Gerald the Chronoventor had a brain and that brain was flummoxed. The price for labour in the last forty years was growing like a Godzilla weed and tearing the foundation of his plans. How could he employ anyone if after no more than ten twists of a screw they asked for his weight in gold? To keep people was to keep the finest marble statues of the world polished. He consulted his guide, the Umbrator, which hummed with delight it saw him approaching.

“Ah, my fellow jell-o, friend,” it whirred with cordial delight. “You look more desolate than your usual desolate self?”

The Umbrator sat atop a bookshelf that had ten shelves in total but was no higher than a table, for the bookshelf was for literature of the minute kind. Gerald’s mind took him in twelve directions an hour, this recipe producing a very disorganized person that couldn’t sort a bolt from a battery. One day Umbrator was put upon the bookshelf because it meant his two marble eyes could greet Gerald’s by neither looking up nor down.

Those eyes looked all around Gerald like he’d spilled milk all over.

“Oh Umbrator, my wise child, my precursor to my curses. It is the hands of humans and their arms that is making me wallow so,” said Gerald and he laid a hand around the edge of the machine where it was the warmest.

The Umbrator made a noise that would make anyone realize its insides were made of a hundred-thousand grains of rice. It asked Gerald to elaborate.

“In the world of flesh and mess,” continued Gerald, “the sapien has been selected for two appendages we call ‘arms’.” He held up two of his own like they weren’t his. “Once these were our purpose, then once these were not and it was our brain” – which he poked with a finger – “but now it seems we have replaced the brain and the arms are back.”

“Mmm, yes quite the turn, I see. I cannot do anything but deeply apologize, for I realize that the great replacement of your cortical areas was due to ones like myself,” and here the Umbrator lowered its eyes to Gerald’s shoes in the imitation of a bow. After a few moments it shot them up again and they flared an extra bright green and things really rattled around inside of it.

“But. Allow this moment forward for me to make amends, for I see farther than the oldest photon of Betelgeuse that the formula you have presented me means that the price for pairs of arms would be more than the collective weight of Idium in the Pontac Nebula.”

Gerald lowered his head, for to hear his desperate situation said back to him was no different than to hear his head do the same thing. The Umbrator continued:

“I have here in my lower half procured you a machine. This is no ordinary babbling box like I, but one that with two good hits and a crank will take from any time stream, a person of the description you have described: with two great arms to wield.”

Gerald saw that in the Umbrator’s flap at its base there shone a box. It fit in the palm of his hand and it had two hand prints on two sides and a ratchet crank on a third. The front was a void in which when he looked he saw not the bottom but the eye of a black hole that growled.

“You have provided me a portable wormhole?” said Gerald in suprise.

“Quite. I have mixed it and stretched it so, that it can only handle the sapien form and will only bring that forth.”

Gerald understood now, for he recalled the times before and times that were even before the times he recalled just then and when in his mind he saw pay checks and bank cheques and the prices of bread, it was a number with so many fewer zeros that Gerald had to squint in his mind’s eye to count it up. How cheap, he thought! What a subtle and genius move, for now I could hire a thousand arms and still eat suckle-egg omelettes three times a day!

Such a thought made him laugh and laugh. The time machine he threw up and down, he was so delighted. And then no more time was to be wasted and he hasted to his workbench. He couldn’t care for the old twin-sun cage he had been working on and he threw it to the floor to make room for the time machine. As instructed, he slapped his two hands on the machine and cranked the ratchet hard. A light shone from its base and the table rattled, the machine lifting into the air like one possessed.

“Does it speak?” shouted Gerald over the noise.

“It does fine without a voice,” said Umbrator.

And the Umbrator knew, for suddenly the cube coughed out semi-precious stones from its side with a hole, but before Gerald could wonder why, a finger, then a hand came through it.

“Haha, a hand!” said Gerald as he reached forward and felt the flesh of the new arrival.

But the rest came through and fell onto the table and Gerald realized that before him was a person exactly as himself, yet their stature was ten times smaller, even if they stood on their toes.

