(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 10

The pain of returning was never the same as the pain from arriving. That meant very little, though. Pain was pain, and either one was immense, going through skin and bone like hot iron needles. Bones felt like they were cracking, skin felt on fire, and the migraines... The migraines were so unreal they became almost fascinating.
"Bad return!!!"
The shouts rang out close by at first, then were echoed down halls and hallways. Commotion started filling the place with a low frequency white noise, a droning hum of activity. Mechanical devices could be heard spinning up to speed, and the air became cooler. Then the water came. Water. That meant something was on fire. Did the burning sensation on the skin mean that it was...
There was no time to think the thought to an end. Blankets seemed to come out of nowhere. No, the clothes were not on fire, or at least were not burning the skin. The clothes were... The clothes... were...
"Am I..." Coughs took over, violent coughs, like throwing up small spikes. Talking became a chore, a painful stress on the body. But this seemed important.
"Kris, am I naked?"
"I told you to never return without wearing your original clothes, Marie. Why do none of you listen?!"
The voice was gruff, intense, filled with an anger that was more about concern than frustration. He was clearly standing near by somewhere, but the sound of footsteps and busy hands drowned him out enough to make him hard to pinpoint. Of course, it didn't help that returning meant several minutes of blindness. It was something about the energy affecting the fluids in the eyes.
"Your suit is basically scattered all over the place, and on fire. Just be happy you're the major mass returning, by far, or it would be your hide splattered on the walls. And did I mention, on fire!"
The major mass. Returning pulled every atom into the same path through whatever time was made of, if that was even a way to put it. The tiny colored dots were atoms returning to the location that had most of the stuff for the return, right before the actual jump through time. The suit was at the base, having been swapped for the funny clothes to trick the machines. No return to the base meant no return to the suit. It had been pulled to in like every other atom that had come along on the original trip. Everything that went out came back, and nothing else.
"I need..." Standing up hurt. Or, more precisely, attempting to stand up hurt. Standing up never happened.
"You need to replenish your strength, that's what."
This was another voice, female, younger, and hidden behind a mask of some kind, muffled. It was followed by a needle prick in the back of the shoulder. Another pain, but this one with more welcome effects. From the prick, a cool sensation spread out. Brief jolts of pain followed, but were quickly replaced by a warmer calm. Muscles relaxed, blood began flowing slower. Nutrients spread throughout the body. Everything that went out came back, but nothing else. That included any nutrients absorbed by the body. Either you brought food along on the trip, or you came back as if you had not eaten at all on it. The same was true for fluids. Most of what the needle replenished was simply water.
"I need to talk to Daniel. The coordinates were wrong."
The physical help continued. Nutrients came rushing into the body, burns were treated, muscles were cooled, bones were supported. But the voices disappeared. Nobody responded. Nobody had to, honestly, except for one person.
"I'll get you to him," Kris finally said.

It always felt wrong when sight returned after a trip. Waking up from sleep was a blur, snapping back from a head injury was too sharp and bright. When the eye fluids returned to normal, it was somehow both, at the same time. The world looked as if seen through rippling water, twisting and waving. Apparently, the fluids in the eyes were distorting the shape of both the eyeball in general and the lenses in particular, thus distorting the image they allowed the brain to perceive. There was no pain, just a warm sensation, like having cried heavily in a hot room.
The printouts on the walls were the first things to come into focus. Lighting was not really an issue, although it seemed a bit dom, and the many lines and small notations seemed somewhat artistic when seen at just a quick glance. There were no such thing, of course. Daniel was not the artistic sort. Logic, symmetry, simplicity, precision, those were more his thing.
"Precisely a century, you say?"
He got up from his chair, which he was sitting in the reverse way, like some old spy movie interrogator. His old farmer's shirt, traditional black and dull red criss-crossed pattern, fell down to near his knees, easily three sizes too big for him. It clashed against the bright blue of his expensive jeans.
"That's unusual."
"Why? Why is that unus..."
The coughing came back almost immediately. Kris had been smart enough to take most of the medical gear along, but the coughs were not easy to get rid of. Downtime between trips was typically days, at least, or the body would burn out. In some cases, quite literally!
"Because the machines don't work in years, they work in some sort of Planck time. Which doesn't line up with years, much less centuries."
