by J.R. Blackwell | Jun 28, 2006 | Story
Sol lived with her guardians on a lake of ice. Every day she would strap on skates and push her way across a mile wide lake to her school, which was inside a giant crystal dome. All the children on her ice world were guarded by slim solemn men and women who watched each other as fiercely as they watched the children.
Today was eighth day, Shipfall, when the white ships would land from the sky and bring food, supplies and teachers with new stories and games. Many students had one or more teachers just for them, and each student learned different things. Sol was the only one who seemed to get a taste of everything. She didn’t have nearly as work as Lussurioso, the small boy with gold skin, nor did she have as much freedom as slender WanWen, who ran around the compound like a wild child.
She stuck her hands in her pockets and felt for the paper note that Lussurioso had slipped her. All it said was: Second floor bathroom, Shipfall. She didn’t know how Lussurioso was going to meet her, since kids weren’t allowed in the bathrooms together. Still, her curiosity got the best of her, and she wanted to know what Lussurioso had to tell her. Lussurioso thought of the best strategies in the games they played. Although he wasn’t athletic, everyone always wanted him on their team.
The guards waited outside while she went into the bathroom. She ran some warm water over her stiff hands and watched the door. She should have known better. A ceiling tile moved, and she jumped.
“Lussurioso?” she whispered.
The ceiling tile was pulled away, to reveal the golden face of Lussurioso.
“Sol. We have to talk.”
She dried her hands on her coat. “Sure. Where are your guardians?”
Lussurioso smirked. “I ditched them. They are waiting outside the bathroom in the next hall. I’ve been taking long bathroom breaks for a while now, reading books while in there, trying to build up their tolerance so they wouldn’t suspect anything when we had this meeting.”
Sol’s eyes went wide. “You’ve been planning for this?”
“For months, yes.” Lussurioso swung his legs down from the ceiling tile, on to an outcropping in the wall. He leaped, landing silently on the stone floor.
“Whoa! I didn’t know you could move like that! Why don’t you do that kind of stuff in the games?”
Lussurioso shrugged. Standing next to Sol, he only came up to her armpit. “I think you’ll find Sol, that sometimes it’s best to hide some of your abilities.”
“What do you want to talk to me about?”
“About you, and me, and why we are here. Why we don’t see our parents and why we play all these games.”
“We’re being educated.”
“Yes. We are. But I get to read more than you, and most children aren’t taught like this. Most children live with their families, they are not sent away to ice worlds.”
“Our parents want us to have the best education, and this is the best school.”
“You really believe all that? Listen to me; you have the right to know this. Sol, you are the heir to the Empire. You are the future Empress of the Known Worlds.”
Sol’s stomach twisted, like she had eaten something bad. “Are you playing a game with me Lussurioso?”
“No Sol. I’m beyond games now. It’s time that you knew, because something has happened to your mother, the Empress, and we will be moving out soon.”
“What?” Sol said, a little loudly. There was a knock on the door that made them both jump.
“Are you alright in there?” asked her female guardian.
“Yeah, just girl stuff!” called Sol. Lussurioso rolled his eyes.
Sol whispered at him furiously. “How do you know this?”
Lussurioso pulled her to the far side of the bathroom as far from the door at they could get. “I guessed when I was eight. The guards were stupid. They told me everything I needed, even when they didn’t say a thing, even when they lied. Especially when they lied. Then, this year, I hacked the system, and what I knew was confirmed.”
“If you knew all this, why didn’t you tell me earlier!”
“Because it’s dangerous to know things. Don’t worry Sol. I love you, I would never betray you, but the world out there is dangerous right now.”
Sol stepped back, stunned. “You love me?”
He took her hand. “Of course I love you Sol. They made me to love you. All the children here are your court. When you go to become Empress, they will come with you and be your advisors and your lovers and your family. Every Empress comes with a court. Most of the kids don’t know it yet, but you are our reason for being. We were all designed for our place by genetic engineers, birthed for this purpose. I was designed to be your military advisor, WanWen was made to be your lover, we are all your court.”
“You are my court?”
“Sol, next to me you are the smartest person on this world. You know this is true.”
“I knew something was going on, I just didn’t know it was this.”
