Tag: Science Fiction

Ornithoscillation

Pavowski5 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week:  The Opening Line Challenge.  I used the opening line posited by a member called, simply, Nikki.

This was a fun one, and not nearly so dark as some of my other flash fiction.  But still pretty weird.

1000 words exactly.  Enjoy!  As always, I welcome feedback and comments if you’re out there reading.

 

Ornithoscillation

There was a dead bird on the porch again.

When the first one had shown up, Gerald thought that the family tomcat had simply started bringing him gifts again.  Trouble was, the second day there was another, and the day after that there were two, and tubby little Snuggles had never been much of a hunter.

Flummoxed, Gerald had called Animal Control.  The man who answered the call had poked around the property for thirty minutes, inspected the crawl space, and stuck his nose under some of the bushes before telling him that he had no idea what was causing the deaths.

On the Monday that followed (and the eighth bird) Gerald had bagged a few of them up and taken them down to the University, where a raccoon-eyed grad student named Samir met him at the veterinary building and took them in for testing.  Tuesday arrived (birds nine and ten) and Samir called back to say that physically the birds showed no signs of illness or trauma.  They certainly hadn’t been killed by any cat.

Now, Wednesday.  Bird number eleven.  Burying them had gotten too tedious, not to mention all the unsightly little patches of dirt on his immaculate lawn in back of the house, so Gerald took a shovel and dumped it in the corrugated trash can next to five of its little feathered friends.

That night, in his dreams, Gerald heard the sound of a deep humming.  It penetrated the walls of his mind, it reverberated behind his eyes, it pulsed deep in the soft tissues of his brain.  He woke to a ringing in his ears.  The clock read 2:30.  A disoriented minute followed, in which he realized that the ringing was outside his head, not inside it.  He followed it, to the bedroom door, down the hallway, to his son’s room.  His son, twelve years old, fascinated with trains and clocks and electric things.  A dim light shone underneath the doorway, brilliant against the dark of the night.  Gerald cracked the door, making as little noise as he could, planned to see little Simon snoring away, tuck him in, and return to bed.  Instead, he saw Simon silhouetted against the tiny desk in the room, hunched over the makeshift desk of milk crates and plywood, earphones clamped to the sides of his head, scribbling madly on a notepad while he fiddled with the dial of a radio with the other, twisting it this way and that, a lunatic safecracker dialing until his fingers bled.

“Si,” Gerald whispered, but Simon did not waver in his work.  “Simon!”

Simon stopped, but not because he heard Gerald: the noise-canceling headphones made that nigh impossible.  No, he had stopped because he had heard something.  A phantom wavelength, a rogue echo of a noise which should not have been there.  It had only been there for a moment, an infinitesimal crackle of static in a sea of white noise, but it was there.  He stopped writing, craned his neck, and twisted the dial back in the other direction.  There, again, and gone, just as quickly.  He focused his entire being on the noise, gripped the dial as delicately as his clumsy adolescent fingers would allow, and ticked it by the tiniest of degrees back toward the noise.

Gerald had crept up behind Simon, his hand outstretched to shake his boy’s shoulder, when Simon found the frequency, and this time he held it, letting go of the dial as if it might shatter.  Behind him, his father clutched at his head as a lance of sound seared his ears and burned his vision hot-white.  He fell to his knees, and the noise was gone.  Simon, still oblivious, tapped and banged at his receiver, checked his notes and began to spin the dial again, chasing the lost frequency like a rabbit into the brush.

A thump at the front door.  Fatherly instinct pushed all else aside and Gerald dashed downstairs, stopping at the side door to the garage to grab a worn and polished Louisville Slugger off the wall.  He crept to the door and peered through the keyhole.  Nothing.  Flexing his fingers on the bat, he unlocked the door with his free hand, stepped back from it, and used the end of the bat to shove it open wide.  Nobody there.  He stepped out, in bare feet and boxer shorts, ready to swing for the fence at the sight of anything moving.

Squish.

He jumped back in horror.  Another goddamned bird.  This one had hit the door so hard its neck was bent in the wrong direction, as if it had been built of Legos and put together backwards.

