Lloyd Heller sells luxury vacations in alternate timelines. If he can close one last sale in the next 24 hours, he gets his own vacation package, the best of them all, a real career topper: the platinum-level vacation package of his dreams.
Too bad the secret science Heller uses to jump timelines is just whacky magic dreamed up by a bored deity. Heller doesn’t know it, but his company, his product—his entire career—is a divine prank. When all the tech explodes in a speed yoga accident, the whole shebang goes into ground-hog mode. The strain on reality threatens to turn Heller and the rest of the known galaxy into a scorched field of low-grade aquarium gravel if somebody doesn’t fix it, pronto.
Actually racing against time, Heller does everything in his power to stop the ground-hogging, reset reality, save the world, score that platinum vacation package, and maybe, against all odds, fall in love
(Please note: novel includes sentient phones, recursive reality T.V., vacuum-induced full-body fart scenes, Gerry Rafferty songs, transgressive blasphemy, spider dogs, naked old people, and endless cthulian dread.)
Lloyd Heller sells luxury vacations in alternate timelines. If he can close one last sale in the next 24 hours, he gets his own vacation package, the best of them all, a real career topper: the platinum-level vacation package of his dreams.
Too bad the secret science Heller uses to jump timelines is just whacky magic dreamed up by a bored deity. Heller doesn’t know it, but his company, his product—his entire career—is a divine prank. When all the tech explodes in a speed yoga accident, the whole shebang goes into ground-hog mode. The strain on reality threatens to turn Heller and the rest of the known galaxy into a scorched field of low-grade aquarium gravel if somebody doesn’t fix it, pronto.
Actually racing against time, Heller does everything in his power to stop the ground-hogging, reset reality, save the world, score that platinum vacation package, and maybe, against all odds, fall in love
(Please note: novel includes sentient phones, recursive reality T.V., vacuum-induced full-body fart scenes, Gerry Rafferty songs, transgressive blasphemy, spider dogs, naked old people, and endless cthulian dread.)
“Agent Number 1134. Please, take a seat.” The Human resources manager of Transluminal Vacations, Inc. shuts the door to her office behind Agent 1134. She sits down at her desk. She picks up a pen and clicks it once.
“Why’re you using my employee I.D. Number?”
“Anonymity assures impartiality,” She clicks the pen two times. “The nature of our services requires us to take every precaution against favoritism.”
“Specnacular.” 1134 looks around. “I’ve never been called into H.R.”
She opens a folder. Looks down. Click click click. “Twenty years on the job, 1134. Not a single incident. Not only that, you’ve written a number of our protocols.”
“I didn’t know about the impartiality thing.”
“It’s a need-to-know level of protocol, 1134.”
“Why do I need to know now?”
She leans back into her expensive office chair. Clickety clickety clickety clickety click. “You’re about to make your 100th sale.”
“Am I? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Despite how you’ve decorated the last square on the Closing board?” She almost grins. Click. 1134 sees that whiteboard in his mind. It’s divided into rows of salesmen’s names and 100 columns for their sales. He can see the final box in his row—his last sale. It’s filled in with a cartoon palm tree in dry-erase green.
“I may have thought about it once.”
Clickety clickety clickety click. “Not all salesmen have a Fuck You Money Timeline, 1134.”
“Language,” 1134 deadpans.
“How, in 20 years, have you managed to avoid it?”
“Deep in my heart, I’m a rules guy.”
“The pain of withholding explosive sardonic laughter is excruciating.” Click.
1134 folds his arms and looks at a poster on the wall.
“I may have peeked. Once,” 1134 inspects the bookshelves, the furniture. “Twice.”
“Fourteen instances of unauthorized access to alternate timelines.”
“Or fourteen. Am I in trouble?”
She slaps the folder closed.
“No. We’re in weird territory, ethically. I mean we as a company. We sell vacations into alternate timelines to greedy billionaires. What we do isn’t what a lawyer would describe as legal. However, no lawyer can describe it as illegal. It is, in the finest definition of the term, unlegal. Which puts people in my position in a tight spot, ethically speaking. The thing is, twelve of the unauthorized access incidents occurred in the last three years.” Clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety click.
“That’s weird.”
