lot of effort into interaction with you guys. I’ve always been content to watch, you know. That was the whole point of this universe, right from the very beginning.”
Marcus waited a beat, then asked the question he was obviously being baited for. “What point is that?”
The Barkeep spread his arms and grinned. “To see what happens.”
Marcus frowned. “That’s the meaning of life? ‘Let’s see what happens’?”
“It’s a meaning, sure. I’m not going to tell you what the meaning of your life is, though. That’s up to you. What would be the point of all this if I decided how everything was going to work out beforehand?”
“You’re the most laid back God I’ve ever met.”
“See,” the barkeep said, shaking a finger at him, “you’re mocking me now. I get that a lot too, if you can believe it. At least right at first I do.”
“You brought all these people around, though?” Marcus asked, indicating the bar.
“Yeah. Even Lowbeard. He just likes to grumble, but he’s here by choice, just like the rest of them.”
“So what was that he said about you not liking time travelers?”
“I like them fine. I admire them, honestly, because they figured out a loophole in the universe that I wasn’t aware of when I built it. Look, I gave you guys all these dimensions you could travel freely in - up, down, sideways - but I never wanted you to travel in time. That’s my bailiwick. If even one person starts jumping around willy-nilly in the timestream, I have to start dealing with paradoxes and/or alternate dimensions, and I don't even want to think about what a pain in the neck that would be.
“So I built a safety valve into the universe. Whenever anybody starts artificially tampering with time, their first trip defaults to here, no matter what they had it set for.”
“And where is here?”
“You're a long way into your future. A long way.”
“How long?” Marcus asked.
“Well, I'm not trying to be evasive here, but time stops meaning much when you get to about a googol of years from your time period. That's ten with a hundred zeroes after it, by the way.”
“I built a time machine. I know what a googol is.”
“Of course you do,” the barkeep said with a smile, politely ignoring Marcus's snippy tone. “My point is that we're so far in the future, it doesn't really make sense to measure it in years anymore, even relatively speaking. We're coming up on the end of what you guys call the Dark Era. Most of the matter in the universe has broken down, been sucked down a black hole, and spit back out again multiple times. Except for this piece of rock that we're standing on, there's almost nothing solid or energetic left out there. The Big Bang kept banging until everything was spread so thin it ceased to matter.”
“That's why I didn't see stars in the sky.”
“Yup.”
“But wait... there were lights. Streaks of light in the sky. They looked like comets.”
“That's cosmic dust burning up when it hits the atmosphere. There's clouds of it out there, thin as a two-lane highway and millions of miles long – all that's left of stars and black holes. I could steer us clear of them, but I think the lights are pretty.”
Marcus took the glove off his right hand and grabbed the beer. “First one's free?”
“They're all free. What, I'm going to expect you guys to have brought cash with you to the end of the universe?”
Marcus nodded and took a deep swallow of his beer. It was starting to go warm, but it still felt good going down. He closed his eyes for a moment, and there was Theresa, looking for him, calling to him across an impossible gap of years. He took another drink before opening his eyes.
“So all those things in the junkyard...?”
“Time machines,” the Barkeep confirmed. “Of one sort or another. Some of them what you'd call magic, some of them what you'd call science. Some of them were used on purpose, but most of them were mistakes – Lowbeard got here when he found a cursed gold coin, for instance. I'll have to ask you to go toss your machine out there when we're done talking, by the way.”
“You don't understand,” Marcus said. “Look, I have to get back to my own time. I mean, not my time, but earlier. Where I was trying to go when I used the time machine.”
“It's not allowed, Marcus.”
“You don't understand,” he said, more forcefully this time.
“I'm afraid I do. I'm God, remember? I know all.”
“Bullshit!” Marcus banged the fist that was still gloved on the bar. “You're not God, you're a crazy old man. Or I'm crazy, or dead. Or something.”
Everyone at the bar was looking at Marcus now, even the shell-shocked woman at the end of the bar with the antenna on her head, and he could see in the mirror that some of the people at the tables were too. “What the hell are you all looking at?” he demanded. “You're just going to believe he's who he says he is?”
