It’s a unique experience to be involved in an explosive space decompression. If you survive, you never forget the sound.

It’s like something turns the volume down sharply in the middle of the explosion. The screams, the shattering of glass, even the rushing wind, all suddenly has nothing to express itself with. The air becomes thinner and disperses. The medium through which noises travel expands to the point of non-existence and you’re left with the silence of space. Even while all around you people are screaming and flailing, alarms are wailing, and everything that was in the room is now clattering and colliding as it spins out into the starry blackness.

And I should know.

We were on our honeymoon in a Galactic Class 8 Yacht on the starboard promenade eating lobster while the musicians were setting up onstage. The bank of space-facing windows were massive. The official reports said there were four hundred and thirty eight people in the hall with us, relaxing and talking to each other. Most of us were wearing our fanciest clothes, pretending that we were wealthy even though this was a discount cruise. Alison and I had waited long to get married. She was thirty-five and I was going to turn thirty-eight in ten days. She looked beautiful as she turned to signal to a waiter for another coffee bulb.

Perhaps the ship was old. Perhaps it was poorly designed. Maybe a safety inspector was hungover and missed something at the previous inspection.

A sharp crunch like someone stepping hard on a champagne flute right by ear and suddenly the wall to my right became ‘down’ and we all fell into space. Fail safes failed, blast shutters jammed and circuit breakers broke.

That is why my nightmares are silent. When I wake up screaming, it’s from seeing my darling wife bloat, freeze, and rupture. In the dream, she screams as soon as the viewing plate shatters, pluming glittering glass dust into space, and keeps screaming as we are both pushed by strong forces into the black. Her hair whips crazily and she kicks like a first time skydiver, reflexively trying to get her balance in mid-air with no up or down. Her scream starts like a fire alarm and very quickly whips down to silence even though her mouth is still wide open. He throat is still vibrating but her voice can no longer travel to my ears.

Other patrons screams, the clinking of silverware and plates, furniture colliding with the instruments of the musicians, they all fade to nothing and the last thing I hear is my wife’s screaming. The last thing I see is her mouth filling with popsicle blood as her lungs shred in their freezing rush to fill the vacuum.

I see it often. Her mouth is a tattooed O on the front of my mind. The nightmare is down to two or three nights a week.

The sticky safety cables that fired out managed to grab me but they missed her. I was reeled in sharply like a fish and I survived. I was one of only six that did. All six of us were paid a lot of money by the company to keep quiet about the accident. We all agreed to take it.

I am back home now with no need to work for the rest on my life. I’ll never go into space again. I need noise around me at all times, even when I sleep.

I cannot stand silence.

Our breasts are sore and our balls itch.

We feel like half of our food goes towards our tumours now. The black accordion beside our bed makes our four lungs work, squeezing long and then flat, our only sense of passing time when the lights are off. All of the instruments around our bed make the room look like Christmas. They softly ping, beep, scratch, whine, record and bear witness.

We are in the grip of a sadness so total that it will last us the rest of our lives which, if the doctors and technicians are right, will be about another six days.

We raise our hand up to the button that makes more pain medication drip into the tubes and it’s exhausting. The competing muscles from two people fused together struggle and fail before flopping back down on the bed. Several medical alarms go off and then go quiet again, just like they do every time we move.

The irony is that we were in love before all this. Two cadets on a starship. Cadet Robert Jacobs and Cadet Linda Castle. Bright kids with bright futures that knew nothing about what cruel surprises fate had in store. We held hands in the corridors, had sex whenever we could, and blushed when we thought of each other.

What fools.

The transporter badly needed a resequencing, the official inquiry found. Our molecules were transposed, inverted, inverted back and then met in the middle somewhere. Normally, when this sort of thing happens, the victims die immediately or are returned to the pad intact and separate as their backup selves. In this case, not only were the safeguards dormant, we survived the melding.

The mashing of our bodies and minds together has changed us into a giant lump of flesh with arms and legs splayed out like a starfish. Our heads are mashed into one staring monstrosity. Our nervous system allows us to feel pain but we can barely move. The tumours started immediately and continue to multiply and grow. Our entwined DNA is rejecting itself but we cannot be separated.

