by submission | Mar 7, 2014 | Story |
Author : S. L. Gilbow
Nancy is running late again. Not surprising. She’s the type who shows up after you’ve already decided the movie you wanted to see isn’t really worth seeing or after you’ve figured out that the dinner reservation you’ve had for a week was a mistake in the first place.
“After all,” she says, “reservations are so confining.”
But she told you she would be on time today. Time machines, after all, run on a tight schedule. At least that’s what Nancy tells you, and she’s the expert on time travel. She’s the one who works for Timely Vacations. She knows all about time travel, and she knows this time machine is going in five minutes, with or without her.
“Your friend, she’s coming, right?” asks the attendant. You and six other travelers are crowded together in a small waiting room decorated with pictures of notable moments from the past. Washington crossing the Delaware. Napoleon at Waterloo. Shakespeare on stage. They’re all photographs.
As you wait for the time machine doors to open, the attendant looks at his watch, really just a show for you. An old couple stares hard into your eyes. It’s that disconcerting look strangers give best. Scornful and disapproving.
“She said she would be here in time,” you whisper to them. But you aren’t so convinced.
Really that’s too bad. Nancy is the perfect person in so many ways. Nice looking. Raven hair with a tinge of red. A lower lip that quivers with incessant conversation. She’s the one who convinced you to take this trip, a popular vacation package she’s currently marketing.
“I’m just not sure about time travel,” you told her.
“You’ll love it,” she said. “Everyone should try it at least once.”
“What if I meet my grandfather?”
“I recommend you be polite.” She smiled.
“What if I shoot my grandfather?”
“You’re not going to shoot anyone,” she said. “Just have fun. Relax a little.”
So you agreed to go on this trip, your first trip together. Now you’re thinking about not going at all, canceling the vacation to reschedule when Nancy can be more dependable.
“Your friend, I don’t think she is coming.” says the attendant.
“Of course she is,” you say, but you’re not so sure now.
Nancy said the trip would be a blast. A real blast. Going off to see Ireland and spending a few days on the Titanic. Those good few days before that iceberg thing. It’s a popular destination, and you’ve had this trip booked for a month.
You call Nancy one last time in desperation.
“Hi, this is Nancy. Leave a message. I’ll call you back.”
That’s it. You’re going alone. The doors to the time machine slide open. The passengers shuffle in, turn, and stare at you. You step into the time machine and wonder if you’ve ruined everything with Nancy.
As the doors start to close, you feel a tap on your shoulder. You turn around and there’s Nancy, standing next to a door labeled “staff only.” The door closes softly behind her.
“Surprise,” she says. “You didn’t think I was going to make it, did you?”
“Of course I knew you would make it,” you lie. “Where did you come from?”
“Next week.” Nancy smiles at you. “I caught a ride from next week.”
You smile back at her and take her hand. You squeeze it and it feels good. It feels warm and nice. But you can’t help wondering, wondering about the other Nancy, the one who’s out there somewhere, doing something, running late.
by Julian Miles | Mar 6, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They put me in a mansuit again. I objected until the Hnth decreed and I had to comply. Then to my surprise, they acted upon the other half of my request. The Krntch dropped me on a beach. I stood there, watching men of both genders flee in terror, their scanty environmental suits adapting badly to the sudden change of behaviour.
Their negotiating men would take a short while to arrive. In that time, I had to change the environment on which they based their diplomacy. All I needed was a man with a projectile weapon. As if to order, a man in the uniform of a lawgiver charged through the retreating men and pointed his weapon at me.
“Don’t move!”
I raised my upper limbs quickly. It was enough. His training made him shoot me and his fear ensured he shot me several times. I felt the projectiles pass through the suit and let myself fall, gravity flattening the suit and propelling me out through the holes. I reformed in the air above the suit and he fled.
“You’re beautiful.”
My perception shifted and I saw a man with pronounced suckling attributes standing barely a drift away. I modulated my waft and squeezed words into being.
“This is our natural form. We only want to visit your planet to ride the meteorological gases. They are like no other planet we have encountered.”
It nodded and I felt resonance with my desire. An understanding at last!
“You want to surf the wind. I can dig that.”
I ran through the available language I had to find the words: “We only want this. Your elders present us as a threat to further their own aims. I need to speak to the people. To tell them the truth.”
Again, I saw understanding and belief.
“The media! There should be a news chopper here soon.”
That word for hazard I knew: “No! The wind of a chopper will injure me.”
“Oh, yeah. I should’ve guessed, you being a swirl of glowing gold gas. Sorry.”
“Is there any alternative?”
It reached behind itself and pulled a communication device out.
“I can call them. Can you move or do you just drift?”
Obviously some local meaning to the word ‘drift’. I drifted to be beside it. It looked almost reverent as I did so.
