Automatic Headspin

(Originally published in Allegory under the name Tim Lambert)

Chloe Ziebeck once nearly totalled her clapped-out Toyota when a tiny piece of grit hit her windscreen in just the right way to shatter it. Two small cracks either side of the dent momentarily dithered, then burst open in a concentric cascade like the first flower of a crystalline spring.

She had sworn violently at that moment, scattering tributes to the Long Island Expressway into the traffic as she cut across it towards the next exit. When she finally managed to pull over in an Arby's parking lot, she was still cursing the windscreen, the expressway, other traffic, commuting in general and the very concept of roads itself.

Chloe liked profanity. It was the weapon with which she beat the world for not being perfect. That, and she enjoyed how puerile it sounded coming from the mouth of a graduate physicist.

She looked at her watch, and cursed the time too. It was getting late, and she wanted to get to the lab before it was locked up for the night.

#

She arrived as the lab was closing, but the lone security guard let her stay on the condition that she finished locking up for him. Security at the Institute was lax, possibly because the local labour pool was more of a muddy puddle with a handful of fish flopping around in it.

In her lab she had potent words for the recently departed thief who had stolen her UPS. The UPS was required to stop anything interrupting her experiment, which was going to make a tiny chip in the universe itself, to see what interesting extra dimensions it might be hiding there.

The thief had climbed in through the window. She had been out of the lab at the time, checking along the corridor to make sure nobody else was still around. She wasn't supposed to be running the experiment at all, and had worried that she would be caught. Presumably the thief had similar concerns, and had selected the UPS as the easiest prize, hoping to convert it first into cash and then, most likely, into heroin. Junkies were just one of the flopping fish in the area. She had a few offensive phrases for them too, but not anything they hadn't heard before. They weren't even particularly good at being junkies, the best of them having moved to the city with all the other talent.

In the absence of the UPS, when the lab suffered a brown-out the power had surged on its return, and bound in its own exuberance had poked the universe far harder than it was supposed to.

Space had fractured, and a maze of cracks had raced around the world.

Great, Chloe thought, I've broken the universe.

And so she swore again.

#

As the cracks spread they broke the world into fragments and reconnected it in ways it had never been connected before, reflecting itself across the boundaries of the mosaic like a hall of mirrors. Suddenly Sydney Harbour was next to Weston-super-Mare, Hawaii was in the Mediterranean, although most of the Mediterranean was now scattered around the globe, with an especially warm bit making a surprise appearance just outside Reykjavik.

In the quiet Dorset village of Lower Westford, all that was noticed by the locals was a sudden flash of light, as though they had all been simultaneously blinded by a prankster reflecting the sunlight with a mirror.

Troy Bosonberg had been knocking on the door of a thoroughly English house when it happened. The house was the very definition of quaint from his American viewpoint, and was surrounded by a frighteningly well-tended garden. A high hedge ran around it, perfectly trimmed into a leafy wall. The amount of planning and effort that had gone into the garden was undoubtedly more than Troy had ever spent on steering his own life. 

He gazed idly through the vestibule window. A cheese plant stood proudly next to a polished mahogany hat stand, as though awaiting an eccentric vicar to wed them. Troy wondered whether his new role as a proselytising Mormon gave him such power. He supposed that even if it did, it was unlikely to extend to furniture.

At the foot of the hat stand leant a tan leather briefcase. A leather strap hung across it, the metal clasp at its end touching but not fitting its lock. It looked old and worn, and as far as he could remember exactly like the one used in the movie Automatic Headspin.

Automatic Headspin was the first movie Troy had seen after his release from Utah State Penitentiary. He had served two years of a three-year sentence for home invasion, which had been his previous role in life before he joined the Church of Latter Day Saints and impressed the parole board with his reformation.

In the movie, the briefcase had contained a large quantity of heroin and was quite the magnet for entertaining carnage. His new Mormon friends wouldn't have approved but the movie's amoral action thrilled him. He saw it three times in the theatre before buying the DVD.

He found himself still gazing at the briefcase. From somewhere at the back of his mind, his old self insisted that he had to have it.

"He's not in. Away on business and whatnot," said a dithering voice behind him. It surprised him, and he span around to see an old gentleman at the end of the driveway, waving a copy of the Telegraph.

