Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine

by Jw Schnarr

  “This is the moment you have waited for,” Racoczsky told him. “The end of the universe is here.”

  Matheson stepped right up to the screen. As he watched, two of the spiral arms of a galaxy collided with each other. The whirlpool-like structure broke apart. In the process, an impossible number of worlds were wiped out.

  “Look at that,” Racoczky smiled at the screen. “The last of the universe. Dying. Two hundred million years ago, the milky way merged with the Andromeda galaxy. Throughout the universe, galaxies had died, creating supermassive black holes that pulled the debris and space dust across the cosmos into this – one last, final black hole. Now it is dragging the last remaining star systems toward each other. In a few hours, they will reach critical mass and explode, just like all the others have done. I have been watching this for thousands of your millennia. I have seen countless burgeoning civilizations destroyed. Innumerable stars perish. We call it Charybdis.”

  “But what about the immortalization treatment?” Matheson pressed.

  “Oh, it worked,” Racoczky turned back to him with a somber face. “Our stem cells constantly replenish themselves, forever turned on. The body does not die, does not age. But let me ask you this: once every cell in your body is replaced, are you really the same person, or are you something different altogether?”

  Matheson listened as Racoczky went on. He had heard his argument before, and had never been able to answer it.

  “Do you stop being yourself? And if you are not yourself, has the old “you” ceased to exist? Each day, your body sheds thousands of skin cells to make way for new ones. Do you not then continually die each day? Can you say with certainty that you are that same Arthur Matheson who stepped out of that ship several minutes ago?”

  “I—I don’t know,” he replied truthfully.

  “I have had time to ponder these questions.” Racoczky said with an enigmatic frown.

  “Where are the others of your race?” Matheson asked.

  “As I said, I am the last,” Racoczky answered. “Those that went to the stars did not return. I think they have merged with the universe, which has become their final resting place. Perhaps they are at peace. Who knows? They may still exist in one form or another.”

  “But you didn’t go?”

  “I like my body. I enjoy the immediacy of physical experience. Every thousand years or so I download my memories into this ship - so that I do not forget anything when my brain reaches its maximum biological capacity. Would you like to see?”

  He waved his hand over one of the glowing lights inside the walls. An instant later, a three-dimensional image flashed before Matheson’s mind’s eye. Another thought transmission.

  Suddenly he thought he saw vast cityscapes - the like of which no mortal man had ever seen - huge boiling oceans of metal churning across distant planets. And men and women, reduced to a pre-Eden-like state, scampering through unruly jungles populated by gigantic fruits and vines.

  It resembled Paradise.

  It made him sad. Sad in a way he could not describe. He missed all the people he had known who had now died. All the girlfriends who had perished, all the relatives now turned to dust. It made him think of the cruelty of Time. He resolved that when he returned, he would give away his invention for free, to everyone who needed it. They would seed the stars of the future and the past.

  One last question bothered him.

  “How do you know that galaxy is the last, Racoczky? The universe is infinite. There could be more star systems, more planets out there.”

  “My ship detects no more,” Racoczky laughed. “Our instruments are limitless in scope. Our wormholes can take us anywhere. Distance is no object. Yet now all my devices tell me there simply is nowhere else. The universe may be infinite—but its infinity is simply the absence of matter. Matter itself can have an end. And in seven hundred billion years, you’d be surprised how many planets you can explore.”

  Seven hundred billion. So that was how far he’d come—to the end of it all.

  It seemed so final, that he could put a figure on the end of time.

  “Excuse me,” said Racoczky, “I must feed.”

  He waved his hand over the console. The wall warped open to reveal a thin, transparent tumbler. Dark red liquid splashed into it from a faucet hidden in the ship’s mechanism.

  “An unfortunate side-effect of the treatment is that I can no longer imbibe drink or food. I must have the raw nutrients direct from source.”

  Racoczky took a sip.

  Matheson felt his stomach drop. “That’s blood,” he said.

