Microstory 69: Breakdown

I blew a tire out on my way to the bulk store today. It was just another in a series of problems I’ve had with my car. It’s so old that, last week when my muffler was dragging on the ground, the mechanics had to build a new one out of parts. They literally don’t make them like they used to. I was already late to help my mother with the heavy groceries, so it was even more humiliating rumbling and shaking like a crazy person, trying to desperately make those last couple of blocks. After getting the groceries, my mother needed help unloading them, so I rode with her back to her house. I tried calling a tow truck, hoping to meet them back at the store, but they said they wouldn’t even send one out unless I was already there waiting for them, so I borrowed my father’s truck and left. Apparently this was a big day for tows, because it took them almost an hour to reach me. The driver had to find a workaround because I evidently don’t have any “hook points” in the front. But he finally got it strapped down, and we headed out for the tire shop.

I was told that I had arrived at the tire place with enough time to install new tires before closing, but it took them much longer than expected; so long, in fact, they they wouldn’t be able to finish until tomorrow. That was extremely annoying, but my dad didn’t need the truck since they were going to be out of town for a couple of days. As it turned out, it didn’t matter since the truck refused to start anyway. There was a guy sitting in his own car nearby who heard me dealing with it and was 99.9% sure they it was something called the “fuel pump”. He had me stick my head in the tire well to prove it wasn’t making the sound it was supposed to. Having no other choice, I began the long walk back home. When I finally got back, exhausted and just wanting to go to bed, I found police officers escorting a man in handcuffs from my front porch. I asked one of the officers what was going on at my house. He answered, “he just robbed the liquor store down the street, across from the police station. It’s a good thing you weren’t home. He’s been holed up in there for hours, claiming to have hostages.”

Microstory 68: Selenophobia

Melvin Leo suffered from selenophobia; fear of the moon, and he had his entire life. He hadn’t left the house at night for several years. He even directed his career path so that he could live in England half of the year, and Australia for the other half, so as to maximize daylight hours. He went to therapists regularly, trying to get his anxiety under control. They were making progress, but he still kept this sinking feeling that something dangerous was hiding on the far side. One day, he was in the middle of nowhere on the train from Oxford to the airport when the power went out. It was twilight, so as they stepped out of the train, the passengers could see the skyline dramatically blink out little by little. Melvin gathered all of his strength; calling on the lessons that his therapists had taught him. And then he ran. He ran towards civilization as long as he could, but eventually had to start walking. Long before he was anywhere close to the safety of a building, it grew dark. Still, he kept walking. He even slowed his pace, reveling in his newfound fortitude. When he finally found a public building, he smiled and climbed up to the roof. Just like that, he no longer felt fear of the moon. He stood on the ledge, and yelled his revelation up to it. And while he stood there, he watched in horror as invading spaceships broke off from a mothership that appeared from behind the moon.

Microstory 67: The Typhon Lie

The Typhons were a fabricated race of aliens from another galaxy. They were imagined by a task force as part of the Ceresian-Eridani Interstellar Unity Initiative. They are said to resemble giant snakes with the head in the shape of a large skull. The Eridani claimed that the Typhons invaded and warred with them for almost a thousand years (which is equivalent to about 1,019 Earthan years). In that time they supposedly inadvertently taught the Eridani all they needed to know about military strategy and execution. In truth, with help from Ceresian refugees, the Eridani procured historical documents and other literature regarding the wars on other planets to gain their military knowledge. The Eridani used the Typhon lie and what they had learned, not to fight, but to assert themselves as the dominant military race, discouraging others from fighting each other. This elaborate and convoluted plan ultimately proved successful. There was a modern movement to uncover the truth about the Typhons. Several skeptics came together and started to question whether they ever existed. The movement, however, was quashed following the 25th Century Typhon Infestation. It was only a recent development that the Core revealed that the Typhons were, in fact, originally not real. All evidence points to a rogue group of scientists from Fostea that genetically engineered these new Typhons in retaliation for the Light Wars.

