Afterwards

I woke up flat on my back staring at a slew of blue swirlie-cues, which turned out to be the ceiling. After that revelation sank in, I took a look around before doing anything else. Nope. It wasn’t all just a freakish nightmare. The weird furniture was still there, as well as the high-tech mushroom, and standing next to it was her. The cute Interface.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I lied. “Why do you look like that?”

“I’m modeled after my designer,” she replied. “But I hardly think that’s relevant.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, sitting up. That was a mistake. My brain immediately began to spin around inside my skull, but at least it was still inside my skull. I shudder to think what might happen if it weren’t. Gripping my head in both hands, just in case the old mind pudding decided to attempt an escape, I soldiered on. “It might matter to some people.”

She showed no sign of having a sense of humor, but to be honest, it was probably only funny to me. Instead, a frown creased her face and she said, “Well, if you must know, the plan was a success. In fact, without your… assistance, it went flawlessly. The precise mass was delivered to the precise target with the precise trajectory, resulting in the initiation of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Congratulations. You have become part of a static temporal event.”

That felt good. I gave her a nod and immediately felt nauseous. “I knew you two could do it.”

The frown didn’t leave her face. “There is one problem, however.”

I didn’t want to hear it. All I wanted was to bask in the afterglow of a mission accomplished. But her statement bothered me too much. Then, I remembered what I didn’t see when I looked around earlier, and I looked around for it again, but it wasn’t there.

“Where’s Scaley?”

She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “If you mean the dinosaurian, he fled via his dimensional fold device when we dived towards the planet.”

I sat up straighter. “And you let him go?”

She cocked her head irritably at me. “We were too preoccupied at the time to concern ourselves with the matter. Besides, I am the Interface. I do not have the ability to restrain prisoners.”

My nose wrinkled in utter disbelief. “What about the sonic?”

“I couldn’t do that and pilot myself, now, could I?” The ship sounded quite petulant about it. It must have been taking lessons from the Interface while I was out.

“My apologies,” I conceded. Then, it hit me. “Wait! Then, he’s gone along with the rest of his timeline.”

“Most likely,” she replied. “Which makes his parting vow of revenge moot.”

I shook my head, suddenly feeling very heavy. “You realize what we did, don’t you?”

“We destroyed countless lives to save countless others,” she immediately replied, telling me that she was always aware of the cost. She didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t need to. I didn’t want to think about it, anyway. At least, not right then. That vow of revenge was starting to trouble me, though.

“Do you think he’s really gone?” I tried not to sound nervous about it.

She rolled her eyes back in thought, then said, “Chronal possibilities were in momentary flux, so there is a chance that he somehow escaped erasure.”

“What kind of chance?” Okay, I sounded a little nervous that time.

She studied me carefully. “Slim, at best.”

I raised a brow. “You don’t want to quote the numerical odds?”

“You wouldn’t understand them, anyway,” she replied.

Touche. “So, what now? We have a potential nemesis on our hands?”

She looked at me dubiously. “Doubtful.”

I was confused. “So, what’s the problem?”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “You are.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay. You’re kicking me out. Fine. I get it. So, just drop me off at the hotel and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Her brows knit together. “You don’t understand. You cannot leave the vessel. At least, not for now.”

My brows lifted into my hairline. “Wow. You two like me that much?”

She frowned. “No, not at all.”

“I like you,” the ship helpfully chimed in.

“Thanks,” I told it.

“You cannot leave because if you do, your head will explode.” She was quite serious about it.

“Explode?” That didn’t sound good.

“Possibly literally,” she added. “Your brain is not meant to access the full scope of the Matrix, and unfortunately, the vessel did not take that into account when it linked itself to you.”

“I didn’t have time to think,” the ship whined.

“You quite literally did not think at all,” she coldly retorted. “You reacted. There is a difference.”

“I’m sorry,” the ship wimpered.

“Hold it!” I needed to regroup after the whole head exploding revelation, but there wasn’t time for it. I had to plunge ahead anyway. “I can’t leave?”

“Not until we stabilize the connection,” she replied. “And implant safeguards to prevent further damage.”

That got my attention. “Further damage??”

“Your mind may have already been damaged by the link,” she replied. “We do not yet know how. But it could get worse.”

I did not like that in the least. “Damaged, how?”

She took a deep breath. “Unknown. We must wait and see.”

“And the safeguards will cure me?” I wanted to be hopeful, but her serious expression didn’t change.

“No.” She had a terrible bedside manner. “The safeguards should prevent further damage or… anything more serious.”

“More serious.” I couldn’t believe she was being so indirect about it. “You mean, death?”

“Perhaps,” she admitted, never losing that serious expression. “Or perhaps worse.”

I couldn’t believe her. “What’s worse than dying?”

“You do not want to know.” If she didn’t look so serious, I might have thought she was kidding.

On second thought, there was no way to tell if she wasn’t, either.

“Right.” I needed to deal with it by talking myself through it. “Well, I’m not dead yet, so what do the safeguards do?”

“They limit your access to the Matrix to a level that your human brain can handle.” Dang, she was still so serious that it was making me nervous.

“Why not just remove the link?” It seemed simple enough to me.

She hesitated briefly. “It cannot be removed. The implementation was flawed, resulting in permanent connection.”

“I’m sorry,” the ship whined.

The instant it said that, I felt its shame. And more, I felt the connection between us, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of the consequences of my stupid decisions. Like when I came up with the plan to ram the Earth. And more than that, it felt like the ship was more than a means to return to my time and place. It felt like my kid, and I wanted to be there to watch it grow up.

“It’s okay,” I told it. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“It did, though,” she immediately interjected. “It could have caused irreparable harm or death with its reckless -!”

“Agree to disagree,” I quickly interrupted, feeling the ship sinking into despair. Directing my thoughts to it, I added, “I, for one, do not mind the connection. It feels really nice.”

“It does?” The ship was hopeful.

“Until your head explodes into a million pieces,” she helpfully added.

I turned to her in shock. “Did you really just say that?”

She blinked in astonishment at herself. “Your connection must have corrupted the Matrix and by consequence, my programming. The sooner we establish those safeguards, the better.”

“I agree.” I didn’t want to imagine what a sass-mouth she might become with parts of my mind floating around inside her head. And the ship tittered in agreement.

The End

“Aha!” I burst into the console room, yelling to grab the dinosaur’s attention. He turned away from the console in surprise, immediately leveling his pistol at me, and I voluntarily stopped dead in my tracks. My plan had worked a little too well.

“How did you -?” he spluttered before shaking his head violently and snapping his jaws to cut his own exclamation short. “Never mind! There’s nothing you can do! Empire ships will be here soon, so just stay back or I will shoot you, and this time it won’t just be on stun!”

I lifted my hands in defeat. “You don’t have to do this.”

The velociraptor bobbed its head in a figure eight pattern. “Don’t try to trick me. It won’t work.”

“Of course, not.” I wish I could say I sounded confident and in control, but the truth was, I couldn’t take my eyes off the business end of its weapon. I tried to keep my voice from trembling but didn’t exactly succeed. “I’m just an idiot. I couldn’t possibly compete with you in the brains department.”

The dinosaur turned his head to study me suspiciously with one eye. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing!” It came out a bit too hastily, so I had to talk quickly to cover myself. “I couldn’t possibly trick you! Not even if I asked the ship to reactivate the Interface!”

The dinosaur shook its head like it was shaking off a good drenching and incredulously demanded, “What?”

“Like, for instance, if I said, Ship, reactivate the Interface!” I really hoped the ship got the hint. “You wouldn’t be tricked by that, would you?”

The dinosaur aimed his pistol at me, and behind him the Interface shimmered into being. Even before she formed completely, she scowled darkly and demanded, “Oh, no! You didn’t!”

The dinosaur whipped around towards the sound of her voice, and I leapt forward, swinging both hands, clenched together, at his neck. I nearly shattered the bones in both hands upon impact, and it didn’t phase the raptor in the least. As I stumbled back a step nursing my injuries, he turned and backhanded me across the console room. As I skidded across the floor, I counted myself lucky that I ducked just in time to catch the blow on my shoulder rather than my head. He could have broken my neck.

“You forged a link?” She was irate, but I wasn’t sure who she was yelling at, me or the ship. “Do you realize how dangerous that is?”

The dinosaur stomped towards the console, and I had to stop it from turning her off again. Despite the ache in my shoulder, which I assumed meant it was either broken or dislocated, I thrust myself to my feet and whipped the sonic out of my pocket. Brandishing it before me, I yelled in my most commanding tone, “Stop! Or else!”

The raptor glanced back at me in only passing interest. Apparently, I wasn’t a threat to it. But its eye caught the sonic in my hand and it turned, hissing sporadically. “Or else, what? You’ll put up a shelf?”

“Three words,” I told it. “Sonic pest control.”

I thumbed the activator. The device whirred. It vibrated in my hand, and the green gem glowed. The raptor hissed in pain as a sound that only he could hear spiked his brain. He threw his paws against the spots where his ears were and staggered beneath the invisible onslaught, but it didn’t drop its weapon like I’d hoped it would. I had to take what I could get, so I rushed to the console and warded the raptor away from it with the sonic, and the raptor obligingly staggered back.

“All right,” the Interface grudgingly admitted. “That was mildly clever. But he is still armed and still here.”

“One thing at a time,” I replied, turning to sit against the edge of the console. I kept my eye on the raptor as it desperately tried to block out the excruciating sound. “We need to get out of here. Now!”

She stared off into space for a moment. “The time rotor is still damaged. Auto repairs will take approximately -!”

“We don’t have time,” I interrupted. “They’re coming, and they’ll tear the ship apart.”

She stared into space again, and a worried frown creased her delicate face. “I see.”

“Is there anything we can do?” I didn’t know why I even had to ask. With the memories of all those pilots haunting my head, I should have known the answer already. But there was something very weird about them. They were there, but they weren’t talking to me. At least, not right then. “Can this ship move at all?”

“We have retained spatial movement,” she quickly replied. “But it is limited.”

“Can we outrun the ships that are coming?” I couldn’t believe that I didn’t already know that, either. “Or get out of here before they arrive?”

She stared into space for a moment. “Unlikely, although without knowing the motive capabilities of the incoming vessels, it is difficult to calculate.”

All the time we spoke, I was watching the raptor carefully. He struggled to remain on his feet as he staggered in tiny circles, hissing in agony. I hated doing that to him, but I knew what would happen if I shut the sonic down, and I couldn’t risk it. But watching him reminded me why we were in that time and place, and I had an idea that I honestly wished hadn’t occurred to me.

“Then, we do what we came here to do,” I told her and the ship before I could back out of it. “Fix our mistake.”

She cocked her head dubiously. “How do you propose to do that? I already told you we cannot go back on our own timeline, even if the rotors were still functional.”

“Then, we do everything right here.” I honestly wished that I felt as confident as I sounded, and her skeptical look almost shattered what little there was of it. Before she could ask what I was talking about, and before I could chicken out of the whole thing, I said, “We recreate the impact ourselves.”

She frowned dubiously. “How? There are no stellar bodies nearby that match the mass or trajectory necessary to duplicate the impact’s effects. Even if we found something in the asteroid belt, this vessel is in no condition to tow it here or set it on the correct course.”

“No, you’re right.” I don’t know why the memories chose to let me know that when they weren’t helping with anything else, but I didn’t have time to complain about it. “We have everything we need right here, in the ship.”

She eyed me dubiously, and I said, “Mass! Mass and trajectory! That’s what we need, right? The precise mass and trajectory necessary to duplicate the event exactly.”

“Although a few hours later,” she sarcastically added.

“Does that really matter considering the scale of time?” I’m not sure which memory the words were coming from, but they weren’t from mine. “A few hours compared to millions of years?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, apparently digesting what I said. “Very well, then how do you plan to deliver the mass?”

That was the part that I really didn’t like. “We dive towards Earth and release it precisely where it must go.”

She stared at me as if I had two heads. “You are, of course, joking.”

I couldn’t help grimacing. “I wish I was.”

She rolled her eyes and took a deep breath. “You do realize, of course, that this vessel is not designed for maneuverability or speed. It is a reconnaissance and research vessel, not a fighter.”

