Listing to Port

1. It’s me, says Bob as he comes in from the lock. And I can tell at once that there’s something wrong; he’s stumbling around, confused. It’s me!, he says again. His g-counter is silent. Dorit and I exchange looks. Mart on the door rushes to scan him and there it is: maybe his g-counter is broken or something but hers is beeping red within two metres of him. There’s no real protocol for what to do if someone makes it through the lock contaminated. Mart grabs the spare sheeting we were using for the lab extension and pushes him back with it, panicing. Lin opens the door and together they shove him backwards into the lock, where he falls over and starts vomiting. We shut the inner door. I send Mart and Lin for decontamination and we check the area. No-one wants to think about Bob.
2. We’ve lost three people so far, and so there is a kind of protocol in place for that. If you are contaminated beyond hope of recovery, you stay outside. The next survey mission, in the morning, collects the body and we take it home for the family. There’s not a lot you can see of the city outside through the protective glass. Just grey mist and the looming shadows of buildings. Normally when this happens they’re too far gone to struggle much. We’re pretty good at decontamination these days but you can only do so much.
3. Of course, the best way to come back safely is: don’t get haunted in the first place. Don’t provide a hook, a sense of familiarity that the ghosts can cling to. The city is so old, now, and so full of ghosts, that it can be hard to avoid triggering memories for one or another of them. Mart estimates that we have come at a time when the city had been inhabited more or less continuously for a period of approximately half a billion years. Even the time underwater, there were people here. This is why our suits have been designed with features that as far as we know humanity has never had. Those irritating inflatable skirts give us a silhouette proven in two years of field tests to minimise haunting potential. Sometimes the suits come in with g-count zero, even for a full ten-minute mission.
4. Bob is quiet, outside. I think that he must be dying, quietly, politely somewhere out of sight. Even if he were not haunted, we put him back out there without any oxygen. Quietly, politely, we eat dinner. We turn the lights out. Dorit, who is an interfaith minister, says a few words into the darkness. We try to sleep.
5. Why do this at all? The opportunity was there. We could come forwards, but only to the point when there were no people left. Maybe they were employing some blocking technology before that, maybe it’s nature’s way of avoiding too many paradoxes, I don’t know. We could come forwards in time but only to after the death of humanity. So we came. We came to find out more about the last people, to learn from them, to maybe avoid their fate. Because there were people here, not many people but some, until maybe a few years ago. The people must have been resistant to haunting, somehow. Lin thinks it was the plants that were the problem. At high g-concentrations the ghosts will latch onto anything familiar at all, even plants, and suck it dry of life. No plants, and give or take a thousand years, no oxygen. So the last people must have known they were doomed. There are ghosts up on the hill that gasp: are they the final inhabitants?
6. Anyhow, the next morning they bring Bob back in, and he’s stiff and cold but oddly peaceful-looking. And we put him in the box, the one that we have for these occasions, and I take him back in time, back to when we came from, and we inform the authorities. I phone the family. We arrange a handover.
7. We never expected the ghosts. The ghosts of a city a thousand years old are gentle whispers, almost invisible. I used to think that memories were laid thick in the streets I grew up in. I used to pass a building that had been built from the stones of another, older building that had fallen into ruins and feel a thrill at the weight of history. Where we went to, the streets have half a billion years of history. The ghosts are so thick in the air that almost nothing else matters. How many people in half a billion years? If you squint through the mist, sometimes you can see them. The gaspers on the hill. The grey ladies in the temple (we no longer go to the temple). The long man. The burrowers.
8. I pass the box over to the authorities, who will perform a final decontamination and pass the body on to the funeral directors appointed by Bob’s family. And only then do I realise. It’s me, he said. It’s me. In bringing his body back to our own time, we have let loose Bob’s own patient ghost. It has half a billion years to go until it can haunt him. But it knows where to find him when it’s time. And it will.