Microstory 66: Business Review

The other day, I was invited to tour the Fostean Galaxy. They were trying to assure me that they had changed their ways. And I admit, they had...to an extent. The following is a review I wrote of a business on a planet called Dikaio that gave me trouble when I tried to buy something:

I walked in here with no intention of buying anything, and I think the vendor could sense that. According to him, “browsing” is taboo in the entire galaxy, which is ridiculous, because I spent hours in the Great Mall of Poreia and didn’t buy a single thing. Just to get him to stop bothering me, I grabbed a pack of gravity gum. That seemed to insult him quite a bit. I told him that I couldn’t buy anything too advanced because I live on Earth, and the Martians would confiscate it anyway. He was perturbed by that, but he finally rang me up. I gave him my visitor card to pay and he acted like he had no idea what to do with that. He insisted that I pay with my skincode. Again, I’m from Earth. I don’t have one of those. The Core has a deal with Fostea that allows Lacteans to purchase items with visitor cards, and in return, the Core shares technology, supplies, and military training. The vendor pointed out that that’s because most Lacteans live in a moneyless society. And that’s true, but there is no conversion rate from Earthan money to Fostean indexa. He said he would take “one of those thousand dollar bills” for it. I explained that the gravity gum is nowhere near worth so much. He pulled a weapon on me, so I was forced to shoot him. The government gave me permission to eliminate any threat I perceive. Don’t go to this store. It has been permanently closed.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 31, 3118

« < » > Table of Contents

Everything changed. Mateo was no longer in the Snow White coffin. Instead, he found himself on a comfortable bed inside of a larger dome. There was no discernable way out of the dome. He looked around for a seam, and banged on the glass, but it was useless. Around the dome were machines and other instruments. The rest of the room was empty, except for a man who was staring at him without a hint of surprise. “Welcome back, sir.”

“What is this? Where am I?”

“You’re safe. We need to keep you in there or you’ll be contaminated. We built this facility around your jumpsite so that you would never breathe the open air.”

“What year is this?”

“Thirty-one-eighteen.”

“No, that’s not right,” Mateo reasoned. “It should be 2024.”

“It should be, yes. But it isn’t. The machine that the old scientist had you in disrupted your pattern, and threw you here. And it’s a good thing it did.”

“Why is that?”

“You are very special to us. Your genes are the key to the revival of the human race. You are to become the father of a multitude.”

“Why can’t you do it?”

“I’m not biological. And even if I were, I would already be contaminated. Everyone is. The few living humans are incapable of reproducing. You’re the first pristine person we’ve encountered in decades.”

“And you knew I was coming?”

“You told us.”

Mateo nodded. “That makes no sense.”

“You helped us build this place,” the man explained. “Yesterday.”

“If you’ve already met me, then why didn’t the other me help you with your virus problem?”

The apparently non-human laughed. “That version of you was contaminated, along with everyone else. After today, you will travel back to your time period, and then you will resume your pattern. Centuries later, you will jump into a year after the virus is first released, and it will infect you.”

“But it won’t kill me?”

He shook his head. “That’s not what the virus does.”

Mateo sighed. “What do you need from me? This me?”

“Samples. Lots of samples.”

Mateo let the machines run tests and take samples from him, partly because he didn’t feel like he had a choice, but also because if there was even a slight chance for him to save humanity, he couldn’t risk refusing. They needed a lot more than Professor Andrews had. He was feeling a bit violated, honestly, especially since they at one point gave him anesthetic and took some of his seed. But he learned a little bit more about how the world had been developing. Biological humans were a dying race. The man was hesitant to tell him too much, including how the infection began. They were worried about him going back and altering the timeline. He could make things better, or he could make things worse. There were too many variables to count, and even a nanite transhuman was incapable of accounting for all of them. The dangers of time travel. But if that were true, how were the powers that be justifying their intervention in the timeline? Once the machines were finished, and the samples had been safely taken out of the enclosure, Mateo took a much needed nap.

He must have dreamt of it, because when he awoke, he remembered the device that Daria had given him yesterday. The man scanned it with his high tech robot eyes and nodded. “I could read that easily, but not from out here.” He waved his hand at the dome. “You actually have everything you need in there, but you would need to build the interface from parts.”

“Teach me,” Mateo asked.

