by Julian Miles | Jul 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The sirens start to wail behind us. I hate this bit.
“Time to do one!”
Adey swings his backpack onto his shoulders as he starts running, dodging the spotlight of a hunting drones as he goes. Must be nice, being that fit.
“Auntie Jin?”
I look down at Little Em. Ten years old and too serious.
“Go with him, little ‘un. He’s a tool, but right now he’s the getaway gear you need. Tell your mum I’ll be along for a chat and a cuppa tomorrow night.”
If I survive.
After giving me a fierce hug, she takes off. Just look at her go. All angles and speed.
Looking about, I spot a chunky old 4×4 sticking out from under a wind-blown tarp. It’s right up next to a battered container. Almost made for me, and I’m not going to ignore with whatever’s on my side tonight.
Hang on, it’s locked! What bastard game is this? Nothing for it but to scoot myself under. Fresh shattered glass will register with the drone-mounted ambience scanners. I thought artificial intelligence was meant to make our lives easier, not make them better at oppressing us.
Here I am again, stuck at the arse end of nowhere, hiding under a car. Plus ça change, as grandmama would’ve said with a little laugh. I wonder if she ever got to France?
Make it back. That’s the trick, isn’t it? I’ve done too many of these supply raids. I’m long overdue to not return.
Footsteps! Bloody Domestic Army patrols. The bastards just can’t leave us be. Most of them used to be our neighbours. Problem is, too many of them still are.
“What the fuck are we doing out here, Vardy?”
“Procedure says areas tangential to the alarm site have to be swept by a patrol after the drones. So here we are. It’s bollocks, but has to be done. Obey orders or go join the riff raff. Mind you, some nights I think that might be a better choice.”
The reply sounds angrier than I’d expect.
“You worry me sometimes, old man. It’s wall-to-wall ubiscum out in the ‘burbs. I know, I walk past them every day. Only a few like me do real work. All the whining and cheating got the freeloaders where they deserve to be: outside the New Era Mandate.”
Vardy coughs, then chuckles.
“Like the One England Initiative wasn’t enough. We should have stopped you lot back in ’28 before the lying bastards got in properly. All our protesting about national service and we still missed the fact that for a lot of conscripts, it gave them the identity they craved, a gang they wanted to be part of, and permission to pick on all the people they didn’t like. It also gave your neo-fascist government a pool of bigots from which they could build a new Schutzstaffel.”
“You’re talking treason.”
“No, I’m talking history. This is treason.”
That was a gunshot!
There’s a wheezing laugh.
“You know, of all the things I expected tonight, finding you hiding under a truck again wasn’t one of them. Still leaving distinctive tracks in the dirt, I see.”
Wait… Vardy? No way!
“Five years back. You let me and Em go.”
He crouches down and peers under the truck. Damn he’s old. Got fire in his eyes, though.
“That’s the one. How’s your tall friend?”
“Her ankle didn’t heal straight.”
“That’s a shame. Can I give you a lift?”
“What?”
“They’re about to bust me for helping people like you, so I’m leaving. You’re hiding under my getaway vehicle.”
Oh.
“Go on, then.”
by submission | Jul 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“I’m trying to tell you, Clem, I’m a Dusty Oyster. Just like you and Billy Lee, Davy, Sherm and Stevie. It’s me, Fizzy. You remember, don’t ya?”
Clement Ellis stared unbelieving from his wheelchair at the young man jabbering at him. “Dusty Oyster? You? Nonsense. I’m old, but I haven’t lost all my marbles yet.”
“Great! I sure hope you never lost that Red Devil you had. That was one lucky marble. I remember you traded Stevie a Tiger and a Turtle for it.”
An icepick of recognition stabbed at his heart, and Clement Elllis stammered, “You can’t know that. Nobody alive can. Who are you?”
“I’m Fizzy. Tom Fitz. One of the original Dusty Oysters. The six feisty runts in fifth grade that Mr. Severin told, ‘If you boys always got to be fighting, I’ll teach you how, so you don’t end up a bunch of dusty oysters on the shore.’”
The wheelchair creaked as a tremor ran through Clement Ellis. “Not possible. That was eighty years ago. I’m the only Dusty Oyster left. Fizzy died when I was in college.”
