skonen_blades

I walk into the room and see myself there on the bed.
Dead or sleeping, I can’t tell.
I’m scared.
I hear a footstep behind me.
I look behind me and see myself walking up to the room.
We make eye contact and I quickly look away.
I look back at the bed.
The body in the bed opens its eyes and frantically gestures for me to get under the covers.
I dive into the bed with him.
As I do, he scurries under the blankets to hide.
He hides very well because when I look down at myself, it looks like I’m the only person in the bed.
I take his place just as the other me comes into the room.
I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep.
It occurs to me that the me in the doorway might actually think I’m dead if I do this.
I open my eyes just in time to see that doorway me is scared of something behind him.
I motion quickly and quietly with my hands, telling him to get into bed with me.
He does.
I dive under the covers just as I hear the third me get to the doorway and
I open my eyes and I’m in a hallway.
At the end of the hallway, I can see the door to my bedroom.
There’s someone standing in the doorway.
It’s hard to tell from behind but it really looks like me.
He’s wearing the same clothes as I am.
As I start to walk towards him, he turns and sees me.
Shocked, he turns back, staring into the bedroom.
He leaps away from the door into the bed.
I can’t see him anymore but I hear some tussling of bedcovers.
I walk up to the doorway of the room.

I walk into the room and see myself there on the bed.



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I seem to have hit a time ‘dam’ of some kind.

My personal temporal relocation prototype device is working perfectly but there is a barrier here.

It’s a blue wall and it extends as far as we can see.

When I say ‘we’, I mean that there are six copies of me here with me.

We are all quite distressed.

When I first arrived here, I arrived by myself. The blue wall looked nothing like my destination. I was trying to go to a future Vienna. I immediately tried to go back home, slapping the button on my time travel belt. That only brought me back here.

I met myself then. We both arrived at the same time, looking at each other in shock, immediately terrified of any sort of paradox. In a panic, we both slapped our buttons to return home at the same time. Stupid. I already knew it wouldn’t work but I reacted instinctively when I saw my copy, just as he did.

It had the same effect as before. We boomeranged back just in time to meet ourselves getting here. Then there were four of us.

The two of us with memories of failing to return home reached out to the two new ones just arriving and told them not to go anywhere. They didn’t.

For a while, we considered our options.

We elected that one of us try to keep going forward and drew straws to select which copy of us would go.

He tried it.

Then there were five of us.

We took apart one of the time travel belts to see if there were any sort of feedback loops in the circuitry or if the power modules had changed. It was experimental technology but with our five minds working together, we improved the design and cobbled something together with a more direct hold on the temporal flow and much more boosted power.

Copy number 5 was the winner this time. He tried on the belt and slapped the button, bidding us adieu. We had a theory that if he was successful, the rest of us would disappear. It was a frightening moment. Copy 5 disappeared in a puff of smoke.

And came back just in time to meet himself again.

Now there are six of us.

We are afraid to go anywhere in time. We’re wondering why we’re the only ones here is this is a time trap. Shouldn’t all time travelers be stuck here?

We all brought enough food and water to last for a week.

And it’s been a week.

It just occurred to me that maybe if we'd sent a time belt back wrapped around some water and food, we could have created an infinite supply for ourselves. Wish I had thought of that a week ago. We have nothing now.

Other alternatives are coming to mind that I don't like. I can see the same look in the eyes of my copies. I've never tasted human flesh and I don't want to.

We’re thinking.



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The problem was material.

By my calculations, I would have had to have built a dish over six miles in diameter. Tin or lead-lined steel would have been best.

I’m an old man that lives in my son’s basement. I don’t have the money to afford that much metal, let alone get a grant from city council to build something so huge within the city limits. I was stuck.

Until I thought smaller instead of bigger. I bought an old electron microscope from the university that they were going to throw out anyway. My son thought it was a good idea to humour his old man. I bought thirty magnets from the hardware store and aligned them in the way that I’d read about but with a few adjustments of my own. By pulsing the electrons from the busted television through those magnets with the electron microscope turned on to observe them and therefore make them collapse, I basically created a tachyon spray gun.

With it, I could describe a radius of five miles around my house in an invisible web of time-retarding, mostly-stable tachyon nets.

