by submission | Feb 24, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Even grandfathers fearful of paradox— in case squashing a butterfly alters the future—had no cause to fret, because the time engine emerged in low Earth orbit and just took pictures. What could go wrong?
Instruments gazed down on a warm, pristine planet, dominated by behemoths. Sometimes herds could be glimpsed from space. Then one ordinary morning in the Cretaceous, a rock bigger than Mount Everest changed everything.
The impact sends a blast wave round the globe and a killing darkness shrouds the skies. A global catastrophe streamed live. Everyone wanted to watch the culling of the dinosaurs.
Zeroing in on that exact day involved much jumping back and forwards in time, and it was only by accident, something glimpsed out the corner of the eye, that our predecessors at the Time Authority spotted the activity in orbit.
In the century leading up to the asteroid strike, sleek shiny time engines bearing the TA logo were busy launching probes out into space.
Sometime in our future, they had mounted a space mission 66 million years ago, a phenomenal undertaking, which only prompted more questions.
We didn’t know it yet, but the past was beginning to exert its baleful influence.
History waits with sinister patience, so there was no urgency, but eventually we went back to see what they were up to.
We watched the doomsday asteroid tumbling lazily in its distant orbit; we watched those probes rendezvous with it, and we watched them nudge it Earthwards.
Those unfamiliar with time travel keep demanding explanations. But without our efforts, the asteroid would have stayed out beyond Mars in its safe and stable orbit.
This must be the way it always happened, otherwise we mammals would not have inherited the Earth.
Like the return of some guilty comet, each generation is reminded it can’t afford the global effort needed for that mission in the Cretaceous, not with the Melt and the plagues, not with the problems that beset us.
We also know we can safely leave the extinction of the dinosaurs to the future, since we saw them do it.
So many Deniers now, with their magical notions. Why do we need to do anything, when it’s already happened? Words from paradox land.
We are only here because we interfered with the past. It seems we created ourselves. Or we hope we will, though until that loop of causality is completed, our world has all the substance and reality of a soap bubble.
The dire warnings about time travel were deserved, though not in the way people thought.
We know now that our interference with the Cretaceous impact was just the beginning. Academics hoping to solve an ancient puzzle used time travel to stake out the grassy knoll and saw a lone gunman step from a Time Authority craft.
What if we witness our fingerprints elsewhere on history? On births and deaths, inventions and ideas, assassinations and crucifixions?
We no longer worry about accidentally meddling with the past; now we are fearful that the past will compel us to.
by submission | Feb 23, 2024 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
“What’s happened?” The Captain’s voice was a harsh rasp, his throat still raw from the cryo-fluid.
“The ship has experienced a failure of one of the three cold fusion engines due to a catastrophic meteor strike,” the mainframe avatar replied. “We have diverged substantially from our planned route and are now on a collision course with the eighth planet in this system.”
The Captain shook his head, trying to clear the fog from his mind, a side effect of the emergency re-animation.
“What needs to be done to rectify the situation?” he asked.
“The Chief Engineer needs to be awakened. Only he has the expertise to re-align the remaining engines, which will allow us to resume a safe course,” the avatar responded, in its soothing feminine voice.
“Can’t you re-align the engines?”
“Unfortunately, protocols hardwired into my programming mean that I will self-terminate if I attempt to undertake any action for which a trained human is present, as per the ‘Full Employment for Humans’ Act of 2261.”
“Right, right,” the Captain muttered, “Go ahead and waken the Chief Engineer then!”
“Regrettably I am unable to do so. The Chief Engineer remains in suspended animation. He has undergone a recursive feedback loop, which, if interrupted, could lead to a psychotic breakdown.”
“Explain what that means!” the Captain said, frustration creeping into his voice.
“The scenario developed to maintain brain plasticity during suspended animation has been accepted as real by his sub-conscious.”
The Captain swore softly. It was rare, but he’d heard of this happening before, on other ships. During suspended animation, virtual reality scenarios were fed into the crew’s brains in an attempt to preserve cognitive function. There had been instances where these realistic dreams became fully integrated into the host personality, altering their perceived identity. If those dreams were forcefully interrupted then this could cause a catastrophic personality crisis and result in a psychotic break. The Chief Engineer wouldn’t be much use to him in such circumstances.