“Wrong, Clem. Fizzy disappeared when you were in college. I disappeared and now I’m back.”
“You’re a young man. You can’t be Tom Fitz. Who told you to do this to me? This is a cruel trick to play. I’d whoop your smart ass if I could.”
“Like you tried after I threw your picture of Mary Kay Fletcher into the campfire at Beacon Falls? You were sure sweet on her, Clem.”
Clement tried to rise from his wheelchair, but failed. Everything failed him now. “Who told you these things? Who could’ve told you these things? Why are you here?”
“The question, Clem, is really: How am I here?” The young man took a thin piece of rope about a foot long from his back pocket. It was dirt-stained, badly frayed at each end and had three lumpy knots tied at uneven intervals.
Clement froze. His heart gone cold. His eyes locked on the rope. After a moment, he reached into the baggy pocket of his khakis and took out an almost identical piece of rope with three knots.
“See, Clem. It’s me. Fizzy. I kept my rope. Just like you. Just like all of us. Dusty Oysters always kept their rope with them. That’s how Mr. Severin said we’d always be tied together.”
“How? How, Fizzy?” Clement struggled to ask.
The young man smiled and crouched beside his old childhood friend’s wheelchair. “I didn’t die in college all those decades ago. And I didn’t exactly disappear.” He held his piece of rope next to Clement’s. “I kinda took Mr. Severin’s advice a few steps farther about staying tied together and learning to fight. I discovered how to bind time and fight death.”
Clement shook his head. “You can’t fight death. I know. Mr. Severin, Stevie, Billy Lee, Davy, Sherm. Time always wins. Death never loses.”
“I’m not talking about winning and losing. I’m talking about evading. I don’t expect you to understand quantum string theory, but I need you to believe that I’m real. That Tom Fitz, me, Fizzy, is real. I’m real. And that I’m still in my twenties because that’s when I figured out how to manipulate the invariant metrics of F-space to move between dimensions. I call it fizzing. And when I fizz, I tie up time. I don’t age.”
“But,” Clement’s eyes were wide and clearer than they’d been in years, “where have you been, Fizzy?” “Why are you here now? Why now?”
The forever young man, Tom Fitz, Fizzy, rose and snapped his length of rope at the sky. “Everywhere and nowhere you’d know. Always on the move in one dimension or another, but I’m tired of running from time. From death. And now I think I know how to bring the Dusty Oysters back to help me.” He locked eyes with his old pal. “You ready to fight, Clem?”
Clement Ellis looked a long time at the young man before raising his rope and snapping it at the sky like Fizzy had done. “Dusty Oysters don’t back down from a fight. That’s sure. But there’s more to life than whooping death’s ass. In this dimension or any other dimension. Fizzy, you got to grow up even if you aren’t gonna grow old.”
“How you figure, Clem?”
“You may have burned Mary Kay Fletcher’s picture at Beacon Falls, but she was my first sweetheart, my first crush. We travelled in our own dimensions, separate lives and marriages, until we were both widowed and reconnected a dozen or so years ago. We got married. We were happy. She passed last year.”
Fizzy looked at his friend, a strange sensation sapping his certainty. “We can find her, too, Clem. Bring her back with us. Live forever. Dusty Oysters forever.”
Shaking his head, Clement Ellis, chuckled softly. “There are other ties that bind, Clem. Other shores where dusty oysters hold the pearls, the real treasures, worth keeping.” He turned his wheelchair, tossed the little knotted rope over his shoulder and whistled an old show tune from their youth.
Fizzy picked up Clem’s rope. Slowly, he tied it around his.
Entanglements.
Much less sure of wanting to live forever, the very old young man sighed as he fizzed into a parallel dimension. Only the dust he stirred up remaining.
by submission | Jun 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“This is a rare photograph of Christ, taken before time tourism was banned,” said the Director of the Temporal Institute.
The Senator stopped to examine it, and his entourage jostled and bumped awkwardly behind him.
A picture-lined corridor led to the gallery overlooking the wormhole, and though each picture was an actual snapshot of some historical event, the Director knew the Senator’s particular interests.
