Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

by Michael Bunker

  Elle sits on Frannie’s lap, playing with a toy I don’t recognize, a plush character from a children’s show, and it strikes me again that I am left out of even Elle’s tiniest experiences. Does she hold that doll close when she sleeps? Is it her favorite?

  “Am I supposed to be alone for the rest of my life, too?” she asks.

  I don’t know what to say to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes. “I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.”

  “I’m an asshole,” I say.

  Her eyes widen and she looks in Elle’s direction, then back at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Elle, ignore Daddy.”

  Frannie turns the camera to Elle’s face. “Say night-night to Daddy,” she says.

  My beautiful daughter looks up and smiles and says, “Nigh-nigh, Daddy.”

  Frannie turns the camera back to her own lovely face and says, “I’m sorry. Don’t worry about us. We’re going to be just fine. We love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I say, and kiss my fingers and hold them up to Frannie’s.

  * * *

  Sarah is in the research module when I come out.

  “I thought everyone was asleep,” I say.

  She shrugs. “Sorry. Sometimes I can’t sleep. Are you okay?”

  I touch my face. My skin is tight. “I was crying,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re a sweet man,” Sarah says to me.

  “I wanted to kill myself.”

  She smiles sadly. “We all do.”

  I float past her and go through the hatch to our sleeping quarters, and then I turn and look back at her.

  “I’m putting her through so much,” I say. “It’s inhuman. I can’t think of anything worse.”

  “I can think of lots worse,” Sarah says. “But Frannie’s wonderful. She’ll be okay. She’ll find someone.”

  I look down.

  “You have to let her do that,” Sarah says. “You’re not really hers anymore. She’s not really yours.”

  “I… yeah.”

  “I don’t know what it feels like to be in your skin,” she says. “But maybe it helps if you think of them as a story that you’re watching. Like on television.”

  “I’m going to miss every episode,” I say.

  She nods. “But you’ll know the ending tomorrow.”

  I can’t help it. I cry. The thought of my family growing up, growing old, dying—and that all of it will happen while I’m asleep—feels like someone has grabbed my ribs and is spreading them apart, pulling as hard as a body can be pulled. It feels like I’m going to come apart, and I double over involuntarily.

  Sarah is there, then, and she holds me and we wobble in zero gravity together. She puts her hand on my face, and my tears crawl from my skin to hers.

  “You won’t lose everything,” she whispers. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  * * *

  The last conversation with Frannie is surreal.

  She is wearing the bulky sweater that I liked, the one with the neck that’s wide enough for her shoulder to peek through. I stare at her skin and try to remember what it felt like to touch it. I try to remember her smell. I can’t.

  Elle is wearing a beautiful sundress and yellow rain boots. “Boots!” she cries, pointing at them.

  “Boots,” I agree, trying not to cry again.

  Frannie smiles with shining eyes as Elle runs to her toy chest and picks up a building block, then brings it to the camera.

  “Block!” she says. Her eyes are big and she bites her lip, waiting for me to understand.

  “Block,” I say, nodding.

  I wish that I could stack the blocks with her into a great big prison cell, and stay inside of it forever with her. I watch her run to the toy chest. She puts the block down and picks up a squeaky giraffe.

  “Raffe!” she says, displaying it to the camera.

  “Giraffe,” I say.

  “Elle, honey,” Frannie says as Elle runs back to her toys. “Daddy has to go in a minute. Can you say goodbye? Can you tell him how much you love him?”

  I cannot hold back my tears. I suck in deep breaths and stare longingly at the Earthbound room and my girls inside of it.

  “I miss you, Ellie,” I choke out.

  “Daddy misses you,” Frannie says.

  Elle comes back to the camera and holds up a stuffed pig. “Piggie!” she cries.

  I nod like a fool, and she runs away again. Frannie snatches her up and brings her back to the camera, and Elle kicks in protest, and Frannie looks at the camera with a terrible fear in her eyes and says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she’s—”

  The digital counter runs out, and the screen goes dark.

  * * *

  Heidi and Walter see to us all, one by one. Walter will be the last into the units, as the ship’s doctor.

  He stands in front of me, adjusting the monitoring belt. He is close enough that I can feel his breath. He smells like coffee. He smiles at me and says, “It’s going to be a pleasant dream. Okay?”

  I nod and look away, uncomfortable with his closeness.

  Heidi comes by next, after attending to Sarah, who will be in the sleeve beside mine.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  I am tired of crying. I feel as if I have cried a thousand years.

  “The first thing Walter’s going to do is adjust the gas compounds in your sleeve,” she says. “There’s a light neuro-sedative in the mix. You’ll feel relaxed and carefree.”

  “I don’t want to sleep,” I say.

  “We all have to,” she says.

  “I’ll stay awake. I’ll watch over the ship, make sure everything runs fine. I’ll make sure you’ll all be okay.”

  “The ship can do that for itself,” Heidi says. She leans closer and kisses my forehead. “You are going to be all right. When you wake, we’ll talk. Okay?”

  I think about Heidi’s family. “What about your kids?” I ask. “Don’t you care about them?”

