by Anthology
The cracks coursed through history like a mouse running down a clock. Some small number of us—and by ‘us’ I mean the seven billion human beings who were alive to see those final days of sanity—were snatched out of time before it broke, preserved by brilliant men like Doctor Comoy. We are, theoretically, the lucky ones. At least we still exist.
Doc Comoy and his team are still mapping the expanding debris cloud that is time itself. When we find a fragment we can reach, we catalogue it, plot it, inventory it. The science is not academic. We are looking for sanctuary, temporary shelters from the storm. For the first few decades it was us against the end of the world, blazing our trails through the monsters of prehistory and the depredations of our own ancestors to find places that would be safe to hide in, even for a little while. Then we discovered that one other thing had survived the annihilation: the enemy, whoever and whatever they were. As we scurried from fragment to fragment, eking out our miserable existence in the spaces between, they were hunting us. Even this tenuous life was more than they were prepared to allow us.
Warsaw 1943, and it is an insult to that city’s name that only this shard of it remains: its darkest hour, the last three months of the ghetto. Jewish and Polish resistance fighters, desperate and poorly armed, clashing with Nazi troops and collaborator police; a thousand plans of getting out, so few of which came to anything; an implacable enemy; the doom of utter annihilation hanging in the air. The only advantage to that terrible place was that we fit right in. No point in trying to hide, because every hidden part of that city was already crammed with the fearful.
“We can’t stay here long.” We’d got everyone into a shelter, the cellar of a collapsed house. There were a dozen families already there, pushed together, on top of one another. Starved, dirty faces stared at us, seeing our bizarre clothes, our mix of ethnicities, the fact that we were all far too well fed. They would all be dead, I knew. They were already dead. The Nazis would storm the ghetto as this fragment of time began to fail. Every one of these people had been preserved by that malevolent cripple, history, solely to suffer, to hope and fear, dread and die, over and over again.
“We need a proper sanctuary,” Ellie said. “There’s nothing I can see where we’d be safe hiding up. Someone has to make it to Comoy and get him to find us somewhere. We don’t have enough data here.”
“Can we even get someone to Comoy?” Marcus asked her.
“I have a path,” she confirmed. It was nineteen fragments long, skipping from time-piece to time-piece, in and out of history like a rat in the skirting, scant minutes to cross between the shards. We could never have got the children through it, probably not most of the adults. But then staying in Warsaw for any length of time was no better.
Time would be of the essence.
“I’ll do it.” And it was my creeping shame that courage did not motivate me. I could not face the end in Warsaw another time. I had seen it too often. The broken fragments of history have sharp edges.
Marcus nodded bluntly, and I looked over Ellie’s obstacle course. It was mostly out of recorded time, a worm-trail through monster-haunted spaces that man had no place travelling in.
My finger tracked to a projected five late Devonian minutes and I raised my eyebrow.
“Hold your breath,” said Ellie, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
I walked the tops of glaciers when they ruled the world, huddling and hurrying in my too-thin clothes. I lurched from them into a desert that spanned the horizons, that could have been anywhere, save that in this time it was near everywhere. The sun tried to kill me; elsewhere it was pelycosaurs at my heels with their razor teeth. For one minute I walked the streets of Pompeii where the ash had yet to fall. The eruption would never come to this fragment, and yet its work had already been done. The locals were gone, removed entirely, not a living thing remaining. The enemy had been there. We had lost another crumb of our past.
I held my breath and ran through the uncertain Devonian, crushing liverworts beneath my feet, a pelting figure from a lost future dashing through the ferns and towering hands of fungus.
Ellie had plotted my escape well. She always did have the best head for it. Me? The only things I was really good at were running and hiding.