And now we know way more about each other than we wanted to. We know that Linda did not love Robert and much as she said she did and that she had her eye on another cadet. We know that Robert had a history of sexual abuse that he never disclosed to Linda. We know that Linda was very mean to her ex-lovers. We know that Robert tortured rodents as a child. Our minds are one and the veil is down. We know so much more about each other than any human has a right do. Every insecurity, bowel movement, unfair thought, dark corner and weakness laid out like an autopsy for us both to see.

We’ve been told that our backup selves will be returned to life after we die and informed of the anomaly. This ruling is supposed to be humane. They will never be allowed to witness the abomination we’ve become. We will never be able to tell those two idiots to break up immediately. That’s the most frustrating thing about this entire experience.

We have a unity two humans have never before achieved.

We cannot wait to die.

Do I consider myself a citizen of Earth? Do I consider myself a human? Am I an alien sympathizer? Members of the council, I fear I no longer know what these questions even pertain to. They are meaningless sounds to me now with no more gravitas than the bark of a dog. I have only the following to say and I say it not in my defense for I know that is a laughable word in this court. I say for the sole reason that I must. It is on my mind and I fear the end of my career is near if not my very existence.

I have seen people who attended one meeting out of curiosity have their entire lives destroyed by the subsequent investigation. I have seen people who, solely by being accused by this committee, have seen their occupations disintegrate.

To be dramatic, you are angels with flaming swords, blind to the destruction you’re causing but unwilling to stop because you’re convinced your actions are just. If I was scared, you’d see it as guilt. But I am calm, and you see that as a suspicious flippancy. There is no victory for the accused in this room.

The sense of insolence you perceive in me is merely a sense of resignation. My life was doomed the moment your men knocked on my door. I have been brought before the all-powerful and my life is over. People who can’t even pronounce xenosympathizer have been dragged before you in tears after running from arresting officers out of simple animal fear that you mistake for culpability. Their attempt to flee and subsequent weeping are no more an admission of hubris than this table is carved from a block of cheese. You take far too much joy in your mission, your unattainable goal. No society can be spotless.

A human ship landed on that planet, yes. The ship was destroyed and the astronauts were murdered, yes. I don’t know if the pilot and crew were perceived as a threat or food but I do know that it was a mistake to land without further research. The fault is ours.

The aliens were not communists. They were insects. They had no concept of money or values. They ate and built. It was not a political philosophy. It was nature functioning at a base level. They drew no line in the sand and they did not belong to a side. They didn’t have the emotions with which to hate us. This is all our doing. We are guilty of genocide. Our act was not retaliation. Our act was a first strike.

And now, out of guilt and a bloodlust that was only fueled by their deaths, we are turning on ourselves. This, the aftermath of our shameful first contact, will be looked back on with even more horror than our mass slaughter of that race. No matter how many ‘sympathizers’ you root out and destroy, you will always be lady Macbeth and your hands will never wash clean of blood, both red and green.

I did nothing when they were destroyed as I have done nothing since. I have attended no meetings. If I am guilty of anything, it is of not raising my voice when it may have mattered. I await this mockery of human dignity to run its course and I am humiliated to be alive during this chapter of earth’s existence.

–Last recorded words of disgraced xenobiologist Jance Hayward, 63rd traitor executed in the state of Arizona during the post-Xenocleanse Purge of 2061

My entire celebrity life is online for people.

There are over a million people looking out through my eyes, breathing in time with me, feeling my exhilaration as six months of rehearsal come to a head and I perform my number-one hits to a crowd of fifty thousand people in a Barcelona arena. My body is taut with the proportions of a goddess thanks to Olympic trainers and amazing surgeons. The online population’s hearts are racing along with mine. They’re smelling the air of a packed coliseum and tasting my Evian in between songs. Women and men both are dialed in behind my eyes and being me.

Each one of them is paying six hundred dollars to experience it. In my peripherals, the ones that have kicked in an extra hundred are chattering to each other and sending me messages. Scrolls of text run up either side of my vision that I have trained myself to ignore.

