Testing Time

 Written for Globe Soup. Prompt: Location - tachinomiya

Testing Time

Teleportation is hard. It requires you to send your mind ahead, and then pull your body through along the thin connecting thread of your lingering consciousness. You need to plan your place of arrival (not inside something, or in front of a speeding train, for example) and you need to rely on your body’s desire to remain intact as a unit. It has to do with particle physics and the action of the fermions, ideally while you distract the Pauli exclusion principle with a foot massage and maybe a generous gin and tonic. 

Make it teleportation with time travel, and suddenly you have to bribe a whole other set of natural laws. Add in being drunk, and it’s getting into near impossible level. For one thing, your body’s cohesiveness is not a given. Jim Kunyato arrived at the tiki bar, which was only our second stop, missing the fingertips of his left hand and an exasperated Professor Glauto had to put him back together before sternly sending him home with a D. I don’t think Jim had ever had alcohol before tonight.

You might think a pub crawl is a pretty cool idea for a final exam. That is, you might think this if and only if you have never taken Advanced Teleportation with Professor Glauto. You only get an A+ if you make it to the final stop, which is an obscure underground club in Germany. In the 25 year history of the course, only two students have done it, and one is now the Dean.

Ten years ago, Glauto lost five students into a whirlpool in the Pacific because they overshot the fourth stop. Insurance agents appeared at the school and muttered darkly about risk rate increases. Since then, Glauto has allowed students to work in partners. 

We are at the B- level now, my partner Reika and I, still standing, carefully sipping our Guinness in the Dublin pub and planning our leap to the next stop, in Tokyo. If we manage it, we will be in an early 80s tachinomiya in Tokyo. 

“Bottoms up, everyone!” hollers Glautto, and then he blows the whistle. We are standing next to two unwary Trinity students who benefit from our inability to chug. We dump our drinks into theirs and then teleport within five minutes. I check Reika’s figures, for no good reason. She’s twice the math witch I am – literally, since her fox familiar is a computational whiz. 

We clasp hands and focus, build the spot to land in our consciousnesses, and then send our minds there. So far so good. We start pulling our bodies along. Reika mutters, as she realises that in the blink her consciousness has been gone, one of the students has planted his hand on her breast. Reika’s fox sinks her teeth into the frat boy’s ankle before she makes her way to us, following Reika’s trail. As our eyes snap open, the salarymen around us make space without really looking. 

Professor Glauto  thrusts drinks into our hands as soon as we are substantial. Two young businessmen move aside and gesture an invitation for us to join their table, their skinny ties askew and their eyebrows waggling. 

“Tetsuo Imazawa,” says the first one, pointing at himself. And then, “Hidehiro Fujiwara,” pointing at his companion. Between them is a paper bearing rough sketches. 

Reika introduces herself and says, “Gretchen,” pointing to me. I incline my head. Fujiwara-san asks where we are from. When Reika leans in and whispers “the FUTURE!”  I realise my partner is hammered. 

Imazawa-san apparently understands English because he stares at Reika, agape. Her blue fox has slunk up and around her neck and now looks like a scarf. They chat a few minutes in animated Japanese. I wish I had fared better in Modern Translation. At the next table I see a distracted suited man making notes in code, as in computer code. Assembly to be exact. At least that is a language I recognize. This tachinomiya must be near some video game offices. 

Suddenly, Imazawa starts scribbling wildly with the pencil, looking up at Reika as if for reference. I look across the table and recognize he is drawing her. He is chattering to Fujiwara much too quickly for me to pick up what he is saying but he keeps repeating what sounds like “he-CAN”. 

Reika giggles into her hand and tosses back her drink. The whistle blows and I scramble to get the coordinates established for the St. Petersburg vodka bar that is next. As we start to vanish, the fox mutters to Reika, “Time Gal? Really? You couldn’t resist?”

Reika shrugs. “I always wanted to be in a video game!”

Eurotrash disco decor greets us and we toast our minimum B+ grade.