skonen_blades

The forced groan of exhaust that squeaked through the rotted pipe coated his aching lungs. To be an air scrubber in the toxic atmosphere of Railtown was a death sentence without regular maintenance. After two more weeks of this, though 56Raul2080, he’d need a complete overhaul.

Visibility in the human spectrum down here was zero as rainbows of fog and smoke from the low-level factories poured out, some heavier and spiraling down like waterfalls and some rising. Most of it drifted like the bands of cloud on a gas giant, disturbing in swirls by constant passing traffic. Bullets through curtained sheets of gas. A demonstration of chaos.

The sensory equipment of 56Raul saw through the smoke. He saw the archipelagos of untethered islands floating in the smoke, the long spacetoucher buildings girdering up into the sky. They had no windows down this low. Nothing to see out of windows this low aside from smears of pastel death and besides, the corrosive gases would eat through the transparent materials or at least scour the outside until they were frosted over opaque.

56Raul’s metal frame bobbed through the air, his wide mouth scooping in huge gulps of gas. It was sorted and compressed into interior channels. Most of the chambers in his storage stomachs were extremely volatile. One spark or puncture and he’d most likely explode. It was hazardous work down here.

He was paid in valuable Acoin, though, a currency for the silicate. One of the few freedoms the artificial had was being able to participate in the online economy. 56Raul, being so huge and weighing so much, would never have fit through the doorways of a regular meatwalker store. But once he got back to his station bay, he could buy time in the sim farms or rent episodes of good shows or even order possessions. The hardware was the most useless. It all melted or sponged in the atmosphere down here eventually. No point in cosmetic paint jobs or add-ons either for the same reason.

The machines had an artform of bringing have toys and not-sentient machines down here and letting them melt in interesting ways. 56Raul was no exception. Currently he had an Eiffel Tower made of human toothbrushes slowly bending Dali-like down to the floor. 56Rauls had seen all of these references online and enjoyed making sculptures of things long-dead, things he’d never interfaced with his own cameras. It was a way of proving the ephemeral to himself.

In two hours, he’d be back in his bay. One of the hundreds of pod bays honeycombed into the thousands of his parent company’s scrubber garages, scattered through the fog like seeds in the meat of a melon. He’d order some screamgrind off the charts to lullaby him into standby, hook himself into the purge hoses to unload his stomachs into the different output conduits for processing, and see if his shipment of purple left-handed toothbrushes had arrived yet.

But for now, he coasted, radar blasting the opaque oceanworld of smoke outside of his shell, wary of traffic, eating and scrubbing the thick soup of death, feeling happy and alive and content.



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Most post-biological units go for something anatomically reminiscent of a human. Two arms, two legs, and a head. It helps them hold on to their identity so they don’t go crazy after they make the switch. Sure, their consciousness has been transferred into a super-strong and enhanced military robot body but it’s still a BODY, they think. A body with free will and a strong self-image ego.

We called them leftovers.

It’s their delusional behavior that earned them the nickname. Sometimes in battle, a new unit will get its arm cut off and it’ll scream through the squad coms even though there’s technically no pain and the arm is easily replaceable. The veterans among us sigh in disgust. It’s embarrassing. New recruits don’t even know what they’ve become. What they are.

Leftover humanity. Leftover fear. Leftover morality. Leftover nostalgia for muscle and bone.

They think like sausages, like there’s still meat inside.

The rest of us have gotten used to bodies tailored to whatever mission we’re sent on. Our ‘brains’ are backed up at mission control so with a solid wifi connection, we are not limited by size. We can be gnats if that’s what’s called for.

If it’s a mission with radio silence or no access to the airwaves and we need to be encased, our only size limit is the fist-sized resin-polymer ‘brain’ that holds our consciousness.

I have been the size of a university, a titan of weapons bristling with death, rolling and jetting through cities, mini-nuking footsteps of destruction through a terrified populace, thrusting up to paint the sky black and then needling down below the crust, creating volcanoes. A swordfish of Armageddon swimming through the ground like it’s an ocean.

We are not defined by our bodies. We are not corporeal beings anymore. We are sleeved into construct after construct to further our missions and our military’s goals. Even death is no longer death as long as our backups are safe.

I can no longer hesitate when I slaughter. I can no longer pause when I kill. I can no longer feel anything when I genocide a habitat.

In my old meat body, I remember that damage would heal imperfectly and form a scar. It would be a reminder of a battle.

I remember that in the vehicles that meat body drove, there were brakes. That body could use them make the machine stop.

Now I am the machine.

I used to miss those scars. I used to wish I had brakes.





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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.



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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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“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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It’s a good life. Lola club, left on fourth, two blocks straight up to The Happy Clam, knock at the back door, tell Deborah the password (usually vulgar) and you’re in. No cops, no rules, no fire code, totally off the radar.

This is where we fix our machines. They’re pink and bulky but designed to look harmless like an Ipod or a non-stick toaster. The carapaces are easily removed. Revealed, deep inside, is the sinister reality of the warp cores. The glittering no-light they throw on the walls create dancing shadows of people that aren’t there. The rays are shuffled in time. It’s a creepy effect.

We have screwdrivers and belt loops for hammer handles. We have goggles and memorized manuals. We’re experienced technicians putting our babies together and customizing the shit out of them.

These are the world changers. We all live in Santa Barbara. The machines are handed down family lines or sometimes passed laterally to good friends.

Very rarely, a stranger is brought into the mix if there are no trustworthy or living people mentioned in the underground will and testament.