Totally harmless to the normal population.

To time travelers, it might as well have been a brick wall.

The first traveler arrived at midnight on January the first. The party was in full swing upstairs and they thought I had gone to sleep.

There was a flash and there he was. Dressed in blue and with goggles. He had a bright orange rubber fin on the top of his head. He was wearing black rubber gloves and his chest had a tangle of monitors on it. It looked pretty homemade. He had what looked like a throttle in his left hand and something that looked like a hand-blender in the other.

“Sweet! It worked! Where am I?” he asked. Looking at me and then at his surroundings with a wide child’s smile on his face.

“1958” I lied.

“What? That doesn’t make any sense.” He looked down at what I guess was his temporal co-ordinator.

I raised my gun and shot him through his left eye.

The party upstairs was loud enough to cover the gunshot.

I took off his clothes and looked at his tools. There had to be about six patents here alone. And judging by his inexperience, he probably wasn’t even that advanced.

I would rob more of them and steal their technology. I’d leak the patents out on the market. I’d be rich.

Right now, though. I had to take the body out to the truck and sneak away. This time traveler was about to mysteriously disappear into a shallow grave in the forest.



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Looking for sin in these people is like twiddling the knob on a radio in a crowded city. There are stations between the stations. Every person I walk past is broadcasting their own shock jock phone-in radio talk show. What gets me the most is what people think is horrible.

I walk past a kid in his teens who’s still flagellating his soul because he didn’t visit his grandmother before she died. There’s a guy on the steps over there who practically suicidal after noticing that his very young daughter looked pretty hot in the bikini she wore to the family outing at the beach. There’s a clean cut man in his thirties who’s still overcompensating for the fact that he tortured a cat to death when he was eleven.

These people are haunted over nothing. When I walk through the slums of Shanghai, I’m genuinely turned on. God give me El Salvador again. These little sins here in Idaho? They’re nothing. Not even sins. Just fears of possibilities of sins. Even the monsters that lurk in these people are cuddly and innocent. Nothing to work with.

I had a future downstairs. They were going to promote me. I had to get lippy and ambitious, though. Seems like the impatience of the humans was starting to rub off on me. I’ve never been a ‘long con’ kind of demon. I like the get in, get out, get a soul kind of business. When I tried to take those ten souls off of that cruise ship before the signal was given, I ruined the whole operation. Parts of my backs and thighs still hurt and that was ten years ago.

Stupid rules. Stupid plans. They think we’re getting stronger and I think we’re just getting watered down.

I’m hoping to find someone here to tempt, to crush, to entwine, when suddenly a black hole walks by me. It’s like I’m looking into a black grand canyon filled with spiders. It’s like I’m looking down an old well with babies at the bottom. I shake my shaggy head and look again.

Just a dude in a grey suit. Blonde hair, forties, looking a little ragged around the edges. He’s dragging a dog leash beside him with no dog. Walking quickly.

There’s a stink on this dude that I haven’t smelled since…well…ever. A few of the Germans that were deep into the necromancy, possibly. I mean this guy reeks of evil. Before I know it, I have a raging hard on. I’m drooling. I have to compose myself.

This is a prize worth taking. This is a prize worth bringing home. This will get me reinstated to somewhere with a future.

I follow the grey suit into the alley.

He stops at the end of the alley and stands. I’m thinking that he’s going to take a piss or something but he just stands there. I cock my head.

The sunlight behind me chalks out and the alley’s shadows stop moving. I get the sense that a door just slammed behind me but I heard nothing. I don’t even have time to be scared.

Grey Suit splits down the back and the storm lashes out. Something like an orgasm of pain rips through my entire being. I’d scream but my mouth is filled with dancing razors. My whole sense of self is whisked away on the back of searing agony that I didn’t think was possible for one born in fire. My flesh is peeled back hotly like a banana skin and my screams are sounding like hysterical laughter. I feel myself getting thinner. I feel myself getting smaller. I’m being whittled.

I’ve been caught by an angel. When my corporeal being, the person I’m wearing, and my soul are all rags and splinters, he’ll forgive me as a coup de grace. I’ll be pulled against my will up into the light where I will overexpose and die for real.

I let myself get trapped. I’m a stupid demon. There’s one less of me now.


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