The "
best" of all possible outcomes is being ripped to ribbons, out of
phase with time itself. I hate my fucking job.
Nothing has gone right since I went
Transoxania. I'm probably the only one this far over the
river. I could explain, but the common tongue of
history is denied me. I'm the only one that remembers the
Baikonur Cosmodrome burning, when they hung
Lincoln in
Atlanta, when China pressed the
button. I'm the only
Chrononaut that they ever lost.
Radar ghost.
Paradox.
The
future, relative to my experience, is a shithole. The
Industrial Revolution was the fitful start of a chainsaw that we used to chew the
Earth a new one. Problem is, it's all
relative. Mutant children with steel arms still go to school, still
chew gum, still tell lies. I think I used to have
nightmares like this, but my mind didn't imagine the possibilties.
Strip mall historical societies.
Twinkies as traditional cuisine. Mindwipe
insurance. Society has always been a monster, but I only lived with the
catepillar.
This is the goddamn butterfly.
They caught me as soon as I popped up in the parking lot of a cheap
brothel-mart on the far northern coast of New
Alaska. North quarter of BernersLee City, in good ole United Nations of America. ExxoTex
drones sprayed nanofoam up my ass before I even hit the ground. I was booked by an
AI that processed me for illegally teleporting across stated
spacial borders and tossed me in a holding pen to wait for my
Virtual lawyer. No chips in my skull to mark me as a loyal NorAm-er, so they tagged me as a dirty
orbital refugee.
My suit blocked out most of the
gas they pumped in to keep me
docile.
The
robot in the next cell was crying. The
sound looped at 36 second intervals, and alternated between 70 and 90 decibels. The readouts on my
retinas flooded with
advertisements about a
millisecond after I tried to access any kind of
public signal. I was flying blind. At least the constant of humanity remained:
Man will kill that which he doesn't understand.
I held my head in my hands and thought about the
past. The past was so much easier.
Superstition was my greatest tool for survival. That time in Norway, when I blew though the roof of some poor
Viking bastard's blacksmithing shed, they just assumed I was a
Thunder God. Here I'm a refu that isn't even worth human interaction. They sprayed an apple green symbol on my
suit. "No threat" in binary.
Oh yeah?
After I press the
button, I'm everywhere. You have to be careful not to occupy the same
physical place as yourself in the timeline, but that isn't too hard when you can fix your own mistakes before they happen. One of me holds the crying robot while another, older, wizened version slams a
metal baton into its voicebox. All nine of us laugh when the crying stops. The roof of the cell disappears with a sizzling
hiss of disintergating plasteel, and I toss myself a hoverbelt from the
roof. Just as the klaxon starts to sound, I toss a
Tesseract cube to the onrushing guard. It shows a loop of one of those old Detroit car factory robot
arm welders sparking hot metal onto some naked chassis. As close as these rivetheads get to
porn is creation imagery.
When the electromag grenade inside erupts, it blows the guard's arm clean off. Blast channeling shields carve the expanding cloud of metal and flaming synethics into intricate patterns on the remaining walls and ceilings. The heiroglypic
epitaphs it makes describe many unnatural acts the translator can participate in with his mother.
Well, that's what they told me would happen when I bought it. I'm hip deep in a 15th century Vietnamese swamp picking apple green paint off my
spacesuit, so I'll have to take their word for it.