Then it clicked.  Simon had brought his science project about radio frequencies home from school the night before the first bird showed up.  Something about how sound frequencies, properly amplified and directed, could alter living tissue.  Gerald hadn’t really paid it that much attention — it was a sixth grade science project, for god’s sake — but Simon had been engrossed.  Obsessed.

Breaking out in a cold sweat, Gerald ran back upstairs, taking them two at a time.  “Simon?” He called, rounding the corner into Simon’s room — where the boy jumped in circles, pumping his fist and shouting, the headphones still clamped to his ears.  Gerald yanked them off.  “Stop it!  You’ve killed them!”  And if the sound had killed all those birds…

But Gerald caught a glimpse of the radio equipment, as Simon stared at him, open-mouthed.  It wasn’t a receiver.  It was a transmitter.

“Dad,” Simon said, tugging at his sleeve, “I’m not killing them.  I’m saving them.”  Simon pointed to the window.

With trepidation, Gerald peered out the window.  Something had set off the motion sensor in the driveway.  The light was on; he saw a cloud of birds spilling from the trash can and from his lawn like swarming bees, twisting and writhing as one like some great dark winged beast, spiraling out of the light and ascending into the darkness.

The Acid Orphan

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This is my second bite at the apple for Chuck’s 5 random words challenge.  If anything, it teaches me that I should trust my instincts.  This title occurred to me immediately, and I shied away from it initially, but it just wouldn’t go away.  I realized, as soon as I gave it serious consideration, that it meshes perfectly with another novel idea that I’ve had; maybe the next one I’ll write after I’m finished with AI.

So, lesson learned, and fun has been had writing this one.  It’s not as dark as my others of late either, so there’s that, too.

994 words, and I could easily have kept going.

 

 

The Acid Orphan

When Terry arrived at the League, the wolves began to circle.  They always did, of course, when an Orphan arrived.  But something about Terry drew them in more than usual.  Maybe it was her tiny stature, maybe it was her too-pale skin, maybe it was the strange symbols tattooed on her wrists that she refused to explain.

Not every Orphan is an orphan.  Some of them come from loving households.  But even those have an unmistakable air of abandonment about them.    A sadness, a weariness, a mistrust cultivated from years of rejection, years of phone calls home from the principal, years of being locked away, being forced to hide, forced to pretend.  Every recruit at the League has felt it in some capacity or another — we are all a bit different — but the Orphans carry it heaviest of all; it is a part of them, etched on their heart, stamped on their soul.  You can spot it on them, smell it, like dogs smell fear.  Abandoned.  Turned out.  Unwanted.

The unspoken hierarchy of the school puts them at the bottom, where by and large they stay, outcasts even in the place that should sweep them close.  Most of them drop off the face of the earth once they pass their evaluations, choosing to live in exile or even to check out for good.  They become hermits even among the hermits; all of us are reclusive by nature, but the Orphans take it to extremes.

Funny thing, though, is that the Orphans have a way of being the strongest and smartest.  Something about working so hard for so long to suppress your Ability makes it fester and expand, an amoeba feeding on its own colony.  Exposure to the Catalyst would then cause it to flare up and spike, like a saucepot boiling over and spattering the kitchen with bits of tomato.  Accidents happen all the time at the League: a classroom will have all its windows blown out, a student will lose an eye or have a limb shattered in a routine sparring session, that kind of thing.  They always look at the Orphans first.  Unofficially, of course.

In her first month, Terry shut down the entire academic wing of the complex — all thirty classrooms — for a week.

She claimed it was an accident, and nobody doubted it.  But I saw her smirk when she came out of the council’s office.  She saw me see her and she smiled, a lock of her short, chemically-blackened hair falling across one eye.  She casually unwrapped a lollipop as she asked me, “How’s Gina doing?”

I laughed mirthlessly.  Gina had marked Terry immediately — she loved to give Orphans hell — and invited her to the roof for a “welcoming ceremony” with some of her friends.  What happened next was a story none of them were willing to tell, but all of her friends came back covered in boils and burns.  Gina had the worst of it.  Her face was unrecognizable: a riot of red, puckered skin and swelling sores.  Half her hair was gone, dissolved in a sizzling gout of Terry’s acid blood.  The runoff had oozed down through the building, chewing through cement and steel and drywall and wires.  It had been three days before they were even sure they’d cleaned it all up.  Incidentally, that was how we had all learned what Terry’s Ability was; until that day, it had been the subject of heated supposition.

