Category: My Fiction

Here are my own stories. Science fiction and fantasy mostly but other things may be added too.

Lost Histories

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Lots of fantasy and science fiction authors have used the rediscovered history theme.  I think maybe Robert Howard used it for Conan and maybe some of his other sword and sorcery stuff.  Tolkien sort of used it for the Lord of the Rings.  The Red Book of Westmarch is supposed to be the source from which he wrote his books.

So, the conceit is usually a scholar is searching through old manuscripts and suddenly finds stories that somehow no one has ever read before.  I guess maybe a case could be made that an existing manuscript might have a palimpsest layer that couldn’t previously be seen or read and now because of advances in sensing techniques it can.

But usually, this kind of text underneath text is limited to at most a few pages of written language.  But as anyone who has been a religious reader of this site knows, the Roman papyri from the ruins of Herculaneum are slowly and painfully being deciphered using a form of x-ray tomography.  These charred and unopenable papyrus scrolls are being read right through the other layers of charred plant material by an artificial intelligence that can scan the three-dimensional surface of the scroll in its rolled up and damaged condition.

Currently the progress is glacially slow.  And this is even though a million-dollar prize has been announced for the tech genius who can take the scans and turn it into text.  Currently the part of the library being examined contains the works of an obscure stoic philosopher which has extremely limited popular appeal.  But there have been claims made that the total library was an extensive collection of Graeco-Roman literature and history.

If this turns out to be true and the scanning technology becomes robust, there may be many lost masterpieces of ancient writing to be found.  Lost plays by Sophocles and histories of ancient peoples like the Etruscans.  Every classical scholar has a wish list of what would be wonderful to recover.

But what comes to my mind is what a perfect place to find some lost history with fantasy or science fiction elements.  Now exactly what they would be is something that will require careful thought.  As I said there have been a lot of stories somewhat in this vein.  The trick would be to allow this history to tie into the present day in some way.  There could be detailed information of something that’s been buried and could be retrieved.  Or maybe it’s something that’s hidden in plain sight and possibly still operating in the present day.

So, this is the vaguest of outlines and needs lots of thought but while I was out watering the vegetable patch and photographing half-grown preying mantids it occurred to me.  And since I never have an undocumented thought, lo and behold; here it is.  It occurs to me I’ve never written a horror story.  Mostly I just make fun of H.P. Lovecraft but a two-thousand-year-old Etruscan demon might be something I could get interested in.  And since we know next to nothing about the Etruscans, I could make up anything I wanted and no one could definitively call me out on any of it.  What could be lazier?

I Feel Like a Phoenix Rising Over Arizona

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The suffering is over.  The waiting is over.  The only thing I have left to do this week is get the oil changed on my car.  I can read, write, watch movies, sit in a hammock in the shade (well, if I had a hammock), write poetry (not good poetry), plot the overthrow of the Dunwich town government, laugh in the face of death, learn to play the piano; you name it!

Great Caesar’s ghost!  I’m exhausted just reading that list.

So, emerging from my forced isolation I see that nothing of note has happened in the last five days.  The endless jousting between the press and the Trump administration continues and Trump slowly accumulates small victories from the courts and larger ones from the Supreme Court.  Good!  I’ve declared victory (for the most part) and allow the world to slowly become Trumpified while I get on with my agenda.

I finished my re-read of the last third of my book and came to a few conclusions:

  • I like the writing. I like the way it reads.
  • I like the story line. It moves forward.
  • There is something missing to allow the story to end satisfyingly for all the threads of the book.
  • So, the good news of the first two points makes it worthwhile for me to tackle the bad news of the last point.

As I earlier stated it was weird to read the book after a good long time and read it as if I wasn’t the writer.  Of course, I knew the plot but the writing seemed fresh to me, like I was reading it for the first time.  Now, I did make some edits and even made some small changes to the wording during this read.  But I’m good with what’s already done.  So, I’ll kick around a few ideas to see which one makes the ending most satisfying.  Good.

