Voyeurs

Voyeurs

by Roger Ley

Roger Ley has self-published eight novels and one anthology of speculative stories.
He was born and educated mainly in London, but spent some of his formative years in Saudi Arabia. Later, he worked as an engineer in the oilfields of North Africa and in the North Sea before starting a career in higher education teaching computer-aided engineering.
His early articles appeared in publications including The Guardian, Reader’s Digest, The Oldie, and Best of British. His short stories have been published on a multiplicity of websites and broadcast on BBC Radio.
He lives in Suffolk (UK).

Visit his website at rogerley.co.uk

More TTTV Stories by Roger ley: https://talltaletv.com/tag/roger-ley/

His Amazon author page is at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Roger-Ley/author/B01KOVZFHM

Making a living as a journalist wasn’t easy, thought Gibson, especially after you’d argued with your editor about the boring stories he expected you to write, left his office in a rage, and slammed the door behind you.

Freelance articles were reasonably well paid if you could sell them, but there lay the rub. He’d had a lot of rejections over the first two years. What was it his father had said? ‘You can have talent, you can have luck, but most of all you need persistence.’ He’d also learned that the more bizarre the story, the easier it was to place.

His first real success came after he’d gone to the Ozarks posing as a photographer who specialised in shooting pictures of old-time farm buildings, and drinking whiskey in old-time pool bars. By virtue of his generosity at the Hillbilly Hideaway Bar and Grill, he’d easily infiltrated an illegal redneck robo-fight club. They bought old clunkers from the scrapyard and fitted them up as warriors, usually with one hand replaced by a steel claw, the other with a club hammer. One of the club members was a software engineer who could hack into robot inhibition software and program them to fight each other to the death. Out in the backwoods the battles were brief but unbelievably noisy and exciting. The bots hammered at one another and tore off chunks of casing and limbs, until one or both were incapable of movement. Sometimes, if its battery was damaged, one of the opponents would burst into flames and carry on fighting, much to the delight of the ragged-arse onlookers.

Gibson’s story got much more interesting (and saleable) when the hillbilly techie failed to take proper precautions as she approached a legless and supine combatant, which was faking its own death. The casualty suddenly came alive, grabbed her, and slowly tore off both her arms, despite the best efforts of half a dozen screaming, drunk, and disorganised spectators. One of them even shot the robot through the head, but too late, and anyway its brain was in its chest. The young woman lived for some minutes, but blood loss and shock took her in the end. Yes, the ‘Robot Whisperer’ story had gone viral for a while. It seemed to tap into the audience’s primal fear of an inexorable, mindless machine, which turned on its maker. And the fact that the victim was female seemed to add to the frisson the mainly male viewers felt as they watched the footage. He’d been very lucky to be on the scene to record it. The royalties kept him going for the next six months of rejections.

Gibson had noticed, when he was editing his clips of the fight and its bloody aftermath, that there were half a dozen people in the shit-kicking, whiskey-drinking audience who didn’t seem to fit the usual profile. He’d been living in the area for two weeks and knew most of the crowd, but these six had appeared out of nowhere and disappeared soon after the shockingly violent incident. Their reactions seemed all wrong. They weren’t surprised, just interested. It was as if they’d been expecting this to happen. Also, they all wore the same style of glasses. It was a puzzle, but he let it rest; time was money, and he had other stories to research.

He checked his web crawler’s offerings.

There was a report of an Irish Roman Catholic priest who had secretly used a home companion robot as his replacement in the confessional. It had heard hundreds of confessions, given perfectly satisfactory advice, set penances, and given absolutions, before Father O’Malley was caught fishing in a local trout stream when he should have been on duty back at Our Lady of the Innocents. He was promptly excommunicated, of course, but he immediately formed his own sect, ‘The Church of the Iron Jesus’. Apparently, he got his robot to read the whole of the New Testament while in learning mode, and then promoted him as the New Messiah. Several well-documented miracles had been reported by his new congregation, many of whom had transferred across from his old flock. Gibson guessed that the story wouldn’t really have legs, though. There was so much AI to human interaction going on these days that hearing confessions didn’t seem all that out of place. The Catholic hierarchy might disagree with him, but plenty of people had AI bosses, AI friends and AI counsellors. Anyway, Ireland was a long way to travel from New York. No, he’d leave it.

The next snippet looked much more his style. It was a group that believed that their special AI, through some sort of quantum computing technology, was able to display the animated faces of the dead on a hologram projector and hold conversations with them. The group’s publicity material, somewhat enigmatically, alluded to ‘exciting developments enabled by the quantum matrix’. He planned to go to his first meeting later that week. It sounded as if it would be like the phony seances so popular in the Victorian era. He guessed that the AI was scraping data from the internet, so he’d planted fictitious information about his ‘deceased’ mother and father, both of whom were currently living happily in an old folks home in Iowa. He hoped to record the interview and expose the fraud. It wasn’t a big, gory story, but it should keep the wolf from the door.

