skonen_blades: (hamused)
April 30/30

29/30

I’ve gone to the future hundreds of times. Even to alternate universes. It’s all the same.

There’s nothing there.

Timecasting is a strange way to travel to the future.

You had to ‘throw’ a receiving station forward in time so that your timechair could land there. A receiving station was around the size of a car.

First, you retarded the receiving station’s constant with a time anchor, effectively nailing it to one single here and now. Like putting your back against the elastic of a slingshot and starting to walk backwards until it starts to stretch. The further backward you walk, the further forward you’ll go when you relax.

The flow of time dams behind the stopped station, becoming temporal gunpowder. It’s like putting a clamp on a hose and watching the water building up behind it. Or shaking a champagne bottle. After a few seconds, a timer turns the time brakes off and the station re-enters the timestream. The backed-up time behind it shoots the station forward. The longer the pause, the further into the future it gets.

Time cannot stand anything going against its flow. The resistance increases exponentially. The most we’ve been able to hold a station back for is three minutes. Luckily, that’s enough power to shoot the chair a thousand years into the future.

You could also say it’s like dropping a huge weight on one side of a seesaw. Whatever’s on the other side of the seesaw will go flying upwards into the air but the seesaw itself stays where it is. The seesaw is our present moment, and the timechair is what gets catapulted.

So after the brakes release the station comes forward, releasing its potential temporal energy, and flies past us in time, continuing on decades into the future. Everything that goes up must come down, to use the seesaw metaphor further, and so the station will slow, pause and then reverse course back to our lab.

At that perihelion, the tip of the parabola, it’ll stay still in one time enough for us to send a temponaut forward in the timechair. Then the receiving station arcs back to us.

As long as the timechair doesn’t move in the future, we can recreate the steps to bring it back. No communication is possible but with a good plan and a decent watch, the temponaut just comes back to the time chair at the agreed upon time, sits down and waits. Suddently, he’ll be back in the lab.

That ‘he’ is me. This time I’m only forwarding a few weeks.

The top secret reason that I’m doing this is because every time I’ve gone forward, all I’ve seen is rolling hills and regularly-spaced mounds of moss jutting up from the ground. In some of these mounds, I can still make out windows. As far as I can see from where I land, there is nothing but grass and ivy and nature reclaiming the city to the point that if I didn’t know the layout of the streets, I wouldn’t even be able to tell that the humps had been buildings. The city has been dead for centuries if not millennia.

There are deer. There are birds. There are no humans.

The first jump I did took me a thousand years in the future. There have been 58 jumps since then. The last one was just six months into the future with the same results. An impossibly long-dead future just a few days away from this bustling human-dominated one.

I have no idea what it means but it scares me.



tags
skonen_blades: (hamused)
April 30/30

27/30

I’ve stabbed deep into the envelope around the white dwarf sun at the center of this solar system. My gravity repellers are maxed. I’ve skimmed the perihelion right in the onionskin. I came in at .75c and the slingshot here has nudged me just past full light. This experimental craft is performing perfectly. A silver arrow of flexible diamond called The Needle. The seventeen thrusters that have burst-accelerated me across a fifth of the Milky Way to end up here have all been discarded behind me like Fibonacci-spaced buoys. I was by all accounts the fastest human-constructed artifact in the universe.

I am seven miles away from the surface of the dwarf and here I will stay.

I can look up from my cockpit and see the whorls and radiation of the star as it quickly spins. My ship’s cabin protects me from the effects as does my hubris.

I have found out what happens when a ship with mass goes faster than the speed of light. Caught by surprise, physics found an agreeable solution that I have not found agreeable.

The moment I hit 1.0000001.c, all of my control panels stopped. They didn’t turn off. They just stopped. Anything that oscillated froze in mid strobe. My shuddering, screaming, deafening ship became silent. Oddly, I am free to move about. I can touch everything in my cockpit but I cannot move it. It’s like I am immersed in a three-dimensional photograph.

I am a fly trapped in an amber bulb of time. Why my consciousness has been permitted to remain alert is a mystery. Perhaps something to do with Schrodinger and perception. Even though there will be no outcome, there needs to be an observer.

The folks back home are waiting for telemetry from my ship. By my viewpoint, they will always be waiting.

I have been here for six days so far. My ship has not moved forward and I have not run out of air and I’ve felt no hunger or thirst. I seem to be destined to remain here. In a few years, I suppose I’ll find out if I’m even aging at all.

If I’m caught in a loop, it’s a loop too small for me to detect. I won’t go forward. I won’t go back. I have been put ‘on hold’ by the universe’s laws.

I wonder how many alien astronauts dot the border of light with me, strung out across the galaxy like doomed fireflies in jars.

Perhaps when the universe ends and physical laws break down we will all be set free to complete our parabolas.

Until then, my orbit is not done. My orbit will never be done.






tags
skonen_blades: (hamused)
April 30/30

17/30

If I’m wishy washy then it’s only because I wash wishes and I wish Wash didn’t die in firefly.

I cast spells to slow down time because I’m witchy watchy and I like to watch witches. Witches wash time to slow it down. A clean second is the kind that takes a long time to go by. Dirty time goes by too fast. Time that has regret or worry or a lot happening. Clean time, unobserved time, takes a long time to go by. Ironically, it’s the time that feels like it’s going by the fastest.

