Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 15

A Troubling of Time

Margaret leaned back against the cold metal of the time machine, and waited for history to change. She had waited for decades now. She could wait a little more, she told herself. She kept telling herself that in the darkness of the underground chamber, lit only by the dim glow of the time machine’s atomic power cells. Things would change any moment now. Merrick, back in the past, would stop her younger self from destroying the world. The dead city above her would spring back to life. All the hardship of the past generation would be undone. History would be better.

The time machine hummed blithely on. Margaret wondered if she ought to try and pull Merrick back. She wasn’t entirely sure how; she had assumed that once he changed history, he wouldn’t need to come back. He might not even have been born. Margaret resolutely ignored all the paradoxes that created. She had known of superheroes, before, who messed with timelines on a daily basis. They complained of violent headaches from trying to keep everything straight. Margaret simply didn’t deal with it.

The machine kept going. Nothing changed. A tiny little animal began to scurry around in Margaret’s mind. It pointed out that the room was still abandoned, that the city above was still silent. It had sharp claws, and it went very fast. Margaret shoved it in the back crevices of her mind. At that moment, the concrete underneath her feet trembled ever so slightly, and she heard a distant boom. Margaret leaped up and dashed out of the underground room. The little animal fell quiet, waiting to see what would happen.

Margaret ran hard up the tunnels, and finally burst out into the sunlight. She looked up, and saw a white streak of cloud, ruler-straight, and she almost sobbed aloud. She hadn’t seen a contrail since before the world collapsed. Contrails meant planes. Planes meant civilization.

Then she heard the aircraft itself. Without warning it tore across the sky above her, engines screaming. She started to cheer….and then she saw the plane’s markings. She didn’t recognize them. They weren’t the familiar red-white-blue she had known. The little animal began to scurry around again.

A dull boom resounded in the distance. Then another. A clanking, metallic rumble filled the air, punctuated by the staccato drumbeat of marching boots. Margaret looked down the street. The creature in her mind snarled, and flourished its claws. Margaret fought it back. Things were better. They had to be. Merrick had saved the world-

Soldiers swung into view. They didn’t look at all friendly. A megaphone squealed. “Attention. By order of the Empress, this is a restricted zone. Civilians are not permitted in a restricted zone. You have five seconds to identify yourself and surrender peacefully.”

Margaret had no identification. No one she knew did, not for a generation. She raised her hands, knowing that she could blast these people away in an instant. A squadron of the soldiers neatly detached itself from the main group and closed in on her. “Identification, ma’am, right now,” one of them barked at her.

“I don’t have-” she began.

“Ma’am, you want to explain why you’re a civilian, without ID, in a restricted zone?”

The little animal snarled louder. Margaret furiously ignored it. “I’m not strictly a civilian. I didn’t use to be, anyway. My name is Margaret; you might have heard of me as Meg Atomic?”

A short, pregnant pause ensued. Finally, the leader spoke. “You said her name. No one says the Empress’s name. No one, ever. She burned a whole town because someone there said her name.”

“But that’s my….oh no.” The little animal snapped, its claws sinking deep. Despair flooded Margaret. History hadn’t gotten better. She had made it worse.

Previous stories in this serial can be found under the Megverse category.

The Big Shiny

It was raining on the asteroid, a cold rain, a rain that hammered hard on the iron walkways and smeared across the viewports. The mining company that owned the place didn’t care too much about terraforming it to look scenic, and it was too far away from the system’s primary star for good weather anyway. It was always raining, and it was always dark. This was exactly the kind of weather Mr. Stamper liked.

He sat in a shadowed corner of the asteroid’s only bar, brooding over a drink the color of muddy streamwater. The space otter didn’t even look up when someone approached him and dropped into the seat opposite. “You again.”

“Look, pal, I need you,” she said without preamble. “I know things went squirrelly last time-”

“Squirrelly?” Stamper said. “That some sort of angel humor?”

