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“Derek,” Conald struggles to say, “this is not right. You have to flood the capsule with hard radiation.”
“Yes,” cries Delores, his significant other, though I’ve always thought of her as the wife he’d never married. Sadly, he won’t be proposing now. “Do it!”
I know they’re right, but all I can think about is my 9mm I left behind.
Easy-to-Read B&W Format
Fiction
Horror
“Derek,” Conald struggles to say, “this is not right. You have to flood the capsule with hard radiation.”
“Yes,” cries Delores, his significant other, though I’ve always thought of her as the wife he’d never married. Sadly, he won’t be proposing now. “Do it!”
I know they’re right, but all I can think about is my 9mm I left behind.
We’ve been lying on the floor of the time capsule for eighteen minutes now, helpless. Only twelve minutes left to go. I’m the tempilot, as I’ve been trained. Conald and Delores are along as it’s already been determined that a lone pilot can travel backwards in time. And three sounded like a good number in exploring a multiple crew complement.
“No,” I hiss. “I know it’s painful, but just try to hold on.”
“I can withstand this agony as well as anyone,” Delores moans. “That’s not it. Look at us. Just look at us!”
I’m trying hard not to. Though I’ve always been dark-complected, my skin has become a leathery pock-marked brown with a greenish tinge. The bones in my body, especially in my arms, have warped, contorting me to this hideous form. My back hurts most of all, the terrible burning in my shoulders surely transforming me into a hunchbacked monstrosity like my two crewmates. Delores, who once flashed the loveliest of smiles, now sprouts fangs: thick, yellow, grotesque. Conald’s distinguished face had always set him off from the crowd, but now he’s an archetype of primal savagery, making the most hideous past member of Homo erectus a bronze Adonis.
“Do it!” Conald cries. “I don’t want to go on like this.”
Neither do I, but I’m not about to terminate the mission. Not yet. And with my back and arms such a wreck, I don’t think I can reach up and find the right button to open the core anyway. The temporal displacement field is making me feel eight times my regular weight.
Time travel is nothing new. Humans have been time traveling since their inception, moving into the future one second at a time. Call it the old-fashioned way, someone once joked, but I see nothing funny about it now. We’d finally mastered the ability to transport objects, and then animals and people, back into the past, but it wasn’t like science-fantasy writers envisioned it. No stepping into a time machine and, poof, you’re back in the distant past ready to relive history.
I was the first temponaut, going back four hours, emerging from the capsule to a laboratory full of cheering scientists and technicians. And yes, to actually meet my past self who existed another four hours until he became me and became the first successful temponaut. I think, anyway. It’s all so confusing. You know how long my journey into the past took? Four hours, that’s how long. Four hours of sitting in a similar capsule, wondering if I’d make it to the past whole like my predecessor Lonnie the Chimp had. A slow process, this time travel, but at least it wasn’t physically painful. Call it the new old-fashioned way.
Of course this wouldn’t be a practical way of visiting the distant past. You couldn’t ask a temponaut to sit in a capsule for ten years just so he could visit the previous decade. Acceleration was in order. Two experiments with cutting the duration by half were successful. I piloted the second such mission alone. And while it was a painful two hours, I had endured. We figured that speeding up the process eight-fold might be even more agonizing, but no one had remotely considered this.
As soon as the temporal process began, we started to mutate. Into what, I can’t be sure. A strange offshoot of something primal man had been spared. Something so hideous that—
“Derek,” Conald insists. “Flood the chamber. Kill us now!”
But I know that’s not how it will play out. I have never been a proponent of handguns, or firearms of any variety. I’ve always found them distasteful, ever since my father took me hunting as a boy and I watched him kill a buck. The sorrow in the dying creature’s eyes is one I’ll never forget. But sometime after my first temporal journey, I found myself carrying a 9mm, as if some inner voice told me I would be needing it. And as repulsive as I found the thing, I kept it on my person. Always. If they’d let me bring it on this mission, I might consider granting Conald and Delores their wish at this very moment, but that is not the case.
“Please,” Delores pleads.
There is much debate over whether time travel can actually change the past, offshoots of time being one possibility, the past being immutable another. Though I have no memory of it, I know I will be waiting for myself in the past, waiting for this version of me to exit from the capsule. This time not to applause, but to gasps of appalling horror.
“Listen to her,” Conald cries. “Listen to me. Flood the chamber!”
No, that won’t be necessary. Myself will take care of us when we arrive.
Copyright 2009, Marshall Payne. All rights reserved.
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