The Atheist Wind

by submission
June 19th, 2011

Author : Dan Whitley

The weathered old Director stood before a window in the control tower, gazing southward at the freakish storms over the ocean, churning up the water where his company’s facility was – or had been, he wasn’t sure. He turned on his heel and faced his subordinate. “Mr. Xavier, would you like to explain to me what in the hell is going on out there?”

“Director, I don’t know,” Mr. Xavier answered, still feverishly working his console, trying to get a feel for the situation. “The only explanation I can come up with is that I vastly overestimated our energy requirements, and thus fed too much power into the system, so that when the capsule left, all the excess energy got dumped into the surrounding environment.” He took a look out the window from his seat and continued, “However, if there’s this much waste energy in the environment right now, I would conjecture that a good percentage of the total input energy went back with the capsule.”

“Mr. Xavier, explain to me why I can’t see the facility. Not even the immense storm clouds can account for that.”

“Well, sir…” Mr. Xavier adjusted his collar and swallowed hard. “I think it went with the capsule-”

The Director stomped up to Mr. Xavier and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. “You mean to tell me we just teleported a multi-trillion-credit facility a full millennium into the past?!”

“Or the future,” Mr. Xavier croaked, “if the polarity somehow destabilized and swapped at some point in the experiment.”

The Director dropped Mr. Xavier back into his seat and looked back out the window. He stared hard for a while before beginning to chuckle morosely. “This is a historic day, Mr. Xavier. September 3rd, 2588: The first day in my long life that I’ve wished there were a god, any kind of god, who could damn you the way you’ve just dammed this company, and dammed me, Mr. Xavier.”

* * * *

The Minister strode into the conference room with a bundle of documents under his arm. His Queen sat at the head of a stately table, a few of her advisors exchanging counsel at her sides.

The Queen stood as she caught the man in her gaze. “Minister, I do hope you bring good news of the war effort. These advisors’ plots have given me headaches.”

“Divinely-good news, milady,” the Minister replied, holding out his documents for the Queen to read. “These reports are from our watchmen on the northwestern shores; they say that a series of incredibly strange and powerful offshore squalls have sprung up suddenly, and that the enemy’s armada has been dashed upon the rocks all down the western shore of Ireland.”

The Queen looked awestruck. “It’s a miracle,” she declared. “He blew with His winds, and they were scattered.”

“I like the sound of that, milady,” the Minister observed as he grabbed a quill and a spare bit of parchment. “Could you repeat it?”

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