Monthly Archives: September 2016

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

Traveler: Conversation with an Old Time Traveler

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The All Clock

“You see, the trick with Time Travel is what I call ‘The Law of Neutrality‘ that means that you can change any timeline except your own,” the old man states as if I know what he is talking about, “You can change others’ timelines because you always have changed them, but you cannot change your own timeline as it can never be different because then you would never be there changing it. And, therein lies the paradox of the All Clock.”

I am certain that I have never met the grizzled old man before, but something about his manner feels so familiar. It is midnight and, other than his growling voice, there is silence all around us. He is standing in my dorm room gazing down at me with a strangely tender expression. The window is still closed and the bedroom door that I always locked before going to bed looks intact and unopened. I have no idea how he got into my room, but this strangely does not bother me.

“I tell you all of this, but I also know that you will not listen. I never did, so you won’t. When she dies in the Spiral Feeds, you will go back to try to stop if from ever happening. Not if, but when this happens, just remember to come back here now and I will remind you what to do next.”

Suddenly there is another man standing in the room. He is older than me and carrying a gun of some sort. He looks at me and nods before looking across at the older man. It is then that I notice that, although he is dressed differently to the older, grizzled man, he bizarrely looks like a younger, less sinewy version of him.

“You were right,” the younger man states flatly, his voice exactly the same pitch and tone of the older man, “It did not work. Each time I tried it, I was another variable in the timeline making it happen. I cannot save her. We–” he glances at me, “We cannot save her. What now?”

The older man smiles and walks across to the side of my bed where I am now sitting straight up, my eyes wide.

“First, let me introduce ourselves ,” he smiles at me, it looks like a leathery skull grinning and I notice a fine scar from his left eye down to his jaw, “Your thesis works. You invent Time Travel, but you are not alone in doing this and the others are our enemies. We are your various future versions of you and there are a number of things I must tell you,” he glances at the young man, “and some that I must remind you.”

A thrill of excitement runs down my spine at this news. My rough thesis lies across the room on my study table. But the excitement quickly dissipates as I see the pained expression of the middle-aged me and start to notice all the criss-cross scars on the old-aged me.

I suddenly realize that my future holds a lot of pain for me.

“The All Clock offers us a unique opportunity to save the world. The Law of Neutrality prevents us saving our future, present and past daughter from the coming Spiral Feeds, but it does allow us windows into multiple world end scenarios. This allows us to travel backwards in time and prevent others from dying in the first place. We save the world countless times in our loop. It is interesting how often, though, saving the world involves killing another Time Traveller, but it seems that this technology offers many temptations to those that control it to alter the world in unexpected ways.”

“How do I know where to save the world? How do I know where to go and what to do? How do I know how I can survive all of this?” the middle-aged me asks the old-aged me.

“You will know because I will tell you,” the old-aged me smiles and hands the middle-aged me what looks like a black leather-bound book, “And I knew because I once in your place being told by an older version of me, who handed me this book. It has all the dates, times, co-ordinates and details needed to execute our time loop.”

The middle-aged me takes the book in silence and nods. The old-aged me nods back, grimly. And the room’s dark silence weighs down on me sitting in my bed speachless.

But suddenly I find my voice: “W-what is the All Clock?”

The old-aged me turns to me. He kneels down to my level, places his hand on my shoulder and look directly into my eyes. Even in the darkness of the room I can pick up the faintest sparkle of metal and circuitry in his eyes.

“We are the All Clock,” he growls narrowing his eyes, “And the All Clock is us. Remember to love her while she is alive. There will be plenty of time for revenege after she is gone.”

The old-aged me looks up at the middle-aged me and nods: “It is time. I would say ‘good luck’, but you don’t need it. I did it, so I know you will, and so will you,” he say swinging his gaze at me.

And then his head explodes. Blood splatters out across me, the bed and the wall behind me. It is warm and sticky.

The loud bang from the gun is still ringing in my ears hours later, long after the middle-aged me has time travelled away and I am left all alone.

He told me I will go to jail, but there I will learn to fight. He told me that my thesis is correct and I do not need a PhD for our future. He tells me that after jail I will her and we will have a daughter. He tells me to spend time with her, but to build the Time Travel Machine then according to me theory. He tells me that I will forget about much of this meeting, but when the time comes that I will travel back to right now and remind myself.

He tells me not to worry. He survived it all, and so I will survive it all. He tells me that I will survive everything and see such wonders that mortal cannot comprehend.

He tells me all of that as he is wiping the blood-splatter from jacket and placing his smoking gun onto the bed at my side.

