The Time Travel Chronicles
Page 1
The Time Travel
Chronicles
WINDRIFT BOOKS
Subscribe to The Future Chronicles newsletter for news of upcoming titles in this series, and to be eligible for draws for paperbacks, e-books and more – http://smarturl.it/chronicles-news
THE TIME TRAVEL CHRONICLES
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the appropriate copyright holder listed below, unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal and international copyright law. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein.
The stories in this book are fiction. Any resemblance to any person, place, or event—whether occurring in the past, present or future—is entirely coincidental.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
The Time Travel Chronicles copyright © 2015 Samuel Peralta and Windrift Books.
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Samuel Peralta. Used by permission of the author.
“Extant” by Anthony Vicino, copyright © 2015 Anthony Vicino. Used by permission of the author.
“Gambit” by Rysa Walker, copyright © 2015 Rysa Walker. Used by permission of the author.
“Beasts of the Earth” by Ernie Lindsey, copyright © 2015 Ernie Lindsey. Used by permission of the author.
“Excess Baggage” by Carol Davis, copyright © 2015 Carol Davis. Used by permission of the author.
“The Traveler” by Stefan Bolz, copyright © 2015 Stefan Bolz. Used by permission of the author.
“Eighty-Three” by Erik Wecks, copyright © 2015 Erik Wecks. Used by permission of the author.
“Life/Time in the New World” by Ann Christy, copyright © 2015 Ann Christy. Used by permission of the author.
“Just Like Old Times” by Robert J. Sawyer, copyright © 1993 Robert J. Sawyer. First published in Dinosaur Fantastic, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. Used by permission of the author.
“Shades” by Lucas Bale, copyright © 2015 Lucas Bale. Used by permission of the author.
“The Nothing Gate” by Tracy Banghart, copyright © 2015 Tracy Banghart. Used by permission of the author.
“Meddler” by Ernie Luis, copyright © 2015 Ernie Luis. Used by permission of the author.
“The Diatomic Quantum Flop” by Daniel Arthur Smith, copyright © 2015 Daniel Arthur Smith. Used by permission of the author.
“Red Mustang” by Michael Holden, copyright © 2015 Michael Holden. Used by permission of the author.
“Hereafter” by Samuel Peralta, copyright © 2014 Samuel Peralta. First published in a slightly different form in Synchronic, edited by David Gatewood. Used by permission of the author.
“The Time Traveller’s Sonnet” by Samuel Peralta, from How More Beautiful You Are, copyright © 2012 Samuel Peralta. Used by permission of the author.
All other text copyright © 2015 by Samuel Peralta.
Edited by Crystal Watanabe (www.pikkoshouse.com)
Cover art and design by Adam Hall (www.aroundthepages.com).
Print and ebook formatting by Therin Knite (www.knitedaydesign.com/)
The Time Travel Chronicles is part of The Future Chronicles series produced by Samuel Peralta (www.samuelperalta.com).
978-0-9939832-6-9
THE TIME TRAVEL CHRONICLES
STORY SYNOPSES
Extant (Anthony Vicino)
Manipulating time always comes at a cost. For Special Agent Kaelyn Kwon, Blinking means living with one foot in the past and one foot in the present. Torn between memories of what was and what could have been, she must use her power to decide what is yet to be.
Gambit (Rysa Walker)
Saul Rand is one of a select group of genetically-engineered CHRONOS historians who study the past firsthand. Convinced that he can create a better future than random chance and human blunder, Saul’s main challenge is circumventing the system’s safeguards—and he thinks he’s found the perfect opening move.
Beasts of the Earth (Ernie Lindsey)
For expert oncologist Dutton Quinn and his wife, Jess, the chill of a wintery morning matches the gray blanket of sadness draped over their hearts. After a devastating loss, it seems as if nothing can save their marriage, except for a mystical gateway through time.
Excess Baggage (Carol Davis)
14-year-old Toby Cobb is living an ordinary life… until he’s hit by a wall. It’s a tornado, he thinks, or maybe a nuclear attack. But neither of those things explains how he’s suddenly ended up in the cellar of a very old house that seems to be nowhere near his home in Pennsylvania. His only companion is a strange, frazzled guy in glow-in-the-dark coveralls – someone who says Toby has ruined everything by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by being in the path of something called “the ribbon.” Something that’s swept the two of them far from suburban Pennsylvania… and into the past.
The Traveler (Stefan Bolz)
Devastated by the death of her father, a twelve-year-old girl discovers a notebook hidden away in a drawer of her dad's blacksmith workshop. In it, she finds detailed instructions to build a time machine.