Gina was out of the infirmary — I’d seen her that morning — but still pretty badly scarred and burned.  “She’s not so great,” I replied.  “I’d watch out for her if I were you.”

Terry chuckled.  “I doused her so that I don’t have to watch out for her.”

That made sense to me, so I told her as much, and that’s how I made friends with the Acid Orphan.

We walked outside, talking aimlessly.  She was more than happy to demonstrate her Ability for me, though she insisted that it was silly to call it an Ability.  It was her blood; slightly caustic before, but the Catalyst had turned it into a smoldering poison.  It didn’t harm Terry, but it burned like hellfire on the skin and it could eat through almost anything if allowed to work.  It was a liability until she learned how to weaponize it.  She took off one of the oddly spiked rings that she wore on her thumbs and handed it to me: a simple band of dark steel with a viciously curved talon of topaz in the center.  The precious stone, she explained, was one of only a few substances that could abide her blood.  The ring was too heavy for its size and the stone was wickedly sharp.  It had to be, she told me.

“Why?”

She grinned a mischievious grin at me and slid the ring back on her thumb, the glimmering claw turned toward the inside of her hand.  With a deft, practiced motion, not unlike a snapping of her fingers, she drew her pinky across the ring and then pressed her thumb to the blood that welled up.  Thick and dark, it looked perfectly normal, but it smelled of foxglove, almost medicinal.  When she smeared her hand in the grass, it began to smoke, the vegetation withering and then simply coming apart, the dirt beneath blackening and sizzling.

She watched the poison boiling into the earth, her eyes unblinking.  “A deeper cut means more blood, and more blood turns these,” she held up her hands, looking at me between splayed fingers, “into weapons of mass destruction.”

“Perfect,” I said.

“What?” She asked.

I could already see events unfolding in my mind.

“Could you use that to open a door?  Like, a reinforced door?”

Terry rolled her eyes.  “I can remove a door.”

“Do you want to help me with something?”

“Depends,” she said, “Will we have to break any rules?”

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer.

“Then yes,” she said.

The First Wave

Pavowski10 Comments

I approached this week’s Flash Fiction Challenge from Chuck with a healthy dose of self-doubt.  I tend to be a bit long-winded when I write, and the limitation of 1000 words spread out into 10 chapters felt tailor-made to put the screws to my brain.  I pondered on it, meditated on it, kicked around about four or five different story ideas before finally arriving at one I liked and then mutating it into something horrifying.

Honestly, I don’t know if my short stories are trending dark because I’m writing comedy or if I wanted to write comedy because I’ve got these dark stories bubbling up.  One way or another, this one’s probably the darkest yet, and I don’t really know what to make of it except to let you know that this is all artifice and is probably the product of too many crime procedurals and alien movies.

I wasn’t sure about the first person viewpoint, but I didn’t know how else to write it.

In fact I’m not sure about the story as a whole.  I just don’t know if it works.  But this blog is not about what works, it’s about THE WORK.  So here’s the latest.  Like all my short stories thus far, it’s edited only a little bit (mostly to get down to the word limit).  If you’re out there, let me know what you think.

Coming in at 1000 words on the nose:

The First Wave

1.

Things aren’t supposed to happen like this.

I’m a scout, not a soldier, but the link has been silent so long that they must think I’m dead or lost.

It’s been almost eleven months since I was last contacted.  The feeling is unmistakable.  A tingling at the back of the neck, a rush of blood to the head, and then a ringing in the ears that means a transmission is coming.  The body becomes a lightning rod for sensation, and underneath the sensory rush that follows, the messages can be heard.

So when my skin tingles while I’m waiting in line at the Starbucks to sample my two hundred thirty – third flavor/texture combination, I know in an instant that I’m not forgotten, that today may be the day it begins.

But something’s wrong.  The waitress notices me. Looks at me for half a second too long, the way you look at a misspelled sign. You know what it’s supposed to say, what it should look like, but it’s wrong, and you pause to process it.  She smiles to cover it – very cagey – but I know what she saw.

