Back Then
Sci-fi flash fiction about time machines and an idiot lab assistant. Let me know if you like the story and I'll keep writing it!
Sunday, December 4th, the year 292,277,026,596 AD:
“Fuck Dennis Ritchie, and fuck Ken Thompson.”
“Who are Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson?”
“They invented Unix and decided on the epoch time.”
“What does that have to do with us?”
“Well, in Unix, everything before the epoch time may as well have just not existed.”
“So?”
“So, the epoch time was January 1st, 1970… When did I ask you to send us?”
“January 1st, 1970…”
“Sierra” Klara sighed. “You didn’t send us back to January 1st, 1970- did you? When did you send us?”
“December 31st 1969. You think I wanna miss THAT party?”
Klara sat in stunned silence for a few moments.
“It’s just a day, Klara. What could possibly have gone wrong?”
Klara lowered her face into her hands and let out a muffled shout of rage. She looked up and scanned the horizon. For as far as the eye could see, gray expanse was punctuated here and there by mountains of junk. And they were literal mountains. Klara could see clouds gathering at some of their tips and what looked like a forest blooming in an alpine valley.
What exactly was she looking at? The walls of the valley were technology of some sort….
She bumped the zoom on her visor from 10 to 100x. Details leapt into view- wires and burned cockpits, sleek metal pills, large brutalist cubes, tiny melon-sized Faberge framed eggs that had once transported irrelevant trinkets as a formality. Some still held their cargo of bananas or pizza or 1 kilo tungsten cubes. A tragic few still held their passengers. Captives? Researchers? Inventors? Investors, Klara hoped.
“Time machines.”
“What?”
“Those mountains over there? They are mountains of time machines.”
“What? No. That’s impossible.”
“This place defies logic, we shouldn’t be able to breath right now. All of its atmosphere must be brought back with the machines.”
“Now that isn’t too hard to believe. I mean you remember how large the test auras were, remember when we accidentally sent half of that pine tree to the 1910 world series?”
“We sent it here.”
“No, we sent it to the world series! The mets still won! Ha!”
“No, we sent it here. Everything we tested we sent here. Everything everyone has ever tested has been sent here.”
“That makes no sense. If it’s this Unix buffer overflow thing you’re describing why are we just getting here now? Everything should pop into existence here simultaneously.”
“It did, we’re lucky. Seems like we ended up at the bottom of the Radnio Stack.”
“You’re saying this is a quantum emergence bubble?”
“Yes. We never had any reason to think about them on a macroscopic scale though. I guess it makes sense that they could attain atmosphere… become stable.”
“So we’re just a probability field? We could all collapse into nonexistence at any second?”
“You’re acting as if that’s some big update to the way things were before you hit the button.”
Sierra shrugged away from Klara and pouted, pulling her lab coat up against a cold gust. They must be up pretty high as well. Klara looked under her feet to see grass crusted in snow. Where was the soil for these plants coming from? She kicked the ground at her feet to reveal a chunk of rusted metal plating that skittered off over the edge of the cliff, flailing to the gray expansive floor of the space below. When it got to the bottom, it slipped in without a noise, swallowed up by the gray. Fog. It wasn’t a floor. It was a layer of mist over something else Klara couldn’t see. This place was massive. It defied reason.
“Why these stacks, you think?” Sierra asked.
Klara opened her mouth to answer just as a large clanking shuddering crash behind her sent up a plume of snow over her shoulder. The noise rose as a flaming wreck of a time machine- an early diving bell style thing- rolled lopsidedly into the clearing where they stood. Shouts of panic and alarm rose from the bell amid a cacophony of klaxons and other general anxious beeping indicating that something that should not be on fire is very much on fire.
“There’s someone in there!” Sierra was halfway to the craft before Klara realized what had happened.
“Sierra wait it could expl-” Klara’s sentence was cut off as a plume of white flame retardant shot from the craft. Sierra stood coughing and waving retardant away as a door slid aside and a short figure stepped out.
“Hi,” A speaker on their helmeted suit crackled to life “I’m Sam.”
“I’m Sierra! Why’d you light your time machine on fire?”
“I didn’t, they did” Sam said, pointing at the ridge above. Klara hadn’t noticed before now, but new light danced up over its lip. Silhouettes stood against that light, watching, unmoving.
“We should get out of here before they make up their mind to come down here and do it again.”