“Umbrator – you are great – but what am I to do with hands like these,” and he motioned to show that the tip of his finger cast a shadow across the palm of the small person.

“Although I will not point out that you desired hands, but did not specify the size nor shape, you greatly underestimate the power of this collective micromechanics. For I could have delivered you just as easily a hand a hundred times the width of the moon, but this would have been sluggard and slow; if not ten years it would have taken you, then at least one, to instruct such a magnanimous being to just open an envelope.” replied Umbrator. His impressive whirs and hums oozed a confidence that reassured Gerald.

Gerald looked down at the small shape, he put one eye level to its two and said, “Oh micro-man, can you hear me?”

The micro-man stood, dusted solar residue from its trousers, then from its pocket pulled out a stopwatch that was too small for Gerald to see and squeezed out an exclamation from its face. It then said, in a voice that sounded like it came from the plucks of a tin wire, “Get me a spade! A spade! Where in the hell is my spade!”

Gerald rushed to the closet where he kept his tools, and found a spade, racing back to the tiny person on the table.

“Here!”

He realized his error when the spade’s handle eclipsed the whole person twice over. For a moment he thought, but not too long before he turned to the Umbrator for an idea. The two eyes glowed blue again and the Umbrator said, “Do not concern yourself with their useless requests, for it is not a spade this microscopic mammal needs. No, get him companions and make it treble and treble more and treble that ten times again!”

And Gerald followed this order like it was his own thought and how he hit that box and ran that ratchet around so many times that it sparked and the Umbrator had to put out the fires. Round and round, smick-smack he didn’t stop and soon hands a-hundred with fingers on each one of them flowed from the void.

A pile of flesh was forming and as it did, the voices from those that made up this puddle of bodies began to add so that when they all shouted it filled the room with one tone. Hands on hands and Gerald’s hand just kept smacking and cranking like one caught in the adrenaline of a voyage near a neutron star. It took two hours for Gerald to awake from this state and only then another hour for him to slow the momentum of his hands and stop their attack on the box.

He stepped away from the table, smoke trickled from the time machine and it cooked and coughed various noble gases. Someone admired Gerald’s work and Gerald turned and it was the Umbrator, humming and glowing as usual. But the voices, Gerald turned and saw was not voices, but a voice, and the mass around the table flowed. Before his two eyes, Gerald saw a million eyes come together and move like one and it took shape like a gas fitting itself into a new suit. A leg and then a second took form. Following this a barrel torso carved out. And in wonder, did Gerald see what started as two stubs at the top of the body, stretch out and become two arms which from these sprouted five points for grasping.

“Call me,” came a voice from what was the belly of this assemblage, “Assembly Arnold.” Gerald took the hand that Assembly Arnold held forth and shook it. His hand was but a button in that great palm. He felt the tickle of all the little people that made that fist and this made him laugh.

“Arnold!” Gerald said. “My oh my, what a delight. Now. We have work to do!” Gerald clapped his hands, looked around, and found some engine that needed a repair.

“Would you repair that engine over there for me, Arnold?”

Arnold saw the engine and nodded, and then turned to Gerald and said, “Assembly Arnold can move matter in any way you desire. My only request is a fee for my efforts, so that we can keep the mutual energy between us equal.”

“Of course, of course,” bowed Gerald, low, for he liked to exaggerate his philanthropy. “I will even, out of the kindness of my heart, allow you to request the wage for your labour – the wage you see fit for your efforts.”

At this, Assembly Arnold took to rippling, it was clear that the millions he was made of were chatting and discoursing on the information from Gerald. Gerald waited and finally from Assembly Arnold’s mouths of many he spoke:

“We do not ask for much, for we know that labour is plenty and minds are far more valuable.” At this Gerald had to hide his scoff, for he knew this was not the case in his time.

“And so a meagre pence-a-person would do for this task.”

With a pence-a-person, Gerald could run this Arnold the whole year. Gerald eagerly agreed.

“But as you are aware,” said Arnold, “We are persons of a million.”