Clean wishes are the best wishes. Simple wishes. Clear wishes. Dirty wishes need to be washed. They have a better chance of coming true. If you have clean wishes during clean seconds, then your chances of having them granted go up astronomically. Wishes that cast washing spells on watches to clean time and make wishes come true live in in Whichitaw, Greenwich, Midwich, Edritch, and Sandwich.

Which witch will wash a watch? Which wish will witches wash? Watch the witches wash the wishes and watch the witches wash the watch.

Keep the watch in your pocket after the ceremony. It will run fast but don’t touch it. It will grant your wishes as you walk. Step by step, minute by minute.



tags
skonen_blades: (hamused)
I thought about these concepts this morning. It's not really a story but I like the idea of this element.

------------------------------

The miners kept disappearing. That’s how we found tempranium. It’s a new fifth-dimensional element that moves through time but not space. If you have a glass full of the sparkling, blue, translucent metal, that glass may be full for minutes, years, or centuries. But one day it’ll be gone. Suddenly but with no little pop as the air rushes in to fill the vacuum because it will have never been there according to the physics of the stuff. That’s how it appears and disappears inside of mountains without causing massive landslides.

You have to picture tempranium as a lightning bolt going sideways through time. There seems to be several deposits here on earth in the rockies close to where I grew up. There are claims being staked in more countries these days. The veins of tempranium have a unique effect on most intelligent life that’s aware of time’s passing. Any lifeform that’s capable of being impatient, basically. When an upper-minded life form touches the tempranium, they disappear from our timeline and join the tempranium’s constant.

If you touch it for a second, you join the tempranium while time flows around you and you’ll end up one second in the past. Same for five minutes or a year. The problem for time travel is that we seem to keep a sense of time with us when we go. If we want to travel five years into the past, you have to touch the tempranium for five years. That’s a long time to be sitting and holding onto a hunk of metal.

The other problem is that going back in time splits the continuum. You can’t change the past because you go off to a different fork, creating another universe. You are effectively removed from this timeline forever.

If you handle the tempranium with gloves and metal, it’s fine. You won’t get yanked. But skin-on-metal touching will pull you out of this timeline like a loose baby tooth. The physicists reckon it’s because of our ability to perceive it. Something Schroedingery goes on there. Spiders can crawl on the metal and nothing happens. Same with all insects. Dogs disappear. Cats, too. There are still tests going on. It’s an effective barometer to classify life’s intelligence, if a somewhat harsh one.

That’s why we mine it with machines mostly.

The military has made bullets tipped with the stuff. The minute they come into contact with an enemy soldier, that soldier is whisked away to an alternate earth, emptying this present battlefield of another enemy.

We’ve made time-dampening fields to contain the element. The fields also work on humans. That’s how we discovered immortality. Effectively giving us the ability to go forward in real time without aging. So now we can go back in time in real-time and forward in time in real-time.



tags
skonen_blades: (bounder)
There’s an 8 track. There’s a birdcage. There’s a bubble of soup. There’s a signature. There’s a corkboard with thumbtacks arranging half of a life. Here are schedules and numbers being added to calculate net worth. Here is a movie from 1982. Here are homemade efforts. Here is a stereo.

The distance between the edges of the chasm is one leap. The distance from the bottom of the rope to the top is one rope’s worth of effort. The distance around this hug is arms. They distance between here and success is trying. The distance between no degree and degree is school. “The shortest distance between two people is a story”. The distance between knowing and not knowing is learning. The distance between birth and death is life.

I am a cup burglar. I am a secret hoarder. I am a catalogue sniffer. I am an adding machine. My unconscious weighs my days and adds stacks to other stacks. The calendar is a treadmill, not a ladder. There are no days. Each day is unique. There is no Tuesday after Tuesday after Tuesday. One o clock does not exist. All paths are new and watches try to force us to forget that.

I am a collage. My inside-out truths match the mixture of tea and coffee in my cup. My time is up. But time is an illusion. So I am stretched calmly like a settling sheet over the distance between now and then. I am allegory. I draw my own parallels. I align to no comparisons. I put the past in a sound proof room and I muffle the future. The long game must be tackled in very small achievements. Empires are built by ants.



tags
skonen_blades: (hamused)
Time exists a byproduct of the universe winding down. Entropy needed a dimension to inhabit so time flowed in one direction to let that happen. Time is a secondary effect of the heat death of our galaxies. Time is a little brother. The creeping collapse of it all is the most important part of this place we see in the sky at night.

That means that clocks measure the death of the universe. That is their sole function. They have nothing to with life. They have no importance other than that. They do not measure our existence. It’s easy to think that clocks control us. They do not. They are Christmas ornaments. They are unimportant.


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skonen_blades: (Default)
Time is a liquid. It drains fastest through those beings that are able to perceive it passing.

Us.

It drains through our hearts. It drains through our worry. It drains through our fear of the future and our fretful attempts to hold on to the past. We are time vampires, sucking the universe dry. Ourselves and all other intelligent life with finite life spans are chasms that the hours and years spill into.

Nature abhors a vacuum and entropy abhors perception. We are canyons hungry for centuries. We eat time. The universe winds down faster because of our eyes. Our planet ages faster because of us. Dog years and cat years are actually longer than human years. It is us that puff out candle-snuff quick. We cannot see it because we are adrift in time. The clocks look correct to us but they are spinning faster than propellers on airplanes. We can't see the forest for the minute hands. It our own frame of reference that is flawed. Time sloshes around us in a surplus that splashes us in the face and drowns its way through our pores, through our ears, through our organs. We are pickled with time but still our bodies act like sponges abandoned in deserts, demanding more.