  She’s unruffled by my tone. “My boys will be fine,” she says.

  “They got to know their mom,” I say bitterly.

  Heidi’s smile is kinder than I deserve. “Let me help you inside,” she says.

  * * *

  Inside the sleeve is a slim, curved screen. It’s fixed to the thick polyglass before my eyes, and it displays a simple message.

  You are humanity’s finest, it says. We wish you godspeed and long lives. Make us all proud.—WSA, Earth

  The message disappears, replaced by something new.

  Hey. Look left.

  I frown, then turn my head.

  Sarah waves at me from the clear sleeve next to mine. She says something, but I can’t hear her, and I shake my head. I mouth, “I can’t hear you.”

  She points at the screen in front of her face. I understand, and look back at mine.

  The message reads, We can talk until we fall asleep.

  Then another line: It’s voice-activated. Just talk.

  I say, “Hi.”

  Hi.

  I look over at Sarah—weird, strange Sarah—and she smiles.

  “You’re too happy,” I say.

  You’re the saddest person I’ve ever met.

  “I should be,” I say back. “I’m a monster.”

  Will you be okay?

  I hear a dim hissing sound, and outside the sleeve Walter waves at me, then gives me a thumbs-up. He folds his hands beside his face and mimes falling asleep. I nod blankly at him, and then he moves on.

  It smells sweet.

  I sniff the air. “I don’t want it.”

  I know you’re scared. You’re a good man.

  “I’m not. I’m not a good man.”

  You’re not really the best judge of character. Your own, I mean.

  “Sarah,” I say, feeling the drift of the gases. “I’m terrified.”

  It will be over before you know it.

  “That’s what I mean. When I wake up, my little
Elle—”

  She will be proud of her daddy. What do all the other dads do that’s so special?

  “She’ll hate me,” I say. “She’ll die thinking I left her, that I didn’t love her.”

  She knows.

  I stare at the screen. To my left, Sarah is drifting.

  I say, “Record a message.”

  * * *

  Elle, Frannie—

  I hope with all of my heart that this message comes through. Maybe the WSA will see it and make sure. I hope so.

  We’re going to sleep now. It’s about to happen—I already feel woozy. I’m sorry. This is my last message and I’m going to sound like a drunk. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—

  Frannie, my dear, my sweet wife. I have loved you since I met you. I wish that I could hold you forever, but I can’t—I have to let you go. Be happy. Fill your days with love. Fill Elle’s.

  Elle, sweetheart—I’m going to cry, I’m sorry—Elle, there is nothing—I—oh, god, I’m drifting, it’s happening—

  Elle—Elle—

  I hold you always.

  I am—I am always—

  Elle—

  * * *

  The message ends, and I blink away tears.

  “Stupid,” I whisper to myself. “I didn’t say anything at all.”

  Sarah is wrapped in a white blanket beside me. Her eyes are wet, too.

  “You said everything,” she says. “Everything.”

  We sit in shock around the table with the others. Each of us leans on another.

  Heidi looks the worst, as if she can’t believe it’s real. “My pretty boys,” she whispers.

  The table is lit from within, a soft bone-blue glow like a ghost, which is exactly what it is. Before each of us are the messages we sent to our families and loved ones—except for Stefan’s. He presses his palms hard to his eyes. Walter rubs his back.

  “I didn’t know,” Stefan rasps, his voice tired from the years of sleep.

  “He didn’t send any messages,” Sarah whispers.

  I nod. What a terrible feeling for his family on Earth—to wait for his message, to see reports of the others and their final letters, and to never receive their own.

  Poor Stefan.

  A gentle tone sounds, and I look down at the table.

  2,783 messages retrieved.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “You’re the communications specialist,” Mikael says.

  * * *

  2,783 messages.

  The sum total of missives sent to the Arecibo from Earth following our entry into the Long Sleep. Most are reports from the WSA—status updates on major events. It is an otherworldly feeling, thumbing through them and seeing tiny bites of history. They read like fictions: North Korea. Nuclear detonation. Dissolved democracy. It’s like reading an alternate history, a science fiction novel.

  The WSA is gone, we learn. The World Space Association was disbanded in 2142—“They couldn’t have waited until we woke up?” Walter asks—which explains the dead air on the networks.

  The United States is gone as well.

  “All empires fall,” says Heidi, but she says it in a haunted voice.

  The rest of the messages are personal ones.

  Sarah has dozens from her parents. Heidi’s boys have recorded hours of video—she’s a grandmother. Each of the crew has countless messages. Stefan has many, and this seems to cheer him.

  I have one.

  * * *

  It’s a video.

  I don’t recognize her at first. Her blond hair is brown now, her green eyes steady. She is outdoors, at a picnic table. The sky is pink behind her—dawn over the trees. She’s backlit, partially in rose-colored shadow. She stares into the camera, and opens her mouth once, then twice, as if she isn’t sure where to begin. A nervous smile, and I see her then: I see her mother in her upside-down smile, the smile that should by all rights be a frown but isn’t. I see myself in her eyes. She is older than I am now.

  Elle.

  Nine hours of video.