“Right, poor word choice. Anyway, I’m sorry about the whole Ark thing, and Bianca. I can’t protect everyone, you know.”

The space otter growled into his drink. “Can you at least leave me alone?”

“No. I can’t.”

Stamper looked up at her for the first time. She’d turned down her usual glow, and flickering red neon now lit her face instead of golden light from her halo. For one moment, Stamper wondered if she had started playing for the other team.

“One of my people got themselves killed.”  She produced a battered holo-cube and slid it across the table towards him. A grainy image traced itself in the air.

Stamper immediately observed several things. The person in the wavering image was unclothed, humanoid, and female. She was also quite dead, which Stamper worked out from the fact that her head was at least a meter farther from the rest of her than it should have been. “Yipes. What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” the angel said, her face twisting in anguish. “I was in another system. Saved a shuttle from crashing into a crowded city. The thing had a padamantium reactor; it would’ve vaporized a million…. anyway. Saved them, lost her.”

“And you need me why?” Stamper asked. “You’re an angel. Can’t you just fly up and ask her yourself who killed her?”

The reply was almost as cold as the rain outside. “She didn’t go up.”

“Oh.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. Then, finally, the angel went on. “I thought she was on the straight and narrow. I was away for one week. One week. I get back, Raph tells me I lost her. I’ve had people die on me, sure. But not like that. And since she went…there… I can’t ask her what happened. So that’s why I need you. I need to know what happened in that week.”

Stamper sighed. “It won’t be easy.”

“Figured that.”

“It won’t be cheap, either.”

The angel produced a plastic card for his inspection. “Figured that too.”

“How…?”

“Streets of gold, and all that.”

“Fine,” Stamper said reluctantly. “I’ll look into it and let you know.”

“Do that,” the angel said.

“And Constance? Last one. I’m not helping you again. Not after Bianca.”

Constance sighed. “Whatever, pal. Like I said, I can’t protect everyone.”

“I noticed,” Stamper said, glancing at the holocube. He palmed it and the plastic card, then rose. “See you around-”

But she had already vanished. Stamper paid his tab, then left the bar, walking out into the pouring rain.

I departed from the Megverse briefly in order to participate in October’s focus on fiction, noir. I always wanted to do something noir, ever since the Star Trek: Next Generation episode where Captain Picard and friends play out a detective story. Good times.

On Returning from a Walk

This is my family dog, Molly. She is, as she is frequently assured, a Good Dog.  At this moment in time, she has just returned from a lengthy walk. As best I can tell, she is pleased. She sniffed several leaves, assorted bushes, and spots on the parking lot, and used the bathroom. Now she is heading home, back to her people.

In some ways, I envy what Molly’s life is like. She plays with her squeaky toys, chases squirrels, barks at the garbageman, whom she suspects in an invasion on her territory. She has no idea of serious world events. She does not know that 95 people were killed in a bombing in Ankara, Turkey last Saturday, during a peace rally. She has no conception of evil, no idea of what human beings can do to each other. The worst thing that can happen in her world is that one of her people might go away. Otherwise, she is at peace.

She also doesn’t understand about politics. Molly has absolutely no interest whatever in who the next Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives might be. She doesn’t know the words synod, or intercontinental ballistic missile, or Nobel Prize in Literature. The words she does know are one-syllable words like walk, toy, and food. Her entertainment consists of a squeaky plastic dolphin, or a stuffed frog. I could talk to her all day about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or my current rewatch of Frasier, but Molly would just wonder why I haven’t tossed a ball for her to catch yet.

I realize it’s a good thing, on the whole, that we humans are endowed with a broader conception of the world. We have to do adult things, care about our society. Those broader things do matter, and even might affect Molly’s world, though she doesn’t know it. Still, sometimes, I wish I could share in Molly’s bliss. She is, after all, a Very Good Dog.

Profit Directive

“You saved our planet!” squeaked the alien.

