There Are Many Tokyos In Flower

Chapter 9: Five minutes ago, again

Everything looked the same.

The sky was just as bright, and the sight of Mars beyond the drum of Neo Tokyo above Martin's head was roughly in the same position it had been just a moment ago. The city looked exactly the same as it had five minutes from now.

About the only change was the sudden appearance of traffic and people everywhere around him, none of whom were in the places they had been just a second ago.

Martin swerved hard to avoid putting himself and his bike into the back end of a large yellow fuel tanker. "Fuck me, where they hell did that come from?" he yelled out.

"Pretty sure it was there all along," BIRD said. "You're the one who came out of nowhere."

"Are you serious?" Martin asked, as he slowed down and pulled over to the sidewalk. "Then you mean..."

"It worked, yeah," BIRD replied, its head turned to the right.

Martin shook his head, his thoughts too disoriented to even begin coping with what he had just experienced. And it was that disorientation which left him staring down at his bike for a long moment without comprehending what he was looking at.

Or more precisely, what he should have been looking at, but wasn't. "BIRD, where's the chronotanium?"

BIRD hopped over his shoulder and looked down. "Huh. It was there five minutes from now," it said. It flew off his shoulder, did a quick loop in the air above his head, and settled back down.

"If I had to hazard a guess — and believe me, I'm just guessing here — I'd say the unobtanium stone is exactly where you saw it when you were last here," BIRD said, as if that explained anything. It looked at Martin for a moment, and somehow frowned disappointingly without having a face that could make facial expressions. "In the case you were travelling with."

"But it was right on the bike when we jumped," Martin protested. "How did it get back in the case."

BIRD shook its head. "It was in the case first, then you went back in time."

"So why are you and I still here, rather than where we were five minutes ago?" Martin asked.

"And you finally ask a smart question. Give me a minute to work out a smart answer, I'm still reconnecting this platform to my server banks"

"All of my teachers always said there was no such thing as a stupid question," Martin reflected.

"That's what they say to stupid students so they don't get discouraged," BIRD said. "And let's face it, I doubt you'd have gotten into mercenary work if you had a brain like Rin's. Now, oh, that's weird."

"What?"

"I'm in two different places at the same time."

"You can see yourself?"

"No. But I'm connected to my server farms. Took a moment to download the short term memory from this platform, and try to reconcile having the exact same quantum entanglement schema on two different spaces. It took a moment to wrap my brain around having exactly the same entangled quanta in two different places."

"Yeah, I'd struggle with that," Martin said, trying to sympathize.

Which BIRD only seemed to find insulting. "You struggle with converting miles to kilometres. The math involved in running the power draw for my servers would break your tiny little mind."

"Arrogant asinine AI," Martin replied, then mockingly held a finger up into the air. "Whoops, a tautology trifecta."

"You see, this is part of why I hate living in a universe created and run by a writer. Even an idiot like you gets to be impressively witty," BIRD scathed. "Anyway, we're just up the road over there. And you've just launched Rin's motorcycle into that anime gang. By the way, didn't you blow something up shortly after that?"