place was a crowd, so once it had started to fill out, she moved down the road instead, which was the direction newcomers were most likely to walk in. Better they meet her than wander off into the eternal desert. “It’s nice enough. Eclectic, filled as it is with people from all sort of random times in random timelines. They have cows now.”

“Cows.”

“Yep. Do you have cows in your timeline? I could explain – ”

“I know what a cow is. Do they all speak our language?”

“You think we’re speaking the same language right now?” She laughed. “No, no; don’t think too hard about it. I know that look. You’re gonna tie yourself in knots if you think too hard about anything here. But there’s the option. If you’re willing to pay the price, that is.”

“Price?”

“Of time. Six of us are immune; lucky genetics. Everyone else, everything else, ages five times faster than normal.”

“Five times faster?!”

“Yep. A year is like five years.” She put the last silver knob in her bag and withdrew a small pen-like tool. “Works on plants, too, which is lucky because we’d all starve otherwise. Give me your hand.”

“Wait, how does that work? If plants grow five times faster and people eat a normal amount but age five times faster, how can the plants possibly absorb enough energy from the sun to keep everybod – argh!” He wrenched his hand out of her grip, grabbing at the bleeding spot where she’d stabbed him with the pen. Ignoring his glare, she read the display on the side of the device. “You’re not immune. Sorry. You’d age five times faster.” She put the device away. “And to answer your question, nobody has any fucking idea. We’ve got a couple of biochemists who are as confused as anyone else. The way time works here throws all kinds of calculations off. You should see what a nightmare it is to predict the output of solar panels.”

“What are solar panels?”

“Don’t worry about it. Or do, if you want to stay. I’m sure somebody in the village could explain them to you.”

“No, I don’t want to stay! Why would anybody want to stay?”

“You’re not even gonna check the village out?”

“In case I change my mind about ageing five times faster in a timeless wasteland? No! Th-thank you, for your help. But I have to go now. I have to see my family, I have to make sure my plan worked. I have to…”

Kennedy stepped out of the time machine. Seeing the back end of time, thinking for a moment that he’d fucked up his own timeline, must have given him quite a scare. She shouldn’t delay him any longer.

“Wait.”

She stopped.

“Why did you stay? In a place like this? You could fix your own time machine, right?”

“Now I probably could, yeah, if the thing hadn’t been cannibalised for parts years ago. Or build another one. Plenty of time machine parts around here these days. But I was the first one here, and back then, there was nothing. By the time enough people had showed up to make another machine… well. I have a life here now. Besides, a lot of us invent time travel because the timeline we’re in isn’t all that great. So they prefer to stay. And others… others Figure It Out.”

“Figure what out?”

“If you haven’t figured it out, I can’t help you. Of course, there’s no rush, if you prefer to – ”

“There is a rush. Every minute here eats five minutes of my life. I need to leave. Thank you.”

“No problem. Try not to break down again on your way out.”

It wasn’t a good idea to stand directly next to a time machine that was taking off. Kennedy backed off to a safe distance and watched him vanish. Once the dust had cleared, she headed home.

She had tried to warn him.

She used to tell them outright why she thought leaving was a bad idea, after she and the village folk had figured it out. That never went well. They had to decide to stay on their own; if she convinced them then they became consumed with guilt and regret, and usually resented her and the village for it, and half the time they changed their minds within a few years and took the chance anyway. It was best to just let them go right away if they couldn’t figure it out on their own, and save everyone the trouble of having to deal with them.

She’d given him as much as she’d dared, though. She’d told him outright that she didn’t know what effect his actions might have had on his timeline, because she’d never met a successful time traveller. Everyone who’d ever ended up in the Back End had broken down on their journey, and hadn’t made it home yet.

He’d taken that at face value, which was stupid. Because it suggested that everyone who ever ended up here was on their first time travel journey. Meaning that successful time travellers either never made more than one trip, or never ever broke down. And it also suggested that everyone who’d ever ended up here had never spoken to a successful time traveller and learned about the results of their trip, that there were no universes where time travellers met or learned from each other. Which was incredibly unlikely.

A far more reasonable explanation for why she’d never met a successful time traveller, was that perhaps there were no successful time travellers. It made no sense that people wouldn’t make (and break down on) repeat journeys, unless nobody made it home from the first one. It was very unlikely, Kennedy thought, that the stranger was headed home. Wherever he was headed was somewhere from which time travel was completely inaccessible.

A realm deeper and more inescapable than the Back End, maybe. Or a swift and merciful death in the timestream, maybe. But not home.

She collected his beer bottle on the way home. The ashy ‘sand’ in the Back End, whatever it truly was, didn’t make glass well; bottles were precious.

She set the bottle aside for refilling, and tossed the silver knobs into a crate of similar silver pieces. It was half full. Soon enough, there’d be enough silver to be worth melting down, to build something useful for her home or for the village. The brass button he’d paid for his beer was too small to bother with, unless there was some truly desperate need for any scrap of brass in the future. (Ha, future.) She headed into the bar and opened the drawer that contained it, there, sparkling amidst a pile of dozens, maybe hundreds of little trinkets. She’d never counted.

“Good luck, tyrant killer,” she muttered. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is a way back home for you.”

Then she shut the drawer, plunging the souvenirs into darkness once again, and went to bed.