The summer has gotten amazingly hot and humid.  And this has drawn the grandchildren to want to swim in the pool.  And this year the water is perfect.  Perfectly clear.  No algae.  Good pH.  No leaks.  There are a few small cracks in the liner above the water line.  So, I bought a patching kit and I will attempt to fix them myself.  If I botch it, I’ll call in the professionals and they’ll overcharge me but make the problem go away.  But it’s good to see this expensive hole in the ground get used by someone who can enjoy jumping in and swimming around.  I think in the fourteen years I’ve live here I’ve gone in once.  Oh well.

So, let’s see where Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is in a few days and where the various wars are in a few weeks.  But I’m ready to enjoy the seasonal weather and do some cooking out with friends and relatives and enjoy the only true summer month in the otherwise blighted New England calendar.  Because remember, July is the only month in which measurable snow has not fallen in southern New England.  That makes it sacred.  Enjoy.

Return and Roundup

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I have returned from the Great White North!  I had a quick get-together with the Coffee Walk Brotherhood.  Much booze was imbibed and many cigars were smoked (not by me) and much wet wood was forced to burn using mass quantities of medium length hydrocarbons.  It was a great success with midnight bull sessions and even some very good guitar and singing from the two musicians in the gang.

It ended off with a hearty breakfast while the television aired Caddyshack in all its 1970s glory (“Yo, Lama, how ‘bout somethin’ for the effort?”).  So, after a total of about eight hours of driving I return to the Compound a tired but spiritually enhanced individual after communing, consulting and otherwise hobnobbing with my fellow wizards.

Unfortunately for me I have two very long days Monday and Tuesday so my output will still be constrained but on the positive side I finished my initial re=read of my book and found some clarity for my march to completion and publishing (yaaay!).  Anyway, here I go.

So, the dissident right community has had an outpouring of grief over the passing of the ZMan.  I’m interested to see if his readers find a way to keep their community intact.

I saw that the Supreme Court provided some relief to the Trump administration on the endless lower court injunctions against his immigration and other efforts.  I haven’t had a chance to read much on the details but supposedly it will now require class-action law suits to allow these judges to foul up the works.  Maybe this will slow down the interference somewhat.  But we’ll have to see.  And I saw the good news that SCOTUS ruled that parents of school children can opt out of public-school LGBTQ indoctrination classes and “learning materials.”  Good for them.  It’s part and parcel with the first amendment and freedom of religion.  Hopefully this can be built upon to rein in the blue states.

As for the Israeli/Iran war it looks like Trump may have been able to thread the needle and tamp down the fires.  Anyway, let’s hope so.  Maybe this will force him to end our support for that other war that’s raging out of control.  But I’m not holding my breath.

And finally, here we are almost halfway through Donald Trump’s first year in his last term and it seems he’s starting to make a dent in the “resistance.”  I think it is now apparent that ignoring the Left’s whining and temper tantrums and just going forward with his priorities (like deporting illegal aliens and forcing changes in the trade imbalance and off-shoring of jobs) is a winning strategy both objectively and optically.  Keep it up Mr. Trump!

So here I am at the brink of July but my calendar is cluttered with annoying responsibilities in the short term.  Hopefully by Wednesday the clouds will have parted and serenity and summertime relaxation will be reestablished.  But regardless, we must soldier on.  Okay, I’m halfway back to normalcy and the universe hasn’t exploded around me so I’ll call it a win and move on.  Next!!!

Reverse Engineering an Ending

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I’ve been trying to figure out how to end my book. Today I’ve been reading the last third of the book to see if I can force an exit strategy into the story. The good news is I’m enjoying the narrative. It’s almost as if someone else wrote it. So that’s good. The bad news it’s taking a while to figure out a satisfying ending that leaves all the major characters with a satisfying “landing.”
But I’m glad I’ve re-engaged with the writing on a more robust schedule. I think the story is well written so it gives me motivation to get the darned thing out there. Onward and upward.