“We just need to dive at the precise speed and trajectory,” I told her, unable to believe that I was the one concocting the cockamamie scheme, “And release the mass at the precise moment.”

“And where do you intend to get this mass?” she demanded.

This was the part that I didn’t think the ship would like. “We jettison it from the ship.”

“We do?” the ship demanded incredulously.

“You can do that, right?” I was fairly confident of the answer, but I had to ask so I could boost the ship’s confidence.

“Yes,” it uncertainly replied.

“What are you doing over there?” the raptor demanded. It was a strain for it to speak through the pain I was still inflicting, and I felt terrible. But I had to do what I had to do.

“The amount of mass is moot,” she firmly interjected, ignoring the raptor. “With a nearly infinite amount suspended in transdimensional space, the mass necessary isn’t a concern. Escaping from such velocity is. This vessel is not designed to do what you propose and still allow for an escape from the aftereffects.”

The ship whimpered. “Am I going to die?”

“Very probably,” she instantly replied.

“No one’s going to die!” I had to nip this in the bud, before we all lost our nerve, but she was right, and I already knew it. But for some weird reason, it didn’t bother me as much as it should have. Maybe it was the memories whispering secretly to me, but there was one that I knew for sure. “I have faith in us.”

“Really?” She wasn’t buying it, and I didn’t blame her. “And how are your piloting skills, pilot?”

I winced. She had to bring that up. “All right. So, I might not have the mind to hand motor skills to pull it off, but I know we can do this.”

I nodded at her. “You can do the calculations necessary so we have the right amount of mass and the correct trajectory, can’t you?”

She frowned, looking insulted. “Of course, I can.”

“And ship?” I had to talk fast before either of them could put a damper on things. “Can you fly yourself with that much precision?”

“No.”

I didn’t expect that, and it threw me off a little. But a spark of memory put me right back in the saddle.

“We can use the telepathic link,” I suggested without thinking it through. “You can steer yourself through me!”

“No, it can’t,” she firmly disagreed.

“What are you doing?” the raptor desperately cried, still staggering beneath the sonic attack.

We ignored him.

Before I could demand to know why she said that, she said, “The connection would burn your mind out in a heartbeat. The human brain is not compatible with an information matrix of that immense size.”

A hard lump formed in my throat, and it took a tremendously hard swallow to get it down. I should have backed away from the crazy scheme right then and there and spared myself what I already knew would happen, but instead, I stupidly said, “That’s a risk we have to take.”

She stared at me strangely, with an expression that I couldn’t figure out. Then, she nodded. “You are the pilot. You now know the risks. If that is your decision, then it is final.”

I had to swallow another lump before nodding back. “Ship, do you think you can use the link like that?”

The ship hesitated before reluctantly saying, “Yes.”

“Good.” I had to be brave. For them. Inside, my guts were turning to Jello. I turned to the Interface and asked, “Do you have those calculations ready?”

She nodded. Weirdly enough, she didn’t even bother to act insulted.

“Just tell the ship when to jettison the mass,” I told her. Then, I rolled my eyes towards the ceiling. “Whenever you’re ready, ship.”

That’s when a golden firework exploded behind my eyes and I stopped completely.

Escapade

I couldn’t do anything, of course, until I escaped from that closet. I tried the door, but the knob wouldn’t turn.

“Locked?” I couldn’t believe it. “Really? Who locks a closet? Who even has a lock on their closet?”

I turned my back on the offending door and my eyes toward the ceiling to address the voice that I could only assume belonged to the ship. “Do you have any bright ideas?”

“They’re coming,” it wailed in its childlike voice. “Oh, they’re going to cut me apart! Help me!”

“I can’t!” I winced as soon as I said it. I was much too harsh, and there was no call for it, even under the circumstances. I took a breath, collected myself, and tried again, but much calmer. “I can’t do anything from in here. Is there any way that you can get me out of this closet?”

The child… I mean, the ship didn’t answer for a while. I thought I’d lost connection, or it had abandoned me as useless, and then it said, “Do you mean…like… jettisoning the door?”

“Doing what now?” I felt stupid asking, but I didn’t know what it meant.

“Making the door go away,” it quietly replied. It really sounded like a little kid uncertain about itself. “I can do that… I think.”

That was good news. “If you can, it would really help a lot.”

“Okay,” it replied with the same uncertainty. “I’ll try.”

I waited. Somehow, I knew that rushing the ship to do anything wouldn’t do any of us any good, but the wait took far longer than I expected and yielded no results. The door was still there and I finally had to intervene.

“Are you okay?” I thought that was better than asking it why it wasn’t doing anything about the door. “Do you need me to do anything?”

“No,” it replied in the tone of a kid doing a difficult math problem. “It’s just harder than I thought.”

I accepted that. If anyone had asked me to disappear an entire door, I would have had trouble, too. Then, I had a brilliant idea. “What about just the knob? Can you make that disappear?”

“Maybe,” the kid replied, sounding more uncertain of itself. I knew I had to encourage it, but my experience with anything like that was pretty limited. Still, I had to try.

“Just take your time and concentrate,” I told it.

The ship groaned woefully. “But they’re almost here!”

It was going to panic, and then it wasn’t going to be able to do anything, so I had to calm it down. In my most soothing voice, I said, “I know, but you can’t think about that right now. Just concentrate on making the door or the knob disappear. Okay? Can you do that for me?”

“But they’re coming!” Its whine was heart wrenching, and it was impossible to think of it as anything other than a frightened little kid.

“I know,” I said as soothingly as I could. “And I know you’re scared. But you can do this, can’t you? You can jettison things?”

I decided to use its own phrasing, so it understood exactly what I meant, and it worked. The ship hemmed audibly for a moment, then admitted, “I’m better at jettisoning bigger things, like whole segments of my interior. The little things are harder.”

That was a bummer. I had to rethink my strategy a little bit. I glanced around the room for ideas and stopped on the racks of clothing. An idea formed. Clothes had pockets, and pockets sometimes kept things like keys and other things useful for opening locks. I rushed to investigate but soon found something quite depressing. They were women’s clothes, mostly pantsuits, and most of the pockets were fake.

“You have got to be kidding me!” I couldn’t help putting voice to my frustration, but it didn’t stop me from rifling everything that had a decent pocket until I found something very strange. It looked like a high-tech magic wand but was made of a patchwork of materials, mostly brass, was as thick in diameter as two fingers, and was full of knobbly bits. One half was bound in old, brown leather and was obviously the grip while on the other end was a green gem encased in a spherical cage. My thumb accidentally brushed one of the knobbly bits and the subsequent whirr that issued from it nearly stopped my heart. It also made the whole thing vibrate and the gem glow eerily.

“What in the world is this thing?” I wondered, and just as I was about to further wonder if it could help me out of the closet, my head exploded with images that were not mine. Other people’s lifetimes ripped through my skull. Adventures that were not my own suddenly became mine, and I knew things that I had never learned in my entire life. It flooded my head, my eyes, my ears, every sense that I knew and several that I had just then discovered, and then it was over and I was on my back, lying in a very uncomfortable position across a very uncomfortable bed of very uncomfortable shoes.

I sat bolt upright, rubbing my temples. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I’m sorry,” the ship frantically replied. “I thought it would help.”

I don’t know how I knew that the ship had forged a telepathic link with me to share the experiences of the previous pilots, but it didn’t matter. I knew the sonic setting I needed to oscillate the lock into submission. The only thing I didn’t know was what I was going to do once I got out.

“Interface,” I called on a hunch. “Can you hear me?”

“He turned her off,” the ship told me.

I sighed heavily. “Then, I’ll just have to turn her back on again.”

“And save me?” the kid pleaded.

“And save you,” I assured it, trying to sound more confident than I felt.

“How?”

It was a fair question. As an American, I should have told it that I was going to go in swinging and take out that highly evolved dinosaur. As a coward and someone that had never been in a fight in my entire life, I didn’t have a clue, even though I had a few hundred lifetimes freshly swirling through my skull to use for reference. In fact, for some reason, despite their obvious presence, I couldn’t fix on any of them for help. They swirled around like ghosts, visible but untouchable and thus completely useless.

“I’ll think of something,” I said, tuning the sonic for unlocking doors. It was weird that I could do that and nothing else with those memories.

The device whirred in my hand, the door popped open, and I leapt into the hall, knowing exactly how to navigate my way to the console room. I even knew that it was called a console room and not a bridge, control room, ops, or any of the other names sci-fi might give it. But oddly enough, I couldn’t identify any of the rooms I passed on the way, including the one with the weird metal tree and the bulbous glass fruits hanging from it. I couldn’t worry about that, though. There was a child to rescue.

“Tell me what’s happening in the console room, ship!” I did my best to keep my voice calm, so there would be no reason for the ship to panic. “What are they talking about, now?”

I ran past three more rooms and the ship didn’t reply. Worried, I asked, a little louder, “Ship? You still there?”

After one more room, it said, “He’s just standing there staring at the console. Why does he look so scary?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean to be.” I tried to sound reassuring, but I had to admit that the velociraptor kind of creeped me out, too. “He’s probably very nice.”

“Not to me,” the ship whined. “He wants to cut me up!”

“He doesn’t know you.” It sounded stupid the moment I said it and I knew that I had to do better, but at the moment, I was in too much of a hurry. “Just tell me what he’s doing. Is he fiddling with anything?”

That sounded better in my head. Before I could correct myself, the ship said, “No. He’s just standing there. What should I do?”

I suddenly had a wild idea. “Can you reactivate the Interface?”

“Do you mean, right now?”

“Not yet.” I was impressed that the ship could even do that. It made me think that the Interface wasn’t being completely honest with me about its own abilities. “But I’ll let you know when I get there.”

“Are you sure?” The ship was getting scared again. It probably hadn’t stopped being afraid the entire time. It was heartbreaking.

“Don’t worry.” I tried hard to sound reassuring. “I’ll be there soon.”

“Okay.”

It sounded so vulnerable that I was suddenly racing as fast as I could to get there. I still didn’t have a plan, really. Only a concept of one. But it was still important that I get to the console room as fast as possible and stop the dinosaur’s dastardly plan. The thing was, there was still a lot of distance between me and my destination, and I could only run so fast.

“With this much dimensional space to screw around with,” I couldn’t help muttering under my breath, “Why didn’t anyone think to install a train or a turbolift or something!”

An idea struck me, but it was a long shot.

“Ship,” I called, panting for my life. I’d done more running that day than I had in a very long time. “Do you know anything about dimensional folding?”

The ship let me pass two more rooms before it timidly replied. “No. Should I?”

“Never mind.” I had to drop the idea before the ship had something else to worry about. “Forget I asked.”

“Okay,” it replied uncertainly.

I kept running, really wishing that the people who had designed the ship had thought to install transporters, too.

Awareness

What is the moment when we first become self-aware? When we realize that we are individuals with our own thoughts and feelings? Where do our memories even begin? My first memory was when I was four or five, watching Star Trek and waiting for my brother to come home from school. At least, that’s what I count as my first real memory, and perhaps my first moment of self-awareness. It’s different for everyone, of course. Some claim to remember things when they were one or two years old. There’s even a chance that there are people who retain no memory of any event at all, or who haven’t yet or never will come to any type of self-awareness whatsoever. I can’t vouch for them. I can only vouch for myself.

I suppose before we become self-aware, our time is so taken up with discovering the physical world around us that we have no opportunity to discover the world within. We’re caught up in touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, hearing, and wondering about everything in the outside world, discovering things that in the present day have become mundane, but at the time, we couldn’t imagine there being anything else to life except that. Nothing deeper. Nothing more personal. Maybe it takes some epiphytic event, no matter how insignificant it might seem later on, to trigger our sense of self-awareness, and maybe that newfound self-awareness is the just the first step in forming lasting memory. Maybe our self-awareness serves as an anchor for those discoveries, helps make sense of it all, puts everything into a unique perspective that we can understand and retain. Maybe those discoveries help shape us in ways we don’t even notice and help form our individual styles and personalities, even our ethics and morals. And maybe the whole process is supposed to prepare us for the madness that comes later in life.

I wasn’t prepared at all.

