by submission | Apr 12, 2009 | Story
Author : Paul Starkey
The ad said; “I’m rich, you can be too! Call to find out how!”
Frankly it was the sort of ad you see in the papers every week, and you always laugh at the idiots who reply. At least I used to, but the recession was pinching, and my redundancy pay was running out. I was desperate.
The interview was laughable. Just a bland guy called Tony asking me inane questions in a hotel room, followed by him waving what looked like a calculator in my face.
‘Congratulations,’ he said afterwards. ‘You’re hired.’
‘Yeah but hired for what?’ I asked, suspicious that I was about to be asked to strip.
‘Why to time travel of course.’
Desperate or not, this was the point when I stood up, flipped him the finger, and headed for the exit.
Before I could reach for the doorknob however, it vanished…along with the door. Suddenly I was facing a counter, an old cash register welded to it by rust; empty shelves lined the back wall, cobwebs everywhere.
Turning I discovered I was in an abandoned shop. The windows had been badly boarded up- and sunlight streamed in through myriad gaps.
I wasn’t alone. ‘Welcome to 1978,’ said Tony.
I was in shock, stumbling to the nearest gap in the boards, weaving my way like a drunkard (Chronosickness Tony calls it). Peering out I saw a busy high street. Only the people were dressed in out of date fashions, and the cars looked ancient yet brand new at the same time. Sweet Jesus this was the past…
A moment later and I was back in the hotel room, back in the now. ‘So,’ said Tony. ‘Want to be rich?’
I nodded like an idiot and he explained how it worked…
Firstly Tony is from the far future. He won’t tell me exactly when but whenever it is, it’s dull, and he seems a lot more at home in 2009 (apparently THE year to be seen in). To live here however, he needs money. Now I know what you’re thinking; time machine/lottery numbers/horseracing etc …doesn’t work. Time is a bitch, a cantankerous bitch at that. She won’t let you profit from future knowledge. Winning lottery numbers fail if you bring them back, horses fall…
After trial and error though, Tony discovered that time has nothing against hard labour, and nothing against putting your earnings in a high interest account then drawing the proceeds out in the future. However it only works with money earned in the past (trust a woman to be that fickle).
So Tony hops back, gets a job as a labourer for a week or two, banks his wages and skips forward to live off the interest.
He got rich, but he also got greedy, and he quickly figured out that he could only earn a finite amount alone. If he had help however…
So now I have a new job. I’ve been a street sweeper in 1970, a navvy laying railway lines in 1925, heck I even helped build the Titanic. I never have to work more than a week, then I return to the instant after I left to discover I’m a wealthy man.
Of course Tony takes half, but so what… I’ve worked just a month in the last year, and earned well over a hundred thousand.
Gotta go anyway, Tony has a new job for me in 1815. Only pays a schilling, but with that much interest I’ll wealthy enough to take a year off. I’m meeting him at Waterloo. I’m assuming he means the railway station…
by submission | Apr 11, 2009 | Story
Author : Christina Kern
I don’t like to think of it as “running”. No, let’s call it “traveling with the intent of avoiding a specific party”.
What you call it doesn’t matter, I guess. What does matter is that the Abunari have tracked me through six states up and down the Atlantic coast, and I need to keep moving.
I’ll assume you think that the Abunari is something like the mafia, some family organization geared toward money and corruption and a skewed view of honor. You’d be terribly wrong. The Abunari is ten times what the mafia could ever be with no clear understandable motivation. At least what the mafia does can be understood; the Abunari do what they do simply for the hell of it.
I guess with that much power it’s understandable.
I attacked one of them. They have this hobby of taking over largely public vehicles and crashing them into things. They like to watch your thoughts panic and bounce frantically around your aura as you see death approaching you, as you begin to comprehend that your life is terminating.
They live for that moment of clarity you experience right before impact. It feeds them.
I happened to be on that bus one of them overtook in Virginia. And I happened to notice that he didn’t even realize I was there. I looked him straight in the face. He looked right through me.
The Abunari do not “see” like you and I “see”. They perceive the world through something they like to call Visual Telepathic Energy. In essence, they don’t see you, they see your thoughts. Think something along the lines of thermal energy goggles.
I can’t explain it, but for some reason, they can’t see me. I have some sort of VTE shield, and they can’t penetrate it. That’s why the one on the bus couldn’t see me pull out the handgun I carry for protection and shoot him directly between the eyes. Now, of course, this didn’t kill him, but it stunned him long enough for us to toss him onto the road at 60 miles per hour. That didn’t kill him either.
I assume that’s why they want me so badly. It gives them something to chase, something to experiment on when they eventually catch me.
How are they tracking me? I can’t say that I’m entirely sure about that myself. My theory is that they can see me through other people’s VTE. Sure, they never had a clear basis for what I would look like to them, but I’m sure the one on the bus caught glimpses of me, even though he had no idea where I was or what I was doing. Using that, they simply follow me through the people that see me, those who happen to see a ratty, skinny, dirty young woman scaling scaffolds and running through shadows, those who happen to see me hop a bus to wherever.
That’s just a theory, though. I cannot claim to fully understand the Abunari. As I said: all that matters is that they’re tracking me, and I’ve got to keep moving.
All I care about is staying ahead. All I care about is finding others like me, other Shielded, so that maybe we can start a resistance. The Abunari want to tear this world apart; I don’t feel inclined to let them. There are more out there, somewhere, and I’m going to find them.
So I’ll keep moving. Be on the lookout for a woman in the shadows, beyond the perception of everyday life. That’s where I’ll be, preparing to fight.
