FLASH CHALLENGE: January '08

[kailhofer]

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The challenge was: To create a time travel story where the time traveler's arrival had something "accidental" about it.

THE FOLLOWING ENTRIES WERE RECEIVED:




[center]Serendipity is a Happy Accident?[/center]



She awakes in darkness. She looks to the night sky to search out the Great Bear constellation. It always leads her home, but it is not there; there are no stars. No trees. There is a canopy above her much like the roof of her Father's bark longhouse in Werowocomoco. That is her Father's capitol. He is Wahunsunacock, a weroance of her people, a chief, most powerful leader of the entire land. So she is, in fact, an 'Indian Princess'.

A man stands before her. She guesses he is the age of the man she is prepared to marry. He smiles to her. His skin is pale, and a thick mustache and (what he would call a VAN DYKE) beard covers his chin. He wears a blue cape (or should that be LAB COAT?) the color of bay water. She tentatively whispers, “Winkápew, nitáp.”

A loud voice fills the other's longhouse. It is powerful. Crisp. Like her Father speaking as chief. Authority incarnate. Commands unquestioned.

TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT FACTOR: 500.624.
SUBJECT: FEMALE.
AGE: TWELVE YEARS, APPROXIMATELY.
CLOTHING: ANIMAL HIDE, TANNED CERIVIDAE.
ANALYZING SPEECH PATTERNS.
INITIALIZING TRANSLATOR PROGRAM: ALGONQUIN LANGUAGE SUB-SET.

“Hello, my friend,” the man says in words she knows. His voice is sweeter, kinder she thinks. “Your being here is an accident. Or at least we call it an accident. I'm sure the reason is buried in the cold equations of the physics. Beneath a Sigma 9X-squared or a trinomial expression (the translator hesitates, UKNOWN).”

He stumbles a moment speaking with her. In his culture, she is a year less of a teenager; in hers, she is a young women. Both are just barely adults to their peers. He is a graduate student intern. His acne is worse than hers, which he uncomfortably notices.

“Wasn't planed at any rate. We can't plan it. It's random. We sent someone back in time, so someone or something has to balance it out by coming here. Not always a person, sometimes a plant or animal. It's like a lottery. You should have seen the pterodactyl (the translator hiccups before stating: LEATHERY WINGED CREATURE) we got once. Well, maybe better you shouldn't 've.

“Oh yeah, my name's Joss.” He holds out one hand. She jumps back, but he is not truly threatening.

“I am Matoak,” she says.

“We have some time to kill. Oh, no pun! I am allowed to show you around. To show you the wonders tomorrow brings. Come on.”

The solid flap of the room hisses open, sounding like a angry, slithering snake. They walk out into the corridor. “We can use the glass tram, but not travel in it,” he says. Another flap cycles open with the sound of a loud Summer wind. The panorama of his city spreads out before her. Tall, long buildings crowd the view. These are so like her Father's longhouse stood upon one end. Strange giant birds fly about. Their wings do not flap or beat. Towering stone pipes billow out white smoke, like a winter fire of burning chicory or palmetto. Ants – what must be ants – walk upon two legs only.

“Sorry,” he says, “it's not the best side of the laboratory. We have the fuel cell factories and their smokestacks. The cells may be pretty green, but the hydrogen extraction process is powered by some ungreen sources. Even with the Clean Coal, they wreak havoc with the shell-fish beds, I'm told.”

She knocks upon the clear surface. “It's steelglass.” (The translator brain-farts again. TRANSPARENT IRON.)

“Is this my Tenakomakah?” she asks. (THE TIDEWATER, the computer translates.)

“Yeah, water's the main ingredient going in and going out of a fuel cell.” He laughs at a joke she cannot understand even with the aid of the translator.

“Where are the four-legged people?” Matoak asks.

“Oh, we've got zoos. Even big preserves. The (ANIMALS) are fine. I wish I could bring you to the Washington Zoo. You'd love it!”

“Where is my home? Where is Werowocomoco?”

“There,” he says, “it's there.”

[center]* * *[/center]

She awoke into the brightness of Spring daylight. It was just a dream, she told herself. Thank the Great Spirit! She gazed up to the sun, but a shadow fell upon her. She turned her head to see the old woman who had raised her. Her people had no queen, and her mother had been sent far away upon her birth. This aged one sufficed. Mostly.

