The second blast coursed through him like a bucket of cold water. There was pain. There was nothing, a wave of numbness. There was enough time to think, to register that his nervous system was giving out under the strain, the nerve-shell was shutting it down, leaving him numb, and he thought, he thought –

– A snap of power. A spasm. A breath.

Tracey opened his eyes and saw white light. He couldn’t move. There were wires in him, tiny hooks all over his body, holding him in place. There were people pacing around him.

He was still alive. Or—not still alive. Rolling his eyes upwards, chest heaving, he saw the RESC unit still sparking. Of course, he thought.

“Help me.”

The figures in the room kept moving, kept circling him, like sharks. They were wearing masks over their faces.

Silence.

“Who are you?” There was an insignia on the RESC unit, but though he rolled his eyes up and squinted, he couldn’t make out the colour. It looked a sickly purple.

A high-pitched whine. He knew that sound.

“What—no.”

Apparatus glided into view, a squat box with blades and serrated wheels and needles, its arms swinging over him, and he knew that apparatus, it was nauseatingly familiar.

“No,” he said. “No, you—you don’t want me—I’m a medtech, not a soldier.” He gulped down air, the sound of the apparatus powering up filling his ears. “Look at me—you don’t want me—no, no no no no –”

The glistening point of a needle angled towards him and in the moment before it stabbed down, he saw that the people around him weren’t wearing masks. Those were their faces, metallic, expressionless visors, and when he twisted, trying to escape the needle, he saw another helmet, set aside for him.

A pinprick of pain as the needle went in and as the world swam around him, he had time to think right, of course. Because there was no sense in fighting this, no sense in worrying about Blues and Reds. They’d already lost. All of them.

Katie Gray is an author of science fiction, fantasy and science-fantasy living and working in Edinburgh. She has a master’s in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh and transcribes bank statements to pay the bills. Her work has appeared in Orbis and Freak Circus and she’s currently putting the finishing touches on a fantasy novel.

Quantum Flush

Daniel Soule

Tristram Stumblebawb materialised in a back alley of Alexandria in 47BCE, while Julius Caesar’s warships attacked the ancient Egyptian port. Mission parameters were simple: confirm the cause of the great library’s destruction; obtain texts unknown; and, above all, don’t change the timeline. Oh yeah, and this was his last chance.

If that wasn’t hard enough, Tristram was backed-up, as always, because the worst thing about time-travel is the constipation. Tristram had a bit of thing about public conveniences anyway, but displacing to a new time vector made it excruciating. The Sacking of Rome and the Great Fire of London were just the same. Hitler’s bunker was a nightmare and don’t get him started on the whole ‘out of Africa’ misadventure. Although, one thing he’d say for the bunker: “Amazing toilets”. Nazi high command faced the end with an embarrassment of quilted tissue. And Africa taught him three things: improve his click-languages; up the cardio; and always carry a stash of loo roll, as he did now under his toga.

Recruited straight from Oxford, Tristram was the only linguist on the project. He was an unlikely kaironaut: zero physics, even less engineering, and no survival skills to speak of; but the lad was a walking Babel. It was those linguistic talents that gave him this last chance and Greek of this period was his specialty.

Reconnoitre went well and the costume department had done wonders. Papyrus papers of a visiting scholar were tucked into Tristram’s toga, along with a purse of gold for bribes. But even amid the grandeur of the classical world all he could worry about was locating a latrine, because after the constipation came ‘the flush’, and there was no holding it back.

The physicists had tried to explain, or hypothesize was more accurate: something to do with entanglement, invalidating the information paradox, and particles “settling down,” was how they put it, using inverted-comma-fingers. Essentially, they thought after displacement the kaironaut was a little physically “fuzzy” (they used the fingers again) in the new time vector and constipation was symptomatic of this (more fingers) “fuzziness.” Id Est, they didn’t really know.

Implanted lenses recorded the exterior splendour of the library. Archaeologists would pore over the detail when he got back. If he did a good job this time, command might consider him for the Neolithic scoutings. Göbekli Tepe had been on Tristram’s wish-list from the start. The prospect of discovering Neolithic languages was tantalizing. And the project had learnt lessons from the ‘out of Africa’ debacle – saving the timeline and humanity… just.

Taking Tristram’s paleness as an indication of higher class, the library’s clerk looked over his papers, smiled, and spoke in Greek. Feeling bunged-up and filled with foreboding, the kaironaut was shown to the scrolls. Tristram panned his head for the lenses to record the layout on the way to the reading hall. Traversing the cool marble floor, nine muses looked down. Oil lamps burnt, lighting drafty corners.

The clerk left him to browse. For the first time since displacement the heavy feeling left him. His heart raced. This is what he’d signed up for: forgotten texts and languages. Well, forgotten until the Surveying History in Time project.