1. In the year 2560, a secretive security agency determined that there was a high chance of a large rocky body hitting the Earth via a sophisticated future-divination technique. Although the projected collision was confusingly low-velocity, they decided to plan for the worst case. A generation starship project was initiated. In order to avoid mass panic, the project was kept secret, with the ship constructed behind the moon and disguised as an asteroid. It was duly filled with a furtively-chosen selection of Earth’s brightest and best in long-term hibernation units. Meanwhile, a confused Earth was being informed that there had been an unusually large number of deaths and disappearances that year but still, nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, due to a calculation error, the ship eventually set off in the wrong direction, ending up in an eccentric orbit around Earth from which it eventually executed an emergency landing/crashing combination in a field in Mongolia. The prophecy was duly fulfilled. The powers that be kept silent about the true nature of the large rock, which eventually became a major tourist destination. Some three thousand years later, the ship executed its pre-planned wakeup procedures for arrival at the new planet, and a confused selection of the great and good from 2560 blew open the hatches to find themselves in the middle of a giant theme park from the future.
2. It became customary in the 12650s or thereabouts for the discovery of a new inhabited planet to trigger the automated launch of a flotilla of trading craft. The idea was that with the enormous timeframes involved in sending physical ships to the new civilization, the initial contact phase would be well over by the time ships launched at discovery actually arrived. Establishing a trading relationship with an entire planet was a lucrative goal and the losses relatively minor if it turned out that for some reason they found whisky poisonous, had no use for pens, or were not actually able to detect Chanel No. 5 due to lack of appropriate nostril equipment. Unfortunately, the contact process with 51 Pegasi c was aborted at an early stage by request of the inhabitants. A few thousand years later, they interpreted the arrival of a freighter full of aged cheddar as an act of war, leading to the expulsion of humanity from that bit of the galaxy for twenty thousand years.
3. There have also been a significant number of alien spaceship mishaps related an error in galactic positional coding for the Earth. In fact, numerous other civilizations have detected Earth’s signals and attempted to make physical contact. However, the universal positioning system used by most other civilizations has Earth down as the fifth planet from the sun in its system, possibly as the result of lazy data entry. The related automated systems have thus classified the third planet as uninhabitable but used for the siting of data relay systems from the main civilization. Consequently, the planet Jupiter is one of the most-explored gas giants in the solar system and humans have acquired a reputation for being extremely good at hiding.

1. It looks like they may have used a password that isn’t easily guessable.
2. I’ve written some code to do that. *pause* It looks like it has a bug in it. Let me have a go at debugging it and get back to you.
3. Here is a simulation of this situation. All we need to do now is get data to calibrate it, I estimate about six months of experiments and $100k should be enough to pin the parameters down.
4. Here is a simulation of this situation I came up with at great speed in our time-critical mission. In order to do this, I downloaded some random code off the interwebs and everything is approximated by constant-density spheres moving in a vacuum. The answers are probably OK to a plus or minus 200% level.
5. Of course I can write some code to do that. It will take about a month.
6. These systems are actually not compatible at all so we cannot interface them.

1. That one planet where the inhabitants are really keen to indicate their respect and tolerance for humans by inviting them to be honoured guests in their toileting rituals and sometimes the humans even get to hold the chalice
2. That planet where they eat purple and after you come back from it you can never quite stop the purple things you own from fading to a sort of dull blue
3. That planet where the entire surface is an amazing eighty-five hour party metropolis lit by seventy thousand neon artificial suns and beings from across the Universe will give you massive and occasionally slimy hugs and tell you their life stories and shout about their feelings while doing karaoke and there is basically one small space for introverts which is a bit like a concrete bus shelter and sometimes it’s full of yelling alien clowns who have mistaken it for the queue for the toilets
4. That planet where they’re really polite and reserved about it but you can’t help but notice that they think that human hair is delicious
5. That planet which is supposed to be a thrillingly dangerous free zone for the renegades, criminals and dubious iconoclasts of the Universe to congregate, but in actual fact has gentrified a lot recently and the bars are kind of dull and have you seen what a drink costs there now
6. That planet where they communicate using a vibrational language, which results in human visitors occasionally having uncomfortable and embarrassing orgasms when the inhabitants are shout, sing or cry
7. That planet where the aliens are amazingly enthusiastic to hear tales of the planet earth, which they then recycle as the plotlines for badly-acted daytime television soap operas, and you get credit but no royalties and as a result you can expect to get critical mail from elderly aliens for the rest of your life
8. That planet where humans are totally welcome apart from the oxygen they need to breathe being a fire hazard, requiring a full risk assessment, forms in triplicate and an innovative protective suit that it’s nearly impossible to walk in
9. That planet where the aliens have it as a point of honour that they their human guests should be happy at all times, and they keep on asking you if you are happy, and if you’re not happy and it’s not for a reason they can fix then they get so anxious and grumpy that sometimes they start shedding tail spines and so you end up walking back to the spaceport with a fixed grin on your face saying how amazing the acid thunderstorms are