“Matoak, your father needs you. Do you know what he requires?”

“Yes,” she said. “My Uncle Opechancanough has captured one of the the newcomers. I am to throw myself across the stranger to protect his life.”

“Very good. It will be his death and his birth to our people.”

[center]* * *[/center]

The stranger was thrust upon a large rock. He lay across it. His coat fell open, and his soiled white shirt stood out. His eyes grew wide as he scanned about the capitol of the Powhatan, and wider still as he focused upon Kocoum, her future husband. In his hands, he carried the foot long hickory shaft of his tumahák. One end had a stone axehead that she had seen him chip himself. The other end was hollow to allow the drinking of tobacco. It was a peace pipe and tomahawk together: the two sides of a relationship, friend or adversary.

The newcomer looked like Joss, the pale man of her visions, but with a heavier beard. The man who had shown her the wonders of the day after tomorrow's tomorrow's sunrise. Matoak ran between her betrothed and the newcomer. Kocoum raised his weapon as if to club her.

“Pocahantas,” the Powhatan said, calling his daughter by her childhood nickname for her wanton nature. “What do you do?” It was all for his staged plan for the stranger from the island across the water. She thought of her vision before answering.

“We cannot let this man live. His people cannot despoil our land. Chief Powhatan, my father. Kill John Smith!”

[center]THE END[/center]


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[center]Heat Wave[/center]



“Put it in gear and then give it some gas,” Todd Barton told his sister Caitlin, “nice and easy.”

“Sure,” Caitlin said, doing her best to seem at ease and competent on her brother’s ATV.

Todd had brought his college roommate Duncan down from San Diego to join them for a weekend of running the sand dunes at the far southeastern edge of the Imperial Valley. Caitlin thought this Duncan fellow was pretty nice – and not bad looking, either.

The typical early summer day they had chosen for riding was clear and hot, the sun a yellow scorching mass above the dunes. Heat waves rose from the dun brown dunes and the sky was a washed out blue.

“Come on, Cait,” Todd admonished his sister, “hit it.”

“Alright,” Cait yelled back, “alright.”

More quickly and less smoothly than she had hoped for, Cait shifted the ATV into gear and gave it gas. The vehicle shot forward. While Todd and Duncan watched in amazement, Cait struggled to control the ATV. She shot across a tall dune, managed to turn up towards its top, accelerated more to reach the summit.

Gunning the vehicle to make the last few yards to the crest, Cait noticed a wavering, floating heat wave in front of her. It had an odd, bright light at its center. Unheeding, unhearing, cries to slow down from Todd and Duncan, Cait shot through the heart of the heat wave and cleared the dune’s summit.

“Yeoww,” she cried as the briefly airborne vehicle slammed back down onto the sand.

It landed nose first, the impact simultaneously pitching Cait off the ATV and killing its engine. For a moment Cait lay sprawled on the dune, then rolled over, spitting out hard, salty sand granules. It took another moment for her to regain her wits.

“Crap,” she said, standing and knocking the sand off her hiking shorts.

The ATV was on its side a few feet from the backside of the dune crest. Cait walked to it and after a bit of a struggle got it righted again. The engine started easily. More carefully, she steered the vehicle back to the top of the dune to see where Todd and Duncan were but, strangely, there was no one on the other side of the dune at all.

“What the…,” she said to herself, “where did everybody go?” Turning to look back in the direction of her recent spill, Cait let out a surprised cry.

In the distance, at the end of the dunes, was a huge city, vertical towers driving high into the white-blue sky. There seemed to be some sort of aircraft buzzing around the tall buildings in this peculiar, unexpected apparition. Cait thought perhaps she was seeing a mirage, as the city seemed to float among the burning heat waves rising from the desert floor.

“What is that?” she wondered out loud. “I didn’t know there was any town out here.”

“Intruder at ten o’clock,” a booming voice suddenly called out, causing Cait to jump in the seat of the ATV. “Stand and identify yourself.”

It seemed to Cait that the voice was practically beside her but she didn’t at first see anyone. Then she spotted the vehicles. A half dozen, at least, racing towards her. They looked something like ATVs but moved above the dunes, as if hovering on air. Each carried a large, dark figure dressed in reddish-brown body armor and each of the figures held out a long, dark instrument, aimed at Cait.

“Whoa!” she cried as one of the instruments, clearly a rifle of some sort, fired a silent charge at her.