“Sure did,” Captain Kemper said. “’Course, I can’t guarantee that wormhole won’t collapse on y’all again, ruin them padamantium deposits you got. Darn shame, considerin’ what they’re worth…”

The alien understood. Planetary salvation wasn’t cheap.

I Believe That the World Will End

I believe that the world will end tomorrow, Wednesday, October 7th. It has been predicted, using math and unique theological interpretations, and more math. It will probably happen while I am stuck in traffic. In the area where I live, there is constant construction, so I am always stuck in traffic. I am sorry for the construction people who will now never finish their projects, due to the imminent apocalypse. Good effort, guys! Staying at your posts right up to the End, and all that.

I believed that the world would end on Y2K. There were reliable books on the subject. Computer clocks everywhere would click over from ’99 to ’00, and mistakenly assume that we are now in 1900, and chaos would ensue. ATMs would fail. So would pacemakers and gigapets. I distinctly remember checking my digital watch to see if it was still running when it clicked over into the millennium. (It was).

I believed that the world would end in May 2011. May 21st, specifically, right after Eliza Doolittle Day. (No connection, as far as I know. The only interest in theology Eliza had was being advised by Henry Higgins to practice proper speech exercises instead of praying, as she would “get further with the Lord if you learn not to offend His ears!”.) As I remember, it was supposed to happen at 6 PM, and this went by timezones, so Australia and New Zealand were first in line for the Big Show. I had always wanted to see Australia and New Zealand. Sydney, the place where they filmed Lord of the Rings and the Narnia films…Melbourne, where the depressing post-nuclear war novel On the Beach was set. (Spoiler: everyone dies. This happens a lot in post-nuclear fiction, I notice).

Then, when Australia and New Zealand were not dissolved in fire and brimstone, I believed that the May 21st prediction was wrong. There was an error of maths. It was actually October 21st of that year. This was in the middle of my first semester of law school. Given the choice between the End of Days and law school exams, on the whole, I think I would prefer the End.

I believed that the world would end in December 2012. The Mayan calendar ended at that date, and when your calendar runs out, all existence runs out. It stands to reason. There was also a movie about it, starring Woody Harrelson and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The Washington Monument fell over, among other things, and Yellowstone blew up. Happily, the kid that plays Little Shawn Spencer from Psych survived.

I believe that when the Lord said to the disciples quite plainly in the Gospel of Matthew that he doesn’t know the day or the hour of the Second Coming, that only the Father knows, that he immediately followed that up with “Just kidding, boys!” It is absolutely possible to calculate the End Times. This removes the element of surprise. By simply making note of astronomical phenomena, United Nations conferences on the environment, and experiments with particles like the Higgs boson, it is obvious that we can know exactly when it all winds up. And it’s tomorrow, as of this writing.  Wednesday. I never did like Wednesdays.  But at any event, math doesn’t lie. The world will end on Wednesday. Just like it ended in 1844.

This month at yeah write, they’ve started a new nonfiction feature exploring certain literary devices. They began with irony. Irony is fun. :)

In This Fateful Hour

Merrick stumbled out of the time machine into chaos. He was in a broad room, all concrete and metal. Lights blazed on his face, unwavering, too bright, and oddly pale. People in odd uniforms dashed past him, yelling at each other or into devices they carried in their shaking hands. A steady howling wail rose above the din, lasting far longer than any wolf or dog could have done. Merrick had no idea what was going on, but he decided he might as well set about his task. He reached out and seized the arm of a frantic passer-by. “Where’s Margaret?” he shouted.

“Who? Oh, you mean Meg!” The man was so terrified that he didn’t even think of asking Merrick what business he had to be there. “Outside! With Super Soccer Mom! They’re trying to stop-”

The concrete floor suddenly bucked under Merrick’s feet like a wounded animal. The lights flickered, and bits of plaster fell about his head. The man pulled free of Merrick and darted away towards a set of stairs. Merrick shrugged and followed, hoping the man was headed outside. It turned out that he was instead heading for something he called “the bunker.” Merrick had no idea what a bunker was, but rapidly decided that it wasn’t outside. So when the man bolted down the stairs, Merrick charged up the other way. He pushed through a door that squalled like a newborn child, and found himself outside.