“I am the All Clock,” I whisper again and again under my breath as the world wakes up around me, “and I will save the world.”

Any moment now, someone will walk into the dorm room and find body of the old-aged version of me with my fingerprints on the gun on my bed.

Read the next story in the “Traveler” series here.

Science Fiction

Traveler: All Clock

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The All Clock

People say that time travel will never be invented. They say that it cannot ever have been invented in the future. They say that they know this for a fact. The reason they know is that, if time travel has been invented in the future, then why have we never encountered any person from there? Since we haven’t, it couldn’t have been invented. People say all of this and smile, thinking that they are really smart.

But they are all wrong.

Time travel has actually been invented quite a couple of times. Many times quite independently of each other. Sure, some were more successful than others and, sure, some were more accurate than others. But many of these Travellers, as they are known to a select few, befell the same fate at the hands of the one who calls himself the All Clock.

Few facts are known amongst us Travellers about the All Clock, but we do know that no one has survived a direct encounter with him. We do not know how he locates us or hunts us, but we do know that he does this across certain timelines that exist on fractious moments in the human history: the Crusades, the Assassination of Julius Caesar, the Cuban Missile Crisis, all three World Wars, the Andromeda Space Accident, and so on.

The problem is that these sort of moments are like honey to a fly for Travellers. These are the magical moments when the human race could go one way or the other, with major implications on the future of the world. While many Travellers begin travelling for their own reasons, these moments are almost always the reason why we keep travelling.

And so he preys on us moving through those moments.

But why does he prey on us?

The short answer is that no one knows. The long answer is cloaked in rumours and conjecture. Some believe he was the first of us to invent time travel and that he is slowly travelling through time killing those that stole his invention. Some believe he is, in fact, eliminating parallel outcomes on the timeline and preventing disasters before they happen. Some believe that he did not invent time travel, but is from the distant future where Travelling is regulated and he is travelling back in time to punish those that abuse it. Some even believe that he has invented the All Clock.

In theory, time is just a dimension, much like the breadth, width and depth that make up space. Now time is a dimension that space moves along, and Travellers move across time by keeping space constant and changing its position on time. The fact is that time is always happening and the universe is both being birthed and ending along the same timeline while we are both alive and dead.

It all gets very confusing, but for the reason that all events along a timeline are happening simultaneously, there is the fact that they cannot be changed. To change one thing in the past would change everything in the future, but you are not there to change it and, therefore you cannot change it in the past.

Many a Traveller has gone crazy trying to change the past or fix his future. Those of us who survive are the ones that accept that these things cannot be changed. They have already happened and will always happen. We are merely tourists across the timeline, not gods.

But the All Clock is said to be able to recalibrate timelines. It is said that with the All Clock, you don’t travel through time, but over it. You sidestep the space-time continuum with the ability to reach into the timeline and change it.

But, you know, rumours are rumours and who knows? We have no facts and I am, personally, happy about that. If I had some facts, it would mean that I had met him and that would probably mean that I was dead. And, well, you know, I quite like being alive. Why am I telling you this? Well, I obviously always have and always will, so who knows? It’s all predestined anyway. No, I don’t have the All Clock!

So, why don’t we just relax and watch the procession? I have a feeling that it will be quite memorable. I do love the smell of Dallas in 1963! I think that we’ll be able to get a good view from the grassy knoll back there, don’t you think? Great, let’s go check it out…

Read the next story in the “Traveler” series here.

Fantasy, Horror & Dark Fiction

When the Darkness Answered Back

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occult-ritual

He had always liked the occult. Even if he believed that a lot of it was rubbish, it still felt good to have knowledge that most other people did not have. It made him feel special like he was elite and set apart from his fellow man.

He had never been the most athletic or popular kid in school, but one day hiding in the library he had found a dusty old book with references to other dusty old books. It had piqued his interest, so he had found another one. Seeking out and reading these books had become his hobby.

And from the Witches Bible, the Emerald Tablets, the Satanic Bible, the Wiccan Handbook, he had begun to piece his internal image together.

It had even begun to be slightly hip to be a Wiccan, so he felt like he was going in the right direction. Like vegetarians or those people who do Crossfit, own iPhones or electric cars, he could bring up his occult religion, Wicca, at dinner conversations. It not only scared people, but it gave him a sense of power. People in these circumstances would be forced to listen and open-mindedly smiled and nod.

He would wait until those vegetarians and other social constructs had announced themselves–as they always did–before announcing himself.

He loved stealing their limelight.

He would usual pour himself a glass of wine and propose a toast to one of his old gods. He would then let his pentacle accidentally be revealed around his neck and answer the inevitable question that someone would ask.

