Author: Alfred C. Airone

I awoke in completely unfamiliar surroundings, not remembering having gone to sleep.

There was someone else in the bed with me. I turned and saw her: cropped copper-red hair, perfect face, lips slightly parted, still asleep. I recognized her immediately: Rho Rondella, the fictional owner and captain of the equally fictional interstellar spacecraft Furious.

It worked, I thought, and into my silent jubilation there came a sound: the noise of all the scornful criticisms of my theories crashing to the floor like broken glassware. I had traveled to the future – a future that I had made real. A future that had previously existed only in a science-fiction novel I had read and re-read many times. A future I had created by hard science and uncertain devices coupled with ten thousand acts of choosing. A future plucked from among the Hydra-headed Potential, the not yet real.

I let her sleep. We were obviously already well acquainted.