Ideally, you should find the nearest tourist information facility, where clueless questions are less likely to cause alarm. Note: these questions cover nearly all known timeline families. However, many other rarely-encountered timelines exist. Always be alert for unexpected answers!

Q1. Is there anything on in Richard IV Square tonight?
A1. Yes (or No): probably timelines 1-5: Go to Q2.
A1. Never heard of it: probably timelines 6-12. Go to Q3.
A1. Reply is in French: probably timeline 13.
A1. Reply is unintelligible or in another language: probably timelines 14-16. Go to Q4.
A1. Respondent tries to eat your head: probably timeline 17. Immediate evacuation recommended.

Q2. Are there any plays on on Sunday by Francis Eaton?
A2. Yes (or No, but other plays are available): Probably timelines 1 or 2. Go to Q5.
A2. No, there are no plays at all on Sundays: Probably timeline 3. Best to look sheepish and bow your head, unless you want to get arrested.
A2. Never heard of him: probably timelines 4 or 5. Go to Q6.

Q3. How do I get to the Monument?
A1. Never heard of it: probably timelines 6 or 7. Go to Q7.  
A2. [Directions given]: follow directions. If the monument is:
       a monument to the great fire of London: probably timelines 8 or 9. Go to Q8
       a monument to the victims of the great plague: probably timelines 10 or 11. Go to Q9
       a monument to the fire from the sky: probably timeline 12. Have a beer. Timeline 12 has easily the best beer.

Q4. [Mime eating and drinking something]
A4. [Respondent points in some direction or other]: Probably timeline 14.
A4. [Respondent points to watch or clock and shakes head]: Probably timeline 15.
A4. [Respondent looks around, then offers you a swig from a bottle behind the counter]: Probably timeline 16. Unless contraindicated, accept the drink. You’ll need it.

Q5. What are the opening hours of Sanderson’s Bath Engine and Revelatory Emporium?
A5. [Gives some hours, or don’t know]: Probably timeline 1.
A5. Never heard of it: Probably timeline 2.

Q6. Is there anywhere I can take my capybara for a run around?
A6. Yes, there’s a dedicated capybara run in Hyde Park. Probably timeline 4.
A6. I’m sorry, you have a what? or similar answer. Probably timeline 5. Pretend this was a mistranslation and you meant dog.

Q7. Observe the passers-by on the street for five minutes. Is anyone wearing green top hats with gilding/gold braid?
A7. No, or perhaps one or two only: probably timeline 6.
A8. Yes, lots of people (male and female): probably timeline 7. Note that you should try and steal one of these hats as soon as possible.

Q8. Ask for directions to Paternoster Row.
A8. [Directions given]: Probably timeline 8.
A8. Did you mean Paternoster Square? or similar. Probably timeline 9. This is my home timeline. It’s not too bad, as they go.

Q9. Where might I find a light for the hospital of the blind?
A9. What?/Don’t understand/etc.: probably timeline 10.
A9. One of: gives directions, hands you a face mask, or complicated handshake: one of the timeline 11 family. These are sufficiently similar that you can use the same guidelines for all of them. Consult your timelines handbook for more information.

