"To stop bad guys." He looks at me. "You are reputed to be a hard case. Is this true?" "Yes. I don't have super powers but I'm hard enough."
"Hard enough to deal with the end of the world as we
know it?" "Depends" "Depends? On what?" "Are you
speaking literally or figuratively?"
"There are plans afoot to alter the very structure of
reality." "Uh hunh. You're starting to sound like an undigested bit
of beef again."
Granger's doppelganger lets out a great moan. "Unn! You
are so difficult to talk to! Man of the worldly mind! Do you believe in me or
not?''
"Look pal, you waltz into my office masquerading as a
dead man, chatter about altering reality and I'm the one who's difficult to
talk to?"
"Masquerading? Dead man? Who do you think I am?"
"I'd bet my last shilling you're an actor sent to pwn me." "Did
you just say 'shilling'?"
"No I said 'dime' as in 'I'd bet my last DIME.'"
"You said shilling." "I'm sure I didn't." "You really
said SHILLING." "NO, I said DIME."
"I DISTINCTLY heard you say SHILLING!" "I
TELL you I said DIME!" "SHILLING!" "DIME! JUST BACK
OFF!" "WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?"
"HOW ABOUT I BEAT YOU WITH THE BLUNT OBJECT APP ON MY
CELL PHONE?" He looks at me, then takes his phone, taps the screen and
shows it to me.
On his Twitter account I see my words "I'd bet my last
shilling…" Like a swift gut punch I
realize the truth. "You follow me on Twitter?"
"Yes. You didn't learn a lesson when A tagged your
tweets last time." A had spied on my Twitter feed during the Granger
murder inquiry.
His Twitter awareness gave him an advantage in evading me.
It also came to so preoccupy his attention that he ultimately gave himself
away.
"OK. I said shilling. So what?" "You said
shilling but remember dime." "But what does it mean?" "I
fear it may be earlier than I thought."
"Earlier than you thought? Don't you mean later?"
"Later than what?" "Later than you thought." "No, it's
earlier." "How can it be earlier?
"While you engaged A in your half-twitted combat, gears
turned and actions were taken." "I disagree. Our confrontation was
fully twitted."
"When technologies clash there are winners and losers.
In this case I won, A lost. Why did you say earlier?" "We may be
ahead of ourselves."
"The shilling has been gone since 1991, yet you
referred to it as still in circulation. In addition, you're not even
British." "Not lately."
"A slip of my tongue is the result of time
travel?" "One unanticipated consequence of a reality shift can be a
phasing in and out of time."
"If my tendency to tongue slip is a passing phase, this
tale will be much shorter." "One can only hope." His words give
me a lot to ponder.
I am onto something. I need to quickly get off. I'd best keep my tongue to myself. He paces
back and forth. "This is really bad." he says.
"If I grant your time-warped hypothesis," I say
"what has it got to do with me?" "You are the only regularly
tweeting member of the police."
(The Twitter Mystery continues daily at
@Twitstery)
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