Some other intelligent life knows this. It knows that the more perceptive beings there are in one place, the higher the drain of time. Our planets are age spots on the hand of god. The only way to halt the hurrying is to meditate, suicide or hermetize. If single beings are spread out and can’t talk to each other, if they are stationed in places that have no change of scenery and no seasons, if they are taught to become one with the eternal now, the drain of time can be slowed to a drip.

But those are enlightened beings. There are those among us here on earth that have the power but they are in a pitiful minority. In much the same way that people with more money buy more expensive things that make them spend more money in an endless rising cycle, so too do the majority of people here save time only to stuff it full of more tasks. We are addicted to speed.

We are a black hole for temporal energy.





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skonen_blades: (Default)
Concurrent untraceable harmonicas coursed through his bloodstream. The stiffening of his legs from being kept in such a cramped space reminded him of ways to bring confessions out of alleged witches in the thirteenth century. Or was it the fourteenth? Either way, it’s disturbingly easy to create agony in a living body when time is not an issue. Simple tools will suffice. The beggar’s chair, for instance. A regular chair with for mushroom-shaped knobs evenly spaced around the seat. A person strapped into that chair would scoff at its effectiveness.

But then a day would pass. And another. The metal mushrooms would force the muscles of the thighs to adapt. To reform. The split and fray their muscular threads in an effort to recreate themselves, to adapt to their surroundings. It was like being stabbed through the legs in slow motion and it didn’t even break the skin. Four days would have anyone screaming incoherently, driven provably insane by the agony. It takes six months to walk again after something like that and even then, that person will never dance gracefully again.

It’s dark in his little crawlspace but luckily that’s not a worry for him. His eyes are tuned in and turned up. Mice crawl over him like he’s a piece of driftwood. He gives off no heat signature. In the past, he might have been called an angel. Further back, maybe a demon. More recently, a vampire or a witch. A hundred years ago he would have been referred to as a robot.

The truth is that he’s not from around here. He’s a synthetic alien built to last for millennia and built to look like us. Built to look like his creator.

The creature known as God to the humans built several hundred of them to police the Earth, to colonize it and keep it tidy. They’d failed.

Humans had evolved from single-cell organisms. They’d gotten footholds. For thousands of years him and his kind had kept the humans in check but recently they’d exploded across the globe, too fast to control. You can’t corral butterflies. You can’t herd cats. Even all-out war only seems to spur them into a rutting phase that doubles the population.

He is in a sunken ship with thousands of tonnes of nuclear submarine on top of him. The rest of his brethren are in similar situations. Under buildings, trapped beneath avalanches, resting in the foundations of cities they accidentally fell into. You see, a few hundred immortals are as prey to time as anyone. Not super strong but definitely unable to die. All of his friends are trapped now.
The human race runs amuck.





tags
skonen_blades: (Default)
Season six of Starfleet Academy had just started on the television. Pizza boxes were stacked high around him. The lights were out. Underwear and dirty clothes lay strewn about the place.

Jim’s laziness was catching up with him. He was growing fatter by the month. His uncle had gotten him work as a janitor in the science wing of the university but he wasn’t liking it. It was only part-time but it was hard on his back and the boss kept disrespecting him.

He reached forward to turn up the volume on the remote control when a flash of light erupted in the front of the television and a large figure stood blocking his view of the show.

He pushed back from the television, scraping the floor with couch. The effort left him wheezing.

“Jim, don’t freak out. I only have a few minutes to talk to you.” The figure fumbled around the boxes and clothes and turned on a desk lamp.

Jim looked up into the face of the intruder and froze. It was him but a few years older. Still grossly overweight and unkempt but with less hair and more grey.

“Jim, I’m you. I’m still the janitor in the science department. They’ve invented time travel. I’m one of the only people that has a key to the place after hours. The whole team has gone out to celebrate and I’m here alone. I’ll probably get fired for doing this but here.”

He handed over a few pieces of paper with some numbers on them.

“These are lottery numbers. Use them wisely and don’t get greedy. Keep the janitor job and don’t spend like a crazy person.”

As he spoke, he grew several gold rings out of his fingers and a gold tooth appeared in his mouth. A diamond stud sprouted out of his ear. Modest but expensive.

“Also, do some pushups and hit the gym. Even a little regular exercise will do the trick. My heart is ready to burst and I’ve been told that I only have a year to live before I need a transplant. Luckily I can afford it so that’s not too worrying but please do that.”

As older Jim spoke, fat melted off of him. He didn’t grow buff but he did look decidedly trimmer. The missing hair didn’t look so bad. There was confidence and a healthy glow to his eyes. His posture improved and he seemed less panicked.

“And Jim, please go back to school. We both have a natural aptitude for math. It’s how I could figure out how to use the controls here. Imagine what we could accomplish if we really applied ourselves! Jesus, if you'd have studied then maybe I wouldn’t have ended up just being a goddamn janitor.”

The older Jim’s stained jumpsuit whispered away in fragments and was replaced by a lab coat and clipboard.

“My colleagues will be back soon. We can’t use the time machine for personal use so I’ll no doubt face disciplinary action if I’m caught. One more thing. Ask Janine out. While my work is fulfilling, I regret not having kids and she was the one.”