In the distance, the Sea of Galilee gleams like a sun-struck windshield, as sightseers stream down from the Sermon on the Mount. Slightly out of focus, they all wear tunics and sandals, making it difficult to tell if any of them are locals.
“The vote in the Senate to ban it was close. You must have been under a lot of pressure, but you stood by your principles and helped make the difference.”
The Director paused to see the effect of this blatant flattery.
The Senator nodded absently. He was studying the photograph. It had been enlarged to the limits of resolution and, unaccountably, was in black and white.
He pointed. “So, that is…”
The burly man slapping Christ on the back like a trainer congratulating his boy on a good fight, or a miracle well done, is Peter.
“Difficult to believe time tourism was permitted for so long,” the Director continued. He found it distasteful being a salesman, an actual unpleasant taste in his mouth.
“Opponents of the Bill maintained that since anachronisms like the camera taking this picture weren’t a problem, the ban wasn’t necessary.”
The features of Christ are hidden by the raised arm of someone striding into shot just as the shutter clicks. Only Judas, his mouth a perfect O of alarm, has seen the blade.
“But the ban was to stop rogue time travellers interfering with pivotal moments in history. Manpower and resources are poured into that.”
“Though the Institute doesn’t benefit,” he added.
One of the Senator’s aids murmured to the Director about their tight schedule.
“If we could move along to the viewing gallery now,” said the Director smoothly.
The demonstration was near the limit of current wormhole technology. Hopefully, the Senator would be impressed by men costumed in bronze armour and plumed helmets returning with film of the skirmishing round Troy.
Hopefully. The energy costs were punitive, but it would all be worthwhile if the Senator’s oversight committee approved next year’s budget.
The Senator seemed reluctant to move on.
“Assassinations,” he said. “I hear you call them celebricides.”
“Well, informally, yes. Trying to assassinate an important historical figure was usually how lone actors attempted to change the present.”
“I recall a best seller about a time tourist who planned to foil the assassination of Julius Caesar in the Forum.”
Like many patricians, the Senator claimed to be a descendant of Caesar.
“The world would be a very different place if he’d succeeded,” he mused. “Though of course, we’d never know.”
The Senator had been a military commander and still wore his authority like a uniform. The Director found himself being lectured to by an amateur.
“Well, foiling that assassination could certainly change the time-line,” he acknowledged. “In fact, Christ was a frequent target for religious cults attempting to rewrite history.”
He ushered the Senator into the gallery and let the eerie glow of Cherenkov radiation from the wormhole speak for itself.
“Though none of them ever managed to prevent his assassination,” the Director added. “For which we owe eternal thanks to Jove, and of course the Roman Temporal Guard.”
by submission | Jun 29, 2024 | Story |
Author: Andrew N. McCue
I was 15 when I left home. Replacing schoolbooks from my pack with clothes and food, I steal my mother’s favorite can opener, some flatware and a small stash of cash.
I walk mostly or hitch. Standing on the side of a road I read stapled, tacked and nailed sheets of paper on a power pole; lost cats, yard sales, a suicide prevention lifeline flyer with a few tear-off phone numbers missing and an advert for a free palm reading.
My food supply dwindling, I hope the palm reader offers snacks.
It takes me two days to work my way to the palm reader’s address. Not a horse drawn wagon
or a purple stucco house but a high-rise office building. I go up an elevator and am greeted at a door. Not by big hoop earrings or a gold tooth but by a sharp looking business dressed woman. Maybe she’s my mother’s age.
She shows me to a room with a table. We sit on either side, and she guides my palm-side-up hands under a scope thing. She peers into a pair of eye pieces and makes small noises as she adjusts knobs. The light on my palms brightens.
She looks up from the scope thing. “You have an unusually long lifeline,” she says. She says some other things but I’m mostly wondering where the snacks are.
“We’ll be in touch,” she says as she walks me from the room to an elevator.
“I don’t have a phone or an address,” I say.
“We’ll find you,” she says.
At a mission, I get a hot meal, a shower and a place to sleep. In the morning an army type in a suit and two uniformed army types are standing over me.
“Will you come with us, please,” the suited one says.
“No thank you,” I say and roll over.
The two uniformed army types manhandle me off my cot. In handcuffs, they escort me from the mission. I’m hoping they will offer me snacks.