"Thanks!" said Troy, pleased to have been saved from making a rash mistake. He slipped his rucksack off his shoulder and reached inside for some leaflets to post through the letterbox.

The old man wrinkled his already very wrinkly nose and sniffed. "Bloody Yanks."

It was at that moment that Chloe, in her New York lab, threw her technological piece of grit at the universe and turned the world into a mosaic.

#

Troy had been an impulsive burglar. All it took was the white light of Chloe's experiment to change his mind. He just did what came naturally and tried the vestibule door. It opened, and the next few steps were so clear that he couldn't not take them. This was what he did. It was a compulsion.

Step one: Get the briefcase.

Step two: Look inside the briefcase.

Step three – wait, was that heroin in the briefcase? He took out a packet. Shiny and squidgy, the off-white powder was wrapped in polythene and clear tape, just like in the movie. He weighed it in his hand thoughtfully. He had no idea how much heroin cost, but he was certain that a briefcasefull was worth a lot.

He put the packet back into the case and considered step four. What was it again? His head was lost in the fast-cut world of Automatic Headspin. The briefcase in the movie had eventually been exchanged for a briefcase full of money. He had no idea how much money there was in that instance either, but he was sure it was also a lot.

There were sounds from within the house - coughing, then the metallic scraping of a door chain being released. The awful suspicion that the house wasn't quite as unoccupied as he'd thought was as familiar as it was unwelcome.

Step four: Run!

#

Two years of prison followed by several months of spreading the word door-to-door had left Troy quite capable of running at speed when he needed to. He had his doubts about the church in general, and in truth he'd only joined to get early parole, but he had to admit that on a purely physical level it was getting results. By the time his pursuer had worked out he'd been robbed, Troy was already dashing past the angular hedge.

The old Telegraph reader had managed to become entangled in the hedge during the flash of light. "Oh, bother!" he exclaimed, as he tried to fight his way out like a parish-bound Livingstone.

Troy briefly considered helping him, recalling some religious instruction on that matter. Fortunately he was saved from any further tests of moral character by falling through an invisible fracture running across the road, roughly level with Lower Westford's large, illuminated speed limit warning.

The pursuer, a stout man with a couple of well-lived decades on Troy, had rounded the corner just in time to see Troy disappear across the exotic interface.

"What the bloody hell is going on?" he said, to nobody in particular.

"I don't know," came a feeble voice from the garden hedge, "but you really should get someone to give this thing a good trim."

#

Troy didn't think he was asleep, but he couldn't say he was awake either. He supposed he might be having a lucid dream, but he didn't appear to have much control over it. Lucid dreams, he'd been told by Cleveland Steve while in prison, were a man's only true freedom. Cleveland Steve was serving thirty years for armed robbery and needed all the freedom he could get.

Troy had never managed to dream lucidly. Cleveland Steve had prepared a murky brown potion which he'd refused to drink. Had he drunk it, a dream of floating over the rooftops of Pittsburgh may have been the exact result.

#

"Hey man, wake up."

A foot pushed at Troy's shoulder, nudging him awake. The foot's owner was indistinct, towering in the blurry distance.

It was dark, and between his fingers he could feel moist blades of grass. He blinked, straining to focus his eyes and shake the weird images still clinging around his thoughts. Pittsburgh. Sydney Harbour. Some mountains. A whole lot of ocean.

He pulled himself upright and was mildly surprised to find he was clutching a leather briefcase, and it was night time. The events leading to that moment oozed back, rolling across the fractured and incomprehensible parts. How long had he been out for? The last thing he'd known, it had still been mid-morning.

He rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. "Where the heck am I?"

The shadowy figure chuckled. It was a phlegmy laugh, caught on the edge of blossoming into a coughing fit. "Havenbrook. Where do you think you are?"

Troy looked around him. There wasn't much to see. Some red brick buildings in the distance and a lot of neatly-mown grass with young trees tied to posts in between. Most illuminating was a nearby sign, rendered ghostly by the moonlight:

Havenbrook Physical Research Laboratories

Havenbrook

New York

He looked more closely at the man who had woken him. He was in his early twenties, unshaven, and thin in that modern way which was from either too little money, or too much. He was standing next to an impressively hefty looking piece of technical equipment.

"Are you a physicist?" asked Troy.