Eighty-Three (Erik Wecks)
Noah Wilson struggles to maintain his sense of sanity while grappling with intense hallucinations and voices that take over his body. He comes to suspect that he’s traveling in time only after he has witnessed his future divorce from a mysterious woman who haunts his visions. When the woman turns out to be real, he must find the courage to agree that a mental illness has caused his delusions or be forced to believe his life is welded to a disastrous future he cannot change.
Life/Time in the New World (Ann Christy)
Most people want to live forever—probably everyone at some point or another. Aside from just living, we often yearn to see what the future will bring, convinced that something amazing will happen just after we’re no longer here to see (or benefit) from it. In this way, both the rich and the poor are in the same boat. Death and time…they wait for no one. But what if that weren’t true? What if finding a way to skip into the future came around, secretly available only to the very rich? For Darren, such a trade has been offered and accepted. Will the bright future be as bright as he thinks?
Just Like Old Times (Robert J. Sawyer)
Rudolph Cohen is a serial killer, responsible for the deaths of dozens of victims. In the year 2042, he is sentenced to death, but his lawyer manages to convince the judge that the sentence be carried out by a program of euthanasia by chronotransference, where Cohen’s consciousness will be transferred into the past, into the body of one about to die.
Shades (Lucas Bale)
Will McIntyre is different. He has no friends. No family. No past, and an uncertain future. Every five years, since his birth, Will has been ripped from the universe he has tried to make his home, only to be tossed into another - a decade in the future. Universes where no one knows him; where he has not previously existed. Yet he is not alone. There is always someone watching. Someone who, like him, doesn't really belong.
The Nothing Gate (Tracy Banghart)
What if the only way to ensure a future for Earth was to change the past? Juniper Young has known since she was a child that the Earth would die in her lifetime. When her father uses his powerful friends to secure their escape, Juniper has no idea the extent to which the world’s survival will depend on her.
Meddler (Ernie Luis)
Miller, a dealer and addict of drugs from the future, must decide between stopping one of his clients from killing someone in the future, or letting the timeline play out so he can maintain his addiction and his employment.
The Diatomic Quantum Flop (Daniel Arthur Smith)
Sure, the experience of the trip is euphoric, but what if you actually broke through the doors of perception? When four college friends are promised a psychedelic adventure that mirrors the Tibetan Kalachakra Time Travel Tantra, they discover the transcendental cost of tapping the wheel of time.
Red Mustang (Michael Holden)
Jimmy is a sixty-four-year-old handyman and habitual thief, identified as having fenced stolen items from his current employer. But the old lady Grace declines to press charges on one condition, that Jimmy do her one more chore—drive her, take her somewhere she needs to go, today, in a beautiful red Mustang convertible.
Hereafter (Samuel Peralta)
Cpl. Caitlyn McAdams returns home from war, back to her family and the life she knew--but she doesn't return whole. How can she forget the man she left behind--a man she'd met only once before--a casualty of a roadside bomb, dying in front of her? And then, one day, he comes back.
CONTENTS
Foreword (Samuel Peralta)
Extant (Anthony Vicino)
Gambit (Rysa Walker)
Beasts of the Earth (Ernie Lindsey)
Excess Baggage (Carol Davis)
The Traveler (Stefan Bolz)
Eighty-Three (Erik Wecks)
Life/Time in the New World (Ann Christy)
Just Like Old Times (Robert J. Sawyer)
Shades (Lucas Bale)
The Nothing Gate (Tracy Banghart)
Meddler (Ernie Luis)
The Diatomic Quantum Flop (Daniel Arthur Smith)
Red Mustang (Michael Holden)
Hereafter (Samuel Peralta)
A Note to Readers
Foreword
Time Machine
by Samuel Peralta
“We all have our time machines…Those that take us back are memories.”
– H.G. Wells
From the mirrored aparador, my mother selects four enormous albums, settles down on the sofa. On the coffee table she piles them into a precarious ziggurat, and opens the topmost one to the first page.
“This was at our old house on Zafiro,” she says, pointing to an enlarged, monochrome photograph of four sisters and two brothers in front of an iron garden gate, held open by a woman as old as my mother is now. A whisper under seven years old, my mother holds an older sister’s hand as my other aunts and uncles smile in sepia.
She is about turn the page, but she hesitates. I glance at her, and I see her eyes dart first to her own image, then flick down, to her knees.
Her eyes turn inward, and I know that in that moment, she’s no longer there with us, but somewhere else, transported by that photograph.
And so, too, am I.
About a year later, there would be war.
Air raid sirens would signal the approach of the 5th Air Group, supporting ground operations of the 14th Army of Japan’s Southern Expeditionary Army. An amphibious invasion by the Third Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy would breach the coast of the island of Luzon, supported by the aircraft of the 11th Air Fleet.
Fleeing with her family as the bombs fell, my mother would stumble over the concrete-strewn road and lose grip on her older sister’s hand, screaming.
