Friday Flash: Time Was

This week's Wendig Challenge was to use your smartphone's predictive text feature and, starting from "Once upon a time," pick words until you had a story, or at least an opening line. My own efforts were pretty boring, but follow the link and see what some people came up with. Since I didn't like what I got, I picked one to use to start my story. I stole the line, "Once upon a time, I could change time," and got something from someone else mixed in, which gave me a story to write. I even hit 1000 words spot on.

And maybe I have another flash-fiction anthology to put together sometime: the end of the world. I think I've destroyed it quite a few times on this blog.

Time Was

Once upon a time, when there was time, I could change time. I could speed it up or slow it down, even stop it altogether for…a time. 

The only thing I could not do was the one thing I wanted to do. I could not turn time back. But I had to.

It’s not that time is a river, the way they say. You literally cannot turn a river back, unless you are a really major earthquake, I guess. It’s more that time is a one-way street: you can go the wrong way, but you had better be prepared to be run down by a semi. Or I could put it stronger: it’s like those old-fashioned clocks with chimes, the mechanical kind from way before they invented electronics. You could put them forward, but if you tried to set them back, they broke. 

I tried to turn time back.
**
It happened a long time ago. Or maybe it was yesterday. I told you I broke time.

I was in charge of my little brother, and I failed.

Mom threw us out of the house that morning, told us not to come back until dinnertime. She'd had about enough of summer vacation, and didn't want us underfoot. "Adam, you take care of Benji. Make sure he doesn't go anywhere near the quarry."

Of course, all I wanted that day was to go to the old quarry. My friends were headed there to go swimming, and I didn't want a little brother tagging along, even if Mom hadn’t forbidden it. He'd rat on me if I took him, anyway.

Don't ask me why I didn't think he'd rat on me for leaving him behind, but I was only 14, so my brain didn't work so well.

Long story short, I ditched him, he tried to follow me, got hit by a car, and died three days later.

Later, when I found out that I could change time, can you wonder that the first thing I wanted to do was go back and change that day?

**
I first learned I could change time during an incredibly boring Western Civ lecture in college. I know, you’re thinking that everyone has found that time takes twice as long to pass when you are bored out of your mind. But when I got to wishing the end of the class would come faster…it did. Of course, I missed the rest of the lecture, and all that stuff was on the test. I got my first “D” ever, but I was too excited by what I’d discovered to care.

A few days later, I found myself doing a bio lab with the most beautiful girl I ever saw, and I just didn’t want the class to end. I managed to stretch that 3-hour class over about 3 days, judging by how my beard grew. No one else seemed to notice, which was weird, but I was too happy to care.

I spent the next several years trying to figure out how the whole thing worked. From the first, I knew what I was going to do once I had learned enough. To help me get there, I changed my major to physics, and then started a graduate degree in theoretical physics.

After five years of study and experimentation, I decided I was ready.

I spent weeks making my plan and preparing for the project. There were some things I couldn’t figure out. I had no idea if, when I got back to that fateful day eleven years before, I would be 14 or 25. I didn’t think that mattered, but I worried what would happen if, having saved Benji, I lost the ability to manipulate time, or the drive to perfect the skill, or…you can see the sort of dilemma I was considering. Or should have been considering.

None of that mattered to me. I wanted Benji back and I was willing to risk anything to get him.

The one thing I didn’t consider was that I might not just rip the fabric of time, but destroy it.

**
I did it all with my mind. I didn’t need a time machine or anything like that. Not even a TARDIS, though that would have been way cooler. I just had to re-work my entire consciousness, while leaving my body free to do whatever needed doing.

If I’d been as smart as I thought I was, I’d have done a dry run—gone back to yesterday and ordered the shrimp taco instead of the chicken, or something like that. But I was so sure of myself, and so eager to see my brother again and fix what I’d done, that I jumped right in.

I knew as soon as I began that going back in time was different from slowing or stopping it. I could have scrubbed the experiment, but I was too excited. I pushed on.

I mean that more or less literally. That whole “time like an ever-rolling stream” thing works here. I was swimming against a stream, and it wasn’t a gentle brook. This was a flood. Not the 60-mph debris-filled flash flood of the desert, but more like the Mississippi in flood: much faster than it looks, and about a million tons of force pushing against you.

I struggled on against the flood of time, and the farther back I went, the harder it pushed, and the faster it seemed to move. I was nowhere near my goal when I began to get glimmers that something bad was happening. I thought it was just happening to me, and I was willing to do or suffer anything for Benji, so I kept on.

I’ve tried two or three metaphors for what happened, and none of them is right. That semi on the wrong-way street didn’t crush me. The clock didn’t break into pieces. The river didn’t turn backwards.

They all fragmented.

Time fragmented.

**
Chaos consumed the universe.

And Benji was still dead.

***

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Friday Flash: The World in the Palm of Her Hand

Chuck's challenge this week was to pick a random image from Flickr and let it inspire a story. After a long trip down the rabbit hole, I stopped looking at pretty pictures and selected one.


