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 Stephen R. Smith | Feb 20, 2024 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
I have no memory of what came before. It’s as though I didn’t exist prior to this moment and have just come into existence and apparated into this crowd, in this hall, surrounded by the ordered chaos of these several hundred people. We’re collected here for a singular purpose, all of us waiting to bear witness, to share witness.
They seem not to notice me, caught as I am in the frenetic jumble, almost vibrating in tune with the collective hum of anticipation.
The reverberation rises with activity on the stage ahead and above us to crescendo as a woman appears, guitar slung low, eyes wide and bright, the room hanging on the precipice until those first chords, a familiar structure, then the space erupts into mayhem.
Nothing comes close to the magic of this music, the harmony formed of hundreds of voices, of heartbeats, synchronized with the one who leads, the one whose voice and instrument eclipse the crowd, riding our energy and elevating us all to some higher plane. Beneath it all are drum sounds, and a bass holds down the bottom end, maintaining our precarious tether to the Earth.
Time ceases to have any meaning, the masses moving as one, taking every ounce of energy she gives away and returning it a hundredfold.
And then it’s over, and she’s gone, whisked away to the relative safety of some back room, while the crowd, still vibrating but nearly spent, slowly and reluctantly drifts to the exits, spilling out to who knows where.
I find myself alone. The silence is deafening.
Nobody bothers me as I drift through the side door to beyond the stage, navigating around and through the road crew as they tear down the gear, packing it up, ready to move to the next show in some other time and space. There’s a familiarity to this, and as someone looks through me as I pass, I wonder, was that a glimmer of recognition?
I find her behind a closed door, in a small, warm room, reclining on a chaise lounge upholstered in a garish fabric from another century, sipping water from a large glass.
She smiles, watching me, but doesn’t speak.
She seems not to be surprised that I’m here, and as I sit at the end of the chaise, she crosses her feet on my lap, still slick with sweat, bare soles black with dirt from the stage, and as I rest a hand on her flesh I remember.
“There he is,” she speaks, “you finally found me.”
I remember everything, all of it, a tsunami of what once was.
She leans forward and whispers, “I’ll see you again soon.”
In that instant, she’s gone – disapparated – leaving me alone in the cooling room.
But this time, I remember.
by Julian Miles | Feb 19, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s a tavern by the graveyard. Not one of those new servaraunts, but a real vintage place with tiny lattice windows and a big wooden door that glints in the light from the glows as it swings back and forth. Old Stanislaw told me it used to not do that, but the grey rain meant they had to spray it with Staveoff like every other bit of wood still outdoors.
“Stormin’.”
I look up. In the sky-high glow from this sleepy city I can see the towering mass of clouds coming in. Daido’s not wrong. It’s going to be raining bats and frogs before long.
“What we do?”
Otto’s returned to the acceptable version of ‘I want to run away’. Next time, I’ll rope in someone who wants to come stealin’.
“What we came for.”
It’s not like we have a choice. There’s nothing in the pantries and the fridges are so empty they echo.
Another crowd of happy chappies and chapettes stagger from the tavern. Looks to me like they’ve had a little more than their sobriety passes would allow. Almost like this place has a way of getting past the squealers and the dealers, because everybody knows you can’t make a profit off a dealer. What they charge is always street max, and taverns – new or old – can’t exceed regulation prices.
“You sure about this?”
I look up at Otto.
“No. I thought I’d drag us all out here to get rainburned just to show how much pull I have so I can impress Maisie.”
It’s like I can watch him think. He takes another hit on his vaper.
“You still need to do that?”
What the jiminy do you have in that thing? Neat toluol?
Maisie appears out of the night and slaps his arse.
“You’re lovely, Otto, but that vaper is rotting your brain faster than we can compensate for.”
She crouches down by me, squeezes my shoulder, then points to the tavern where the security shutters are coming down.
“We’re on.”
With a muted rumble from high above, grey rain starts hissing down. We flick our hoods into place and wait for the corrosive ground mist to wash away. Thunder crashes above, lightning scorches the dark, and the rain gets heavier.
Maisie nods.
“Now or not at all.”
She and I sprint across, scramble over the wall and finish up sprawled across the roof of the big gothy mausoleum at the centre of the graveyard.
The rain continues to pour down. Finally, I see light: the tavern loading bay shutters and doors opening. Four swearing men rush from the bay, enter the side gate of the graveyard, then split up and race to two tombs. They press disguised switches recessed in the headstones. Each tomb slides silently open. The men hurry down the steps revealed. The tombs close. All goes quiet.
A vibration runs through the roof we’re lying on. Maise looks at me, eyes widening.
I hear voices below.
“Still think having the only ways in separate from the way out is daft.”
“This mausoleum is too obvious. Armouring the doors, fitting them to open outwards, and only working from inside, keeps the thieving gits wondering how we do it.”
The four hasten away carrying casks and catchnets full of food cartons. Doors, shutters, and mausoleum close behind them.
When the tavern lights finally go out, I flash once left, once right. From the shadows all about, everybody I could lay my voice on swarms in.
We’re going to empty the place.
You just can’t fool us thieving gits forever.
