by submission | May 20, 2008 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
I pushed the fedora up on my head and watched the bloody letters with suspicion, as if they might rearrange themselves during a blink. Brick snapped a picture, then muttered, “Josh Ledder. I knew him.”
“Not in this reality,” I said.
“No, but I know him in ours.” My supervisor held the camera nervously, as if unsure of how many more pictures to take; a visual desecration of the hallowed dead. “He almost came to the Temporal Academy with us, but he couldn’t take the string tests without fainting.”
“Hard times for everyone.”
“More for those who didn’t get in.” He gestured at the letters. “What do you make of those?”
“Well,” I said, leaning a little bit closer, “they appear to be his own initials, drawn in his own blood.”
“JL?”
“JRL. Apparently his middle name starts with an R.”
“No it doesn’t.” Brick waddled over and examined the wall. “Josh’s middle name was Earl. JRL… that could mean….”
He trailed off. I cocked my head at him, puzzled. “What?”
“Nothing, just a flashback. We used to have a game we’d play, before I met you. Replace the middle initial with a word to indicate that something had happened. But there’s no context here.”
“Context?”
“It would be in notes, passed in class. Like, I’d write that I was hungry, and change my middle initial to B, for burger. He’d write back that he hoped the burger was good, and change his to G, for gas… it wasn’t a very good game, come to think of it. Still, I can’t help but think that he’s trying to tell me something.”
“It was probably just a mistake,” I said. “Let’s get these back to the station.”
***
That night, as we were filing our reports, the door opened and a pair of beefy Inter-Temporal Cops came in. If we were the watchers, these were the guys who watch the watchers. They trooped over to Brick.
“Sir, you’re going to have to come with us.”
“What for?”
“You’ve been officially charged with the Cross-Temporal murder of Joshua Ledder.”
“Charged with-that’s the case I’m working on right now.”
“And a smooth move it is, to try and avert suspicion by investigating your own work. Come with us, please.”
Brick looked at me, panicked. “Rudy, you’ve gotta help me out here. Show them the pictures.”
“These pictures?” I held up a sheaf of 8 by 10 color glossies, each showing either Brick’s deceased friend or the bloody letters on the wall. The letters that spelled out “Brick killed…” and then smudged off into oblivion.
Brick goggled. “That’s not what was there before! He changed his middle initial to R! He was trying to tell me something! Send someone back to observe, that’ll prove it!”
One of the IT cops grabbed Brick, pushed him down over the desk, and cuffed him. “That reality has too much strain on its subspace net as is. Sending anything back to that location would be just begging for a paradox. Besides, everything looks clear as far as the judge is concerned.” The other cop grabbed the glossies and they hauled him off.
I sat back in my chair and thought, then checked my illegal timeline feed. My second, unauthorized jump showed up under routine maintenance. A little tweaking changed the exact time, and then I shunted the whole thing over to another bureau.
I had never liked Brick anyway. He smelled funny. Besides, now his job was open….
by submission | May 18, 2008 | Story
Author : Jacinta A. Meyers
So here I am, a third-class passenger bound for the floating island of a techno-civ, armed with various skins and plotting infiltration and assassination.
Ah, sounds like vacation.
Well, except for the intended target, that is. How do you disarm a human trigger? I mean, I’ve done my fair share of seduction and all, but this is a kid we’re talking about here; his twelfth birthday’s not for another four and a half months. My employers want him dead before then. Even I admit it’s a weird mission. And it wouldn’t even be so bad if I didn’t know that he’s a fair, kind-hearted kid. But what can ya do? Desperate times, desperate measures.
The skin I wear today is white, former Western European. By the time I reach their palace, oh in about seven week’s time, I’ll be wearing one of their skins. They don’t like foreigners where I’m headed. But they do let refugees in. We do their dirty work. We are an expendable commodity and we know our place. So today, I am a lowly immigrant looking for a bottom-rung job. Start at the bottom and work up, that’s how it goes. I’ll tell ’em my story if they ask, “Homeland under water, no place to go, no family, need work.” Boo hoo, they hear it a million times a day, won’t look twice at me. I’ll be just another face on the wharves. Just another grubby girl there to work the night lines in their factories or clean up their hazardous chemical waste.
Or there to kill their Emperor’s heir.
You know, one of the nice things about what I do is travel. I can just see the island up ahead, growing bigger as we get close. They had to float the whole dang thing when the sea level rose. My employers are still trying to figure out how they did it, and whether it’s still tethered to the bottom somehow. I hear that they carry their pureblood women around on platforms covered with jewels, and that the penalty for touching one is mutilation beyond recognition. Sounds neat to me. Maybe I’ll steal one of those skins while I’m there. See what it’s like to be doted on and protected for once.
Oh, and the kid. Can’t forget about him. Emperor’s got a dozen nuclear missiles rigged to go off if anything happens to his son, all pointed at the League of First-World Nations. If you ask me, it’s a terrible idea. I mean, what if the kid falls out of bed one night? Well. Maybe they sleep on the floor. . . Weird culture, after all. And anyway, it won’t matter anymore.
Because that’s what I’m here for.
by submission | May 17, 2008 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
“I invented a time machine,” said Professor Rudnicki morosely. The whiskey in front of him glinted, a cylindrical crystal promising amnesia.
My hands moved on their own, needing no guidance, wiping a glass that would never be clean. I looked skeptical. “Isn’t time travel impossible, except to the extreme relative future?”