Maybe she doesn’t know, though, so I ask for her phone number and she gives it to me, scribbling it artlessly on my coffee sleeve.  I return her empty smile and beat it out of there, cursing myself.  She distracted me, and I missed the transmission.  I can only hope they’ll send it again.

2.

Back home I scan all the frequencies and search my residence for signs of contact, but come up empty. The receptors are as blank as they’ve been for months, their green glowing grids blipping ceaselessly.  Maybe the shiver was a false alarm.

But if that’s so, what did she see?

3.

A tap at the window wakes me up.   I fly to the sill and throw it open, and the freezing air smashes me in the face. No signs of life on the ledge or on the street below. I don’t look up; never up.  If I look up and they’re there, then it’s over. If I look and there’s nothing, it only reminds me I’m alone.

I’m so tired from loneliness.  Tomorrow I’ll call that waitress, even though I’ll probably have to kill her.

4.

Somebody was here last night.  Whoever it was took something or…  moved something or…  I don’t know what it is, but there’s a wrongness here, pressing outward against the walls, an over-inflated balloon ready to burst. I tear the apartment to pieces looking for what’s lost but it’s gone, stolen, maybe destroyed.

I remember that I have to call that waitress. She can’t see my place like this – it looks like a lunatic lives here. I methodically put everything back exactly the way it was before I lost it.  I even put the dirty dishes back on the table.  It only takes me three hours.

5.

We met for sandwiches. I asked why she didn’t want to meet for coffee like normal humans do and she looked at me like I was stupid. I’m not stupid; just because you serve coffee doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a coffee. I think she thought I was joking because she laughed, her pretty cheeks stretching back the corners of her mouth.

She knows.

6.

When she left me, the transmission came through clear as day. The time is not right. She cannot interfere. I tried to question them, but as ever, my words spiraled out into the ether, and no further directions were forthcoming.  I was, as always, on my own.

7.

It’s unsettling how little people look out for their own safety.  Lock the front doors, lock the windows, and call it a night.  But my waitress doesn’t lock her balcony door, and she only lives on the 7th floor.  A quick shin up the fire escape, a shimmy along the ledge to her window, and I’m with her.  Granted, most people wouldn’t risk their necks on this three-inch concrete outcrop, but thoughts of my own mortality were taken from me long ago.

It smells of her, and it smells of coffee, and I’m overcome by sadness and doubt.  In a few moments, she’ll be gone; all that she is and was and ever might be will be erased.  For a long moment I pause at her bedroom door, my hand slick on the handle, the blade humming in my pocket.

The act sickens me.  I’m on her before she’s even awake, the silver sings across her throat, and my hands clamp down on her windpipe as the life sprays out.  In seconds, she’s gone, but I stay there, holding her, hyperventilating.

The parasites ooze out of my ears and flow down my arms in a grey-green river, mingling with the blood and rushing in through the smile in her neck.  The horrible sucking sound of their ingress turns my stomach until I hear it, the transmission again, whispering under the tumult  in my brain.

And I understand.  I’m not scouting for the first wave.  I am the first wave.  It begins with me.

8.

Giddy with hope and purpose, I convey her body delicately out onto the balcony, where she will find the moonlight that she needs.  I stay with her until the sun is almost up, then I leave.  She’ll need some time.

9.

The next day, she is back at work.  I order number two hundred thirty-four, and she smiles at me knowingly.  They are hard at work in her.  I smile back and drink my coffee thoughtfully.  The sweetness is almost too much to bear.

10.

I step outside and feel the sun on my shoulders.  I look up, for the first time in a lifetime.  They’re not up there.  But I’m not alone anymore.

A woman, engrossed in her phone conversation, bumps me, dropping her armload of papers.  I help her pick them up, but when I hand them back to her, she looks at me for a little too long.  I feel my neck start to tingle.

Borrowed Time

Pavowski1 Comment

Today, a time-out from writing The Project.  I will probably take tomorrow off entirely – I’ve earned it this week!

Chuck Wendig’s latest Flash Fiction challenge is here.  Took a day or so to marinate on the idea, then just let this flow.

