Microstory 2451: Mud World: World of Mud

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Here we have another overly descriptive name, like Mountain Mountain or Substrate Development Dome. If you’re lookin’ for mud, they have it here. We got obstacle courses, wrestling, bogging. We got all sorts of sports. If it’s typically paid on the ground, you’ll be playing it on—see if you can guess—a muddy ground. Did you guess right? There are some places in Mud World that isn’t mud, and that’s because it’s SWAMPS! There are no boats, so you have to wade, or even swim, across in order to get from one sector of mud to another sector of mud. MUD! There is already a dome that’s dedicated exclusively to swamp and wetlands, but this one has both. That’s okay, there’s room for all of us. If you come here, you’re gonna get muddy. I know, big surprise. Like, there are only a bunch scattered points of respite from all the mud called King Hills where you can play King of the Hill. A few people can probably stand on the top of it, but there’s only supposed to be one. If you manage to secure it, you better not rest on your laurels, because I guarantee that someone else is gonna come challenge you within the next three seconds. It’s not that everyone is trying to get out of the mud, it’s just fun to push people around, and get pushed around...back down into the mud. If you don’t like mud, you’re not gonna have a good time. You walk through the doors, check in, and then walk down some stairs to the area. Once you get down to the bottom (and in the mud that I was talking about earlier), the stairs collapse, and the nearest other stairs could be miles away for the next group of visitors. You could try to get to one of those quickly, but why would you do that? You’re walking through mud! And mud is great! I don’t know how else to explain that this is a Mud World: World of Mud. I’m not just calling it that for fun, by the way; it’s the official name, which I’m guessing you know because you’re here, and if you’re here, then you must be interested in mud. Which is a good thing, because we got plenty of mud here. MUD! Okay, that’s enough—it’s enough mud! ENOUGH MUD! I’m done with the mud! It’s over! If you’re done with mud, walk over to the nearest exit, and step into a shower. Ah, that feels good. Nice to get all this mud off my body. The water is warm, the jets go every which way. You can stay in the shower as long as you want, they got loads of them; as far as the eye can see. I mean, you can’t see the other showers, they have partitions. Well, they do have group showers. If you wanna wash off in full view of others, that’s your business, and theirs. It’s not 2025, where everyone is sexually unhealthy, and self-conscious. When you’re done with the shower, they have hot tubs too. After you’re done tubbin’, please get back in the shower, because hot tubs are gross. I’ll take a pool of mud over a hot tub any day. HOT TUBS! And-or you can dry off, and leave the dome. You can leave the dome for good, or come back another time. Or hell, you can turn around right that instant, and get back into some muddy shenanigans in the mud. One last thought before I go: MUD!

Microstory 1724: Columbarium

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I am the only survivor of a crashed scout ship on an alien planet. My communications array was destroyed, not that there would be anyone to reach out to this deep in the black. If Earth doesn’t hear back from us, they will assume the worst, and make no attempt to mount a rescue mission. They cannot waste time looking for me when every ship is needed to search for a new home. Here is where I will live for the rest of my days, which will probably be long. The forward section of the ship is intact. It has good ventilation, solar power, ample medical supplies, and comfortable quarters. I must still go out in search of food, however, as our reserves all burned up. I’ll only last a year on the emergency rations that we had the good sense to store separate from the rest. I leave the protection of the vessel, and venture out into the wild. I won’t have to walk, fortunately, as a single occupancy helicopter did manage to survive the devastation. I’ll be able to hunt for resources from above, and it will go much faster. I immediately find a source of freshwater. It appears to come from a spring, and cuts through an oasis. I’m not sure if any of the plant life is edible yet, so I’m going to have to run some tests. I keep traveling over the lands, and keep finding these isolated oases, but the majority of the planet appears to be rather barren. It will be fine for me, but it would have been a poor choice to migrate our entire population. Life here would have been hard for people, so hopefully they will find something better elsewhere. I don’t see any land-dwelling animal life at all. I see some birds in the distance, but they are quite repelled by me. I don’t think I’ll be able to catch any of them for food. They appear to be too skittish.