A red velociraptor in an orange jumpsuit was pointing a tubular device at me, which I could only assume was a gun of some sort. To that end, my hands went straight up into the air in the universal sign of surrender. It was reflex. I’m an American, after all. I know what guns can do.

He, she, or it had come out of nowhere to… no, that isn’t quite accurate. I should get this right, or as close to correct as I can, if I’m going to relate this story properly. For the record. A velociraptor had stepped out of a transparent donut suspended in midair, made out of either the air itself or space-time, or something more technical, like timey-whimey stuff or something, and held a supposed gun on me, not only demanding my immediate surrender, but also vaguely accusing me of crimes that I hadn’t even committed. Oh, did I mention that this was over sixty million years ago? And that I was the only human being to ever exist because of my own screw-up?

Do you see now why I wasn’t prepared? Who could be for something like that? Just wait, though. It gets worse.

He, she, it, or they cocked their head curiously, like a bird. “You don’t look like much. I expected you would be taller.”

It had some nerve saying that. It wasn’t any taller than me, and I thought velociraptors weren’t supposed to be much bigger than a medium-sized dog. But I wasn’t about to argue with an armed dinosaur, so I let it slide. Pick your battles wisely, my Pop always said. You’re less likely to get shot that way.

“And what are you doing?” it hissed irritably, gesturing over my head with the weird device. I glanced up but didn’t see what the dinosaur was talking about, and it noticed, which made it even more irritated. “With your paws! Why are they in the air?”

I didn’t quite understand, and it hissed menacingly. “Put them down or I’ll fire!”

“I don’t think I can.” I was too terrified to move. Decades of American news had drummed into me just how dangerous guns could be, and now that one was pointed right at me, it was overwhelming.

“Do it,” the velociraptor urgently hissed. “Or I open fire!”

I squeezed my eyes shut and dropped my arms. Luckily, it didn’t open fire at the sudden move, so I pried my eyes open a bit for a little peek. The dinosaur cocked its head at me, demanding, “What were you doing? Was that some kind of trick?”

That was brow raising. The dinosaur either didn’t recognize the universal sign for surrender, or it was the suspicious type, and I had a feeling that it might shoot if I tried explaining myself, so I didn’t even bother. But my silence only irritated it further.

“Don’t play games with me,” it growled. “I’m watching you! Now, power down the remainder of your systems!”

That raised my brows even higher and I glanced helplessly at the Interface, but she just regarded me blandly. She wasn’t going to be any help whatsoever, so I stared at the console instead, but that didn’t help either. It still made absolutely no sense to me.

“What are you doing?” the velociraptor demanded. “I told you to power down! Now, do it!”

My arms stiffened at my sides as a whole slew of scenarios flew through my head. Should I dive for the floor when the shooting started, or make a run for it, zigzagging for cover? Should I try to overpower the creature instead? Or should I throw a bunch of switches and hope for the best? I didn’t bother trying to figure it out, though. I knew exactly what I was going to do. Chicken out.

“Look.” My voice trembled as I spoke, but I couldn’t help it. “I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m telling you that you have the wrong guy. I don’t know who you are or why you’re after me, but -!”

The velociraptor hissed sporadically and it was so frightening that I couldn’t finish the thought. I remained rigidly in place while it laughed, and when it finally caught its breath again, it hissed, “Is that really the best you can do?”

That was shocking but I still didn’t turn around. “I beg your pardon?”

“This isn’t you?” it hissed. Curiosity made me glance over my shoulder, but shock made me turn fully. It held a small silver box in its other claw, about the size of a folded phone, with a brilliantly blue screen that threw an image in the air, and that image was me. It was just my head and shoulders, but it was like looking in a mirror, if that mirror also slowly rotated your reflection to cover all angles. As impressive as the technology was, it was unnerving seeing myself like that.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, unsure if I even wanted an answer.

“At the scene of your last crime, of course,” it hissed. It squeezed the box and the image changed to a scene of me running for my life through some sort of military compound. I peered at it carefully. It didn’t look like it, but it had to be CGI, then an entire building exploded in the background and suddenly, I knew why I was running.

“That’s not me,” I protested. I pointed at it for emphasis. “I’ve never been there before in my life!”

The dinosaur trilled in what I could only assume was a sarcastic manner. “Don’t play games with me! There are hundreds of witnesses that place you on the scene. In fact, there are hundreds of witnesses that place you at the scene of every one of your attacks, and holographic evidence to corroborate their story. You are an alien menace, and you won’t be harming the Empire ever again!”

That wasn’t very encouraging, and I had nothing further to say. I knew when I was being railroaded. Not that I’d ever been railroaded before, but I’d seen it on TV plenty of times, and this was a railroading if ever I saw it. I didn’t know if that little device was manufacturing the evidence against me right on the spot or if it was doctored surveillance video, but I knew that there was nothing I could say to convince the dinosaur of my innocence, so I didn’t even try.

“Now, power down,” it commanded. “Then, I’m taking you into custody!”

I glanced at the console. It still made no sense to me. The console, that is. The video didn’t make sense, either, but that was something else altogether. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“Of course, you can,” it hissed, adding a snap of its jaw. “Now, do it!”

I squeezed my eyes shut, as well as every orifice in my body. I knew what I had to do, and I didn’t like the odds of surviving it, but if the movies had taught me anything, it was that sometimes, you just needed to bluff your way out of a situation. Taking a deep breath, I put on my most detached expression and turned to face my captor.

“I’m afraid that if you want this ship powered down,” I said, lifting my chin brazenly, “Then you’ll have to do it yourself!”

The dinosaur hissed menacingly and snapped its jaw. Its weapon claw twitched, grabbing my full attention, then it shook its head violently, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was calling my bluff, I just knew it was, and I wasn’t prepared for that. The weapons claw twitched again as it gestured at the console, but I forced myself not to react.

“I said, power down,” it firmly hissed.

Something wasn’t right. I didn’t know what it was, but I did know one thing. The dinosaur was more qualified for the job than I ever could be. And it bothered me so much that I griped before thinking it through first. “What difference does it make who powers down the ship?”

The velociraptor shook its head violently. “Just do what I say and power down!”

I admit that I’m pretty thick. That’s probably why I asked, “Why can’t you do it?”

The dinosaur shook its head harder and snapped its jaw. “Just do it! You’re right there, anyway!”

That raised a brow. I glanced at the Interface, but she just shrugged. That was no help! I was on my own again, but some things were starting to fall into place.

“Are you saying that you don’t know how?” I was only bluffing to entice the creature to do it for me, but the raptor suddenly froze dangerously still and stared at me with unblinking eyes. It was silent for so long that I knew I had stumbled onto something, and believe me, I was just as shocked as anybody. I was riding so high on that little triumph that my mouth kept going before my brain could stop it.

“You don’t, do you?” I should have kept quiet, but I didn’t have the ability. “You haven’t a clue how to operate this ship! That’s why you need me to do it for you!”

The dinosaur bobbed its snout randomly for a moment, then blurted, “Alright! Yes! You’re right! I don’t know anything about your controls!”

It extended the weapon at the console. “Now, shut it down before I do it my way!”

I glanced from the weapon to the Interface. A hint of worry leaked through her stoic facade. But I was on a roll, and there were no brakes.

“No, you won’t,” I replied.

The dinosaur shook its head. “You want to make a wager?”

I stepped into the line of fire, and the raptor froze, watching me intently. I glanced at the Interface. She held her chin high but didn’t interfere. I didn’t expect her to, anyway. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever done, and it was about to get stupider.

“If you wanted me dead, you would have already done it,” I said, parroting what the Interface had said earlier. “And if you wanted this place destroyed, you would have done that, too. You have the weapons for it. But you didn’t. Now, why is that?”

The dinosaur shook its head. “You’re going to stand trial for your crimes!”

That sounded so reasonable that I nodded, but it still didn’t sound like the full picture. “Okay, but what about the console? You have a ship just like this one, so operating it should be a breeze. Right?”

The dinosaur growled but didn’t speak. And it kept the weapon pointed at the console.

“Unless your ship isn’t like this one?” I glanced at the Interface, who had inspired that line of thinking. “We were wondering about that, weren’t we?”

“The molecular composition of the other craft is consistent with materials found on Earth,” she finally said. “The other capsule is either a copy of the original design or a very coincidental parallel development.”

The raptor’s dewlaps twitched at the mention of a copy, and I knew that I was onto something. “You need this vessel intact, don’t you? You can’t destroy it or anything inside it because you need it…”

That’s where my train of thought ended and I had to deboard. Luckily, the raptor provided the rest.

“Yes, it’s true,” it hissed softly, undulating its head as if swallowing something whole. “You’ve destroyed so much of our work that with this vessel, we’ll finally have a complete time machine, and after we take it apart, we’ll have a whole fleet of them! But why are you acting so ignorant? You’re the one that destroyed the laboratories working on the project!”

That was brow raising, too. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

It snapped its jaw. “I find that difficult to swallow.”

It took a moment for the ramifications to sink in. If the dinosaurs were successful in taking the ship and taking it apart, then I had no chance of correcting things and getting back home. Although I had no idea how to correct things either, I still had to keep the ship in one piece first, and hopefully, myself as well.

“Believe what you want,” I told it, deciding to keep brazening it out. “But I know that you need me as much as you need the ship. You need my intimate knowledge of its inner workings or else your little plan will fail.”

I pretended not to notice the quiet titter that the Interface thought she was hiding behind one hand, disguised as a little cough. The dinosaur froze, corroborating my theory. I stepped forward and held out my hand.

“I’m not going to let you have anything,” I told it. “Not this ship, and not me, and I know that you won’t shoot either of us. So, give up and give me the gun.”

The raptor cocked its head curiously. “Who says that I won’t shoot you?”

I hesitated, but I had gone too far to back down. If my bluff was going to work, I had to steam ahead. “You need me.”

“True,” it said, leveling the gun at me. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t shoot you.”

“You’re bluff-“

The next thing I knew, I was waking up on the floor of a darkened closet. Clothes hung all around me and there were shoes everywhere. Nothing was tidy or neatly arranged. I knew immediately what happened.

“A closet! Really?” But I was talking to myself. I was all alone. Not even the Interface was there. I went to the door and tried it, but something blocked it from opening. Something very heavy.

“Help me.”

The voice was tiny but very distinct. A child’s voice, and they were frightened. I looked everywhere but couldn’t see them.

“Where are you?” I called. It seemed weird to be worried about a single child when the whole of time and space was in jeopardy, but really, I could only process one crisis at a time and the current one easily overrode the other, so I added, “Let me know so I can help you.”

“They’re going to hurt me,” the child whined. “They’re going to take me apart!”

That was alarming. Who would be so evil as to hurt a child?

“Where are you?” I demanded. “Are you in the closet with me? If you are, I promise I won’t let anyone hurt you!”

“Please help me,” the child pleaded, their voice stronger than before. “They already called the others. They’ll be here any minute and then they’ll take me apart! Please help me!”

“I can’t help you if I don’t know where you are,” I called back, wondering over the curious phrasing. What dastardly villain would dare cut an innocent child apart? “Just tell me where you are!”

“I’m here,” the child said. “With you.”

That was a relief. At least I had a chance of helping them. I just had to find them, but it was really weird how well they could hide.

“I’m in the console room,” the child added. My brows knit, and the child said, “I’m watching. It’s talking to the others. They’ll be here soon! Please, help me!”

I closed my eyes. Out of all the weirdness that had plagued my day thus far, this was possibly the weirdest thing to happen. I had a guess as to who the child was, but I was still reluctant to ask.

“Are you the ship?”

“Please, help me,” the child replied. “They’re going to kill me!”

No

It took a long time to digest what I had just done. It was weird enough that I had somehow found myself inside some sort of time-traveling craft, but in going back to thwart an event that had prevented the human race from ever existing, I had inadvertently caused the very extinction I had gone back to prevent. I had doomed the human race. Me. An American idiot, just by accidentally destroying an asteroid.

“What do we do now?” After gaping stupidly long enough, I finally found the wits to speak, but my head was still reeling.

She cocked her head slightly. “Why ask me?”

It took a moment to process that, and when I finally did, I was shocked. “Because you’re the one with experience in these things?”

