Story 198: Limited Options

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

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"I can already tell you aren't interested in the admittedly confusing equations I've taken the time to write out, which is fine. So to give a quick and imprecise summary I will use the tired metaphor of Schrödinger's Cat, where a cat is placed in a box with something toxic that will be released with a fifty-percent likelihood, triggered by radioactive decay of something else in the box.

"In the Many Worlds interpretation the universe splits, and in one the cat lives while in the other it dies. Obviously we only get to see one of the two, but both happen somewhere. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until a measurement collapses the wavefunction to just one option at random. In the Stockholm interpretation, the cat falls in love with the scientist that locked it in the box.

"Nothing? Well, my wife thought it was funny. At any rate, while the Copenhagen interpretation is currently the most accepted there are problems with all of the theories and they are all devilishly hard to test. In large part this is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one, until we can get more data. Rather, until they can get more data. I already have it, and know the answer. I'm just not sharing it yet.

"Imagine, for a moment, that the Many Worlds interpretation is correct. That means that entire universes are unfolding constantly, an unimaginable number of them every moment. Some have speculated that we could find a way to travel between them, see the alternate versions of Earth that might have been. That's a pretty thought, and something that might come to pass someday, but what I've discovered while working towards it is far more productive – and profitable.

"The device you see before you provides limitless free energy. This one prototype could power every device in the world at once if you could find a way to plug everything in. Every instant our reality is remade along with an infinitely expanding fractal cloud of others, and this device just... nips one in the bud. All the energy of the big bang, for free. All for just one lost option, one that will never be missed.

"Destroy the universe? Not this one. No, it's quite safe. Technically speaking it destroys a universe every ten seconds or so, but they're more like proto-universes. It's not a big deal, really. It very nearly collapses them before they exist. Very nearly. Honestly, you don't need to look so horrified. We're talking about free energy here. This is the holy grail of science. It's... excuse me?

"No, I told you it's perfectly safe. It can't break in a way that would do any more harm than a transformer exploding – You would have to deliberately turn it into a bomb if you wanted it to do anything serious. Well, yes, in theory. I'm not sure that's a productive use of free energy, but I suppose with the right design you could release a minute fraction of the harvested energy as an explosion before the device obliterates itself. Call it one-one millionth of a percent, enough to level New York. No, no. The state.

"But we've gone off-topic. Back to the matter of free, clean energy for... Pardon me, but I'll thank you to put away those guns."

Story 192: The Sound/Fury Variable

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

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Charles is scared, which is understandable. If I had to guess I would say that in his head he’s attempting to dial the police right now, over and over, even though I’ve blocked all transmissions. The lab has to be heavily shielded for my experiments, the fact that it helps with this kidnapping is just a happy coincidence. The tiny jerks of his eyes stop and he focuses on me.

"Walter... please. You need help. Don’t do this. Don’t kill yourself."

I have to smile at that. "I’m not trying to commit suicide, Charles – although it’s true that the machine will destroy the planet upon activating whether it works or not. So, yes, there’s at least a ten percent chance that I’ll kill myself... but those odds are acceptable. I have one shot for this, one chance to meet my maker. In one way or another I’ll be walking in the footsteps of God."

The reaction will begin at the core of the planet, if I’ve done everything correctly, and just before it tears the Earth apart I’ll be flung backwards in time. Impossible, according to all my peers. Insanity, according to Charles. He’s trying to get my attention again, encouraged by my mention of God. I’ve avoided his religious debates in the past, but here at the moment of destruction I see no reason to hold back. I take the double-crucifix pendant from his neck and snap the chain. "This? This is a lie, Charles. There is no afterlife, no soul."

"There is a God," he says, "and you can turn to Him! Walter, God loves you and wants..."
His voice dies off as I point the gun at him. I will enlighten him, but I don’t have time for debate. The device is nearly ready.

