This book is dedicated to those who made it possible.
To my family, the living story I’ve been blessed with, who have supported my writing since I was old enough to put pen to paper.
To my readers, who cheered on my silly dream of turning tiny stories into literature.
To Ryan ‘Elena’ Moursund, a hero out of space and time who emerged in my hour of need to pull the stars within my reach.
And to you, reading this book. I hope it helps you create something more beautiful and bizarre than I could even imagine.
CONTENTS
Dedication
How This Book Is Meant to Be Read
1 Time Travel
2 Coniferous University
3 Space Travel
4 Alien Life
5 Technology
6 Magic
7 Fantasy
8 Nature
9 Horror
10 Weird
11 Other
Supporters’ Stories
A Note on the Author
Index
Supporters
Copyright
How This Book Is Meant to Be Read
To begin, you can read this book however you like. I’m not the boss of you.
However, this book is not meant to be a traditional narrative. It is a collection of hundreds of microfiction stories, each just a few words or sentences long. Each one is meant to evoke its own emotions, images and ideas, and may have nothing to do with the stories surrounding it. Like time, this book is not meant to be experienced beginning to end, as a continuous stream. Feel free to skip to whatever chapter captures your interest, and select random stories for inspiration.
Out of this multitude of stories there is no knowing which ones will echo in your mind. To make it easier to keep track of the stories that are most important to you, each one is numbered within its own chapter, and there is an index of recurring words at the back to help you navigate.
The exception is chapter 2, ‘Coniferous University’. While the stories here are meant to inspire creativity and original ideas, just like the rest of the book, they can also be read from beginning to end. This gives me the chance to provide a cohesive example of world-building and, hopefully, inspire others hoping to do the same. Chapter 11, meanwhile, compiles unusual items – songs and micro-mysteries – that do not fit neatly in any of the preceding sections.
CHAPTER 1
Time Travel
1 He checked the letterbox for mail. He hadn’t given his address to anyone yet, but some rare postage stamps could send letters back in time.
2 ‘This is the one true star-map,’ he whispered. ‘Time fluctuates wildly beyond our solar system. Everything we know about distance is wrong.’
3 Parenthood was no barrier to time travel. Children were left in nursery timelines, idyllic realities with extra-long sunsets, three days in each weekend, and alternate versions of their parents to babysit. Those children often struggled to adapt to their harsh, native timelines.
4 A single grain of sand rolled endlessly around the Klein-bottle hourglass. He could stretch that moment forever, and never see her leave.
5 Time travel wasn’t just possible, it was genetic. His DNA coded for proteins that folded into the geometry needed to snag passing tachyons.
6 She couldn’t travel through time, but she could still participate in temporal warfare. She just had to shield her memory against timeline shifts. She could see who was benefiting from changes to the past and undo them in the present. They would have to come to her eventually.
7 A stopped clock is right twice a day.
A clock running in reverse is right four times a day.
A clock running at 720 times normal speed is right once a minute.
A faceless clock is never wrong.
Our concept of accuracy is just fine.
But time itself won’t be kept under lock and key.
8 Call your representatives in the legislature. Tell them you support legalising communication with beings outside of time. Tell them not to be duped by their own future selves, who show up in our time to scream about ‘blue suns in a white sky’ but offer no legislative solutions.
9 Journalists from the future would appear as history was made. He got nervous as a crowd of them filmed his blind date from outside the café.
10 Huygens’ Syndrome, causing increasingly improbable assertions about reality, resulted whenever a time traveller changed his or her own past. The first patient was called Jane Doe, instead of ‘Erin, the Emerald Isle made flesh, sent to the past for heroic purpose’, as she insisted. It was unknown how Jane Doe changed the past. She was found giggling in a forest clearing, holding a sledgehammer near a pulverised statue. Jane Doe made countless claims about the future. She predicted a coming war between Jupiter’s moons, and the end of ‘unregulated astronomy’. She always called the reporter documenting her ‘Your Majesty’, and often enquired after GPS coordinates that, so far, were open ocean. Jane Doe vanished, smiling, when the probability of her existence reached zero. Millions waited in vain for her predictions to come to pass.
11 Using a quartz clock during time travel is a rookie error. The crystals heat up, crack and even explode under the stress. Experienced travellers prefer mechanical timepieces. The best are built like fighter jets, with cogs of ceramic and titanium that don’t warp in extreme heat.
12 Well-to-do young ladies had polished fragments of time set into the heels of their shoes to undo missteps and faux pas on the dance floor.
13 The time machine gathered dust. He was eager to visit the past, but the appeal soon wore off. As with all things, the book had been better.
14 They broke into her loft, but she was already gone. She must have left in a hurry: all the telltale signs were there. Lockpicks lodged in the back of a pocket watch. Reference photos of comets and novas. Geodes. She was an unlicensed time traveller on the lam in a forbidden year.
