Acme Time Travel Incorporated - Volume 2

Gabriel’s mum’s flat - Clacton

Gabriel rolled himself off the old sofa that was his bed. As he got up, an exposed spring tugged at his shirtsleeve. He stopped, slowly un-hooking the fabric from the curl of steel. He couldn’t afford to damage what few presentable clothes he had.

His mum was still asleep. She wouldn’t get up until maybe midday. He got washed, dressed, and then switched the kettle on. He rummaged in the sink to find the cleanest looking mug for his morning coffee and gave it a quick scrape round with a metal washing-up scourer. Gabriel tried to keep his thoughts calm, but he always found that searching through a sink piled high with dirty pots made him deeply unsettled. He would try to keep the place a bit clean, and he would wash the pots every day for weeks on end, but if he ever stopped, then he would find that his mum would simply push dirty pots into the sink again, as if they magically cleaned themselves. It wasn’t as though she was otherwise busy. She would exist on £1 meals-for-one from the Iceland shop (she never shopped or cooked for him ... he had been fending for himself for years), and then she would throw the rubbish in the sink or the bin, neither of which she cleared out.

The kettle boiled, and he made himself a strong black coffee. He sometimes liked to have black coffee, but today it was just that he had forgotten to buy milk. He had looked but the milk that sat in the fridge didn’t look too promising.

“Good morning, Gabriel,” Vicky whispered. “You might want to fit the earpiece, in case your mother wakes up.”

“Morning Vicky,” he whispered back, pulling the tiny earpiece from a zipped compartment on his wallet.

“I need to do some research on my story idea ... the one about care support for families back in the 1920s and 1930s,” Gabriel said. “I guess that you might be able to get me some information that I could use.”

“I can certainly do that, Gabriel. How would you wish it to be presented?”

“Erm ... I don’t really know. What sort of things could you do?”

“Well, I could present it in the form of a television documentary, for example.”

“We don’t have a TV, you know,” said Gabriel, looking around at their bleak flat, with its jumble sale and second-hand shop furniture.

“I could display it on any flat surface,” said Vicky, “for example ...”

Immediately the wall behind him began to shimmer. A section of the faded yellow wallpaper became creamy parchment on which a series of old photographs and textual descriptions began to scroll upwards.

“The old photographs look so clear,” observed Gabriel. “I don’t think I have ever seen old photographs with that level of sharpness before.”

“That is because I am using a great deal of visual enhancement,” Vicky explained. “The photographic material I have pulled back from the stock archives, but I am able to enhance it to a far greater degree than your current technology would allow.”

“It looks so sharp, you almost feel that you are there. Is it possible to make the screen even bigger?”

“If you wish, I could make the visuals fully immersive. Would you like to see an example?”

“Yes please, Vicky.”

Suddenly Gabriel was standing on the pavement of a busy town.

“This is Coventry in 1932,” explained Vicky.

The street was a busy thoroughfare, with cars passing and people walking up and down the pavement. On the other side of the road, a woman was walking along with a child, a boy of maybe 12 years of age.

“Why don’t you cross the road and see the woman with the child,” suggested Vicky.

Without thinking, Gabriel checked that no traffic was coming and set off across the road. It was only when he was halfway across the road that he realised that he was walking into an old piece of video footage.

“How am I doing this?” Gabriel asked. “How can I walk around an old piece of video?”

“My graphic enhancement features enable me to ‘build up’ what you would have seen from the original material to hand, Gabriel. If you notice, I am also providing olfactory information to supplement the visual information.”

“Sorry ... what does ...?”

“I am providing smells that would probably have been present at the time. I can turn that feature off it seems unnecessary or unpleasant.”

As Vicky spoke, a man got into a car next to where Gabriel was standing. As he opened the door of the car, Gabriel caught the faint smell of the wood and leather interior. The starter turned, and as the engine caught, a puff of bluish smoke caught in Gabriel’s nose and throat. Gabriel was about to ask Vicky to turn off the ‘smell feature’, but then he saw the woman with the boy getting closer to him. The boy was shrieking intermittently, but for no obvious reason. It appeared that the woman had fashioned some sort of leather harness for the boy. It tied around his waist, like a belt, and then crossed over each of his shoulders. Each of the crossovers attached to a circlet of leather, which was fastened around his neck. The woman held onto a leash, and this was attached to the leather belt. It looked a little like she was walking a dog.

As the woman and the boy progressed up the pavement, coming towards where Gabriel was standing, Gabriel could see other pedestrians giving the woman a very wide berth. Typically, they avoided looking at her. Most cast a quick and furtive glance at the boy. They could not hide their unease at seeing such a thing.

As they got close to Gabriel, Gabriel stepped aside to let them pass.

The boy’s eyes caught Gabriel’s ... glittering and cavernous. Spittle dripped from the boy’s mouth. The boy’s mother wiped him automatically with a piece of cloth.

As the pair passed immediately in front of Gabriel, the boy looked directly up into Gabriel’s eyes and shrieked. The noise seemed to come from the very depths of the boy’s soul.

“Vicky? ... shit, shit, Vicky, Vicky?”

Instantly the visual was gone, and Gabriel was sitting in his mum’s flat. His morning coffee was in front of him. He took a large gulp.

“Sorry Gabriel. Maybe we should stick to the first type of presentation. I was trying to find relevant material, but maybe ...”

“That’s ok, Vicky. Don’t worry. I just wasn’t expecting it to be so real, so vivid.”

“Ok, Gabriel. By the way, I don’t know if you are aware, but you can change my voice pattern, change my name and modify my personality. It’s all part of the client service. What would you like?”

Gabriel thought for a minute.

“Did you give John these choices, Vicky? Are your current features John’s choices?”

“Yes, that’s right. He selected these features 70 years ago.”

“Well, Vicky. It seems to me that it would be ungracious of me to request that you change after so long. You seem just fine to me.”

“It’s nice of you to say, Gabriel. Alright, I will stay just like this.”

“Anyway, I had better get off to work ... Barney will be wondering where I’ve got to. He waits for me to make the first cuppa, so God knows what he’ll do if I’m late.”