Captain Disaster Episode Six - Timedrive
Feb 19 '04 (Updated Jan 06 '05)
The Bottom Line The Bottom Line is out of time...
If you've already read this, the reason I've re-posted it is because all the rest of the series was under "Sci-Fi" whereas this had been posted under "Humour" - it seemed to make more sense to put them all in the same place!!
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Captain Disaster
Episode Six
Timedrive
"I've made a time-drive", announced Zero-Bit.
Captain Disaster looked up from his Acturan Megaprawn. Little bits of seafood splattered across the control panel in front of it. It really was a most disgusting sight.
"Oh yeah? And what about the black hole, eh? We've just escaped from a black hole, and all you can think about is a stupid time drive? You've got your priorities on the wrong things, ZB. You should live in the real world. Set goals and achieve them. Be alive. Follow my superlative example."
Zero-Bit let off a long burst of static. "And what, pray, have you been thinking about and doing since we escaped, thanks to, I have to say, my ingenuity? When I mentioned it, you thought the slingshot technique was something to do with rubber bands!"
"I've been eating. Fancy another slice of Megaprawn?"
"You disgust me."
Captain Disaster thought about this at length.
"So, is that a yes or a no?"
ZB was persistent about his timedrive. He kept going on and on and on and on and on and on and on etc etc for goodness sake this is getting to be a really ridiculous sentence oh no I can't stop I'm in a terminal warp or is that a flux um shouldn't there be a full stop or a few dozen commas here somewhere. (The author there showed signs of repetitive strain injury as related to the brain. After taking his case to the judge, with conclusive
evidence that it was a real ailment, the judge decided in his incomprehensible wisdom that it wasn't a real disease and that the writer was just being a big girl and making a fuss out of nothing.*) Anyway, to make an already long story push into the very limits of human tedium, they tried it out.
CD was not exactly wild about the idea, thinking that they'd had quite enough adventures recently. In doing so, he completely missed the point of being the main character of a science fiction series, and I, the author, had a good row with him about it, not for the first time.
You may at this point notice worrying signs that I, Le Author, have reached a stage where reality and fiction have merged into one impenetrable mass, leaving me prone to talking about Captain Disaster as if he was a real person, not merely the product of an extremely warped imagination. Well, I say to you, just prove me wrong. Go on, just try.
Anyway...
What happened is best explained by leaving it unsaid. However, I've never been one to take the easy route in anything. (This is why going from Hounslow to Putney and back takes me three days each time.) They (CD&ZB) went forward in time, only to find that time had caught up with them. Then they went back in time, and time slowed down to keep up (down?) with them. Then
they stood still in time, caught it out, and watched in great amusement as time galloped off into the future, getting a speeding ticket before realising what had happened and coming back.
Zero-Bit attempted to explain what had happened.
"Time is curved, right?"
"I always thought it was linear."
"Right, so that's settled then. Thus, if you try to go in any direction on the surface of a spherical object, thus moving at different speeds, but actually staying exactly the same distance away from the centre, your speed in relation to the speed of light, taking into account the gravitational effects of planetary and solar bodies, given that there's an 'R' in the month and that the Spice Girls are top of the charts in more than half the countries in the world, is actually equal to the average speed of light travelling through every different type of surface in East Acton on the twelfth of July, 1765CE. This being the case, mc/2IR*number of singles sold by Diana Ross in her whole life+the entire population of the world as a percentage of the population of the entire universe which is addicted to ER at any one time=c/1. Therefore, time, although being a variable, is in fact a constant. You may understand it better if you imagine a helicopter crashing into Pavoroti."
"Why?"
"You always think better that way."
Captain Disaster looked blank for a brief second that lasted nineteen hours. Suddenly, a year later, the beautiful simplicity of ZB's explanation hit him like a brick covered with horrible crawly things that answer to the name of Albert. Four decades after this, he shook his head slowly, let out a huge sigh (he'd been holding his breath for 40 years), and exclaimed "Eureka!"
"You mean you get it? You actually get it? You understand? You know? You believe? Tell me you believe!", shouted Zero-Bit, in an American Evangelical style frenzy.
CD looked very smug. "Yes. I see it clearly now. Time is like a journey; the time it takes to reach your destination is relative, not only to the distances and speed involved, but the level of expectation, wakefulness and interest of your consciousness. Therefore, whatever speed you go through time at, you appear to be travelling at the same speed, because your consciousness keeps pace with it."
Zero-Bit blew several circuits as he realised the perception of Captain Disaster was improving at an exponential rate. He was still a rank moron, of course, but that was such an improvement over what he had been...
But he hadn't finished yet, he was on a role. "So, if in the past I asked myself something in the future, I could answer it in the present, theorise on it in the future, and go back to the past and answer the question before I even ask it. But hold on! Then I wouldn't understand the answer, because I wouldn't know what I was answering! Or why I was answering a question I hadn't asked. I'd think I was mad."
"As opposed to everyone else thinking it" muttered Zero-Bit. All the good work he'd done on improving the Captain's psychological condition had now been undone.
Suddenly, as quickly as a stream of tachyons passing through yesterday's porridge, a message came over on the microwave.
"Why can't you just use the communications network properly, just like everyone else?" complained the walking Disaster.
"I'm unique", said the mysterious entity. "I'm also a mysterious entity."
"What's the point? The story's nearly over", said CD.
"Just so that a) You've had one outside character in the episode and b) so that I can keep coming back in future episodes when the scriptwriter's got writer's block."
"Oh, OK then."
And with that, the author ran out of patience with this entirely stupid episode and gleefully wrote another few hundred words to his novel which he'd been working on forever and a day, and which still isn't finished to this day.
It happened just so. And that's how the teenage girl got her spots and lost 90% of her social appeal.
"Goodbye", said Captain Disaster and Zero-Bit in that way that characters in children's TV programs usually do. Then they realised that it was probably adults reading them, or at least adolescents who viewed themselves as adults, so they said it again, in more macho voices, and made some unfunny joke that was in some way relevant to the episode, and laughed until the screen faded out.
Oh yes, they'd seen Buck Rogers and Star Trek:Next Generation enough times to do that. They were professionals, they were.
* The views expressed herewith are not necessarily those of the author.
Copyright Dave Seaman
The Captain Disaster Series
Episode 1 - The Planet-Eater of Acturus
Episode 2 - A Beta Burger
Episode 3 - Wormhole
Episode 4 - Mercenaries
Episode 5 - A Newish Hope
Episode 7 - "Correctness, Politically Speaking"
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Read my review of
Red Dwarf Series 1-4
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