Will you?
by submission | Apr 10, 2009 | Story
Author : Suzanne Borchers
Agnes glanced up at the tiny yellow dot that hardly pierced the vacuum of black sky. She crouched over in her threadbare spacesuit touching Carl as their gloved hands picked through the rubbish pile. Her stomach fed upon itself, while her eyes searched for bits of discarded food.
“The supply ships will be here soon.” Carl tried to straighten up, failed, and collapsed on the ground.
“You’ve been saying that for years, you old bear.” She sat down beside Carl, enveloping his gloved hand in hers.
“They promised,” he whispered before his heart pumped one last time.
Startled, Agnes realized his passing. She carefully removed his helmet and touched Carl’s cheek.
She thought back to their joyful arrival buoyed with youthful hope, later childless loving and mourning her empty womb, failed hydroponic gardening, crumb rationing.
A sigh escaped. “I’m coming, my old bear.”
She unfastened her helmet, falling beside him.
by submission | Apr 9, 2009 | Story
Author : Daedalus
I look around, one last time, at the empty apartment and the packed bags.
One last time? Nicholas Jameson will see those old, beat-up duffels often, but I can’t think of him as being me. As being real. It isn’t my new face I see in the mirror, courtesy of Tabula Rasa’s plastic surgery, it is his. It isn’t my brand-new driver’s license in my pocket, it’s Jameson’s.
Still, I tell myself it was worth it as I begin to feel sleepy. “‘Tis better to have loved and lost…” Bullshit. What did Tennyson know about loss? Better a new life, a new person, than this wretched loser. I try to silence my doubts, but if life is so terrible without Her, how can I live without even her memory?
I won’t. Nicholas Jameson will. I’ll fall asleep, and the nanobots will go to work on my amygdala. Nicholas Jameson will wake up, happily ignorant of the breakup, the obsession, the thousand unsuccessful drinking binges…
As my eyes begin to droops, I look around desperately for a pen, for some way to tell this new person who he once was…
—
Nick Jameson woke up in the middle of leaving for a new apartment. Making a mental note to get more rest, he checked to make sure nothing was forgotten. The raise had come as a bit of a surprise, but Nick had always been a hard worker. He could hardly wait to make the spacious new apartment his home.
“Well, time for one last check,” he muttered, wandering into the small bedroom. He looked under the beds, on the bedside table, in the drawer–
Nick froze. His mouth was dry, and there was a ringing in his ears. What the hell? It was just a photograph, no doubt left by the previous occupants. Strange that he’d never noticed it. It was of a happy couple, holding hands and basking in love. It was a cheerful picture, so why did he feel so sad? It wasn’t jealousy… Meh. A mystery for another time.
Turning to leave, Nick Jameson suddenly grabbed the photo and shoved it into his pocket. No point in leaving it behind, after all.
by submission | Apr 7, 2009 | Story
Author : Gwen Harper
The math, of course, came first.
It took a while, nearly forty years, for the technology to catch up to the possibilities in her set of equations.
They said it was impossible, the body of those who considered themselves enlightened thought. Even if such a thing would work – as the numbers, indisputable, cold, facts those numbers, indicated – it would not have the effect that its creator sought.
The human mind is more than data they said, and such a rich medium of data as the human experience could not just be coded.
Even if that were possible, somehow, using some fuzziness of logic that escaped all but the best and brightest of them, it wouldn’t really be more than a simulation.
You could replicate, or so the theory went, the human personae, but you could neither store nor transfer it.
She, the grand architect, disagreed.
They told her it was tantamount to homicide. Suicide, maybe, if you believed it would merely be a copy.
Legislators seized on the whole thing. They’re good at that, those legislators. Excellent at seizing on the crux of a perceived problem and dragging out every last little bit. Clearly, said those experts legal and – ostensibly – scientific, the very notion involved the commission of a crime, but what sort of crime. Precisely where, they asked, loudly, where all could see and hear, did the ethical transgression occur?
What, precisely, could they charge her with?
She held the patents, by hook and by crook. She knew that this would work – she’d had four decades to make certain of that. It would work, precisely as she had envisioned. Injunctions were filed; long winded speeches became sound bytes on the newsfeeds.
A simple matter, on reflection, it was. And – viewed from the right perspective, something of a solution to all of humanity’s considerable ethical, spiritual, and moral problems. Not an escape, as some had proposed, but a new thing. A wholly new way of being, of existing.
Others, perhaps others closer to the architect, laid their fears down like confessions. Others questioned her judgment, if not her equation.
But how could you cast away the flesh so casually one asked.
She smiled and said you’ll see.
And so the nation and the world talked, and talked, hot air likely contributing to the enhancement of an already rosy warm climate.
As the hour drew near, and the world grew strident its belief that they could put a stop to this sort of crime, she found a sense of peace where none had existed before.
This would work, she would be the first, and it would be all hers, for as long as she felt content to hold it. Which probably wouldn’t be long, as the architect had never been a greedy woman.
They key to unlocking the code, the equation, the difference between all things had been maintaining their symmetry. In the right proportions, anything made of matter or energy could safely be changed from one to the other – the rest of it had been mitigating loss of one as it became the other.
That last night, the longest night, was all preparation. Cords and wires, and tests – countless tests, were run, attached, documented, and run again. The immense blue crystalline slab of memory was wheeled in and its backups run.
She didn’t say good bye, for it wasn’t good bye.
She dismissed them all, that small contingent that had believed in her and her work. The lights went out, and in a moment of Frankenstein glee, she threw the switch.
At 0917 pm 21 December 2036, she committed immortality.