So, has Trump really ended the Iran/Israeli War? Well, here’s hoping.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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Today is the first day of the new OCF editorial regime.  I’ve noticed over the last year that the quality of my posts has been inconsistent.  And I believe the reason for this problem is that sometimes I’m covering old ground again.  I’ve said about all there is to say about some of the political issues of the day and I’m just banging the drum, so to speak.

And this is not a good thing to be doing.  In addition, I really need to finish my book and get it published and see if fiction writing is something I want to do.  So these two separate situations point me to a change in the way I run my website.  I’ll continue to post the photo and quote of the day, same as always.  As far as a daily post, I’ll put something up but if I don’t have a topic that’s truly crying out to be covered then I’ll put something else up.  Maybe some photos that I like or a link to a song or a video that caught my attention.  This will free up more of my time for fiction writing and it will prevent me repeating myself and boring the readers.

I think this is a good idea and I expect it to improve the site significantly.  Anyway, I’ll give it a try and see how it goes.

Yellowstone Summer – Part 2

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Patricia (Pat) Tollens’ first week in Boghadair had begun less than smoothly.  Her first encounter with her new supervisor could best be described as a train wreck.  Tanner Carrero had encountered her when she attempted to hike in the mountains.  But instead, he had to rescue her from a marauding grizzly bear that she had incited by leaving her bear transponder in her car.  Things had started poorly.  And then they got worse.

From her point of view Tanner was a hopeless throwback to the stone-age patriarchy that no longer existed in her world.  Back at UC Berkeley if he had yelled at her the way he did on that trail, she would have had him brought up on charges; verbal assault, hate speech, and any number of micro-aggressions.  In fact, he pretended that she was the one at fault.

And now she had to work for this caveman.  She called up her advisor at Berkeley and requested that a grievance be opened up against Carrero by the school.  But she was advised that Typhon Industries didn’t work that way.  In fact, they didn’t even have an HR department.  They had something called “Personnel” and basically, they handled payroll and insurance paperwork and handed complaints over to local management.  If she wanted to lodge a protest, she’d have to talk to Carrero’s manager.  When she attempted this, she found an even older, more sexist man than Carrero who told her to stop making trouble or she’d be sent back to California by the next plane.  And just to make things completely transparent she was cc’d on an e-mail from his boss to Carrero telling him what she had done and recommending he straighten her out right away or send her packing.  Pretty bad.

So, on her first day of work she showed up at the small frame building that housed the survey team.  There was an office list and she found Tanner’s name and walked down the corridor to that room and saw him setting at one of the desks and approached with the bleakest expression that her face could produce short of actually being caught by a grizzly bear.

Tanner was sitting working on a spreadsheet but caught sight of Pat as she approached his cubicle.  His expression turned to a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment.  He had never liked “supervising” people.  He was an “individual contributor” down to his boots.  There was nothing he hated more than “onboarding” employees.  And now he had a problem that threatened to drag him into a world of paperwork.  Terminating an intern sounded like a nightmare of paperwork and he would avoid it by almost any means possible.

Tanner had booked a conference room for her first day to allow her to come up quickly to speed on the project by working one-on-one with him.  He asked her to follow him to the conference room and they sat down opposite each other at a small conference table.

Tanner coughed nervously and started, “Ms. Tollens, we’ve started off badly but we can move past the problems we’ve had if we concentrate on the work at hand.  My boss is sort of upset.  He’s probably more upset with me than with you but we have to show him that we can work together efficiently and hit our deliverables on the schedule.  If you think we can work together then I’m going to meet you in the middle.  But if you feel that I’m as bad a person as you indicated in your grievance then we should end this today and not waste any more of your time or this company’s.”

He stopped talking and waited for her reply.  Pat had listened with interest to his words.  Apparently, he wasn’t the monster she had assumed.  He sounded almost reasonable; confused but almost reasonable.  She thought, “Maybe this won’t be horrible.”  She wanted badly to get Typhon Industries on her resume.  Everyone in the mining industry knew they were light-years ahead of the competition.  She had heard they weren’t a progressive company but this Carrero guy might be honestly trying to work with her.  She decided to give it a try.  She said, “I think we can work together.”

