Writer's Journal

((Many apologies to those of you who liked “Nameless,” but I think that this will probably be the screenplay I work on.))

The body lay in a coma, and its mind looked down at it through borrowed eyes. Beaten, swollen, and left for dead, the body of a young man lay in the hospital bed. The mind had reached out and seized the body of this other man, almost on reflex.

The mind glanced down, and saw the syringe in this new body’s hands. Was it a doctor? No. Doctors wore white coats, not suits. Chances are, this man was sent to finish the job.

He couldn’t tell what was in the syringe. It looked clear, but was vaguely blue. A washed-out watery blue.

Test the plunger. Squirt.

He put the needle to his borrowed throat, and found the artery that fed the brain, oxygenating it and keeping it alive–or did it?–before plunging the needle in and applying pressure.

Dropping the syringe into a wastebasket, he walked out, going outside and allowed the body to drop dead. The mind remained standing.

A young man of unremarkable appearance, save for his white suit, and save for being a disembodied mind. The world took on a chiaroscuro appearance to him: people were bleached out and glowing, while the world they inhabited darkened to a saturated charcoal-sketch world.

He looked down, and saw the dying embers of the hitman’s spirit, fading and darkening, sinking into the inky black background.

Turning, the mind considered the street, the river of lights of the people going this way and that. He walked out, and touched one, flowing into the homeless man.

Dropping the “THE END IS NEAR” sign in the gutter, he walked into the alleyway, and checked the hitman’s pockets. Jenkins, Eddie. Sounded like a pseudonym.

He found an address, and took the keys in the man’s pocket. It was time to do some investigating.

(To my sleep-deprived brain, the disjointed images here seem interesting enough to warrant a post.)

A desiccated corpse was propped upright on the park bench, dressed in a fine suit, with a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. On the other end of the bench was a man wearing white, crunching away happily on an apple.

The passers-by gave the bench a wide berth, glancing over at it and its occupants with worried faces.

The man simply kept crunching away on his apple, seemingly contented, and seemingly disinterested in those individuals who stopped and stared.

He offered a bite to the corpse, but was ignored. The man returned the favor, ignoring the rudeness of his companion. When he finished with his fruit, he tossed the core into a nearby trashcan, and leaned back, looking up at the too-blue sky overhead.

“I know it doesn’t look it, but we’re in for some rain, today. A torrential downpour, to say the least. You’d never know from looking at the sky, though.”

The dead body said nothing, its lips beginning to char from the cigarette in its mouth.

“Yeah…it’s going to rain.”

The man reached over and flicked the still-burning cigarette out of the corpse’s mouth.

“You’ve got to take better care of yourself, you know that?” the man said, “wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

The corpse contemplated this for a long moment.

“How did you even get to this park bench? Shouldn’t you be lying down, somewhere?”

No reply.

“Well, take care of yourself,” the man in white said, getting up and walking away, “if you’re not going to say anything, why should I bother?”

(If you want to jump right to the new part, I suggest you hit Ctrl+f and lok for the next appearance of “5.”

3. Ali

The crash had been spectacular. The machine crumpled around him, and just about every system failed. The hull cracked open, exposing him to the nearly-airless desert and the giant red sun up above. The terrain outside was unrecognizable, just an ancient world eroded until it was smooth as polished bone.

Diaz crouched in the shadows, and had the hose from the water tank into his helmet, periodically he would sip, and he urinated in jars, not sure if the waste reclamation system was broken or not.

By definition, the trip hadn’t been long. Unfortunately, there were other issues to deal with. A trip back was impossible: no rescuers were on their way, and there was no way he could repair the machine.

In the night, he tossed a heavy tarp over a patch of sun-warmed metal, and pressed himself to it, trying to absorb some warmth, if only to prolong his life until he could die from something other than cold.

Sometimes, he would inspect his vehicle. There was an underslung bulge on the silvery machine, a large quantum computer that took care of all the hard math. Its casing was broken, and he saw oddly colored shapes dropping out, liquids dripping, he tried to come up with terminology for the other things that were happening with it, but words failed him.