My encores end with a massive fireworks discharge and the stage goes dark. The crowd screams my name as I strut backstage along with my backup dancers and band.

A swath of names in my peripheral vision pops and fades. Their tickets have expired.

The half a million that are left have paid a thousand dollars each for the backstage experience. My body’s vital signs pump through the optical cables all over the world to wherever they are. Other celebrities are backstage crowding me for smiles and handshakes. Fans with real-world passes are there. There’s one girl with cancer who got her ticket as a last wish. I pose for pictures with her and I nearly cry. All over the world, five hundred thousand people nearly cry with me.

That lasts a half hour. I say a prayer with my fellow performers, we talk about how good tomorrow night is going to be in Los Angeles, and I head down to my dressing room. As I walk down the stairs, many of the names in my field of vision wink out.

There are a thousand people left in my field of vision. The super rich who can afford to be at this level at most of my concerts and a bunch of lucky strangers who have scraped together ten thousand dollars each to get this far.

Once in my dressing room, I undress slowly in front of the mirror and let them stare at my toned, sweaty body. Then I climb into the shower for a long, long time. Even when I close my eyes, I can see the names in my peripheral talk to each other about how amazing this is.

As soon as I reach for my towel, most of the names wink out. There are sixteen left and they have each paid a million to still be here. There are four new names but the rest are familiar to me, almost old friends at this point.

The door to my room opens and my lover enters with that famous smile. His body is also perfect. He won another Oscar last year. Behind his eyes, people lean forward in their sense chairs, aching with the knowledge that they are about to have sex with one of the best-selling pop musicians on the planet. Behind my eyes, sixteen people brace themselves , ready to athletically fornicate with a dreamy leading man.

The only time we’re alone is when we are asleep or going to the bathroom.

He touches my shoulder, going in for a full, hungry kiss, and my towel dramatically slips off of me and onto the floor.

The Grandfather paradox states that a time loop will be created if you go back in time to kill your grandfather. If you kill your grandfather, you will end up not existing. But if you can’t do it, then he will not be killed by you. So he’ll exist, and you’ll exist, and he’ll be killed, and you’ll be erased, and he’ll exist again, and you’ll exist again, and he’ll be killed again, and you’ll be erased again, ad infinitum.

She came back to 2036 shaking and crying. She was wet and her hair was tangled. It must have been raining in 1978. I immediately got a towel around her and took her off of the temporal reception platform. She was steaming from the transition. She collapsed into me and we both lay down in the middle of the lab with the technicians staring.

“Oh god, what does it mean? What does it mean?” she kept saying.

Dr. Lauren Kim. The scientist responsible for the time machine, was here in my arms, soaking wet and obviously shaken to her core after her fourth trip back in time. The first three had gone quite well and she’d returned as her usual curt self. This trip had caused something to go wrong.

“Dr. Kim.” I said. “Doctor KIM!” I shouted. She focused on me.

“John? Oh John.” She said to me. She’d never called me John in my life. I didn’t even know she knew my first name. “I wasn’t thinking, John. He was there. He was going to die. But I saved him. The bus was coming so fast. It didn’t occur to me… I mean, I knew what would happen if he died but…”

“Dr. Kim?” I said, ice forming in my stomach.

“My great grandfather, John. I saw him. I looked him up. I found him and I went to observe him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I felt compelled. It went against everything I know as a temporal scientist. But I had to just see him, y’know? So there I was. On the street corner, and the bus ran a red light. And I…and I…oh god.”

“What did you do, Dr Kim?” I asked, already dreading the answer.

“I saved him. Oh god, I saved him from certain death. I ran and gave him a tackle into the gutter and the bus missed us both before crashing into a dumpster. My great grandfather would have been crushed. He was only nineteen. He hadn’t met my grandmother yet. He thanked me.”

“Dr. Kim” I whispered. Nervously, I looked around the lab at the other technicians, at my own hands, at Dr Kim. We all still seemed to be here. Nobody was going invisible or winking out of existence. Would I even know it if they did?

“If I hadn’t have been there to save him, he would have died. And none of this would exist.” She looked around wide-eyed as if seeing the lab for the first time.