"Before the big bang, there was only God. God was without limits and without time, and was one with Himself. God knew that nothing could exist while He did, because God was all and all would be God. And so He chose to die, to explode and cast His body into the universe we know. Time and Space are the corpse of our dead creator, and we are maggots crawling within. You say there is a God. I tell you there is not, and the proof is all around you. Look upon His scattered remains and weep in mourning and in joy. You foolishly ask me to enter into a relationship with Him, but the truth is that God is a mother who died in childbirth – He never met us, never knew our thoughts or wrote books to guide us. All we can do to know Him is to look at what is left behind, the laws of physics that he used to commit suicide."

I step into the chamber. The reaction is already building, the Earth eating itself from the inside. The readings are excellent. Charles is screaming something, but I can’t hear him over the machines. They all told me it was impossible. But they never thought large enough. They need to go to a time without time, a point where no physics yet exist to say what can and can’t be done. I’m going to meet God, right now.

---

For a timeless instant God is aware of an arrival. He notes the relevant information: Elapsed time, 13.82 billion years. Complex DNA present. Method of termination? Pre-event time travel. And God saw that it was good. God ponders Himself, and resolves to try a 0.005% higher matter/antimatter ratio for attempt number 497.

Story 191: And That's When the Screaming Started

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

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"I'm sorry, Dave. The effects are likely permanent."

Roger looks properly sympathetic as he gives me the news, clutching my chart like a shield and wrinkling his forehead. I'm distracted, not by the bad news but by a green stain on his lab coat that I'm trying to identify. Lunch, medicine, or something else? Dave nods at nothing in particular, glances around the ward awkwardly and takes a step back.

"Well... I'll leave you to... process all of this. I, uh. I'll be around if you need me." Presumably Roger has mistaken my silence for shock or something. If he had been Kathy she would have sat down on the bed next to me and offered a shoulder to cry on. If he had been Jake he would have suggested we sneak out and go to the bar.

I know, because he's been both of them before.

I shuffle down the hall (flip-flops only, nothing with laces in case someone decides to do something drastic) and lean on the window at the end. I can see the lab building from here; feel the warm rays of the device reaching out to me. It's like ripples on a pond, expanding outwards from the big splash. The metal meshwork embedded in the safety glass presses against my skin, making a pattern of red indentations. I push off of it and stand upright, careful not to let my feet slide too close to the wall. There's a door next to me and I take the handle in hand – it's locked, of course, but I need support for this next part...

Dangling by the knob, I lean through the wall – high above the sidewalk I reach back through and unlock the door from the other side. I pull myself back and open it – the alarm sounds as I step through, but four out of five times the orderlies won't find me before I reach the street so I remain calm. The exit is facing the lab, unfortunately, so as I step through my feet sink into the liquid earth. Some interns walk past halfway between me and the lab, laughing about something, but they don't notice my stumbling, half-swimming sprint.

Finally I reach the corner and step around onto solid ground. I've lost both flip-flops, probably somewhere in the manicured lawn. I suppose I could make metal shoes and gloves at some point, armor myself against the effects of the device like an astronaut going on a space walk and head ever closer to the lab. Not that it would do any good. The device is destroyed, its ripples only felt by me.

Instead I turn towards home and...

"David? We've run every test we can." It's Kathy this time. She's looking at my chart even though she's probably memorized it. This was the shortest yet, maybe ten minutes. Hardly worth sneaking out at all.

"I'm afraid that the effects are probably permanent. The... the dementia and disorientation will never go away."

There has to be a pattern to it. Why the little things change, why it lasts longer some times than others. Unless I'm actually crazy, but that's a dead end anyway. Kathy sits next to me on the bed and drapes an arm around my shoulders. I think she's wearing different perfume than before.

"It's okay, David. We'll figure this out. Somehow."

Well, time for plan 'B'. Let's see her reaction to something impossible. I take her hand and point to the hallway. "Will you take a walk with me? I want to show you a magic trick."

Daily Story 164: Stowaway

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

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I’m weightless, then suddenly formless like the universe before God spoke to it.