We had retained a lot of the Permian, snapped-off pieces of it scattered like stones across the broken substrate of time. Some of those fragments were years long, even centuries. They were harsh, dry times, the age before the dinosaurs, populated by starving monsters; each shard a memento of a time when all life on earth was sliding inexorably towards an extinction that would claim very nearly everything that lived. The world would know only one greater disaster, and that was ours. It was fitting that Doctor Comoy had made his home there, cycling between a dozen bestial, inhospitable fragments and taking his laboratory with him. Nobody else was permitted to set up in residence along the course of his peregrinations in case they got in his way. He was not a man fond of company, or of the human race much. He was its only hope, though, so it had no choice but to be fond of him.
Permian One was his migratory home, where he and his staff and guards were trying to start the clocks again. It was the hope of every lost, scattered, desperate soul who crept in and out of the fragments and scurried from era to era. Doc Comoy will fix it.
I believed. I thought I believed. I had lived all my life to that mantra. We will remake the world again, glue the fragments back into a whole. Somehow the misanthropic genius would save us all, give the universe CPR, turn back time.
I hadn’t been to Permian One in six years of personal time. My faith had sat at the back of my mind, comforting in its presence, never needing to be unsheathed. When I had talked with Marcus, the doubter, I had taken Comoy’s side, always. Of course he would succeed in fixing it all. What other alternative was there, that was worth the consideration?
I found his prefab compound exactly as before, that set of metal boxes that they took down and put up each time he moved his base to another piece of doomed Permian time. I went in, seeing the faces I remembered, his subordinate scientists, his guards, all their grim and drawn expressions, harried and weary just like before. Just like before, all of it. I think that was when it broke. My faith had sat back there for so long it had corroded into nothing, and when I tried to test it, it just broke.
Doctor Comoy himself was in his high chair, a cherry-picker affair that lifted him up and down the bank of screens that displayed the secrets of the universe, or at least those few pieces of it that we could still access. He was an old man now, older than last time, skin like sun-cracked leather, liver-spotted, pouchy about the eyes, sunken in about his cheeks. Old, he looked old but, other than that, I might as well have just left a moment before. Here was the saviour of the human race, the engineer of time.
I had the utter conviction, then, that nothing was being done, no progress was being made. Doc Comoy, after jury-rigging together the calculations that allowed the dozens of refugee bands to limp from timepiece to timepiece, had achieved nothing. In all of my life he had just been marking time.
I did not voice it. I could not have brought forward the maths to prove it. I could not shake the belief, though. I had a new faith, and it was pure nihilism.
I got out the problem, my band stranded in Warsaw’s darkness. I needed an exit, and I needed it yesterday. We had to get them out.
This small service he could provide, this prolonging of the end. His great computers and his greater mind gave me the path they must follow, and my own to get back to them. Even as I looked at the sequences, though, I was doubting them. Was this why even our precarious hold on time was breaking down? Was this why the enemy was winning?
Was Doctor Comoy fallible in everything? Were we just now seeing the inevitable disintegration of a system that he had not thought through?
I left Permian One. I had two hundred and fifty million years to cover and no time at all to do it in. I wove my way in and out of history, dodging cavemen and dinosaurs, revolutiona
ries and the Golden Horde. In my mind was the distant candle flame that was Warsaw, so soon to be snuffed out. I was always a runner, and I ran. Nobody could have made better use of time than I. I did not stop for man or beast or cataclysm.
And I was late. I was too late. Was I slow or were the calculations wrong? Perhaps it never had been possible, just as the long-term survival of all that we knew was only a dream. I arrived in Warsaw, but it was a different Warsaw. The fragment had ended and begun again, all the pieces, Jews and Poles and Nazis, reset on the board. And no Ellie, no Marcus, no Scarrows or Nguyen or the rest of them. I was too late.
They might have got out. Knowing the end was coming—of the ghetto and of time, one and then the other in a great wave of pain and fear and utter oblivion—perhaps they calculated an exit. Ellie was always good at the figures, after all. There were fragments they could have made—or Doc Comoy’s calculations said there were. Unless it was a lie.
Or perhaps the enemy had come and wiped them away, shot them and removed them from the ruptured track of history. Or the Nazis had stormed the ghetto as they always did, and Ellie and the others had been just more corpses amongst so many, so very many.