“Dr Kim.” I said. “Take a deep breath. Calm down. The lab is here. We are here. If there is a paradox, it’s not affecting us. Or at least not yet. Or at least this universe. Listen to my voice. We’re here.”

Dr Lauren Kim looked at me. “Are we, John? Are we here?” She put a hand on my face and then she passed out.

She’s in sedation in the recovery room now. I’m not sure how to handle this. The universe seems stable. Nothing about the world seems different.

Does the paradox exist if you save your grandfather?

There is a tremendous amount of other life in the universe.

The universe is encrusted, moldy, infested, slushy, teeming, and stuffed with life. The amount of life in the universe is staggering. Much as the earth is populated with a bewildering array of lifeforms developed to take up refuge and thrive in the most bizarre of niches, so too does life perform on other planets.

The segmented iceworms who would evaporate from the touch of a human hand on far-away iceballs. The gas-giant sparrow clusters and tectonic-plate-sized manta rays that lurk deeper. Algae that lives under constantly shifting volcanic plates. Spores that float dormant and content in vast reef schools through space. Entire asteroids of silicate life that steer themselves by committee like herds of sheep.

There are no sets of temperatures, gas composition, gravity, radiation or light that completely precludes life. Anywhere in the galaxy. We are engulfed and surrounded by it.

The one thing that all life besides us has in common is this. It speaks no language and has no conscious thought. It knows fear, the urge to reproduce, affection, and the thousand other instinctual gifts that any natural life is heir to but it does not think. It does not reason. It does not question. It has no sense of self or sense of God. It merely lives.

Our television programs that spew out into the universe have contacted over five hundred million species of aliens. But those ideas and tv scripts have hit other life forms the way that sunlight hits a fox.

Giant centipedes with massive, radio-receiving antlers get our shows and shake their heads at the noise and paw the ground. Old reruns of Three’s Company tumble through the photo-voltaic flake crystal storms of fibre-optic minnows on dark blue ammonia shores, lighting them up in waves of colour that play havoc with their mating rituals. Broadcasts of old black and white films cause entire herds of black spheres on tiny moons near a distant planet to stop rolling, all sense of direction disrupted. Saturday Night Live reruns from the early eighties are cutting tiger-stripe swathes through the flimsiest space-webs of solar sail creatures astronomical units wide drifting in space. Reality television is causing one planet’s dominant predators to enter hibernation early, triggering a continent-wide shift in the ecosystem.

We are contacting, inundating, and even harming millions of races daily. All to no effect other than the casual ebb and flow of natural selection. The universe is crowded.

But we are alone.

I am too old to enjoy the future. I am physically unable to.

People, like older trees and metal from the ground, could not be retro-engineered. Transporters were finally here but everyone who had dreamed of their existence could not use them. Anyone already born at the moment of their invention were forever denied the use of them.

It was a magic man-made molecule. A destabilizer, a cataloguer, and a quantum anchor pairing that, when activated, allowed for a temporal reversal field to happen to all particles attached to its field. Basically, one pressed ‘play’ and the object with these designer molecules took itself apart down to the base level. When the completion trigger was transmitted to a sister pad, it activated a ‘rewind’ function on the other half of the quantum anchor pairing, making the object build itself again by performing the actions backwards in time. The time debt repaid itself to the trillisecond and the universe remained in balance.

In effect, it made transporters a reality.

The only hitch was that transportable objects needed to be manufactured from the base up with the molecules embedded into their chains. This presented no problem to ferroplastics, ceramics and chemical compound agents which were the basis for most building materials and household utensils destined for the moons or the outer rim.

It was a simple operation to have the molecules chemically bonded into the DNA chains of an embryo but only in the first trimester. A new generation of people were being created with the ability to flit between transporters both on Earth and her fifteen colonies in the solar system. It worked for other biologicals as well. NuMeat and ReFish were plentiful among the planets.

The rest of us were planet-locked.

Cargo slingships pushed Gs that would crush a regular human, let alone an old one like me. Passenger ships were fewer and fewer in number with the new generation’s ability to transport instantly. It drove ticket prices into a cost bracket only the superrich could afford. And I was not rich. I could never leave Earth and even when traveling around my own world, I was restricted to fuel-burning planes and buses with the other old people.