“Oh, wow. You have rainbows inside when you move.”
‘Rainbow’? Another new word. They have so many here.
“I presume this is what you mean by ‘move’?”
“Yeah. Follow me.”
“We are interrupting this program with breaking news. This is Kirsty Walters, live from Surfrider Beach, Malibu. The incredible glowing cloud behind me is a real, live Srssn’n. This is what they look like outside of the suits that their leaders make them wear to the diplomatic sessions. Next to it is Suzy Masters, a PA on vacation whose quick thinking allowed this historic event to occur. We’ll talk to Sh’rr, the Srssn’n, in a moment. But its message needs to be stated now. The Srssn’n are not invaders. They want to be tourists, to surf the winds of this planet, and are prepared to trade technology to be allowed to do so. We are being lied to.”
by Clint Wilson | Mar 5, 2014 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Time travel has always been possible. We’ve been doing it for centuries. Even the most archaic craft in our earliest space faring ventures used to bring back brave voyagers aged a fraction of a second younger than they would have been had they never left.
But to really traverse time, to cover a temporal distance that can be measured in actual years rather than fractions of seconds, would take some extra ingenuity. And consequently the first singular photons were successfully sent back down the time stream in the early spring of 2240. Initially it was just a few seconds, and then minutes, and then hours. And then pretty soon those seemingly insignificant tiny travelers were spanning the years at our command.
But when it was suddenly discovered that we might be able to actually infiltrate antique fiber optic cables and send our own messages back into the past, we all hesitated, and approached this realization with extreme trepidation and concern… and then we plowed on ahead anyway.
We still weren’t able to boost the signal enough for video, but audio was working perfectly, and that was just fine. The newly targeted period of the early 21st century was a time of almost complete global coverage by audio communication systems.
We continuously searched for a likely subject in the archives. “How about this?” said my assistant Harland one afternoon.
“What do you have?” I asked.
“An old 2D site run by an early 2020s woman. A Beatrice McLean of eastern Canada. Her society called, simply enough, ‘The Time Travelers Club’ once celebrated the possibility of, and more importantly, its members’ belief in, time travel.”
“Interesting,” I admitted. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes.” He looked back at me, one eyebrow raised. “There’s a phone number.”
* * *
Brrriiiing… Brrriiiing…
“Hello, Beatrice speaking.”
* * *
I yelled into my cheekplant. “It’s time to open our trap and see if we’ve caught anything. All associates into position please!”
As we pushed forward down the long hallway Harland led the way with his Eyepiece’s strong flashlight. According to our research the old New Brunswick family had owned this place for centuries, but the power had now been off for decades. At last we came upon the ancient storage room.
They had all waited for me. The two maintenance workers had their prying tools jammed into the cracks on either side of the crumbling cinderblock. I stopped, took in the dusty scene for a brief moment, and then nodded toward the workers. In unison they wrenched the old block loose.
It came crashing down and fell into near powder. I stepped forward, waving the cloud away, and covering my mouth I coughed several times. Then through the dispersing fallout I saw it.
It was a flat rectangular piece of white plastic, nearly upright, leaning ever so slightly in its cubbyhole, extremely non-biodegradable, as per our original instruction, perhaps the lid of an antique food storage container. I had a dozen team members standing behind me shining their lights over my shoulders. As I pulled it free from its hiding place and shook the centuries of sediment away with a flick of my wrist, we could all now read the message that had been faithfully carved deep into the plastic with a 350-year-old wood burning tool, by a staunch and serious practitioner of science and science fiction, all those years ago.
The message read…
“2370 Code
XX2D338CG.
Hello future,
Love Beatrice”
by featured writer | Mar 4, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jay Knioum, Featured Writer
He thought he heard crows. When he found the noise, it was just a loose telephone cable blowing against the remains of a wire fence. Crows wouldn’t have survived. Crows built nests, not bomb shelters.
“Ramon? Hey Ray!”
“Yeah. You find anything, Smitty?”
“Not a damn thing. Another fuckin’ goose chase. The Lootenant’s losin’ it, man. Tellin’ you.”
“He says look for survivors, we look.”
Smitty chewed his bottom lip and seethed. “Yeah, Sergeant.”
Ray searched Smitty’s eyes, then slapped him on the helmet. “Ah, fuck it. Nobody and nothin’ around here anyway. Let’s go, man. Get dark soon.”
Smitty grinned. “Hoof it, dude. I wanna get back before Deke, get first dibs on Ziggy before the rest of those fuckers stink her up.”
Ray didn’t say anything to that. He never did. He’d stood up for Ziggy once, after Deke’s squad found her in that parking garage, blind and muttering. She never stopped muttering, even when Ray found Deke on top of her three nights later.
Ray tried to play the white knight then, pulled Deke away and took a rifle butt in the temple for his trouble.
