—June, 2009-September, 2010
Borrego Springs, Los Angeles, Tijuana
THE CHRONOTOPE
I.
And here I am getting the inoculations for two jaunts: one half a million years into the past and one half a million years into the future.
A good number of timers had died so that I, and my contemporaries, will not. Every new method of travel―by sea, by land, by space, and by time―is paved with gravestones from the folly of trial and error. In the first jaunts, into the distant past or future, the notion of deceased or new microbes, bacteria and viruses alike had not been considered by the great minds that were too busy dealing with equations, physics, and the nature of time as the fourth dimension.
This is what the doctor tells me as he gives me the shots that will keep me alive.
We must thank them in our prayers, says the doctor.
I thank them before each jaunt, I say.
They sacrificed for the future, says the doctor.
Which future? I ask.
All possible times, says the doctor, and all possible worlds.
II.
And so I do not get stricken with any illness when I jaunt back half a million years to collect the data from the machine left by a timer who returned with an extinct virus that spread throughout the lab and killed many. That lab, in Denver, had to be nuked.
I pray for those who died, and I thank their souls for the sacrifice they made so that I can jaunt and carry out my job safely.
III.
And so I do not fall ill when I go half a million years into the future to an earth where no human beings live, only insects and small animals. I like it here in this time: no crowds no stink of overpopulation, but the bugs and rats…and these giant land lobsters who seem to be the dominant intelligent species.
IV.
And still, when I return, I am subject to three days of quarantine to make sure my body is not host to something new, what we call the hee-bee-jee-bees. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, to think that, unknown to me, hee-bee-jee-bees are swimming like happy fish through my bloodstream. Not all hee-bee-jee-bees attack the body right away; they could swim around for days, weeks, months, maybe even years, and then one day decide to destroy their home, not unlike we humans do, and make a mess of things.
V.
And my jaunt point is the old military base on Coronado Island, part of San Diego, California. My jobs are tasked to southern California. I have worked out of points in London, Miami, and New York before. I like San Diego, the weather is nice in any era.
VI.
And I find myself in the city of Tijuana, Mexico, near the border by San Diego, in the year 1987. The city is a mixture of poverty and wealth; the haves and have-nots; third world and modern world. A hungry child begs me for money as I see a limousine drive down the street.
My job sends me to the red light district of Tijuana, an area the locals call Zona Norte. Here the streets are lined with prostitutes dressed provocatively to entice men to pay them money for sex. Inside the clubs and bars, naked women dance for the delight of men’s eyes. On street corners stand musicians with accordions and guitars, singing of better times and better days. Many American men walk up and down the streets, enter the clubs, looking for women to pay to have sex with.
This is a delightfully decadent city. I have read much about it. I like the atmosphere, which is festive despite the poverty; I like the smell of street vendors selling hot dogs and corn. It is too bad that in 2037, the city will topple in a large earthquake; for now, in 1987, is thrives on various human needs for connection.
I walk into the restaurant of the Hotel Nelson and have a meal of tacos and small beer. The food is magnificent. Men and women come to my table to sell me things: bracelets, wallets, hats. Children try to sell my gum and candy.
It is from the vantage of the restaurant window that I see my job, just as I was told: a group of five off-duty sailors walking down to where the prostitutes are. I take the knife I had been given for my task and place the knife in my pocket. I get up and follow them: into the Hong Kong Club, where they sit down and drink beers and watch local women dance on the stage. They give these women one-dollar bills, and for that they get to feel the women’s body parts.
I am patient.
I am a man, too, and I enjoy watching the display of flesh.
One of the sailors gets up and goes into the men’s restroom. He’s happy drunk. He is my job.
I follow him.
We are alone in the restroom.
He is at the urinal, relieving himself.
I take out the knife.
I quickly reach around and slit his throat.
He turns and I jab the knife into his chest.
Leave the restroom, walk back into the streets of Tijuana, waiting to jaunt back to my time now that the job is done.
VII.
And I’m told I did a good job, and reminded why the young sailor had to die in 1987. He would have gone on to be a career man in the Navy, reaching the rank of admiral where, in the throes of madness, he would order several submarines to launch a nuclear attack on Beijing, instigating a war that I once remembered but has now been erased from the timeline of my memory.
One life to take, to save the lives of millions.
It would give you an incredible headache to ponder on how future history was changed, from 1987, by that one death.
VIII.
And it’s never that easy. I am tasked to remain years in a certain era before my job becomes clear. I have spent five years in the fifteenth century, before the colonists came to the area that would be Southern California, where I killed a simple crewmember of a Spanish ship. I have waited three years in the eighteenth century, where I killed a writer whose philosophical works would have become the basis for a tyranny far greater than Hitler’s. I waited one week when I went five hundred years into the future and I have waited one minute when I was ten thousand years in the future. I stayed one year as far back as two hundred thousand years from my time, to kill a simple hunter-gatherer and his tribe before they evolved into what I was told was dangerous. I had no idea how or why such sincere folk could become dangerous. I do as I am told; I do my job, and I jaunt back―
IX.