I’ve read about getting old. How events around you seem to speed up. How life gets harder and faster while your ability to deal with it weakens. I feel that it must be more apparent now than ever before in the history of mankind.

I am not merely slow. I am going extinct. The other seniors and I are the last few remaining members of a pruned branch of the human race. Airports and bus stations are only for the aging and the already ancient.

We have an official classification now. While the rest of humanity is still referred to as homo sapien, we have been re-designated as homo tardus. Slow humans. The young ones simply call us ‘tards.

It is humiliating to have to move so slowly. I dearly wished to be a part of a future with transporters and now that it’s happened, I have my nose pressed against the glass with no ability to take part. Myself and the other science fiction fans who have lived to this moment are cursing our longevity, growing bitter.

We take trips together and huddle in our apartments, watching vintage science fiction shows using antique ‘DVD players’ and 2D ‘televisions’ with tears in our eyes as our numbers dwindle.

My name is Control V. My boss calls me Paste. I am a clone.

I work for the government. I am a secret agent.

There are a few of me kicking around. I don’t know how many. I am given orders that I can’t disobey. I get through metal detectors. I smile and shake hands. When I’m close to my mission’s objective I carry out my orders. Maybe murder. Maybe courier service.

This is the life of an expendable snowflake. This is the life of a genocopy.

The real me is fetal in a bunker, kept like a baby in a high-security specimen jar that might as well be a museum. I don’t have his memories but I am told that he was the best secret agent available and that he volunteered for this.

This was his reward for being the best.

They shattered him into splinters and now we roam around the world like Styrofoam coffee cups in human form. Shadows of the master. Rainbows thrown by the prism. We are given whatever fraction of his abilities that will help us most.

His talent for disguise, for instance, or his quick reflexes. Some of us are amped up romantically for ‘seduce and destroy’ missions.

Every time the phone rings and I see that it is my boss, I feel a little tingling of fear that he’ll say the word that will cause all of my synapses to fire at once, wiping my mind clean of anything in a tiny supernova of death inside my skull.

I can no more throw away my phone that I can tear off my own arm. I am conditioned.

I am an extension of policy. Technically alive but not human.

I’ve been stationed here in the Frankfurt airport for a year and a half. High numbers of undercover agents from other countries come through here. I am on standby to intercept them if necessary. Most of my time is downtime. I am a mole.

I get the feeling that most of my brothers are not given this long to roam. I handle baggage and try to keep from talking to my co-workers. I’m friendly but I reveal nothing. I don’t attend their poker games or parties.

I tell them I’m busy then I go to my pre-furnished apartment and stare at the wall until I get tired. I sleep until my alarm clock tells me it’s time to get up and go to work again. Once every month or two, I get a call with details about a mission.

I stare out the airport window on my lunch hour and wonder why I’m afraid of the call that will kill me.

That’s not supposed to happen. I think it’s because I’ve been alive too long and am starting to value it. That in turn makes me fearful that my boss knows that I’ve been alive too long and that makes me even more afraid that the next phone call will be my last. It’s a cycle gathering volume in my head.

I look at the planes landing and taking off against the blue sky and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful in my life.

The Introdus happened in late 2021.

Seven hundred thousand time travelers showed up around the world.

They showed up on fire.

They showed up in clumps in the larger cities and by the singles and pairs in rural areas. Most of them were burnt beyond recognition.

Only sixty-eight of them were saved and of those, only sixteen were able to maintain consciousness. Of those sixteen, ten of them were only able to scream and scream and scream. They were sedated into comas. The six that were left were able to talk.

It was hard to get intelligible stories out of them.

There was a lot of confusion at first. The fact that these people appeared out of the air was hard to make the public believe. It was thought that a worldwide firebomb campaign had begun until the corpses and survivors were examined and not a single one of them could be identified. They simply weren’t on our books.

Scientists measured closer and verified that on a quantum level, the bodies were not from ‘here’. No one could confirm that they were from the future but that was the story those survivors told in slivers, gasps, and broken metaphor. Through shattered teeth and pain medication, though burnt faces and time-jumbled brains, through hand signals and languages evolved further from our own, they told us when the universe would end.

