Ad Infinitum

Author: Bill Cox

I know this probably isn’t the best time from your point of view, but if I didn’t tell someone every now and again then I think I would lose it altogether.

Anyway, if you’re a gamer like me, then you know how it goes. You get to a particular point in the game and you just can’t get past it. Maybe it’s a platform game where you can’t beat a particular boss, or perhaps a first-person shooter where the enemies always overwhelm you. Obviously, there is a solution but you just can’t find it. Frustration builds as attempt after attempt ends in failure and you find yourself in the wee small hours screaming obscenities and throwing the controller at the TV set.

So that’s where I am; unable to discover the way forward, resetting to a new life each time. I know you’re probably too busy trying to stem the flow of blood to listen to me, but you shouldn’t try too hard. I’m going to die anyway. And so, I’m sorry to inform you, are you.

How, you ask? Well, you eggheads at CERN have managed to design an experiment that will, unintentionally, condense the Higgs field into an anti-matter black hole that simultaneously explodes and implodes the whole planet, ripping the obligatory hole in the Space-Time continuum. This, in turn, creates a time loop where, due to an unenviable case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I’m the one that collapses the wave function. In layman’s terms, I’m the guy that gets to look inside Schrödinger’s box to see if the cat is alive or dead. Except the cat is the Earth and it always goes suckity-boom.

Now, I know that as far as you are concerned, I’m just the janitor here, but I’ve had a serious amount of time to investigate and understand the esoteric physics of the event – time loop, remember? At this point I’m probably the smartest person at CERN. And I also know how to unblock a toilet.

So, to summarise, your admirable efforts at first aid are not going to save me but you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Obviously trying to disrupt the initiation laser wasn’t a good idea, as this large hole in my torso demonstrates. Note to self – try something else next time!

Ah well, back to the drawing board. Looking past your concerned faces, I can see the gravitational distortions starting to take effect. Shortly we’ll all be introduced to the business end of a mini black hole, which tends to be a bit of a crushing experience. Then everything will reset once more. I’m going to keep at it though. There has to be a solution that breaks the time loop and saves the planet. There must be a way!

There must be a…

Just Press Repeat

Author: Steven French

“Professor? If you’d just like to press the button, that’ll initiate the experiment.”

Professor Sarah Roberts looked around the control room, with satisfaction and pride. It had taken so long to put all this together, starting from that first idea, only roughly sketched in conversation with a graduate student as they barrelled down the motorway to some conference or other. She remembered those long days in the office, drafting and redrafting grant applications, only to have them rejected in turn by all the major funding agencies.
“Unintended consequences my arse!” she thought.

And so, in desperation she had turned to the one funder she had always said she wouldn’t apply to, the one supported by someone who described himself as a ‘cosmology buff’ but who was also the owner of a nationwide chain of stores selling powertools named, amusingly enough, ‘The Will to Power’. She remembered her anxiety before the interview but also how the questions didn’t seem that hard, the concerns about safety protocols not that deep, the worry about possible consequences so slight she felt all the calm reassurances she had lined up were actually wasted.

She also remembered that surge of elation when she got the call and the feeling that now, finally, she stood above her erstwhile peers. She knew what they thought of her, those old men who had dismissed her work and laughed at her behind her back.

Construction stretched over months and into years, with setbacks and challenges, some expected, others not so much. And then it was done. Her device, her great machine, ready to be switched on and create something that had never been created before, something that would usher in a new understanding of the universe, with all the attendant plaudits and prizes.

‘Professor? Are you ready?’

Sarah shook herself from her reverie and cleared her throat.
“This will be the first manmade, or should I say, woman-made black hole ever created,” she announced and her team of scientists and technicians chuckled along with her.

“There were some who opposed my dream, our dream”, she continued, “who threw up objections, who said it was too expensive, who even declared that space-time itself would be disrupted by what we’re about to create.” There was more laughter, some of it a little nervous this time.

“Well,” she finished, “we shall show them how wrong they were as we draw back the curtain on a bright new future!”

