Kim opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. Déjà vu, she thought.
She rose and showered, soaping for exactly six minutes and being careful to clean inside and behind her ears and in-between her toes. Then she brushed her teeth, squeezing 75mm of toothpaste onto the brush and brushing for exactly two minutes. Then she got dressed, the clothes hanging crisp, ready and ironed on the back of the door as always.
Each day, for Kim, began the same way, continued in much the same vein and ended more or less identically. Regular as clockwork. Every day exactly like the day before it and the day before that, the day before that and every other day previous. This was, for Kim, exactly as things should be: sane, rational, predictable and routine.
Kim was a clockmaker and prided herself on her clocks keeping perfect time, outlasting their original owners and passing down through generations of grandchildren, tick-tocking with a relentless, steady regularity that could only be stopped with a mallet, or by being dropped down a toilet. Kim knew being a clockmaker meant she was a little behind the times – everything was digital now after all – but her small clock making business continued to pay the bills and Kim, a staunch nostalgic, loved her work and was good at it.
She had just finished brushing her hair in fifty even strokes when her mother started banging on the wall. In her youth, Kim’s mother had been one of the most well-respected Temporal Physicists in the world. Today she was mad as a hatter; disorientated, often incomprehensible and on more than one occasion, a little bit violent. She had suffered a severe temporal distortive episode ten years before which had affected her memory and caused her to suffer from delusions so bizarre in nature, that the doctors had simply shrugged and encouraged Kim to take her home as soon as possible and please not to feel the need to come back in for check-ups.
The banging continued and wearily Kim made her way to her mother’s bedroom door, opened it and peeked in, ready to dodge projectiles or more direct forms of attack.
Professor Gillian McDougley was hiding behind a needle-point cushion depicting a family of outrageously ugly cats.
“Mum?”
In a rush, the professor dropped the cat cushion and, brandishing a mallet Kim couldn’t imagine how she had procured, made a reckless dash for the doorway. Kim stepped neatly to one side.
“Would you like some breakfast?”
Kim’s mother was out of the room and half way down the stairs on her way to the front door.
Kim followed her.
“I can make you some eggs?”
“Scrambled.” The professor cried, flinging the front door open, brandishing the mallet high above her head. She surveyed the street, mallet poised, and then seemed to think better of it, lowering the mallet and shutting the door.
“Bastard cats are at it again.” She declared venomously, “Damn that Zimmerhalf, the fraudulent feline flibbergibbet, I’ll give him an Inter-Dimensionary Time Vortex, you see if I don’t.”
“Toast?”
“Two slices.”
While Kim scrambled three eggs with 10ml of skimmed milk and a pinch of salt and pepper, her mother took to muttering at the blender,
“I could just contabulate the wavomitry drive to light speed and set it in reverse. The triptometer should release hyperstitional relativity at about 8blillion megaclicks a millosplice and the resultant power surge should tip the relopathology into statial verbometry, causing a chain reaction and allowing the temporal spectrometer to activate…”
Kim spread one tea-spoon of margarine on the toast and poured two 200ml glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“I just need a high-powered hydrabattery…” Her mother continued thoughtfully, “and a Tempolaxidator…”
“Just please don’t take the microwave apart again.” Kim pleaded, “You almost electrocuted yourself last time.”
Kim’s mother glared at her and mumbled something which might have been, “Bite me rat face.”
They had just sat down to breakfast when there was a blinding flash of light. When Kim could see again, there, in the doorway was Kim. Only Kim was still sitting at the table with a forkful of scrambled eggs halfway up to her mouth.
“Ug.” Said eating-breakfast Kim.
“Quick,” Said standing-in-the-doorway Kim, “You have to help me.”
While Kim stared at her with her mouth open, New Kim explained in a rush that she had somehow managed to escape something called ‘the inter-temporal time vortex’ by ‘intersecting’ with a ‘timeline’ which was ‘free from felinial interference’.
Kim-who-was-there-first slowly closed her mouth and put down her fork.
“The CAT agents are tracking me even now,” New Kim urged, “You have to take me to your lab, with Pfleeg’s help, I think we can work out how to stop them.”
“I don’t have a lab.” Original Kim told her steadily, “I have a workshop. And who’s Pfleeg?”
Now it was New Kim’s turn to blink in confusion. “What do you mean you don’t have a lab? Where do you conduct your experiments?”
“I’m very sorry,” Kim tried to keep her voice level, which was extremely difficult when your double was standing in your kitchen shouting about cats and vortexes. “I think you’ve got the wrong… I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How did she get here?” Kim’s mother demanded, stuffing the last of her scrambled eggs in her mouth and starting on Kim’s.
“Good question.” Kim agreed, wearily.
“Oh God,” New Kim looked stricken, “Don’t tell me… Is it possible that you’re not a Temporal Physicist?”
“No,” Non-Temporal-Physicist Kim acknowledged weakly, “I’m a clock maker.”
This did not seem to please New Kim at all. She began moaning and dragging her hands through her hair which Kim noted did not look as though it had been brushed in fifty even strokes. Now she came to think of it, New Kim was also wearing a lab coat that had clearly not been washed in at least forty-eight hours and she seemed to have something stuck in her teeth.
Real Kim shuddered.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you.” She tried to keep her voice light and polite. “Maybe it would be best if you just left. My mother isn’t well you see and I don’t think…”
“You don’t understand,” The Kim-like stranger told her desperately, “The fate of the world is at stake.”
And then Kim began to understand. Clearly this poor woman, who bore a scruffy likeness to her, suffered from the same disorder as her mother. Of course, it was the only possible explanation. The fact that she shared, really only a passing resemblance to Kim herself was disconcerting, but not unfathomable. Stranger things had surely happened.
In any case, if this stranger with a vague Kim-like appearance, was suffering from a temporal distortive episode there was only one thing to be done.
“Wait here,” Kim told her kindly, “I’ll call the doctor.”
“The doctor?!” Poor-copy-Kim looked at her as though she were mad, which Kim felt was a little rich.
“No, I need information, details. Something about your timeline must be fundamentally different from the rest of ours for you to have escaped. We need to work out at what point you branched off and then maybe we can go back and…”
Kim had been trying to edge past her to get to the phone but now Fake Kim grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “You have to tell me everything. Start at the beginning, your Mother, did she die during the hyperbolic years or did she invent immortality? Has Professor Gilbert O’Sullican imploded Mars yet? Who was your first grade History Teacher?”
Kim was losing patience. “I’m calling the doctor. You’re sick. You need treatment.”
“No, no, you’re not listening,” Imposter Kim wailed, “This might be our last chance. If Zimmerhalf finds me here he’ll extend the vortex to this dimension and all will be lost. We’ll never escape, do you understand? We’ll be forced to live the same day for millennia, maybe forever. This is our last chance to escape and return to linear time! You have to help me.”
“That’s quite enough.” Kim snapped, rummaging in her back pocket for the instant incapacitation spray she always kept with her in case her mother got hold of an axe again. “Now just calm down and I’ll call for help…”
Escaping-the-time-vortex-Kim was beginning to despair when suddenly Not-a-Temporal-Physicist Kim’s eyes glazed over, she stumbled, said, “Egag,” and then collapsed forward in a dead weight.
Behind her, the older woman in blue striped pyjamas who had just eaten two plates of scrambled eggs on toast, lowered the bloody mallet she was holding above her head.
“A pity,” She sighed, before raising her eyes to the only Kim left. “But desperate times call for desperate measures. I’m glad you’re finally here. Can you get hold of a high-powered hydrabattery and a Tempolaxidator? We’d better move fast, Zimmerhalf won’t be far behind you.”