Chronovore

I hunt the Time Killers.

I am the person they call in when they have a chronovore infestation. These creatures are bright blue and frog-like with the giant faceted eyes of an insect. Millilocular lenses, each one seeing progressively further forward and back in time.

The smaller a beast is, the less it can see into time. The babies can see ten minutes in either direction. The big ones could see for days. I heard of one giant beast that saw a week and a half in either direction.

It’s like how a fly’s eyes are giant hemispheres, giving it a nearly 360 degree field of view for warning of incoming danger. These chronovores see a lenticular time-field to give them warning of imminent attacks.

These chronovores, being quantum animals, needed to see the chunk of time that they were going to eat. If they could only see five minutes forward and five minutes back, then they could only eat that ten minutes of time in one go before moving on. If they ate more than they could see, they’d untether from the timeline and were never seen again. Greed kept their numbers down.

It was when a pack of them got together and started grazing that the problems really started.

The fields they emanate can take up entire city blocks. The area where they eat gets shuffled back in time and the blue frog’s bellies get full.

Most humans blame their memories or drugs or other mind-altering experiences. One day looks pretty much like the next in their numbing drudgery of an existence. The small 'vores pass without much damage. It’s the big ones that cause problems with history and timefaults.

I’m from the Core. I have perfect recall. When a chunk of my time goes missing, I know it. My scanner says that there are ripples here. The beast must be close. I warm up the looptrap and place it near –

- Wednesday for lunch. It’s not much but I’m hoping that they don’t linger. Wait. Wait. What day is it? I check inside and compare streams. I lost a month. That can’t be! A month-eater would be the size of a shuttlecraft! I’ve heard no reports.

Wait. The television. It’s talking about a giant blue frog in the downtown core. The helicopters of this era are circling. Jesus. The chronovore’s field emanation must be the size –

- tranquil, almost summertime breeze. I’m looking forward to the barbeque and seeing Marie. Damn. It’s happened again. I wonder if it’s yanking the entire city backwards a month at a time. It’s going to continue on its path, leaving month-sized holes across the seaboard like a moth making its way through a closet of expensive clothes.

Maybe they can drive it into the ocean. In the depths, a month of time isn’t going to make too much of a difference one way or the –

-peanut butter. I can’t even be sure that the supermarket is open. The queue is taking a long time. How did I –

- given my orders. Apparently there’s a large chronovore in LA. I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t like the heat in that city.



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Map

It’s the turns on the roads, the infected varicose veins spreading across the atlas, that tell us how to get from one end of the continent to the other. They wiggle across the map like a child’s crayon-drawing of a cardiogram. Blue rivers, red roads.

This snapshot-spread of our civilization printed on the crushed-tree paper that needs to be updated every time the forests shrink again. It's a cycle.

The straight lines of state borders stop abruptly at jagged coastlines and ragged mountain ridges. The imposition of order on chaos. We’ve really tamed the wilderness, ignoring the fact that it also grows within us. Our disease spreads in grids while the green shrinks.

There is a war of attrition happening that we cannot win because if we don’t stop working against and start working with, we are battling ourselves. We are nature yet we are the defilers of nature.

The lines across the roadmap are magic-marker squiggles written on the giant palmprint of North America. Just as impermanent. They are only a small representation of the other lines; the power lines, the telephone lines, the cables holding this Gulliver down.

A map is a catalogue of atrocities perpetrated on a piece of earth. It’s directions around a disease. It’s a napkin for pigs. It’s proof.

We will follow the rivers and mountains until we no longer have to do their bidding and they become inconvenient to us. We will pave the paths and plan our cities. We will claim this ball of iron as our own without waiting for a reply. Humanity is an abusive boyfriend and the Earth has no shelter to run to.

Extinct. The word should not exist. It should be obscure in the extreme. It is not.

Watch it happen on the television. Give to the charity of your choice to help those less fortunate that yourself.





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Podcast

Hey everyone! It's a podcast!

I've been guest-hosting a few times on the Unknown Origins Podcasts here in Vancouver but they're starting to become a regular thing. They're a lot of fun. Old songs, new songs, good songs. Johnny Vancouver, Zen Render and myself talk in between the tracks, giving snippets of information and being amusing. If you would like to hear our voices in your head instead of your own, give it a download and a listen. We're also on facebook if you lean in that direction. Just do a search for Unknown Origins.


Check it out!

->UNKNOWN ORIGINS #17<-


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