For anyone who wants to catch up:

Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three

Oh God, I have no idea how to summarise the plot now. Asexual librarian, Jamie (I’ve forgotten his surname), has been pushed by a cat through a time portal into Victorian England, where he has been attacked by a mysterious (though perhaps, to some, familiar) gentleman with a knife and static for eyes, and then rescued by a prostitute called Mary, who has taken him back to her rooms above tannery. Where she appears to be collecting pornography to aid a future war between the Mimetic Empire (the post-physicality information beings, of which the cat — currently imprisoned in a cat in the 21st century — is one) and a group rebels known as the Atavists, who would prefer humanity not involve beyond their physical selves.

Or something.

Suggestions for future time jaunt encounters include:

• Gerard Manly Hopkins
• A shy data programmer from the near future
• John Wilmot
• Plato

Welp. I’m working on it! Thank you for all your wonderful, deliciously insanesuggestions – I, err, I hope you you’re having as much fun with this as me.

A couple have people have mentioned it’s sometimes difficult to come up with ideas when it seems like I have stuff in mind. As it happens, I kind of don’t. When I integrate a suggestion, I’ll contextualise it so it fits the developing narrative but other than that the sky’s the limit. The whole war of ideas things came about in Chapter 3, not because it was always what the story was about, but because I needed something for the incidental prostitute to be doing in Victorian England.

Anyway. Without further ado!

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Chapter 4

i have located
the instrument
elsewhere
in the
manifold
i reawaken the machine
& bend my thoughts
towards the next end
this prison of flesh
tears my mind
between
the singular pursuit of my idealised will
& naps.

Jamie glanced between his new companion, her prodigious collection of explicit literature and the peculiar glowing device in the corner. It turned out the most depressing thing about being told what was going on was how little it helped.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, “you can get me home?

Mary shrugged. “Well, I can scan you the way I do the books. But, honest truth is, I’m not really sure what happens to ‘em. I’ve got a sort of feelings they just wind up as bits of knowledge swirling round a big blue cloud in the future.”

“So basically you’re offering to digitise me?”

“What, you mean where you stick your fingers—“

“No,” said Jamie hurriedly. “It’s, I mean, it’s. Um. Never mind.”

He got to his feet and went the investigate the machine rather in the manner he had seen academics approach the photocopier in his library. He wasn’t sure but he thought it looked a little bit like the thing the cat was making in the basement Elfin Grot. Or had been making. Or was going to make. And, yet again, it was depressing how little that helped.

He turned back to Mary, trying not look as desperate as he felt. “Something like this sent me here. It should be able to send me back.”It

“If you want to poke it, be my guest.” Mary got off the bed and joined him in front of the device. She pointed at a brass stop that looked worryingly like the top of a shredder. “I just stick the books in here. And they go somewhere else. Thinking about it, I don’t reckon you’d fit.”

Jamie sighed. “And there’s nobody at all who understands how this machine works? Nobody we can call or contact or telegraph?”

“Well.” Mary scrunched up her nose thoughtfully. “There’s the bloke that put it in but he don’t come round much. Just if it needs fixing or someone is trying specially hard to kill me. Far as I can tell, he’s from a place that’s not as far in the future as the big nothing Empire or the people who are fighting the big nothing Empire but further in the future than you. He don’t say a lot. He just sorta shows up and is all hi, you’re in danger, bye. I don’t think he’s very happy, if I’m honest. Nice to look at, though.”

The words washed over Jamie in an unhelpful and seemingly endless flow. Or perhaps not entirely unhelpful. “Wait a moment. Are you saying that if this gets damaged, a man from the future will come here and fix it?”

Mary gave him a wary look. “I’m not sure I like where this is going.”

Jamie kicked the machine. It made a deep sonorous noise, like a bell echoing across a really long distance.

He kicked it again. This time, a hum filled the air and several of Mary’s illustrated periodicals drifted slowly towards the machine.

Mary ducked to avoid a copy of Sins of the Cities of the Plain. “Look I really think this is a bad idea.”

“I just—“ kick “—want” kick “—to go” kick “—home.”

i have found you material

 Jamie flinched as the familiar voice range through his mind. He thought it probably best to stop assaulting Mary’s interdimensional fax machine.

“What have you done now?” Mary took a step away from him.

Jamie had heard that voice three times now and there was one deeply infuriating common factor. “You know,” he said, “I’m rather afraid that’s my aunt’s cat.”

i am no cat, material. i am a sophocrat of the mimetic empire. i have stalked the manifold & danced in the thought streams of eternity. it is by merest chance that you encounter me while i am imprisoned in the body of a corpulent feline at the start of what you call the 21st century.

 Mary snatched up the nearest floating book and brandished it wildly. “Watch out, Imperial. I got explicit engravings and I’m not afraid to use ‘em.”

i am already exiled to physicality, atavist. such representations can do me no further harm. & for now your enemies are my enemies.

 Jamie was not in the mood for ideological discourse. “Look,” he snapped. “Can you just get me out of here?”

such manipulations of the tapestry you perceive as space time are but a shadow of a fragment of my singular capacity

 “Is that yes?’

The voice that resonated through his head sounded faintly peeved. patience, material. this device is crude and your body cruder. i must calibrate.

Before Jamie could take offence on behalf of his body and, indeed, his species, the door flew open with a crash. And there upon the threshold, hazy in the half-light, his eyes fields of glowing static, stood the man with the knife.

“Oh balls,” observed Mary.

The stranger’s mouth curved into a glinting smile. “I shan’t quit,” he said, “til I do get buckled.”

Mary darted across the room, snatched the blanket it from the bed and flung it towards the doorway. Jamie didn’t consider himself particularly brave but he felt it wouldn’t be quite the thing to let his hostess fight a knife-wielding maniac on her own. While said knife-wielding was working his way free of the bedding, Jamie grabbed the chair and swung it with as much force as he could muster. It made a surprisingly soft cracking noise—not at all what he would have expected from wood hitting flesh.

A blade came out of nowhere and ripped through the sleeve of his tweed jacket. Jamie jumped away, a sharp, cold pain shooting down his arm.

Oh bother, he thought, I’ve been stabbed in a room above a building full of urine in a time before antibiotics.

The murderous gentleman had torn through the blanket and now he advanced on Jamie, his eyes shinning like his knife.

enough of these disruptions. initialising redistribution.

 Struggling with a mixture of confusion, injury and blind panic, Jamie was vaguely aware of Mary pulling at his one good arm. He turned and was swept into a now-familiar swirling purple vortex. He was by no means an expert in time travel but this journey seemed somewhat more turbulent than the last. A chorus of indecipherable voices clamoured in his mind and invisible tendrils pulled him this way and that like pasta in the hands of an amateur chef.

There was no sign of Mary.

Or, for that matter, that bloody cat.

Then, with a jolt, he was somewhere instead of nowhere.

On the plus side, nobody seemed to be attacking him with a knife. Unfortunately, it was rapidly becoming apparent he was still very far from home.

He was, by the looks of it, in someone else’s home.

Most specifically, crouched in a cluttered corner while the man he presumed was its owner —

a  dissolute fellow in a long curling wig and a full-skirted coat — was battering vigorously at at arse of a bored-looking pageboy he had bent over a writing table.

Jamie froze. It was terribly difficult to know the polite course of action in a situation like this.

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Aaaand there we have it. What manner of unlikely adventures can our reluctant hero have in Restoration England?

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Alexis Hall is wastrel with a good hat. You can find him on his website, onTwitter, and occasionally on Facebook, which he doesn’t know how to use. He’ll be at Love Bytes on the 14th of every month, writing something he doesn’t yet know.