She scowled pensively. “I don’t think so. No, I’m quite certain this is a first for me, too.”

That threw me for a moment. “Okay… okay… so… so you must have come across something like this before?”

Her eyes rolled up in thought. I waited. And waited. Waiting grew into impatience. I bounced on my heels. She didn’t notice. She kept thinking, so I kept waiting. She wasn’t someone I felt comfortable interrupting, even if it was driving me up the wall. Finally, she said, “No. Nothing like it ever.”

She was so calm about it that it was maddening. I snapped, “Don’t you have any clue how to fix this?”

She had the nerve to be indignant. “I am the Interface. I do not initiate functions. I react to the needs of the pilot.”

I knew enough by then to realize that the exchange was going to go nowhere. I needed to be more decisive if we were going to get anywhere. “Fine! Then, as the pilot, I’m asking for suggestions.”

“I suggest that we catalogue this new timeline,” she dutifully replied.

It took a moment to digest that. “You’re the one that suggested going back in time to correct this.”

“That is correct,” she replied. “But more information regarding the situation may reveal the solution to our dilemma.”

I rolled that over in my head for a moment. “What exactly does that mean?”

Her brows knit; she was bothered by my question. “It must be your lack of education, because I thought I had made myself perfectly clear.”

“You want to explore this new timeline?” I spoke a bit more sharply than I should have, because she wasn’t making it easy for me. “I thought you were on my side!”

“This is not a matter of ‘sides’,” she glibly replied. “It is a matter of reconnaissance. I am suggesting that we find out what we are committing to before we act.”

“We don’t have time for that!” I couldn’t believe her. Couldn’t she see what kind of a mess we were in? Couldn’t she see that we didn’t have any time to waste? No! She wanted to go back to the same plan that she had before I took over as pilot! The traitor! I was on my own, and since it was all up to me, I quickly pondered all the time travel movies and TV shows I’d ever seen, trying to remember if there were any that had this kind of plot and what they did to fix it.

“Couldn’t we go back to the moment that we hit the asteroid and stop ourselves from hitting it?” I was pretty proud of myself. That had to be the smartest thing I’d ever come up with.

“And how would we do that?” she crisply asked. Her skepticism deflated my ego quite a bit.

“I don’t know!” I was running on empty when it came to smarts. “Use the tractor beam? Tell ourselves to get out of the way? Something?”

She scowled. “Tractor beam?”

My brain started hurting. “You don’t have one?”

She shook her head at my stupidity. “This is a reconnaissance and research vessel, not a rescue ship. However, as valid as your suggestions might be, there is one significant problem that we cannot overcome. We cannot go back on our own timeline.”

“What?” I demanded, trying to sound irritated. I actually had no idea what she was talking about.

She scowled patronizingly. “We cannot go back in time to undo any mistakes we make. It would create a paradox that you are not qualified to deal with.”

“But we already did!” I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t seeing the situation as clearly as I was. “We came back here to stop the human race from being erased!”

“That is another thing entirely.” She sighed heavily when she saw my own skeptical frown. “It’s a timey-whimey thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why not?” I demanded. “I’m not a moron, you know! Besides, that’s stupid! How can we go back to save the human race but not be able stop ourselves from screwing it up?”

“Because of time differentials,” she replied. She studied me skeptically for a moment, took a deep breath, and tolerantly added, “There is vastly more potential for disaster in deliberately altering a temporal event than there is in accidentally altering one. The creators of this vessel knew that and build safeguards into the system to prevent any action like that from ever happening.”

I scowled harder trying to process that, and finally I think I got it. “You couldn’t do it even if you wanted to.”

“Precisely,” she flatly stated. I didn’t believe her, not entirely, but instead of trying to argue about it, I let it go. After all, it was a timey-whimey thing.

That left me with nothing, though. “So, what do we do, then?”

She shook her head slowly. “I do not know. This is beyond the scope of my experience.”

That stopped me short. Was there no hope after all?

She suddenly stared off blankly into the distance. If she hadn’t been so animated earlier, I would have probably missed it, but as I was aware of it, it was utterly alarming. I nervously edged closer and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Incoming transmission,” she mechanically replied.

I couldn’t believe it. We were millions of years in the past, well before the invention of the radio, and someone was calling us. “From who?”

“Activate monitors,” she instructed, pointing out the necessary toggles. I threw them and the holographic display shrank to a large rectangle at eye level. What I saw of the screen took my breath away. A tree floated in space, rotating gracefully in zero-gee. Behind it was Earth, or so I assumed. The land mass was completely unfamiliar, but the blue ocean was unmistakable. Seeing the world spinning below us, I suddenly felt a lot of separation anxiety with the ground.

“So, you returned for another go at it, did you?” Audio filled the room with a bit too much treble for my taste. Also, a lot of hiss, as if the speakers were shot. “Well, I’ll fix it like always. But first, make it easier on yourself and surrender your capsule. I promise you’ll get a fair trial.”

I had to tear my eyes off the tree to scowl at her skeptically. I didn’t recognize the voice. It certainly wasn’t mine. “Friend of yours?”

She lifted a brow, as perplexed as I was. “No. However, analysis indicates that they are in a DB3000 Temporal Archeologic Reconnaissance and Discovery Integrated System.”

I scowled, not knowing what she was talking about. “Do they all look like trees, or is that a picture of us?”

“It is the same model as this vessel,” she stiffly verified. She snootily added, “And they do not ‘all look like trees’! They employ a particular technology that allows the vessel to blend in with its surroundings and minimize contamination of the native species.”

I peered closely at the monitor and scoffed. “A lot of good that did! Who ever heard of a tree floating in space?”

She scowled. “Can we focus on what’s important, please?”

I winced. She was right. I was getting distracted, but who could blame me? I was in way over my head! Who could focus through all of that?

“Sorry. So, that’s your people out there?” I don’t know why I asked. She was going to shoot me down anyway and make me feel stupid again. I braced for impact.

But instead, she frowned, concerned, and I was suddenly concerned, too. She carefully studied the visual and said, “Apparently. However, their capsule has not yet communicated with this one.”

“What’s that?” She’d thrown me for a loop.

“Every vessel maintains contact with the others,” she explained in a distant manner. “Except when within the time vortex, of course. They share a network of information easily accessible to any capsule that needs it.”

My brows knit on their own. “Like a data base?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, her eyes narrowed at the display.

I tried to salvage my dignity. “Maybe they can’t right now? Maybe their radio is damaged?”

“It’s automatic,” she absently replied, staring at the visual. “They’re very gossipy.”

She tore her gaze off the monitor just long enough to glare at me and say, “Radio damage? They just communicated with us!”

I wasn’t about to lose another argument, so I didn’t even try. “So, why are you so worried about them not talking to each other, anyway?”

“I do not know.” She was more concerned than she let on. In fact, she looked like her world had turned upside down. “It’s… unprecedented.”

“Well?” The demand hissing through the speakers was rude and impatient and came so suddenly that I jumped. “Lower your shields! Now!”

Shields? I leaned in closer to her. “We have shields?”

She looked at me as if I was the stupidest person in the universe. Well, the stupidest human being in the universe, which was no longer saying much. “Of course, we have shields! How else do you think we survived that collision?”

I glanced at the monitor, and the tree floating gracefully in its center. “Are you going to do it?”

“I cannot comply,” she huffily reminded me. “I am not the pilot!”

I glanced at the tree again. “So, what do we do?”

She looked at me, her gaze steady but not entirely unreadable. “You tell me. What do we do?”

I studied the tree. Something didn’t feel right. Maybe it was something the other pilot said or the way he framed it, but something was definitely not right.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But something tells me not to lower those shields.”

“I concur,” she replied.

It took a moment for it to sink in, then I was surprised. “But those are your people.”

“I do not know,” she absently replied, studying the tree carefully. “Perhaps…”

She didn’t immediately elaborate, and then she didn’t get a chance. The voice came through again, demanding, “Lower your shields, or I will be forced to take drastic measures!”

That sounded bad. “What does he mean, ‘drastic measures’?”

“I do not know,” she absently replied. “There is no offensive weaponry aboard a Temporal -!”

The entire room shook violently, and resounding thunder filled the air, throwing me to the floor. The woman shimmered like bad TV reception for a second, but otherwise the shaking didn’t bother her. Before I could even pick myself up again, the voice filled the air.

“That was just a warning shot,” it announced. “The next one will target your propulsion systems. Now, lower your shields and prepare to be boarded!”

I looked up at her, shocked. “No offensive weapons?”

Her brows knit pensively, but she didn’t reply. She didn’t even take her eyes off the display.

I hauled myself to my feet using the edge of the console. “Do we have anything like that and you’re just not telling me?”

“No.” She was blunt. Too blunt. And she incessantly studied the tree to the exclusion of all else. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“What are you staring at?” I demanded.

“I am not staring,” she mechanically replied. “I’m analyzing!”

I couldn’t help frowning as I leaned in to take a closer look at the monitor. It didn’t show me anything that I hadn’t already seen. “Analyzing what?”

“I am analyzing the composition of the alien vessel,” she flatly replied.

“Alien -?” I was confused. “I thought that was your people.”

“As did I,” she absently replied.

I was even more confused. “You mean, they aren’t?”

“Inconclusive,” she replied, still fixated on the tree.

The room shook again, immediately followed by a tremendous boom. This time, I was prepared and grabbed onto the console for dear life. The woman tore her eyes off the monitor just as the voice announced, “I have just disabled your temporal motive systems. You are dead in space. Surrender before I target life support, as well.”

“What did he just -?” I started to ask, but seeing her staring at the center column, I followed her gaze and wasn’t sure what to think. The weird crystal teeth that had been chewing slowly the entire time had stopped chewing entirely, although they remained slightly agape. I glanced at her. She looked white as a sheet. That wasn’t good at all. “What is it? What did he do?”

“They stopped the time rotors,” she quietly gasped. “That should not be possible.”

“The time -?” This one hit me right away. “You mean, we can’t go anywhere? Not even back home?”

“As you no longer have a home to go to, I would say your concern in that regard is moot,” she said, staring in dismay at the crystal teeth. “But yes, for the moment, we cannot access the time vortex.”

I panicked. It was past time for it, anyway. “So, what do we do? Fire back?”

“We do not have offensive weaponry,” she quietly reminded me, still bothered by the time rotors. “And we cannot flee the conflict. I would suggest lowering the shields.”

“For what?” I demanded, not willing to give in just yet. “So, they can finish us off?”

“I do not believe they will harm you yet,” she replied. “If they meant to hurt you, they would already have done so. Apparently, they have the capability.”

“Do not force me to further aggression,” the voice demanded. “Lower your shields and prepare to be boarded!”

“It is either that,” she quietly told me, “Or destruction.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I had no choice, even if it felt like I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life. I took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. How do I do that?”

She guided me through the procedure, but her heart obviously wasn’t in it. She acted as defeated as I was, and that only made me feel worse. My hands moved sluggishly and as soon as I threw the last switch, the voice boomed over the speakers.

“Excellent! I knew you would eventually see reason,” it crowed. “Now, prepare for dimensional interweaving.”

I glanced at her, and she glanced at me, frowning.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I don’t know what that is, either.”

She suddenly glanced away from the console, and I looked at where she was staring. An invisible bubble had formed in the area where there was plenty of space for it, distorting like a fisheye lens the image of everything seen through it. The center of the bubble immediately sucked into itself, forming an upright, invisible donut, and out of it stepped a human-sized dinosaur. Or more precisely, an upright walking, two-legged, humanoid that looked remotely like a velociraptor from the movies, with a scalp of short black and red feathers and wearing an orange jumpsuit of unknown material tailored to fit it precisely. Its mottled red and black head glanced around for a moment before it fixed yellow eyes, and an odd tubular device clutched in one paw, on us.

“So, human, we finally meet,” it said in long, drawn-out sibilant hisses that told me the speakers weren’t malfunctioning earlier. That was its real voice. “Sadly, every hunt must come to an end, and now, you will answer for your crimes!”

Blink

Reality blinked.

I thought it was just me, blacking out momentarily from the utterly appalling notion that I was being kicked out into the middle of Seventeenth Century London, until the cute hologram frowned at me.