Tanner let out a sigh and managed a half smile, “Good.  I’d like to have you go over our field work manual today and we can break that up by having you begin to attend the project meetings so you can meet the team and become familiar with the way we work.  In the afternoon I’ll meet back here with you to go over a field study I have planned for tomorrow.    I’ll provide you with the itinerary and also the gear you’ll need.  We’ll take three other interns along to get them trained too.  They’ll be at the meeting today so you can get to know them too.  The four of you may find some benefit to spending some time together to help acclimate yourselves to a new locale together.”  Pat nodded her head and said, “That sounds good.  Is there a laptop I’ll be using?  I’d like to take notes on the manual and figure out your e-mail system and other onboarding tasks.”  He said, “Sure, it’s the one on that side of the table.  There’s a folder with the onboarding information, including initial passwords and other IS gobbledygook.”  She looked a little anxious when he used the term gobbledygook but she didn’t say anything.

And so, they began.  Maybe not a ball of fire, not “Astaire and Rogers” but no one had been brought up on charges and neither of them had raised their voices a decibel over cubicle normal.  A new beginning!

Yellowstone Summer – Part 1

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Tanner took a break from his mineral survey to drink some water and get out of the sun.  He was in the Beartooth Mountains and recent discoveries of rare earth metals had provided him with some summer employment to help him pay for his coursework in mining engineering and mineralogy at Yellowstone University.  He was a 23-year-old graduate student and between his gigs as a teaching assistant and driving a snow plow in the winters he kept himself almost fiscally solvent.  But this survey work was more what he wanted to be doing with his time.  Typhon Industries employed most of the population around the town of Boghadair and technically Tanner was already an employee with an equity account but he’d have to wait until his schooling was completed to get his hands on any of the credits accruing in that account.  So, this survey work meant the difference between hamburgers and pizza a couple of times a week or just cheap noodles night and day.

He was standing on a rocky slope that descended onto a flat highland covered with wildflowers.  There was a small lake and woman was at the water’s edge washing her face.  But what caught his attention was past the woman in the distance was a large grizzly bear and it was running directly toward the woman.  He approximated her distance from the bear as half a mile and his distance from her as a little more than a mile.  He screamed a profanity, dropped his water bottle and started running toward the woman as fast as his legs would carry him, screaming to her as his breathing would allow while running.  The bear was moving at about twenty-five miles an hour and Tanner might be doing ten but his repeated screams of, “Bear!” finally caught her attention and she looked around to see the bear and began to run directly away from it.  Unfortunately, this was not toward Tanner but at almost a right angle from him.

Tanner gave a cry of frustration at this unfortunate circumstance and tried to figure out how he could run to end up between the woman and the bear.  In his confusion he just ran after the woman.  When the bear was only a hundred yards from the woman it suddenly spasmed in mid-stride and tumbled to the ground.  Tanner was only slightly closer to the woman than the bear but luckily the bear’s receiver had finally registered the signal from his bear protection transponder.  The bear saw him running off at an angle and according to the algorithm in his controller ran off as fast as he could.  He wasn’t running directly away from the woman but pretty soon the diverging tracks would put Tanner between the bear and his former prey.

Pretty soon Tanner caught up to the still running woman and told her she was now safe.  It took her a few minutes to catch her breath and get over the terror she had experienced but when she seemed calmer, he starting yelling at her, “Lady what the hell are you doing in grizzly country without bear protection?  If I hadn’t seen that bear charging it would’ve gotten you!”

The young woman was shocked to hear him so angry, “I have bear protection.  It’s in my car.”  He was confused, Where’s your car?  She pointed east and said, “At the road.  I wanted to climb up the slope to see the lake.”  He was stunned, “That’s two miles away.  The transponder only has a range of a mile.  You would have been killed.”