"What? Yeah, sure. What's in the briefcase?"

He reached down towards it, but Troy recoiled, clasping the case tightly to his chest.

"Easy, buddy," said the young man, crudely turning his briefcase grab into an offered handshake. "I'm Danny. You need a hand?"

"I'm Troy." He took Danny's hand carefully.

"Pleased to meet you, Troy." He gave Troy a strange look, as though sizing him up. Troy was never sure what people made of him in general, because although he wore the clothes of a missionary, he still felt like a petty crook inside.

Danny brightened as he reached a conclusion. "Say, you don't have any money I could borrow, do you?"

Troy blinked. "Are you mugging me?"

"No! Not at all!" Danny protested. "I just need a bit of cash for some stuff." He gave a pleading look. "You know?"

Troy didn't know exactly but had his suspicions. "Just what sort of a physicist are you?"

"I'm a street physicist. I learned my physics in the ghetto. Yeah, that's right – on the streets."

Troy took a step back, but Danny was warming to his subject.

"I deal in equations and publish my results on the corners, you get me? This ain't no book-physics, this is real apple-on-your-head, twenty-four-seven – " he began to laugh to himself, a filthy rattle which quickly progressed to a spluttering cough.

"Damn it man," Danny said when he'd spat out the last of the coughing fit, "how much can you give me for this?" He tapped the boxy object by his feet with the side of his shoe.

"What is it?" asked Troy.

"It ain't heroin, that's for sure."

Troy produced a handful of coins from his trouser pocket. "Sorry, but I've only got British money."

"To hell with this." Danny picked up the boxy UPS and held it partly tucked under one arm. "What kind of nut appears out of thin air with the wrong god-damn currency?"

"To heck with it," Troy corrected unthinkingly, his recent indoctrination shining through, "and gosh-darn."

"You said it, fruitloops." Danny strode away with the air of a high-tech farmer whose best pig had failed to sell at the market.

#

Around the world, people were struggling to understand what had happened. Power across the fractures was cut, but much of the electromagnetic spectrum was unaffected. They could see across them, and they could communicate across them. The problem was that physical objects passing through them ended up altogether somewhere else. They acted like a filter, allowing matter to fall into the newly-opened fractures while light continued along its traditional pathways in blissful ignorance.

At a small semi-detached house in Reading, Mr Harold Davis settled down with a mug of tea and watched a golf tournament on the TV. This was exactly what retirement was all about, he mused to himself. His contentment was rudely broken when the television set went dead, a disappointing development punctuated by the violent arrival of a golf ball through the bay window. It landed in his mug with a resounding plop.

At a government research centre in the South Downs, scientists abandoned their laptops and took to scrawling furiously across blackboards.

In the corridors of power, world leaders prepared vague yet reassuring speeches, although they felt the rug really had been pulled out from under them this time.

The military, having nobody to attack for this affront on their rigid view of reality, began to map the newly arranged cartography.

Somewhere between Lower Westford, Dorset and Havenbrook, New York, a slightly portly gentleman was looking for his stolen briefcase. He was doing this by being reflected and refracted around the latticework which had replaced the more familiar continuous space.

The search for his briefcase was not going well from his perspective, which had involved walking down the road with a bemused expression, followed by a long sense of detachment in which he thought he'd recognised Spaghetti Junction drifting by below him. He'd driven through those tangled roads many times, and supposed that he must be dreaming.

#

Troy tapped on the only window with some light coming from it. He had walked across the moonlit campus grounds with the small notion of finding someone who knew what was going on. Once he saw how empty the building was, he had settled for just anybody to talk to.

Chloe appeared at the window with wildly frizzy hair. She mouthed obscenities at him from behind the glass.

With an angry tug she slid the window open as she was finishing her admonishments. " – in your eye socket!"

They faced each other in silence for a moment, then Chloe jabbed her finger at Troy's eye to illustrate her point. He stepped backwards reflexively, holding the briefcase in front of him as a makeshift shield. "Are you a physicist?" he asked.

"That's an odd question. Does the Pope sh-"

Troy cut her off before she could swear again. "Do you know what's going on?"

"Yeah, I may have sort of broken the universe. A bit. I haven't figured it all out yet though. Have you seen anything unusual recently?"