I’m behind my desk, staring at a black screen. There are three bananas on the desk and no peels in the trash, so it’s probably a Wednesday morning. The desk is one at SureTech and I’m wearing a wedding ring, so it’s between May of 2004 and July of 2010. Everyone is standing up and looking around, surprised by the sudden power outage. I check the phone, but it’s dead so I just sit back and wait. I have all the time in the world.

"Tom?" It’s one of my coworkers. I haven’t spoken to him since he died of lung cancer two years ago. He looks healthy – so it’s probably not later than 2009. For a second I have trouble speaking for some reason, but then the words tumble out.

"Yeah Josh? What’s up?" I’m pleased with how casual I sound, but now I’m thinking that I should have sounded concerned. Healthy or not, Josh looks scared. Maybe he just found out about the cancer? Did he even tell me about it before it was obvious?

"Tom... does your cell phone work?" I pull it out knowing that it won’t, but I make a show of checking. Josh just nods.

"I need to step out. Maybe get a drink. I can’t get anything done with the power out anyway."

I’m at the bar across the street, and I don’t remember going there. The feeling of disorientation passes and I realize that Josh is talking to me. He has an empty glass in front of him and is holding one that’s mostly melting ice.

"I... it was the strangest thing. Right when the power went out... I don’t know, I guess it was a kind of hallucination or something, but I... it’s like all of these memories. It has me confused, I remember my... it was just that I must have nodded off or something. It was a dream, but so vivid and so detailed. It was the next three years of my life, right up to my funeral." I’m fidgeting with a cocktail napkin, trying not to react, trying to remember to breathe. This isn’t happening.

Josh and I are both back at my desk. I’m still holding the cocktail napkin, though I don’t remember coming back from the bar. I shouldn’t be blacking out. The power is still out, which is strange because it should only last fifteen minutes at the most. In the grand scheme of things that’s less important than Josh having displaced memories. He wasn’t there, he didn’t come back. He wasn’t even alive, and you can’t remember your own funeral in any case. Josh is still talking; I’ve missed part of what he said.

"So... are you coming?" We must have just gotten back, but he wants to go somewhere? I nod and stand up, and we both walk out of the suite and down the stairs into the lobby. Josh throws what looks like a full pack of cigarettes into the trash can as we walk past it.

"Let’s just hit the bar across the street," Josh says, and my stomach is a bottomless pit. We haven’t gone to the bar yet. My fist tightens around the napkin that shouldn’t be there and I pray that I’ve just lost my mind, that the consciousness transfer failed and I’m in a coma somewhere.

God forgive me, I’ve broken something.

Daily Story 145: In Accordance With Prophecy

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

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Gerald Forsythe was still too weak to move, his mind still partially asleep, but he knew the walls didn’t look how they should. Ever so slowly he was able to take in bits of information in an attempt to solve this riddle. The walls were flat. Good. They were a pale green color. Good. Gerald felt a moment of pride at remembering the color ‘green’, and then was immediately embarrassed for thinking of that as an accomplishment. Was waking up from stasis always like this?

The walls... were dirty. No. Not dirty, and that was the problem; they were perfectly clean but looked dirty due to the general wear and tear of use – scratches, dents, corners softened by the casual bumping of hips and hands. The walls had been so crisp and perfect what felt like an hour before, but Gerald was almost fully awake now and could remember that his first shift was set to be twelve years into the journey. Should the walls be this damaged already? If twelve years could do this would the ship even survive for the hundreds of years it would take to reach the new homeworld?

Gerald sat up, and darkness pressed in around the edges of his vision for a moment before receding. He turned his head – slowly – and confirmed that he was alone in the decanting room.

“Computer,” he called out, wincing at his sudden headache, “How many years since departure?” The speaker spewed out crackling noises in reply, but Gerald was fairly sure he had heard “Three hundred Seventy-Five”. That explained his hangover, at least.

“Computer... how many people are currently active?” He knew the massive arkship should be operating on a rotating skeleton crew of forty people, each crew member serving for three years before going back into stasis. The speakers crackled again, the reply slightly more audible. “One Hundred Thirteen.” Life support could provide for roughly three hundred Active humans indefinitely so this wasn’t a safety concern, but it still meant something was wrong... Any further questions Gerald had were forgotten as a strange figure appeared in the doorway.