She began to cry and Tanner started to notice that she was probably about his age and he felt guilty for yelling at her.  And he also noticed that she was very pretty and this seemed to make him feel even worse about yelling at her.  He said, “Look I’m sorry I yelled I guess I was just scared for you and I got too excited.  I’m sorry, okay?”

She pulled out a handkerchief and dried her eyes and nodded her head, “Okay, it’s alright.  I guess you did save my life.  Thank you very much.”  There was an awkward silence while both of them tried to figure how this meeting would end.  Finally, Tanner said, “Look I need to walk you to your car so you’ll be safe.  And from now on please carry the transponder wherever you go outside of town.  Are you staying in Boghadair?”

She nodded again, “Yes, I’m working on a mineral survey project and have to start work tomorrow.  I was just enjoying a little sightseeing before starting work.  Tanner’s brain clicked through all of this and he said, “Are you Pat Tollens?”  She said, “Yes, how did you know?”  He replied, “I’m Tanner Carrero.  You’re my summer intern.”

Living with Them – Part 2

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There was a little additional discussion of the hunt but Bob’s prognosis on the end date seemed to have depressed his comrades and so they departed one at a time after a few minutes.  Dave headed home and reached his front door just as the dusk warning siren sounded.  He felt a little shudder of fear pass through his body at the sound.  Maybe tonight’s talk had depressed him more than he thought.  He opened the outer door and closed it behind him and then the scanner activated and after twenty seconds the inner door opened, he stepped inside, the inner door closed behind him and the safety bolts shot home with a loud and comforting bang.  And based on that sequence he knew that everyone was home for the night.  They were locked up tight and could live and sleep secure for the night.  Walking through the entry hall he reached the dining room where the cheerful yellow light revealed his younger brothers and sisters sitting around the table working on their school assignments.  They looked up as he entered but it was his father who smiled with a relieved expression that the last of the family was home, “Busy day Dave?”  He shook his head, “No Dad, I just spent some time with the boys to blow off some steam.  Nothing too busy,” he lied, not wishing to upset his family about the hive found so close by.  His father nodded his head and went back to working on some chore at his work station.  He walked through to the kitchen and found his mother cleaning up from dinner.  She smiled at him and handed him a warm plate of meat, mashed potatoes and some kind of vegetable hash of some sort.  He smiled at this mystery course but thanked her and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.  “Gina stopped by today and asked if you were going to the social this weekend,” she mentioned in what she hoped sounded like an off-hand way.

“Oh really.  And I suppose you told her I could” he shot back.  She looked offended and said, “I did nothing of the sort.  I told her I’d tell you to call her.  And you should.  She’s the nicest girl you’ve ever brought around here and she’s very pretty too and if you’re not careful someone else will speak up and win her away from you.  Girls like that don’t wait around forever you know.”  Dave laughed to hear her vehemence but he promised to call her that night.  Finishing his plate, which was quite good even to the unrecognizable goulash, he put his plate in the dishwasher and patted his mother’s shoulder and thanked her as he headed for the living room.  His father had migrated there too and was watching a video about a new surveillance system that incorporated lasers and advanced machine intelligence.  Seeing this brought back Dave’s gloom as he reflected on how life always came back to the hunt and the lock down.

His father must have sensed his black mood and turned off the video and said, “Sorry Dave I needed that video for a work meeting I have tomorrow.  I should have had it on the small screen where you couldn’t see it.”  Dave smiled halfheartedly and said, “Nah, it’s nothing Dad.  Just one of those days, you know?”  Then he said less cheerily, “We found a nest pretty close by today and I guess I let it get me down.  Then Mom starts telling me that I better scoop up Gina before she marries someone else.  It just feels like we’re living in a nightmare and I can’t see how it goes on.”  His father looked down and sighed then looked up, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.  When I was about your age, I met your mother and she wanted to get married right away but I couldn’t imagine bringing children into the world with danger and horror all around us.  Back then it was considerably worse than it is now.  We had lost two of my brothers to the beasts when I was a teenager.  They were older than I and had been part of the hunt.  A communication snafu had them unprotected practically on top of a hive in their sector.  I was devastated.  I couldn’t see the sense in living that way, always one mistake away from losing friends or family to these awful creatures.  I despaired.

