Author: Robert Gilchrist

You know what it will do to you. The warnings are everywhere. The PSAs on holovision. The billboards on the highway into work. Your social circle has even been impacted by it (Sophie’s cousin’s boyfriend is still in recovery). But that’s not going to stop you. Not now.

MmryLne was developed as the be-all end-all designer drug. It’s said it was supposed to mine the biggest business outside of sex – nostalgia. You’ve never been into that crap. After all, the past didn’t have grocery stores or social media. Besides, we only remember what we want.

But the planet is cracking. Any day now the core will spill onto the surface and burn away whoever’s left. All the scientists are saying so, and aren’t we supposed to believe them? If you’re going to go out, why not take some solace in what used to be?

It’s bigger than you expected. Viseos always make these kinds of drugs seem tiny but carry a big wallop. It has the appearance and viscosity of a bull’s eye. They don’t even know how it works – does it send your consciousness into the past, or just hyperfocus your mind on bygone eras?
You choke down this horse pill on an empty stomach, take several swigs of thirty credit bottled water, lay back on your couch, and wait for it to –

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Your brain spazzes as the pill dissolves instantaneously in your stomach. Before your eyes is a rancher herding cattle across a dusty vista. The taste of baking clay lingers as you suck in fresh breath. It’s hot, but manageable. Better than –

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Thrown forward to the floor by your seizing stomach. Hands smush into brown muck. Smells like shit. Voices calling, don’t recognize the language. Flies buzz everywhere. A hand touches your shoulder –

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Boardroom. People screaming. Shots ring out. You weld your eyes shut and hope this –

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It continues. A surrealist nightmare as you bounce through time, sensing what the past was like but continuing on before it can take hold. History and time and reality and the self and existence blending and melding into five-dimensional sculptures. You’d puke and void yourself if you hadn’t already done so. Over and over.

Ancient Rome. Rainforests as developers dig out the last of the vegetation. The fray of battles – Attila the Hun, Alexander of Macedonia, Dwight Eisenhower. The universe spins around you. The shakes start after your fourth trip to the American Nineteen Eighties. Muscle spasms like you’re freezing hit your arm as you wipe away rivers of sweat. Did you just have a seizure? Will this kill you before the apocalypse outside your –

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You’re back. Curled in the fetal position on the kitchen floor. Lying in a pool of sweat, vomit and blood. Head pounding. Voice hoarse. Shaking uncontrollably. Feeling you don’t belong here. Like you don’t belong anywhere.

Your phone begins bleeping at you. Slowly your arm moves from clutching your tattered shirt and turns off the braying. You force yourself up gingerly. Wet chunks stick to your face. The tiny window that looks out on the hazy, smoke-stained sky offers a sliver of light.

It’s time to begin another day at the end of everything.