In the meantime, he was going out for a drink that evening with an old college friend. Rainer was always good company. He was in touch with the zeitgeist and had interesting ideas, some of which were pretty off the wall, probably as a result of his reading habits combined with the Class A drugs he indulged in. Gibson was looking forward to spending time with him.

#

They sat in a booth at the Timeout Bar across town from Gibson’s one-bed apartment. Gibson told Rainer about the Irish priest over their first drink. The conversation moved on to gene splicing as they began their second.

‘There’s this group of green activists,’ said Rainer. ‘Apparently they’ve had some sort of therapy that allows them to photosynthesise. They still need food, but their ultimate aim is to be completely self-sufficient and put no strain on the environment. That’d make a good story for you.’

‘Sounds interesting; how do I find them?’ asked Gibson.

‘It shouldn’t be difficult,’ said Rainer vaguely.

Gibson wondered if the story was a product of his friend’s enthusiastic use of magic mushrooms in his early twenties. Rainer was probably having flashbacks that he couldn’t distinguish from reality.

‘And there’s a group of bodybuilders that call themselves the Urban Guardians,’ he continued. ‘They’ve had a protein extracted from jellyfish spliced into their genome so they glow in the dark with a green light. They hang around the Park and protect people from the gangs.’

Rainer stood up and went to the restroom, leaving Gibson thinking that the Guardians sounded suspiciously like comic book superheroes Rainer might have read about.

A few minutes later, Rainer came back with another round of drinks and sat back down.

‘Have you heard about the time tourists?’ he asked, sipping his beer and watching his friend’s reaction over the rim of his glass.

‘Time tourists?’ asked Gibson.

‘They’ve been seen several times,’ said Rainer.

‘What do they look like? Shiny silver suits, antennae sticking out of their heads?’

‘No, they blend in pretty well. They wear appropriate clothing; it’s the glasses that give them away.’

‘Glasses?’ asked Gibson, paying slightly more attention as a memory tickled at his subconscious.

‘They all wear the same design.’

Gibson’s interest was suddenly aroused as he thought back to the incident in the Ozarks. He shuddered at the memory but wondered if he could revive the story with a different slant and milk it again.

‘The thing is,’ said Rainer, ‘if time travel ever becomes possible, then any dramatic or historically interesting incident might draw time tourists. It all depends on the cost. If an ordinary Joe could afford it, then they might appear quite regularly.’

‘What about the glasses?’ asked Gibson.

‘Probably some sort of recording device. People have been wearing glasses for hundreds of years. The tourists wouldn’t want to be seen using futuristic technology. Even smartphones would be conspicuous if they travelled back further than the beginning of this century. ’

#

When he got home that evening, despite his level of intoxication, Gibson began searching through library clips of dramatic incidents: the Twin Towers, Hiroshima, the assassination of both Kennedys. He thought he caught glimpses of the tourists but couldn’t be sure. He used freeze-frame to scrutinise them, but a lot of the films and videos were grainy and of poor quality. Those he suspected were tourists never stayed long. One second they were there in the crowd; a couple of seconds later, they were gone. The only really good clips were his own, at the robot fight.

He found some third-party evidence however. There was an interview with a New Yorker who said he’d seen a group of people in Pumphouse Park, watching as the South Tower collapsed, shouting and cheering. And a fireman who said he came upon a strange group as he climbed the stairs in the North Tower. He’d needed breathing apparatus, but they didn’t seem bothered by the smoke. He’d told them to go back down, but they hadn’t taken any notice.

A week later, Gibson asked Rainer around to his apartment and showed him some of the stills he’d printed off, as well as his own video clips.

‘I guess they’d be present at lots of dramatic events,’ said Rainer. ‘The Guillotine during the French Revolution, the asteroid hit that killed off the dinosaurs, the Great Fire of London.’

‘What about the Crucifixion?’ said Gibson. ‘Do you think the tourists might try to save Christ? All it would take is a couple of extremists with modern automatic weapons. Think of the way world history would change if there weren’t such a thing as Christianity.’

Rainer raised his eyebrows and shrugged noncommittally as he brought his tobacco tin out of his pocket. Gibson continued with his train of thought. ‘I’ve always wondered about the Antikythera mechanism. It’s a bronze orrery made by the ancient Greeks and found on a shipwreck about a hundred years ago. Apparently, it could be used to predict eclipses and astronomical events. It’s the first known analogue computer, but was manufactured centuries before its time. What if a time tourist gave the idea to one of the early Greek philosophers? I mean, it didn’t need any batteries. It could even have been specially designed to work at a time when none were available.’