The man had a thick, bushy grey beard and long hair, and his jumpsuit had been cut and dyed so that it was barely recognizable. He had to be at least fifty, and the cutoff age for colonists was thirty – not everyone on Earth could be saved.
“You are Engineer first class Gerald Forsythe?” The man asked. Gerald nodded. “I am Ethan, son of Eric, son of Lars. I am sorry to pull you from the Great Sleep, but my daughter Sarah is our current Speaker and she says you are needed.”

The man clearly thought this sentence made perfect sense. “What... what the hell is a Speaker?”
“The Speaker,” the man replied, speaking slowly as if explaining to a child, “is the one charged with interpreting the will of the Computer, that it may guide us all to the Reward where your people can once more awaken from the Great Sleep. Sarah has told us that the computer needs someone to enter one of the Forbidden Halls.”
“Which... uh... Forbidden Hall would that be?”
“The Computer calls it Maintenance Service Corridor 36G. It speaks of something called...” the man closed his eyes in concentration as he spoke the unfamiliar words, “a Fused Control Circuit.”

Gerald had a million questions, but the bottom line was that if a control circuit was fused it was still his responsibility... what the hell. “Take me there, I’ll have it fixed in a jiffy.”

Daily Story 141: Resourceful

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

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Come closer to the monument, child. Do not be afraid. You have done well to make it all the way here – I know the journey from your village is hard. Your brother had to turn back the first time, and your mother arrived with an injured ankle and had to wait here for nearly a week before undertaking the final trial and becoming an adult – so do not be ashamed to lean up against the monument and rest a while.

No, it is not haunted, who told you such a thing? This is why we wait to tell you where our people came from – children are too superstitious. Come, feel the monument. Like no stone you have ever touched, is it? You can see it is shaped with a purpose, but it was not carved or chiseled. This is a special stone that our ancestors could shape as a single piece. Yes, child, that is a good comparison – but it is not quite like clay. Think of the candles your parents make, how the fire causes them to flow like water rather than hardening as the clay does. This stone gets soft like clay when you heat it, and then becomes hard again when it cools down. It is unlike anything else in the world – as strong as stone, but it does not shatter under any force. They called it "metal".

More amazing, this metal channels lightning like water down a riverbed. Our ancestors knew this, and found ways to harness the lightning with materials like this. They used fire not only to shape it, but to pull it into threads and weave it like fabric. When they coaxed lightning through these tiny threads of the metal they were able to create all manner of wonderful things. They made light, wind, even life. If you choose the path of knowledge you can read the ancient texts about the things our ancestors made.

No, child, we cannot. They used this special type of stone to create the monument and make it fly – do not look at your elders that way – fly away from the lands they had called home and to here. But the lightning died out, and the fine metal threads snapped, and they found none of this material here to replace it. They could not return home, could not make more of the amazing tools that controlled the lightning and wind. Our ancestors did not despair, and they did not curse the land for not providing what they needed – this land had everything that they could ever ask for apart from the metal, and for that we are grateful. We do not mourn the loss of their wondrous tools; we wait, and we watch the stars, because we know that some day cousins from the land of our ancestors will find us and take us home.

Daily Story 136: Sufficiently Advanced

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

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Jacob looked down at his hands, at the skin that had grown wrinkled and translucent over time, veins rising as the liver spots bloomed around them. His wedding ring rattled around loosely on his twiglike finger, secured only by the gnarled joint of his knuckle. He had done so much with these hands. They glowed red intermittently as the light on the control panel flashed beneath them, begging him to reach forward and press the button that would abort the experiment. Already the others that could have done it had fled to what they prayed was a safe distance. He had told them to, sent them away without telling them that the experiment was actually going as planned.

