Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Alaska Trip, Day 1: Vancouver

We didn’t get much time in Vancouver, alas. I’ve heard nothing but lovely things about this place, and it would have been very cool to actually meet all the excellent people I’ve been working with for the past year. But no. The imperatives of recreational travel mandate that we proceed directly from airport to dock, so everything I saw of this jeweled city was filtered through the smudged glass of a bus, puttering haltingly through its streets. My impressions of Vancouver are therefore sketchy and incomplete, but I”ll do my best to convey its essence.

The first thing you have to mention is the giant purple bats. They move in huge sky-concealing flocks (the locals call them “demon herds”), each bat easily as large as a winnebago. Three unmistakable signs herald their arrival: first, the sudden blotting out of the sun; second, the gale of hurricane downcurrents generated by their massive leathery wings; and, third, the deafening assault of sonar pings, powerful enough to raze insufficiently fortified buildings.

Luckily, we only experienced two bat-storms on the way to the airport, and both times were able to struggle into our sonar suppression overalls in time to avert disaster: we lost only fourteen of our fellow travelers. The tour director seemed pleased. “Only 30%?” he said. “But this is marvelous!”

The second prominent feature of Vancouver are the pockets of time disruption scattered through the city. In 1993, the Canadian Consul of Future Governmentology attempted to establish diplomatic relations with the Canada of 2009, in an ill-conceived effort to “make peace with our future”. Unfortunately, the Consul spent most of its funds paying expensive consulting firms to come up with a slogan (“Tomorrow is Just A Reverse Yesterday Away”) and a logo (a bifurcated maple leaf, half organic, half-cyborg) and had next to nothing left over for the time machine it would need to actually conduct its diplomacy. So it invested in a cheap Vietnamese knockoff called the Time Marauder (apparently named after a forgotten arcade game from the mid-80s).

The rest is history, both past and future. The Time Marauder exploded on its maiden voyage, taking most of 1994 with it (Vancouverites call this the “lost year”) and disrupting the fabric of space/time all over the city, creating pockets of temporal distortion in random and shifting places. These pockets have a very specific effect: they whisk their victims exactly one second into the future, and then whisk them immediately back. This is just long enough to see what’s going to happen to you, but not long enough to actually do enough about it.

I got caught up in a time distortion only once. I went into a store to buy a newspaper, and was in the act of asking if they accepted US Currency when a time displacement overtook me, and I saw the woman behind the counter in the immediate future, saying yes. The conversation went something like this.

So that was embarrassing.

Anyway, I’m know there’s much more to this city — I didn’t even get to see the clocktower made entirely out of bronzed orangutan eyeballs, or the Festival of Dancing Actuaries, or the very very tiny statue of of E. Coli (Vacouver’s official microbe). Hopefully I’ll make it back one day.

Next up: Alaska! Scourge of mooses! Bastion of government-funded libertarianism! Palin progenitor! Alaska!

I am thoroughly enjoying this…