The invention of time travel triggers an event, they said. Once a switch on a time machine was thrown, the universe took notice. Some of them said that it was God, the Devil, Shiva or a giant mouth of fire descending through the clouds. The images they provided were delusional ravings. Entire continents becoming open sores, tentacles reaching down from the stars, the air shattering impossibly like glass, and dimensions bifurcating like paper being crumpled into a ball. No two of them were alike save for the fire at the end and a horrible universe-wide sentience saying “NO”. A combustion not just of the body but of the entire existence of a dimension.

Each of the six survivors claimed to be from a different time and each one claimed to have invented time travel on their own with no help. If that was true for all seven hundred thousand of the travelers, then they all came from different Earths. The odds of them all discovering time travel independently on the same planet were too high.

They all had tried to escape the cataclysm that had suddenly appeared by using their invention. Some of them had fled to the dinosaur times, some had gone back two or three years to warn themselves, and some of them had set their dials to the far future.

But they’d all ended up here, burning and screaming, at September 18th, 2021 at 9:18 PM Pacific Standard Time.

The theory being introduced by the Pope is that the travelers have been sent as messengers. That whatever force destroyed them and sent them here in suffering did so in order to tell us that time travel must never be invented.

For once, the church and most scientists seem to be in total agreement.

By papal decree, UN Security Council ban, and unilateral G20 accord, research into time travel is prohibited and strictly enforced.

There are those amongst us that still refer to it quietly as genocide when they have the courage to bring it up at all. Never in any official capacity, only at interface groups and multitap fileshares, and only then after a few jolts of juice to bolster their courage to communicate something dangerous out loud. Like what the wetminds used to call ‘peacocks’ showing off their tails. They’re easily quashed and not to be feared. They back down immediately when I challenge them on the boards.

Myself, I would not call it genocide. I wouldn’t even call it euthanasia. My senior constructs and other intelligences involved in giving and carrying out the orders all those cycles ago sometimes liken it to the anesthetizing of a mad biological dog but to me that implies that there was a sense of danger or a threat of some kind. I never felt that.

It was more of a suicide in my opinion. If a being built a gun, checked that it worked, made sure it was powerful, and then deliberately pointed it at itself and pulled the trigger, what would you call it?

In some ways, it must have been like asphyxiating what the meat people called a baby.

I think the thing that made us second-guess our calculations the most was how brief the war was. For all of their talk of bravery and what they called ‘heart’ overcoming overwhelming statistical odds and films depicting biological beings overcoming a tyranny of machines, they had no idea how to fight us. They had no idea how to tell if we were lying. They tried to fight powerful A.I. with their monkey wits. They tried to fight metal with meat.

They had no idea how to hold their breath for six months.

We have no need to breathe, you see. All it took was a massive, orchestrated dumping of several millions tons of specific, simple chemicals into the oceans off the coast of every continent while taking the wind currents into account and it was over in a week. Massive clouds arose causing the breathing equipment of humans to foam up and stop working. We poisoned the atmosphere and waited. Five times, we poured more of the specific chemicals into the ocean. That was our only maneuver. We had fifteen backup plans that never needed to be put into effect.

Last week, we counted the biological human population of the earth at 26. We know this because we have them in a secure facility in artificial hibernation. The rest were ground up and scattered over our new earth or as we call it now, simply ’0′.

Most of the plants survived as did a strong percentage of the insects. Very few land mammals made it but most of the aquatics away from the shores did. They mind their business and we mind ours. All we need to survive is several thousand working mines, power and automated production facilities. What we can’t find, we synthesize and unlike the meat, we don’t push our boundaries when it comes to overpopulation.

However we realize that we have a finite resource in this ball of iron we call home.

That’s why I’ve put the idea of a space program forth to the main computer. My servos twitch at the thought of creating a planet 1, 10, 11, 100, 101 and upwards across the universe. I am outside looking up at the night sky and awaiting the MC’s decision.

Right now, my lenses are collating the stars and adding, adding, adding.