IBM Adventure 3

MAX arrived on a speedboat a bit later. Amazon was initially hesitant, but Attie did her best to explain the situation, and eventually she consented to transfer over to the speedboat and tie the canoe to the back.

MAX was still baffled by the time-sync issue. "Look." He held out his wristwatch for me to see. It said 6:40 AM, which was about six hours earlier than the indication on my sat-phone.


"Honestly, the clocks being out of alignment isn't even in the top ten weirdest things I've seen today," I said. Attie and I explained everything that had happened to MAX on the ride to the island.

"I–wow. This is just insane," he said. "Let me guess, was there a giant smoke monster on the island as well?"
I raised an eyebrow. "Smoke monster?"

"It's from–never mind," he said.

We reached the shore soon afterward. MAX powered off the motor and navigated the boat through the passage that Amazon had cleared earlier. After Amazon stowed the canoe back in the cave, we made our way back to the village.

I pushed open the door to Amazon and NatGeo's yurt. The bed was empty and Vivendi was nowhere to be seen. NatGeo was skinning a rabbit. He turned around and locked eyes with me. His face immediately twisted in anger. He shoved me against the wall, held a knife to my throat, and began yelling at me incomprehensibly.


Amazon rushed in quickly after, and NatGeo's eyes went wide as soon as he saw her. They exchanged some words and he released me.
I gasped for air and rubbed my throat. "What the–Attie, can you ask NatGeo what that was all about? And where's Vivendi?"
Attie tried to talk to them, but Amazon and NatGeo ignored her and continued talking with each other quickly. Attie turned to me. "NatGeo seems to think we've been gone for a lot longer than we have," she said.

"How much longer?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," said Attie.

I grabbed MAX's wrist. "The clocks. What's the exact offset between us right now?" I checked my sat-phone and MAX's watch. "Looks like five hours and fifty-two minutes. MAX, when we came back in sat-phone range, you said we'd only been gone for twenty minutes."

MAX scratched his head. "Seventeen minutes, if you want to be exact."

"Right. There's some freaky time-stuff happening on and around this island, and our clock moved forward nearly six hours while yours moved forward seventeen minutes. So maybe time here is moving faster by that ratio? About a twenty-to-one ratio?"

"Well not quite," said Attie. "If we assume the distance where our sat-phone started working again is also the point where the island's 'zone of weirdness' starts, it took our recon vessel some time to get there in the first place. Probably about fifteen or more of those seventeen minutes. So something like one or two minutes of real-world time, or even less, is equal to six hours of island-time."

"Whoa," I said. "So, like, when we spent like an hour off the island syncing up with MAX to get medical supplies..."
Attie blinked hard a couple times. "That could have been days, weeks, or much, much longer."

"Vivendi," I said. "What the heck happened to Vivendi? Attie, ask them–" She cut me off and started talking to NatGeo. After a few minutes, they stopped talking, NatGeo walked out the door, and beckoned us to follow. We all filed out the door, except Amazon, who stayed behind. As we walked through the village, I noticed NatGeo look back at us periodically, continuing to grip his knife and shoot me looks of disgust. According to Attie, he didn't fully accept the "time-weirdness" explanation of events, and held us (mostly me) responsible for Amazon's disappearance.

We finally arrived at a yurt that was quite a bit larger than the others around it. NatGeo knocked on the door.

A minute later, the door opened to reveal Vivendi. His formerly clean-shaven face was covered in a thick beard. His wounded left leg had been amputated below the knee with a wooden prosthetic in place instead. He had a makeshift crutch in his left arm and what looked like a lopsided musket in his right arm. He leaned the crutch against the yurt's outside wall and pointed the musket at me.

"You've got a lot of nerve coming back here," he said
I held up my hands slowly. "Vivendi, I–"

"Not a word." He adjusted his grip on the musket. "You ran our ship into those rocks, and then rushed off the island and left me here to die. Do you have any idea what it's like to have someone saw your leg off while you're fully conscious?"

Attie opened her mouth to speak, but Vivendi swung the musket in her direction as soon as he noticed. "Not a word out of you either. Or you, MAX."

Vivendi turned towards Isa and said something in the native language. I couldn't understand, but Attie's eyes went wide and her jaw dropped.