The landscape was unfamiliar. He thought that, with enough studying, he could find a landmark, but there was no way, not in this weather. He could only go out for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, to put his footsteps on the face of this ancient, dying world.

He considered taking off his helmet and the emergency environmental suit he’d had the foresight to pack, and just facing the dawn, naked as the day he was born. Ripped from the life he had known, and cast far, far, far downstream, until here he was:

Alone and with dwindling supplies,

Stuck here on this half-dead planet with a nigh-unbreathable atmosphere and no water,

With No tools, no means of communication, and

Only a broken time machine for shelter.

The quantum computer dripped abstract shapes in a color he’d never seen before, leaving a slowly-growing puddle beneath it.

The sun rose, the sun set.

He wrapped a tarp around him, and tried to think of a way out.

1. Knock Knock

“This is the machine,” the doctor told him, standing on the gantry over the silvery pod, “it has been running for three days, now, meaning that it has a past-ward range of three days. The future-ward range is still unknown.”

Diaz sucked his teeth as he looked at it.

“And everything you’ve put through it has been returned safely?”

“That’s right. The first test was completely automated. A one-minute jump forward. No unusual radiation. No elevated temperature. A fairly impressive magnetic field, but unless the occupant or someone nearby has a pacemaker, they should be safe.”

“And you’ve already put live things through it?”

“There were bacteria in the first one, the third test involved a cage full of lab rats, sent first backward, then forward. The only problem was when two iterations of the same rat were placed in a single cage. That was the fifth test. Both died of cardiac arrest, but we don’t believe it to be directly related to the machine. It’s more likely their brains couldn’t process what was happening and the elevated stress level killed them.”

Diaz nodded.

“Anything more complex than the rats?”

“We put through several monkeys. We repeated the rat experiment with a chimp, which resulted in a violent altercation that ultimately killed both animals.”

Diaz furrowed his brow.

“So…how do I know that I won’t encounter myself?”

“The computer has been programmed to recognize you, and would force a landing six hours after its sensors last catch sight of you.”

Diaz nodded.

“So. Shall we suit you up and set you on your first test?”

“One question. How does it stay in place while traveling through time? Shouldn’t it end up orbiting the moon, or something?”

The Doctor nodded, impatiently.

“You know Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? The short answer is that this machine keeps you in a single frame-of-reference and moves you with that. So, you’re stapled in place, in regard to the Earth.”

Diaz nodded.

“Where’s my locker?”

4. Ali Who?

Diaz stumbled from the hole in hull toward the bulge on the bottom of the machine, the computer weeping day-glo geometric figures that stained the sand triangular and octahedral.

It was dawn, and he was checking for new damage, trying to think things through. Trying to see if there was something he’d missed.

He looked sorrowfully at the hole that something had punched in the ship. No clue what had done it, but the thought of getting hit by something moving up and down the stream of time bothered him. Shouldn’t that be impossible?

He looked around at the blasted landscape.

More than anything, it looked like a desert that had been bleached out to nothing. The horizon was just a flat line, with no deviation, no mountains, no buildings, nothing.

Just the white below, and the bruise-colored sky above.

He hid from the sun, but something told him that it was not the sun he had known. It was some swelling, reddening thing.

He climbed back inside to hide from the sun, and checked how his supplies were doing. The emergency bottle of water he’d found was half-full. He was surprised how long he had made it last.

Patching up the computer was useless. Its strange calculations would just move into the patch, warping it into some bizzare computational structure.

Diaz closed his eyes and tried to think.

For a long, long time, he waited for inspiration like a stylite at the end of time.

Nothing came. Maybe whatever inspiration came from had moved on when the last person died or moved out.

Perhaps there were other people, or things like people, somewhere in the universe. Maybe they were watching him, amused at this ape-thing that had appeared out of nowhere and proceeded to flounder. A fish thrown up on the shores of time and left to gasp, suffocating in the air.