Originally I meant to take a sci-fi action angle, but instead I ended up with this sort of cynical, sort of sad moment.  I beat the clock on this challenge, coming in at 945 words.  Haven’t edited it too much because it kind of shook me up.  Maybe I will tinker with it later.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy it – and as usual, I welcome any and all feedback if you’re out there reading it.

Borrowed Time

Andres was laid comfortably on his back, the lush chair feeling like a cloud bank buoying him up toward the soft fluorescent light.  The sting of the needle in his arm barely even registered.  It was replaced immediately by a dull, heavy feeling that crept across his body; first the fingers of his left hand went numb, then his shoulder, then his neck, and then he simply felt strangely dense and weightless all over.  The chair sunk away, the drones and beeps of the machines faded into nothingness, the outline of the lamp blurred slightly.

In a few minutes, his mind would empty of all thought, and a few minutes beyond that, he would feel no more.  The fear no longer held any power over him, he was merely curious.

The crowd gathered behind the one-way glass looked on in equal parts satisfaction, shock, and disbelief.  Just days ago, the Collective had all but announced that they had given up hope of ever locating Andres and the rest of the Timekeepers, but now they held him on their table, surrendered of his own free will, about to make his Donation to the powers he had fought against.

A surgical mask floated into his view, a lifetime of experience gazing at him through impossibly young eyes.  Dimly he was aware of questions being asked.  He blinked once for yes, twice for no at her directions.  Do what you will.  He let his eyes flutter shut, felt the fluorescent light glowing through his eyelids.

In moments, the chamber would seal around him, a steel and glass oubliette, and a mist of not-quite-gas would pour in: a horde of tiny nanobots which would permeate his skin, activate the growth enzymes in his cells, and then siphon off all the energy and divided cells, leaving him aged by the space of a lifetime in just a few short minutes.  The energy and the cells would be processed and purified through a bizarre alchemy and used to Reinvigorate a member of the society that Andres would never know.

******

The Borrowed Time Initiative was ostensibly one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.  In virtually no time at all it had gone from a fluke discovery into rapid, frenzied medical testing; within the course of just two years, there were BTI facilities in every major metropolis around the world.  The hook was simple.  Give a little time to make a better time.

At first, the initiative was fueled only by the elderly and the infirm, but the Collective quickly began putting convicts  into the stainless steel chambers, and from there, it was only a few short months before the Donation program was opened, and that was when Andres had started to fight.

The Donation program was innocent enough at first.  Give a year of your life and receive a year’s wages for your family.  The number of donators in the first month flooding the BTI facilities had been so overwhelming that the Collective immediately deregulated the system and allowed each center to set its own rates.  In the suburbs, a year would still get you about six months’ pay.  In the cities, Donators were lucky to get two weeks.

But where did the time go?  The BTI claimed that the stolen time (as it was colloquially known) was rationed out to those who needed it most, with extensively detailed logbooks showing where this inventor or that teacher or some other great leader had been Reinvigorated.  Sick children, cured by an infusion of Borrowed Time, were pasted on the sides of buildings and TV ads everywhere.  But the executives of the BTI stopped having their photographs taken, presumably because they were growing younger and younger, and then the stories began to break: Borrowed Time was being bought and sold like stock options, to the highest bidder.  Great stockpiles of it were found in palatial mansions, dingy apartments, buried in backyards.  There was some outcry, but the overwhelming part was that people kept lining up at BTI centers to make their Donations. It’s hard to get really upset when you can feed your family just by going into the chamber for a few minutes.  Sure, you die a little sooner, but what’s a few years of not wearing diapers and not forgetting your own name?

Andres was one of the first to join up when the symbol of the Timekeepers started appearing in alleyways and overpasses.  He fought the good fight, made a name for himself.  Then he came home one day to find a picture of his ex-mother-in-law tacked to his door.  Old, harsh, her face lined and sunken and her hair faded.  Dead.  What psychopath would send him a picture like this, he barely had time to wonder — until he saw the gold locket that he’d given his wife for their tenth anniversary around her neck.  She had been thirty-eight, and her corpse looked ninety.  Next to that picture was a picture of his daughter.