And so the man went about giving him instructions. He had him strip parts from machines they no longer needed, and haphazardly put them together. He even had to use a sort of soldering tool to mold the pieces. Finally, he had what he needed. He inserted the device and let it play.

A video automatically came up on the screen. On it was a man he didn’t recognize. He had a sinister smile on his face. “Mateo Matic. The Transient Hero of Earth. You’ve not yet met me, but I know you. I’ve been scouring the timeline, looking for when I could be rid of you before you cause me so many troubles. I’ve been trying to kill you for, well...days. But something always protects you. The powers that be don’t ever let us get close enough to end each other. But I found a loophole. I set in place a series of events that eventually led to your dear aunt Daria giving you this device. It took me a long time, but we’re finally here.” He took a drink from something and slammed it back down on the table. “You’re done! And you haven’t even started!” The machine exploded.

Mateo was thrown into the other side of the dome, but remained conscious. The fire began to consume the bed, and the oxygen was quickly being ripped out of his lungs. He banged on the glass again, and begged the man to let him out.

He just looked back at him in horror. “I can’t let you leave. If you become contaminated, you’ll carry the virus back to the past and make things even worse.”

“But if I die in here, then I can’t go back, which means I can’t return using my regular pattern, which means that I’ll never help you build the dome in the first place!”

“I have to trust that you won’t die,” the man responded. “But I can do nothing from out here. My hands are tied.”

He looked for a way to snuff out the flames. They had left some drinking water for him, but it wasn’t nearly enough to put the fire out. He opened every bottle and started drenching himself with it. The explosion had compromised the integrity of the dome, but the weakest points were very clearly on the other side of the fire. He grabbed some kind of large instrument, then jumped onto a cart. He slammed the instrument into the glass. It didn’t shatter, but it opened up enough for him to escape. He fells to the floor on the other side and began to crawl. There were tons of cuts and second degree burns on his body. He reached out, hoping to receive some help from the robot man.

But the robot man made no move towards him. He stared at him stoically, like he was weighing his options. “I’m sorry.”

“Please. Help!”

“I can’t let you go back to 2025. The virus is bad enough in our time, but we have technology, the human race will survive. We might be different. We may even be unrecognizable. If there is no cure in your uncontaminated blood, we will still find a way to keep going. But we would never survive an early 21st century pandemic.” He started to walk away.

Mateo struggled through the blood in his throat. “Wait, just wait. I’m the cure, right? Well...I was the cure. So, cure me with my old blood.”

“We don’t know how long it’s going to take to develop a cure, or even if there is one. You may be fruitless for us. And we can’t risk losing what few samples you gave us by returning some of it to you on blind faith. I’m very sorry, but your journey is over.”

“But if I don’t survive, I can’t go back to 2025. We just went over this. You need me to build the dome whether I’ve been infected or not.”

“The past can be changed; this much we’ve uncovered. But if it were going to change, it would have already done so from our perspective. As soon as you broke out of the dome, your future—our past—was altered. Yet the dome was still constructed. I don’t know how, but it’s there. Someone must have built it just the same. I’m made out of nanites. I can shift into any shape I choose. Perhaps the man who helped me build it was never you at all, but an imposter.”

“Don’t do this,” Mateo begged, then coughed up a little blood.

Before the man could say anything else, one the walls lit up and turned into a video screen. The man from the message before was back again. “Did you think that that explosion was meant to kill you? That was just the primer. Now it’s time to paint this room red.” He let out an evil laugh.

Mateo prepared himself for another explosion, but yet another man appeared out of nowhere, took him by the shoulders, and jumped them both out of there.

Hours later, Mateo woke up again. He was on a bed of leaves and grass in the dark, but the moon was bright and seemed larger. A teeny tiny dinosaur that looked like a triceratops hopped around nearby. His wounds had been treated with some kind of high-tech liquid bandage. He rolled onto his side and looked around. The man who had taken him out of danger was holding a musket and keeping watch for danger. “Hello?”

The man turned around, but his face remained obstructed by shadows. “How are you feeling?”

“Alive.”

“Alive, and in the Cretaceous period. Great story for your kids.”

“You slungshot me through time, like my aunt.”