Diaz growled, and pulled off his helmet and breathing apparatus. Time to change the filter.

The air tasted gritty and sour, and it was so dry it felt like he would be mummified in a matter of minutes.

It was for this reason that he had figured out how to change the filter with his eyes closed. He could do nothing for his skin, but if his eyes were dried out completely, he’d be left out of luck.

2. Who’s There?

They went through the checklist and did the first test. Backward a week, forward a week-and-a-day.

Perfect.

The second test was to go forward a year, this made him nervous, but Diaz bit the bullet and went through with it.

The computer locked down when he tried to stop, skipping him forward. Looking at the picture taken, the computer had recognized a photograph of him, with the words “In Memoriam” beneath them as himself.

He was skipped forward another 36 months before the lab shut down.

Stuck in an abandoned laboratory, he checked the outside, swiveling cameras around and around. No one there.

Diaz sighed in frustration, and began to back up.

Everything was fine for a long, long stretch of time, longer than he was used to, as if something were holding the machine in limbo, pressing it forward as he was trying to press back.

Then the machine shuddered, cracked, and crumpled.

The most terrible howling sound could be heard, and Dias looked out of the machine with his own eyes.

He was tumbling down a tunnel, through a darkened corridor lined with geometric shapes carved out of smoke, the mathematical structures of time, filtered through his sensorium and into a form he could vaguely understand.

What had struck him was a silvery ball that seemed to fill the tunnel completely. Some giant thing that pulsed with an internal light.

It shot forward again, and there was a crack as its body met his machine, and pushed him along. Accelerating faster and faster through the corridor of time. His machine twisted and flopped, but held together.

Eventually, he slid off of the silvery thing’s prow, and fell through the wall of the corridor, falling ten meters or so onto the salt-white sands of the end of the Earth.

1. Ali your friends and family have been dead for millions of years

Diaz sat at the console, and powered it up with some of the remaining charge on the engines. The computer was leaking, dripping qbits onto the sand and stone beneath the stranded time machine. If he wanted to live, he’d have to treat that as a resource.

So he began writing a simple computer virus, imbedding in it a handful of images from the computer’s database.

This could work in theory, but no one had ever really tried it outside of laboratory conditions: a computer virus written on spinning quantum dots, waiting, hoping that it would do what the theorists said it would.

The next drop began to spread, becoming a glassy bowl, sinking into the sand, and filling up with sand until the rim was all that showed.

Diaz crouched next to it, watching for what would happen next.

A liquid triangle dropped onto the sand in the bowl, and let out a liquid plunk. There was a gentle wave of heat that came off the transmuting sand, and it turned from a solid to a liquid, becoming pure water, with a small ingot of aluminum sitting in the middle.

He plucked out the aluminum and tossed it beneath the quantum drip, and drank the water deeply, then discarded the bowl as he had the ingot.

Diaz next tried to make a computer virus that would make a solar panel.

His first two tries failed, the first producing a sheet of glass, the second two sheets of aluminum in a glass frame with a liquid oxygen filling. It cracked open almost immediately, chilling its surroundings.

So, he thought, narrowing his eyes, and began typing, telling the computer to form a microscopic machine that could make a solar panel, and told it to connect it to the computer.

When it had done so, he instructed the nanite to construct two children and then build solar panels, copying the instructions into its child, up until an arbitrarily high generation of six-million duplications, and went to sleep.

Upon awakening, the time machine was surrounded by rows of solar panels, wired into the machine.

Diaz smiled. Now he could begin working.

He wired the old nanites together, and began working on a plan for upgrading them. He didn’t know much about machinery, but the computer, while damaged, was still able to provide assistance.

When he’d finished, changing them into the best type he could pull from the computer, he loaded them with more instructions.

“Fix my time machine,” he said. Then added “I am not raw material.”

He closed his environmental suit, and sat, trying not to think about the small machines that were crawling along the ship, welding things in place. Like carpenter ants the size of a virus, made of silica and aluminum.