‘Who knows?’ said Rainer vaguely as he rolled a doobie. He looked up and paused as he licked the edge of the paper. ‘It’s a pity you couldn’t interview one of them, the time tourists, I mean. That would be quite a story, but you’d have to be in the right place at the right time to meet one.’

#

Gibson carried on with his research and nearly got an advance from the editor of one of the offbeat news sites, but their negotiation came to nothing in the end. He attended various events where he hoped tourists might appear, but none of them were what he’d call sensational. Truly sensational events were not really predictable. After a couple more weeks of research, he decided to go back to the story about the AI spiritualist.

But then an unexpected visitor rang his entry bell.

‘Good morning, Mr Daniels, or may I call you Gibson? My name is Martin Riley. I’ve come to talk to you about the article you’re researching.’

Hoping this might result in an assignment, Gibson asked him in. It was time for a break from his screen, anyway. He made a pot of coffee. Riley was a young man; Gibson guessed about twenty-five. He was of average height and build, with auburn hair, a cheerful demeanour and an English accent.

‘How could you know what I’m researching?’ he asked as he poured hot water into the pot. He presumed Riley had been talking to Rainer.

Riley smiled and ignored his question. ‘It’s about the temporal observers you noticed at the robot fight in Arkansas.’

‘Gawkers, if you ask me,’ muttered Gibson.

‘Well, I suppose it depends on your point of view,’ said Riley. ‘I have a personal interest in temporal displacement, in that I invented it. I’m a physicist, you understand.’

‘Really?’ said Gibson, beginning to regret that he’d invited Riley over his threshold. The man was obviously crazy, or else this was an elaborate practical joke initiated by Rainer. The guy was probably an actor; perhaps they were being videoed right now.

Riley smiled. ‘Now I can imagine what you’re thinking, but you just have to suspend disbelief for a few minutes. I know about the temporal displacement business because my future self told me about it.’

‘Your future self came back in time and told you how to make time travel work?’

‘Oh no,’ laughed Riley, ‘that would be a paradox because the information would have had no source. All he told me was that I would be successful in the future. So, I’m here to offer you a deal, if you’re interested.’

‘What sort of deal?’ asked Gibson.

‘How about a trip to the historical event of your choice at the expense of First Planet Temporal Travel? “Your personal Chrono Escape” as the company slogan says, or will say in a few years’ time.’

‘What’s the catch?’ asked Gibson.

‘The only catch is that you don’t write this article about the time tourists, as you call them. It would complicate matters if people of this epoch knew in advance that temporal displacement was possible. It might even cause a bifurcation of the timeline.’

‘Now you raise an interesting point,’ said Gibson. ‘How can it be safe for you to send these people back into the past? What if they shot their own grandfather or did something else that would alter their own future?’

‘Well, fortunately that isn’t easy because they’re out of phase with the past they’ve travelled back to. I suspect it’s something to do with the Pauli exclusion principle, but I’m not sure yet. Anyway, the effect is that the Tourists are insubstantial. They can’t make sound; they can’t speak. They can see what they’ve come to observe but are not affected by it, so if there was an explosion, shrapnel and splinters would pass through them. Their perception is limited to the visible light wavelengths. They’re effectively ghosts, spirits, phantoms, call them what you like.’

‘Okay, just going along with this for the moment, how do you and your future self communicate?’ asked Gibson.

‘We use whiteboards and board markers,’ said Riley earnestly.

Gibson thought about the proposition for a few moments. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘it’s a deal.’

‘The only problem is that you’ll have to wait for five years before the first working temporal projector is operational,’ said Riley.

Plenty of time for me to get a copy of the drawings for the Antikythera mechanism, and learn to write a smattering of ancient Greek, thought Gibson. Just a few words like: bronze, gear, eclipse, planets.

‘I’ve always been fascinated by the Hellenistic period,’ he said.

‘Ah, ancient Greece,’ said Riley. ‘Fascinating. Good choice, Gibson, good choice.’

After Riley had gone, Gibson sat and thought about temporal displacement.

Bifurcation of the timeline my ass, he thought. Everything in this world is so screwed up, a bifurcation of the timeline might be just what I need. Forget about small changes and the butterfly effect. The ancient Greeks wouldn’t find it difficult to build the Antikythera mechanism; it was the design they needed help with. But that would only be a taster. If he could explain the basic principles of the steam engine and the Bessemer converter, using drawings on the whiteboard, then with luck, they’d get the Industrial Revolution started two thousand years early.

All he had to do was buy a whiteboard, some markers, and find a way to jump to the new branch of the timeline once the bifurcation happened. Now, that would be a story.

The End