But my father told me something that has stayed with me ever since.  He said, ‘Hal, remember that you come from the smartest, toughest animal to ever appear on this green Earth.  Your ancestors had to fight off saber-tooth tigers and cave bears with flint spear-heads and bone clubs.  And their only protection were caves and maybe a campfire.  But over the course of a million years, they killed off all those predators and made the Earth a garden.  And by God, you and your descendants are going to rid this Earth of these giant vermin, take my word for it.’  So, I thought about what he had said and I understood.  There is within us all of the cunning, courage and tenacity of our ape-men ancestors and we should look at this crisis as a challenge that we must accept and overcome.  We’re men and our enemy is just a stupid bug that needs exterminating.  It’s just a part of life.  A problem no different than cancer or earthquake.  Something we use our brains to figure out and eventually eradicate.  Just like the saber-tooth.”  His father looked off into the air for a second and then said, “You know your mother is right about Gina.  A girl that pretty is going to be snatched up pretty quickly if you don’t wake up.  Why don’t you give her a call.”  Then he walked away toward the kitchen.

Dave sat there for a few minutes thinking about everything his father had said.  Then he called up Gina and asked her out to the social.

Living with Them – Part 1

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Dave watched the flying drone’s video output on a twenty-four-inch screen that he perched on a shoulder height outcropping of rock in front of him.  It was flying at about three hundred feet of elevation over the landscape in front of him.  It was typical Northeastern US second growth forest; a mixture of conifers and deciduous trees breaking out into overgrown fields, swamps and rocky hills.  But in one of those fields, he could see the tell-tale earthen cone.  It was a hundred feet in diameter. Twenty feet high with a ten-foot round hole in the center.  And sure enough, there were five specimens of Camponotus vicinus gigas.  They ranged from nine to fifteen feet in length and were carrying the remains of some dairy cattle that they must have torn apart.  Sending the drone in for a closer look he saw that one of the ants was transporting what looked like human remains.

Dave geolocated the nest and then released two projectiles that plummeted from the drone directly into the entrance.  They were black and spherical, about six inches in diameter and they popped upon impact and released a cloud of red colored dust that thoroughly coated the entire entrance area.  Dave typed in a report on his actions and attached the geolocated video.  He also recommended that all human habitations within fifty miles be contacted and warned of the nest.  He specifically mentioned the dairy cattle and human predation.  Then he said a short prayer for the poor victim.

The rest of the day was uneventful.  The drone had covered the rest of the area in his portion of the grid and nothing else was found.  When the drone returned, he packed it up and waited for the transport to pick him up.  The transport landed in the clearing where he was set up.  Dave looked admiringly at the huge machine.  It was a two-hundred-foot square hovercraft with armor extending completely around a central deck.  There were guns located on all four sides and powered hoists on booms located in the center of the craft.  One of these booms was lowered toward his drone package and snagged it and hoisted it into the craft.  When it was clear Dave walked over to the closest door on the perimeter and waved his ID in front of the scanner and walked through the opening door.

Once inside he walked across the open deck to the control room and checked in with the supervisor.  The pilot was already starting the engines in order to head to home base.  The supervisor was already reading Dave’s report and said, “That hive is a disappointment.  We thought we cleared this whole sector three years ago.  Maybe the current virus isn’t 100% effective anymore.”  Dave nodded his head wearily, “Yeah, same old story.  Nothing works forever.  Eventually munitions and poison gas are what make the job thorough.  Anything less is just too dangerous.  We can’t have people getting torn to pieces by these monsters.  It’s not right.”