While they worked, it sounded like some quiet but forceful exhalation from lungs with infinite or near-infinite volume:

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

He could see the breech closing up, could hear the ship resetting, becoming chemically new, atomically identical to the first moment his employers had put the damn thing together.

After fifteen hours—halfway through, he’d gone to the computer and told it that the machines could make more copies, but they’d have to get the raw materials from outside—the ship was ready again.

But would it work?

Only one way to find out.

But first, Diaz stopped at the airlock, watching the sands around the time machine glitter with the viral machines that had repaired it.

Perhaps he was sentimental, but he felt better to be overly affectionate than hard-hearted.

He instructed them to build a computer, and hook it up to the solar panels, then connect to it. He sent them the design specifications for a human brain, and watched them build one of glass and metal, watched it light from the inside.

DiaZ punched a few more keys, and copied as much information as he could into the glass mind.

His machine repaired, he set it in motion, returning to the past, aiming for the period just after he left.

But, in the instant between instants, he wondered:

What had that silvery ball been?

And had he given his little friends the knowledge of time travel?

(This one has potential as the beginning of a story, but I’ll have to do more than sketch the vague outline of it.)

The two men sit in the coffee shop. It is a Tuesday morning, after rush hour. The hole-in-the-wall shop is deserted, and the barista is attempting to solve a rubix cube.

“You ever get the feeling that there are supposed to be three of us, instead of two?” Max asks.

“Sometimes, why?” Jacob replies.

“Because I’m starting to feel like it all the time. Like one of our number vanished into thin air.”

“Must be your imagination.”

Max reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a photograph, unfolding it along the crease down the middle, and hands it to Jacob.

“This is us,” Jacob says.

“…and?”

“…and a woman I’ve never seen before.”

“Yeah. I know. But doesn’t she seem familiar, in some way?”

Jacob nods.

Max looks over at him, and sees Jacob’s mouth draw tight and his eyes widen.

“Do you know her?” Jacob asks, sipping his coffee.

“No, but I feel like I do, you know?”

“Not in the least.”

“You know how when you look at someone you know, there’s an emotional component of the recognition? I get that. But I can’t recall a name or address or anything else.”

“No stories?”

“No story but the lack of a story.”

Jacob scratches his chin.

“So, it’s a mystery, is it?”

“Seems like.”

Jacob thinks for a moment, and Max sips his drink to punctuate the statement.

“We should ask around, see if anyone we know has seen this woman. Where did you find the photograph?”

“It was in an envelope in the couch. I was looking for quarters to do laundry.”

“Was there a marking on the envelope? An address, a logo, or something?”

“No such luck. Blank.”

#

After finishing the coffee, Max hands Jacob the photograph, and the two head off on their separate ways. Jacob asks his friends, and find that no one knows the woman. He marks down the names on a notecard, under a heading that says “doesn’t know her.”

The next day, he hands the card and the photograph to Max. Another day, another dozen or so names are added to the list.

The two meet up again on Friday, and compare notes. They meet in a book store, and begin prowling the shelves, browsing instead of seeking. Eyes turn to funnel in names instead of shine a light upon a certain target.

“I feel like I know her, but we’ve got no answers,” Max said.

“Don’t give up hope,” Jacob said, pulling a book from the shelf and reading the back, “we’ll find her.”

Max takes out the photograph, and looks at it, trying to find any clue in it, and follows Jacob up to the counter.

“Something happen to your friend?” the Clerk asks.

Max looks up at the short old man.

“What?”

“You’re looking at that photograph like something’s wrong,” the man said, taking Jacob’s book and checking the inside for the price.

“You know this woman?”

“Yeah. You came in here with her all the time up until two weeks ago.”

“Interesting. You remember anything else about her?”

The man looks down, thinking, “nothing that I can really think of…why do you ask?”

Max thinks for a moment, trying to put his thoughts into words that would make sense, but finding it impossible.

(This is based loosely on this event.)