The Captain stroked his beard as he thought.
“Wasn’t there a safe way to remind the host personality of their reality, of the fact that they were experiencing a simulation? What was it called again?”
“The Percosi method,” the avatar replied, “Named after the famed psychologist, it involves introducing gentle prompts into the virtual reality to remind the host of their underlying reality, encouraging their psyche to break free of the simulation.”
“Can you do that for the Chief Engineer?”
After the briefest of pauses, during which time the mainframe carried out several billion calculations, the avatar responded.
“Yes. He is undergoing a simulation of life in the early part of the twenty-first century, prior to the Third World War.”
“Whatever! Can you introduce some elements that will remind him that he is actually the Chief Engineer aboard a starship in OUR century?”
“Yes, I am manipulating the virtuality now. I have introduced the concept into a short story that he is presently reading online in the simulation. This may prove sufficient stimulus to break through the simulation and remind him of his underlying reality.”
The Captain looked at the ship’s course on the main display. The situation was critical.
“If he doesn’t wake up then we’re all dead.”
“Indeed Captain. I am beginning the insertion now.”
Chief Engineer, this story that you are reading is part of a simulation. You are currently experiencing a virtual reality aboard a starship. It is imperative that you realise this and now wake up! The ship is in imminent danger of destruction.
Wake up!
Wake Up!
WAKE UP!
by submission | Feb 22, 2024 | Story |
Author: Amy Lyons
I meant to birth children but they slipped my mind. I should have ransom-noted a reminder with the black and white word-magnets on my aughts refrigerator, though those sudden stories trended toward pronoun erasure and my sketchy memory, even as a twenty-something, would have slotted a roommate as the directive’s addressee. My likely fragments on that fridge: write stories blendingly, travel blind, rest noons. The roommates mothered one by one despite wino pacts to sister off together into cinematic sunsets.
Mid-thirtied and C-level salaried, I spewed marketing strategies to a table of doughnut-dunking stakeholders when, advancing slides PowerPointedly, I saw the audience as their truer selves: parents, all. The detritus of offspring festooned their persons: unicorns galloped along the CFO’s necktie, the accounts director’s coffee mug revealed her as the world’s best mom, a breast pump bloomed inside an IT guru’s open briefcase.
Unreproductive and embarrassed, I posed unnaturally at the post-forty conception clinic, crossed my legs to approximate virtuous young ladyhood for doctor fertilizer. My bosomy blouse flounced ten years age-inappropriate. Mammary, my fashion stated, latchable. Fallopially speaking, I was unobstructed. The doctor mapped sperm’s hypothetical swim through twin tubal tributaries emptying ovumward. Uterus inhabitable, it was a lack of scramble, a certain un-sunny-side-upness that made my body unviable.
I flung myself on planes all through my fifties to live and learn and drink a cup in every country. The sixties I spent nurturing my spirit. At seventy, a shaman prophesied children gathered at my feet. Impossible, I told her, too late. She shook her head and laughed like rain.
In the cushy retirement chalet, I dialed my grandchildren and all of them answered. The oldest agreed to grab my prescription, the middle one said he’d be over for lunch. My roommates’ kids rarely return messages, show up on holidays with lukewarm leftovers and rumpled re-gifts.
There are six of us old ladies in the world. They’ve studied all our chromosomes, drawn our blood and formed questionnaires around our diets, habits, social interactions, and exercise routines. Impossible, they say, child-bearing can’t skip a generation. The only commonalties? We forget facts easily and our nocturnal dreams occur in colors that don’t technically exist.
by submission | Feb 21, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“You occupy space. Therefore you exist.”
“Does that Descartes bastardization work in graveyards?”
“The dead occupy space.”
“Well in a diminishing returns kind of way. You might want to factor biological depreciation into your axiom.”
Stenslen eyed Bihrduur icily. “You don’t want this to work.”
“No. Not really,” Bihrduur replied. “Call it my Oppenheimer moment.”
“Ever dramatic.”
“Can I get an atomic drum roll, please?”