“What did you do?” she demanded. When I couldn’t come up with an immediate answer to her blatantly unfair accusation, she got more serious. “What! Did! You! Do?”

I gaped at her incredulously until I finally found the indignity to argue back. “What are you talking about?”

She rolled her eyes irritably and pointed magnificently at the doorway. Ancient London was gone. The buildings were replaced with trees, and the road was a wide strip of dirt.

“Me?” I demanded incredulously. “You think I did that?”

“Well,” she irritably countered. “I’m not the one that played higgledy-piggledy all over the console controls!”

I stared at her utterly dumbfounded. She took advantage by getting in one more jab. “You must have messed about with the helmic regulator, or something!”

I had to take a moment to absorb that. “Are you serious? I don’t even know what that is! How the heck could it be my fault?”

I glanced over my shoulder. The trees were still there, but a gigantic reptilian leg slowly settled to the ground right outside the door, blocking view of them. Whatever the creature was must have been over a hundred feet long, judging by the size of just that appendage. Its foot sank inches, maybe even feet into the ground.

“What the heck is going on?” I demanded. “Why does it look like Jurassic Park out there?”

She became quite huffy. “Obviously something is wrong with time.”

“And you’re blaming me for that?” I challenged.

She scowled at me as if I was an absolute idiot. “You are the one that played havoc with the console.”

“I didn’t do anything!” She made me furious. Jabbing a finger at the doorway, I snapped, “I certainly couldn’t do that!”

Her chin lifted indignantly, then her eyes closed and her lips pursed. She took a deep breath and looked at me again, but without scorn.

“Perhaps you are correct,” she stiffly admitted. “An idiot such as yourself couldn’t possibly have affected time like that. Not to that degree, and certainly not from a random pounding of buttons and switches.”

“Thank you,” I irritably accepted. Then the meat of what she said hit me like a thrown brick. “Hey!”

She stroked her chin thoughtfully, completely ignoring me. “If my calculations are correct, and they always are, the Earth has been subject to an alteration of a fixed time event as far back as the Great Extinction.”

That lifted my brow enough to make me forget about her earlier insults. “What does that mean?”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head over my ignorance. “It’s a timey-whimey thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

She was so irritating! “Try me!”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Then here it is. Approximately sixty-six million of your years ago, the impact of a massive meteor caused the extinction of around seventy-five percent of all animal and plant life on this planet in what your paleontologists call the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. It was the end of the reign of the dinosaurs but heralded the beginning of the reign of mammals and eventually, the evolution of humanity.”

That was an interesting history lesson, but I didn’t see how it applied to the situation, although I wasn’t going to admit that to her. I’d never hear the end of it. “So?”

She shook her head, openly agitated with me. “Something may have altered the course of history, changing that event.”

That made no sense. “And how do you know that?”

She rolled her eyes and pointed magnificently at the doorway. I looked and saw the leg lift from the ground, leaving a massive depression behind. As soon as it left my view, a handful of small, thin, feathered creatures ran past after it, chittering softly. My jaw dropped. They ran upright on two legs, were about the size of an adult person, and wore rudimentary clothing, and even some jewelry, but they were definitely velociraptors. Or were once velociraptors. But they had obviously evolved, and they carried pistols in their feathered hands.

I turned to her, flabbergasted. “How is that possible?”

“I do not know,” she stiffly admitted. “I can only surmise the most likely scenario given the limited information available. Apparently, something altered the timeline around or after the extinction event to cause the dinosaurs to survive into the present.”

“Huh?” At the moment, I couldn’t be any wittier than that.

“It’s a timey-wimey thing,” she said in a condescending tone. “Just understand that the timeline you once knew no longer exists.”

That made sense. Somewhat. “Like in The Good Dinosaur?”

She scowled at me; her disdain had returned in full. “Did you listen to anything that I just told you?”

I didn’t dignify that with an answer.

She drew in a deep breath. “Right. Well, suffice to say, your world no longer exists.”

Then, it hit me hard. I was suddenly very lonely, and it was staggering. “Wait! Everything’s gone? Just like that? Gone?”

She shook her head, scowling. “The Earth is still there, but it isn’t the one that you knew. It’s been altered.”

I panicked but tried to keep it together. “I know that! I get it! But we can’t just leave it like that, right?”

Her brows knit, but she didn’t seem overly concerned. “Like what?”

I gaped at her, too astonished to think. Then, desperation kicked me out of it. “We have to do something! We can’t just leave it that way!”

“Why not?” she calmly asked.

I couldn’t believe it. I also couldn’t help being sarcastic about it. “Because billions of people are dead?”

Her brow knit tighter. “How could they be dead if they never existed?”

I was flabbergasted. “What are you saying? Something changed the world and you won’t do anything about it?”

“The purpose of this capsule is not intervention,” she indignantly replied. “It is for temporal reconnaissance and historical study. It is no concern to me how the timeline flows for any particular world, only that it flows.”

I was absolutely floored. “You mean, you’re going to do nothing? Nothing at all?”

“I am the Interface,” she reminded me with an exasperated sigh. “I am not the pilot, nor is it my purpose to dictate how timelines must unfold. I record the information available and report it when asked.”

She eyed me critically. “And apparently, on occasion, play host to ignorant people.”

Her chin lifted higher. I didn’t think that was possible without looking straight up. She was trying to ignore me again, or put an end to the argument, or maybe prove that everything I said had no meaning to her, but I wasn’t going to let her get away with it. “You have to fix this!”

Her scowl became more condescending. “I already explained that it isn’t my function to alter timelines.”

“You have to do something!” I insisted.

“I cannot initiate such an undertaking,” she indignantly replied.

I was irate. The full impact of what happened had finally slammed into me like a Mack truck. I was the last human alive. Or rather, I was the only human that ever existed. I was completely alone in the entire universe, and it was too much to bear. But I couldn’t give in to it. Not if there was a chance that it could be changed back to the way it should be. I swallowed the sorrow welling up inside and wiped the moisture from my eyes. I couldn’t let her see me like that. She would just be mean about it.

I closed my eyes for a moment to staunch the flow of tears, then sniffled and said, “Then that’s it? There’s nothing we can do?”

Her brow knit curiously. “I thought I had already said that. A more proactive action requires a pilot to make such a decision.”

My brows shot up. “What do you mean?”

She tilted her head to study me critically. “A qualified pilot would have the authority to react to the alteration.”

My brows knit together. “So, you can’t, huh? Well, what about me?”

Her head straightened up, but she became suspicious. “What about you?”

I cleared the goo from my throat, unable to believe what I, myself, was about to say. “Could I be the pilot?”

She closed her eyes and sighed in exasperation. “Given your limited intelligence, I doubt it.”

“Why?” I couldn’t help feeling insulted, even though a part of me hoped she would say something like that. I didn’t want the fate of the Earth on my shoulders, but I was the only one that could. “What do you have to do to be a pilot of this thing?”

She lifted her chin indignantly. “This ‘thing’ is a highly complex temporal incursion vehicle! One cannot just blunder inside it and become its pilot! You need years of training to understand the controls, and years more just to use them in an intelligent manner! You cannot expect to be the pilot just by asking!”

I was stymied. My world was gone. No, it never existed, and there was nothing I could do about it. My heart felt sick. My stomach churned. A tiny part of me was relieved to be freed of such a tremendous responsibility, but the rest of me wanted to vomit. “What do I do now? What does Earth do now?”

She glared at me for a moment, then her expression went blank. She stared off into space for a moment, creeping me the heck out. She was so focused on nothing that I started to worry about her. I studied her carefully, waiting for her to do something, but she remained frozen like a still picture, and I got even more worried. I peered closer at her and she suddenly blinked, startling me.

“This is unprecedented, but I am still not authorized to make you the pilot of this vessel,” she reluctantly replied.

That made me mad all over again, and I lost all sympathy for her. “Rub it in, why don’t you?”

“I am not authorized to make you the pilot of this vessel,” she stressed, tilting her head the other way. “My function is only to obey the orders of the designated pilot.”

“You just said that,” I grumbled. Then, I got mad, and a lot sarcastic. “See? I listened!”

She shook her head and sighed heavily. “Granted, not all pilots were designated by the proper authorities, but that is outside my influence.”

I closed my eyes, no longer caring for the history lesson. No longer caring about much, to tell the truth. In just one blink of an eye, I’d lost my entire world, my entire life, and everything that gave it meaning. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing! “So, what?”

“Some just sneak into a capsule and claim it for their own,” she complained. “And go galivanting across the cosmos doing whatever they please. It’s an utter embarrassment!”

“Don’t try to cheer me up,” I grumbled.

She sighed very heavily. “And some just blunder ignorantly inside and demand to be the pilot,” she added airily. “And it isn’t my place to either authorize or refuse them.”

“You’re a credit to your… whatever,” I grumbled.

She sighed heavily, rolling her head back as her shoulders sagged. She looked utterly exasperated, but I didn’t care why. She’d already peeved me so much that I didn’t want to hear from her ever again. But I was stuck there… unless I wanted to take my chances on a world that had never before seen a human. And I doubted I would last long before I ended up in something’s stomach.

Then, she looked at me so seriously that I was taken aback.

“Are you truly that thick?” She was genuinely frustrated. But then, she was just as frustrating to me. That one barb, though, hit harder than any other. It wasn’t just an insult. It was something more, and it took a little while for it to hit me. It was a hint. And when it finally became clear what she had been trying to say, I had to restrain myself from hitting my head against the wall for being so stupid. I had earned every insult against my education.

Something wasn’t quite right, though. “I thought you said I couldn’t be the pilot.”

“You are not qualified,” she formally informed me. “But neither were others.”

“So, you just changed your mind?” I was very suspicious. She had to have an ulterior motive. Every about-face like that had one. “Why?”

Her brows knit together. “It won’t be just the Earth that is altered, you know. Temporal alterations here will ripple throughout the cosmos. Although the time altering event may have originated on Earth, humanity has made innumerable contributions to the universe, both good and bad, and all of that will be rewritten by this new timeline.”

“That must be a lot of history,” I had to admit.

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “It isn’t just ‘a lot of history’! It could be a cosmic disaster!”

She had my full and unfettered attention, but she peered at me skeptically, obviously uncertain that I understood the depth of the crisis. She wasn’t far wrong. “Well, I shan’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say that it’s a lot of timey-whimey stuff. The point is, such a major change to the Earth has significant impact on the rest of the universe, to the point where it could strain the fabric of time and space. Or even shatter it.”

She paused to see if she still had my attention, and if I understood anything she said, condescension in her eyes. I didn’t pay her skepticism any mind, and after a moment, she continued. “If the universe shatters, it spells the end of everything, including this vessel.”

I had to pause for a moment to contain my indignation. “Yes, I gathered that.”

Undaunted, she added, “You are not an ideal choice for pilot, but you are all that is available.”

“So, you told me,” I grumbled.

“I do not have the authority to place you in charge of this capsule,” she reminded me.

“I know,” I irritably replied. How many times did she have to say that? Then, it hit me. It was another subtle hint. I’m not a fast learner. “Then I’ll just take it over?”

She eyed me critically. “Are you claiming to take command of this capsule without proper authorization?”

I scowled, thinking that we had already gone over all that. “Um… yes?”

“Very well,” she imperiously replied. “I am not authorized to contradict the pilot’s command.”

“The pilot?” I glanced around the room. “Are you saying… that’s it? That’s all we have to do?”

She sighed heavily, acting as if I should have already known that. “This vessel has awaited a pilot since it was abandoned by the previous one. However, since there isn’t a better option available, you will do.”

Well, she hadn’t lost her charm. “Another pilot?”

She tilted her head and studied me cautiously. “She was not the designated pilot, either. But she was much more qualified for the position.”

With the situation we faced, I decided to let the insult slide and glanced out the doors. The trees hadn’t changed. But I saw unfamiliar birds with dull plumage flying among them, some of enormous size, some even big enough to carry me off. I quickly turned back to the young woman.

“What do we do first?” I fretted.

She lifted a brow. “I would suggest closing the doors for a start.”

It was so obvious that it slapped me across the face. “Right!”

As I activated the door control, she stepped back to give me space. “I will give you the coordinates where we must start, but you must input them precisely.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

She eyed me steadily. “No mashing buttons randomly.”