There was a pause while an expression shuddered across older Jim’s face.

“Okay I have to go. I need to get home and tuck the kids in and tell my wife the good news. Remember what I’ve said.”

There was another flash of light and he disappeared.

Jim sat staring at the empty space where the older version of him had stood. He slowly put down the remote control, looked around, and started cleaning up his apartment.


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skonen_blades: (Default)
These days I like to wear adult clothes and pretend to be a library, looking laser-thin down the bridge of my nose to belittled people scraping through the uneducated book lust wilderness. I scrabble their hearts into my lengthening middle names.

I used to split my mind into different tented versions of myself so that I could hunt in packs. I unwrapped Christmas for young girls and sprinkled the glowing owl dust on their tiny moth-wing mouths. My conscience was all elbow back then and I was looking for a candle lens to see myself through. To see myself up. To see myself out.

You speakered me. You made anvil with my river. You made craters of silence in my speeches. Over time, you left graffiti on my driveway prison of a face. Every corner I take too quick, every losing bet I make with glee, every avalanche I start by laughing too loud, it's all dedicated to the way you forgot things in memory of yourself. I can still describe the arc of you, the parabola of your life. I see now that you were a runaway response to jail cell tangents. The further away you get, the more of my mercy you are blind to.

So now I sweep up disco balls and add crossbones to skulls on the black flag of my high seas. I have the intuition of a tame zebra. You left me with scars all over my cloak of invisibility. I let my backstage pass lapse and now it's as useless as old milk. I can only throw curve balls to music teachers these days and my boomerangs don't return. I have the simple anatomy of a pencil. I am almost completely business card.

So thanks for the high kicks and the plectrum embedded in my liver. I am a different person now. Tree frog bright and jaunty. I am bright paint on an old house. I am cobweb free and solid in my stare. Sure, I might be half nametag these days but it's from beautiful failure and not from a lack of trying.

See you soon, supernova. Return to me in your own time. I'll be on vacation until then. There is no smile in the world that can get away from me now.



tags
skonen_blades: (borg)
We reckoned with a material like this, it would take ten minutes for the event horizon to oscillate down to a state of entropy safe enough to let the test subject come back.

Ah, yes. The test subject. That would be me.

It’s not necessary to travel forwards in time. All that’s necessary is to make a functioning anchor and a bubble around it that will protect you. Something that removes you from the stream. Much like slamming on the brakes on the highway and letting all the traffic go past.

We had the technology and it was right here in my hand. A black stick that looked like the broken-off handle of a sword. We called it the throttle. Three cables snaked out of it into a grey box on the floor the size of a stapler. Not much to look at but the compound in its core was extremely expensive. It would another year to get as much of it.

A hard shake would break the shell on the inside of the throttle releasing a small pocket of reverse-entropy antimatter. The half-life of the antimatter was only a thousandth of a second but in order to process the magnitude of it an event horizon would extend out from our universe like a huge pair of wings into neighbouring timestreams.

To stop the multiverse from collapsing, the theory was that the ‘wings’ would be forced back into our own universe and would fold the other way, along the ‘x’-axis of our own universe. That is to say, along our own timeline instead of interfering with neighbouring possible timelines.

The stapler on the floor worked in a similar fashion to a loop pedal. It would capture the thousandth of a second it would take for the ‘wings’ of the event horizon to re-orient and then play that back to the throttle, giving it false information. Instead of disrupting our timeline, it would simply stack that thousandth of a second over and over until it reverberated down to nothing.

I looked at Gary who nodded at Stephen and he in turn gave Carl the okay. After double-checking his readouts, he gave Jake the thumbs up. Jake pointed three fingers at me, then two, then one.

I shook the throttle.

It didn’t take ten minutes. It took six weeks. I didn’t feel a second of it. In fact, I thought the experiment had failed until I noticed there were seven people in the room instead of four and the clocks were different.

After the de-briefing, I felt a little ripped off. While I’d been gone, a lot had happened. A few celebrities had died, a war had ended, even rumours of our experiments had made it into the pages of the less reputable tabloids.

But for me, it was less than a blink.

The world’s first time traveler. Bah. What a bogus title. At least the first man on the moon had awesome memories of the event.

Time travel is lame.




tags
skonen_blades: (Default)
Ode to Time

Oh sideswipe of time, you raucous flow chart, actuarial tabling us from milk and cookies to cancer-ridden hardware we can’t replace. You dancing dog. Your enemies number the ones that waste you. I have known people that have loved fully and achieved mighty goals welcome death with resigned grace. It's the ones that haven’t done what they wanted and can’t see the beauty in their failure that hate clocks as much as witches hate bodies of water and piles of sticks.

Time, you have sandpapered off my corners but I am not yet a wheel. The ride is still rough. The pull of you as I roll downhill feels like gravity. You go by quicker because of your familiarity. Only adventure slows you down. Only effort makes you invisible. Only fun makes you fly.

Records broken create timestamp beasts, children of yours that embarrass themselves until they are broken again. You cannot be divided. We have not yet found your smallest number. You are as unknowably vast to us as space. The fact that we have the audacity to measure you is hubris.

According to us, the Earth is out by a whole day every four years. According to US, the EARTH is OUT by a whole day every four years. What unbelievable arrogance. Foxes don’t know that they are called foxes, lions don’t know that they are called lions, and time does not know that it is comprised of hours and minutes and seconds.