  “Daddy,” she says, looking straight into the camera. Her voice is strong and a little scratchy, like her mother’s.

  I remember her wrinkled pink skin, her insignificant weight in my hands. Her strange smell, her little fish mouth gasping at the air.

  “Boots!”

  Her tiny fingers—opening, closing.

  A-da.

  A tear slides down her cheek. I am struck by her beauty and how much of an adult she has become. I have so many questions for her, and I will never be able to ask any of them.

  “I hold you always,” she says, repeating my own confused words back to me.

  Her tears spill over, and so do mine, my long sleep over, my dark age turned to light.

  A Word from Jason Gurley

  The Dark Age is one of those stories that is born out of frustration, and worry, and fear—all the emotions that seem to either produce great art or completely drown it before it can take a breath. I wrote this story during a perfect storm of circumstances. I’d lost my job a couple of months before, and I’d just gone on my twentieth or fiftieth interview, and nobody was slapping money down on the table. I was working long, long hours on freelance and book cover design projects, trying to keep some income in the pipe. And I’d just listened to a literary agent tell me that the most important thing I’ve ever written had “too much character” and not enough plot. Through all of this I was just missing my daughter, who at the time was two years old. My wife and I both work very hard—she works exceptionally hard and long days as a full-time mother to our little girl, and I work as hard as I can to keep food on the table for all three of us. There are days when I leave the house before six a.m. and don’t get home until midnight, and every waking hour between is spent working and missing my family.

  The Dark Age came from that. Children grow up so fast, and there’s nothing worse than discovering that in the moment when you weren’t looking, they’ve learned seven new things—and in the moment that it takes you to light up with joy about these new things, they’ve grown bored with those new things and have moved on to a dozen more. Keeping up is not easy, particularly when you aren’t always there.

  I started writing this story one afternoon in a public library. I was supposed to be designing a book cover for an author, and this small idea in my head wouldn’t stop nagging me. I set the book cover aside and began writing, and within a few pages I knew that I couldn’t keep writing the story in the library. The story was taking a sledgehammer to my insides. So I packed up my laptop, walked outside, and sat in the passenger seat of my Jeep for another hour, and wrote the rest of the story. It completely wrecked me. Two months after writing it, I still can’t read it without feeling the same way.

  Short stories like this one, at least for me, don’t come along all that often. I don’t know if The Dark Age is good, or if it’s sentimental crap. What I do know is that it got under my skin, and that I hear from new readers every week who tell me that it tore their heart out to read it—not literally, of course, though readers have used those words. And maybe a story that has that effect on readers doesn’t have to be good or bad. Maybe a story that does that is true. I can’t think of a better thing for a story to be.

  The Dark Age is dedicated to my little girl, Squish. When readers order a signed paperback edition of the story from my website, they don’t just get my signature on the title page—they get my daughter’s Crayola autograph as well. This story is as much hers as it is mine, and I hope one day she’s proud of me for having written it for her.

  Afterword

  Writing a time travel story… it’s almost a rite of passage for a science fiction author. Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, H. G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Crichton, Gene Wolfe, Stephen King, Jack Finney, Joe Haldeman, Robert Charles Wilson—all have written stories of time travel. Even Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol, 1843) and Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889) got in on the action—trendsetters both
, as it turned out.

  And in TV and film, stories of time travel have, if anything, been even more popular. Star Trek alone, in its many incarnations, has incorporated time travel into a whopping forty-nine different TV episodes and four of its feature films, according to fan site Memory Alpha. Box-office smashes like Back to the Future and The Terminator have grossed millions and launched franchises. Mind-benders like Primer, Donnie Darko, and TimeCrimes (Los Cronocrímenes) have gained huge cult followings. And Bill and Ted’s adventure was so excellent that they followed it up with a Bogus Journey.

  One might think—given all this—that time travel has been done to death. That the well has run dry. That there is nothing left to enjoy, nothing new to learn—no more insights into human nature, no more bewildering paradoxes, no more ripping adventures. No chance of an “original take” on a tired trope—just one more protagonist breaking free of time and traipsing naïvely through history.

  And yet.

  As the authors in this collection have masterfully demonstrated, “time travel” is definitely not a pre-fab, cookie-cutter story outline that limits the author. There is no finite well of “time travel stories” that will eventually be tapped. These thirteen authors were each given the same instructions—Write a short story involving time travel—and yet they came up with thirteen stories that couldn’t be more different from one another, more varied, or more original: moving, intellectual, gut-wrenching, gritty, insightful, haunting, and just plain fun. In skilled hands, the time travel device doesn’t constrain the storyteller—it liberates her. It allows her, and the reader along with her, to grapple directly with powerful emotions and concepts like regret, love, purpose, and mortality.

  It also lets us explore what would happen if a pack of ravenous tyrannosaurs ran into a team of Navy SEALs with machine-gun-mounted Humvees. And that’s pretty damn cool.

  I want to thank the thirteen wonderful, amazing, talented authors who created Synchronic. I’m honored to be associated with them all. And if writing a time travel story is a rite of passage, I’m thrilled to have played a small role in initiating such talented authors as these into the club.