"Like what? I saw someone trying to sell me some fancy looking lab gear for heroin a while ago."

She swore again, this time volunteering to help the junkie in question make a four-dimensional object known as a Klein bottle out of his reproductive and digestive organs. She was confident that this surgical feat could be achieved using only duct tape and an ordinary office stapler.

"I've also walked here from England as far as I can tell," Troy added.

Chloe looked much more excited by this news. She dug a small notebook from her lab coat pocket and opened it on the windowsill. "Actually walked?"

"It's kind of hard to say. I think I might have been asleep for most of it."

She was busily scribbling in the notebook by torchlight. "You sleep-walked across the Atlantic?"

"I think I skipped that bit."

She made a rough calculation in the notebook and shrugged. "That figures. What's in the bag?"

He was still holding the briefcase between them, and realised too late that it looked like he was offering it to her. She grabbed it by its handle and yanked it through the window.

"Just bibles and so on," he said hastily. "I'm a Mormon missionary."

She looked him up and down, taking in his cheap but easy to clean suit. "That figures too." She weighed the briefcase in her hand with a small grunt. "Just how many bibles have you got in this thing?"

"There's a lot of work to be done in England?" he chanced, but it was too late. She'd already opened the briefcase.

"Oh my God!" She held one of the packets up to the moonlight and gently squeezed it. "Just what sort of Mormon are you?"

He scratched his chin ruefully. "A street Mormon?"

"This is heroin, right? Are you a heroin dealer?" She additionally discussed her preferred means of punishing heroin dealers, which involved a combination of mythology and sexual violence not often witnessed outside of a specialist Japanese book shop.

"I found it," was the best Troy could manage.

She dropped the packet back inside and held the briefcase to the light, studying it. "Have you ever seen that movie, Automatic Headspin? This looks exactly like the one they had in that."

"I know. It's my favourite movie."

"Hey, me too! Which is your favourite part?"

He thought about it for a moment. "Definitely the restaurant fight."

"Oh, you mean when McMurdo makes a forkupine out of Valenti? That was awesome!" She laughed a little at the memory. "Maybe you're not so bad for a drug pusher."

He took the case back from her. "I know it looks bad, but I'm not the one who broke the gosh-darned universe."

"Did you really find that briefcase?"

"Kind of."

She glanced down at her notes. "It's just that if it isn't yours anyway, I could use some of it to buy my UPS back from that junkie you saw."

"The fancy box he had with him?"

"It's actually basically a big battery, but at the moment it's the only power I've got."

"And you think you can fix everything if I get it back?"

She shrugged. "You got anything better to do, Mr Street Mormon?"

#

Scenes from Automatic Headspin replayed in Troy's head as he made his way through the campus. The first promise of dawn was showing, rendering everything in a crisp, cool light. He hugged the briefcase, partly for warmth, and listened to the birds chattering in the trees. Were they as confused by all this as he was? They would have been flying across the fractures too, finding themselves altogether not where they expected. Migratory formations of geese may have found themselves back where they started, and penguins could be waddling down Walthamstow high street.

Chloe had given him directions to a house just outside the campus. Past the library, over the road, and look for the house with the '50s fridge in the garden. He'd have to work out how to arrange the deal himself, but considering the quantity of heroin involved, it shouldn't be hard to walk away with a UPS.

A UPS was all he was likely to get, considering Danny had been begging for cash from him earlier. The briefcase in the movie had made its owner a lot of money. Certainly enough to buy plenty of UPSs.

He paused at the roadside. Looking along the street, he could see a house with an old refrigerator outside. He drummed his fingertips on the briefcase's creased tan exterior, and for a few moments those leathery beats formed a soundtrack to the movie playing in his head.

He would walk into the house, and coolly – just like McMurdo in Automatic Headspin – introduce himself, holding the briefcase above his head while chewing a stick of gum.

Sadly he didn't have any gum.

Alternatively, he considered, he could sneak around the back and tape a note arranging a meeting to Danny's window, so that he'd see it when he opened the curtains. That was also from the movie.

Realistically he thought Danny most likely never opened his curtains, and more to the point he had no idea whether Danny even lived there. All he had was the word of a very tightly-wound physicist.