15 With time travel, the maths of probability became convoluted. Mathematicians insisted the ‘love’ constant was accurate but always misapplied.
16 Imprecise methods doomed him to make the same failed trip to the past infinitely. Reality from his machine to her door grew ragged and worn.
17 The subjective passage of time is obvious to those travelling through it. It takes ages to cross a perfect summer afternoon when the air is thick with lemon and memories. Autumn is always gone in an instant, and only the best travellers can revisit something as brief as childhood.
18 The stabilised double paradox is an advanced time-travel technique, useful in making isolated timelines for recreational world domination.
19 Time traveller funerals are rare. Careful travellers can outrun death for ages, while reckless ones tend to delete themselves from history. When a funeral is held it’s a major event, attended by friends from a dozen centuries, and at least a few younger versions of the deceased.
20 Time moved slower at the spot on the outskirts of town where a time traveller had crash-landed. Lovesick kids spent years there every night.
21 Old-fashioned time travel was covert but risky. Her golden anchor slipped from the bedrock, and the planet spun off into space without her.
22 A ship without a name is bad luck. This is especially true for unnamed time machines. Temporal com-pression amplifies bad luck exponentially.
23 There is no convenient ‘out’ for dealing with extra versions of yourself created through time travel. They won’t wink out of existence. Have a protocol for living with your time clones, or have a plan to deal with them. Remember, you might be on the other side of the equation one day.
24 After time travel was invented, futuristic armies app
eared in the past, temporal patriots guarding the changes that spawned their realities.
25 Our plan to deflect the asteroid was a long shot, but we knew it would work. Refugees from doomed timelines were pouring into our reality.
26 Early time travellers measured the trips in ‘grains’, in reference to an hourglass, since they could only move a few seconds at a time. Later machines used grandfather clocks, and measured quarter-hours as ‘chimes’. The terms remain in use today; time travellers adore tradition.
27 The time-travel community was like a family. A trendy, steam-powered cousin in 1899. A crazy uncle ‘definitely not’ trying to delete Hitler.
28 Wary time travellers kept clocks to count down the probability of their own birth. Travellers deleted by paradox were said to be ‘midnighted’.
29 Each passing day of spring brought more hours of daylight. We got suspicious when the sky stopped getting dark at all. The sun was rising before it had even begun to set on the far side of the sky. Someone was skimming hours off the day, saving all the night-time for themselves.
30 ‘Time travel is hard because time moves at light-speed,’ he lectured. ‘The distance in one second would get you seventy-eight per cent of the way to the moon.’
31 Time machines of modern origin are automated enough for any amateur to pop back to pre-Revolution Paris for lunch. Earlier time machines took skill and expertise to operate. Temporal explorers would have to watch the sky, counting full moons to judge how far they’d wandered.
32 His political party prioritised the invention of time travel. He didn’t campaign; taking the country was not a question of ‘if’, but ‘when’.
33 His parents talked about visits he hadn’t paid them, things he didn’t remember telling them. He didn’t mind. Moving between timelines was easier than changing the past. He assumed an unlucky version of himself had lost his parents, and was visiting a kinder timeline to say hello.
34 He managed the late shift with help from an overclocked snooze button, able to funnel a night’s worth of dreams and darkness into nine minutes.
35 The phantom sensation of insects on your skin isn’t always an illusion. The yesterfly glides through time to feed on sweeter moments in the past and future, but it needs to rest in the present. They prefer to land on humans, watching us grow up to keep their bearings in history.
36 He begged for their help, but no one would protect him from his angry, time-travelling double. Legally, their quarrel was a private matter.
37 Shards of backward time were common and cheap. Tiny ones were affixed to pens as erasers. Bigger ones were detonated over clear-cut forests.
38 Temporary ‘mayfly timelines’ can be made using an object from the future that will prevent its own creation, often by deleting its creator. Native time travellers can send the object back to continue the cycle, but it will eventually age and crumble, and their timeline with it.
39 Time was sold like electricity. Wealthy homes had days of free time between shifts at the office. Poorer homes barely got time to sleep.
40 The art of investigation was almost lost with the invention of time travel. Some gumshoes got lazy, travelling back to witness crimes as they happened. Only crimes with delayed results posed any challenge: poisoning, espionage and eliminating someone with a well-placed paradox.
41 A big storm knocked out the grid. When she awoke, her calendars were all blinking 1 January. She held her breath and checked the year.
42 Dust from a doomed timeline. Scraps of paper covered in paradoxical words. He hated carrying such weapons, but time travel was dangerous.
43 The first time traveller arrived, took one step, and vanished. We debated whether it’d been a test run, or if she’d undone her own existence.