I return to the ship knowing that I’ll have to become a vegetarian once the rations are gone, but also relieved that I’m probably going to be okay. I’m a decent engineer, there don’t seem to be any predators, and the weather array suggests a mild climate all year-round. So what am I going to do with all my time? My life is meaningless now, and I was raised in a world where meaninglessness meant uselessness, and uselessness meant a drain on resources which could be going to someone who contributes to the survival of the species. I have to find my new purpose. I first cremate the remains of my crew, and temporarily store them in bags. Bodies take up too much precious land, so we stopped burying our dead decades ago. I find some nice clay just outside the ship, so I use that to fashion a personalized urn for each and every one of my 55 fallen friends. I don’t stop there, though. Once the cremains are in the urns, they need a place to rest, so I begin building an entire structure for them, called a columbarium. It takes me a very long time to set the stones by hand, by myself, with clay and sand as my mortar, but I literally have all the time in the world now. I no longer have to worry about radiation pockets, or smog, or rioting. It’s important that these heroes be honored and respected. They deserve to be on display, not just for future travelers who might happen upon us millennia from now, but for me. It’s twice as big as it needs to be, because they deserve the wide open space too. Once it’s complete, I begin setting the urns in their niches. I stand there and admire my work, proud that I did this for them, and didn’t just focus on my own needs. As I’m making sure all of the urns are faced correctly, one of those white birds flies in, and perches in one of the empty niches. Another follows, and does the same. Then more come in. Perhaps I won’t have to become a vegetarian after all.

Microstory 1277: The Hikers and the Wallet

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Two hikers were walking along the mountain path when one of them spotted something underneath his feet. It looked like a dark leaf, but when he decided to dig it up, he discovered that it was a wallet. It was wet and muddy on the inside, which suggested that it had fallen from its owner’s person sometime yesterday, for it had rained last night, but was perfectly clear today. When he opened it up, he found a punch card for a restaurant two states away, an insurance card that was turned totally illegible by the rain, and a couple hundred dollars. “Look what we’ve found,” said the one hiker. “I’ll split the money with you.”

“No,” the other replied. “We should find a way to return it to its owner.”

“That should be impossible,” the first hiker said. “There is no identification of any kind here.” He looked down the mountain. “The rain must have washed it away.”

“Either way, I’m not sure we should keep it. We’ll find the nearest ranger’s station, and see if anyone’s reported it missing.”

Just then, they saw a group of hikers climbing down the mountain towards them. A forest ranger was accompanying them. “I remember you from the campsite the other day. Did you steal my wallet?” asked one of the strangers.

“I did not,” the first hiker said.

“Why, I see it right in your hand!” the wallet’s owner cried.

“We found it here in the mud,” the second hiker explained. He took it from his friend, and handed it back to its rightful owner. “How fortunate that you returned here. Your ID must have fallen out, so we would never have known where to return it.”

“Yeah, okay,” said the wallet owner. He was a bit reluctant, but appeared to believe them. Their explanation was only logical, for if they had stolen it on purpose, they would have surely kept it hidden so as not to be caught.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Travelers and the Purse.

