46. They Repaired My Fence — Those Bastards! I Can’t Go Back Home No More

He kept working into summer — what passed for summer — through fall, and now it was definitely winter. Winter here meant rain and the sun going down at 4pm. Fall had looked legit, like the Driftless.

But this soggy endlessly dark winter with no snow was getting to him. It was like living inside a wet laundry basket. He knew he wasn’t being fair, place was beautiful, but it was the wrong kind of beautiful, just the right mix of the same and different from everything he knew from before. Like dating somebody who looked kind of like the ex you weren’t over. He’d been here in this stupid high-waisted time for over a year and a half.

He looked out of the gray window in the half empty dorm at the rain and wished his shift would start already. He tried to shake himself out of his mood — he was just in a funk today, for some reason.

It’d been a good summer and fall on the clock and off it. There was a whole club of hikers (they didn’t call it that but that’s what they were) and he’d actually gotten to leave the property with them, a lot. He’d loved seeing the different summer and fall out here. Different plants, different sounds and smells and land, same boots. He even got to go into town — more than one town! — which had been kinda overwhelming at first and also AWESOME. The beer was weird but good, and anyway he went light because his odds of saying something dumb and futuristic were higher if he overdid it.

Get over yourself, might as well start your shift early. Beats sitting here trying to make it all bright and sunny with your mind powers, yeah right. People back now had it real bad but you’re not one of them.

He put on his boots and coat and splashed off to work.

***

Turned out relays kind of sucked. Like, they worked for this but imagine having to baby every bit in your computer. Your computer would be like fifty yards long, for one. Plus if you tried to process any info with any kind of speed all your zeroes would spot-weld themselves into permanent ones. Still, he wanted to beat up on something in this crappy mood, and beating up on mechanical faults worked. He made sure all the setups for the punchcards were good to go so that his wizard co-workers/hiking buddies could do their job with a minimum of trouble.

He kept angling for an opening to bring up light sensors or vacuum tubes. So far, so bad. Nothing. For a year. When was Colossus? Maybe his just being here had screwed things up somehow and it should have already happened, or worse, he was supposed to cause it! ...Nah. He was just a little cog in here, just one relay in the mainframe. This place hardly knew he was here, organization-wise. If he zapped himself to death working on this thing his co-workers would be bummed but they’d find a replacement. He wasn’t the kind who accidentally messed up history that bad, he was like 99% sure.

But honestly, he just wanted to be done so he could go home. ...which was crazy. It didn’t work like that. There wasn’t any back to go to. Assuming some history thing didn’t go haywire war-wise and get them all invaded and killed and stuff, he had the rest of whatever life he had (if the cars with no airbags and the secondhand smoke didn’t get him) stretching ahead on through the fifties and sixties and seventies. It was like thinking you were almost home on a long road trip and then realizing you still had a hundred miles to drive. And not really any home at the end of it.

He carefully checked and re-checked part of the punchcard feed mechanism. Think about something else before everyone comes in and sees you sulking. Turing designed this sucker and it’s helping keep you alive. Also you got his autograph last week and he thought you were a harmless loony for asking. There. That helped.

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