The photo is by Truus.
Since I'm not sure if it's okay to post, the picture is here.
And when I went to find that link, I found a photo that is even better for the story.
Check them both out!

The World In the Palm of Her Hand

All Lissa knew was that she was supposed to save the world.

In point of fact, she didn’t really know even that: she’d had a message from some mysterious old man who refused to show his face, exactly according to regulations. The message read, “She has the world in the palm of her hand. Don’t let her drop it.”

In theory that left the field so impossibly wide open that there was little hope of finding the right woman, but Lissa had a bit more to go on than the message suggested. For one thing, since she got the memo, she could assume that the woman was somewhere in Lissa’s region.

All the Guardians had their own regions to watch over, and Lissa’s was large, but sparsely populated. That would help.

Further, she could feel disturbances in the powers, so she ought to be able to sense the problematic woman.

But Lissa had no idea what the message meant, beyond trouble. Was the problem a politician about to do something stupid and trigger World War VI, ending everything? Or some well-meaning genius trying to cure diseases who might instead unleash a plague that would wipe out all life?

Lissa spent two full days researching all the possible madwomen, scientists, terrorists, and politicians in her region and, for good measure, the regions touching on hers. None of them seemed in a position to do anything of world-ending import, either of malice aforethought or by accident.

She then spent two more days racing about her region trying to sense an imbalance.

Nothing.

Nothing, that is, until she got to the boundary with Region 76. What she felt there wasn’t what she expected, but it needed investigation all the same. The assignment of a mission didn’t relieve her from the duty to look out for other disturbances.

Crossing into another Guardian’s territory was frowned on, except in hot pursuit. The paperwork required for a waiver was extensive, and Lissa, like most of her fellow Guardians, opted to skip it and hope she wouldn’t be caught.

Following her instincts, she went looking for the Guardian she couldn’t feel. Something had happened to—what was her name? Lissa had to look through the records a long way back to find that the Guardian of Region 276 was Ilga, and that she had been a Guardian since the days of the horse and buggy. Now Lissa could feel only the faintest hint of her presence in the area she was meant to protect.

She followed that trace through an agricultural landscape that seemed to have been frozen in the 20th Century. The early 20th, if Lissa was any judge. Was that Ilga’s doing, or just the inclination of the locals?

On the third day Lissa found her: an old woman, sitting in a farmyard doing absolutely nothing. Only her aura told Lissa she’d found the missing Guardian. Ilga held something shiny in her hand, and at first Lissa thought she was admiring herself in a mirror, gone childish in her final days.

When she got a better look, Lissa felt dizzy. The object was not a mirror, but a crystal gazing ball. Lissa had seen such things, mostly in the Guardian’s Museum of Silly Human Artifacts, where they sat next to a collection of cracked and glazed Crazy 8 Balls.

A gazing ball in the hands of an ordinary human was just a piece of pretty glass that reflected the world back in a beautiful distortion. In the hands of a Guardian, it could quite literally contain the world, and turn it upside down.

Ilga looked up and saw Lissa. Her smile was not what the young Guardian would have liked to see. Someone had miscalculated: Ilga should have been retired long ago; what Lissa saw looking from those ancient eyes was the pure madness that could come of centuries of trying to keep humans from destroying themselves.

“So you’ve found me.” Ilga’s voice was old and cracked, but calm.

“You’re upsetting the Messengers.”

The old woman cackled. “They are such fuss-budgets. I’ve nearly finished here.”

Keep her talking, Lissa encouraged herself. The first rule of stopping destructive lunatics was to keep them talking. Usually they were human lunatics, but Lissa figured the same rule applied to a Guardian who had slipped a cog.

“Finished what?” she asked, with what she hoped was the right blend of interest and indifference.

“Loading the world into my ball. So much easier to watch this way.” She held up the ball on her hand, and Lissa felt herself turn cold. Ilga had done it. The ball cleared, no longer reflecting the sky. An ever-shifting view of people and landscapes played in the depths. The constant motion made Lissa a little sick, but she knew what had to be done.

The ball could no longer be destroyed. It would have to be taken to the head Guardian to be disassembled with utmost care. For now, whatever happened to the ball would happen to the world.

The Messenger had been right: Ilga held the world in the palm of her hand, and she didn’t seem to be particularly concerned.

“Why don’t you give me that?” Lissa asked as casually as she could.

Ilga only cackled and balanced the ball on a fence post, stepping back to admire it. Lissa felt the shift in gravity as it moved. This was bad.

“It will do very well there,” Ilga said, and walked away. Torn between a need to stop the woman from any more madness, and the need to protect the gazing ball, Lissa hesitated a moment too long. The earth made another jolting adjustment, and the ball began to roll from the post.

Lissa caught the movement from the corner of her eye, and launched herself in a long, desperate dive, arms outstretched to catch the world in the palm of her own hand.

###

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Flash Fiction Friday--In a Starbucks at the End of the World

I didn't get anywhere with the Chuck Wendig prompt this week, so I decided to go back and do another from last week's settings.  I really liked the idea of "a Starbucks at the end of the world" so I took that and ran with it.  A note on the science of this one: it's bogus.  Climate change is real enough, but the rest I totally made up.  To the best of my knowledge, caffeine is not holding the physical world together, only the social one.  I have no idea if coffee bushes could grow at high latitudes.  And I'm almost 100% sure that sacrificing caffeine-hyped 20-somethings to volcanoes will not prevent them erupting.