He saw Margaret immediately. She was much younger than the version he knew, and more brightly clad, wearing a red uniform emblazoned with a yellow sunburst. She was on her knees, sobbing over another figure lying on the ground. Merrick realized that if he was going to whack her over the head and stop her from wrecking the world, now was an awfully good time. He looked about for a stick.

Then he paused. Merrick was not a cruel man. Some people had snapped in the hard life they had to live, but he hadn’t. He’d killed bandits, sure, when they stormed his camp or raided his trade expeditions. But he had never killed anyone in cold blood, and never a friend. This was still Margaret. Maybe she was the Nameless One of legend, but he knew her. Basic survival skill: never turn on a friend. A friend could give you shelter when the spring storms wreck your cabin, supply goods to trade with, provide company on long journeys or cold nights. And so, now, faced with the choice to smash a friend’s head in just to create an uncertain new future … Merrick just couldn’t do it.

The younger Margaret was still crying. Merrick heard a sudden grating burst of laughter. He turned, and saw a man in some sort of metal armor at the edge of the square. “Looks like it’s just you an’ me, princess!” the man blared. “No more mommy, just you an’-”

Margaret rose, her face twisted in fury. Her hands lit in yellow fire. Merrick knew what would happen next. World destroyed. End of everything. No more time. No stick either. Couldn’t use it anyway. Now what? Calm reasonable discussion?

He ran forward, more on instinct than anything else. Margaret saw him coming, reacted without thought. A bolt of power slammed him down. It hurt, badly. He could still see her, running towards him, her fury replaced by shock now. He wondered if that had changed something. The sky stretched blue above him, marred with smoke but still there, unending, forever. Then it faded to black.

This story is part of the Megverse serial. Thanks for reading!

Into the Dark Places

Merrick was used to the silence of cities. His trade routes south passed by several abandoned places, where vines wound up through sidewalks and ivy shrouded over crumbling ruins. He had never grown up hearing the constant roar of traffic, or the wailing of sirens, or the thunder of planes flying overhead, so he didn’t miss it. The silence in the dead city, however, unnerved even him. There were no sounds of birds, or the skittering of small animals, or even the faint whine of annoying insects. There were no vines crawling up buildings either. It was all concrete smashed into rubble, as far as he and Margaret could see.

She didn’t seem to much care, at first. She marched straight forward, down the buckled streets, towards one of the few buildings still standing. Merrick, seeing the slope of the domed roof, wondered if it had been some sort of temple. He ventured this suggestion to Margaret. “No,” she said shortly. “Not nearly that. It was where the politicians met.”

“The….”

Margaret sighed. “You know our camp meetings? Where we decide things? People met here to decide things for the whole land roundabouts. That was the idea. It didn’t always work. But they tried.”

The doors hung open, gaping like open wounds. They crept cautiously through the dark corridors, into the depths of the building. Merrick lit a torch as they got further inside, beyond the reach of the sunlight. Finally, Margaret stopped at a metal door that wouldn’t open to her. She waved Merrick back, then raised her hands. The door dissolved in a blast of golden light.

They advanced into a room cluttered with crates and workbenches. In the corner was what Merrick initially assumed was a larger metal crate. He would have compared it to a phone booth, had he been at all familiar with the concept. Phones had died out a long time before.

Margaret pulled on one side, and a door creaked open. “This,” she said, “is something else we tried. It’s a time machine.”

“A what?”

“It lets you go back in time, and change it.”

“How?” Merrick asked.

Margaret shrugged. “I asked the man who built it. Tachyon slip-streams, parallel realities, multiverses, take your pick. I could give you a lecture on the theory, but trust me, it works. I watched the Battle of Fort McHenry from the deck of a British ship. Tasted gunpowder. Saw the flag. It works.”