Turning back to his cloud station, Stenslen gestured three new apertures open and nested the targets within. “They’re out there, and this will find them.”
“I have no doubt we’ll find them. But, this isn’t the way to do it. In this case, the means are much meaner than the targets.”
“They’ve killed many and will kill more.”
“So will this algorithm.”
“You tried that argument with Harbaugh and Suarez. They didn’t buy it.”
“Yeah, because life is cheap, if you’re not our target.” Bihrduur spoke so softly Stenslen had to pay attention. “This software can find anyone, anywhere. You really want that?”
“For these guys, yes. I know there are potential misuses and abuses. That’s always a risk, but it’s not scalable for anyone without our resources.”
“How about in ten years?”
Stenslen shrugged his broad, rounded shoulders.
“That’s what I mean,” Bihrduur insisted with the same quiet intensity. “In a decade or sooner, Quantum Density Displacement software could be available to any dictator, hitman, stalker or paparazzi on the prowl. Nobody would be able to hide.”
“Including dictators, hitmen, stalkers and paparazzi.”
Bihrduur dipped his head, acknowledging his colleague’s point.
“Perfect transparency,” Stenslen followed up matter of factly.
“I’d term it forced nakedness,” Bihrduur snorted. “You’re undressing all of humanity. What about privacy? What about anonymity? What’s wrong with being inconspicuous? With getting lost?”
“Nothing—until you want to be found. Or need to be.”
“And who gets to determine that.”
“The same folks who always have.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be much of a comfort to Anne Frank.”
“As much as it would’ve been to Osama bin Laden.”
“There’s no winning this.”
“Never is. We’re humans. We battle. Finders keepers. Losers weepers.”
“I’m ready to cry, Stenslen.”
“I’ll know if you do—wherever you are.”
“Our loss.”
“Never.”
by submission | Feb 18, 2024 | Story |
Author: Michael Edwards
One night, when you are asleep, you have a dream. And in this dream, you are sitting —on a plain wooden chair — in the belltower of an ancient temple. Which you somehow know is standing at the summit of Tai Mountain, in China.
Above you hangs an enormous iron bell. No one knows who made it. The temple was well-established here, even when the original Chinese population came to this region, thousands of years ago. And the bell has hung above the temple ever since.
For a long time, it has not even had a tongue with which to speak. Somehow the clapper, itself weighing hundreds of pounds, no doubt, has been removed from it. Yet the bell is so well made — of some extraordinary alloy — that, when the wind blows softly around it, the bell gives off a vibration, almost a sound. One doesn’t know for sure if he hears it — or if he feels it — or perhaps only imagines that he can feel it. Nevertheless, the vibration is quite real.
And now this ancient mysterious iron bell hangs silently over your head. You sit under its shadow, listening to your heartbeat. In breath. Out breath. The metal of the bell feels cool above you.
And now the wind begins to blow across the mountaintop. And now the wind comes near, caressing your brow, and bringing with it the fragrance of the fields, far below.
Suddenly, you think that you can feel the vibration, almost hear it, beginning to hum all around you. Sonorous. Magnificent. Spiritual. Uplifting. And yet the bell stands silent above you. Just as it has stood silent, suspended over the countryside, for years without number. Yet at the touch of the breeze, instantly speaking the one word that only you, at this moment, in all the world, can hear.
Like an alarm, the vibration awakens your soul from its slumber. At once, you know the truth of the language that it is speaking to you. And only to you.
With a start, you understand — in its entirety — the history of this bell, and your own connection to it. It is you who put the bell here, long ago, in a previous original earthly lifetime — as a great teacher, come from the stars — to awaken yourself to the truth again, the moment you were ready to receive it. Even now.
And thus to attain mastery over, and to attain liberation from, this one last planet. The most challenging planet in the entire Milky Way galaxy. The Earth. And then — to ascend forever. At one with the one.
And at this moment, you realize that your journey through the cosmos has come full circle. The bell never had a tongue with which to speak. But you are its voice, for whom it has waited patiently across the eons. And now you alone must know its truth — yet remain silent forever.
In the midst of the silence, however, you will experience bliss.
Today, then. Taste that bliss: in the eternal now.
