skonen_blades

I can remember them and no one else can. I’m trying very hard to figure out why.

Time travelers. They walk around among us. Lots of them. Weird costumes, strange tech, and all kinds of bizarre customs from the different centuries.

I’m looking at one right now. Huge shoulders and skinny legs, bright orange jumpsuit, one misshapen cybernetic eye. He’s laughing with a friend of mine.

They talk to us and interact with us. They talk to each other and they interact with each other.

But none of them remember. The time travelers remember what they see when they come back here but they forget each other. And none of us remember our interactions with them at all.

Time travelers cause contradictions in the timeline so it seems the universe rewrites our memories. We can talk to a traveler for an hour but the minute we look away, it flees from our mind. Like the rewriting of reality in a dream from one scene to the next. No alarm bells ring in our head because our memories get filled in with something that makes sense, that works with the timeline.

But not me. I talk to them and when I turn away, I remember the conversation clearly.

When I look at footage of Ghandi, I see clusters of travelers in the background. Every famous figure is crowded with these strange, bizarre, creatures from further up the timeline, all drinking in the scenery and forgetting about seeing each other.

I’ve shown this footage to my friends. It’s not hard to find. Just any youtube clip of an icon will do. My friends see the figures, too. We talk about them. Then as soon as they look away or don’t pay attention for a second, they don’t remember what we were talking about. Not in a way that makes them thing anything’s strange. It’s very frightening.

I don’t know why I’m immune.

If it was going to have a huge impact in the future, you’d think I’d be the person mobbed with travelers. But I’m not.

But I figure if I’m the only person that remembers conversations with the future, I can use that to my advantage. Not just with getting sports scores and placing bets. But with actually brokering information between travelers. They remember what I say but they don’t remember what each other says. I can be a broker of information. A biological e-mail server for time travelers.

For the first time, I’ll telling one now about my abilities.

He’s telling me a message to pass on to someone named Harakina from two hundred years earlier that him.

When he pops out of this timeline back to his with a wave and a nod, I brace myself for forgetfulness or cosmic punishment.

Nothing happens. I remember the message perfectly.
I’m waiting for Harakina right now. I really hope this isn’t a bad idea.




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The phone we found with the boy’s body was troubling me. I turned it around in my hand.

It was late in the police station. My officers had gone home but as the acting chief, I was the one to turn the lights out at the end of the day. The paperwork of leadership. I was by myself. My brain was spinning.

The phone in my hand was an iPhone but the logo I was looking at didn’t have a bite out of the apple. My first thought was that it was a cheap Chinese knock-off. Bu it was also slightly curved. I have to admit, it fit in my hand a lot better than a plain rounded rectangle of my regular phone. I’m not up on my technology. Maybe it was a few generations ahead of mine. But why would a knockoff have a different shape than what it was trying to imitate?

The boy’s body had no ID. It was found in the forest near our town by a hunter. The clothes on the body were a little strange. Bright colours that didn’t go together. One sleeve was transparent plastic. One pantleg was shorter than the other. A copper necklace that looked out of place on a teenage boy. Small cheek piercings like I hadn’t seen before but he didn’t look like a punk or a misfit. Very clean shaven. Nice hair. No dye or strange shaved designs. Lots of hair oil, though. Almost like back in the fifties.

The fads of city kids come and go and I’m none the wiser, old man that I am. We get a lot of travelers through here. This is a small town near a main highway. Half our income these days is from the truck stops ever since the mill shut down.

This boy’s phone. I was looking at the screen now. It appeared unlocked which seemed unusual. The keyboard was standard, caps lock if you wanted and numbers and symbols if you tapped the right button. But there was a third keyboard with symbols I’d never seen. Not just upside-down exclamation points like in Spanish or Chinese characters or another language. At a guess, I’d have to say math symbols but I had been looking online for hours to match them and I couldn’t.

A full keyboard of them.

And the icons. It still wasn’t connecting to our wifi but the icons were confusing me, too. I’m used to games I’ve never seen before on my teenager’s phone. But I recognize snapchat. I recognize facebook. I recognize Google and Youtube. These were like them but different. Snapchat’s ghost logo has no arms. Facebook’s looking had a lower-case t instead of an f. Google was an R instead of a G and YouTube, while still called YouTube, was blue instead of Red.

And it wouldn’t connect to our wifi. It just couldn’t find it.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say he sidestepped here from another place. A different earth.


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It was a beautiful night to watch the stars go out.

The grass rustled softly in the wind. Small waves scudded across the pond as other families unpacked night time picnics. The clouds had been removed for the viewing so we could see the beautiful night sky in all its milky, glittering glory.

The man beside me is over 700 years old. He has two friends here that are the same age but they all look like they’re about thirty. I call him grandfather but I’m told there are a whole lot of ‘greats’ in there. He is a war hero. He is the reason we’re here. He speaks to me in ancient English. My mind translates.