The supervisor gave him an angry look, “Look, we’re making progress.  The safe zone in this area of the grid used to be fifty miles square.  Now it’s five hundred.  We’re winning.  There are bound to be failures.  Stop getting so emotional.  Just do your job and be part of the solution.”  Dave grimaced but inside he knew the man was right.  Mankind had been dealing with the ants for over seventy years and for the last twenty years the tide had turned against the creatures.  Starting at the poles and working toward the equator the ants were being driven toward the tropics.  No one believed they could ever be extirpated from the amazon or equatorial Africa or Southern Asia but it was hoped that the temperate zones could be completely cleared and an effective barrier strategy established.

When Dave exited the transport in Fort Peterson in the White Mountains he headed for the local watering hole and joined up with his friends.  Half of them were miners in the local quarries and half were like him bug hunters for the government.  All being in the twenty- to thirty-year-old age group most of the talk was about where the best-looking women could be found.  But after they were finished lying about their weekends some of the miners were curious to know how the bug hunt was going.

The senior hunter at the table was Craig and at twenty-eight his vast knowledge of the project didn’t impress anyone too much but he attempted to give an authoritative lecture on the theory and practice of bug hunting, “What we’re seeing is a steady and comprehensive rolling back of the infested area throughout North America.  All of what was the Canadian territory except for British Columbia is already cleared.  In the former United States, New England, the Great Lakes region and the Mountain West is clear all the way to Eastern Washington and Oregon, down as far south as Colorado.  Projections indicate ten years will bring us down to the old Mexican border.”

Dave looked bleakly toward Craig and said, “We found a nest two hundred miles south of here that had just finished off the human and bovine residents of a dairy farm right before we got there.  I’m guessing ten years might be a little optimistic.  What have the university researchers published this year, Bob?”  Bob was a former academic who had joined the hunt after he lost his family to an infestation a few years earlier.  Biological modelling had been his field of research and he still had contacts within the bug modelling project.  The small bespectacled young man looked up at Dave and quietly began to talk, “Well Craig is right that we have turned a corner.  In the first twenty years of the war humanity lost essentially the entire human population of the tropical zone that was forty percent of the 2.69 billion people living, about a billion people.  We lost another billion people everywhere else.  After that we only lost another two hundred million over the course of fifty more years.  And this year was the first net population gain.

As far as the bugs.  Initially their population increase was asymptotic.  In the last twenty years it’s levelled off.  We don’t have any hard numbers but we have reduced their territory substantially in the last ten years.  The modelling I saw showed a hundred-year estimate to clear the temperate zones but that’s a low confidence study.  The problems with resistance to the viral agents we’ve been using makes it almost impossible to extrapolate the curves for anything more than a year with high confidence.”

Dave nodded his head, “That’s what I heard from someone in the headquarters this week.  Not particularly cheering.”

Tempus Fugit – Part 5

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“I said, That’s impossible.  That world has been dead forever.  You must be mistaken.”  Bertram McKenzie shook his head and I could see there were tears in his eyes, “No the stars don’t lie.  We are one thousand years in the future and that is Earth or what’s left of it.  And the rest of the solar system has also been impacted.  Mercury is completely gone.  Venus is worse than Earth and even Mars has lost its atmosphere completely.  The only thing I can think of is that a massive disruption of the Sun’s fusion process occurred in the last thousand years; something like a nova.  And the Earth as we knew it was destroyed utterly.”  I asked him exactly when did it happen and he said, “Without searching for the event it’s impossible to know.  It could have happened just a few years after our present day in the twenty first century or it could have been almost a thousand years in the future, right before when we are now.”

And then I asked him the question I had been thinking about most, “Bertram did we cause this?”  And he shook his head violently, “No!  No, no, no.  I didn’t do this.  This is just a coincidence.  How could the tiny energy I used to transport us cause this stellar event.  It’s not possible!”  But I was pretty sure there was fear in his voice and panic.

I was as frightened and panicked as McKenzie but I could see we had to get back to our time as quickly as possible and try to get ourselves re-grounded with reality.  I told him, “Alright none of this is anything we can act on here and now.  Let’s go home.”