There were voices, speaking to him from the console. Telling him to abort, telling him that whatever was happening was beyond the understanding of physics and had to be stopped before it tore the world apart. Jacob ignored them and turned the speaker off. He gazed once more at the ring of gold on his withered finger, scratched and worn. Remembered the feel of his wife’s cheek against his, the dry warmth of her skin. He thought, too, about the way the ring reminded him of the brass linking rings he had used in his performances. Making some extra money on the weekends, his hands not yet shaking and curled from arthritis, hiding and revealing cards and coins as his spectators stared in awe and confusion. His wife was among them, always, watching his eyes rather than looking for the trick.

Once more the safeguards tried to kick in, and Jacob calmly disabled them. He had told his teachers, his students, his coworkers. Physics is about magic tricks – and the deeper you go the more magic is revealed. The motion of the tiniest building blocks of reality seemed mysterious only to those unfamiliar with the tricks of the craft; his hands could disassemble the most complex puzzle-boxes as easily as they wrote equations on a blackboard, as easily as they made a dove seem to vanish into the air, as easily as they traced the secret lines down his wife’s form that only he knew – and so he had known the trick to the universe would unfold before him eventually. There was always an equation up God’s sleeve, a palmed quark, a hidden force. But he had searched for the trap doors and secret compartments, never stopping even when his wife took her final bow and did a vanishing act right in his arms, leaving only her cold body behind – a particularly cruel trick.

The room went dark for a moment, but his hands knew every inch of the control panel and he coaxed the device back to life. The emergency lights now showed the walls seeming to buckle and warp, but this was an illusion; misdirection. Communication with the world outside the lab would be impossible, and Jacob wondered briefly if the lab was even visible from the outside anymore, or if the scientists were panicking at it’s apparent departure. Watch, closely, ladies and gentleman – now you see it…

Jacob the Magnificent’s hands made a flourish as he reached for the button. “Abracadabra,” he whispered, and pressed. The world was still. He reached down and plucked the wedding ring off of his finger seemingly through the bone, and it unfolded into a chain of interlinked rings longer than the universe itself. With another flourish, he produced a new galaxy from his other hand – and behind him, his wife clapped.

Daily Story 101: Sometimes We Wake Up Alone

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

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I can't stop staring at the massive crater, watching the clouds of dust that blow out past its rim before curling down into the bowl and dissipating. For the hundredth time I wonder why the crater hasn't filled up with water; maybe it just doesn't rain anymore. I always forget to ask. A lack of rain would explain the dust that tints the sky red, that covers the ruins of the city and transforms them from twisted buildings into indistinct burial mounds. I had decided that some virus or pollutant had killed the plants and that, in turn, had allowed the soil to blow freely... but maybe it was just a simple lack of rain.

The robot glides noiselessly through the doorway with my lunch.
"Greetings! I have the meal you requested!" They always sound excited. I take the tray and place it on the table by the window.
The spindly metal creature does its equivalent of standing at attention and asks the same thing as always - "Is there any other service I can provide?" I tell it I have some questions and it waits eagerly. I've already tried asking about the crater, asking for the location of any other humans, asking to travel. I try asking about the rain this time.
"I'm sorry, weather information is not currently available!"
Of course not. Always the same answer, with the automated systems trying to access networks that no longer exist. I allow the robot to leave, and go back to staring out the window.

The landscape is hard to read with the buildings knocked over and covered in dust, but the more I think about it the more I'm sure my old apartment should be in the crater - if it even still existed by the time whatever it was happened. I leave the bland recycled food and wander downstairs, past floor after floor of empty offices and idle robots. I stop on the ground level for a moment to once again look at the electronic sign on the main doors - "Until further notice the government has implemented a mandatory lockdown for public safety reasons..." before heading to the basement where the hum of the building's independent power plant vibrates up through the soles of my shoes. Once more I pace down the long hallway with the countless cryogenic chambers, the time capsules filled with what could be the only other humans on Earth.