“Of course, not!” She was ruffling my feathers again.

“No playing higgledy-piggledy over the controls.”

My brows clenched together. She was really irritating! “Just tell me what to do!”

“I am,” she casually replied.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. It didn’t help much. I was still irritated. “Just tell me which buttons to press!”

“Buttons, switches, toggles, levers, widgets, gadgets,” she rattled off.

I stared at her incredulously as she rattled off random words. I thought she’d gone instantly insane. Then she stopped and peered at me imperiously. “There is more to the input of temporal coordinates than the mere pressing of buttons!”

My incredulity lasted moments after she’d said that, then the weight of our situation brought me back to my senses. “Just tell me how to put in the coordinates!”

And she did. The room shuddered slightly when I threw the last toggle, then a thunderous alarm filled the air. The lighting turned red and the young woman became very concerned.

“Collision alert!” she snapped. “Activate monitors!”

I waited for the monitors to activate, looking everywhere for where they might be. There were no screens in sight, except for the little one on the console that continued to show little script that I assumed were system readings. After a bit, she loudly cleared her throat, getting my attention.

“I said, activate the monitors,” she calmly reminded me.

Then, I got it. “Oh! You want me to -?”

“Unless you do not wish to know what is hurtling at us at cosmic speeds,” she replied with eerie calm. “We could wait for impact to find out.”

I panicked. “What happens if it hits us?”

“Well, the capsule’s shields are down,” she said, eyes rolled back in thought. “So, I imagine the capsule will sustain irreparable damage, if not complete destruction, with all hands aboard.”

I panicked even more. “What do we do?”

“Activate shields,” she replied. I searched the console frantically, but nothing was labeled “shields”. She put up with it for all of two seconds before magnificently pointing at a small lever. I threw it, and the room was violently turned upside-down by an ear-splitting roar of thunder.

The room was spinning. I was plastered to the floor, far too heavy to move a muscle. Eventually, the room slowed down, and I slowly became my normal weight. When I could breathe again, I demanded, “What happened?”

“The capsule collided with an asteroid in Earth orbit,” she told me. I looked and saw her standing in her usual spot as if nothing had happened. In fact, she looked completely unaffected by the collision. I hated her for that. “Fortunately, shields were raised in time to mitigate any damage to the vessel.”

“Well, thank God for that,” I sarcastically replied, peeling myself off the floor.

“Activate monitors, please,” she strongly suggested.

“Which button?”

She tsked, but showed me the switch, and the moment I threw it, the room filled with a translucent blue display of everything outside the weird place. At first glance, the sight made my head spin. We were in space. Earth was below my feet. Stars were all around me, and so were small chunks of rock rolling rapidly away. She stood on the north pole, unaffected by the image.

“A moment while I gather data,” she asked, then stared off into space.

I watched her for a moment, then gawked at the spectacle around me. I had to remind myself that she was a hologram, or an “interface” as she called herself. But it was hard to believe that she was just some sort of sophisticated program rather than some annoying person phoning it in from somewhere else. She acted so real that I wondered how she could just ignore such a marvelous spectacle surrounding us so she could do, well, whatever it was she was doing instead.

Then, her face fell. Alarmingly. And it alarmed me, as well.

“What is it?” I demanded, worried.

She lifted her chin. “Coordinates were properly input. We are at the designated temporal destination.”

“Great!” But I couldn’t get excited seeing her downcast expression. “What’s wrong?”

“Unfortunately,” she replied, “The asteroid that struck this capsule, and was subsequently destroyed, was the very asteroid that triggered the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event.”

I was too thick to understand that. “So?”

She glared at me as if I was the stupidest person on the planet. “So, we have just destroyed the asteroid that heralded the age of mammals. We have become the cause of the very crisis we came here to prevent!”

Houseplant

The moment she set it on his desk, he looked up from the laptop, glared at it, and said, “Don’t put that there.”

She scowled down at him, hand hovering near the plant. “I don’t have anywhere else to put it.”

He looked up at her. “You still don’t, now put it somewhere else.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s just a tiny little plant.”

“Then, it’ll fit somewhere else,” he replied. “Now, please move it.”

A heavy sigh followed the eye roll. “It’s not hurting anything.”

“That’s not the point,” he said, then felt it prudent to return to his work.

Another sigh. “Then, what’s wrong with putting it here?”

“Because this is my desk,” he said, peering with exaggerated intent at the spreadsheet. “And I don’t want it here.”

Her brows lifted, but she decided to try a different tactic first, suggesting, “It brightens up the place.”

“It’s green,” he replied, really wishing that she would take the plant away so they could avoid an argument. But that didn’t seem likely to happen. “So’s my blotter.”

She rolled her eyes and tsked. He tried not to be triggered by it.

“Can I just leave it here for a little while?” she asked, employing her patented subtle hint tactic.

“No,” he replied, pushing his face closer to the screen to suggest that he was too busy to talk about it.

Her arms folded, ready for an argument. “Why not?”

He rolled his eyes in resignation. He didn’t even need to see her folded arms to know that things were going down, so he took a deep breath to rally his wits and turned to face her.

“You really want to know why?” He knew that that question never heralded anything good, but his steam was building and now he was ready for a fight.

She smirked, indicating that she was ready for him, too. “Tell me.”

“Encroachment,” he curtly replied.

She blinked a few times as she absorbed the answer. “Encroachment?”

He knew there was no use prevaricating, so he just got right to it. “Yes. From the moment we were married, you have steadily taken over the entire house until I have very little that I can genuinely call my own.”

“That’s not true,” she automatically replied.

“No?” he said, meeting her eyes. “You decorated the entire house with your taste. You dictate what does and doesn’t get hung on the walls and what furnishings we have. You even chose the windows we needed.”

“Okay,” she interrupted, clearly thinking that she had the upper hand already. “But as I recall, you didn’t care about any of that.”

“As if I had a choice,” he replied.

She rolled her eyes. “So, what does that have to do with ‘encroachment’, or don’t you know what that word means?”

“I’ll tell you. “He was eager to argumentatively knock her down a peg. “Slowly but surely, you’ve been taking over all the shared space with your things. Your decorations, your personal things. Everything. And the little space I have has been shrinking at the same rate.”

“That’s not true,” she countered.

“You’ve practically taken over the entire bathroom vanity with your things,” he replied. “You’ve taken over both drawers and the medicine cabinet. I don’t even have room for my toothbrush anymore.”

“Don’t be silly,” she argued. “It’s not that bad!”

“Isn’t it?” he continued. “I used to have one whole half of the bedroom closet, but now I only have half of that and everything I own is shoved way over to the side to accommodate your outfits and shoes.”

“That’s not -” She stopped herself once she realized that what he’d said was true, so he decided to go in for the kill.

“The only thing I have left that I can call truly my own is this desk,” he said. “This one tiny desk in this entire house, and it’s hardly big enough for the laptop and printer, let alone anything I might want to display on it, so what makes you think there’s room for a plant?”

She scowled and pointed at the plant. “It fits right on the corner, and it’s not in your way.”

“That’s not the point,” he retorted. “The point is that it’s my desk, not yours, and you can’t just take it over like you did the rest of the house.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not ‘taking over’ your desk! It’s just a plant!”

“Prove it,” he challenged. “Plant it elsewhere.”

She sighed heavily. “Fine! But can I just leave it there until I find another place for it?”

He sighed, too. “Fine. Just so long as you find another place for it.”

“I will,”‘ she irritably replied.

“Good!” he curtly replied.

“Good,” she echoed and stormed off.

It was still there the next day.

“I thought you were going to move it?” he asked her the moment she walked by.

She thought she could just sneak past. His face was plastered to the screen, pouring over figures, ruining his eyes. But some sixth sense warned him of her presence and without even pulling himself away from the screen, he threw the question at her, and she stopped dead in her tracks.

“I’m looking for somewhere to put it,” she replied. “Can I just leave it there for a little while?”

“No,” he said, certain that if he gave her an inch, she would surely take a mile. “Find a spot for it today.”

“I’m too busy today,” she honestly replied. “Can it wait until tomorrow?”

He sighed. “Okay, but I’m not moving it for you. Find a place for it, or it goes in the trash.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine!”

“Fine,” he replied.

It was still there a week later.

She’d had an early doctor’s appointment, and he couldn’t confront her about it, so he did what he had done for the past week. He ignored it. Or tried to. But as the day progressed, his eyes strayed to it, and he noticed that the leaves were withered. He stuck his finger in the pot and felt dry soil.

“God damn it,” he muttered. “She can’t even water it?”

He eyed it disdainfully. They’d already argued about it several times. If she wasn’t going to move it, the least she could do was water it. It would serve her right if it died because of her neglect. She didn’t even care enough to find a better place for it, like maybe somewhere in the sun. He was ready to let it wither away just to teach her a lesson. Maybe then, she might actually move it, albeit to the trash can. He glared at it and finally sighed, got up, and fetched it a drink of water, carefully pouring it in so that it didn’t overflow. The soil drank greedily, and he thought the plant smiled. Fine. He wasn’t going to let it die because of her. But she had to take responsibility for it soon, or else.

When she got home, they had a horrible fight over it that sent her crying to the bedroom. It was a big over-reaction to a spat over a houseplant.

“Did you find a place for the plant?” he asked as she walked past behind him the following day.

“I’m busy,” she replied. “I’ll do it later.”

She didn’t.

“When are you going to water your plant?” he asked the next day when he just happened to glance up and see her by the window.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she just walked away, and he wasn’t going to repeat himself, so he watered it himself, just enough to wet the soil and keep it alive another day.

“Are you going to find another place for the plant?” he asked as he passed her, lounging on the couch a few days later.

Her arm draped over her eyes, she muttered, “I’m tired. I’ll do it later.”

It was still there the next day.

“Are you ever going to water this thing?” he snapped a few days later, feeling like a starting an argument.

She just shook her head and said, “It looks fine. I’m going to lie down for a while.”

It wasn’t fine, and he ended up watering it himself. Again. And it repaid him by growing vines that left the pot and spread across the desk, encroaching on his workspace.

“Can you please find a place for it today?” he testily demanded when he moved some papers on his desk and nearly knocked it to the floor. It and its pot had grown significantly, thanks solely to him, and there was hardly any room to spread out his stuff anymore.

“I’ll try,” she sighed heavily, but then lumbered away. It was still there the next morning.

It became a daily routine. He would ask, and she would prevaricate. He would grow increasingly more annoyed, and she would grow increasingly more depressed, until he finally figured out that something else was bothering her and asked what it was, and when she finally told him, the placement and care of houseplants became the least of their concerns.

“You really should get rid of her things,” his sister said after everyone else had left.

He nodded, unable to speak without choking. They sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by dozens of casseroles, pies, and assorted leftovers. He’d deliberately avoided alcohol, but she had a last swallow of scotch in her glass. Her husband was driving, and at the moment was bringing their car around. They’d had to park down the block, and he’d said he’d honk when he got there.

“You don’t want to be reminded of her like that,” she advised. “Not right now, anyway.”

He nodded. It had been so sudden. Too sudden. The doctors had told them that she had longer to live. They’d lied.

A honk from outside brought her to her feet. Putting a hand on his shoulder, she quietly offered, “Call me if you need anything.”

He nodded, but he didn’t have the will to lift his head or to see her out. After the car pulled away, silence rang loudly throughout the house.

It took a long time to build up the energy and still longer to make the decision, but he finally sat down at his desk after finishing the monumental task. He didn’t bother with auctions or online sales. Everything went to resale shops, and what one wouldn’t take, another did. He didn’t even bother with calling ahead. He just hauled everything with him wherever he had to go. But it was still hard and he didn’t even know how he’d managed to get it done.

Everything of hers was gone. Like she had never been there. As if she had never existed. The closet was all his now. The bathroom vanity, too. Everything was his. Then he noticed the plant. The plant that had grown bigger with watering, requiring that he buy it a bigger pot so that it could take up even more of his personal space. It was hers, and it had to go, like all the rest of her things. That’s what was supposed to happen, right?