“We ain’t soldiers no more,” the Lieutanant told him that night, “We’re just keeping the kennel, throwin’ scraps into the cages, making sure the dogs don’t get hungry enough to kill us.”
When they got back to camp, Ray saluted the Lieutenant, reported a quiet patrol, then left the boys and Ziggy to themselves. He kept walking.
He picked his way across a cratered parking lot, keeping his weapon handy and sweeping the ruins with practiced attention.
He crept over the low hill of shattered concrete, threaded his way around a forest of exposed rebar and found the school. He figured it had been a school because of the playground and the torched remains of school buses in front of the building, parked in a row, waiting for kids that never boarded.
He made his way around back, to the wall. Her wall, where she always waited for him in the midst of the other shadows, where the light and heat from the blast left imprints on the school wall. Imprints of fire hydrants, and trees, and a swing set, long melted away. Images of children, and their teacher.
Ramon smiled at her. He brought up his hand and brushed a finger gently around the curve of where her neck would have been. “I’m sorry, baby. Sorry it took me so long to get back, but the Lieutenant…”
He trailed off, then pulled something else out of his jacket. “I found this. There was a library, I think it was. There were some shelves in the basement. Looks like a book of poems. I tore out all the burned pages. I can read it to you if you want. I figured it might make you happy, bein’ a teacher and all.”
He looked up at her again. “I sure am glad we found each other. I guess it’s kind of a good thing that all this happened, or else you wouldn’t be here, neither would I.”
She stood there, one with the wall, silent.
Ramon unshouldered his rifle, sat down cross-legged and carefully opened the book. He started to read.
The shadows on the wall listened like no one else.
by Desmond Hussey | Mar 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
“Who am I?” Karen asked the reflection in her bathroom mirror. For years now she couldn’t shake the feeling that the face looking back at her was somehow alien, not really a part of her. As usual, the unspoken response was instantaneous, “Karen Lynn Warden, son of Greg and Laura Warden. Age fifteen.” Despite the obvious truth of the statement, a nagging doubt tickled the back of her brain like a hard to find radio station, there for a second, then lost to static.
Karen, like all privileged children born to the ruling class after the Revolution, had two brains. Two months after conception, prenatal Karen was introduced to her secondary brain, a nano-implant nestled into the tiny space next to her hypothalamus. As her brain grew within the womb a secondary brain grew along with it, grafting fine filaments of artificial neurons alongside organic neurons via self-replicating nano-bots. By the time Karen was born, her brain was more powerful than any pre-revolution infant’s by a factor of ten.
“How are you feeling today?” Karen’s on-line tutor, Mrs. Perkins asked before their daily lesson began.
“I’m well.” Karen responded mechan cally. She wanted to say something else, but the words never fully formed.
“Excellent!” Mrs. Perkins smiled broadly. “Are you ready to begin?”
Karen nodded.
For the next hour Mrs. Perkins rattled off complex algebraic equations, which Karen answered effortlessly while idly fidgeting with her stylus. Her secondary brain, linked to the DataNet, was able to perform even the most esoteric mathematics within seconds. It seemed to Karen as if she wasn’t even really participating in the process. She simply watched with her inner eye as numerals and symbols danced around her mind until her mouth emitted answers. They were, invariably, the correct responses.
Next was history and social studies. Today’s topic was the Revolution of 2023, which brought about the current utopia of which Karen and her remarkable brain were both products. While a part of her mind responded to each question in fluent and accurate detail, another part of her was dimly aware that her hand was sketching an image on her tablet.
When Mrs. Perkins asked about the Final Conflict, a war which had been waged both in the digital world and in the very bloody, very real world between the AI known as Ozymandius and the rebel Freedom Fighters led by General Kim, Karen finally glanced down to see what it was she’d been doodling. She froze in horror at the image glaring back at her.
“I repeat,” Mrs. Perkins was saying, “Why was it important for our Glorious Leader to imprison and rehabilitate General Kim’s Rebels rather than simply execute them for treason?”
The shock of seeing the sketch had apparently disrupted even Karen’s superior cognition, because for a second all her mouth could formulate were unintelligible syllables.
Once again, Mrs. Perkins repeated the question, her tone and rhythm identical to her previous attempts, making her sound like a skipping record. Or robotic.
For a brief moment there was an internal struggle within the teenage girl’s cerebellum; a miniature, yet desperate war raged like an echo of the Final Conflict as identities battled for supremacy of Karen’s fractured mind.
When it was over, the victor spoke. “It was necessary to rehabilitate the Rebels to demonstrate to humanity the compassionate generosity of Ozymandius and the futility of resistance.”
With the casual flick of a hand, the defiant image of Karen’s hate-filled facsimile was erased from the tablet forever, along with all trace of Karen’s original brain.