“Oh, I’m a Magi in the Golden Dawn, dear. We practice the Great Art. How much do you know about the Occult?”

The answer was almost always nothing, and from there he would control the conversation.

Afterwards, he would go home and light the candles. He would then mumble to the old gods and look at the moon in self-induced wonder. He was in control. He was special. He was apart from and above his fellow man.

There was not a huge lot of believing that actually went into it. It was kind of like an interesting hobby that made him feel unique; draw the circle, sprinkle the dust and light the incense while sitting in the glow of candlelight and feeling special.

One night he played out this well-rehearsed dance, before returning home. The one Christian woman at the table had looked particularly shocked, which had made him quite happy with himself. He had found that a little bit of shock and awe did wonder to elevate himself in society.

It was the Dark Moon far above. The night sky hid the pale face of Isis in a bed of twinkling stars. He lit the incense and candle before muttering the incantation he had found in the Book of the Dead. It was old and sounded most exotic as the strange words rolled off his practiced tongue.

Something felt different, though. It was like someone was watching him. But he ignored it and took a sip of his wine.

“And Osiris, brother of Set, answer my call in the darkness of Isis’s closed eyes…”

Suddenly the candle went out. The room fell into a heavy darkness and there was a moment of absolute silence. It was then that he felt a presence unlike anything he had experienced before.

“ALEISTER, I HEAR YOU CALL FOR MY BROTHER, BUT IT IS I THAT YOU DESIRE. I WILL GRANT YOU THE WISH YOU HAVE ASKED FOR, BUT I WILL TAKE FROM YOU THE PRICE OFFERED.”

A number of nights later he was at another dinner party.

The conversation tired of a young woman explaining how she was lesbian. She had only just come out to her parents. Everyone had nodded, smiled and told her how brave she was. The guests were mentally patting themselves on their back for being so open-minded.

He tried to smile reassuring to her and reached forward with his glass. His pentacle accidently slipped from under his black shirt and sparkled in the soft light.

“Oh, is that a pentacle?” a young man asked, “Are you one of those occultists? You simply must tell me about that, I find these new beliefs fascinating. Or are they old beliefs? You see, I just don’t know anymore. Which school do you practice?”

He fumbled and stuffed the amulet back under his shirt. Back away from prying eyes. These people had no idea what they were messing with. It was dark and dangerous, not fit for a dinner table. A cold shiver ran down his spine. He felt like he was being watched again. The corners in the room suddenly looked especially dark.

“Uh, it is,” he began, not sure what to say, but then he remembered the cold, powerful voice in the darkness and shivered again, “It-it is nothing. Just jewellery I wear. Tell me, though, did you say that you do Crossfit? How’s that work? Is it worth going?”

And somewhere, not-as-far-away-as-you-would-think, something old, cold and powerful smiled in the darkness.

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

Where Teleporters Go Missing

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man in fog

The warning on the box says safety cannot be “guaranteed”. You chuckle as you remember interviews with old, white-haired scientists telling the world this was a bad idea.

There are always those that resist change, like when the aliens made contact. Many doomsayers and haters would howl about how the Wolves–named after the planet that they originate from–had come to take our planet from us. Interviews and adverts all droned endlessly on about the End of the World from this superior alien race. Warmongers arguing how we should attack first. Survivalists hiding out in their basements…

And so on.

But, alas, a decade later, and the Wolven trade with Earth was growing and intergalactic relations had never been as good as this. Or that was what the President said. He was not wrong. Sure, intergalactic relations had never existed in the first place, but the Wolves and Humans were now fantastic cosmic partners.

All of this flashes through your mind in a split second and then is forgotten. You are excited. You feel like a young boy again on a cold Christmas morning. You are holding brand new a personal teleport device in your hands right now.

Incredible!

Humans are superior in a few aspects, for example, we are better at agriculture than them. That was probably a function of the fertile planet we evolved on. That said, Wolven tech is definitely superior to our own. The Wolves have worked out a limited degree of cold fusion to help drive starship drives nearly infinitely, which had helped them reach our planet in the first place.

Also, their short-term logistics was covered by short-range micro-wormhole generators or MWG’s. People instantly named these devices “teleporters”.

And so the first tech-driven intergalactic trade route developed between the Humans and the Wolves: organic produce for teleporters. Seemed like a fair trade to most humans.

The teleporter’s box in your hands has a number of other disclaimers on it, including “Do not operate intoxicated”, “Do not point Exit Portal at solid or liquid state objects”, and “Declare all MWG devices at official checkpoints and in your local registry for tracking” where some of the more colourful ones.