Or the end had come, the real end, where time’s frayed edge caught up with them, and when the fragment began again they were gone, erased from time and space, made as if they never were.
In the ghetto, I knelt down and wept, screamed out my frustrations to the sky and shrugged off the attempts of those doomed and desperate people to comfort me.
I was alone, and Doc Comoy’s escape route was consigned to history. I sat there in the ruins and the ashes, amongst that other fugitive people, and did my own maths—not elegant Ellie maths, but my hamfisted imitation. I had to get out.
Even with nothing to get out for, a part of me wanted to live. Life has its own momentum. Ask the people in the Warsaw ghetto: no matter how bad it is, everyone wants to live.
It took me two years of my life, and I walked from one end of time to the other, but I made it back to Permian One. I hid in the Rome of the Medicis and cowered back from the wise, cold eyes of Neanderthals. I did what I did best: I ran, from the Mughals and the Zulus and the Iceni and Tyrannosaurus rex.
When at last I found the jump into the Permian fragment that the doctor was using, I saw it was true. Nothing had changed at all. He was older—they were all older, the clocks of their bodies marching on in ignorance of what had happened to wider time—but that was all. Oh, they were all busy, and there was the great impression of things being done, but I knew I was right. It was all a show, even if Doctor Comoy himself believed in it.
“They’re gone,” I told him, and from his expression he either did not know who I meant, or did not care.
That was when the enemy arrived.
I had never seen them properly before. I did not do so then, quite. They were humanoid, armoured, but what they were armoured in was proof against mere light as well as more violent measures. They shifted and warped and flickered and yet, at the same time, they were the most definite, concrete things in that complex. They were death, after all. There’s nothing more real than death.
Like death, they were patient hunters. They had been stalking me for a long time, following me from fragment to fragment, effortless in their transitions, whilst I scratched and strained at the mathematics. They had tried to hide from me, but I was too much of an experienced fugitive. I had known they were there.
I led them to Permian One. I led them to Doctor Comoy. It wasn’t as if I was doing anything else with my time. None of us were. That was the problem.
I had not known whether they were people at all, before that. They were the enemy, from before time broke, but I had thought they were no more than machines following the last orders of history. Until one spoke, I chose to believe that they were simple annihilators, the things that come at the end of the day, to close the shutters and put out the sun.
“Doctor Robert Comoy,” one of them said—impossible to tell which one, but it was a woman’s human voice, strong and stern. “You and your accomplices will be taken into custody for trial and disposal. Any attempt at escape will be met with force.”
The old man on his ridiculous high chair goggled down at them. “What are you doing?” his frail voice demanded. “Can’t you see I’m trying to put the world back together?”
“We are already restoring time,” the woman returned flatly. “The only thing standing between us and a unified timestream is the interference caused by the presence of you and your people. We cannot repair time with your vermin running riot amongst the pieces. You will either come with us and be rehabilitated, or you will be removed.”
Removed. She said it as though it had a capital letter: excised from time. Even then I could not have said whether it was true. Were they able to put the egg back together again? Were we the problem, rather than the solution?
Perhaps there was no solution.
Doctor Comoy was spitting, trying to force out words that were too big for the gape of his mouth, but then someone started shooting. Someone always starts shooting. Give a man a gun and he will want to use it. Perhaps that mentality is what caused this mess in the first place.
The enemy opened fire in return, beams of energy scorching and scouring whatever they touched. I wanted no part of it. Ellie and Marcus and the rest were gone, and I was on nobody’s side but my own.
I had my calculations already made. While they were fighting, while the enemy were triumphing over Doc Comoy and his wretched little Permian dream, I fled.
It had taken me long hours of patient calculation, but once I knew the enemy were content to follow me, I realized that I had time, for the first time in a long time, to get it right. There was a fragment of the Eocene, that dawn age after the extinction of all the old dinosaurs, that was three years long, and I stepped from the burning confusion of Comoy’s compound into a bright new day.