There are no stopwatches in space. The right amount of time to make a sun ignite is merely the right amount. The number of revolutions needed to create a planet is merely the number of revolutions needed. If it cannot be a planet, it will be an asteroid belt. If it cannot be an asteroid belt, it will be rings around a gas giant. Nothing is measured. It merely exists. And time is what enables it to happen.

If there is a God then God is time. Time gives the universe permission to exist and it gives us permission to experience it.

Our human label makers will break one day. And the universe will take no notice. Time will wheel and erode and create and let this universe keep on keepin’ on like the gigantic clock it is. Each nova a tock, each quasar a tick. And there will be no numbers ever again.


tags
skonen_blades: (borg)
The Grandfather paradox states that a time loop will be created if you go back in time to kill your grandfather. If you kill your grandfather, you will end up not existing. But if you can’t do it, then he will not be killed by you. So he’ll exist, and you’ll exist, and he’ll be killed, and you’ll be erased, and he’ll exist again, and you’ll exist again, and he’ll be killed again, and you’ll be erased again, ad infinitum.

She came back to 2036 shaking and crying. She was wet and her hair was tangled. It must have been raining in 1978. I immediately got a towel around her and took her off of the temporal reception platform. She was steaming from the transition. She collapsed into me and we both lay down in the middle of the lab with the technicians staring.

“Oh god, what does it mean? What does it mean?” she kept saying.

Dr. Lauren Kim. The scientist responsible for the time machine, was here in my arms, soaking wet and obviously shaken to her core after her fourth trip back in time. The first three had gone quite well and she’d returned as her usual curt self. This trip had caused something to go wrong.

“Dr. Kim.” I said. “Doctor KIM!” I shouted. She focused on me.

“John? Oh John.” She said to me. She’d never called me John in my life. I didn’t even know she knew my first name. “I wasn’t thinking, John. He was there. He was going to die. But I saved him. The bus was coming so fast. It didn’t occur to me….I mean, I knew what would happen if he died but….”

“Dr. Kim?” I said, ice forming in my stomach.

“My great grandfather, John. I saw him. I looked him up. I found him and I went to observe him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I felt compelled. It went against everything I know as a temporal scientist. But I had to just see him, y’know? So there I was. On the street corner, and the bus ran a red light. And I…..and I….oh god.”

“What did you do, Dr Kim?” I asked, already dreading the answer.

“I saved him. Oh god, I saved him from certain death. I ran and gave him a tackle into the gutter and the bus missed us both before crashing into a dumpster. My great grandfather would have been crushed. He was only nineteen. He hadn’t met my grandmother yet. He thanked me.”

“Dr. Kim” I whispered. Nervously, I looked around the lab at the other technicians, at my own hands, at Dr Kim. We all still seemed to be here. Nobody was going invisible or winking out of existence. Would I even know it if they did?

“If I hadn’t have been there to save him, he would have died. And none of this would exist.” She looked around wide-eyed as if seeing the lab for the first time.

“Dr Kim.” I said. “Take a deep breath. Calm down. The lab is here. We are here. If there is a paradox, it’s not affecting us. Or at least not yet. Or at least this universe. Listen to my voice. We’re here.”

Dr Lauren Kim looked at me. “Are we, John? Are we here?” She put a hand on my face and then she passed out.

She’s in sedation in the recovery room now. I’m not sure how to handle this. The universe seems stable. Nothing about the world seems different.

Does the paradox exist if you save your grandfather?




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skonen_blades: (Default)
The Introdus happened in late 2021.

Seven hundred thousand time travelers showed up around the world.

The showed up on fire.

The showed up in clumps in the larger cities and by the singles and pairs in rural areas. Most of them were burnt beyond recognition.

Only sixty-eight of them were saved and of those, only sixteen were able to maintain consciousness. Of those sixteen, ten of them were only able to scream and scream and scream. They were sedated into comas. The six that were left were able to talk.

It was hard to get intelligible stories out of them.

There was a lot of confusion at first. The fact that these people appeared out of the air was hard to make the public believe. It was thought that a worldwide firebomb campaign had begun until the corpses and survivors were examined and not a single one of them could be identified. They simply weren’t on our books.

Scientists measured closer and verified that on a quantum level, the bodies were not from ‘here’. No one could confirm that they were from the future but that was the story those survivors told in slivers, gasps, and broken metaphor. Through shattered teeth and pain medication, though burnt faces and time-jumbled brains, through hand signals and languages evolved further from our own, they told us when the universe would end.

The invention of time travel triggers an event, they said. Once a switch on a time machine was thrown, the universe took notice. Some of them said that it was God, the Devil, Shiva or a giant mouth of fire descending through the clouds. The images they provided were delusional ravings. Entire continents becoming open sores, tentacles reaching down from the stars, the air shattering impossibly like glass, and dimensions bifurcating like paper being crumpled into a ball. No two of them were alike save for the fire at the end and a horrible universe-wide sentience saying "NO". A combustion not just of the body but of the entire existence of a dimension.

Each of the six survivors claimed to be from a different time and each one claimed to have invented time travel on their own with no help. If that was true for all seven hundred thousand of the travelers, then they all came from different Earths. The odds of them all discovering time travel independently on the same planet were too high.

They all had tried to escape the cataclysm that had suddenly appeared by using their invention. Some of them had fled to the dinosaur times, some had gone back two or three years to warn themselves, and some of them had set their dials to the far future.

