There Are Many Tokyos In Flower

Chapter 12: A Reunion and a Blackout

The sun was setting at eight in the morning, and the skies below had taken the red hue reminiscent of days yore, when Mars was a barren ball of dust. In the red haze of the day's first sunset, the skyscrapers in Neo Tokyo reaching up towards each other had the look of fingers grasping for something they couldn't reach.

If Martin's sudden appearance in the morning traffic flowing across the Information Highway troubled anyone who witnessed it, they took it in stride. Martin ended up in the middle of a group of motorcycles larger than most schools of fish, matching their pace and direction so effortlessly it might have looked like he had always been there.

He had to take the first exit, though, when he finally looked down below his phone, and saw the glowing green stone was still there. He pulled over next to a seedy looking clinic that advertised same-day instillation of artificial limbs, and looked over his shoulder at BIRD. "Have you seen this?"

"Damn thing glows like a lighthouse lamp, it's hard to miss," BIRD remarked.

"It's still here," Martin said. "But it disappeared when we travelled back last time."

"It did," BIRD agreed. "My working theory was that the time stone, I mean chronotanium, treats time differently than we do, and would only be in one place at a time. Like it maintains continuity even when you're trying to wreck it. But it being here means two things."

"Which are?"

"Either I'm wrong, or the stone didn't exist until your ship finds it tomorrow," BIRD explained.

"Wait, you're saying the stone might not exist yet?"

"No. It obviously exists," BIRD said, gesturing at the stone. "Just that it exists in only one place at a time, so it wasn't anywhere else until you brought it back in time with you."

"That's confusing as hell," Martin admitted.

"Which is part of why we're here," BIRD reminded him. "To go see someone better equipped to understand time travel. Oh, though having this stone here complicates things."

BIRD fluttered over to the stone, tapped it with its foot, and looked at Martin. "You need to keep it hidden from Rin. She cannot see it, or even know you have it."

"Right. Because it could cause a paradox and destroy the universe?"

"Oh, you've already committed a few paradoxes, and the universe it just fine. Turns out, you're not that important," BIRD said with an amused scoff. "No, just that every time Rin goes after the stone, she dies. Which would make whole exercise fairly pointless, if she saw it while she was helping us figure out why she keeps dying."

"Right," Martin said. He reached down into one of his cargo pockets, and pulled out a small first aid kit.

"You had that in your pocket?" BIRD asked.

"Yeah," Martin said. He took out a couple of triangle slings, wrapped the stone in them, and stuffed them in his other cargo pocket. "I'm a mercenary, not an accountant. If I have a gun, I have a first aid kit."

"That is weirdly pragmatic," BIRD mused. In the meantime, Martin wrapped the stone up tightly in gauze, using more and more until the glow from the stone was so faint Martin could barely see it.

"So our first problem is solved," Martin said as he tucked the stone into his pocket. "Now, where did Rin say she worked?"

"You don't remember?" BIRD asked.

"Thought the whole point of having a Backup Information Retrieval Device was to recall Information?" Martin asked. "It's in the name, after all.

"I'm commenting on you forgetting something important that the girl you fawned over said to you," BIRD said in a sing-song sort of voice. The sort of voice little children took on when singing about siting in a tree and kissing.