Timestream

One man's attempts to conquer time and save his marriage

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash

The raft bobbed down the river…

For millennia, humans have used tools to explore the world, make the land theirs, and exploit its resources. Why couldn’t they do the same with time? Why not create a way to fix previous mistakes? Don’t just learn from the past. Correct it. Don’t just plan the future. Guide it with purpose.

That was Christopher’s thought.

But now, he laughed at the long nights spent shaping cogs and etching enchantments. What were they even for?

The raft bobbed down the river… he took out the timepiece he’d worked so hard to make.

A polished steel frame housed terranium cogs. When opened, a crystal screen revealed three busy little hands and a date display. On the right edge, a knob and button made for easy time-shifting.

He turned the prototype over, feeling the frigid metal. This was it: the first test. He wound the clock and hit the button.

Five minutes into the future, he was popping champaign. His invention had worked!

A year into the past, he was huddled over a desk, double-checking complex equations.

Five years into the future, he was running out the door, his wife sobbing on the couch.

Wait…

The raft bobbed down the river… he took out the timepiece he’d worked so hard to make. Damn this thing for ruining his life!

That couldn’t be right. He loved Diedra. Maybe he’d been a little neglectful while working on the timepiece, but that didn’t mean he’d leave her like that.

Over the following weeks, he sent her flowers, wrote love notes, and planned dates. But her demeanor was still odd, like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

If only he could ask future Diedra what was wrong, but for now, the watch only allowed one to observe other times, not interact. That part needed work.

But maybe it wasn’t his fault? Maybe it was her?

So he followed her. For months, he dissected her time at work and home. He learned her secrets (she hadn’t actually quit smoking) and latest interests (so… much… Sudoku). But there were no slights against him. Just the tragically mundane woman that he loved.

And yet, she still looked around with suspicion. So he revisited specific points in time with more frequency. Viewed them from more angles. Took notes. Eventually, he’d crack this and save his marriage!

“Dear, is something going on?” she asked one day. “Things have been kind of weird ever since you finished your labwork.”

Deny, deny, deny.

“You’re imagining things, Dee.”

She must’ve been sensitive to the timepiece’s chrono-resonance. It’s not an unusual phenomenon.

But it wasn’t until much later, when he was revisiting the first time she’d asked that question, that he’d noticed it.

She wasn’t looking at the Christopher of the past. It was him. The one that should have been invisible. He made eye contact with her, and it sent his heart reeling. He fled back to the present. He’d need to be more careful.

But she didn’t stop. He caught her staring more and more. Not always directly at him, but at places he knew he’d watched her from before. She was chasing the afterimages he left on the timestream.

The raft bobbed down the river… he took out the timepiece he’d worked so hard to make. Damn this thing for ruining his life!

“He’s down there!”

Time agents stood at the river bank, antimatter guns raised in his direction.

Fine. He’d fix the interaction aspect of the watch and ask future Diedra what was wrong.

Then one day, he found the error: an improperly etched rune. An embarrassing typo, but also a quick fix. He swapped the cog, and just as he closed the watch’s shell, a woman appeared beside him.

“Christopher Jeshur? I’m Agent Canda with the TPD. I need you to come with me.”

He’d punched her on pure instinct. A one-hit KO.

“Chris? Is everything okay in there?” Deidra asked from behind the office door.

“Everything is fine!” he yelled, shaking his hand.

He moved Canda into a closet and walked out. He told her he had a work meeting. Everything was fine. He’d be back soon. Things were good. She needed to stop arguing and trust him. He would solve this time police issue and then return to this exact moment.

Then he fled. It would be months before he’d remember this was the date he’d left his wife to cry alone, haunted by his temporal phantoms.

The raft bobbed down the river… he took out the timepiece he’d worked so hard to make. Damn this thing for ruining his life!

“He’s down there!”

Time agents stood at the river bank, antimatter guns raised in his direction.

Time to go! He started turning the watch’s knob.

Avoiding the TPD was hard. There was no time he could go that they couldn’t follow… But space? Perhaps he could work with that.

Spacial teleportation was essential when time traveling. Planets moved at all times. One wrong calculation and you’d time travel into vast empty space. But if careful, he could alter his calculations and teleport where another planet once was.

So he did just that, jettisoning himself into the far past onto a humid jungle planet. He’d exile himself until the time agents got bored.

But a year later, the chase continued. Traversing a river network via raft was his latest attempt to elude them.

The raft bobbed down the river… he took out the timepiece he’d worked so hard to make. Damn this thing for ruining his life!

“He’s down there!”

Time agents stood at the river bank, antimatter guns raised in his direction.

Time to go! He started turning the watch’s knob.

Agent Canda fired a shot, and it nicked his hand. The watch flew through the air…

Splash.

Dammit!

The timepiece wasn’t waterproof. He hadn’t gotten around to fixing that. Hell, he had no idea how it would react to liqu—

The raft bobbed down the river…

Fact in Fiction

This was based on the second poll from the On Golden Wings issue.

Not much else to shout about on here. Sick dog, insomnia, an unplanned refrigerator replacement, and mental health all meant this came out two weeks later than I would have liked. Thanks for hanging in there with me. Now that things are relatively stable (ok, the insomnia is still hanging around, but that always takes a while to get rid of 🙃), I am re-prioritizing getting a buffer of future content going so we can avoid as long of a delay. Wish me luck, and I’ll see you next time!