The next day, he’d given his thumbprint and his blood sample at the BTI center in Washington.  And from there, it was a short walk through hallways painted with clouds to the chair.

******

The steel-and-glass doors closed over his face, inches from his skin.  He could no longer feel it, but he thought of the picture in his pocket.  Not the photograph he’d found tacked to his door, but one his ex-wife had taken on his daughter’s fifth birthday.  In it, she smiled, her mouth a checkerboard of missing teeth, Andres’s face buried in her tangled hair.  A wet droplet rolled down his cheek as the hissing filled his ears.

300 Years a Thief

Pavowski4 Comments

Here’s a little ditty for Chuck’s flash fiction challenge this week.  My first official one.  I went a bit over the limit but I’m cutting myself a break since it’s my first go.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/03/07/flash-fiction-challenge-must-contain/

I rolled a 7 (a time machine) and a 7 (a hard drive filled with secrets).  A happier combination for me may not exist. The title sucks, but I’m stuck on it for now. May change later. I am trying to improve, so if you’re out there, let me hear it.

**

300 YEARS A THIEF

It was unlike any electronic device she’d ever seen; a tiny silver box, no bigger than a toddler’s alphabet block; gleaming, square, perfect.  And her design for it was now perfect.  Ugly and functional, but perfect.

**

She didn’t believe that it had been anything at first, it was so insubstantial.  But when she followed Karn’s directions and got it close to the ports in her laptop, it had crazily sprouted wires that reached out for the connection, witches’ arms, grasping.  A flash of light and the smell of burned electrics, and when the smoke cleared, she saw that her old beloved laptop from freshman year was melted and charred, buzzing pitifully as the mechanics tried to spin back into function.  Some heavier gauge wires, lots of insulation and a newer machine had allowed her to successfully connect the cube to her desktop: it powered up happily, flashing strange symbols across the monitor and displaying a progress bar in green along the bottom.  Then the cube had started to hum – its alien mechanisms spinning up to speed – louder and faster until, with a sudden clang and a zapping sound, it launched itself across the room, tearing all the wires and punching a hole in the drywall.

It might have been useful for Karn to warn her about the innocuous little box, but his guidance had carried her this far.  The time for questioning him was long past, not that it was even possible.

**

Lisa pushed her goggles up, the last solder finished.  She slid the cube into place and clamped it down.  Silvery tendrils snaked out to make the connection with her snarled cluster of industrial wires.  Almost a sigh as the humming started.  The parade of arcane symbols marched across her screen.  She wiped her grease-smeared fingertips on her cruddy jeans and cast an anxious glance at the doorway.  The green bar on her monitor began to fill.

**

Seven months ago, she had heard that Karn’s estate was slated for demolition.  Some business had been invented about it spanning multiple district lines, containing materials that were a threat to public health or safety or well-being.  When she went digging, the city referred her to the county, who referred her to the next county over, who referred them back to the city, until she got tired of asking for permission and just broke in.

The inside of his big, dark house had been a rat’s nest of science textbooks, wires, defunct mechanical equipment, hastily scribbled notes and vagrant trash.  It was such a mess that she’d all but given up finding anything of value until she sat at his desk and toppled a pile of notes and garbage to the floor.  But it wasn’t the notes that caught her eye.  It was the network of symbols etched into the desktop, with an IP address scrawled faintly beneath it.  She’d made a rubbing and left disappointed, and the house simply wasn’t there the next day, as if some careless creator had reached down and wiped it out with a giant eraser.

**

The green progress bar filled and disappeared.  The cube hummed happily to itself, vibrating in place on the benchtop.  Her screen blanked out and was replaced by simple, ancient dot-matrix text which blipped into the bottom corner of the screen and asked, directly and bewilderingly, “Displacement vector (hours)?”

**

The IP address had led to nowhere, an empty site.  It was an easy task to set her system to monitor the site, but over the following days it saw no traffic and never got updated.

The funny little chart she’d copied from his desk turned out to be a cryptograph, a bizarre recursive system where a symbol could stand for a number or a letter or another symbol, filled with redundancy and apparent nonsense for good measure.  But there were no messages to decipher.

Until one day, a few weeks later, she noticed a stream of characters had been broadcast on the mystery IP address.  A stream of characters that looked remarkably like the ones in her chart.