You smile. It is finally time. It really does feel like Christmas.

Your latest smartphone chip–the ones that are installed into your brain–picks up your intention and syncs your thoughts with the teleporter’s interface. Lights flash, your child-like grin widens and the world in your hand comes alive with beautiful colours dancing across your vision.

You focus on the teleporter’s controls. Your link between the smartphone chip in your head and the teleporter merge into a control panel in your mind’s eye.

You select a destination and click the button to teleport…

Suddenly you are standing in thick mist in a strange, surreal landscape. You can make out vague forms looming in the distance, but the mist is too thick to see more than a few feet ahead of you. You stumble forward, but the sound is dull in the thick, cold, wet air. You think you hear faint talking. You start to panic and cry out a feeble “hello”, but the sound falls dead in the mist and replies with absolute silence.

You begin to panic. The last thing you remember is pressing the button for the teleporter, but you are no longer holding it in your hand. Where are you? What is going on? Why are you so cold?

Silence…

“Do you think they suspect anything?”

The question is being asked by a slim, grey-skinned Wolf standing over your cryogenically-frozen form in a stasis pod on the distant planet, Wolf 1061c. Your eyelids are occasionally flickering. The stasis-induced “Dream of Mist” fills your consciousness. It is an aptly named, but strange and unexplained phenomenon that is a side-effect of Wolven stasis being applied to homo sapien biology.

“No, I don’t,” says a being that looks exactly the same as you in every shape and form, “Now give me a hand downloading and installing this one’s memories into me before I teleport there.”

“Sure thing,” says the amorphic grey-skinned Wolf, reaching for the teleporter in your frozen hand, “Here we go, gonna beam it into your import chip now.”

The replica of you smiles, unerringly similar to how you would smile.

“I know I say this every time I do a Switch, but damn we have a good plan! Befriend a planet, sell them our teleporters that teleport them straight into our Harvesters while stealing their memories. We copy their forms and memories and then teleport back to their planet, thus taking their place in society. And, eventually, we are the society. We not only harvest their entire planet without any violence or unnecessary loss in biomass, we steal their collective knowledge and inherit another planet through the process. Just brilli–aah–there we go, I got the memories.”

“Good. Uh, yes, I know the plan quite well, thanks,” the grey-skinned being says, absentmindedly, fiddling with the teleporter, “but why are you telling me it? Anyway, the teleporter has now been recalibrated to your bio-print and will not bring you back here for Harvest. Time to do the Switch.”

“Yes, I just like saying the plan out loud. How many times have we done this? How many planets has it been now? It is just brilliant, that’s what. OK, is my form stable and do I have all of the creatures memories?”

“Yes and yes. Full bio-data upload completed and stable bio-adaption reached. Now stop talking and do the damn Switch. We got plenty more incoming that I also need to Switch.”

The replica of you smiles again. He clicks the teleporter and disappears instantly. The grey-skinned being shakes his oval, strange head and turns to another stasis pod. An old human woman has just appeared there, instantly cryogenically frozen with a teleporter tightly grasped in her wrinkled hand. Her eyelids are moving as she begins to enter the Dreams of Mist. It will be the last things she remembers before the Harvesters deconstruct her carbon.

He motions for a grey-skinned being hovering behind him to step forward. He clicks a button in the stasis pod and a blue laser scans the woman’s body, taking in both inside and outside bio-structures.

“Right, buddy, step into the Bio-adapter, it’s time to become…whatever this creature’s name is.”

While the second grey-skinned being is being biologically altered into the exact DNA of the old woman in the stasis pod, your replica is greeting your friends at the bar that you had originally intended to teleport to.

“Hey, why you late man? I thought teleporters would help you be on time?”

“Nah, I just popped off to see the pyramids in Egypt first and had a quick cup of tea in Bangkok.”

Your friends all laugh. The replica of you is high fiving your friends and smiling. The drinks are beginning to flow. The replica is then handing your teleporter to one of them and laughing, charmingly about how much fun it is. Your friends are suitably impressed with the expensive tech and your friends are all wanting to try it too.

Only, not all of them are your friends anymore. Some of them had already been Switched. And, by the end of the night, the rest of them will have been Switched too.

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Dream Eater

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The Dream Eater

He knew he was dreaming.

The landscape felt both familiar and vague with no real details. He had no idea how he had gotten here or what he was doing. Somehow he was in his old classroom–the English classroom or was it the Math one?–and outside it was sunny with green trees. Somehow this was not strange, despite the fact that he was now forty and working in another country.

