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26: Uptime: City of En
The Temporale is a physical object, as are the things in it, like the time trains. We learned that the trains make different sounds depending on which axes they are traveling on. The ride along the XYZ axes (lateral through space) is smoother and faster. The ride up or down the X'Y'Z' time axes is slower and noisier. If the train is climbing a particularly steep prime number arc (for the universe and everything in it is built on numbers), then it moves slowly and shudders frequently, and makes a constant slow clanking noise like hammers banging on steel. Moving between parallel universes is the third capability, and that we have not yet explored but I'm sure it's noisy and shaky.
It takes a long time to reach the end of time, and Tuttle put us in a special state of suspension so that our atoms wouldn't age a bit. Think of it this way. You could leave your house at 6:00 a.m. and take a million year journey, and return at 6:01, having fetched the milk. If you continued to age, you'd be a million year old breath of dust blowing away. Tuttle has a gadget a bit like one of those glass shower stalls, but lie-down with a cushion inside, that freezes your atoms so that no further change takes place. It's a rather ingenious method, involving the go-dots in the subquark range. Remember I said earlier that you can swap states between the above quark and below quark ranges. What happens is that the energy of your atoms is transferred to the underlying dark matter, or go-dots, making them hang out there in underspace like dark, invisible jelly quivering away, until the switch gets pulled, and the energy comes back and the atoms start ocillating again in their valence jackets.
We awakened in the City of En, just as the last time train pulled into the station there. The shower stall (for lack of a better name) bathes you in some sort of aspirin fog or something, and you wake up feeling refreshed.
Tuttle stayed behind in 2608 London, but sent notice via the Membrane for a fellow technician and a bureaucrat to meet us (yes, nothing ever changes). The technician was a bright young Filipino-looking lad of 20 named Edgardo Gee. The bureaucrat was an rather unhappy woman with too much lipstick, named Syla Hirsch. We were important to the City of En, and merited two greeters.
We had slept naked, our modesty covered by wavy plex and a kind of soapy dew that settles on things inside the shower stall. Now we each took a hot steamy shower in the privacy of our own train compartment, and donned the standard everyday clothing of Ennites. That was a unisex garment of very little basic variation, although the females managed to put all sorts of little flowers and other cute designs on theirs. The basic garment resembled a sort of asbestos-silver and rough textured karate gi, except you also wore brightly colored ankle boots and instead of a rank belt you had a utility belt. The garment sort of constantly hinted at 'Temporale,' and I guessed that the round collar could be fitted with an atmosphere helmet. I didn't consider this outlandish at all, considering that the world's rage for two centuries was an American farming overalls material called 'Ginas,' which went global along with the corporations that promoted its use and beauty appeal. From a coarse blue material made for walking behind a plow, to the sexiest miniskirt a woman could own (aside from the proverbial Little Black Dress), was a rainbow-sized leap of marketing skill. Gotta hand it to the old Yanks of yore.
We stepped from the train into a clean, beautiful, and enormous terminal at the end of a very tame looking pair of silvery tracks embedded trolley-style in dark gray rubber. The whole place had that smell that comes with new electronic gadgets or new cars. I guess one would call it 'new terminal smell.'
Edgardo Kee, in a dark-red suit, and Syla Hirsch, in a black suit, stood on the platform to welcome us. Sad to say, at the end of time there is still paperwork—only there is no paper; it's all done electronically. Both walked around us and waved black gadgets over our bodies. In this way they recorded whatever information radiated from our blood, our pores, our respiration, the tips of our hairs. They filmed us and recorded our answers to some basic questions.
Ms. Hirsch was all work and no play. Mr. Kee, however, was the warm sort who knew we would want to check things out a bit, even though we were only here long enough to get our cyborg status upgraded. While Ms. Hirsch pouted gloomily, Edgardo led us on a detour above the terminal roof, from which we could gape and gasp at this city to (literally) end all cities.
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