The boys did some calculations and set up the drive within a few minutes and we made another run.  This time it was our Earth.  Alive and blue and beautiful.  I think there must have been tears in everyone’s eyes.  We were back about the time we left the LHS 1140 system to come back to Earth.  We had decided that two sets of “us” in the same time period even fifty light years apart might be asking for trouble.  We brought the craft in for a landing and I sent everyone home for the day.  And I went home that night and got pretty thoroughly drunk.

The next morning, I tried to think of who I should tell this awful thing to.  In a 1950s science fiction movie there would be a convenient convention of physicists with someone resembling Albert Einstein to break the news to.  All we had was tech billionaires and all they would be interested in was how to short the market at the perfect moment.

So instead, I decided to tell the President of the United States and let him figure out how to let the world know they were doomed.  Or maybe not let them know.  After all, maybe we should have some smart men think about this for a few days and then break the news in a way that won’t stampede civilization off a cliff any sooner than it already was.

I got on the phone to the White House and I set up an appointment with the President and his science advisor.  And I got a few of the wise men from the voyage to put together a dog and pony show to give some proof to my story.  It wasn’t a normal experience.  I don’t think either man actually believed me.  But the President told me not to breath a word of this to the press or anyone else until the NSA had a chance to think up a way to break it to the public.

On the flight back to Texas I got a text from McKenzie.  He said he needed to talk to me so I told him to meet me at my home at midnight.  He was there when I arrived and he looked like hell.  He said, “I think we did spark the nova.  When we caused the surge in the field that threw us back into the distant past it must have disrupted the time-space environment of the solar system and triggered the solar activity that destroyed Earth.”  I said, “Well, it’s too late to do anything about that now.  What we have to do is figure out how to save humanity from this disaster.  And I don’t think it’s a good idea to be taking the blame for all of this.  That’s probably the fastest way to commit suicide I can think of.”

But he shook his head and said, “But there is a way to fix this.  We take the ship and travel through both time and space and meet up with our ship while it’s in the LHS 1140 system and tell them how to adjust their program to avoid the surge.  Then the disruption will be prevented and everything will be back to normal.”

I think I looked at him as if he had three heads and said, “Do you know how insane that sounds?  How can we change the past?”  But he just shook his head and said, “It’s the only way!”

I told him to take the week off and we’d talk about this crazy idea when we’d both had a chance to get some rest.  I went to bed and when I got up in the morning there was a message from the field saying that McKenzie had refueled the ship and taken off.  At about the same time there was a message from Bertram it read, “Devon, I performed the mission.  Meeting myself was a frightening but interesting experience.  I convinced them to change the program and afterward I took a time trip, about fifty million years into the future and the big beautiful blue earth was still there.  So, all’s right with the world.

But I realized that this technology is much too dangerous for humans to fool around with.  So, I’m not coming back and I’ve taken all the key documents you would need to duplicate my invention.  I’m going home.  Goodbye.

Bertram McKenzie”

And that’s almost the end of the story.  He never came back.  But he said he was going home.  So, I had a contractor do a metal detector search of the area where the McKenzie family has lived in Maine for the last two hundred years and sure enough, they found a lot of those precious metals buried out in a field in Maine.  There was a rock with an inscription carved into it, “HEY DEVON.  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.””

At that point Devon stopped talking and just stared out at the wall behind me.  I said, “Well, it sounds like it all worked out for the best.”  His eyes snapped back on my face and he said, “Sure, sure.  You’re right, everything’s great.  I guess I’m just tired.”

But as I sat there, I thought of something, “Devon, if McKenzie met up with his earlier self and yours in the LHS-1140 system and they came back on time where are they now?”  He looked at me and nodded his head, “That’s what I’ve been thinking about.  I think the program fix he gave them destroyed their ship inside that system.  We’ll probably never know but I kind of think in some sense I may be a ghost.”

He was preoccupied so I said my farewells and left.  I’m not sure I believe the story, but I think he does.  I think I feel sorry for the richest man in the world.