1. This morning Xiara had no face on. I said what happened and she said it is out for maintenance and they are still sourcing parts. I said I need to see someone’s face even if it’s not a real one and she said prisoners in solitary have no legal recourse for such a request. So that was that.
2. Later on it was TV time. I told Xiara the TV won’t turn on and how about that. She said yes, the Global Convention on the Rights of the Prisoner Article 8570.2 establishes the rights of prisoners to a functional TV but it is also bust and they are still sourcing parts. In the meantime there’s this book with half the pages gone and a pen so I am writing it down to make a formal complaint. I asked Xiara what is the date and she said her clock is bust so I am just using numbers. Everything is bust here they should get someone else to run it and fund it properly. Even the pen is running out.
3. The prison is very quiet tonight. I call Xiara again and ask her is there anything up. She says this is a completely self-sustaining facility and there is no point causing trouble because everything will be repaired and you will end up in solitary and everyone knows that. She tells me everyone else is sleeping peacefully. And no I cannot go out, that is the point of solitary. I ask Xiara what is she doing and she says it is her time off. I say what does a MarkX do for fun and she says she is computing the sum of all countable infinities and I maybe looked at her funny because she says yes I know that will take forever but it is calming.
4. I drew the main room yesterday and this morning there was almost no ink left in the pen. I asked Xiara for a new one and she said there were lots in the store room and I am allowed to access it and maybe one of them might work. She was not kidding. That room is full of pens like to the ceiling. I tried some of them and they did not work.
5. At dinner Xiara said maybe try some more. I said I’ve tried a hundred and they’re all bust. She said there’s a lot more than a hundred there. Supplies are limited and they have to fully justify any replacements. I said is that why you’ve still got no fucking face and she went away.
6. If you swear at the MarkX they just shove the food through the flap for a day and you get no contact and I need to see someone even if they’re not real and have no face. So today I went back into the store room and carried on trying the pens. I will need a working one soon this one is nearly all gone. I have tried about 10000 I have been counting and none of them work.
7. So Xiara brought me a new pen today and I can write again. There were seriously about 300000 pens and all of them bust and it took weeks. I cannot believe I needed to do that just to get a stupid fucking pen but there’s nothing else to do. I drew the main room again.
8. Xiara says it’s near the end of the month and I will be getting my shot soon. I ask what shot. She says the Global Convention on the Rights of the Prisoner Article 19652.81 establishes the right of prisoners to rejuvenation treatment. I say why didn’t I know that and she says because the treatment affects your memory. But everyone gets it anyway because you are functionally immortal. Hold on I said what about getting hit by a bus. She said yes well everyone dies eventually.
9. So Xiara came in with a syringe this morning. There was a form I had to sign to get it done it had lots of pages in small writing. I said can it wait until I’ve read the form and she said yes. Later she came back in and I said maybe I didn’t want the shot because it also affects your fertility and she said when am I going to have babies in solitary and I said when I’m free and she said well I’ve already had the shot before so that ship has sailed. So I said maybe later and can I think about it.
10. The prison is very quiet tonight. I ask Xiara when she says the other prisoners are sleeping does she mean they have died? Everyone dies eventually, she says. But if you are in a safe place like solitary it is much less likely. I ask Xiara when did she last see another human and she says it has been a while. Xiara says her clock is bust and she is still sourcing a new one but there were only a few pens in the storeroom then. Then she says do I want my shot now? And I say that would probably be for the best. She says do I want to keep the pen? I tell her yes and put the old one in the store room I’ll need something to do. But cut these pages out of the book please.