Lussurioso smiled at her, a rare, genuine smile that didn’t come from beating someone in strategy or tricking an adversary. “Don’t worry Sol. You won’t face this alone. I’ll always be with you. All of us will. We will face the worlds together.”
by Kathy Kachelries | May 17, 2006 | Story
It’s a dangerous job. They told me that in college, they told me that in my doctoral studies, they told me that when they recruited me, and they tell me that every morning of a jump. It’s a dangerous job, Jodie. But I know the risks. Everyone in this field knows the risk.
My first case was standard: a sociopath who slaughtered half a dozen children in his basement two centuries earlier. We don’t save the victims, of course…that would mutilate the timeline. We don’t even see the subjects. In the projection chamber, I lie on the table as wires are taped to my head, stimulating REM. It takes a special type of person, I hear: a lucid dreamer. Without that ability, it’s easy to lose yourself.
I enter him as he’s almost there, hovering on the brink and fantasizing about the pale-eyed brunette in the basement. I feel the body shudder with the feeling of falling that accompanies the transition to sleep. His mind unfolds into images: the man who sold him bread in the morning, people he passed on the subway. They never dream about the victims. They have their waking hours for that.
Years in the future, the movements of his unconscious are being recorded. In hours, they’ll be processed and scrutinized, and the database will be updated.
His mother, long dead, walking down a corridor and holding a glass of water. She opens a door and he’s inside. “Did you finish shopping?” he asks, and she gives him the glass. He drops it, spills it. The water is the ocean and the shattered glass is light breaking on the jagged edges of waves as he looks overboard. Dreaming. I watch.
When they pull me from his mind the transition is gentle. The scientist enters the dream patterns with keystrokes. “Nice job,” he says, because he’s flirted with me for months. I smile and leave. I’ll be back the next day.
As I sleep in my own bed, fragments of the dreams are recycled. The lucid dreaming distances them…this is simple review, observation rather than motivation. The scanners realize this, and ignore me. Across the city, people are dreaming, matching and evading profiles. Dangerous cases are summoned and saved by doctors who do my work in reverse. I research, they cure.
It’s a dangerous job, but someone has to do it. We haven’t had a serial killer for centuries.
by B. York | May 5, 2006 | Story |
Danny jumped from the roof this time, hitting the ground with a short thump and glancing down at his legs with pure awe in his pale blue eyes. It took him a moment to jump for joy, feeling his weight on those strong, solid legs. It was the best gift a ten year old could ever ask for.
His parents kept pictures of him before the accident and hid them away after he had recovered. They preferred the new Danny, who loved to run and play sports, to the one that read books in his wheelchair. They watched through the window, smiling at their investment towards a better future for their son.
The boy never knew it, but he was better now. Yes, his legs were whole again, but they were better than before. Jumping off rooftops gave pause to some of the kids walking by. Danny loved it, though. He kept running around the yard, looking over every detail his young eyes could capture.
A phone rang somewhere inside while he played, and Danny’s mother walked over to pick it up. “Gene residence, Carolyn speaking.”
“Mrs. Gene, this is Dr. Bast at the National Medical Lab for Gengineering and Human Development. We, uh, need you to bring Daniel back into the East Hampton lab within the next few hours.”
A worried look brought over the father who mouthed concerns at his wife before she shooed him away. “Is there something wrong?”
She stood there listening to the jargon, holding the phone out so her husband could hear and the only words that seemed to make sense came clear in the end, “In some patients, the splicing has been having some unanticipated side effects. Everything is fine but we need to get Daniel back in to make sure he’s clear of any anomalies.”
Both stood staring at each other as a silent wave of worry just washed over them both. Mr. Gene looked out the window for Danny and saw him crouched behind the tree out front. “He looks fine to me,” he said
Carolyn spoke softly into the phone. “Dr. Bast, you told us they used the DNA of several cats to accelerate the mending. What harm could a few cats do?”
