Author: David Barber

Mr Wells having already written a popular scientific romance about time travel, publishers seemed to think my own literary efforts on the subject suffered by comparison. They also warned my title would be a hindrance to commercial success.

One editor commented that making the protagonist a woman was even less believable than her escapades, conceding however that it might be amusing for a corseted heroine to bustle (!) through time, observing fanciful female fashions of the future.

Perhaps I do not possess the fluency of Mr Wells, which is why I considered submitting a paper to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society instead, but being unwilling to reveal the means and mechanism behind my invention — imagine the disastrous consequences of such public knowledge — in the end I refrained.

Eventually, long after my adventures in time, and in a vain attempt to make sense of it all, I penned the brief memoir you hold in your hand.

For the first foray of my temporal engine, I had planned to return to the years when my dear parents were alive. How I longed to see them again and hear them praise their daughter’s cleverness, yet the paradoxes risked by tinkering with the past stayed my hand.

So it was that on a cold November morning in 1897, I set off into the future.

Imagine a railway journey with new sights and mysteries at every stop, yet a journey without end, a blur of years where my attention was snagged by one wonder after another.

There were adventures in cities that glowed like valve radios, hot with the smell of science; I fled artificial men who wanted my body for its parts; increasingly I glimpsed events I could not understand and peoples whose fate did not concern me.

As I plunged onwards through time, the endless Ages overwhelmed me, yet having come so far it seemed an admission of weakness to turn back. I witnessed the planet grow empty, then full again, continents scurrying to new geographies, the Earth nudged further from a ripening sun.

At some point I was adopted by fellow temponauts, odd folk with too few digits, overly many teeth, and eyes that blinked sideways like elevator doors. They had spotted the wake left by my temporal engine and invited me to join them.

Their sentient device hurled us onwards so rapidly that the dials of my own crude contraption kept spinning through zero. My imagination had failed me and I had not built for deep time.

Halting at last on an Earth grown spavined and bleak as Mars, they spoke in whispers, like tourists in a cathedral. This was their destination, something they called the Last Singularity, beyond which even their clever physics refused to work. Our journey had come to an end. The Powers who ruled here allowed no interference.

Afterwards, my companions dropped me off the instant I set out, though my cumbersome engine was abandoned somewhere uptime. They were sad for their little friend and warned I would find life made no sense now, my mayfly days lost in the vastness of time. In their experience, Eternity did this to simple souls.

And so it has proved. I did not have the heart to rebuild my invention, nor have I invited ridicule by speaking of it and the marvels I saw.

Wisely, I never spied upon my own brief future and discover it one day at a time, as we all do.