Deciphering the first message had been like trying to follow a rabbit through a tangle of kudzu, but follow it she had, and once she got the knack for deciphering the messages, she started noticing them everywhere.  They arrived at unpredictable intervals, sometimes popping up on her computer screen, rarely making sense at the first reading.  She’d had to dedicate a wall of her workshop to his communiques before she started to understand what he was hinting at.  Bits of yarn connected one scrap of paper to another in a gigantic and cascading web of cryptic messages that should have been indecipherable.  Messages meant for somebody else.  Messages that told her how to build the device, how to stabilize it, and finally, where to find the power source: the little silver cube, the hard drive which housed the mind-bending circuits, calculations, and parameters to open a portal in time.

**

When Lisa started translating the messages, she had noticed that each one had a string of characters on the end.  Numbers.  A date.  A timestamp.  Three hundred years in the future.

“Displacement vector (hours)?”

She took a deep breath and keyed in 269274.

Enter.

The cube’s humming climbed in frequency, became a whistling in her ears and then a soundless pressure in her head.  It glowed a bright, luminous blue, an impossible blue, spreading and intensifying, the entire room looking as if it were made of neon lights.  She felt her skin beginning to hum, her insides vibrating in time with the cube, the floor resonating with the impossible frequency bouncing in her brain.  Then a blinding flash, a deafening roar.  She thought, crazily, of the time she’d been skydiving; the sudden, world-shattering wind in her ears.

The cube’s hum died away.  The resonance dissipated.  The computer shut down.  Rain pattered softly at the window.

Had it been raining a moment ago?

She lost consciousness.

**

She’d tried to learn who Karn really was, but there were not very many records to go on.  A recluse, certainly; a genius, probably; and there was also the matter of his being undeniably, bewilderingly, mind-numbingly insane.  One day he’d been an inventor of some repute, living off the patents and income of some gadget he’d thought up around the time Lisa had graduated high school, and then one day he’d quite simply stepped off into the abyss.  He talked about seeing the future and meeting with himself from a hundred years hence, and how he could bring back the technology to save humanity, and what’s wrong with you all, you can’t lock me up like this, you’re all going to die, and … that’s when they took him away.  There had also been the small matter, of course, of him blacking out the power grid for half the city and blowing a crater a mile across in the desert outside of town, whereupon it had rained ash for three days.  The authorities tested the ash and found it to be perfectly harmless, but it had scared the hell out of everybody, and after that, Karn had disappeared.

**

It was, therefore, a great shock to Lisa when she woke up and found Karn himself standing over her, wild-eyed, soot- and grease-stained, raggedly-bearded, holding a device – no, it was definitely a gun, it’s impossible to mistake being held at gunpoint, even if the gun looks like something from a bad Star Trek ripoff – about an inch from her nose.

“Wh… y…” he mumbled, licking at his lips and working his jaw impotently, as if he had not spoken in years.

“Who in the blue FUCKING blazes are you?” He finally spat.

She swallowed hard, tried to focus on him and not on the barrel of the device that had to be some sort of gun.

“I’ve been getting your messages.”

“My messages?” he said, blinking.  He shook his head fiercely, his beard flapping madly.  He pressed his gun into her forehead, pinning her to the floor.  “Those were for me.  For ME.  You should be ME.  I should be… WHO ARE YOU?”

The gun-thing and his raving drove coherent thought out the window.  “I… I…” she stammered, shaking her head feebly.

He slammed her head to the floor, placed a finger to his lips, and darted to the window.  He crept over to it and ducked just below its sill, surprisingly spry for as old as he was.  How old was he?  He stole a glance out then dashed over to her, helping her up off the floor and shoving her toward the back door.

“What -”

“No time.  Run.  Hide.”  Once outside, he blustered past her and broke into a dead run, his unkempt hair streaming behind him.  “They’re COMING.”

She called feebly after him, still shaken from fear, “They who?”  But he was already shrinking toward the line of dead trees in the distance.  A thought nagged at her – those trees weren’t dead before she activated the cube – but she pushed it away.  She looked back past the little house.

Robots.  Hundreds of them.  Coming.

She ran.