He tilted his head. “I don’t think sling is a verb.”

“What’s your name?”

The man looked at his watch. “It’s almost midnight.”

“I can’t know the name of the man who saved my life?”

He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “It’s my job.”

“No, it isn’t. You could quit. Eventually the powers that be would give up on you.”

“You’re just as tenacious as your mother.” The man stepped closer and showed himself by the moonlight.

“Oh my God. You look like me.” It was his father, Mario. Midnight came.

« < » > Table of Contents

Seeing is Becoming: Garage Door (Part I)

« < » > Entire Story

Vearden Haywood was getting ready to leave his house in Oklahoma. Four thousand miles away, Saga Einarsson was trekking through the rainforests of the Amazon. They had not seen each other since college. Saga didn’t even have a social media presence, so Vearden had no idea that she was a traveling photographer. While he was brushing his teeth and making sure that his cell phone was charged all the way, Saga felt a tremor. She looked around for shelter, but found nothing. It ended quickly, and she looked ahead again. Things had changed. Her environment looked remarkably different. She was still in the rainforest, but the arrangement of trees and flowers had been altered. Did she lose time? There was a roar behind her, and she began to run.

Vearden looked at himself in the mirror with the feeling of apathy and a bit of nausea. He didn’t want to go. He stood there, staring into space, for a few moments before sitting down on the couch and flipping on his TV. He had recently cleared out his recordings so there was nothing to watch but the late morning trash. He eventually just fell asleep from the depression.

His phone woke him up hours later. He grabbed it and answered, “yeah?—Yeah, I know.—I could lie and say that I thought it was tomorrow, but I just wasn’t in the mood.—Probably won’t be in the mood tomorrow, no.—You would not do that.—Okay, fine. I’ll be there, I promise...in two days.—All right, tomorrow morning. First thing.” He growled and let his phone fall back to the nightstand. It was only then that he realized he was in his bed instead of the couch. How did he get there?

The next day, Vearden completed his routine and made it out to the garage. He breathed in deeply but held most of it in; letting air out little by little. He haphazardly slapped the door opener several times before finally getting lucky. As he began to walk around the back to the driver’s side door, he saw the outside. It was not his driveway. It was some kind of wooded area. He looked behind him through the glass on the door to the backyard. That all looked normal, but in front of him was a different place entirely.

He cautiously dipped his feet across the border. It didn’t feel any different; as if that was just how it was supposed to be. He slowly made progress until he was fully past the line. He looked back. His house was nowhere to be seen, except for the frame of the garage. He dropped his bag to the ground and began to explore the immediate area. He was able to touch the leaves and feel the breeze on his face. So, it wasn’t just a visual hallucination. It was most likely a dream. He didn’t technically remember waking up, but that was old news. His brain made a point of erasing the memories of monotony.

While he was watching a flying insect that resembled a bee, he started to hear screaming. He looked up and saw a woman racing towards him. She stopped for a half second when she saw him up ahead. “Don’t let the door close!”

“What?”

“Make sure the door stays open!” she called up to him.

Then he saw what she was running from. A large creature was chasing her. It was nearly three meters tall, muscular, and angry. Just as Vearden was looking for a sturdy stick to use as a weapon, the creature caught up with the woman.  It was only then that he realized she was his old college roommate. Maybe this was all real. Maybe they had fallen into another dimension. Maybe this was happening all over the world. Saga fought back hard, managing to keep the creature at bay. Vearden ran up and joined in. Together, they were able to knock the creature to its back. “Get to my house. Go all the way into the kitchen.”

“If your door closes, we’ll be trapped here forever.”

There was a howl in the distance. The creature on the ground howled back to it. They were clearly intelligent enough to communicate with each other. “Then you better get going,” Vearden told her.

While Saga was running for the door, they could hear it begin to close on its own. Whatever had brought them there wanted them to stay. Vearden collided with the creature. It fought using strategy and patience. Even though it didn’t seem to say anything, it was thinking through its actions. Creature wasn’t a very good name for it, but that was all he had. It even carried a sheathed sword. He continued to punch and kick at it. He had never received any formal combat training, so it was just his instinct to keep as much distance as possible between them.