Another scene played in his head, this time from the end of the movie. McMurdo had attempted to sell the heroin for a great deal of money, and had died in a gun-metal grey whirlwind of high velocity, ablative retribution. It made for great fun over a bucket of popcorn, but the glamour faded when exposed to the real world, fractured or not. Troy gulped at the thought of being party to such violence. He was glad he had no gum.

He resolved to simply swap the briefcase for the UPS and be done with it. He should never have taken the darned thing in the first place.

#

A quick rifle through the staff room later and Chloe was listening to a battery-powered radio. Most of the stations were dead, starved of power for their transmitters. There were just a couple still on the air, one of which was broadcasting as much as it knew so far about the 'event', as they put it. Speculation was rife and fingers were being pointed at CERN, home of some truly impressive experiments in high-energy physics. She laughed at the thought that Havenbrook, with its run-down equipment and deadbeat staff, would be the last place anyone would suspect.

There were also reports of an oil tanker running aground in a Midwest shopping mall, people falling to their deaths just going to the bathroom, and many outbreaks of fighting, with skirmishes between the Taliban and the National Guard in Florida in particular raising political eyebrows.

Chloe pushed aside her notes, momentarily beyond harsh language. She wasn't sure she wanted her UPS back any more. She wasn't sure she wanted anything to do with the whole mess. It wasn't really her fault, was it? She contemplated dismantling everything, destroying her notes and just taking a really long walk in a lonely direction.

A tap on the window interrupted her musings. A red-faced man with a heavy frame was standing outside. He looked quite agitated. She casually mouthed an exclamation so succulently provocative that he'd switched from agitated to plain hopping mad by the time she'd opened the window.

"What the buggery is going on?" he shouted. "Where the hell am I?"

"Oh," she said, leaning casually out of the window, "you're British! How neat!"

Her sarcasm was lost on the man. "Have I been kidnapped? Is this one of those CIA things I've seen on the news? Good God! Have I been renditioned?"

A thought occurred to Chloe. "Hey, someone else from England was here a while ago. Maybe you know him?"

He rolled his eyes. "Honestly, I do get tired of you Americans assuming everyone in England knows one another."

"Guy in a suit with a briefcase."

"A leather briefcase? With an old-fashioned strap fastener?" He looked amazed and a little embarrassed following his previous outburst.

"That's the one. Looks a lot like the one from Automatic Headspin."

"That's because it is the one from Automatic Headspin."

"What?"

"I collect film props," he explained. "I picked that one up in an auction yesterday. Got quite a bargain really – it's even got the little parcels of flour they used in place of heroin."

Chloe swore again, this time quite uncreatively, yet forceful enough to cause the portly props collector to wipe a speck of spittle from his cheek.

"I just sent someone to sell that briefcase!" she exclaimed, covering her mouth with horror. "I've sent him to a house full of junkies with a few bags of flour!" How many people have I killed, she thought. It isn't even breakfast time yet!

"This may be a question I regret asking," said the portly man wearily, "but just why are you doing drug deals from a laboratory? What sort of a place is this?"

Chloe sighed and wistfully recalled the days before the budget cuts, before she'd broken the planet. "It's kind of a street place these days."

#

Troy hadn't made it across the road to the house with the refrigerator, where he was going to unburden himself of his latest mistake. A fracture ran the road's length, its peculiar wooziness more pleasing the second time around, like jumping back into a swimming pool.

It all passed by so much more rapidly this time, a whirlwind bustle like a flock of Japanese tourists collecting the world one slice at a time with a camera shutter. The endless grid of an anonymous US suburb, a calm stretch of sea covered with contentedly bobbing seagulls, some desert somewhere, some more desert.

It was actually getting to be repetitive.

#

The portly man, who during a temporarily civil moment had introduced himself as Trevor, was irate again. He was chasing Chloe across the grounds of the research campus, ruddy-faced. His ankles ached with the exertion.

"Will you please just slow down!" he exhorted. "None of your explanation made any sense and I have no idea what you're doing now."

"I'm going to rescue our Mormon friend," she shouted back to him. Her lab coat swished in the moonlight as she ran.

Trevor let out a long, frustrated grunt. "How the hell is that going to help anything?"

"It'll help me," she said.

He stopped, and doubled over panting for air, holding his knees for support. "How?" he called after her, his voice tinged with hysteria. "What's the bloody point? Saving him – a thief I might add – isn't going to fix anything."