  “A synthetic compound, yes. Cloned from my existing supply based on the DNA pattern of a human being.”

  Realization rocked Matheson. He took a startled step away from his host.

  “My god, you’re a vampire.”

  Racoczky smiled, surprised. “In your terminology.”

  Appalled, Matheson backed up toward the pod. But he knew it was futile; Saint-Germain could cross the distance between them in an instant. He knew it from the man’s mind. Unpleasant thoughts were creeping to its surface. The inheritors of man’s empire were its destroyers—these evil things had become the rulers of the universe!

  “Be not afraid. I am no creature of superstition,” Racoczky laughed. “I cast a shadow, just like you. Once I was even human. True, in the first few centuries we did feed on your kind. We preyed on them wherever we could. But we were many and you were few. Out of necessity, we learned to manufacture what we required. Soon afterwards, all those who refused the Treatment gladly accepted it. That was how humanity perished.”

  Matheson’s mind reeled. All the horrors he had witnessed, all the endlessly futile wars, all had been for nothing. Humanity had perished. It had not died out. It had simply been transformed—into what? Into monsters?

  “You are undoubtedly in shock,” Racoczky said. “But in time you will accept the destiny of humankind is to shed what is human. Stay with me awhile. You have travelled so far. Now let us watch the end of the universe. We are a speck in God’s eye, about to witness the destruction of his creation. And I for one am happy to see it end. I have found there are no more mysteries to explore. I long for change. Now, this is that change. Watch!”

  Matheson stared into the view screen.

  Two massive black holes, simply fuzzy vortices of light within the blackness of collapsed stars, began to churn more fiercely. As he watched, the lightless chasms converged into one yawning vortex of darkness. Several small constellations of stars erupted at the rim of the scything hole. Fear seized his stomach. This was it - the final supermassive vortex into which all other galaxies had been sucked.

  “Behold!” Saint-Germain announced. “Charybdis!”

  The rim of the black hole - if it could be called such - suddenly blazed with light. Thousands of star systems imploded under its tremendous gravity. The resulting cosmic windstorm disappeared like celestial confetti into the gaping maw. Matheson watched with awe as the colossal black mass consumed the entire, swirling nebulae. Then even the dust was gone. The black hole swept the last dying sun into itself with a faint glimmer of a nuclear explosion, viewed from hundreds of light years away. All light vanished.

  Only a void remained.

  The way station lights flickered, reduced to ambient red, presumably in accordance with Racoczky’s telepathic wishes.

  “In a few moments, the black hole will collapse upon itself. Then perhaps a new universe will be born like a phoenix from the ashes of the old one,” Racoczky mumbled, dreamlike. “Of course, the explosion might disintegrate us, protected as we are. This new universe will contain a new sort of matter—one totally unprecedented. In any case it will be billions of years before the first life forms evolve, if indeed this universe is capable of supporting any life at all. I have theorized that perhaps there have been many universes with no life of any kind. Those universes simply were—then over countless eons they also vanished without a trace.”

  “I can�
��t believe this is all there is,” Matheson said.

  “What more can there be?” Racoczky asked. “My world ended thousands of years after I should have died. Everything became so different. It was no longer the place I had known. And I too am different. I feel things and have thoughts I never would have as a mortal man. Whether I still exist as Racoczky Saint-Germain or as some cursed immortal being, I shall never know. And now, watching it all disappear, and knowing it may never repeat itself, I only feel isolated from every other living thing in the universe.”

  He turned back to Matheson, “Except you.”

  His hand crept onto Matheson’s shoulder. It was cold and hard. He realized how close he had been standing next to Racoczky in his desire to see more of the end of the universe. Had his immortal thirst truly abated? Was he satisfied with synthetic liquid?

  “I envy your mortal span. The urgency it brings. But perhaps this new universe will rekindle my curiosity. For it is all I have now.”

  Racoczky’s hand grew tense on his shoulder.