It took him a bit to understand that the silence that filled the room came from nobody understanding him.
"Think in seconds. An average year is a little over thirty million seconds. But the point is that it's not precisely that, just roughly. So a century would be a very weird number in seconds, right? You don't just punch in a number of years and get the wrong button for the century. If you press a button wrong, you get something crazy, like 83 years, 107 days, 5..."
"Got it. Century is an oddly precise mistake."
Daniel was bursting at the seams to continue explaining, but he was smart enough to know when he was being too smart for his audience. Strangling his urges, he instead sat down again, still in the reverse way, though he didn't look as if it was for comfort.
"So what was it like`" he asked, sounding oddly shy about it. "I mean, we have very few people there yet, in the late 24s."
"It's all a blur."
Daniel nodded. "I know, the brain needs time to..."
"No, not that."
For once, Daniel actually seemed a bit confused. His little lair, filled with his many maps and printed theories of everything from time physics to historical overviews, was like walking inside the brain of an avid thinker. This was were he understood the world, and much more than that. Taking him a back in such a place was not commonplace, but it happened.
"All of it. Orbital stations and ancient cities, robot wars and dragons. It just all... blends together."
Daniel fell silent. He clearly had no idea how to react. He wasn't really the emotional kind, getting more distracted than emotional when things got tense.
"You okay, Marie?"
"No."
Seconds dragged on like hours. The door was ajar, letting sounds from outside sneak in, only muffled slightly by the walls. The shy hum of casual activity gave way to bursts of rushed footsteps from time to time, little mergencies that needed tending to. Someone even sounded the alarm for new arrivals, meaning that some poor bunch of refugees from some godforsaken time and place were about to be picked up. Medical personnel, protection, technical, anything that might be needed to receive time travelers, it would all have to be made available and on the move in record time.
"No, I'm not okay, Danny. I feel like shit. My head is ringing and my bones still hurt."
Obviously, that wasn't what he meant. But it was the easiest part to answer honestly. It was practice for the harder parts.
"This guy picked me up in what looked like a huge mechanical scorpion. Tenner, I think it was. Seemed nice, cool and fairly collected, wits about him and all..."
Daniel listened closely, which was actually a bit odd. He was mostly involved in his own stuff, not the ebst of listeners.
"He's a face in the crowd already. There, gone. A life of insane things, and all I get is a peek. So many peeks. It can drive a girl mad, sometimes."
"Kris has a theory, you know."
Daniel actually, physical stood there twittling his thumbs, like some actor in a black and white drama. He was usually confident, so confident about anything he said. But it was usually scientific, or something similar. It was rarely an open heart to heart talk.
"According to it," he continued, "you're basically right. It is all the same."
He looked up from his twittled thumbs for a moment, then rushed to one of his stacks of posters. Grabbing one quite quickly, as if he had thought about that particular rolled up poster for a while now, he swung it to the tilted table in the room and unfolded it. It was little more than a grid of textboxes, like someone had taken a picture of carefully arranged sticky-notes.
"See, we went through a bunch of Embassy reports, both yours and others, and it lines up in a weird way."
He pointed randomly to the little boxes of text, clearly just indicating that, yes, there were a bunch of boxes of text there. He wasn't pointing to anything specific.
"There are some really weird patterns, like things repeat themselves on mission after mission. Like theer's a beat to it. We are, get put on the edge of some big conflict, use one side as a vector to get to something controlled by another side, and so on. We even seem to be meeting people that are similar. We don't know exactly why, but there seems to be a rhythm to it, like some deeper human psychology draws us into a pattern of behaviour."
Ending the brief rant with a much faster rate of speaking than when he began, the young man stood there, looking almost a little proud, panting slightly to catch his breath. Then he turned to look at his little audience of one.
"How much time did you spend on this, Daniel?"
Daniel's growing confidence began turning a bit sour, his eyes losing their iron focus and looking haphazardly around the room.
"Most of our time off for a few weeks. Why?"
"Is it... you know, useful? For, like, anything?"
There seemed to be a panic growing in him, the foundation of his research pride beginning to erode. Or maybe he was just frustrated that the weight of his message was not getting through.