"I've had an epiphany," she called back. "I'm done with being angry."

She then tripped over something in the grass and  unexpectedly broke into a short summary of bestiality, presented as a recursive list.

Trevor jogged across to where she had fallen. She was sprawled on the grass, her head bowed, uttering curses like a mantra.

"I thought," said Trevor as he stood over her in an unconsciously superior pose, "that you'd given up being angry."

Chloe laughed, and dragged herself upright.

Immediately behind her, and the cause of her unexpected tumble, was the prone figure of Danny. "And score one to Chloe!" she said.

Danny rolled over onto his back and dragged his hand over his face. "I'll have the rent tomorrow," he mumbled.

Chloe leaned over him and grabbed him by the collar of his T-shirt. "Hey Danny!" she shouted.

Trevor took in Danny's dishevelled appearance and sniffed. "Do you know this individual?" he asked.

"Hey Danny!" Chloe shouted again. Briefly, she turned to Trevor. "Trevor, meet Danny. Danny used to work here as a lab assistant. He had such excellently light fingers."

Danny sat up and rubbed the side of his head with his palm. "I was in space or something, man..." His words trailed off momentarily. "And then I was here again?"

Chloe kicked his thigh and swore. "Great. He's wasted."

"No, wait," said Danny, "I was suddenly in this dark place, and there were all these other places, and then…" He rubbed the side of his head again. "Then this bear, it like came from nowhere and hit me in the head."

"Am I to take it that this is the fearsome junkie you mentioned earlier?" said Trevor. "I think you may have overstated your concerns about the fellow with my briefcase."

"Well," said Chloe, shooting Danny a disapproving look, "It's pretty moot anyway. Danny here has clearly already sold the UPS for smack."

Danny tottered a few feet away on his knees. "No man, it's over here somewhere." His hands clapped around the metal casing of the UPS and he pulled it into view. "See?"

They saw. Trevor shrugged, as if to ask, what now? 

Chloe let out a short, spluttering laugh. "You got me," she said.

Suddenly they were bathed in dazzling white light, the sort of white only usually seen on mountaintops and toothpaste commercials.

"Bloody hell!" Trevor shouted. "Is it already? You haven't even plugged the thing in yet!"

Chloe quite mildly compared him to the male generative organ, then pointed out the massive, noisy Black Hawk helicopter hanging over the campus.

"They've found me," she said. "Oh, crap."

"Just crap?" Trevor said above the wind billowing from the helicopter. "I thought you'd at least start with the f-word."

"Shut up." She sounded panicked. She was panicked. "I've got to get away from here."

And with that, she ran straight into the fracture and was gone.

#

Even more desert, but this time real. Hard, hot dirt burned his hands as he was thrown onto his knees by the force of his arrival. He definitely hadn't been asleep, he was sure of that. A momentary panic made him check he still had the leather case with him. He did.

The landscape around him was overwhelmingly beige. Beige rocks lay in a stumble by a treacherous hillside, and beige dirt stretched out ahead, supporting a few hardy plants which evidently took in beige and produced green in a new take on photosynthesis.

The horizon shimmered in the sun's selfless bounty, and Troy half expected to see an heroic entrance on camelback riding through. Instead, he heard the fierce strokes of a petrol engine bearing down from his left, and turned to see a British Army Jackal churning out a plume of dust as it roared towards him. Bulky, heavily armoured and above all, beige, it crunched to a halt ten yards away, its main gun aimed squarely at him.

More notable than that however, was the flagpole strapped to the side of the vehicle, thrusting ahead like a lance. Tied to the end of it, pointing the way ahead, was a large teddy bear sporting a bright red ribbon around its neck.

The bear was almost level with him, and Troy was unsure whether to address it or the soldiers pointing their guns at him.

"Hold on a second, mate!" called the foremost soldier.

Troy stood nervously holding the briefcase with limp fingers as the vehicle inched towards him. The flagpole moved past him, taking the teddy bear on a reconnaissance mission into whatever stretched between the fractures.

"There he goes!" shouted the soldier as the bear disappeared, leaving a truncated flagpole behind. "Mark it on the map." 

Troy considered stepping back to join the bear in Havenbrook, but was put off the idea by the guns which were still aimed at him.