The sand beside the ATV exploded into the air from the impact of the weapon’s non-metallic round. In rapid succession, several more shots were fired – all near misses. With a yelp, Cait roared across the big dune on which she had crashed, chased doggedly by the pursuers. Maneuvering back and forth faultlessly, she kept just ahead of them as rounds from their weapons continued to dig up the sand all around. Turning to avoid yet another blast, Cait temporarily stalled the ATV. In seconds she was surrounded.

“Stand down,” the same booming, authoritarian voice she’d heard before commanded. It still didn’t seem to come from a specific place. “You have violated Federated space. Identify yourself and surrender to authority.”

Whispering a good luck mantra, Cait restarted the ATV and looked for an escape route. There was a space between two of the chase vehicles just to her left. Smoothly shifting the four-wheeler into gear and then hammering the gas, Cait shot the gap. Sand showered her from weapon blasts, but she drove on hard, back towards the top of the big dune. Approaching the crest from behind, she saw the heat wave again, the bright light was still in its center.

With the trailing hunters right behind her, Cait cleared the top of the dune and sped through the center of the wavering image. In an instant she was back on familiar ground. There was Todd and Duncan waiting for her at the bottom of the dune. Behind her – no one.

“Holy cow,” Todd cried, “where did that come from?”

“What?” Cait asked, shifting the ATV into neutral and taking a deep breath. She cast a quick, nervous look back up at the tall dune.

“You’re driving … it was…,” Todd began.

“Amazing,” Duncan finished.

“Where did you go?” Todd asked.

“Over the dune,” Cait answered, smiling at Duncan.

“You seemed to disappear up there,” he said. “It was as if you went off into another world.”

“As if,” Cait said, checking out the dune a final time.

There was nothing there now. No one was coming after her. She couldn’t tell the guys about it anyway, they’d think she was crazy.

“As if,” she repeated, letting the incident drop from her consciousness as quickly as it had come and then gone. “Another world indeed.”

[center]The End[/center]

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[center]Chance Madonna[/center]



On the road to St. Petersburg Michel was stopped by a white light spilling from heaven. His horse, normally an even-tempered beast, reared, throwing the young man from the saddle. It galloped away into a nearby orchard as light filled Michel's world.

He raised a hand, uttering a cry as the light became too much to bear. Then it was gone, and the quiet, late summer evening was as before.

A woman stood in the muddy road. She wore a white dress, skirted at the thigh, with a top that covered only her left breast. Her golden hair hung in rivulets below her slim, pale shoulders and massed on her head like a glowing crown. Upon her feet she wore strange sandals with leather thongs crisscrossing upwards to her knees. She was the cleanest, purest thing he had ever seen.

This toothsome vixen looked into Michel's eyes and smiled.

"Who are you? Are you a goddess?" asked the stunned man.

The woman laughed.

"No, honey. I'm Gladys Brown from Atlanta. Isn't this Athens? Where's the Parthenon?"

"I don't understand you, goddess. What language do you speak?"

"That stupid travel agent," said Gladys. "She didn't even give me a reverse translator. And this sure isn't Greece." She fiddled with a strange bracelet on her wrist. "BF'ing Russia! That's the last time I use Tara's Temporal Tours. I knew I should have listened to my sister. She said, 'Gladys, go see Christ born, you'll have wonderful time’, but no, I had to see the orgies."

The strange goddess stamped her foot and tinkered with her bracelet again. The heavenly light returned for a moment, and just as suddenly, was gone.

Michel kneeled in the dirt to pray that God might reveal the meaning of this vision.

Twenty five years later, as Arch Bishop of Her Holiness the Blessed Madonna Church, Michel still knelt at the alter every day to pray for revelation about that long ago vision. For some reason, the meaning never came.

[center]The End[/center]

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[center]Warnings.[/center]



I have seen the future, in Black & White. How do I know this? First I have to explain my methods. There I was, wandering along, basking in temporal stability. I stopped to eat at one of those lovely oriental restaurants where they pack three countries' worth of flavor into an external structure approximating Dr. Who's Tardis.

In this particular humble joint, I discovered a large tome propping up the leg of a rickety table. Declaring a Book Swap in effect, I replaced it with a large tome of my own, ordered, and settled down to study my new treasure. It was a documentary from an Alternate Future, which I visited for seven hours spanning breakfast & lunch. What I learned: Barack Obama won't win the Presidency in 2008. The document is a study of the Presidency of America's first African American President following a President disgraced by scandal. It ends in an impeachment trial.