Microstory 1237: Rebecca Halcyon

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Much like Camden Voss, Rebecca Halcyon worked in the past. For him it was a hundred years ago, but for her, thirty-eight. She never quite understood the significance of the time difference, but then again, she never understood why she was chosen in the first place. Back at home, before all this time travel business began, Rebecca was a real estate agent in 2049. So it wasn’t the most noble profession, but at least she wasn’t a car salesman. Though to be fair, car salesmen were a dying breed—since people weren’t buying cars in person anymore, if at all—so she might have done that had she been born earlier. Though perhaps, not even that was true, because when she found herself stuck in 2011, the first thing she did was start helping people. No one told her what to do, but people around her were suffering from having lost their homes to a mudslide, and she seemed to be in a position to help. Rebecca “volunteered” there for a couple hours before she even realized that she had somehow traveled into the past, and not just to the other side of the world. She didn’t know how it happened, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t the last time. The work started off pretty irregular at first; two days on, three days off, one day on, four days off. But then the pattern leveled out, and pretty soon, she was spending all her work hours in the past, and all her evenings and weekends at home with her live-in girlfriend. Hers was a rough working schedule for someone who was supposed to be living in the mid-21st century. By then, the standard workweek was closer to thirty hours, with some people choosing to not work at all, and live solely by the universal basic income they received from automated corporations, via the government. Still, even though it wasn’t the easiest job in the world, Rebecca came to love her new life. She might have felt differently had she been stuck in the past forever, with no way to go home, but she was allowed to stay with Judy when she wasn’t busy, just like most working professionals. Other time travelers weren’t so lucky. She would later meet other people like her, who were sent off to different points in time and space, sometimes never to return to where and when they came from. So this was her life. She lived and worked at two different time periods, neither of which ever lined up with each other. She did eventually catch up with her life’s timeline, and even encountered her younger self, but she never reached the day it was when she first disappeared. In fact, she was allowed to retire the day before, effectively closing her loop.

Microstory 1107: Judy Schmidt

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There was nothing particularly special about Judy Schmidt. She grew up with a normal family, in a normal town, and ended up with a normal job in marketing. She was raised as an atheist, and after careful study of the world’s religions when she was older, decided she still was. She wasn’t superstitious, and she didn’t believe in anything that hadn’t been officially recorded in history. She believed in dinosaurs and meteorites, but not ghosts, and definitely not time travelers. After a few years of working for the company, she finally felt comfortable with her career status. She wasn’t interested in doing the same job, for the same rate of pay, forever, but she wasn’t overly ambitious either. She was ready to hold steady for awhile, and maybe focus a little more on her personal life. Her friends had been wanting to set her up on a blind date, so she agreed. She and Rebecca started off slow. First they had coffee, then lunch, then dinner, and then they had a date that took place in two locations. This occurred over the course of a month, and it seemed to be going so well, that they both decided they wanted to take the next step. On the first night that Rebecca stayed over, she disappeared...literally. They were sitting up in bed, just talking, and in the blink of an eye, she was gone, right in the middle of her sentence. A frightened Judy immediately called poison control, thinking she had ingested something bad, but there was nothing they could do for her if she didn’t specifically remembering taking something. They directed her to urgent care, where the doctors and nurses were unable to find anything wrong with her. There was no sign she had been given a hallucinogen, or anything else. There wasn’t even any alcohol in her system. She finally had to surrender to the odd, but still plausible, possibility that she fell asleep, and by the time she woke up, Rebecca had simply left. Sure, her recollection of what the clock read didn’t account for this, and sure, Rebecca wasn’t picking up her phone, but that didn’t mean she was magic. But she was, sort of. Two days later, Judy was getting ready for work when Rebecca suddenly returned. She was wearing different clothes, and covered in mud. As it turned out, she had just spent the entire time in 2011, providing aid for families displaced by the Sidoarjo mud flow in Indonesia. Judy had a hard time believing it, but couldn’t deny the fact that she never did receive a more reasonable explanation for Rebecca’s disappearance. Three days later, it happened again. This time, she was only gone for about eight hours, and returned apparently from the same time and place as before. This continued to happen every day. She was sent off to work, as if it were any other job, except it was taking place over thirty years in the past. She tried to break up with Judy, but Judy wouldn’t accept it. Though this was all new to her, Judy could tell that her relationship with Rebecca was real, and it would be unfair to the both of them if she just ignored their potential. So she stayed, ultimately forever, and she never regretted it.