But they’d all ended up here, burning and screaming, at September 18th, 2021 at 9:18 PM Pacific Standard Time.

The theory being introduced by the Pope is that the travelers have been sent as messengers. That whatever force destroyed them and sent them here in suffering did so in order to tell us that time travel must never be invented.

For once, the church and most scientists seem to be in total agreement.

By papal decree, UN Security Council ban, and unilateral G20 accord, research into time travel is prohibited and strictly enforced.





tags
skonen_blades: (saywhat)
I was sixteen when they came.

They touched down in large ships all over earth, silently with no visible means of propulsion. Jagged, asymmetrical leviathans ridged with glowing seams and thousands of softly humming translucent spikes as tall as skyscrapers. Their spindled undercarriages contacted the ground and there they impossibly balanced, footprints with no more square footage than a volkwagen bug. Islands on tiptoe with their furthest spires still in space.

A triangle of light spasmed open in their base and they came out.

They floated silently and ghostly like their ships did. They were made of a dark metal that could be made intangible at will. Red sensors ringed their masses. No two of them were the same size. Their appendages dangled, chunky black tentacles of many different widths, some cables nearly dragging on the ground as the beings floated out of their vessels. The smallest one I saw was as long as a cat and the largest was the length of a bus balanced on its bumper.

The missiles we’d fired at their ships at first contact still hung there in the upper atmosphere, barely moving in some sort of time-retardant field. The bullets and shells that had been fired at them from the ground troops did the same. So we stopped. We didn’t know if our stilled ordnance would go off when the visitors left. Our noisy impotence in the face of their silent superiority became embarrassing.

They scanned everything. They took no interest in us except to regard those that came close to them with a whirring chirp of blindingly quick quadrary math. Scientists and mathematicians figured out their language but the numbers still didn’t make sense.

Small ones for flowers but long ones for gardens, small ones for trees and massive ones for forests. Medium ones for buildings but huge ones for cities. London’s number was bigger than Vancouver. Damascus had a larger number that Paris. Water seemed to make the math go recursive and eat itself.

A temporal theoretician named Davis figured it out after some terminally ill humans approached the aliens in search of a divine cure. They were measured and forgotten by the aliens and left disappointed to succumb to their diseases. Those measurement numbers took on meaning after their deaths.

We don’t know how long they’ll be here but the aliens appear to know how long each of us will live.

People seek them out now. It’s a dare to get yourself measured. New parents bring their children, newlyweds find out how long they’ll have together, and one presidential candidate famously got measured at a press conference but the result was scandalously disappointing.

The aliens seemed to have a sense of time like we have a sense of smell. Common opinion is that the passage of time whorls around them and that they are more sensitive to it. That they smell time in chains and whips, in spills and gusts, in pours and dams. When we speak to them, they seem to only measure our word lengths and move on. Perhaps they’re entropy police cataloguing the known universe. We don’t know if they’re sentient or automated.

We are not intelligent life to them. They speak in measurements and nothing else. How they invented space travel is a mystery to us.

All I know is that I was measured yesterday and I have another forty-three years to live. I plan to make them count.





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Detective Peterson was reviewing the interview footage of Kyle Raven. It was late at night and Peterson had looked at the footage many times. He was troubled but he couldn’t figure out why. He rewound the video tape and watched it again.

“That’s the thing, right?” Kyle Raven manically rabbited on during his interview, “If time travel ever gets invented in the future, they’ll come back here. Or before here. Right?” He was pure sinew, no body fat at all. Kyle Raven looked like a human rat. His eyes burned out from his head like meth-addict searchlights. “And they’ll mess it all up. Everything. Causality will fracture the universe. We’ll be screwed.”

“The voices told me this.” Kyle said gravely and then suddenly chuckled, “The visitors showed me.” He banged the table with his fist and thrust his chin up like an angry king. “I have a job. If you’re wondering where all the time travelers are it’s because I killed them.”

Detective Peterson and his crew had just pulled sixteen bodies out of Kyle Raven’s basement. The man was a psychopath and delusional. Peterson had seen this before, people lashing out at imagined threats. Aliens, illuminati conspiracies, demons, fairies; all conveniently taking human form and needing to be killed.

“I’m not the only one” said Kyle. “I’m one of many. The visitors employ a large number of us. I’m a temporal cleanser. A timeline deputy. You can’t stop us. I don’t care what happens to me. I’ve saved the universe sixteen times.”

One thing that was bothering Detective Peterson was that the FBI had showed up immediately along with several other black cars with no markings on them. They’d loaded up the bodies and taken them away. They had the proper authorization and there had been no trouble. In cases of this magnitude, the FBI was usually involved in one way or another but it felt unusual to him.

Peterson had helped excavate the bodies and some things didn’t add up. A body from what looked like one of the oldest graves came out looking like it was freshly buried. A stink of putrefaction was wafting out of it but the skin of the corpse appeared fresh and young. One of the bodies had what appeared to be a glass prosthetic leg. Two of them were tall enough to be professional basketball players. One dead girl’s cel phone kept vibrating in her pocket as the team lifted her out and everyone’s phone in the basement vibrated in time with that girl’s phone for six rings. Peterson was the only one who noticed that and he had kept that to himself. Then there was the five-year-old with grey hair and a business suit.

Peterson had thought at the time that the killer just liked to dress up his victims. He’d seen crazier things done to bodies.