One of my uncles would scoop her up, continue running. Later on, my aunt would press a strip of torn cloth against the blood flowing from a gash on my mother’s leg.
On that photograph from Zafiro Street, her knees are bare and smooth.
Here and now, my mother absently strokes the scar on her leg. She’s silent, and I know she hasn’t returned yet.
Four kilometers away, my father would have been nine years old, living with his family in the older part of the city. During the occupation, they would hide guerrilla units from the Philippine resistance under beds, in closets. Discovered, some of them would pay with bayoneted lives.
Only years later would my mother’s and father’s timelines cross. Only years later, the hesitant courtship of a lady artist by a young anthropologist, the triumphant staging of his first play, a son named after a character in that play…
But now the sirens blared and shadows of planes swarmed like bats against the evening sky.
There are no photographs of that time, not in those albums. If they existed, they might be hidden, sequestered, perhaps, in a secret drawer of that aparador. If they existed, they would show a city devastated, and lives forever changed.
I’ve pieced those shattered lives together from her recounting, from my father’s stories, assembling the prehistory of my existence from that time machine of memory.
My mother sighs, and turns the page. She’s back.
And here, too, am I—back with her from the past, continuing that inexorable journey we all take, day by day, into the future.
www.amazon.com/author/samuelperalta
Extant
by Anthony Vicino
Chapter One
NOW
MADDIX HADN’T EVEN LANDED on Haven before catching the first bullet of the day. Still tangled in the remains of his deployed chute, he tumbled off the hover-compound while Zoe and I did a crab-walk sprint to the first of three large energy displacement cylinders.
Bullets sparked off the metal hull as we ducked beneath a girder.
“I want a redo,” Maddix said, his voice a mixture of indignation and shock ringing loudly through my earpiece.
Zoe nodded an enthusiastic agreement. A bullet pinged off the cylinder beside my head. I flinched, but didn’t wet myself. Zoe popped up like a prairie dog and released a rat-a-tat-tat from her rifle.
The mission was not off to a good start.
“Give me a second,” I said, not keen on doing that jump again. “You know I hate heights.”
“And you know I hate dying,” Maddix said. “So hurry up.”
Zoe glanced over the top of her ultra-reflective Aviators, pulled a silver canister from the bandolier slung across her chest, and gave it a hook toss toward the trio of bad guys currently trying to kill us.
Normally she would’ve been more frugal with those, but we were about to play some spatiotemporal hopscotch and she never missed an opportunity to make something go boom.
The explosion followed a second later, a deafening plume of sound and vibration.
I shook away the dull ringing in my ears. “Maybe next time you’ll do a little less showboating,” I said, recalling the triple backflip he’d used to exit the hover-jet.
“Oh, look! Buildings and people and cars and pavement,” Maddix said with far too much joviality.
“You can’t be that close to the ground yet,” Zoe said.
“Don’t mind me, Mr. Office Worker, I’m just plummeting to my death over here.”
“Fine.” I clenched my eyes shut and focused. “We’re going back.”
“Thank you!” Maddix shouted.
Time reversed, dragging at my atoms like a boat suddenly throwing down its anchor whilst traveling at full speed. Nausea and vertigo twisted about, dancing just beyond the perimeter of my mind before slamming into my chest and driving the air out of my lungs.
BLINK
I opened my eyes and gasped as molecules of thought rearranged themselves, forming memories of what would happen in the near future if we continued on our current course.
“—gonna go for the triple backflip thi—,” Maddix was saying, half his body hanging out of the hover-jet’s open cargo door.
“Stop!” I grabbed the collar of his flak jacket and yanked him back before he could make a very regrettable mistake.
“Really? Already?” He frowned. “Did somebody miss the jump?”
“You got shot and fell off.” The wind played tag with my ponytail as I leaned out of the hover-jet and poi
nted to Haven hundreds of feet below. “In seventeen seconds three soldiers pop out from that service entrance.”
“Boy, that must be embarrassing,” Zoe said, putting an elbow in Maddix’s rib for good measure. “Didn’t even make it thirty seconds.”
“There’s absolutely no proof that’s how it actually happened,” Maddix protested. “All we have is Kaelyn’s word and we both know she likes you more.”
“You sound paranoid,” I said.
“All I know is that whenever you come back it’s because I got shot. Seems a little coincidental, is all.”
“And why do you think that is?” Zoe asked.
“It’s obvious. You two are trying to make me look bad.”
“Or,” I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes, “it’s because you do triple backflips onto small floating cities under enemy control.”
Maddix’s blue eyes sparked and the fake frown he’d been trying to wear disappeared beneath an ear-to-ear grin. “So you’re saying I landed it, huh?”