He stared at the pot for God only knew how long, as every argument over it rang in his ears. He hated the stupid thing. He hated being the one stuck caring for it. He hated how the vines crawled everywhere, and he hated that, no matter how many times he brushed the desk off, dirt still somehow leapt from the pot and scattered all over the place. He wanted to grab it and chuck it into the garbage bin, and maybe he’d rip it apart just for good measure. He would do it, too. That would serve it right for all the things he had to do for it just because she wouldn’t!

He stared at it.

The plant was withered. He’d forgotten all about it. He hadn’t even been at the desk in a very long time. Even the watering can, which he bought just because he was sick and tired of using a perfectly good glass every time the damn thing was thirsty, was dry. He got up, refilled the can, and gave the plant a little drink, just enough to start it on the road to recovery. And he sat again, staring at it, waiting for the leaves to uncurl again.

As he waited, silence rang loudly in his ears. The plant took up a third of the desk, encroaching on his personal space. He really missed that.

Tree

I thought it was just an ordinary tree.

It wasn’t very tall. Just a fair-sized tree, great for sitting under to get out of the sun, or for hiding behind, which is what I thought the instant I saw it. They wouldn’t find me there, at least not right away, or maybe not at all. If anything, I could get out of sight for a bit, get my bearings, maybe even figure out my next step. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had the feeling that no one ever bothered to look at it, even though it was the only one along that sidewalk practically in the middle of nowhere, so it had to be the perfect place to hide until something better came along.

I wasn’t too far from right. I just didn’t know it yet.

I ducked behind the trunk just as they clattered around the corner like a gang of Keystone Kops in a barely controlled skid. I almost laughed at how they bumped into each other, knocking one of them to the street while the others clung to each other for balance. Then it was all shoving and homophobic slurs until the leader bullied them into a loose resemblance to order and barked, “Well, what are you waiting for? Find him!”

“Nobody runs away when I’m mugging them,” he shouted to the heavens as the gang broke apart and scrambled in all directions, and suddenly the tree wasn’t the best hiding place, after all.

I flattened my back against the rough bark and tried not to hyperventilate. Some of them were headed in my direction, and the trunk wasn’t going to keep them from spotting me. I had no choice but to run, except they were too close for me to get a good start. They would catch me in an instant. Panicking, I pressed against the tree, wishing that I could just melt inside it, and suddenly, I was falling backwards.

My backside hit a very hard, smooth floor and I sat stunned for a moment, not from any injury sustained but from sheer flabbergast. Before I even looked around, I knew that I was in a vastly spacious and very likely extravagant room, judging by the shiny marble under my keister. In front of me, set like the portal of an ancient temple, was the biggest and thickest set of double doors that I have ever seen, slowly swinging shut on the area I had just accidentally vacated. Some primal instinct screamed not to let the doors close, and panicking again, I scrambled to get on my feet to prevent it and watched as they thudded together before I could take one step. Then I knew why those instincts had kicked in. There were no door handles on that side. I was trapped.

Although grateful for the momentary relief from pursuing gangsters, I had no idea how I was going to get out of there, or where there even was. It was impossible, but somehow, I had stumbled into… somewhere… without any memory of it. Surely, I hadn’t fallen into the tree. I could almost wrap my arms around its trunk, and the room was much bigger than that. I had to have hit my head or gotten beaten so badly by those punks that I wandered in a daze until waking up in that place. Except that, when I felt my face, it didn’t hurt, and I found no cuts or bumps that weren’t there before, and I didn’t ache anywhere except my tailbone. I had no idea what to make of it, but since I was still staring in amazement at the doors, I decided to look around at where I ended up. Maybe seeing it would present some clue, or jog a memory, or something.

I nearly fell back to the floor in amazement. The place was bigger than I had imagined. That single room was as wide and tall as a house, with a high vaulted ceiling and a catwalk that split the height around the entire perimeter, sometimes once, sometimes twice. Three different stairs accessed the levels from three different points, and passages exited each level in several places, while in the center of the floor, sitting wide and squat and obviously the piece that tied the entire room together, was something that looked like a seven-sided, high-tech mushroom with buttons, switches, dials, levers, and various other gadgets plastered willy-nilly all over it, in the center of which was a wide cylinder with brilliantly glowing flat crystals inside it, half of them jutting up from the mushroom, the other half hanging down from above, and looking like mismatched teeth. The entire place was darkly decorated in a style I can only describe as a science fiction faux pas, with the round passages looking like something from Star Trek. And somehow, whoever decorated made it work.

It was so weird that I ran to the doors and even examined them for hidden handles, but finding none, I turned back to the amazing sight. Somehow, I had found myself in some eccentric’s house, some very strange eccentric’s house, and I was trapped there. There was only one thing that I could do.

“Hello?” I called out, trying to be polite. There was no use in alarming them, so I added, “I’m sorry for intruding! If you don’t mind opening the doors, I’ll be on my way!”

The room was not conducive to acoustics. My voice barely carried, even though there were enough hard surfaces to make it an echoing nightmare. I waited for a reply, but no one answered, and I blamed the room. So, I tried again.

“Hello?” I called louder. “Hello! Look, I know this is going to sound weird, but I got trapped in your house somehow and I just want to get out. Can you help me with that?”

Again, I received no reply. Not even an echo of my own voice. They were either the rudest people I have ever encountered, or they weren’t home. But that didn’t make sense. Why would they leave their doors open for just anyone to stumble through? Didn’t they care that they were practically asking to get burglarized? Unless they didn’t, or they didn’t answer because they were scared. In that case, I expected the police to arrive at any minute. There was no way a place like that didn’t get top priority on the police to-do list. The problem was, I couldn’t explain my presence or how I got there. As far as anyone else knew, I was a burglar, and I had much better things to do with my time than sit in a jail cell waiting for my day in court. And as I had no explanation for being there that any judge would believe, I was looking at some serious involuntary vacation. I had to get out of there before the coppers showed up. That meant convincing the people that lived there to let me go.

“Look, I’m sorry for intruding,” I called, louder still just in case the acoustics were really to blame. “I didn’t do it on purpose! I don’t even know how it happened! I might have hit my head or something, because I don’t remember walking in! I just want to go home.”

I was met once again by silence. I couldn’t believe it. No one was that rude, or that callous. My pleas should at least have brought someone out to challenge my claims, and yet I remained alone, so I was leaning towards the possibility that no one was home. But just in case I was wrong, I kept talking. Maybe something I said would bring them out.

Meanwhile, I had decided to find my own way out, but instead of poking my nose into those passages right away, I decided to check out the centerpiece first. The place was so fantastic that only a rich person could afford it, and rich people tended to automate their houses in the most pretentious ways. And since the high-tech mushroom was the only thing there that had any hardware, I decided to search its clutter for anything like a door control.

I felt like a monkey in the cockpit of a jetliner. There were so many different controls, too many to figure out, but still, I knew I had to try. As I stared in awe at all the toggles, buttons, switches, doodads and gizmos, I called out, “I’m not trying to steal anything! I’m just looking for a way to open the doors, that’s all! But if you want me out of here faster, just come on down and help me out! I won’t hurt you! I promise!

“Oh, good job, idiot,” I chastised myself the instant it hit me. “That’s what serial killers always say just before the slaughter begins.

“Look,” I felt obligated to add, “I’m not here to kill anyone, okay? I’m just -!”

I stopped myself before I dug my hole any deeper. Certain now that the owner thought I was a serial killer, I concentrated instead on finding the door control. But nothing was labeled “Door Control”. There were lots of labels, most that didn’t make any sense unless they were jokes, but nothing that said it opened or closed the doors.

“What did you expect?” I asked myself. “It’s probably just a piece of art.”

But it was a weird piece of art, and it had the air of being a working piece of art. Lights blinked in patterns. Monitors showed readouts. Gauge needles twitched. The mushroom was controlling something or at least looked like it was. And if it was hooked up to the house in some way, it had to be connected to the doors, too, or so I reasoned. It only made sense. And without anyone stepping forward to either help or hinder me, I started flipping switches, beginning with a line of them at the top of a panel.

“I’m flipping switches,” I called out to anyone listening. “If your lights are turning on and off, then come stop me!”

I gave them the courtesy of waiting for their arrival, and when no one came, I began turning and twisting things and even found a plunger of some sort to pump in and out. I worked my way slowly around the mushroom moving things at random until I came to a large lever that seemed familiar. I’d seen something like it before, maybe in a documentary, I couldn’t remember, but I had the distinct impression that something like it had been used to open a door. It wasn’t labeled, but that didn’t matter. I pulled it back, and alarms immediately went off.

The whole room flashed as once-hidden lights played across the ceiling and ran along the catwalks. The cylinder in the center of the mushroom became brighter as the crystals inside undulated up and down in a chewing motion. It was the weirdest burglar alarm I’d ever heard of, and it wasn’t helping my trespassing case any. Thinking that it had to be the lever that started it, I threw the one I had just pulled the opposite way, hoping that would turn everything off, and suddenly everything went back to the way it was. The running lights vanished. The crystals stopped gnawing. And I owed the owners an explanation.

“Sorry,” I called. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to do that!”

I would have said more, but I immediately forgot what I was going to say when the doors opened. I couldn’t believe it, but I’d accidentally done it. Or the owners had, just to get rid of me. Either way, I was free, so I bolted out before I could get into even worse trouble.

And stopped short in an arid desert.

“What the -?” That wasn’t there before. I was sure of it. I was visiting a small English village, not the Sahara. I looked around, but all the way to the horizon stretched endless sand dunes broken occasionally by a tiny tuft of some plant. The sky looked weird, too. The clouds were strangely wispy and the blue between just a bit too green. I definitely didn’t remember any of that before waking in the strange house. In fact, I could have sworn that I had glimpsed the same street where the punks were looking for me just before the doors closed earlier. At least I didn’t have to worry about them anymore, or the police coming to get me. It would take hours for either of them to arrive. But I had to find out where I was. My plane ticket was only good for England. So, I turned to go back inside and nearly fell over again.

There was the tree. The exact same one that I had hid behind. Now, I am not a tree expert. Wasn’t then and still am not. But this one was distinct for its bark and leaves, and I could have picked it out of a line-up. And there it was, planted in the middle of a desert where no tree had any business being. And in the trunk facing me was a vertical rectangle with impossible dimensions, too thin to squeeze through and yet wide enough for two people abreast, beyond which was the room that I had just left.

I staggered back in amazement. I glanced all around me to confirm that I was indeed in a desert. I even felt the scorching heat as the wind blew past me. And I looked on either side of the tree for signs of the enormous mansion before walking completely around it. It was just a tree. The same tree from that tight little block back in that quaint little English village, right across from the alley that the punks had chased me through. And it had an impossibly huge room inside it.

And I was completely lost. More so than I was earlier. I wracked my brain trying to make sense of things, but nothing clicked. I would have remembered if I was in a desert at any time. I should have remembered how I got into that weird house. I might have been able to justify either of those things, but not the tree or the impossible opening. That completely baffled me.

I would have gone insane trying to figure it out if something hadn’t distracted me. A large black shape began to crest one of the dunes from the far side. It looked like a vehicle, maybe a dune buggy, but there were weird claw-like things jutting from the sides and what looked like a gun mount pointing forward over the roof, and suddenly, wondering how I got there became much less important. If that was a military vehicle, I had the sneaking suspicion that I didn’t want to be seen by it, but the only place to hide was behind, or in, the tree, which stuck out like a sore thumb. The decision wasn’t hard. I would rather be inside where it was cool. At least I would be comfortable when they came for me.

I peeked around the tree to check on the vehicle before ducking into shelter and couldn’t believe my eyes. It wasn’t a vehicle. The thing that topped the dune was a gigantic scorpion, and it had spotted me.

I wasted no time. I expected to barely squeeze through the gap but instead raced through with unanticipated ease, so much ease that I careened uncontrollably through the room and into the mushroom. That was a blessing, though. After a frantic search, I located what I hoped was the alarm control and threw it. It had opened the doors earlier, so naturally I assumed it would close them, too. As expected, the doors closed and the lights flashed alarmingly. The crystals gnashed together in the cylinder, but this time a ponderous groan filled the air. It sounded like a bunch of arthritic old men trying to put on socks. Thinking that I had broken something, I threw switches randomly, trying to get the groaning to stop, and the room stomped.