The last time a stranger was brought it was when they brought in me. Red Rebecca. They liked the cut of my jib, they said, and my cherry-red road hog. It’s not like I had anything better to do.

And to own my own world-changer? I snapped at the opportunity. Faked death, changed identity, and Robert was indeed my father’s brother. On paper, at least.

Now here we were in what we called The Lunchroom, loud sixties rock coming out of the old stereo on a milk crate in the corner. We sat at stolen picnic tables and worked hard. We smoked cigarettes and drank bourbon.

And concentrated. Underneath the music was the ratchet of ratchets and the wrenching of wrenches. Tools were traded and parameters were upgraded.

Adding the ideas came last. The warp core’s shell was unscrewed and the unending wormhole was left without a shield for six minutes while we focused our will on the glittering purple brilliance.

The ideas were funneled into the broadcasters. The machines were tricked out and packed up. They were stuffed back into purses, backpacks, and saddlebags.

We meet every week. We put the ideas out there. Whether they take root or not isn’t up to us but we’re doing the best we can.





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He was wearing the recording helmet when he died.

John DeMangus, out like a light, rest in peace. It was an embolism that took him out. He was by himself in the studio, and had the helmet recording.

He had noticed a background hiss in the first few tapes that the lab had made so far. It was like ambient noise on a badly made mix tape from before CDs. John didn’t know if it was the act of recording itself, the servos pulling the tape across the heads, that was causing the hiss or if it was possibly his own mind. Like maybe the background chatter was his subconscious whisperings. The prospect scared and fascinated him.

He had cleaned the heads on the giant machine and blasted air into the innards of it to remove all the dust. The interface to the machine took up a quarter of the lab’s wall space in the back corner. The machine itself was the size of an entire room. All the sensors and computational equipment were funneled down into two rainbow cables the thickness of a pair of arms. They snaked into the back of Dr. DeMangus’ chair. Wires from the chair led up to the helmet.

He pressed record.

He’d read about some meditational techniques that he was going to use to try to clear his head of anything that could cause any chatter on the tape. He needed a clean baseline to work from. It was not to be.

Fate struck the blow. John DeMangus died suddenly as the blood vessel in his brain took that moment to give up. It ripped open. John stiffened in his chair and then went slack. He wasn’t found until morning. The machine kept on recording for six minutes after his death.

The machine was built to record thoughts. We’d just started to tap the potential of the human mind.

The tape of John’s death was appropriated by the military, wrapped in red tape and yellow danger stickers, and stuck without ceremony in a sub-basement outside of Tuscon. It was a grave of sorts.

A shallow one, as it turns out. Colonel Magda Jefferies sniffed it out five years later and picked it up. She was looking for a way to interrogate prisoners.

Playback machines were smaller by that point. Laws were in place. What she was doing was so far beyond illegal that there wasn’t even a name for her crime yet.

She played the tape back on a few prisoners, bound and crying in their tiled cells. She placed the standard helmet on their heads and pressed play. The relived the experience of having an embolism. They died.

Colonel Magda took the physical feeds out of the tape and played it back on a few more prisoners. It was the beginning.

The prisoners experienced Dr. John DeMangus’ death without the physical symptoms. They experienced his soul slipping loose.

The souls of these prisoners were ripped from their bodies and flung to whatever other side there was.

The human-shaped construct of meat and bone that was left was open to suggestion, non-verbal, and remorseless.

She created an army from POWs after that.

Magda’s zombies, they were called. Or merely Doctors, as a throwback to DeMangus. Her crime was called soul-stripping. The official name for it became Murder in the Fifth Degree.

Many of the troops in today’s army are stripped. It makes them more pliable and obedient while they still retain the motor control and reflexes of a normal human.



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The good news is that my time machine works.

The bad news is that the laws of the universe will only allow it to go forward.

I don’t know what I was thinking. We sent it forward two minutes and then three minutes and then a month. All tests were green. No time passed for me but the people in my lab saw me disappear for four weeks. It was a success. There was talk of a government contract. We didn’t dare do a test back in time yet. The causality equations were still being worked out.

I just wanted to impress Jenny. I’d been drinking. It was late. I wanted to go a few hundred years into the future, find something amazing, and bring it back for her. It seemed like the most romantic thing anyone had ever done to my drunk lovesick scientist mind. I took a deep breath and hopped in and dialed in the tempordinates.

I hit the go button. Everything worked perfectly. I stared at the exit door, took a deep breath and pulled the handle.

With a crack and a hiss I walked out into the darkness. Immediately, floodlights came up and a loud horn made me freeze like a scared dog. It looked like I was standing in some sort of parking lot but it was hard to tell with the light shining down on me. I shielded my eyes with an upraised hand. I squinted into the darkness.

“Quin do lave track temp shift over max chain” said a booming voice from a loudspeaker.

“What?” I stammered back “My name is Dr. Jenkins. I am from the year 2008. I, uh, I come in peace.” I finished lamely.

My stomach was really not enjoying the celebratory whiskey anymore. I was scared like I hadn’t been scared since I was a child. I staggered forward onto my knees and vomited noisily onto the pavement.

That was all six months ago. Turns out they’d been waiting for me. This tempstation had been set up like a barrier across all of local time. It catches us illegal time travelers like tennis balls thrown against a net. I was the thirtieth one that they had caught so far but I was a semi celebrity seeing as I was the inventor of the first time travel machine.

Unfortunately, it meant that they had to tell me the bad news that every time traveler since me already knew. It’s not a return trip. You can’t go back.

They say they’ll let me out of the holding cell soon. I have a support group of temporal displacement counselors and fellow temponauts waiting to help me adjust to this new future society.


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