“They're probably just remembering when they had this exact same conversation with me,” the barkeep said with a sigh. “We go through this pretty much every time somebody new walks through the door.
“Maybe what you say is true,” the barkeep said. “But any one of those options you choose to believe... you still don't get to go save her, Marcus. I am truly sorry. No paradoxes.”
Marcus snatched up the time machine, activated the home preset, and punched the GO button. Nothing happened, so he punched it again, and again, and again. The barkeep didn't try to stop him, just stood behind the bar with his arms crossed in front of him, a pained expression on his face. Finally, Marcus slammed the machine down and lowered his forehead toward the bar, lacing his fingers behind his head.
“You said everybody was here by choice,” he said. “Well, I choose not to be here. Let me go home, damn you.”
Instead of replying, the barkeep took Marcus's beer, dumped it out behind the bar, and poured him a fresh one. He set it down and rested his hands on the bar on either side of it.
“You know how many people are here because they were trying to save a loved one? Do you know how quickly this entire universe would unravel if all of them had managed to do it? I can do a lot with a snap of my fingers, but there’s a certain internal logic that needs to remain in place. Do you understand?”
“She's dead because of me!” Marcus said, looking up pleadingly. His eyes were filled with tears. “Do you realize that? She died because of me.”
“You're absolutely right,” the Barkeep said.
Marcus blinked. He'd been living with this so long, with the denial of friends trying to absolve him of responsibility, that he was shocked to have someone agree with him for once. It was surprising... but it was also comforting in a way to have someone else point the finger at him, to validate that he wasn’t just trying to make Theresa's death all about him.
“We were coming home from an awards banquet. I’d won an award for helping the company win a big alternative energy contract with the government, and I had the trophy on the seat next to me. Theresa was in the back seat. She was buckled in, safe and sound.”
“But the roads were icy and you were reckless, and when you went into the skid, the other car slammed into her door. You and your wife walked away with some scratches, but Theresa was killed instantly.”
“She was ten years old,” Marcus moaned. “I wasn't held responsible for it because the roads were wet and I was under the limit. But I was her father, and I was supposed to protect her.”
“I am truly sorry, Marcus,” the barkeep said again, laying a hand on his shoulder. Marcus tried to shrug it off, but the barkeep kept it there. “But there are no do-overs. You did an amazing thing, creating that time machine, but it doesn't give you the right to rewrite the universe.”
Marcus raised his head and wiped at his eyes. “You're a lousy God,” he said. “And your rules suck.”
The Barkeep smiled sadly. “I get that a lot too.”
Marcus straightened enough to grab the new beer. He downed most of it in th
ree long gulps and set the glass down with a gasp. “So what now?” he said.
“Now you finish the rest of that,” the Barkeep said. “And then you tell me whether you want to go home or not.”
Marcus was in the process of raising the glass to fulfill the first part of the instruction, but paused and tilted his head. “Say what? I thought you said we couldn't go back home?”
“Nope, I said you couldn't go save Theresa. But you can go back to your own time if you want. I'll put you right back in your garage half a second after you left, if that's what you want. No fuss, no muss.”
“But I've got to leave the time machine here?”
“Yes. That... and you'll also forget all about building it and coming here.”
Marcus laid a hand on the time machine. “Yeah. I think I'd actually prefer that.”
“Or,” the barkeep began.
“Or?” Marcus said.
“Or you can stay.”
Marcus looked around at the motley assortment of characters crowded around the bar. “Why would I want to do that? I like to drink as much as the next guy, but–”
“The beer isn't what keeps people here, Marcus. In a short while-” he paused to glance at his watch, “-a very short while from right now, the universe is going to end. The energy and matter is spread so thin it's going to all just dissipate. Like smoke.”
“Sounds like fun. I can see why people would want to stick around for that.”
“Then all of it, the whole universe, it's all going to snap down into a lower energy state and become something completely different. And we're