44 Navigation for time travellers gets more complicated near the Earth’s poles. The long Arctic days are convenient for counting the years flying past. With some planning, decades can be tracked by the ticking of a compass as it follows the wandering of the magnetic North Pole.
45 They invented new mathematical symbols to express his age on the tombstone. An imagination like his couldn’t be reckoned with linear time.
46 Patches of slow time grew naturally in primeval forests. Those lost within emerged centuries later, gasping about ancient monsters.
47 He knew better than to squander a good day. He hung them upside down in their kitchen, letting them dry out in the open air. At strategic moments, he would rehydrate one in his tea. It was an early alternative to time travel, fighting back against untamed and deceptive emotions.
48 The rich bought huge sections of the future and demanded tolls to enter. Few of us could afford them, so we had to skip those monopolised years. We returned during the sparse bits of public time around tax day. We saw right through their happy talk about an empty, elitist world.
49 Their enemies were on the lookout for unnatural good luck, so time travellers couldn’t be too prepared. They never had exact change, or a convenient umbrella. Gambling was a rookie mistake, but a savvy traveller might keep a few failed lotto tickets in her pocket as a red herring.
50 How to tell if you’re a deep-cover time cop:
• You feel you were born ‘in the wrong century’.
• You feel oddly comforted by the presence of blimps.
• You can’t shrug off memories of the Silent Cataclysm as ‘just a dream’.
• You feel space travel ‘gives away our position’.
51 She could hear the trilobites crawling along the outside of the museum walls. Her fossiliser was low on silt. This was going to be tricky.
52 Low-level time-travel tech seeped into the consumer market in subtle ways. Autocorrect consulted your future self to flawlessly decipher texting typos. He got nervous when all his texts to her were being replaced by declarations of love. His thumb hovered over the ‘send’ button.
53 They finally retired Daylight Saving Time, but did so in April. A handful of scheming politicians lived for centuries on all our lost hours.
54 It took a full year of diligent work to make a batch of ‘lament blue’ dye. Synthetic dyes failed to capture the complex shade. The genuine article was imbued with the 365 lost nights away from loved ones, which only an artisan could give. The wealthy bought it with a day’s earnings.
55 Reality branched into endless possible timelines, but there was an original. A true universe did exist and, deep down, we were aware of it. Whenever we talked about the way things ‘should be’, it was in reference to that reality. Summer vacation lasted just a little longer there.
56 She brushed aside the dust and saw her own skeletal hand, ring and all, in the fossil’s stomach. ‘Okay,’ she swore, ‘no more time travel.’
57 Time travellers didn’t stop ageing, even if they only went back a few hours to alter some personal crisis. A stubborn traveller could lose years trying to fix one horrid day. If a fellow traveller heard the bad news and said, ‘You look awful,’ it was a compliment to their dedication.
58 Temporal circuitry allowed even simple computers to solve complex problems instantly by sending commands deep into the past. Savvy time travellers kept hidden stockpiles of servers powered up for aeons, running calculations to guide complex manoeuvres through the distant future.
59 Ideas for living with time clones:
• All of you choose different names.
• Live together to share resources.
• Become a magician.
Ideas for dealing with time clones:
• Send each to a different past century to live their life and build a collective, historic fortune.
• Clone fight.
60 With no code of conduct, early time travellers went back hundreds of years to barter. In exchange for ancient gold, they promised to secretly protect the descendants of their trading partners. Ignorant of the arrangement, we invented the concept of ‘luck’ to describe its effects.
61 Never wear white after Labor Day. It’s very disorienting for amateur
time travellers, who may not have access to professional chronometers. Other times of year, they should be able to roughly navigate using things like annual fireworks displays, traditional music and ripe fruit.
62 By skipping nine months of each year, time travellers could raise children who knew only one season. Spring children could hear the silent yawning of trees coming back to life. Summerkin knew the rules to games we never imagined, played in the orange light of their native sunsets. Pale and willowy, the children of autumn spoke of a distant place, the Harvestland, where thunder and wind were grown in fields like wheat. The winterfolk grew up knowing their rank and unit, and would try to recruit anyone who would listen to join their coming war on summer.
63 It’s standard practice for time travellers to endure some life problems: a tragic romance, or perhaps a mortal enemy on the loose. The urge to correct every minor problem with time travel is dangerous. Villainous alternate selves always track down the most idyllic life to steal.
64 Expected
Time travel is, by necessity, space travel. She knew this, but her hand still wouldn’t pull the lever. Every time traveller knew to keep their machines anchored to the largest local source of gravity. Without that, they would watch the Earth spin off into the void as the solar system continued its orbit around the galaxy. She had untethered her machine, and even with all of her testing to make sure it was spaceworthy, the primal fear of the infinite black void fought back against her curiosity. Finally, resolve won out, and she pulled the lever as far as it would go.
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