Merrick, naturally, was unfamiliar with that historical episode. Stockpiling resources to last through the winter, and the spring storms, took up more time than he could afford to spend studying battles of a vanished country. He gave a noncommittal shrug. “So, you go back-”

“Not me. You.”

Merrick blinked. “Me?”

“The thing runs on atomic power. I’ve got to fire it up. That means you get to go back.”

Others in his position would’ve protested. Merrick was a person of stolid duty. “Fine. What do I do?”

“It’s simple,” Margaret said. “I’m going to send you back to the point when I destroyed the world. You’ve just got to stop me doing it.”

“Ma’am,” Merrick said respectfully, “You melted a solid metal door a moment ago. How do I-”

“Well, I suppose you could try patient diplomatic reasoning,” Margaret suggested. “Or you could just hit me over the head with a stick. Whichever works.”

“Fine,” Merrick said again. “Might as well get to it, then.”

At Margaret’s direction, he stepped into the metal box. The door creaked shut beyond him. Margaret did something outside, and there was a flash. A panel lit up before Merrick, and on that panel a large red button glowed dimly. Merrick sighed, wondered what he had gotten himself into, and pushed it. He didn’t pause to reflect on the metaphysical ramifications of what he was doing. He probably should have done.

This story is part of the Megverse, my experiment with dystopia and the hero’s journey.

A World Gone Silent

Merrick had two pictures in his mind. One was Margaret, the distant, slightly eccentric woman who lived by herself when most people bunked up to conserve resources, who never formally led the camp but showed up at all the meetings, who quietly volunteered to help whenever anything needed doing but never went on trading expeditions. She wasn’t wildly friendly, but wouldn’t hurt anyone. She had good stories, if you asked nicely, of the way things had been.

The other was the Nameless One, she who had destroyed the world. In Merrick’s mind, and everyone else’s that he knew, she was the wolves at night, the worst of the spring storms, the sickness that you couldn’t quite shake. She was the worst of all possibilities. Now both pictures had been shattered. She was Margaret.

He didn’t know what to say to that. So, he prudently said very little. They didn’t talk much as they walked south. They kept to separate tents. Merrick plodded on behind Margaret, trying to square the two pictures. He hadn’t yet done it when they reached the river. They crossed without incident. Merrick still didn’t say anything, until he realized that she was leaving the trail south, and walking steadily southwest. Southwest was right towards the dead city. “Ah, ma’am?” Merrick ventured. “I don’t think we should-”

“It’s where I’m going,” Margaret said. “You’re free to go somewhere else.”

“But there’s nothing there. No one. It’s dead.”

“Is it?” Margaret asked.

Merrick paused. He focused so much on ways of surviving; everyone did. Any shortcut, any way of saving time or energy, helped with that. And so he’d never questioned the story that everyone knew, that the city ruins to their south were completely dead, abandoned by anything living. Now, for an instant, he wondered. “I’ve never met anyone from there. I’ve been past on trading routes. It’s dead. Everyone says so.”

“When I was young,” Margaret said, “everyone said aliens weren’t real. Everyone. Except fringe types with tinfoil hats who called in to late-night radio shows. Then there were capes, and we had powers, and one of us went way out into space. Turns out there’s a lot of other worlds out there. There’s worlds with sentient shades of paint. Worlds with talking otters. Worlds with beings I can’t even describe. Some of them came here. I spoke to one once. Nice guy, green, bit shy, all over eye-stalks. I told him I would give him a few pointers on Earth culture.”

Merrick had no idea what she was talking about. He knew there were people to the south, and some out west. But he had no idea who might be out beyond the horizon. Talk of other worlds was completely beyond him. The best he could make out, Margaret had once met someone from someplace else who was a little strange. “So…” he said awkwardly. “Did you talk to him again?”