The day was overcast, but comfortable. Neither too hot, nor too cold, with a gentle breeze stirring the branches of the trees,

The two men got out of their car, and began walking up the hill. They weren’t dressed for hiking, but, then again, they didn’t have far to go.

When they reached the clearing, Tommy sat on a tree stump, and opened up his coke, while Charles pulled the printed list from his backpack.

“Two in the afternoon, arrive,” he said, and marked it off with a slash of red pen, “Two-fifteen, have circle prepared. That gives us fifteen minutes to get everything ready and get situated.”

Tommy nodded, and sipped from his liter-bottle of coca-cola.

“That shit’s going to ruin your liver,” Charles pointed out.

“Nah. I’m going to get diabetes, first.”

“Well, either way, I don’t see it being too pleasant.”

Charles flattened down a circle of grass fifteen feet across, stomping it down as best he could. When he finished, Tommy stood up, and produced a can of white spray paint from his bag, and put on a mask.

He demarcated a circle in the grass, meticulously measuring by eye. Upon finishing, he killed his coke and tossed the bottle into the woods.

Charles knelt in the middle, and set a jar of murky red liquid in the middle, and a small ingot on top.

“Circle complete.”

“Two-fifteen, circle completed,” another slash of red, “Then injections. Wait five minutes, and put on masks at two-twenty.”

“What then?”

“Wait for further instructions,” Charles said.

Tommy shrugged, and rolled up his sleeve. He removed his belt and tied up his left arm.

“I’ll handle yours. You handle mine, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. You never liked getting shots as a kid, did you?” Tommy asked.

“Not especially, why?”

“I don’t know. I was always fascinated by watching. Never really bothered me much.”

“You’re a weird one.”

“You’re not normal, either.”

“Touche.”

Charles produced the syringes, and they jointly passed the point of no return.

“Now…the masks,” he said.

Both removed the lead anti-radiation masks from their bags, and put them on.

“And now…we play the waiting game.”

“You know, it’s the damndest thing,” the old hiker said to the highway patrol.

“Tell me about it,” the officer said, taking a photograph of the two of them.”

“No, no. I mean, this is weird, but you know the weird part? They couldn’t've been out here more than a few hours, but they’ve got frost bite, and it looks like they fell from a great height…but that’s their car out there by the side of the road, isn’t it?”

The officer looked at the old man, and she shrugged.

“Maybe. What’s weird to me is what the big one has in his hand.”

The hiker looked down at it, and furrowed his brows.

“He’s holding on to a receipt from a convenience store. Why’s that weird?”

The officer shook her head.

“It means that he was planning on coming back from whatever this was.”

4. Ali Who?

Diaz stumbled from the hole in hull toward the bulge on the bottom of the machine, the computer weeping day-glo geometric figures that stained the sand triangular and octahedral.

It was dawn, and he was checking for new damage, trying to think things through. Trying to see if there was something he’d missed.

He looked sorrowfully at the hole that something had punched in the ship. No clue what had done it, but the thought of getting hit by something moving up and down the stream of time bothered him. Shouldn’t that be impossible?

He looked around at the blasted landscape.

More than anything, it looked like a desert that had been bleached out to nothing. The horizon was just a flat line, with no deviation, no mountains, no buildings, nothing.

Just the white below, and the bruise-colored sky above.

He hid from the sun, but something told him that it was not the sun he had known. It was some swelling, reddening thing.

He climbed back inside to hide from the sun, and checked how his supplies were doing. The emergency bottle of water he’d found was half-full. He was surprised how long he had made it last.

Patching up the computer was useless. Its strange calculations would just move into the patch, warping it into some bizzare computational structure.

Diaz closed his eyes and tried to think.

For a long, long time, he waited for inspiration like a stylite at the end of time.

Nothing came. Maybe whatever inspiration came from had moved on when the last person died or moved out.

Perhaps there were other people, or things like people, somewhere in the universe. Maybe they were watching him, amused at this ape-thing that had appeared out of nowhere and proceeded to flounder. A fish thrown up on the shores of time and left to gasp, suffocating in the air.