  “The rush of energy will destabilize the way station,” he said. “You may not be able to leave for some time, so I urge you to leave now, while you can.”

  He gulped. Some time, in Racoczky’s terms could mean forever.

  “Do you have a sample of the Treatment I could take back?” he said, impulsively. “I could save unknown numbers of human lives with it.”

  Racoczky shook his head. “All things in their own time. In your lifetime, there will be huge developments in medical gerontological treatments. You may even live to see the Treatment itself being used. But I am unwilling to alter what is your future—but which would be my past.”

  He turned back to the screen. “I have been thinking. I have made some experiments of my own and I am rather confident I can create new life. I may even populate a few planets and watch them grow.”

  “Wait,” Matheson said. He had almost forgotten, in meeting this singularly remarkable being, why he had journeyed this far at all - the whole reason for his many time-traveling forays into the distant future. “I have a wife, children. You must give me the treatment -”

  “I can see you are determined,” Racoczky smiled. “Very well. I have a sample here—”

  He reached toward another console, which lifted up to reveal a second thin vial of green liquid. Matheson stepped forward.

  And with that, the universe ended.

  A great pulse of light shot out from the center of darkness where what had been a visible black hole was now a seething, invisible mass of superdense matter. The gravitational vortex had collapsed under the strength of its own inner forces. Now particles collided, creating massive energy waves. The quantum building blocks of all matter imploded - creating new forms - forms beyond the understanding of any physicist - simply because they were creating their own physical dynamic laws even by coming into existence.

  The shock tore through the way station. What were formed were not new stars or even galaxies, but something altogether unexpected and different - a new kind of universe - one that took on a shape unknown to anything that had gone before.

  Racoczky’s eyes glittered with anticipation as some kind of semi-gaseous cloud rushed toward the ship.

  “Please,” he cried out to his host. “I have to know!”

  Suddenly Matheson felt himself pushed back toward his ship by the force of Racoczky’s mind. He was powerless to resist as he was lifted off the floor and flung inside. The oculus closed before him.

  “No, Racoczky, I want to know!”

  Racoczky’s final thought accompanied him inside the orb.

  “Live your life as it was meant to be,” he said.

  His screams were drowned out by the deafening cacophony of whatever was coming toward them. Would the ships defenses hold? The time capsule rattled around him.

  Matheson focused on survival. He strapped himself down as the outer sphere started to spin. Racoczky’s mental powers were obviously working the controls. Again he felt awe for this creature who could so effortlessly pluck thoughts from his mind.

  His chair rose into the air as the pod suspended its own gravity. The walls spun faster and faster—

  He felt something in the pocket of his jumpsuit. It was the vial Racoczky had given him. The thin soup contained all the power of creation - or all the artificial means to deny it. A final joke, a reprieve for humanity, or a vile temptation?

  He held out the vial, his hand suspended over the edge of the chair, just inside the unified field.

  What would he do with the contents?

  And Happiness Everlasting

  by Gerald Warfield

  The ancient man at the head of the table leaned forward. “I’m sorry to tell you,” he said, his jowls quivering, “that your brother, Charles, is dead.”

  Eddie blinked. A chill settled in his gut.

  “He committed suicide,” the man continued, gripping the edge of the table with his gnarled hands. “Lethal injection.”

  In his mind Eddie saw a smiling Charlie, not the real Charlie, but a holograph that sat in his living room taken on the day his brother began work at Celestial Games.

  No one at the massive table met his gaze except Jeremiah Adolphus, a sagging pyramid of flesh whose blotched, domed head was uninterrupted by hair, not even eyebrows.

  “There was no note, but I’m sure you know about Charles’s depressions.” He gave Eddie a knowing look.”

  Eddie hesitated before nodding.

  Why had they brought him here to tell him—and why in front of the board? He had almost refused the limo that had come for him this morning, but he feared Charlie was in trouble. Maybe he locked himself in a lab or something; he wasn’t the most stable person. But that was the worst he expected: that they needed someone to negotiate with Charlie.