Margaret looked towards the dead city. “No. That next week, I destroyed the world. It’s been fifty-three years since I’ve seen anyone who wasn’t human. They don’t come to our planet anymore.”

This story is part of what I’m tentatively calling the Megverse. It started out as a Hero’s Journey-type serial. Who knows where it’ll end up?

New Hero

Crudmuffin smiled as the train, loaded with gold, thundered closer. It was almost Evil Laugh time-

Then the ground exploded. A dirt clod smacked him in a tender anatomical spot. Crudmuffin screamed. “WHO ARE YOU?”

“I am the Wombat.”

With Great Burrowing…

“So,” Gaseous Girl said, as the police carted Hiccup Holly away, “Wombat. That’s an interesting name.”  She didn’t exactly mean interesting in the dictionary sense, as in, “attracting one’s attention, creating interest, not dull or boring.” She meant it as a placeholder, for lack of anything else to say.

“Yeah,” said the Wombat. “Sadly necessary. Relates to my superpower. I burrow.”

“You burrow,” Gaseous Girl repeated.

“Yes. I can burrow through pretty much anything. Unstoppable underground, that’s me.”

There was a long, awkward pause. “So…has that been helpful?”

The Wombat shrugged. “You’d be surprised. Even the bad guys who can fly have to come down sometime. When they do, I’m there.”

Gaseous Girl could feel laughter bubbling inside her. It would be rude to laugh at a fellow hero’s power, no matter how dorky it was. She’d never laughed at Buttercup, for example, or the Shining Spork, or Captain Happily Married. She resolutely tried not to think of burrowing, and changed topics. “What’s your origin story? Parents killed tragically when you were eight?”

Two seconds after she said this, she realized she shouldn’t have. Fortunately, the Wombat didn’t seem bothered. “Actually, no. Both my parents are alive and well. They live in Iowa.”

“Oh. You’re the small-town farmer type.”

“Not that either,” the Wombat said. “My dad’s a corporate lawyer. Mom’s a nurse practitioner. Nah, after I got my powers I figured I should set up in my own city.”

Gaseous Girl raised her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me. You were bitten by a radioactive wombat.”

“Genetically enhanced, actually. It might’ve been radioactive too, come to think of it. Didn’t think to ask.”

“Naturally,” Gaseous Girl said. “So then you decided that with great burrowing comes great responsibility?”

“More or less. Seemed like the thing to do.”

Gaseous Girl felt the laughter rising again. Desperately she searched for a new topic. “Got a nemesis yet?”

The Wombat looked grim. “The Hummingbird.”

“Of course. And what’s his deal?”

“It’s a her. She spins. Whirls about like you wouldn’t believe. Never gets dizzy. And she wants to take over the world. Or at least the city block. I don’t think she’s ever got past the city block, actually. Bit myopic.”

“Your nemesis is the Hummingbird.” Gaseous Girl felt like she was repeating things too much. Still, a whirling supervillain? She had a picture of a cape whizzing around in circles like a top. This was not helping her urge to dissolve in giggles. “Look, we don’t have a formal association here in the city or anything, but sometimes we get together on Friday nights. Drinks and whatnot. You’re welcome to join us.”

“Love to,” the Wombat said, looking genuinely pleased. “I thought about joining some group like the Caped Coasties or the LMD, but the Coasties are way out west and I didn’t want to go that far. And the LMD’s headquarters is up on that floating platform carrier thing. Can’t fly, sadly. Just the burrowing.

“Of…course…” Gaseous Girl made a little choking noise. “I’m sorry. I have to go. Sudden emergency. Thanks for the assist.”

“No problem,” said the Wombat. “See you Friday.”  He quite suddenly turned about and dove into the earth. It was a small patch of dirt, an interruption in the sidewalk just big enough to hold a wilted-looking tree. It was apparently sufficient for the Boundless Burrower, though. He was gone in a flash and a spray of earth. Gaseous Girl collapsed in laughter. She didn’t stop for several minutes.