Here you go.  The end of the world in 996 words.

In a Starbucks at the End of the World

No one ever said the world would end like this.  In all the movies and novels, the apocalypse was always about zombies and explosions and asteroids, or the sun going nova.  Nuclear war.  That sort of thing.

No one, ever, thought it would come this way.

Oh, everyone knew that climate change meant big trouble.  Rising sea levels, bigger storms, more fires out West.  It got to be routine, cleaning up after disasters.  And farmers—they adjusted their methods, moved into new areas as some grew too hot or too wet for farming.  It’s hard to farm beneath the ocean, but it seemed like there was always somewhere to go.  And we never noticed the bigger threat, never saw it coming.

Coffee is grown in parts of the world most First World people just don’t think about much.  Somewhere way off in equatorial lands, coffee plantations were moving gradually up the mountains, and sometimes farther north.  But coffee doesn’t adapt well to some things, and even warming northlands aren’t the same as old-style equatorial highlands.

When people talked about adapting to climate change and shifting toward the poles and all that, they forgot one thing: climate change doesn’t change the length of the days.  Some plants love the long summer days.  Cabbages and squash are happy to grow 24/7 for a few short weeks.  Tomatoes, not so much.  And coffee, not at all.  Efforts to introduce coffee bushes in Canada simply failed.  Every one died, after a year or two of refusing to produce a single coffee bean.  So the growers stuck with moving higher up the equatorial mountains—and then they ran out.  Nowhere any higher to go.  Fine, everyone said.  Coffee’s a luxury.  People don’t need it, except maybe a few crazy writers.

Everyone was wrong.

Somehow, while no one was paying much attention, coffee had become the glue holding the world together.  And I don’t just mean us humans, though civil society was the first to go.  People in caffeine withdrawal get testy, and civilization began to collapse pretty fast.  They tried to switch to tea, but most tea cultivation had already been lost, to rising seas and rising temperatures and everyone drinking coffee instead.  And it just didn’t do the same thing.

That’s how I ended up here, at Starbucks.  The coffee source.  One on every street corner from Boston to Bombay.  Before the collapse, they had spread literally everywhere.  Tiny villages in Africa and the Andes.  Now those remote Starbucks were the last places with any beans, mostly because they never did much business.  Most have been raided or run out by now.  Maybe this Starbucks is the only one left, in a deserted mountain village so remote no one ever knew we were here.

The coffee is stale now.  It’s been three years since there was a coffee crop, and the strange fellow who runs this place saw it coming.  He bought up every bean he could find—the stuff the big buyers wouldn’t touch, the sweepings from the floor of the dryer buildings, anything the local farmers would sell him.  He even tried to keep a few bushes going in his own yard, but in the second year they died along with the last of the commercial plants.  The wild ones were long since gone.

I had already moved here, hoping to solve the problem at the source before it was too late.  All I’ve managed is to be one of the last survivors.  When the crop failed most people left this place.  Only the owner and I are here now, with our dwindling supply of coffee beans.

While the Coffee Riots destroyed Seattle first, San Francisco, New York, Paris and London weren’t far behind.  Then the smaller cities in every country around the world.  Smart people migrated outward, buying whole beans and Folger’s ground with equal abandon, and hoarding it all.  Perhaps a few of them are left, but I fear most were killed in the panics.

Civilization is gone, but it’s worse than just that.  I’ll die before the end, because our beans are nearly gone too.  But I’ve seen the beginning of the end.  With the caffeine removed from the water cycle, entire ecosystems are collapsing.  In the hundred years since the first Starbucks opened in Seattle’s Pike Place Market we have grown, ground, brewed, drunk, and excreted so much coffee that no water supply on earth is untainted.  Because it happened slowly enough, the ecosystems adapted.  But the change back has been too sudden.

I wasn’t surprised when the marine animals began dying off.  But it shocked me when it hit the trees.  First to go were the great forests of red cedar and fir up along the coasts near Seattle.  That made sense.  But it spread, and with the loss of the forests came a huge influx of carbon into the atmosphere, which spelled the end.

It no longer matters that even the tectonic plates seem to have been made restless by the loss of coffee from the hydrologic cycle, because it’s already too late for earth.  Oh, the planet will be here.  I suppose it’s not really the end of the world, just of all living things as we know them.  Including us, of course.  But I won’t be here to see the super-heated ball this globe is bound to become, because the volcano is restless and uneasy.  They used to keep it happy with sacrifices of young daredevils.  All fully hyped on coffee, of course, and under the impression they were climbers.  Now the supply of both coffee and daredevils has run out, and the eruption will come any day, and take us with it. 

We’re ready.  Without coffee, the two of us here in this dingy, dusty Starbucks on the slopes of a volcano are more than ready to be done.  I can feel the earth shake.  It won’t be long now.