But now here he was, reviewing the interview footage. Kyle Raven was in custody downstairs. No one had rescued him or paid his bail and he was on suicide watch. By all accounts, he was merely dangerously insane.

Something was bothering Peterson about the whole episode. The bodies, the FBI, and this interview. He rewound the interview to watch it again.

Just as he was about to press play, there was a knock at the door. Detective Peterson felt an unreasonable fear in the pit of his stomach.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“FBI.” Said a low voice outside.





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He reeled out of the stinking alley into me. I’d never seen anyone like him and I live in Manhattan so that’s saying something.

For starters, he was nearly eight feet tall and looked too skinny to stand. His hair was several different colours but as I looked at it more closely, it appeared to be made of metal. It sparked just after he bumped into me and the colours in it shimmered and changed like the wings of a beetle before returning to the colours it had been before.

I was fixated on that until I noticed his two extra arms and his tail. I say ‘his’ because his genitals were exposed. He was wearing what appeared to be tight chaps and a red cellophane cardigan.

His backpack was made of metal and smoke plumed out of it. If he hadn’t been staring into my eyes and grabbing my shoulders, I would have backed quickly away from like everyone else on the sidewalk did.

“Pour gras que serachi marta kursk trench ma jakatra, triestin?” he screamed at me. I heard something like a car crash happen deep in the alley. The stranger flinched and looked at me, waiting for an answer.

“Uh, what?” I said.

“Oh. I see. English. Okay. What day is it?” he said to me. His breath smelled like over-ripe strawberries. I noticed his skin was mottled with bruising. He was missing a tooth.

“Uh, Wednesday?” I answered.

He looked at me with that expression like he didn’t understand my language again. He looked at a device on his wrist. I guessed it was a translator. He acted like it was broken. He spoke again, louder and more slowly this time,

“What day is it? Centrus? Martus?” he said.

“Wednesday.” I said back to him.

He shook his head and looked behind him into the alley. There were sounds of a struggle and some impossible sound. If I had to describe it, it was like a sheet of glass being ripped in half. It sounded like something pivotal to reality was being split by force.

“What the DATE, then? The DATE? It’s supposed to be the 46th! Is that correct?” he yelled.

“46th? That’s not….it’s the 13th. March the 13th.” I answered.

“Maaaaaarch” he said and looked at me as if to confirm that he’d pronounced it correctly. I nodded. He looked at his wrist translator in terrified frustration. I realized that his eyes were different colours and that they never blinked at the same time. First one, then the other. Every time.

“Posska DAMMIT!” he yelled and let me go. He seemed to realize that even though I’d spoken to him in the correct language, my information was useless to him.

It was like he was a time-traveler except his frame of reference was useless at his destination.

There was a blue glow from the alley. The traveler who’d accosted me tucked in all four of his arms and ducked into the crowd. It didn’t help.

Tentacles of transparent metal shot out of the alley and entered the traveler's back. He was dragged backwards to the alley’s entrance. He spread his arms wide and grabbed the bricks on either side of the entrance with his impossibly long arms, forming a giant X. He was sweating. He looked at me with clenched teeth. His watch device broke and fell off his straining wrist. He glanced at it and nodded towards me.

“Remember-” he said but a charge of energy came through the tentacles and he shuddered. He was lifted into the air for a moment before disappearing quickly into the shadows of the alley.

There was the sound of thunder and then a sound of reality zipping itself up.

People around me kept on walking, already erasing the parts that had not made sense. I would have been one of them if he hadn't actually grabbed me. I lay on the sidewalk looking at the entrance of the alley. I looked at the wrist device the traveler had dropped. I scuttled forward, picked it up and brought it home.

I’m looking at it right now, daring myself to try it on.



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God give me patience, she thought, as Peter ran into the living room with what he probably thought was another great invention. Peter was wearing a flanged-open broccoli steamer on his head with a crude system of wires sticking out of it like dead flowers in a vase. He was also wearing what looked like most of the entertainment system strapped in pieces around his left arm and joined together with more wires. The iPhone duct-taped to his right wrist was glowing in a series of rapid colour flashes. A bucket was on one of his feet and it sloshed water on the hardwood.

I’m going to have to call the police again, she thought. He’s going to have to go back to the mental hospital. I barely made it through the last stretch. This was supposed to be Peter’s last chance.

“What is it this time?” she sighed.

“It’s a time machine!” he shouted gleefully. His eyes were wide and it looked like he’d chewed most of his nails down to the bloody edges. His lips were raw. He’d shaved part of his head. “It was the capacitor. If I reverse the polarity on it, this should work. I’ve got a line running up to the satellite dish turning the data into energy. That was the power problem I was talking about, remember?”

“No.” she replied. She was actually a little worried. He might electrocute himself this time.

Peter chuckled at his own brilliance and actually danced a little jig of anticipation, splashing more water around.

“Peter, let’s just calm down a little.” She said, starting to stand up and walk towards him.

“Wait! No. I have the prep field humming. Don’t come any closer. This is going to work! Now, I’ve set the reception point to be right here in the apartment in one minute. It’s going to take a lot of power so be prepared for a blackout. It takes a lot to send but it shouldn’t take any to receive. I’ll be okay on the back end. Oh MAN, this is the GREATEST! Honey, we’ll be so rich!” he shouted.

She looked at him warily, really worried now. More worried than she’d ever been, even more than the time with the knife-juggling.