"Right mate!" said the soldier cheerfully. "Welcome to Afghanistan!"

Troy dropped the briefcase and tried not to laugh at the irony of being caught carrying heroin into the very country which had probably produced the stuff. This wasn't just coals-to-Newcastle, it was Troy-to-jailtime once again. The briefcase had brought him nothing but misfortune ever since he rashly stole it. The best thing he could possibly do was get as far away from it as he could, so hoping the soldiers had no real reason to shoot at him yet, he turned and fled.

"Don't do that mate!"

He heard a loud crack and found himself pitching towards the ground. His left knee felt hot and stiff. As he braced himself against the briefcase, he became aware that the heat was the intense pain of a bullet wound. He rolled onto his back and clawed at his leg.

Above him, the teddy bear blankly surveyed the hills with its dull button eyes.

#

Trevor was given very little time to adjust to the sensory overload of the helicopter bearing down on him. He could see his hand glow pink as he tried to shield his eyes, then he could hear some shouting, chopped up and blended by the roar of the blades. Then it all went dark.

Firm hands gripped his arms as his wrists were strapped together with what felt like a cable tie. Similarly firm hands and what felt worryingly like a gun barrel insisted he walk where they wanted him to walk. He didn't know what was going on, but walking where they wanted him to walk was already working out the least painful of his options.

After many awkward stairs and turns, he was forced down onto a chair, his bound wrists behind him. Then he heard a door slam, and then he heard nothing for what seemed a long time.

Then the door opened again and the hood was removed from his head.

He blinked uncertainly. He was in a small room lit by a single fluorescent strip. A store room perhaps. A battered wooden desk was in front of him, and behind that sat a fat man in a bulging business suit.

"I really have been renditioned this time, haven't I?" 

#

The soldier aimed his gun steadily at Troy, a single bead of sweat swelling on his left eyebrow.

"Okay mate – what was all that running for? What's in that briefcase?"

Behind him, his colleagues peered from behind their positions, anxiously expecting the briefcase to explode. In their experience, things that people ran away from had a tendency to explode.

"Just bibles," Troy replied carefully. He crawled painfully back to the briefcase and gave them a quick flash of its contents, hopefully so short that they couldn't tell what was actually there.

"Slowly, please." One of his colleagues was watching through a pair of binoculars.

Troy winced, then opened the briefcase so that everyone could get a good look at the heroin packets inside.

"Sarge, it looks like it's full of smack."

"Yeah, thanks Corporal. I do have eyes." He focused them sharply on Troy. "What kind of bleeding bibles are they?"

"Street ones?" Troy ventured, but his leg hurt so much that his words carried little conviction.

The Corporal adjusted his aim to behind Troy. "Sarge, got another contact!"

Chloe ran directly towards him, half-blind from the desert sun and still drowsy from her trip across the fracture.

"You!" the Sergeant yelled. "Get down on the ground immediately!"

Chloe froze. She shook off a hazy memory of brushing along some treetops then complied, lowering herself slowly into the dirt. With some fascination she pulled a leafy twig from her hair, its surprising presence distracting her from the full terror of being held at gunpoint.

In the meantime the Sergeant had been on the radio. "Roger, we have one American, I think – just let me check." He waved at Troy. "Are you American or Canadian?"

"Jesu – geez, American!" His trouser leg glistened with blood and he clutched it with both hands.

"I'm whatever doesn't get me shot!" Chloe volunteered.

"Two Americans," the Sergeant said into his radio. "Better get a medic here, we've put a dent in one of 'em."

#

The fat man, who had introduced himself somewhat improbably as Mr Zebra, leaned into the table in exasperation.

"Mr Buxton," he began, then thought better of it. "Trevor. I don't think you understand the situation fully. We don't care about your briefcase."

"It isn't full of heroin, you know. It's just a prop."

"We wouldn't care if the damn thing was made of heroin. We just want this Ziebeck woman."

"Well how should I know where she is? She went running off into one of those – what are they again?"

"Beats me."

Trevor tugged at his restraints restlessly. "Does anyone have the vaguest idea what's going on? I feel like I've got the wrong script today."

"All I know is that as of 23:47 EST yesterday apparatus assembled by Miss Ziebeck has substantially challenged not just our understanding of matter, but of geography too. The 48 contiguous states are now scattered throughout the world."

