The slugger led me into the shadows. I’d always imagined there were walls behind the dark, and I was surprised when there weren’t. The shadows enveloped me, and I stopped and held my hand an inch in front of my face. It wasn’t simply dark; it was the complete absence of light. My heart began to race, but I walked on. I was prepared to spend my life in a cage as the centerpiece of their intergalactic zoo if it meant never returning to Calypso.
The farther I walked, the more confident I grew. I kept my hand extended in front of me to avoid stumbling into anything. I didn’t even know if the slugger was still there; I just kept walking. I wondered how it could see without light, and it dawned on me that the darkness was probably natural to the aliens. The lights in the exam room were for my benefit. The possibilities were endless and exciting. Did their eyes perceive heat? Radiation? Maybe they could see my atoms, and I was merely bits of organic code for them to manipulate. The sluggers were so fundamentally different from humans that it was a wonder they understood me at all. How ugly we must look to them, spilling light into every dark corner to push back the shadows, blinding ourselves to the true beauty of emptiness.
Thank God for nipples.
My hands brushed against something smooth, and I halted. I searched for a door or handle but found nothing. “What now?” As if to answer, a hole appeared in the wall, and a narrow beam of light struck my face. I threw up my arm to cover my eyes. I’d been in the dark so long, the light hurt. When I lowered my arm, I screamed, thinking the sluggers had jettisoned me into space. I stood surrounded by stars. I dropped to my knees, comforted by the solidity of the floor even though I couldn’t see it, expecting at any moment to be sucked into the gelid void, frozen and dead. It took a moment for my brain to process that I wasn’t floating in space. I perceived no walls, no ceiling, no floor, yet that I was alive proved that some kind of barriers protected me. The slugger who’d led me into the darkness was gone, as was the hallway from which I’d come. It shouldn’t have been possible. I was surrounded by heaven. The sun, the moon, the earth, and all those living stars. They weren’t static like in pictures taken from impossibly far away—they breathed, they glowed. They were future and past, possibility and memory. They were beautiful.
“I never knew there were so many,” I whispered. We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Our deaths will mean nothing to them.
“I feel so small.” No one replied. I wondered as I watched the stars, really seeing them for the first time, whether they could see me, too.
Time Travel
It begins a thousand years from now. Dr. Jiao Hatori discovers time travel.
A new and exciting industry emerges from the breakthrough. Those willing to pay the exorbitant fees are shifted backward in time to view history firsthand. Time tourists can finally discover the truth of who shot JFK, they can watch the first majestic performance of Hamlet, they can dine with Cleopatra or Queen Elizabeth I or Amelia Earhart the evening before her ill-fated flight. Future humans infest history like cockroaches.
The problems begin when the North American Alliance’s prime minister sends soldiers to the year 2213 to prevent the Texas uprising that turned much of what was once known as the United States into an atomic wasteland. The plan succeeds, which is the problem.
History becomes fluid. Factions with varying agendas fight to rewrite the events of the past to their advantage. The government that controls the past controls the future.
The Guilde Immuable, an anti-time travel organization, forms in response to the deconstruction of the past. Citizens applaud its goals while condemning its methods. Its members destroy art and literature, kill famous figures throughout history, demanding time travel cease or they will dismantle the whole of time. They sow chaos to bring attention to the plundering of humanity’s history.
World leaders declare war on the Guilde Immuable, vowing never to bow to the will of terrorists.
Emmanuel Roth arrives in Geneva on 29 January 2016 to destroy the Large Hadron Collider, the site of the groundbreaking discovery of gravitons, without which time travel would be impossible. Emmanuel knows that scientific progress cannot be stopped, and that someone else will eventually discover gravitons, but he admires the symbolism of the act.
At 10:19 UTC, Emmanuel detonates a fission bomb, atomizing the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, and most of Switzerland. Emmanuel is unaware that the Large Hadron Collider is active. An infinitesimal fraction of a second prior to the bomb’s detonation, two particles collide with such fierce velocity that they form a micro singularity—a black hole too small to see with the naked eye. It would have lacked the energy to sustain itself under normal conditions, however, the fission bomb provides it with all the energy it requires to grow and become self-sustaining. As the earth’s core is devoured by the black hole, the resulting radiation vaporizes the outer layers of the planet and expels them, and all life, into space.
The future destroys the past destroys the future.
3 November 2015