Cliffs at Rest

I never want to come back but here I am again, watching the massacre of my ancestors.

Back in these times, they used what was at hand to execute a mass of people. There were no guns yet, no chemists yet to produce a lethal gas and there were no buildings in the village big enough that my people could be locked into and burnt.

The attackers were merely using spears, torches, pitchforks and pointed sticks to corral my ancestors up to the edge of a very high cliff outside of town. Soon, they will force them off the cliff on a long trip to the rocks tearing through the violent, cold waves below.

I invented the world’s first time machine. I have found that it’s quite easy to change history.

Once.

I went back in time, intending to help my ancestors become rich. I gave them patented ideas years before they should have been invented. I explained myself as a traveling businessman bringing them ideas from the mainland. My ancestors lived in a village outside of Ireland.

They talked openly about their inventions, confident that they could sell them to their fellow villages or at least barter for passage to the mainland to set up shop at some of the larger markets.

There were suspected of being in league with the devil and sentenced to death. There was also not a lot of due process back then.

My ancestors were treated like diseased blood cells. They were surrounded and driven to messy end.

Do you understand? Everyone with my last name was herded to a sharp drop. They all died. I know it. I’ve watched it fifty-six times now.

And here I am. I still exist. I’m hovering near the cliff edge and I cannot control my machine.

Every time I try to leap back to the present, I am brought back to this moment in time. When I try to go back further to right my wrongs, the same thing happens. I can’t leave my craft to change what happens and no one appears to be able to see me or my machine floating in the air.

It’s as if I’m doing penance for my crime on some universal space-time level.

And there they go. Nudged off the edge of the cliff like so many reluctant lemmings. Men, women, and children screaming their way down to the unforgiving ocean.

Soon enough, the villages go back home, satisfied at a job well done and a crisis averted. The bodies of my people lie dead and broken in the undulating surface of the cold atlantic.

The cliffs are silent. And I disappear go back and see it all again.


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In My Shadow, Infinity

The ship had stopped in between Earth and the moon, twinkling like a massive cathedral made of glass and crystal. No shockwave or energy point. It was just suddenly there.

Our Earth defenses reacted immediately. The defenses of the asteroid belt and Mars rendezvoused with us around the alien craft.

We surrounded it, pointed weapons at it, and screamed orders at it to stay still and be calm. It didn’t react. It was hard to tell if it was following our orders, if it was truly dead in the water, or if it had even heard us at all.

The world was watching and the space defense forces of three solar governments were bristling with fear in a pinpointed sphere of death around it.

A hardy space marine scout advanced on it. I was that scout. I was old and experienced but I was also expendable.

I pushed forwards through the tense silence of space until I was right beside the ship.

I had no need to storm an airlock because there were vast open portals in the sides. There seemed to be no need to shield its crew or contents from the vacuum. I thumbed my jets forward, nosing my way cautiously into the interior of the ship.

A curious phenomenon awaited me. The ship appeared to only exist when light was hitting it. The hull and interior were only visible when the light of the sun or my suit’s flashlights played across it. Anything not being illuminated was transparent to the point of not existing.

The ship was half here and half not here. What I could see of the ship looked like ice or clear glass but when I reached out to touch it, my finger slid off of it. Completely frictionless.

According to our sensors, it didn’t have any mass. Obviously impossible yet here I was looking at it.

Movement caught my eye and I snapped my weapon up.

I saw the crew.

Odd, transparent, segmented snake-like creatures that flowered into an ornate nest of tentacles halfway up. They had the same properties as the ship itself, completely disappearing when in shadow. It was hard to tell if they were manufactured out of the same material as the ship or if they were merely in the same state of existence.

One thing was for sure; they were reacting to an emergency. I couldn’t detect any visible damage but the creatures were running around in what looked like panic even though they were ignoring me completely.

My headlamps were bringing the chaos into sharp relief. I wasn’t even sure if they could see me. They made no effort to avoid me yet somehow they never collided with me.

This looked like a cockpit of some kind but from what I could see through the translucent walls, the same activity was taking place in similar rooms. I couldn’t detect a central engine or chain of command.

Experimenting, I turned off my head lights and spun slowly to look behind me.

Lit by the sun from behind, my long shadow was a perfect me-shaped hole in the floor with only the depths of space staring back at me. I nudged down towards it and dipped a toe into the hole.

And my toe went through the floor.

I recoiled. “I’m leaving the ship!” I said into my comm. I couldn’t help thinking about drifting through a wall only to have the light change its angle when I was halfway through and trap me there.

Another part of me did not want to be aboard when the aliens fixed the problem.

I needed to leave. The ship didn’t appear to be a threat. It was just stranded.

I left the ship and angled back to my waiting defense craft to debrief. I was going to recommend waiting.

Over the next hour, darkness washed across us all as we drifted into the Earth’s shadow.

As soon as the ship was completely shadowed by Earth and no longer in the sun’s rays, I told the ships to turn off any lights they had trained on the ship.

As soon as they did, the ship disappeared. When we turned our lights back on to where it was, there was only empty space.

The scientists still puzzle over that crystal ship, theorizing how it could have broken the light barrier with its massless form. They talk about how photons or solar winds must have confused its tech somehow.

What lightless planet did it evolve on? How could it have form and no mass?

How could travel to infinity but only through the shadows?




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