“I’m going to start a song and hit the button. I’ll disappear and then in one minute, I’ll appear right here. For you, there will be a one-minute pause but for ME, it’ll be as if nothing happened! Are you ready? On the count of three.” He said.

“Peter, I’m not sure-“

“ONE!”

“-this is such a good idea.”

“TWO!”

“let’s talk about this.”

“THREE! JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE ALL THE-“

And there was pop, a shower or sparks from the light socket in the kitchen, the lights went out, and the bucket that Peter’s foot had been in clattered onto its side. Peter was no longer standing in it.

She stood there with wide eyes staring at the spot where Peter had been. She dropped her coffee.

Thirty seconds passed.

She picked up the phone to call the police and actually forgot what number to call. When she remembered, she stopped after the first number when it occurred to her that she had no idea what to tell the police. She waited.
Twenty more seconds passed.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

One minute. Nothing happened. Two minutes. Nothing happened.

She waited for an hour. She waited for a week.

That was a year ago. He never came back. Christmas is a hard time for her. She pictures him lost in some cosmic time vortex like in a movie single Jingle Bells over and over again. She keeps thinking he’ll pop back into existence with the rest of the carol on his lips. She thought that maybe he set it to a month instead of a minute. When that passed, she thought maybe a year. Now that’s passed, too. Maybe it was a decade.

Maybe it was a century. Maybe he’s off dead in space somewhere, frozen in the act of singing. It was the not knowing that was eating her from the inside.




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skonen_blades: (didyoujust)
“The only thing time travel has ever been useful for is petty larceny”, Professor Peterson said from the front of the Temporal Studies lecture hall. “Except for the case of David Macker. Mr. Macker took theft to a new level. Some of you know what I’m talking about.”

Laughter rippled throughout the rooms as students from Universe Alpha One Prime chuckled at the other student’s ignorance. ‘High marks don’t buy you a past’, as the saying goes. As smart as the other students were, their universes were still locked into stable timelines with fixed viewpoints. Universe Alpha One Prime was by definition unanchored, as were the sixty-eight copies of it swirling around the probability sphere at the center of the galaxy. A shifting layer of probability built on a man-made temporal fault left over from the wars. The students from Prime had a disturbing way of changing appearances, changing names, and, worst of all, winking out of existence and having ‘never been’. Students from other universes noticed this but students from Prime didn’t. It creeped the other students out.

“Macker was one of the proto-temponauts. He constructed the first needle and found the energy equation necessary to skip that needle across the face of a time like a hard disk or an old-school record. At first decades and then centuries.” The Professor continued. “He looked up declassified scandals from centuries gone past and used that information to blackmail governments from old pre-split Earth, unaware that his own travels were causing more splits.”

The Zapruder film popped up on the screen in front of the classroom, instantly mirrored in the eyes of the students as they looked at Kennedy’s head snap back and the left, back and to the left, back and to the left.

“Macker took the declassified materials that outlined the entire setup and then went back two hundred years to the administration responsible and showed them the proof. They believed him. He had a shield in place so they couldn’t kill him. All he asked was that they put small amounts of money into bank accounts that Macker knew would still exist in our time. By the time he skated further down that timeline, compound interest had given him more wealth that anyone alive at the time. Then he’d come back here.”

Shots of planet Macker lit up the screen. The Alpha students weren’t laughing anymore. That level of carnage was sobering.

“The problem with his scheme is that is creates a paper trail. He was caught but the siege on his newly acquired populated solar system is still the costliest war ever fought in terms of loss of life.”

Amateur telescope footage came up. Dots of light flared and went out in a corner of the sky.

“Time travel theory is complex. The idea that Macker was repugnant and evil isn’t being debated. His crime worked. You can’t bring a loved one back to life or change the course of a marriage but currency and non-living minerals can shift from timeline to timeline.”

The students were left alone with this knowledge.



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skonen_blades: (saywhat)
I’m a mechanic. I work on time machines. It’s tricky work.

I collect the journals of teenagers that have committed suicide and cross-reference them for similarities. I suppose as hobbies go, it’s a little dark. Whatever. It keeps me humble, rooted in the now, happy to be alive, and aware of death.

I have a theory that some people can sense when they’re in the wrong reality. Reality bifurcates and splinters every second and sometimes, with a shudder and whip, a person can jump the tracks over onto the wrong set of rails. Their life is similar at first, then increasingly divergent. People that can sense this get more and more bewildered.

Me, I’m just happy to be drawing breath. Being as close to these engines as I’ve been for the last twenty years, I’ve probably shuffled through dozens of alternate realities. I have no sense of my reality changing but sometimes I listen to the air around me for ripples, anything to tell me that something’s ‘gone wrong’.

You can see how people in my line of work tend to go crazy after a while. It helps to have a hobby.

The fourth-dimensional propellant for time machines is notoriously unstable. We had a time fire last Monday that’s burning for two weeks forward and back from the explosion. A fuel leak hit a spark and all of a sudden, I could remember the fire starting ten days ago, working up to the explosion. This reshuffling of memories is what sends most chronomechanics around the bend.

I’m pretty passive about it. I just go back to reading my journals and try not to think about it.

The journal I’m reading tonight is for James Sharon MacDougall. He hung himself two years ago up in the old Jenkin’s place on Powell Road.

What’s interesting to me is that I saw James yesterday down at the Safeway.

I have to get to back to work.





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