Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Etelka and Pool joined Luc and Beatrix in the cargo hold. It was already cramped and full of dust. Both Luc and Beatrix had masks on along with goggles, so Etelka covered her mouth with her clean sleeve.
On the floor lay the battery and one of the internal nacells.
“Last year, I did an experiment,” she started. “I wondered how far the time device could go,s o I constructed some voyagers…I was never happy with the name..explorers…something like that. Well, I made five with the same miniaturized time engine as the Hut has and placed them in an assortment of places where I would not expect people to stumble upon them, but more or less in the vicinity of my villa in Epirios. Three went to the future, first at hundred year intervals, then at two hundred, and so on, into the past as well. As they went, after a day a timer was to reset the date to return to my own time, last year.”
“Well I went on sending them and awaiting their return, taking measures not to have them duplicate themselves in any one time–as you know that paradox is among my greatest fears.”
“Number six never returned, so I guessed that was a terminous point. I even adjusted the mechanism in the Hut so as to not go beyond the last return point.”
Luc had looked up from his work. He wiped his finger across his dust caked goggles.
They were interupted by Pool, still carrying the blood-stained coal shovel, the kind that were flat on the bottom with increasingly steep sides. His exposed gearwork still hung and twined with the tattered tails of his sleeve.
“Baroness. Mr Maron,” Pool started, lapsing into the formality that he had only recently gotten past after years with them, “…we should lay Captain Gordon to rest. I have prepared the grave and a token pyre for him…. I believe these would be his wishes. A proper send off, so to speak.”
“I would have liked to have built a proper pyre, but the beach and the locale is not suited for dry wood and I am…” He looked at his stump “…disarmed.”
While Pool’s expression was dry and humorless, it was clear to Luc that the similacrum had a sense of humor. Or was it an imitation of humor?
Luc didn’t know. He was still trying to get his mind around the idea that 19th century artifice could produce a similacrum of someone, someone they all believed was a human being.
He looked at the doughty constable, his slack jaw and puffy cheeks, his silly mustache…He did seem metalic…not just the sun-tanned Londbridgean that had weeks camping out on an island….He seemed like leather oiled with metal particles.
“We will be there momentarily, Constable.” She did it too. Falling into formality when things were out of the ordinary. Etelka touched her hair. The blue coloring growing out of exposed light brown roots. Luc looked at her tenderly and wanted to touch her cheek.
She would not have liked that. Not then, at that moment. Their friends were injured. Etelka’s pilot was shot to bits. Pool, for all his insufferable pretensions, was injured and clearly not who or what they thought he was.
Luc obliged necessity.
Ion Fyr 