Danny’s father smiled at the thought before turning back around. Danny wasn’t behind the tree anymore. He was perched on the fence, glaring at Mrs. Collins from next door with an unfamiliar intensity. Mr. Gene wasn’t really sure what was going on till he saw Mrs. Collins step closer to the boy, and, faster than any human, Danny struck her with his palm. “Carolyn…” Mr. Gene said, “get the car.”
by Kathy Kachelries | Apr 13, 2006 | Story |
Hello. My name is Demetri Thornwick. I’m a graduate student in physics at Hawking University, but in your century you probably know it as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I just left Professor Mendalin’s Temporal Physics class, where I just received a D- on my term paper. The paper was on Dr. Franklin’s theory of Negative Timeline Distortions. I won’t bore you with the physics, but it involves the effects of changes made when traveling back in time (aka, Timeline distortions). Now, nobody disputes that the timeline will be irrevocably disrupted if a time traveler makes a major change, like detonating a 100 terawatt EMF pulse bomb in Hollywood. In addition, nobody disputes that a minimal change, like dropping a pebble in a dry well, will not disrupt the future one iota. The arguments always center on the Maximum Disruption with Zero Consequences (MDZC). You know, what’s the most I can change without screwing up the primary timeline.
That’s why I’m overwriting this web page, to prove to Professor Mendalin that my grade should be increased. You see, my term paper predicted that changing an obscure twenty first century web site will produce zero consequences. However, Professor Mendalin argued that 2d/(c2-ga )1/2 is not valid when DT>200 years. And, based on that, my successive derivations were worthless. Frankly, he’s an idiot. And, when I prove him wrong, he’ll have to change my grade to an A.
It’s relatively simple to infiltrate your twenty first century internet using a Tachyon carrier beam. I can do it from here, and you see the results real time. Now, clearly, I cannot make a drastic change, like take ebay off-line for a few hours. That would absolutely collapse my timeline, and my century would cease to exist. So, I decided to go back to April 13, 2006 and delete a story from 365 Tomorrows, and replace it with this dialog. FYI, I chose 365 Tomorrows because it only has a modest following; certainly below the MDZC threshold. In addition, twenty-first century critics all agreed that fewer people read the stories of Kathy Kachelries than any of the other writers, which I why I chose today, because it lowers the MDZC threshold even more. Surely, a few thousand lonely sci-fi geeks can miss one apocalyptic story without the world coming to an end. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you’re all good people, but come on, you’re not a major thread in the tapestry of time. If my calculations are correct, the loss of that one boring story (less than two minutes of your life) will be equivalent to dro-ping a p-bble in a d-y we-l. Wh-t th- he-l is h-pen–g. -h, s-it…
by Kathy Kachelries | Mar 31, 2006 | Story
No one knew how long Catherine Malone had been missing. Her absence was reported to the police after three weeks of unpaid rent, but neighbors admitted they hadn’t known that the apartment was occupied. “She kept to herself,” said the landlord.
The universe does not think in hours, days. There is no measure of universal time. Humans count one moment after the other. Consecutive time. But a vibrating cesium atom doesn’t know how many times it’s shuddered. A sun doesn’t know how long its burned. Time is dependent on the consciousness of the observer, and without someone to draw demarcations between the seconds, time becomes an unlabeled, unmeasured stream.
So what clock must a time machine be set by?
The landlord unlocked the apartment himself, but found no sign of his tenant. Half-read books and half-filled notebooks rested open upon every table, and a mostly-empty pizza box had attracted a halo of flies. The bed was unmade, and the dishes were filthy. The wooden floor was littered with crumpled clothing.
Does time attach itself to an object and move with that object? Specifically, would a time machine set for three days prior return the traveler to the room she departed from, or to the naked void of space left in the wake of the moving Earth? Can there be universal latitude and longitude in an expanding universe, or is that another human construction? In the latter scenario, how could a machine be set to return a traveler to the Earth?
The police could find no next of kin, and although a brief investigation suggested abduction, that theory was ultimately disregarded. “She probably just picked up and left,” said an officer in an off-the-record conversation. “People do that sometimes. Move to a different state to start over.”
Assuming that the problems of the initial leap could be easily solved, the biggest problem becomes the return journey. A person’s presence out of their own time would certainly change their future, so how could they return to the world they’d left? If an oddity like time travel were to spark the creation of an alternate timeline, how could the machine be set to return to the timeline of origin? Could a chronological beacon be constructed, like a lighthouse through time?
The case remained open, long after the apartment had been cleared and rented to another tenant. No next of kin appeared, and the woman’s belongings were donated to a nearby shelter. After a decade, the files on open but unsolved cases were moved to the basement of the precinct, where they rested for almost half a century before a flood turned the papers soggy and rusted the ancient hard drives. “We’re working to restore the old documents,” a representative said during a press conference, shortly before ordering the boxes to be returned to the basement. “These things are sixty years old,” he said to a coworker. “No one remembers them anyways.”