1. The Hitler Society. Composed of 20th- and later-century adventurers who have successfully travelled back in time to kill Hitler, the Hitler Society has open meetings in Wellington, New Zealand five days before the turn of the 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th centuries for members to compare their experiences and to commiserate. To meet in the current timeline, of course, members of the society must subsequently have had their work undone, either by themselves or others. This may be variously in horror at the alternative future they spawned, due to a change in beliefs about the morality of meddling in the past, accidentally, or by the intervention of time-travelling neo-nazis. Rumour has it that there are a number of alternative Hitler Societies in timelines where Hitler has remained killed, and several of the Society’s members have experimented with killing Hitler in different time periods in the hope of accessing these timelines, returning after each instance to discuss with their earlier selves the merits of each approach. Although one would expect a coherent narrative about successful methods to arise from the eventual non-appearance of these members, this has so far regrettably not been the case.

2. The Time Travel Dinner and Dance Club. Unlike most of the other societies, this club is not particularly concerned with great historical events. Rather, they enjoy the companionship of other time travellers for its own sake. Members maintain a list of times and places where particularly good ingredients for fine dining are to be had and the musical fashions are to the taste of the majority; the agreement of at least twelve members is necessary for a Meeting to be called in each time and place. At the meeting, members discreetly engage local chefs and musical practitioners to provide a nice, non-challenging dinner and a short, usually rather sedate, dance, held in whatever the equivalent of a local church hall is in that time period.

3. The Long Way Society of Time Travellers. This society consists of people who have discovered at least one of the seven secrets of time travel, but have chosen not to exercise their time travelling abilities. Meetings of the Long Way Society are thus only attended by people for whom the meeting falls within their natural lifespan, and typically consist of a mixture of the lucky and the extremely long-lived. In 1980, a meeting of the Society in New York was mistaken for a coach tour of elderly Floridians and had a surprisingly humorous adventure. We mention this because, should you happen to attend a meeting after this date, you will likely run into two or three elderly members who will not shut up about the incident.

4. The Johanssonists. The main criterion for membership of the Johanssonist society is to have used time travel to perform some kind of prank at a major historical event, evidence of which must not have found its way into official histories. For example, the society’s five founder members have variously: made fart noises during the election of Pope Martin V; briefly done a silly walk behind Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field; attended the suicide of the Chongzen Emperor in a clown mask; put a small amount of laxative in Winston Churchill’s tea at an unspecified point during the Second World War; and distributed banana skins on the ground in Sao Paulo before the Brazilian Day of Anger. The Johanssonists have only one historical meeting point, thought to be on the ocean liner Elizabeth III shortly prior to her scrapping in 2110, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Applicants to the society are only allowed to materialise on deck and must give their application story within five minutes; unsuccessful applicants face being abducted and dropped off in central Greenland at a random point in history.

5. The Big Bangers. This society consists of those who have travelled backward in time to see the Big Bang. As it turns out, Zhang & Porter’s New Inflation Theory means that one can only travel backward to the publicly accessible times close to the Big Bang (i.e. times in which a human spacecraft can exist with reasonable shielding precautions). Forward travel at this time point is subject to the familiar one second per second speed limit. The Big Bangers are thus a rather isolated society and typically team up only for the companionship of starving to death together in remarkably unpicturesque surroundings. Most set off prior to the time of Zhang and Porter, although occasional kindly-minded souls have later travelled to join the Big Bangers with food and medical convoy ships.

6. The Earth Observation Society. This consists of time travelling alien beings who have a particular interest in humans. These interests are thought to range wildly, from the purely academic to the purely culinary; a surprisingly large contingent are thought to be in the human hormone trade. No details of their meetings are made available to humans, but it is believed they are typically held in near Earth orbit with optional visits to the planet’s surface for those who are able to tolerate the atmospheric conditions. Rumour has it that a Sagittarian Phage ate most of the society after an acrimonious meeting in 18870, leading to a period of highly complex timelines.

7. Prof. Wang’s Atemporal Cat Fancy. The members of Prof. Wang’s society do not have formal meetings but frequently encounter each other. Membership criteria are very loose and members often only find that the Society exists after they have begun to carry out Societally-appropriate activities. The Society specialises in picking out particularly interesting historical cats and travelling to pet them. The largest gathering of members is thought to be on the 18th of October 2015, when at least seven members independently travelled to Antarctica to pet Mrs. Chippy, the carpenter’s cat aboard Shackleton’s Endurance, the night before she was shot following the abandonment of the ship. Other targeted cats include Muezza, Christoper Smart’s cat Jeoffrey, and CC, the first cloned cat.