I want to smash all of the electronics so that the robots are forced to revive everyone, but I know that most of them were frozen when they were already dead or about to be. I asked if others had been healthy and had set a specific date for decanting like myself, but the robot excitedly informed me that it couldn’t give out privileged client information. If I forced the robots to open them all up, thaw them all out, wouldn’t it be worth it if even one person survived? I know I won’t do it. I can’t stand the thought of killing any of them even though I know that they’ll never wake up, that someday the power will fail and they will seamlessly transition from sleep to death. Some of it is selfish too; I’m not sure how many people the robots can provide for. Better to play it safe, lonely though I am. Heading towards the stairs, I take one last look back along the endless vault of frozen humanity. Maybe tomorrow. For now, I head back upstairs to watch the sun set over the crater.

Daily Story 93: The UESS Hermes

Today's offering is a collaborative work between the very talented Patricia Stewart and myself. Normally I would post the finished version here, but that's already been done at 365 Tomorrows.

Instead, inspired by Patricia posting the first few revisions, I'm putting up the penultimate version, from before Patricia put the final touches on it. That way we have the first two and last two, so interested parties can observe the growth of the story.

---

The crew took their positions in the prototype spaceship Hermes, named for the Greek god of flight. The first manned ship capable of exceeding the speed of light, its maiden voyage was scheduled to be a short three light-minute jump from the Naval Construction Station orbiting the Earth to the Space-Dock on Phobos, Mars’ largest moon.

Systems check completed, the Hermes left the Station and aligned itself with Mars. With a mixture of apprehension and excitement, the captain gave the command to activate the Alcubierre Drive and the computer announced that a warp bubble had been formed, dragging the ship toward Mars at just over the speed of light. The timer counted down, but after three minutes the ship continued to accelerate toward the outer solar system. "Bridge to engineering, the warp drive didn’t disengage. Can you shut it down manually?"

Chief Engineer Travis "Slim" Wheeler, who had helped design and install the propulsion system replied, "The drive itself is off, Captain. The warp bubble is somehow sustaining itself!"
"Chief, we just passed the asteroid belt and we’re still accelerating. If you can’t shut the drive down, can you at least turn us around and keep us in the solar system?"

"Negative, sir. Once the warp bubble is created, the ship will move in that direction until the bubble collapses. It doesn’t matter which direction we’re pointed; we’re just going along for the ride. Unless..." he added as a crazy plan formulated in his head, "I’ve got an idea. If we turn the Hermes around and create a new warp bubble going in the opposite direction, the warp fields should cancel each other out. That, or tear the ship apart. To be honest, sir, it could go either way."

"We’re already at the point of no return," stated the captain as he stared at the updated navigation screen. "Accelerating like this, if we can’t stop the ship in the next minute we'll collide with Jupiter." The captain gave the signal. Turning the ship around, the pilot activated the Alcubierre Drive for a second time... Nothing happened. Chief Wheeler mumbled something about safeguards, grabbed a three-quarter inch box wrench, and straddled the Alcubierre Drive like a Brahma bull. Closing his eyes and saying a prayer, he tore off the cover plate and jammed the wrench between the power transfer coupling and the high voltage terminal.

The ship seemed to twist and the cabin was filled with a terrible screeching noise - and then there was silence. The main lights and gravity had cut out, but as the emergency lights flickered on the monitors announced the ship's return to normal space.

The captain looked down at a flashing red light indicating a sudden drop in air pressure in the engine room. He scrambled toward the rear of the ship and was blocked by the sealed vacuum doors; through the viewport, he saw nothing but loose wires floating lazily in the center of the room. Slim and the Alcubierre Drive were gone, leaving the walls completely intact.

As he watched the wires drift past the starboard porthole, they sparkled in the bright sunlight. "Sunlight?” questioned the captain. “There shouldn’t be..." Something had gone wrong, though the only person who could hope to understand what had vanished. Somehow the new warp bubble had flung them back toward the inner solar system before collapsing. "Damn," he said, and watched a solar prominence arch past the ship just before the Hermes plummeted into the fiery furnace of hell.

Daily Story 88: P is For...

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.

---


Ah, Mr. Knight! Thank you for coming, sir. Doctor Dave Ewing is going to be calling you at some point to tender his resignation, and – oh, has he? Well, after this meeting you’ll want to call him and get him back, tell him the charges are dropped – hopefully before he commits suicide or something... the poor bastard is despondent.