“When humans discovered FTL travel, we came up on a lot of people’s radar. We had unknowingly joined a club and that club had enemies. Immediately, we were contacted and drafted into the conflict that raged across the stars.

We proved instrumental. In a strange twist of fate, our bodies were more resilient than most and our minds were able to withstand the chaotic dimensional tortures of n-space without the need for anesthetic. All the other races needed to go blind through the wormholes. Not us. We could pilot a course.

The shattering of reality outside the jumpships doesn’t squeeze the human brain. Being all meat and being stupid works to our advantage. When we see something we don’t understand outside the portholes and viewscreens, we can just shrug and go about our business. We can turn our inquisitiveness on and off. That is rare, apparently. Even automated ships can’t adjust properly in n-space.

So we were asked to pilot ships with sunkiller weapons to end the war once and for all. The good half of the galaxy depended on it, we were told.

We bent reality, folded space, and hopped in and out of the fabric of spacetime with technology customized especially for us. Zipping in and out of our dimensional plane, we supernovaed 23 suns and genocided 800 enemy races. We were successful. If there had been surviving enemies, we would be infamous.

But there weren’t.

The good guys won, kid. That’s why you’re here. And your mother and everyone on this planet and thousands of others.

Now look up.”

I looked up into the night sky.

“We jumped around an awful lot during our mission, kid. We bent a lot of light. For me, it happened a few weeks ago but those lights up there,” he motioned with his hand to one part of the sky, “Y’see, they’re 700 light years away. The light from our battle is just reaching your planet now. That’s how I’m 700 years old by your clocks. Now watch.”

My grandfather looked at an ancient chronometer on his wrist and then raised his eyes up to the sky. Everyone around us did the same.

It took an hour but I could see some of the stars up in the sky grow and fade, blooming and folding away into nothing. Constellations losing teeth and limbs.

It’s been peaceful for us humans and the other races in the coalition since the slaughter. Seven centuries of peace.

My grandfather and his fellow soldiers cheered and drank smelly liquids that came from their ship. I was told we don’t have any of what they were drinking here on our planet.

The rest of us just watched the stars go out like a reverse fireworks show, feeling sadness instead of joy.

My grandfather and his friends are laughing and crying at the same time.




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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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I’ve been schismed out. Shook loose. I’m walking around this laboratory and it’s difficult. The air is thick. It takes effort for me to breathe. I’m not sure how long I have to live.

Next to me, the other scientists ponder the place where I was standing. They’re looking quizzically at the space where I used to be in the machine. They’re frozen in time. Either that or I’ve been sped up. I prefer to think that I’ve been quickened. To think that that this machine has slowed the universe is too extreme for me to contemplate.

I was so sure that the voltage was safe. We thought that I might get a tingling sensation, maybe see some borealis across my skin.

But here I am trying to breathe ‘slow’ air, hoping that any of my colleagues are realizing what happened. It’s been an hour so far and I haven’t suffocated but I’ve been light-headed twice. The room seems dimmer. I’m frightened that might be because light is moving slower through my eyes.

I’m scared that if they turn off the machine, I might be trapped here. They need to exponentially dampen back the strata to below where it is in order to get me back to regular speed but above all, they can’t turn it off.

I’m hoping that one of them will understand what happened and hit the switch to dump more polarized electrons into the memory pools. My money’s on Sarah. I’m looking at her face right now.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human face get an idea this slowly before. I’ve watched Sarah’s face contort from confused from panicked to understanding. Now I’m watching her slowly evolve an idea, hopefully the idea to turn the electron switch.

I’m watching her face move like it’s the hour hand on a clock. I can’t perceive it changing when I stare at it but if I look away for a while and look back, I can see that it’s incrementally different. It’s fascinating to see a brilliant human mind move in such painfully slow detail.

I can imagine the tumblers in her head locking into place and coming up with the dawning of a notion. I can tell that she’ll come through for me because the rest of the scientists are still looking at my empty chair with puzzled looks.

I just hope that I’ll start to see her hand reach out towards the button soon.

I’ve tried to press it and nothing happens. It might as well be carved out of marble like my colleagues.

I tried to yell but it’s too much effort. That was one of the times I almost passed out.

Sarah’s head is turning now, her hair lifting and starting to fan out like the hem of her labcoat. In real time, she’s probably spinning as fast as she can but here, I know it’ll take an hour for her to get to where she needs to go.

I can see that she’s turning in the right direction and I can see her eyes fill with purpose.

I am exercising my patience. I am trying to breathe. I cross my fingers.




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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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I thought about these concepts this morning. It's not really a story but I like the idea of this element.

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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.



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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.




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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.





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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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