That was 19 years ago. Standing watch on the starship’s bridge at one-twentieth of the speed of light we still have at least 70 more years before we reach Rigil Kentaurus.
But that’s okay. I’ll still be around. I have an unusually long lifeline.
by submission | Jun 28, 2024 | Story |
Author: Janaya Young
In space, hyper lanes operate like traffic lanes but with one important difference: you aren’t entirely in one place or another while traveling through them. Most people can’t tell. Maybe you feel a slight shudder of the ship, or for a moment you look down and your hand is not where you thought it was. But then it’s back and you think you must have just blinked or imagined things or had too much of the ship-generated food. With so many ships moving that quickly it becomes impossible to calculate, to avoid collisions. When you’re going that fast everything becomes fuzzy and soft, like it’s forgotten it used to be solid and that it liked being solid and everything decides to have a go at being intangible. But then your ship slows, and your body, right down to the teeth, remembers that it liked being solid and snaps back to what it was.
Sister and I like watching the ships pass in the hyper lanes. You can’t see it with just your eye, of course. You have to look through the special windows they have at the station. You can adjust the settings and slowly, slowly the hyper lane comes into focus. Blurs of blue and red. And then blurry outlines of things that just might be ships but all strung out and see through. Sometimes we’ll take a picture, and we’ll zoom in on that moment of frozen time and we’ll try to find the funniest thing we can see. Sister always thinks it’s funny to find people in the shower, with water going through them instead of running over them. Or when they’re in bed and just a mess of limbs and flesh and funny faces.
Though I like best when people are working, when there’s no line between what a person is and what they are doing. Today I saw an engineer with blinking lights on his arms, binary code in his eyes and wires coming out of his fingers. I saw a botanist’s leg become the root of a Ficus and for a moment if she could be aware of it, I wondered if she could self-reproduce just like a plant could. But then it all went back to normal, and the ship skipped away, and mother came in and started screaming about what’s appropriate for little girls to do. I know I will never see those exact people again, but I wonder if they know, if part of their atoms remember that they aren’t as solid or as separate as they think they are.
by submission | Jun 26, 2024 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Darren had come to dread having to decompress. He wasn’t alone and yet no-one was talking about it, even the media were quiet on the subject but then hardly anyone now was exempt. The evidence was everywhere and decompressing people had become a commonplace sight across the city. Old people, old bodies, slumped in cars and on public transport, sprawled across park benches and on the pavements. The only way to distinguish them from the city’s homeless was by their fine clothes. Shrunken and shriveled bodies adorned in the latest designer labels. It was, Darren had decided, grotesque and he was terrified at the prospect that eventually he would be reduced to this.
When Darren first started wearing the chip almost thirty years ago (although he now hated that phrase: ‘to wear’, the chip wasn’t something one wore like an item of clothing or an accessory). No, it was something one used and relied upon. In the beginning decompressing had not been an issue. The moments when he chose to remove it, and it had literally been just that, moments, it was no more invasive than brushing his teeth.
He remembered how he would often remove it whilst waiting for the morning train or even crammed in to the crowded carriage as it rattled its way into the city. But now, if he needed to remove it on the station platform, he would have to ensure he was seated, sitting slumped for at least half an hour, barely conscious, hardly able to move, the precious chip safely stowed in his pocket. Managing this only if after pulling it from its port in the small of his back he was strong enough to move that far. No, the days of the quick and easy fix were definitely behind him.
The chip has been widely available for almost fifty years now and the oldest users are well into their eighties and possibly above. And these are the people decompressing out on the city streets in plain sight. They are degrading and broken, not just the chips but also the users who are unable to stop trying.
At sixty-one, Darren is still relatively young and he hasn’t yet needed to cower and hide away in a toilet cubicle or lock himself in one of the supply cupboards at the office. But the tension when it comes is a bit more intense and the discomfort, the pain, lasts a little longer each time. So far, he has always managed to make his way home where, closing the bedroom door and pulling down the blinds, he huddles beneath the duvet.
When at last Darren emerges, he doesn’t immediately re-insert the chip. Pushing himself up from the bed, he crosses to the mirror on the wall and studies himself. And standing there, as he pushes the chip back into its port, he watches the not so subtle transformation.