“That’s what they say.” Rudnicki gulped the shot and motioned for another. I poured it.
“Time is relative to our senses, space doubly so. What we perceive to be real is in fact the simple accumulation of expectation; we expect the glass to hold the whiskey, and we expect the whiskey to get us drunk, but only AFTER we drink it.”
“That’s deep, professor.” I hear stuff like this every day; hard not to, when you tend bar near MIT. You pick up the odd scientific fact, and one of the ones I knew about was that time-past was a fixed animal; nothing could penetrate that which has already passed.
“Oh, they want you to believe that, but it’s not true. All you need is to be able to see past Newton, past the expected… so I did. The human mind is the ultimate time travel machine; it sees into the past without leaving the present. All I had to do was replicate that function. And it worked! I never thought it would go so wrong.â€
“What went wrong, professor?†The second shot sat untouched; he kept reaching for it, then pulling away.
“I tested the machine yesterday, multiple times, setting it for no more than hours past. It worked perfectly; the memory of the machine and its contents appeared in my memory right when it should have.â€
“Memory?â€
“When something appears out of nowhere in my past, I expect to remember it,†he said irritably. “Anyway, I showed it to my colleague, Doctor Smith, and he insisted on giving it a test run with himself as the subject.â€
“What happened, did it explode or something?â€
“I do not create machines that explode! That pastime is reserved for the likes of Nobel; all my work is for the human good.â€
“So what went wrong?â€
“In my haste to perfect the time matrix, that which allows a physical object to recreate itself in the past, I ignored Newton entirely. Conservation of mass and energy, the laws of inertia. Reaching the past is one thing; reaching the past and remaining on Earth is another.â€
“You mean…â€
He grabbed the shot now, threw it back like a man just in from a convent. “Yes, exactly. The Earth is in constant rotation, the solar system in constant movement. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion stays in motion… and our motion today is in a different physical spot in the universe than it was fifty years ago.â€
My hands failed me for the first time in my career. The glass shattered. Rubnicki smiled grimly.
“He must have appeared right in empty space, in the same relative spot that the Earth would occupy fifty years in the future.â€
He stood, no signs of intoxication in his stance, and dropped a ten on the bar.
“Keep the change.â€
by submission | May 12, 2008 | Story
Author : Dee Harding
Samsara has worn his locks for 15 years, shining and strong. He has adapted to them by sleeping sideways and letting them learn to clean themselves. Each tangled cluster of keratine farms its own rot, the rain, and the detritus of everyday life. Stray protein quietly becoming fuel for a million miniscule workers, all sculpting their environment in long sheathes and spirals. When the city smog is bad all that can be seen of Samsara beyond his mask are the crawling oil-slick dreadlocks, unbound. Throughout his culture’s history, hair has been alive with the symbolism of wind, water and fire. It has not taken so very long for those abstracts to become material, but his mane remains ritual before anything else.
Anything but the divide. Those that take the twisting path serve the economy’s invisible hand. Although the knotted braids are an efficient manifold for Samsara’s microbial hive they weigh him down with meaning. They bind him to his place within the kingdom and decades of financial debt still to be paid. His scalp harbours his craft, his industry and his caste, all impossible to hide. Those of the Breed spend half their lives physically unconstrained but in monetary bondage before they cultivate the 9 foot long archipelago that marks a master of the art. A sage so skilled as to be rooted to the spot and cared for by concubines, physically encumbered but spiritually free.
In some ways, even now, it is difficult to determine where each compound filament of Samsara’s hair ends. They thread through their own strands of infection into the pheremonal plumage of kingdom socialites and prostitutes, the telluric ephemera of engineers and navigators, the chemical sequencing of medics and pushers alike. Even bald, Samsara is telepresent. Which is good, considering, but no real consolation. Stone burns into his knees in the mid-day heat, ankles bound, and the crowd is silent. No-one will approach but the perfect men with swarming skin. Samsara can send nothing past their gracious smiles and he weeps. No fear has been greater than this moment, every nerve is wracked with grief. They walk closer now, and closer. People like Samsara creep up against every boundary, breaking laws that have yet to evolve, but every loop-hole curls in on itself in time. He is caught dead centre in the web of New Delhi, broken, while around him bronzed razors flash in the sun.
by submission | May 11, 2008 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
They turned Valerie off this morning.
Nothing flashy, nothing officially announced. Two grey-suited daemons came in, picked up her sprite and walked out with it. When I went to the dorms to investigate, her room was blank, no sign that she had ever been here.
I know the drill. They’ll say there was some irregularity in her payments and she was being moved from virtual to storage until it was sorted out. Which is crap. What they mean is that the company directors owed someone a favor or were made a better offer on her runtime. In a few weeks they’ll say how much they regret the misconception and that Valerie will be back with us as soon as a space opens. Which they never do.
Valerie, myself, and most of the other residents are lifers, legacies. We paid on insurance policies for decades so that when the inevitable happened our digital consciousnesses would continue in post-life communities. This was back before they understood how expensive the runtime would be. Legally, they have to maintain us here because our policies have been grandfathered in. In practice they want nothing more than for us to vanish and leave the lucrative virtual environment to paying minds with runtime trusts.
So every now and then, they do this, just to get rid of one of us, just to keep the others scared.
They used to call it murder, back when we were alive.