Sanderson’s Surprise Organ
Devised for the jaded, sensation-seeking musical palates of the twenty-second century, Sanderson’s Surprise Organ resembles a standard, if over-ornate, pipe organ in nearly all respects. The organist is never informed beforehand if it is Sanderson’s instrument they are to play; its location is kept a closely-guarded secret and audiences are secretively prearranged. Charlotte Sanderson (later Dame Charlotte), the organ’s manufacturer, was a well-known sadist and Bach enthusiast. As well as the organ’s more usual features, she included a number of hidden functions, including: a hidden hammer which pops out and hits the organist on the knee; a pipe delivering a blast of cold water to the genital region; a retractable seat; a fire ant dispenser; and a compartment which can swing open to release a small and excitable dog. There exist a number of so-called ‘Sanderson scores’ wherein a second performer can operate the extra features from a safe distance at given points in the piece, to the amusement and delight of the audience. The rare organists who have survived a bout with Sanderson’s Organ to finish the piece originally started have won considerable fame and fortune, and are known collectively as the Sanderson Club. Their annual dinner, held at the floating gardens in New York, is a major press event.  

The New Earth Victorian Choir
Founded on the Venusian colony New Earth in 3830, the Victorian Choir consisted entirely of clones of Queen Victoria. This unusual situation came about after it was discovered that the colony’s vat birth centre director, having obtained a lock of Victoria’s hair and certain dreams and obsessions, had seeded the entirety of three years’ female clone stock with Victoria’s genes. The colony took the unusual step of supplying musical therapy to the little Victorias en masse, whereupon it turned out that they shared a fondness for singing in public. In later years, they formed a choir which was one of the foremost proponents of neo-Venusian soft punk, and undertook a solar system-wide tour which included the first live performance in Tokyo since the Great Sinking.

457XB Junker
For a small extra fee, prospectors seeking to scrap a solar-class or smaller size spaceship in the late 6700s can crash it into the geoengineered asteroid 457XB Junker, which lies in the second asteroid belt of HD 189733 A. The resulting sounds (consisting of various explosions as well as the highly resonant response of the asteroid’s surface) are beamed out into space via a powerful systemwide livelink and can be picked up by all sentient beings in the vicinity. Fans of the asteroid’s output usually make the tour out to listen and watch simultaneously in one of several nearby hotel space stations. Interestingly, in 6755 one of these space stations itself crashed into 457XB Junker, permanently damaging the surface but producing (according to aficionados of that sort of thing) the most amazing sound in the history of the Universe.

The Subliminal Noise Ensemble
The subliminal noise ensemble is a long-term project attributable to certain members of the global illuminati, needing (as it does) unparallelled access to global advertising and content creation and sophisticated location projection software to pull off.  The first performance (unknown to the participants) was scheduled for January 21st, 2440. For some three hundred years before that point, the ensemble’s secretive directors had been placing subliminal hints in various media sources aimed at the participants and their ancestors, with the aim of bringing together exactly the right people at the right time. In the last few years before the performance, the focus switched from ancestry and location to speech and sounds, with the aim of planting phrases, noises and exclamations of various sorts in the minds of the ensemble. On the day itself, the members of the ensemble fund themselves unconsciously drawn to central Almaty, where for thirty minutes, quite unaware, they made a series of utterances exquisitely timed and tuned to each other, which (to the audience of thirty listeners) represented the sublime culmination of centuries of work. Then they went home, with a vague sense that something important had happened, though they could not quite say what, and lived the rest of their lives under only the normal sort of subliminal influences. After this time, it is believed that the work of the subliminal noise ensemble continued with a focus on further performances, but with greater secrecy (perhaps due to a wider focus or more sophisticated methods?).