And with a flourish, she firmly pressed the button on the panel in front of her. There was no flash, no ominous rumbling, just a lurching sense of reality being twisted into a new shape. Sarah grabbed at the edge of the panel and for a brief moment, closed her eyes.

“Professor? If you’d just like to press the button, that’ll initiate the experiment.”

The Cost of Peace and Quiet

Author: Kevin S

The magtrain is running 2 minutes late, someone held it up the last stop, go figure. The day I need it, and it’s late. Jones didn’t show with my neomorph hit, and as I start to shake the irony of jonesing for Jones isn’t lost on me.
Wherever he is, it’s off grid, but hell, he knows whatever he does, it’s forgiven by those of us that need him.
The train pulls in silent and I step on, assaulted by adverts and half the passengers are selling something, food, flesh and other less savory options. A neon punk stares at me as my sweating palm fails to grip the pole as we pull out, I stumble, and right myself. Judged by a freak.
8 stops, 12 minutes and 37 seconds and I step from the chaos of the train. The street is mercifully quiet and the darkness is growing, I walk past shops, the wares and prices assaulting my hurting brain, but it’s less down here than in the main drag.

The curse of the wetware feed, inescapable, irreversible, intrusive adverts, news and mental assaults.

Turning up the alley I see the telltale litter of users. Clear vials litter the edges, phets, psychs, euphorics and sweet opiates, a skinny kid leaning against a dumpster presses a vial up to his nose, and the sharp hiss of compressed gas peels off the walls. Looking up he sizes me up then, his eyes widen and a grin splits his face, fingers drumming on his thighs. A phet flyer chasing the city, as he runs out, the energy carrying him.

I hammer on the door as I reach it. There’s worn paint where a thousand other fists have thumped before. A camera on the door shines red and the door buzzes, I push it open and climb the stairs, the stench of sweat, piss and desperation echoes off the walls as panting and unfocused I reach the top, I unclip my cred reader and all but throw it to Mac who tosses me the neomorph with lazy ease. Moving to the gallery I sit amongst the others, most with pokes hanging from veins, I slip down my scarf and slot the neomorph home, the junkies look at me, more fucking judgment, I have a vial drive wetwired straight into my neck, the vial clips home, and the bliss of quiet and calm clouds the feed.
I sink to the floor, luxuriating in the silence, slipping the empty vial from the socket and pulling up the scarf.
When the feed arrived, it was originally a tactical network, with hud, perfect for silent ops. 10 years out, it was mainstream net link. Civi wetwares have options to turn it off, ours was ever on. The neomorph is the only escape I get. So judge, I don’t care, just let me enjoy the silence a while longer.

The Time Machines

Author: David Barber

Another time machine.

It arrives with a clash like a drawer full of cutlery upended onto tiles.

Mostly they were entirely silent, and the first Martinez knew was when a time traveller stood at the door, latest in a carnival of visitors, eager to poke and pry, goggling at the crudity of the past and always wanting a memento, posed beside him, or in front of his own primitive apparatus.

“Do you mind?” they would ask, thrusting into his hands an incomprehensible recording device. “Just enable the interface.”

It was natural selection. Travellers from futures not obsessed with history stayed away. His visitors were academics, or gawpers convinced Martinez would be amazed by the novelty of their arrival.

Sometimes there was no machine, simply a glowing hoop in the air, or the sudden bang of displaced atoms as a traveller popped into existence. He hated these the most, startled awake or spilling his tea. There was no getting used to it.

“Leave at once,” he warned them, though it was already too late.

He recalled a pair of travellers, each as elegant and beautiful as the other, who sensed what had happened. Alerted by their device, something like a miniature glass pavilion, they repeatedly and uselessly triggered a return.

“Perhaps the physics of this alternate does not allow time travel,” the woman cried.

“In other time lines you are successful,” the man explained to Martinez, as if consoling him.

He turned to his companion and gazed into her face. “At least we are shipwrecked together.”

Over the years Martinez had observed the various manners of travellers, and even when as enigmatically remote as this couple, it seemed prudent not to mention their fate.

Less perceptive travellers would peer at his dusty workshop, at the exposed innards of his time engine spread out like a dissection on the floor. They often seemed disappointed.