Yes, sir. I know he used the fuel cell, and I know we only had four. I can understand your anger at hearing that an eighty billion dollar power source was used to fuel an unsuccessful experiment without permission, but you need to know that Doctor Ewing wasn’t crazy – just... near-sighted. He genuinely believes that his project was a failure, but – well, watch. Pay attention to the mouse, and that empty chamber on the other end of the device. There!

Yes, that’s what I thought at first too but it’s not a teleporter. The matter can’t appear any further away than that, and it has to weigh less than seventy pounds – actually it’s based on mass, but it’s easier to think of it as seventy pounds for our purposes. Yes sir, I agree that that sounds useless, but the point is that the good doctor wasn’t trying to invent a teleporter anyway. It’s a time machine.

I know, I know, but let me slow the video down – the lab cams can do some crazy slow-motion – and watch the part where the mouse moved. There it is! For just a fraction of a second there’s two of them. The bad news is that that’s as far as it’s possible to send anything back – not even as much time as the machine itself takes to warm up. That’s why Ewing thought it was worthless, the readouts from this test run confirmed he’ll never be able to go back in time far enough to do anything interesting.

Yes, sir, I’m getting to that. I played around with his device – I don’t understand the time travel stuff but I know the mechanical aspects and then I took the other three fuel cells and – sir, no, calm down! Look at the box next to you. See, it turns out you can put a real hair-trigger on the killswitch, link it to a sensor on the “receiving” end... and a fuel cell weighs less than seventy pounds.

Don’t worry Mr. Knight – it took me a while to stop giggling too.

Daily Story 86: Productivity

This is another that was first published at 365 Tomorrows.
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I’m staring at the clock. Just staring at it, waiting for it to tick off a minute at which point I will have exactly one hour left of this hell. My brother the crazy artist says I’m not living my life. He says that I’ve sold my soul. If he knew my automator was broken he’d be ecstatic, he’d probably try to get me to go out and party with him as if I didn’t have to go to work anymore.

Actually, though, calling out tomorrow might not be a terrible idea. My productivity is shot anyway – I keep finding myself staring at the screen in front of me, drifting off and daydreaming. It’s the sound of everyone else working; it’s hypnotic. They’re all typing at full speed, seated thirty to a row, all the way down this massive room. It sounds like a thunderstorm pouring around me. I wandered down the aisles this morning for ten wasted minutes, just listening to the endless shower of keystrokes and looking at all of their blank faces… the only good thing was that I saw someone I went to school with. We’ve probably been working together for ten years. I should call her later.

I know my brother isn’t alone, there’s a very vocal minority that will talk your ear off about how terrible automators are. I can only assume none of them have office jobs, because I’ve only been here for four hours and I’m ready to murder someone. Don’t even get me started on my exercise routine! Do I really do that every morning? Why in god’s name would I want to be aware for that? I finished less than half of the workout before going back to bed. If they can’t fix my automator soon I’m going to get all pudgy.

If I tried to explain this to my brother he’d just suggest that I work somewhere more interesting, as if everyone in the world can be an artist for a living. He’d say having less money would be worth not going through life as a zombie, but every second that ticks by feels like an hour and every time I look at the pathetic amount of work I’ve gotten done I know exactly why a “work day” used to be eight hours – more for some people! Missing my life? If this is what my life is when I’m not looking then I’m happy to miss it. Only fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds to go. Please, let them fix me soon.

Daily Story 39: Burial at Sea

This is another that was published earlier at 365 Tomorrows.
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It was May when the Highway arrived from some distant place in the northwest. On the fairly open ground the caterpillar-like monstrosity traveled at the alarming rate of about a mile per day, efficiently clearing away rubble and brush, flattening the ground and packing it down with Thumpers, and then laying out a fresh strip of road that it made internally with Assemblers. Some of the younger villagers had never seen a working machine, and they would stare at it from the hill all day.