There were lost works of Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian philosophy, architecture, medicine and astronomy but he’d been ordered to visit mathematics and engineering.

Once displaced, kaironauts have limited time. They record as much as possible, but they have to prioritize. For each scroll he unwedged and rolled out he knew his lenses recorded priceless information, but only fragments.

Wait! There it was… Archimedes’ lost work, On Sphere-Making, and another not in the records. Tristram must read quickly and move on.

They were like new, rolling out beautifully, skillfully penned. Working through the text, Tristram switched to take a high definition sample. He shifted excitedly from foot to foot. This would rewrite their understanding of the ancient world. Those Neolithic languages were coming closer.

And then it hit: the flush. “Oh Zeus!” The excited hopping wasn’t excited anymore. A cold sweat beaded on Tristram’s forehead. Without the care it deserved, the skinny kaironaut scooped up On Sphere-Making, and scuttled off, buttocks clenched. It was a matter of time; wasn’t it always?

“Where is it? Where is it?” He could also be fluently desperate in ancient-Greek.

The sound of Tristram’s gurgling bowels alerted a swarthy scholar, perhaps of Babylonian descent, who raised his head from a codex and pointed to an archway.

He was off, fumbling for the loo roll in his robe, juggling the unfurling papyrus scroll and skidding into the lavatory.

No polished ceramic bowl awaited but at least there was a clean hole over a well-engineered latrine, lit by more lamps. A little drafty though.

The good thing about togas is that they can be hoisted up in a flash. Tristram released the flush, with something between a cry and a sigh. This also meant that it wouldn’t be long until he displaced back again. He must hurry.

In his haste, a single, delicate piece of twenty-first century toilet paper, accidently slipped from his grasp. It wafted into the air, suspended like a frog floating in a magnetic field, before the breeze caught it again, propelling it towards a lamp.

Toga hitched up, underwear cuffing his ankles together like the wrists of a guilty man, Tristram pitched forward, fingers outstretched helplessly. His lenses recorded every detail. The tissue grazed the flame; its carbon kindled, dancing inevitably towards On Sphere-Making. The papyrus ignited with frightening speed, unrolling as it did towards a neat pile of linen for hand-drying and the inferno was set. Linen caught drapes, drapes caught wood and so on in a chain reaction.

The last thing Tristram Stumblebawb’s lenses recorded was his futile flapping at flames as he displaced back into the Surveying History in Time project.

At least he’d discovered the cause of the libraries destruction, and technically he hadn’t changed the timeline. Two out of three wasn’t bad. But, those Neolithic scoutings seemed further away than ever.

Daniel Soule was an academic but the sentences proved too long and the words too obscure. Northern Ireland is where he now lives. But he was born in England and raised in Byron’s home town, which the bard hated but Dan does not. They named every other road after Byron. As yet no roads are named after Dan but several children are.

Something Fishy

David L Clements

Art: Stuart Beel

It was a fish. Unquestionably. A large fish, coloured mostly a deep, dark blue, but with large pink spots scattered across its dorsal side. The colours appeared especially vibrant in the light of this planet’s bluer, hotter sun.

The fish was standing on its tail—or at least that’s how it seemed, since the tail disappeared into the leaf mould on the forest floor—and it was singing.

The song sounded operatic, but Peter wasn’t sure. He didn’t like opera—he found it too artificial, too pretentious. It was one of the few things he and his now-distant partner Michelle couldn’t agree on, but at this point in his mission he’d been away so long he’d even started to miss those disagreements.

A singing fish wasn’t what you expected to find on a planetary survey. The unexpected, yes—he remembered stories about the semi-sentient plant-life on one planet, and the time taken to work out that the small, scurrying creatures, with no detectable ways of eating or excreting, were actually self-motile seed pods, not animals after all. Or the planet-wide symbiotic ecosphere, where ‘prey’ animals volunteered themselves to be eaten by ‘predators’. But a giant fish, as tall as a human, in a forest of purple serpentine-trees, ten miles from the nearest large body of water, standing on its tail and singing opera? No, this wasn’t right.

He checked that the remotes surveying that area of the forest were functioning. These little robots resembled the local equivalent of birds. Two were perched on the twisting leaves of a tree observing the fish’s operatic display. The remote’s performance metrics were optimal, the video and audio feeds fully encrypted and suffering no dropouts. He even checked his own implants, making sure they weren’t glitching or suffering a malware attack, though the chances of that happening this far beyond the rim of inhabited space were minimal. As far as Peter could tell he was the only human for several light years in every direction, and, since Michelle had checked them out before he had left home, he couldn’t have brought anything with him.