Diaz growled, and pulled off his helmet and breathing apparatus. Time to change the filter.

The air tasted gritty and sour, and it was so dry it felt like he would be mummified in a matter of minutes.

It was for this reason that he had figured out how to change the filter with his eyes closed. He could do nothing for his skin, but if his eyes were dried out completely, he’d be left out of luck.

2. Who’s There?

They went through the checklist and did the first test. Backward a week, forward a week-and-a-day.

Perfect.

The second test was to go forward a year, this made him nervous, but Diaz bit the bullet and went through with it.

The computer locked down when he tried to stop, skipping him forward. Looking at the picture taken, the computer had recognized a photograph of him, with the words “In Memoriam” beneath them as himself.

He was skipped forward another 36 months before the lab shut down.

Stuck in an abandoned laboratory, he checked the outside, swiveling cameras around and around. No one there.

Diaz sighed in frustration, and began to back up.

Everything was fine for a long, long stretch of time, longer than he was used to, as if something were holding the machine in limbo, pressing it forward as he was trying to press back.

Then the machine shuddered, cracked, and crumpled.

The most terrible howling sound could be heard, and Dias looked out of the machine with his own eyes.

He was tumbling down a tunnel, through a darkened corridor lined with geometric shapes carved out of smoke, the mathematical structures of time, filtered through his sensorium and into a form he could vaguely understand.

What had struck him was a silvery ball that seemed to fill the tunnel completely. Some giant thing that pulsed with an internal light.

It shot forward again, and there was a crack as its body met his machine, and pushed him along. Accelerating faster and faster through the corridor of time. His machine twisted and flopped, but held together.

Eventually, he slid off of the silvery thing’s prow, and fell through the wall of the corridor, falling ten meters or so onto the salt-white sands of the end of the Earth.

It’s a piece of water-cooler lore that the machines in the basement weren’t built but discovered. Supposedly these concrete blocks filled with generators and strange, unknown devices fell to Earth sometime in the 1970s.

They hum, down in the subbasement, and it’s our job to make sure they’re in working order. Of course, we don’t know what “working order” is, so it’s just guesswork, mostly.

We do this, because our records show a year that no one remembers. 197X, the year that wasn’t. According to what the bookkeepers say, the records indicate that it didn’t happen because the machines weren’t running.

We don’t know how we know this.

The machines–seven massive apparatuses set into concrete blocks, studded with flywheels, bus bars, and transistors–look like antiques.

Each has a bronze plate screwed to the side, with big, no-nonsense letters set into the side:

“UNIVERSAL DEPARTMENT OF WORKS. BRANAL MAINTENANCE DIVISION.”

And beneath that, an even stranger notice:

“EST’D THE YEAR OF OUR LORD XXXX.”

We try not to think about that one, too much.

Our job, at least on the floor, is simple, and consists of three tasks: Make sure that the machines are powered. Make sure their exhaust is being properly vented. Keep them in good repair.

The first one apparently is to prevent time-slips, like the 197X event. The second one is stranger, though.

Were we not to pipe the exhaust outside, it would buildup in the room where we keep the machinery. We didn’t know the dangers of the exhaust at first, but apparently the room began to swell up.

I don’t mean that the walls bruised and grew. I mean, the room began to get bigger, expanding outward and pushing the machines further and further apart. It got to the point where you needed to walk ten minutes from the door to get to anything interesting.

We installed a new ventilation system, and the problem seemed to sort itself out.

Other than us, there are the Record Keepers and the Search Team.

We don’t really deal too much with the Search Team. They aren’t here too much.

You see, when the machines fell to Earth, there were Eight lights in the sky. We only recovered seven machines.

Due to the way the seven we have look, they appear to be of similar function, and might even slot together, but without the last piece, it’s impossible to know anything.

We think it might be the control unit. Whatever tells them to do more than just idle along, belching out extra space-time and eating up all our electricity.