“Such humble beginnings,” they would say. “To think it all began like this.”

In the early days, Martinez tried questioning the bizarrely costumed and inhumanly tall travellers from far ages, thinking they could explain, but they merely shook their heads. Not speaking of the future was one of the Rules. Whether it was the physical constants of his own timeline differing in some way to preclude time travel, he would never know.

This latest traveller slouches astride a sleek chromed machine, like the time-cycle of Captain Future.

“Band new,” he says. “Just taking it for a spin. Start of time travel is as far back as it can go. Seemed a neat idea.”

He has words tattooed around his shaved head.

“In the morning,” reads the part Martinez can see.

“Jeez,” the youth complains, glancing through the door of the workshop. “This is depressing. Like my step-dad’s garage.”

“The smell of napalm,” the rest of the tattoo says.

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

“Did I turn up before you finished it? Before your first jump?” He shrugs. “All the crap about changing the past. It’s always a different timeline.”

He flashes a knowing grin. “Paradox alert. Still, at least you know it works.”

“I gave up tinkering years ago,” Martinez murmurs.

For reasons he never understood, there is always a delay before the physics of his reality catches up with time travellers. Perhaps it depends on how many centuries they have crossed. But their existence here is impossible, and so it always proves.

Already, the grin is vanishing from the face of the youth, followed by the face, the slouching figure and finally, the time cycle itself.

 

A Card from Me to Myself

Author: Claude Ramone Bernhard

He arrives. I expect a shock of gray or two but, instead, his once black hair has all gone white. He sits in the chair with the high back. His chest heaves as he goes for the breast pocket of his work shirt. He pulls out his deck of cards and hands them to me.
“I can feel the imprint on them. I guess you really are you, then,” I say, as my hand sparks with electricity. “Or maybe I should say I guess you really are me?”
He extends his arm again and it dangles like spaghetti from a fork. He takes back his deck and sinks further into the chair.
“How did you get here?” I ask.
“I used another card from the deck, is how. We used another.”
“You… we did it again?” I point to the windows. “After what happened the first time? Have you gone insane?”
He groans. “You won’t understand. I didn’t. But I’ve used a few of the cards. Sorry to disappoint. You and I… we don’t figure out time travel. We keep thinking we can do it with science. But it’s the more spiritual folk who figure out the secret. And it’s too much for us to master. We resort to the cards.”
“Spiritual folk? So, we save humanity, then?”
“We assumed we’d turned everyone. There are still people out there. Living, but barely. Like we have. You’ve done well. But the androids have figured out where you are. And they’re coming. Now.”
Outside of the window, the trees sway on the horizon. A set of orange dots appears from the darkness of the wood. And then another appears. And that continues until I can’t count.
“And what of me?” I ask him, wobbling.
“I’m sending you into the future.” He wields his deck. Static thrums through the air like radio.
“I’ve been trapped in here for five years. And now you’re just… sending me off. To where? And to when?”
A card floats, now, doing pirouettes over his outstretched palm. He groans and says, “To the day that we… the day that I die.”
Out the window, orange washes the scene in a glow that defies the sun’s setting. Lights shine from the androids’ eyes, hundreds of them, sweeping across the land.
He sighs. “I know you want to stay. Want to help. But that’s not how this goes. I can’t protect you here. I don’t have the means.” The card is glowing now. “Go on. Grab it. The same way you did with the one that started all this.”
The androids are yards away from my house. I sigh. I lower my head and reach out for the card. I begin to sublime.
He looks at me with a smile. Then stands and puts a hand on the chair. “I’m grateful I got to sit here one more time.”
He preps another card and this time he grabs it himself. He lurches and bends into a mass of arms and legs. I scream but hear nothing. My mouth isn’t here anymore. But I see him rise. He expands like a balloon being prepped for a parade. His mouth opens wide. If there is sound, I don’t hear it because my ears aren’t here now. He lifts the seat over his head and runs. He is twice the size he was moments ago. I don’t hear the glass break as my favorite chair goes flying through the window. He jumps out after it. I can’t see where he lands from my perspective. He has gone from here. And so have I.