“And in none of them did you access your financial derivative stream, your FMYT. You visited the same baseline adjacent downstream thread every time. Statistically, it is indistinguishable from your base timeline.”
1134 looks at her thumb on the top of the pen. Click. He looks into her eyes.
“Look, I never accessed my FYMT and I never took anything and I never changed anything. It was . . . It was personal training. That’s why it’s the same one.”
Click. Click. Click.
“You gotta stay honed in this game,” 1134 says nervously.
Click. Click.
“I mean, there’s a whole generation of grinders coming up on my tail. I’m 48 years old. I have to stay sharp.”
Click.
“They make a great chardog.”
“There’s no protocol against visiting adjacent timelines. It would be hard for you to sell alternate timeline vacation packages if there were. And your track record–ninety-nine platinum-level packages,” she lays the pen down. “Well, it carries a lot of weight.” She slips out a paperclipped document with yellow signature tabs poking out from the edges. She plops it down in front of 1134 and spins it right side up. 1134 is carefully avoiding looking down at the document, keeping his eyes blank and steady on hers. “You’ve earned this.”
Now he looks down. Now he sees what he knows is already there, the reward after 20 years of hard work, 20 years of jumping timelines to run down leads and play them out like it’s a long con in some crime movie. His gold watch. His retirement package. He’s dreamed about this moment for 20 years, waited and grinded endlessly just to look down and see, on company letterhead, a Platinum-Level Vacation Package with his name at the top.
“Goddam,” he whispers.
“Just sign where it says to and be aware this is contingent on you closing your 100th sale. But that’s kind of a foregone conclusion,” Clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety click. “You are, undoubtably, the best salesman in the biz. This is almost a formality.”
He signs. Turns a page and signs again. Turns to the last page but before he signs his final signature, 1134 asks.
“What happens if I don’t close?”
“You’re in the sales funnel already, aren’t you?”
“Actually, I don’t have a lead.”
“1134, you’re retiring in two days. We had you down as being in the close phase of a pitch.”
“Guy backed out.” He signs his name.
“Oh,” she carefully slides the clip back onto the papers, places them in the folder, then drops the folder into a vertical file. “Well, your package is only viable while you are employed. If you don’t close by the time your retirement kicks in, you lose access.”
1134 looks back at the poster. It says, “Hang in there, Baby”.
It is not encouraging.
Heller is determined to reach the almost mythical status of reaching 100 sales, before he retires from Transluminal Vacations Inc. He's on 99 sales, and when he steps in to help a colleague close a sale which seems to be going pear-shaped, he believes he's done it. Only to be called into the boss's office and told he hasn't. He's given a difficult client and an apprentice, and told to complete the sale before tomorrow, or he doesn't hit the 100 sales, and he doesn't get the prestigious retirement package.
Oh, by the way, he's selling time-line-hopping-vacations that may, or may not be, completely legal. It's not illegal, per say, but it's not entirely legal either. Especially as they try and talk clients into stepping into their FYMT (F*ck You Money Timeline), where they can spend a couple of weeks, while the company leeches the ridiculous amounts of cash that the client has somehow amassed.
Now, I'm going to say that the above summary is possibly a bit of a mean recap. It's a bit bland, unlike The Platinum-Level Translumunial Vacation Package of Your Dreams. Nothing about this novel is bland, from the mouthful of the title, to the somewhat dizzying and abstractly written plot. There's a lot going on here, and it's a lot to take in.
I will admit, the prologue is somewhat off putting, almost as though Garlington added it as an after thought. It's rife with grammatical errors, which is why I've marked this novel 4 out of 5. If the mistakes hadn't been there, or not been so glaringly obvious, it would have been a 5/5.
Garlington's style reminds me slightly of Terry Pratchett. He's irreverent, slightly surreal and clearly doesn't take himself too seriously, like many other authors can do. The book is filled with witty commentary, addendums and notes from Garlington, and wry jokes about the life we live.
"Our particular timeline sucks, kid" Heller looks around at the world. "This particular 2020 is the kitchen junk drawer of the temporal universe. Every sh*tty thing that didn't fit in other timelines is here in spades. Listening to Phil Collins. On fire."
I may have laughed. A lot.
S. A