And I wait for my next assignment, which could come within days, weeks, months. I have waited two years. I do not know who in the government or military decides that someone from the past or future must die. I am not sure what the criterion is, beyond the good for mankind’s timelines.
I am a soldier.
I am a time assassin.
And I am lonely.
X.
And I go to San Diego back in 1938 and am met with a surprise. There is a parade and the parade is for me. I am downtown San Diego, on Broadway, and there is a large banner that reads:
WELCOME TIME TRAVELER!
Hundreds of people cheer as I make my arrival, as I appear out of thin air in the middle of the street. A portly man in jacket and tie, the style of the times, approaches me, and in his hand he holds a large gold key. He tells me he’s the mayor and this is the key of the city, presented to me. He explains that many timers get the key to the city, and there is always a parade whenever “one of you people from the future” shows up.
Something is wrong; something is not quite right. This is 1938, nobody here should know of timers, or of time travel, let alone throwing parades.
Another man emerges from the crowd. I know who he is. He tells me his name is Jack Jennings and he’s ready to meet his doom, to ensure that the future will be a better place without his influence. He’s a young scientist right now, but twenty years later he will develop a weapon used in the Korean War that is so devastating that it stops Vietnam from happening, and President John F. Kennedy doesn’t get assassinated, and Richard Nixon doesn’t take office, and Ronald Reagan never becomes President which means both George Bushes, father and son, do not become President, and 9/11 never occurs, yet Al Gore does become President i
n 2012.…
That, of course, has to be set straight.
And so Jack Jennings must die.
Jack Jennings waits for his demise.
I point the weapon at him.
The major smiles.
The crowd cheers me on.
Fight the future! they yell.
I kill Jack Jennings and the crowd goes wild, fireworks are shot into the air, confetti rains down, a young man in uniform grabs a woman in a nurse’s outfit and kisses her right next to me, the perfect photo op.
XI.
And back at base, I am told that a paradox has occurred and I say no shit a paradox has transpired, 1938 is all wrong. The whole future is wrong, they inform me, and things need to be done to make sure we don’t all suddenly vanish without a trace in history.
Here is what happened:
There is a rogue faction of timers who have broken away from the program and have been acting on their own, stopping certain assassinations or taking out people who were not on the hit lists, at least not from the time point they launched from. It has been difficult to find them because their whereabouts in time is unknown. They have absconded with technology and hidden it somewhere in the past.
When I ask who they are, I am told they are not fellow timers I am acquainted with; they are a group from three hundred years in the future, when there is no more United States and a different form of the time program exists.
Things are a mess in the past and the future.
XII.
And I remain five years in San Diego from 1906-1911, the longest stretch of time before I find my target. Something must have gone wrong with chronotope settings, or the wrong data were input. I await a pull-back but it never comes. I am marooned in this era, and I must survive. I take off jobs, and wind up working the grape fields in an area known as Temecula.
In 1908 I meet a woman named Catherine who also works the field. She is a simple woman, a widow at age twenty-eight with a child. I fall in love with her after she falls in love with me.
Against all better judgment, I marry her and we have two children a year apart. We live modestly but we are happy.
In 1910, a man passing as a migrant worker calling himself Miguel tells me he knows who I am, he knows what time I come from. He says he comes from 2314, and he is part of resistance group called the Anti-Chronotope Brigade, who have been changing the past and the future in ways they believe are more beneficial to humankind than what computers and politicians and military men in power believe.
Join us, he tells me.
I say I cannot, I am loyal.
What will your loyalty get you? he asks me. Once you complete your mission, you will be taken out of this time and you will leave your wife and children behind. Join us, fight with us, and we can return you to this year whenever you please. You will no longer be a slave to time.
I ask him: doesn’t he see himself and his cronies as time slaves themselves, slaves to their cause, pawns in altered histories.
Clearly, we cannot help you, he says.
I didn’t ask for help, I say.
You are doomed, he says.
Eventually, we all are, I say.
XIII.
And so I wait another year for my target. He is a field worker with charisma. By 1915 he will be a leader of labor revolt. We will usher in the rights for the downtrodden worker earlier than it is supposed to happen, resulting in an economic collapse in the United Sates prior to the Great Depression, which will result in the Great Depression never happening, which will result in the United States never joining the Allied Forces in Germany, and the consequence is Hitler’s rule of much of the world until 1953, when Berlin is nuked by the Russian Resistance.
All because of one man working in the grape fields of Temecula, California.
And I find myself unable to kill him.
Why is this? I have been here for five years and I have changed. I have a wife and two wonderful children that I love. For them, I am willing to risk it all: time, history, and my rank.
So I let him live, to do what he must.
For a year, nothing happens. Catherine gets pregnant again, my target moves on elsewhere.