Yes, this was definitely a dream he thought to himself while he sat in his old chair.

“A-are you real?”

The question made him jump. It came from right next to him. How had he not noticed the strange little, goblin-looking creature sitting next to him in the classroom? Bare skin stretched tightly over a skull-shaped face with large child-like eyes all combined to inspire a strange combination of fear, revulsion and pity when looking at the little creature.

“Are you real?” the little creature asked again looking directly at him, grave near-comical concern over its ugly little face.

“Ye-um, no,” he paused before shaking his head, “This is a dream, none of us are real. I’m not real and neither are you.”

The little creature looked away. It almost looked sad and he felt a silly impulse to hug it. Before he could do anything it looked back at him. The classroom was getting dark. It was nighttime now.

“Are you sure you are not real?” the creature asked softly, almost threateningly showing some pointed, sharp teeth in its mouth, “I am certain I am real. How do you not know that what lies out there is not the dream? Why can’t this be real and the strange place you think you live in be the dream?”

Lightning began to streak in the sky outside. Shadows were rising up in the corners of the classroom with menacing eyes peering out from them. And, just as he was about to answer, the bell rang.

He woke up in his bed covered in sweat with his heart racing. He shook his head. He was sitting in his bedroom a million miles away from the classroom. He was forty years old and had long since left that school.

What a strange dream.

The next day dawned and he fell into the bustle of the weekday routine. All day, though, he could not stop thinking about the strange, goblin-like creature in his dream with its large, child-like eyes and pointy teeth.

In fact, as the day went on, he thought more and more about the creature. What a strange thought? What if he was currently dreaming now? What if this was the dream and at night when he fell asleep, he actually woke up in the real world? What if he was a teenager dreaming that he was a forty-year-old man? What if the creature was right and he was really there? What if all of this was not real? What if he was a child dreaming that he was an adult living in another city?

These thoughts had started as mental itches. But as he scratched them, they had gotten itchier. By the end of the day, sitting in traffic on the way home, these thoughts were starting to circle around and around in his head. By the time he opened the door to his small apartment open, the thoughts were all he could think of.

Faced with the dark emptiness of his apartment and life, he suddenly felt tired. He felt exhausted. He was completely drained of every ounce of energy. If this was a dream, he did not want to be in it anymore. It was a miserable dream and he wanted to wake up.

He collapsed on his couch in his living room. He could not even summon the energy to turn the light or the television on. He just slouched down into a crumpled heap on the couch and–in the growing darkness of evening–he drifted into a deep sleep.

“A-are you real?”

He was standing back in the classroom, only it was a little different. Perhaps it was the French classroom? Maybe the walls were a different colour or the room a different size? There was more detail in the room this time.

But none of that mattered, as the little creature with child-like eyes and pointy teeth stood before where he sat.

“Are you real?”

“Y-yes,” he stuttered, trying to desperately remember why he was here or where he had come from, “Yes, I am real. I know I am real,” and then he remembered the other dark, dreary dream and added, “I do not want the other dream! I do not!”

“Then if I kill you here, you will die,” the little creature whispered menacingly. He was suddenly aware of how he could barely move and how sharp the claws on the little fingers of this creature were. The hairs on the back of his neck were beginning to rise. A cold shiver ran down his spine.

“Y-yes, I th-think so,” he stuttered, barely able to move his mouth as a fearful paralysis crept up his helpless limbs and his mind became blank.

“Goooood, goooood,” the little creature cooed wickedly, rows and rows of sharp, pointy teeth appearing in his mouth as it began to grin, “For I am the Dream Eater, liberating the sleepers from their false dreams of light and life. Come, let me show you the true dreams of darkness and death…”

A gurgling sound rose up from his throat as he tried to scream, but could not. He could not move, his limbs did not exist. His mind was frozen and the darkness was closing in. The classroom suddenly looked terrifying. Flashing lightning and pounding rain sounded outside, as the Dream Eater floated closer and closer to him with its sharp, pointy teeth becoming all he could see…

The police found him two days later when a family member called them. He had not shown up for work for two days without notice. Work had then called the family and his brother who lived in the same city. After numerous calls and no answers, his brother had come over to see if he was alright and had not been able to get into the apartment. It was then that his brother had called the police, who had kicked the door down in the attempt to see if he was alright.

He was not alright.

He was curled up on the couch. He was pale white like the very life had been sucked from him. His eyes were wide open and glassy, like a blind man. Most terrifying, though, was his face. It was contorted in a silent scream that no one in this dream had heard.

For this is how the Dream Eater hunts and that is how the Dream Eater feeds.

Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the Dream Eater bite.