The enemy would hunt me. If what they said was true then I would gum up their works just by daring to exist. The Eocene was a big place, though, and running and hiding are what I’m good at, after all. As long as the enemy leave me fragments, I will find a hole to shelter in. I’ve the whole of my life ahead of me.
And when I’m old, when I’ve seen it all, that pitiful miscellany that is all that is left, perhaps I’ll go back to that cluttered London, if the enemy have left it. I’ll stand amongst the groundlings at the Curtain and listen to Will Kempe’s final routine, his farewell speech to all of creation. I’ll laugh out the end of the fragment into painless extinction, and let them save the universe.
But not yet. Not when I’m still using it. I’ve got a long way left to run.
THE MYSTERY OF JOHN TITOR
Rick Paulas
A person named “John Titor” started posting on the Internet one day, claiming to be from the future and predicting the end of the world. Then he suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again.
This is our planet’s bleak future: a second Civil War splinters America into five factions, leaving the new capital based in Omaha. World War III breaks out in 2015, starting with Russia and the U.S. trading nukes and ending with three billion dead. Then, to top it all off, a computer bug delivers where Y2K sputtered, destroying our world as we know it. That is, unless an audacious time traveler successfully traverses the space-time continuum to change the course of future history.
In late 2000, that person signed onto the Internet.
A poster going by the screennames “TimeTravel_0” and “John Titor” on a variety of message boards, beginning with the forum at the Time Travel Institute, claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world. His mission was to head back to 1975 in order to snatch-and-grab an IBM 5100 computer, which had the necessary equipment to fight the future virus. (His detour to the year 2000 was simply to get a little R&R while visiting his three-year-old self, ignoring every fabric-of-time paradox rule from time-travel stories.) Over the next four months
, Titor responded to every question other posters had, describing future events in poetically-phrased ways, always submitted with a general disclaimer that alternate realities do exist, so his reality may not be our own. In between dire urgings to learn first aid and stop eating beef—Mad Cow was a serious threat in his reality—Titor provided a number of technical specs regarding how time travel worked, with overly complex algorithms and grainy, hard-to-make-out photos of his actual machine. (Which, yes, of course, was an automobile: a 1987 Chevy Suburban.) He even showed off his cool futuristic military insignia.
On March 24, 2001, Titor offered his final piece of advice (“Bring a gas can with you when the car dies on the side of the road”), signed off forever, and returned home. He was never heard from again.
Today, everything posted online gets a healthy dose of skepticism. Let’s call it the Post-Snopes Era. We’ve been conditioned to suspect everything.
In 2003, Titor fan Oliver Williams—some may want to put “fan” in quotation marks, simply because of the numerous unsubstantiated theories that Williams himself is/was Titor—launched JohnTitor.com, which tracks Titor’s predictions and offers a compendium of all of his 151 posts. In 2004, members of George Mason University threw together a multimedia rock opera based on Titor. A summary of the tale at io9.com garnered over 103,000 hits in 2011. And, according to IMDB, a feature-length film about Titor is in the pipeline. What seemingly should have been dismissed as a four-month hoax, the work of some nerd killing time at his boring temp job, somehow turned into a phenomenon.
Since the beginning of the mysterious posts, Art Bell’s popular late-night radio program “Coast to Coast AM,” a nationally-syndicated show that covers pretty much everything that’d fit comfortably into an episode of The X-Files, has been the go-to place for all things Titor. George Noory, who replaced Bell in 2003, has continued carrying the torch, devoting entire episodes to the ongoing mystery, fielding inane questions from callers and somehow answering with a straight face. (Examples: “Is there any way that Titor could be a godsend, sent as an angel, to warn us?” and “Do you think there’s any possibility he was a space alien? I’ll hang up and listen.”) In 2006, a lawyer named Lawrence Haber, who claimed to represent Kay Titor, a woman alleging to be John’s mother, contacted Noory. An interview followed between Noory and Kay—with Haber acting as a phone go-between—and it ended up answering, well, pretty much nothing at all.