"Yeah, I mean, for missions. If we can find patterns, we can, you know, break them? Or maybe just go hey, we're unoriginal, so why not be unoriginal much faster, by just moving through the stages without so much sidetracking. I don't know. It's just, I don't know, kinda cool. Right?"

It had taken a few minutes to build Daniel's confidence around his pet project back up, a handful of compliments and trying to follow his rapidfire explanations. Maybe there was something to it, maybe not.
"So, you already wanna plan the next trip, eh?"
Kris might as well have been standing behind an old bar, wiping off a pint-sized beer glass. He had an aura of supportive wisdom around him, more show than substance, but still substance enough. Slowly, he moved closer, his feet still dragging a bit. Age was catching up, age and a rough life. He rarely spoke about it, but the long-term damage told stories in themselves.
"Yes and no."
Anyone else might have never noticed it, but a brief flash of surprise ran across his face. He had probably expected a firm 'yes'.
"Daniel says you two have been finding patterns."
He chuckled.
"Yes, yes, we have. Not the deepest of patterns, mind you, but any science has its humble beginnings," he answered, sighing deeply as he did. "But then again, you of all people wuold know that, wouldn't you?"
He was right, at least in theory. The future always bore the marks of the past, and what started as flimsy guesswork one day could blossom into the dominant way of thought years or even centuries down the line.
"What do those patterns say about me, then? Will things start making sense anytime soon?"
It was meant to sound like a joke question, a rhetorical spite at some minor frustration. Kris ignored that part. He had a tendency to do that.
"Marie, there are not that many here who can understand what you're going through, I know that. You've basically visited times when we were all dead, or not yet born. It messes with you. But you're getting things done."
It was hard to meet his eyes. Not because what he said was hurtful, but because it was both the truth and very simple. Sometimes, knowing that the truth wasn't some big, complicated thing felt like the universe mocking you for not simply getting it and moving on.
"Look, we just had our, what, fourteenth refugee alert in a week. People are finding a safe harbor here. In the real world, you don't just go out and topple evil empires or defeat monsters and then wait for the credits to roll. The story doesn't end when the day is over. There's just a new day waiting on the other side."
"I know. Just... to many days. To many missions to... sorry, too many stories to keep track of. It all seems like a big mash, like the same party playing the same music, people doing the same things. Except all the people are new people, and there's nobody I really know. I just know what they do."
Kris leaned against the hip-high stone rail that ran along the narrow path. He never said it, but he clearly had aches. His disapproving looks at the cup of coffee in his hand also spoke volumes, but anyone who didn't know him might just think he had some bad coffee in it.
"Am I even making sense here?"
"A bit," Kris chuckled, gazing up from the cup. "How many trips have you taken just this last year, Marie? Sixty, maybe more?"
The number wasn't that far off, probably. It had been a busy year.
"No real time for family, friends. Everything planned out carefully, a great show for the world with someone else playing your part for you. You're disconnected. Most people get like that. You just happen to be disconnected from your time, too."
The sky was black. Not dark or cloudy, but pitch black. Light didn't get in. It was wrapped around the entire place, making it invisible from the outside. The light from behind passed by, touching nothing, and continued for everyone outside to see as if nothing had happened. But that meant that none of that light fell on any of the buildings, or the people. It was a place locked in perpetual darkness, all light artificial. And outside, that artificial light was nearly none, to avoid any of it escaping and being seen by those same people outside.
"She is setting up big monuments. I just have no idea why, not yet. But one of them zapped me home, ripped my anchor from the timeline and snapped me back to my origins."
Again, Kris chuckled, but this time he seemed a bit embarrased about it.
"Ah, yes, the whole unexpected return issue. That explains you and your suit being apart on return," he mused, a bit under his own breath.
"Don't get any ideas, old man. I'm not planning on turning this into a burlesque."
"You really have been making your way around time, haven't you?" he commented, his chuckle reduced to a well-meaning grin. "I haven't heard anyone use the word burlesque in ages."
He sighed, again looking down the barrel, so to speak, of his coffee cup. It said "Best starship captain, 1705" on it, a joke someone had apparently thought up and got printed on it somewhere. There were plenty of those around, but like so much else, they slipped into the background over time.
"What do you say, little girl. Wanna go plan out that next adventure of yours?"