(Hillary won't win either, but that's just me making a bar bet that the strident wife of a former prez isn't the female equivalent of FDR who can force that kind of political precedent.)

Time travel is a Funny subject for all values of Funny. The paradox is, of course, that no one can "directly alter the historical past". This doesn't stop entertainers from making scads of money pretending. But that's why the money flows - because we know that it IS pretense, and it makes us feel safe at a subterranean, visceral level.

The famous phrase that the future is unwritten is completely true. It's that free will theme again. The only qualifying factor whether the influence you can throw at that future can overcome the inertia of that future. This is why Billionaires are fun to watch - because a Billion Dollars can do just about anything, including affixing lasers to sharks.

Anyone, at any moment, can create a chosen future at the micro level. "Oh yea, I'm gonna live on the edge, I'm gonna' take the risk... I'm going to buy THREE bottles of Mountain Dew! Why? Because I need to enable the future, the one when I'm gonna NEED that third bottle."

Excuse me for a moment while I retrieve it.

"But that's not exciting", you say.

Bang - there's the problem with most entertainment depictions of the future - that there somehow has to be an excitement level greater than the present "real" world. Unfortunately, futures don't work that way.

Wouldn't it be exciting to have the first Black President? Maybe. For a year. Then it would tear the country apart, because it will expose some long-suppressed issues our country is not ready to face.

The future is a problem of Information. If I took a vacation for a week and stayed in the hotel room the entire time, the *local* future is easy to predict. It's a matter of controlling the variables. The better the variables are studied for any potential future, the easier it is to visit it. Then all you have to do is learn something, and bring that knowledge back to operate in the Present.

I am holding a 740 page study of the effects of a Black President. It was written forty-three years ago, so some of the variables are out of synch. When these variables are corrected against present trends and mapped to current probabilities, the Prediction Curve becomes hyperbolic by 2012. Let's explore why.

Back when the professional extrapolators were working in 1991, there was a small recession. No one was exactly sure how it was going to go away. Politics-As-Usual forced George H. W. Bush out of office, because that was "the thing to do" to incumbent presidents during recessions just before elections. (Or maybe they wanted to change Southern accents coming from the White House.) By 1996, the recession was over and the reasons were clear - the Information Age was finally here. People were going to work at jobs that never existed, creating brand new value. Value creation solves recessions.

In 1996, someone visited the future and didn't like it. An 875 page document ensued, which warned against the event we now know as Nine-Eleven. In that future, the entire government was obliterated, and national panic resulted. The warning sold a lot of copies, and so traveled through the cultural memory. By the time the real event occurred, the plane bound for the White House/Capitol was forced into the ground. I found that one during one of my bulk acquisitions, sandwiched between a printout of a web blog's study of feeding cactus plants Coca Cola (they live, because it's just sugar & a soil acidity enhancer), and a copy of Arthur Clarke's Sands of Mars.

Now another such event is upon us. One future of the first Black President was foreseen, and it culminated in an impeachment trial. The telling point is this - the vision is set with *the first Black President following an entrenched insider disgraced through scandal*. What the country needs after scandal is a period of quiet in which to recover. Then, when the country has regained some social cohesion, it will be ready to make the effort necessary to move the institution of the Presidency into the 21st Century.

Make no mistake - a Black President is in our near future. Just not in 2008.

[center]The End[/center]

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[kailhofer]

Congratulations to G.C. Dillon, winner of the "Time Travel" Challenge, for the story "Serendipity is a Happy Accident?"


For the record, these were the authors of the stories this month:

Serendipity is a Happy Accident? by G.C. Dillon
Heat Wave by J.B. Hogan
Chance Madonna by David Alan Jones
Warnings. by TaoPhoenix

A heartfelt thank you to all who entered. Your continued efforts and dedication keep this challenge running.


Please feel to comment on these stories now. I'm sure the authors would enjoy feedback.

Be looking for the Mom & Pop's Space Travel Challenge February 8th!

Nate

[Robert_Moriyama]

I must confess I didn't get to read the entries this month, and so didn't vote... but I just realized that I have to add mentions of both the December and January challenge winners to the Short Stories index. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in...

:-/