The Hermit lived on the mountainside, in a shack he’d built in the remnant of a subdivision.

As soon as he’d moved in, people started getting sick, and moving away. Those that didn’t withered away and died.

The stores closed down, and the streets never get repaved.

Sometimes, you have to drive through the area, and you see the shack he built on top of the naked foundation that had been his home. He’ll be sitting out front, with that thousand-yard stare of his.

The drive is rough, but it gets you from one highway to another, so it’s worth it. Sometimes.

The grass is dying in his yard and that of the neighboring houses, turning brown and brittle, with broken sidewalks and shattered streets.

He never waves when someone drives by. He just watches with great big liquid eyes that don’t seem to take anything in.

No one knows what he did before moving in. He just seemed to come out of nowhere and moved in. Nothing strange until three days after he moved in.

The neighbors’ pets ran away, and their children got sick. No doctors could say what was wrong. Expensive and extensive tests seemed to establish that Little Janey’s mitochondria just weren’t working right, anymore.

No viruses.

No bacteria.

No genetic abnormality.

No poison.

No radiation.

Just…nothing.

The parents caught it, soon enough. By the time it had reached the end of the block, people were dying or moving away. They were unable to stay in their homes. Soon enough, the grass started dying, and the trees drooped down, remaining bare all the way into october, where they would gain multicolored buds that dropped out almost as soon as they sprouted.

Those who moved away supposedly got better. But he never sickened, nor did he leave. Even after a vengeful neighbor, who managed to put two and two together, set fire to his home, he stayed right there. He built a shack on his lawn, and lives there, summer and winter.

No one knows what he does for money, but he never runs short. He walks down the side of the highway to the store every Thursday, and buys his groceries, and is blamed for the high turnover rate of cashiers, there.

Once, I think, I saw him standing by the side of the highway, a backpack in one hand, his face unshaven. He had his right hand out, thumb outstretched. An expression in his eyes, the smallest note of desperation in those thousand-yard eyes.

I think my reaction would be pretty typical. I changed over to the middle lane and accelerated past him, hoping he couldn’t see my face.

(This one begins using the earlier story “Crash” and expands it.  This is a new idea, for me, in that I’m doing this interlude as linked, serial flash fiction instead of as distinct pages.  If it bothers anyone…I’ll post the whole thing as an HTML document in two weeks.)

3. Ali

The crash had been spectacular. The machine crumpled around him, and just about every system failed. The hull cracked open, exposing him to the nearly-airless desert and the giant red sun up above. The terrain outside was unrecognizable, just an ancient world eroded until it was smooth as polished bone.

Diaz crouched in the shadows, and had the hose from the water tank into his helmet, periodically he would sip, and he urinated in jars, not sure if the waste reclamation system was broken or not.

By definition, the trip hadn’t been long. Unfortunately, there were other issues to deal with. A trip back was impossible: no rescuers were on their way, and there was no way he could repair the machine.

In the night, he tossed a heavy tarp over a patch of sun-warmed metal, and pressed himself to it, trying to absorb some warmth, if only to prolong his life until he could die from something other than cold.

Sometimes, he would inspect his vehicle. There was an underslung bulge on the silvery machine, a large quantum computer that took care of all the hard math. Its casing was broken, and he saw oddly colored shapes dropping out, liquids dripping, he tried to come up with terminology for the other things that were happening with it, but words failed him.

The landscape was unfamiliar. He thought that, with enough studying, he could find a landmark, but there was no way, not in this weather. He could only go out for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, to put his footsteps on the face of this ancient, dying world.

He considered taking off his helmet and the emergency environmental suit he’d had the foresight to pack, and just facing the dawn, naked as the day he was born. Ripped from the life he had known, and cast far, far, far downstream, until here he was:

Alone and with dwindling supplies,

Stuck here on this half-dead planet with a nigh-unbreathable atmosphere and no water,

With No tools, no means of communication, and

Only a broken time machine for shelter.

The quantum computer dripped abstract shapes in a color he’d never seen before, leaving a slowly-growing puddle beneath it.