  “And,” continued Adolphus, pointedly, “I’m afraid there’s more. It appears Charles did something quite remarkable before he….” The man’s eyelids fluttered, his knuckles turned white as he gripped the table. “Although first,” he said, after a deep breath, “I should ask if you have any idea what your brother did here at Celestial Games?”

  Eddie spoke at last. “My assumption was that he designed computer games.” The board members looked at him with a mixture of pity and condescension.

  Adolphus leaned back. His shoulders sagged, and he put his fingertips together. “He was developing an interface that would allow gamers to interact with the game using only their minds.”

  “Okay.” It didn’t sound possible, but Eddie never understood Charlie’s work. “My sister and I always said that he was the genius of the family.”

  “He was brilliant,” agreed Mr. Adolphus, and there were assenting nods around the table.

  A man slid into the vacant chair on Eddie’s right. Glancing at him, Eddie saw that his long salt-and-pepper hair was unkempt, his skin sallow, and his eyes seemed to protrude from his head. Hunched over in his chair, the man twitched as his gaze shifted around the table. Eddie had once seen a rat in an aquarium with a snake. The rat was bug-eyed and twitched.

  “He was not successful,” continued Adolphus. “And there would be no reason even to mention it now except that, in the process, he did something else quite unexpected. He migrated his—how shall I say it—his persona into our primary development server.”

  “His what?”

  “He managed to transfer his conscious mind from his body to the computer before killing himself.”

  “You mean he’s still alive—conscious in there?”

  “Quite so,” Adolphus leaned back, withdrawing into the folds of his own flesh. “He spent months constructing a virtual world that we knew nothing about, and then, last Friday at six o’clock he sent his assistant home, ate half a pound of Chocolate, inserted the needle in his arm, set the timer, and transferred his consciousness over to the computer. He didn’t even know when the timer went off.”

  The chill in Eddie’s gut crept up his spine and the back of his neck. He
couldn’t let himself dwell on Charlie’s last moments, not now.

  “Unfortunately, he left no instructions how to get in and out of this world. With effort, we’ve been able to access it, but we don’t know how to get out again. It requires some kind of exit key.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.” In the back of his mind a niggling feeling warned that there was more—much more. “And why are you telling me?”

  Adolphus clasped his hands together. “We need you to help us.”

  “How? Do you think he mailed me some kind of secret formula?”

  “Did he?” asked the ancient man.

  Even the rat looked up hopefully.

  “No! And I’m not a programmer, either, so I don’t see how I can help you.”

  “Oh, but you can, Eddie. You can ask your brother for the exit key. In fact, we’ll pay you handsomely for that service.”

  “Ask him?” Eddie’s mind went blank. “You mean—I can talk to him?”

  “Even better.” Adolphus’s smile was benign. “We can send you into his virtual world. It’s a small site; you’ll find him easily.”

  Eddie’s pulse beat faster, but his response was cautious.

  “Okay…of course, I’d like to talk to Charles, but why are you asking me to do this and not somebody who’ll know what this key thing is all about?”

  Adolphus nodded at the rat who leaned back, put his fingertips together in imitation of Adolphus’s gesture, and continued. “That’s the crux of the problem. The virtual address is based on select strands of DNA. We didn’t realize that when we…”

  Adolphus cleared his throat, and Eddie thought he saw a warning glance.

  “In order to get you to the same place in the computer that he is,” the rat said, nervously, “your DNA has to have a correlation coefficient of at least .925 with Charlie’s. That allows for a clone, identical twin, parent, child or—in your case—a genetic sibling.”

  “What this means,” Adolphus interrupted, “is that we can send you in to see your brother, and it’ll really be him. He’ll have all his memories. You’ll be able to talk to him about old times, inquire about family secrets. You’ll even be able to ask what drove him to his final act—if you want.”