Then word gets to me that he was murdered, and I know that they sent someone else to take care of my failed task.
XIV.
And perhaps I should have known better, because I am jaunted back to base while I lay in bed next to my sleeping, seven-month-pregnant wife. I am taken from that life.
XV.
And when I return, I have only been gone five minutes, not five years, despite the gray now in my hair and beard.
I am forced to shave and get a haircut.
I sit in an isolation room and wait for my interrogator, a woman who looks a lot like my daughter will when she becomes a woman, I think.
She demands to know why I failed. I demand to know why I wasn’t sent to 1911 when I could have gotten the job done swiftly, why was I marooned for five years where I had to blend in, where I had to fall in love and marry.
There was sabotage by the Anti-Chronotopes, she informs me, and you are not the only soldier who was displaced.
I tell her about my visit, how they attempted to recruit me.
For my loyalty, I will not be prosecuted and demoted.
To redeem myself, they have a special mission in mind, one where I will prove my ultimate loyalty to the cause.
Send me back to 1911, I suggest. I will take care of the job, and then I want to retire. Leave me there. I have a wife and three children.
Your marriage and progeny have altered the future, I’m told.
How? We are no one. We are simple people.
I am told that my great-grandson will become an important man in world politics, and that was never meant to be; he was never meant to exist.
How do you know? I argue. How do you know that isn’t the correct future, the one that is truly meant to be?
I receive no answer.
XVI.
And you never want to ponder too long on the concept of paradox; it will only give you a headache. They tell you this first day of training. Leave the paradox in hands and minds of scientists and philosophers. I am a soldier. A pawn. A piece of metal in the large machine.
And yet, how can I resist? They could send someone to pull me from 1906, resend me to 1911. Seems to be an easy solution.…
XVII.
And so they send me back to 1899 to murder Catherine as a child, thus ensuring she will never give birth to children where a great-grandson one day might exist and cause detriment to the preferred timeline.
I wait for her outside the small schoolhouse sitting in the middle of a dirt mound. There are fifteen students. I see her and my heart melts. She’s a child, but she’s still the woman I love. She is a smaller version of my wife. I want to run to her and take her in my arms and kiss her.
I cannot do it.
I am not that loyal.
Walking away, I hear behind me a voice: They’ll just send someone else to take over the job.
I turn. It’s Juan, the man who tried to recruit me.
The world is full of murders happy to kill, he says.
I say, I want to join.
It’s too late, he says.
Then why are you here?
Look, he says, pointing,
I notice in the distance a number of men and women dressed for the wrong era.
Time tourists, says Juan, here to observe the death of a paradox.
Catherine. No.
I see her approached by a tall man with blonde hair. He smiles at her.
I yell her name.
It is too late. The man stabs her with a knife, and he laughs.
He laughs.
She falls to the ground and laughs.
What kind of man laughs at the murder of a little girl?
You see, says Juan.
I’m doomed, I say.
We all are, he says.
XVIII.
And I find myself back in 1938
, downtown San Diego, and the parade that awaits. But it doesn’t seem to be for me. The banner reads:
WELCOME TIME ASSASSIN!
And in the crowd I spot dozens of time tourists who did not even bother to dress in period clothes. No one notices. They are waiting for the show. The Mayor of San Diego approaches me, but he doesn’t hold the key to the city. A man next to him holds the key, a tall blond man whom I recognize immediately: the assassin who killed Catherine.
We are honored, the Mayor says to me, to witness the protection of the future.
And the blond man smiles at me.
You laughed when you killed her, I say to him.
I find it all so amusing and ironic, don’t you? he says.
This isn’t fair, I say.
Don’t dwell on it, he says, it’ll only give you a headache.
And then he raises his arm and points a pistol at my heart.
And the crowd cheers for my death.
And I see Juan in the crowd, observing, and finally I understand his cause.
—August-September, 2010
Tijuana, México
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Brothers” first appeared online at New Dead Families, edited by Zack Wentz (2009). Copyright © 2009, 2013 by Michael Hemmingson.
“Of Proms, Time, and Aliens” first appeared, under the title “Solid Memories Have the Lifespan of Tulips and Sunflowers,” in the anthology, Prom Night, edited by Nancy Springer (DAW Books, 1999). It also appears in the author’s collection of literary fiction, Pictures of Houses with Water Damage (Black Lawrence Press, 2010). Copyright © 1999, 2010, 2013 by Michael Hemmingson.
“Something Weird Happened on the Way Back from Borrego Springs” first appeared at Galaxy Online (1999). Copyright © 1999, 2013 by Michael Hemmingson.
“Hardboiled Zombie Detective” first appeared, under the title “Hardboiled Stiff,” in the anthology Badass Horror, edited by Gerald Brennan and Gary Kilworth (Dybbuk Press, 2006). Copyright © 2006, 2013 by Michael Hemmingson.
The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions Page 18