He got a few opportunities to look over to his house. He could see Saga straining to hold the garage door open. There was a sensor that kept it from hitting you in the head, but that was being overridden. “Just get inside!” he yelled to her.

“I can’t do that!”

“Either we both die, or just me! Please!”

As he continued to lose his fight with the creature, she continued to lose her fight with the door. He could only see her legs, and then just her feet. And then the door was all the way down. He could still see her through the little windows, pounding and screaming, trying to get the door back open. But it was slowly fading away. It would soon be gone, and he would be trapped. But at least she was safe.

The creature’s friend appeared through the trees, causing him to take his eyes off of the first one for a moment. It took its chance to stab him in the stomach.

“No!” Saga cried from inside the garage, her voice growing fainter as she held the word.

Knowing that his wound was fatal anyway, he decided to cause as much damage as he could muster. He shoved the sword deeper in so that it came out of his back. He twisted around and slit the creature’s stomach open. Then he jumped backwards and crashed into the second creature, stabbing it so they were both on a skewer. He fell to the ground on top of it. The first one was approaching him, his wound closing up quickly. Apparently they had a healing factor. That’s perfect. Vearden struggled to the pull the sword out of the other creature’s stomach, and out of his own. He released it just in time to trip the first creature and let it fall on the sword. He was in a creature sandwich, their blood mixing together throughout their three wounds.

He gathered all the strength he had left and rolled it off of his body. They were already starting to heal again. He swung the sword behind him like a baseball bat, and cut off their heads, hoping that they would not be able to survive that level of trauma.

Saga ran up just in time to watch Vearden’s wound close up, leaving not so much as a scar. “You heal like they do,” she said

“You were supposed to be inside.”

“I was inside. When it disappeared, it left me behind. Someone wants us here.”

“Where are we?”

“Another planet.”

« < » > Entire Story

Microstory 65: Gravity Transfunctioners

I’ve received a lot of messages over the years, desperately asking me how ships are able to fly. There has been some confusion as to how a vessel could be capable of lifting itself from surfaces without any obvious means of propulsion. People tend to expect to see some kind of jet stream, or arcing electricity, or even explosions. Ships are also relatively quiet, which seems to be pretty unsettling to those who do not understand it. They’re used to loud shuttles being forced into the sky, with pieces falling off as fuel is expended. I’ve been looking through the specifications, manuals, and textbooks that I have attained from various intergalactic organizations in order to help me tell my so-called “fictional” stories. They’re pretty long-winded and overly complex about the science behind antigravity and spaceflight. But then I came across this cute little blurb that a rocket surgeon came up with to explain to his young daughter why he no longer had a job. The following explanation of gravity transfunctioners is several thousand years old: When unobtanium is injected into the turboencabulator, it reverses the polarity of the phlebotinum core which creates a quantum tunnel through which the sonic hand can wave the gravitons in the same direction that the user wants an object to move.

Microstory 64: The Package

My parents are on vacation in Hawaii, so I’ve been going to their house every few days to grab the mail and water some plants. When I get there today, I see a package. The label has their address, but it lists two names that I do not recognize. I send a text message to my mother, and she tells me that one of the people listed lives to the West of them, while the other lives to the East. She must be busy, because I don’t get a response when I ask which house I should take it to. It seems strange to me that two people who live in separate houses would both receive a single package. Perhaps the sender realized this and decided to split the difference by sending it to the house in between them. I flip a proverbial coin and walk over to place the package at the West house. When I get back to my parents’ I see the package has returned. And it must be the same package. I don’t have an eidetic memory, or anything, but the creases on the cardboard and the marks on the corners are the same as I remember them. If it’s just a duplicate, it’s a very good one. I take it back over to the West house, but the same thing happens again. I decide that the package magically knows where it’s supposed to be, and will default to the beginning until it’s put in the right place, so I take it over to the East house. Yet again, I find that it has defaulted to my parents’ porch. Before I can think of a third option, I hear ticking. On instinct, I run towards the street, but it isn’t far enough. The package explodes and sends me colliding into my car. When I wake up hours later at the hospital, the police inform me that the explosion stretched across all three houses, killing all those inside.