"Presumably you'd like Chloe to put them back how they were?"

"On the contrary. The cards have been shuffled in our favour, and we'd very much like to keep them that way."

"Now I'm afraid you've lost me. Just what do you want from me?"

"Is there anything you can tell us about Miss Ziebeck that might help us find her?"

Trevor shrugged. "I barely knew her at all."

Mr Zebra stood up and waved a hand dismissively. The hood went back on and everything went dark again. This time it stayed that way.

#

Chloe inspected Troy's knee carefully. She bit her bottom lip and declared that in her professional opinion the bullet had made sweet, sweet love to it with considerable force.

Troy tutted at the cursing. "What the heck are you doing here anyway? I thought you were trying to fix things back at your lab?"

"I was worried you might get shot."

"You were right to be concerned."

"I was thinking of something more like the end of Automatic Headspin."

"Yeah, so was I – "

"Sarge! Another contact!" The corporal bellowed over their heads.

From the fracture four more soldiers had appeared. They wore black uniforms that made them look like shadows moving through the landscape. Visors hid their faces behind the glare of the sun.

"Hold it right there!" The sergeant shouted. They halted, their weapons trained on Chloe.

"Chloe Ziebeck?" One of them called.

She nodded back, slowly, unsure why she was responding at all. The mixture of guns and fear was quite hypnotic.

"Oh, bloody marvellous," said the sergeant. "More Americans."

"Miss Ziebeck, we are authorised to use deadly force if you do not comply with our orders. Do you understand?"

Again she nodded.

"Hey," said Troy.

"Miss Ziebeck, walk towards us with your hands in the air."

"Oi!" the sergeant bellowed. "This is our territory and our sodding prisoners! The only person giving orders here is me."

The black-clad US soldier raised his sights to the sergeant. "This is not a fight you want to be starting."

"Hey," Troy repeated. "Help me up."

Chloe gave him her hand for support. "Not a great plan, but nothing about this situation is great. You okay to make a run for cover with that leg?"

"It is a great plan," said Troy. As he delicately raised himself up on one leg, he picked up the briefcase, his prize. "This is it – the big standoff at the end of the movie."

"You do remember that the guy with the briefcase dies at the end of the movie, right?"

"You with the suitcase!" the US soldier shouted at Troy. "Move out of the way of the target or we will fire!"

"Just do what they say," Chloe urged. "I'm pretty sure they mean business."

Troy took in a deep breath. The heat of the air made it feel like he was hardly breathing. "No," he said, "let's make a run for it."

She very plainly stated her thoughts on his relationship between himself and his mother.

"Just run," he said, then hopped with an unsteady yet surprisingly vigorous gait towards the American soldiers.

Her hand forced, Chloe ran for the shelter of the UK forces' Jackal. As she ran she heard gunfire, first from behind her, and then from in front. The UK soldiers were returning fire. As she reached the shelter of the far side of the Jackal, the gunshots became more sporadic, quickly finishing with a few round from the vehicle.

She leant against its side and banged the back of her head against its armour plating. She planned on doing so until she'd knocked all of the past days events out and into the sand.

"Miss!" the sergeant called from above. "You okay miss?"

"No," she replied. "It was a stupid movie."

The sergeant looked confused.

"Automatic Headspin," she said, as though that would explain everything.

"Never seen it miss."

"Don't bother. It's got a lousy ending."

#

Chloe's lab had become the focus of attention for a busy group of specialists, dropped in from the helicopter. They had a generator set up outside and were excitedly poring over the apparatus within.

Danny stood outside and knocked on the window.

An irate Secret Service agent snapped the window open. He would have looked dashing back in his day, but now he just looked like a businessman with an earpiece. "Jesus!" he exclaimed. "I've already told you twice, we don't need a damned UPS. We. Have. A. Generator. Capiche?"

"Sure, I hear you," said Danny, holding out the UPS. "And I totally understand your reluctance to seal the deal. That's why I've reduced the price to twenty bucks."

"But I don't need it!"

"Twenty bucks and you'll never see me again."

The agent dug out his wallet, handed Danny a twenty dollar bill and took the UPS off him. He was going to wave sarcastically at him as he closed the window too, but Danny was already gone.