The sun rose, the sun set.

He wrapped a tarp around him, and tried to think of a way out.

1. Knock Knock

“This is the machine,” the doctor told him, standing on the gantry over the silvery pod, “it has been running for three days, now, meaning that it has a past-ward range of three days. The future-ward range is still unknown.”

Diaz sucked his teeth as he looked at it.

“And everything you’ve put through it has been returned safely?”

“That’s right. The first test was completely automated. A one-minute jump forward. No unusual radiation. No elevated temperature. A fairly impressive magnetic field, but unless the occupant or someone nearby has a pacemaker, they should be safe.”

“And you’ve already put live things through it?”

“There were bacteria in the first one, the third test involved a cage full of lab rats, sent first backward, then forward. The only problem was when two iterations of the same rat were placed in a single cage. That was the fifth test. Both died of cardiac arrest, but we don’t believe it to be directly related to the machine. It’s more likely their brains couldn’t process what was happening and the elevated stress level killed them.”

Diaz nodded.

“Anything more complex than the rats?”

“We put through several monkeys. We repeated the rat experiment with a chimp, which resulted in a violent altercation that ultimately killed both animals.”

Diaz furrowed his brow.

“So…how do I know that I won’t encounter myself?”

“The computer has been programmed to recognize you, and would force a landing six hours after its sensors last catch sight of you.”

Diaz nodded.

“So. Shall we suit you up and set you on your first test?”

“One question. How does it stay in place while traveling through time? Shouldn’t it end up orbiting the moon, or something?”

The Doctor nodded, impatiently.

“You know Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? The short answer is that this machine keeps you in a single frame-of-reference and moves you with that. So, you’re stapled in place, in regard to the Earth.”

Diaz nodded.

“Where’s my locker?”

The mineshaft sank into the giant head below the swinging platform. The technician-priests sang chants and spun prayerwheels around the opening of the hole, trepaned into the side of the Dead God’s head.

The pulley above the platform sqeaked as they were lowered into the cavernous interior of the mountainous skull. Miniscule crystals studded the walls, and ichor dripped from pickaxe wounds.

The platform locked into position at the bottom of the shaft, and the miners wheeled out the cart, pushing it down the tracks laid through a dry artery the size of a palatial hallway. The blood had long ago been pumped out, the cappilaries tied off, the opening into the aorta dynamited and sealed off.

A separate hole had been drilled in so that the priests could set up a shrine and feed prayer and chants to the remaining spirit of the dead God. Drumming night and day to keep the God-body manifested and prevent it from rotting away.

They’d rebuilt the heart as best they could, sewing shut the gaping wound with cables as thick as a man’s thigh, and plastering over it from the inside.

The miners whistled as they pushed the cart along the tracks. The miners muttered token prayers with each strike of the pickaxe, ripping shards of congealed power from the walls and shoveling them into carts.

The city that sprang up at the foot of the mountain range that had been the rain god continued about its business, waiting for the daily infusion of the god’s ichor into the clouds. Many ignored the cannons raising, taking aim. Thirty degrees up. Thirty-five. Forty. Forty-five.

Fire.

Bolts of blue light arched upward, accompanied by the sound of thunder. Reflexively, the people halted their business, and waited for the last echo to die.

From the western horizon, the shot from the corpse of the Earth goddess, the lady of the forest, went up, green light suffusing the clouds, the crystaline green bits of ichor fragmenting high above and falling on the remaining fertile ground.

In the markets, people bartered over the staples: food, potable water, coal, fire ichor, lightning ichor.

One of the street urchins looked up, and listened, as the dead-but-not-gone corpse of the rain god groaned in his death-nightmares, moaned in his dreams of death. The god croaked, and rolled onto its back, ichor flowing from the hole in his head.

The blue fluid poured from the gaping wound, and turned into a fine mist.

People screamed, as the God’s geologically slow death throes uprooted foundations, but the urchin merely ran out into the street, to play in the sudden rain.