Gregor was old enough to remember the time before the war, when it seemed like everything was a machine, but he sat and watched the Highway too. He had even climbed up onto it, opening access panels and trying to gain control. It was built like a tank and had very few access points, none of which revealed any kind of input device. Clearly it had received its orders from some computer somewhere - how long ago had that been? Gregor tried to do the math in his head, but he didn't know enough to make any kind of guess. If it had been active since before the war it would have passed by years ago even if it had started in Alaska, but it could have been stuck somewhere or trying to pave over a mountain or something. Maybe someone had been salvaging and had turned it on by mistake. Whatever had happened, it was determined to keep laying down highway now and there didn't seem to be an override. Gregor looked east towards the ocean and sighed. Such a waste.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see his wife standing behind him - he had been spending all of his time staring at the rusty behemoth and felt almost as bad for neglecting her as he did for failing to stop or redirect the machine.
"The best salvager we've ever had and you can't do anything with a fully-functioning highway assembler. I know this has to be killing you, love."
Gregor nodded and sighed, looking back towards the breaking waves. He had been so excited when he first saw it, had pictured reprogramming the assemblers and making the machine construct a proper city for them to live in. He had known that was absurd, far beyond his technical ability, but surely he would have been able to use it for something.
"Come home, love. Get some rest, and tomorrow night the whole village will head down to the shore to watch it go. We'll make a celebration of it."

For the millionth time Gregor imagined the machine stopping on the beach, some safeguard preventing it from committing suicide, but he wasn't sure. With safeguards enabled something would have stopped it years ago, but without them it should have fallen off a cliff by now. Thinking about it did nothing but annoy him further, and yet he couldn’t stop. There was some part of him that was glad it would be out of his hands soon, and that part tried to remind him that he had a good enough life, with a roof over his head and hot meals in the winter. Joints groaning slightly, he stood and hugged his wife and felt his frustrations evaporate somewhat as she squeezed him. With a final weary sigh Gregor turned towards his home, leaving the enigmatic Highway to crawl ever closer to the beckoning sea.

Daily Story 4: Erosion

This one was originally published earlier this month at 365 Tomorrows.

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Entropy gnaws at the walls, shaving them away molecule by molecule. Jeremy calls it the Nothing, after some story that never existed anymore. It’s as good a name as any - certainly I’m not being scientific when I call it Entropy.

“The Nothing is hungry today,” he says cheerfully, looking at the readouts. It’s a nonlinear progression, so some days Entropy eats more of our home than others. More or less, but it always ate. There are never days that it leaves us alone. Each day Jeremy plugs the new numbers in and gives our odds of finishing the job before the walls fade out. “Down a few points today, mate,” he calls today as he drifts by, gravity a fading memory, “we’re sitting at twenty-three point two-one percent.”

The problem was that to fix the timeline properly we needed to make multiple adjustments - but the first change would overwrite us. That meant leaving the timeline entirely and making the changes from the outside. We’re up to 1971 now, and the projections require us to drop some of the specially-designed care packages in ‘86, ‘90, and ‘03. The reality the projections were based on doesn’t exist anymore, so we can’t be sure how accurate they are.

“Almost charged,” Jeremy chirps, smiling as usual. He might be going insane from the isolation, but at least it’s the good kind of crazy. It might help if I talked to him, but somehow I can’t. That probably means I’m going insane too. “We’ll be able to make another drop in twelve hours. Just three more after that!” He says three because he wants to believe we’ll have time to drop ourselves back in too, but I can hear Entropy eating away at our bubble, eating but never full.

I can’t really hear it. I know there’s nothing to hear, just like I know that it isn’t a sentient thing, isn’t actually hungry or even aware. But thinking of it like that, crazy or not, is better than the truth that pulls at my sanity. It’s not alive because it doesn’t exist. It’s not even the vacuum of space, it’s the lack of existence that persists outside of time. I’m willing to die to save humanity from extinction but I can’t stop thinking that when the walls finally don’t exist anymore even my soul will vanish, forgotten by reality itself.