That’s what it felt like. The room lifted itself like an elevator then slammed itself down again, throwing me off balance. I stumbled away from the controls but quickly corrected myself, and just as I was about to wonder if I had broken something very expensive, the doors whirred open.

They whirred. And of course, they did. They were on motors, after all. But I hadn’t heard them earlier, so I knew that I had done something wrong. I went over to check them, even though I wasn’t a door expert, either. If it was something simple that took just a little oiling, I might be able to affect temporary repairs. If I could find any oil, that is. But if it was anything worse, I would never be able to pay it off. I had to know what it was, either way. But I had to be wary of that huge scorpion, so I approached cautiously, and saw rainforest outside.

“This is too weird…” I whispered to myself, peering incredulously through the opening. Humid air and the smell of dense vegetation wafted in, and I felt giddy breathing it in. Thick ferns stood right in the doorway and over them more ferns with wider leaves blocked the view of everything behind them. They were lit by the lights in the room, the ones that didn’t come on just to alarm everyone, and I had the impression that it was night, although there was nothing visible to prove it. Anything could have been hidden behind the wall of vegetation, and I was in no mood for more surprises, so I flipped the lever again to close the doors and put up with the flashing lights and groaning once more.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the lever. Something very strange was happening. It felt like I was trapped inside some sort of magic mansion and that lever was the key. Then I saw it. A button marked, “Intercom.” So, I pressed it, expecting that I would finally speak to the owner of that insane place.

“Hello.”

That one polite little word scared me out of my wits, and I whipped around towards the source. I hadn’t heard her sneak up on me. She was short and blond, with a long lavender coat over a rainbow t-shirt and matching pants, and on her head was a cute little straw hat with tiny flowers and a little bit of veil. She smiled at me in a peculiar way, like she could afford to be friendly because she was the smartest and most capable person in the room, while simultaneously making the place feel very comfortable, and I knew right away that I could trust her. I took a moment to steady myself from the abrupt scare before saying, “Are you the owner?”

She looked up and to the left as if politely telling me that that was the stupidest question she had ever heard, then told me, “I am the interface.”

I thought I’d misheard her. “The… what?”

She smiled, cocked her head cutely, and pointed daintily at the button I had just pressed. I had read it wrong. It hadn’t said, “Intercom.” It said, “Interface.”

And then I looked at her. Really looked at her. She was bright and shimmered slightly, like the rebroadcast of an old CRT television over digital media, and although completely three-dimensional, I could finally see that she wasn’t a person. At least, a person that was in the room with me. She was decidedly translucent.

“You’re a hologram?” I asked. She must have been loaded to afford an intercom like that.

“I am the capsule’s interface,” she loftily replied. “And you are not supposed to be here.”

“No kidding!” I couldn’t help the sarcasm. After all, I’d been trapped in there for a while. “I’ve been trying to tell you that! Now, can you just please let me out of here so I can get back to my hotel room?”

She smiled in a polite form of irritation and pointed daintily to the doors.

I shook my head. “Oh, no! No, nonononono! I already tried that and I ended up in a desert and a jungle, neither of which, I suspect, are anywhere near England! So, if you don’t mind showing me the real way out of your little funhouse, I’ll be on my way!”

“Oh!” The lady perked up, suddenly sprouting the brightest smile. “You’re from England?”

Way to stay on topic, I grumbled to myself but didn’t dare say it. And before I could think of anything wittier to say, she suddenly frowned and remarked, “But you sound American.”

Ah, I noted. One of them. She probably expected me to be packing heat, too. Out loud, I said, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

She shrugged in a pert little way. “No one’s perfect.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t try. “Can you please show me the real way out of here?”

“The capsule’s main portal is the only egress,” she chirped, sounding like a chipper version of Alexa. “Accessible, of course, from any corridor via dimensional intertransition.”

That made me peer at her curiously. She was weird enough already, and now, she sounded like she was reading from a technical manual. But I quickly decided that it didn’t matter, since I wasn’t ever going to see her again once I made my escape from that place, so I smiled and nodded a lot and then put on my confused face when the realization hit me.

“Are you sure that’s the only way out?” I asked, keeping desperation from my voice. “Because that out there sure doesn’t look like a quaint little road in Cottingham!”

“Well,” she said in lofty annoyance, even raising her nose at me, “If you hadn’t been spinning knobs and flipping switches willy-nilly, it would still be a quaint little road in Cottingham, wouldn’t it?”

I had no answer for that, although I should have suspected that monkeying around with the instruments might have had something to do with my current dilemma. But how was I supposed to know that? I thought that stupid mushroom was just an art piece!

“Okay, so this thing changes the scenery out there,” I carefully replied to show my understanding as I gestured at the high-tech mushroom. “Can you make it let me out?”

She frowned at me as if I was a very slow child. “You do realize where you are, don’t you?”

“I honestly don’t care,” I replied, although that was a lie. I’d never even heard of such a place before, much less been in one, and I was curious how they pulled their tricks. But at the same time, I couldn’t wait to get out of there, even if it meant running into that gang again. At least, they were something that I understood. “Just let me out.”

She pointed at the lever. “That’s the door control.”

“Not out there,” I argued. “The quaint little road in Cottingham!”

She sighed prettily in exasperation, even deflating in a cute manner. Her entire demeanor was starting to annoy me.

“Well, you should have thought about that before you played around with the console,” she scolded, her thin blond brows knit angrily.

“How was I supposed to -?” I stopped. It was useless arguing about it. Instead, I took a deep breath and as politely as I could asked, “Could you come out here and help me, please?”

She scowled, pondering my request as if it was also the stupidest thing she had ever heard, then finally said, “I’m right here. However, I cannot interact with capsule controls unless authorized.”

I couldn’t believe it. “What? After all that jabbering, you’re not going to help me?”

Her scowl grew impatient. “I cannot interact with capsule controls without the proper authorization!”

“I thought you owned the place,” I hastily pointed out. It must have been too hasty because her scowl intensified.

“I am the interface,” she haughtily explained. “I activate only to supply ready information or to take temporary control in the event of crew incapacitation.”

She peered at me irritably. “Or if someone pushes the button.”

I felt like I should apologize to her, but I was in no mood for prolonging our acquaintance with the time that would take. And I did need her help, even if she refused to do anything about it, so I made her an offer.

“Okay, so you can’t touch the controls,” I said, trying not to sound too anxious. She could, after all, refuse the offer. I had to put all my hope into her wanting to get rid of me as much as I wanted to leave. “Could you tell me what to do so I can work them for you?”

She rolled her eyes up and to the right in deep thought, pouting prettily. After an interminable amount of time, she finally looked at me, her brows raised, and addressed me like I was in preschool.

“Do you know your primary temporal coordinates?” she asked through a sweet smile.

I knew those words, or so I thought, but strung together like that, they didn’t make any sense. “My primary -?”

She sighed heavily, throwing her head back, and I saw just how much I was annoying her. She didn’t even try to be pretty. Instead, she just let the complaint fly, and it was rather refreshing to see. “How do you less advanced species even make it through the day?”

Certain that was some insult against men, I still let it pass. It just wasn’t worth it. Instead, I kept my cool and asked, “You want to tell me what primary temporal coordinates are?”

“Everyone exists within a chronal period called…” she began to lecture but stopped and eyed me critically, like I was a bug under a microscope. Discarding the topic with an annoyed flick of her fingers, she said, “You know what? Never mind. What is today’s date?”

I felt insulted but I didn’t know why. Hastily telling myself that it didn’t matter, I asked, “Why?”

She raised an eyebrow, as if to say that I should just do it without asking stupid questions, or something to that effect, so I told her and she nodded sagely.

“Please enter the following coordinates,” she said. “Two seven six nine zed gamma eight …”

I got lost after that. There were too many numbers, and she spoke way too fast, and I could swear that she just threw in letters to confuse me, and some of the letters weren’t even letters. Well, pi isn’t, as far as I know. I glanced at the mushroom and back at her while she rattled off somewhere around twenty or thirty things, then she stopped to scowl at me.

“Aren’t you going to input the data?” she demanded.

I glanced between the mushroom and her a couple more times before I asked, “Where?”

She deflated in a huge, exasperated sigh and plodded moodily to a section of the console that had a few dozen switches on it, as well as a digital readout at the top and a few knobs and toggles at the bottom. She haughtily indicated the entire panel and began saying “numbers” again. “Two seven six nine zed gamma eight delta…”

I rushed to the controls to put them in as fast as possible, but hesitated when I saw the switches. They only went up or down and clearly were not marked in any way whatsoever. Neither were the knobs and toggles, and the digital display, which already glowed with numbers and squiggles, had only nine places to populate, far short of the dozens she had rattled off. I stared at it like a caveman for a bit, and the flashing lights didn’t help my thought processes any, before turning to her with a scowl of my own.

“What?” she irritably sighed, eyeing me critically.

I gestured at the panel with both hands in a clearly questioning way, but she only wrinkled her nose in cute annoyance, and it made me so angry that I snapped, “How?”

“How… what?” Then, it dawned on her what I meant, and she sighed again, shook her head, and tsked. “Millions of years of evolution and you still don’t know how to input temporal coordinates?”

“I missed that class in high school,” I dryly replied. “Now, will you please -?”

Thankfully, I didn’t need to ask twice. She passed her hand from one toggle to another and to each knob and switch, explaining how they worked and how they affected each other and I’m happy to say that after what felt like an eternity, when she was all done with the lecture, I finally understood everything even less than when I first laid eyes on the panel. And she wasn’t happy about it.

“Just do everything I say,” she grumbled, then pointing a finger at each individual instrument as she spoke, she walked me very slowly and condescendingly through the process. Somewhere along the way she stopped to remind me, “You do realize that if you hadn’t run roughshod all over the controls, you wouldn’t be in this predicament right now, don’t you?”

I swallowed the very colorful response I had intended to give and waited for her to continue the instruction, and after a short wait for my reply, she tilted her head in a cute display of triumph and moved on to the next instrument. It was excruciating, and after a while I think she got as bored as I was, but she kept going and my mind started drifting even as my hands kept working. I blamed the flashing lights. They were getting quite hypnotic.

“Now,” she suddenly said louder than usual, waking me from my trance. “Move to this panel and throw this switch.”

I did as she requested and there was no change in anything. After a few seconds, though, the room jumped again, the flashing lights ceased flashing, and normal lighting resumed. The lady sighed, gave me a satisfactory smile, and said, “There. Now, get out.”

I glanced at the doors apprehensively. “Are you sure?”

She heaved a huge sigh. “I am the interface. I don’t make mistakes.”

“I’ll bet,” I grumbled, but as much as I doubted her word, I still moved over to the door control. As soon as I grabbed it, though, I hesitated. “But are you sure? The last time I stepped out, there was a giant scorpion.”

“”Ah,” she replied. “That would be the Ordovician period, approximately four hundred sixty-seven million years prior to your temporal coordinates. No, I have not returned you to that era, and yes, I am certain that if you have input the coordinates correctly, you are back where you belong.”

That insult I couldn’t let slide. “What do you mean? You told me what to do. You watched me put them in.”

She nodded, but there was a shadow of doubt in her eyes.

“What?” I had to know if that shadow meant that I was going to walk into something worse than giant scorpions.

“As with any… well, unenlightened species, such as yours,” she said slowly, picking a hell of a time to choose her words carefully. It was making me nervous. “There is always the possibility that an element of chaos might factor into the equation and cause the results to become skewed and…”

I couldn’t stand the prevaricating any longer. “You think I screwed up, don’t you?”

“You had dozed off,” she pointed out.

“You saw that, did you?” My ears burned, but I chose to ignore it. “But you watched everything I did. You would know if I made a mistake.”

“I am the interface,” she indignantly replied. “It is not my place to correct those that I inform.”

That made no sense. “Then, how do I know I did it right?”

She lifted her nose indignantly. “I do not know. I am programmed to work with experienced pilots, not untrained intruders.”

I tried not to let that bother me, since it wouldn’t matter for long anyway, and very nicely asked, “Did I do it right?”

“How should I know?” she indignantly replied. “It isn’t my role to watch every little thing that you do.”

I sighed heavily. There was only one way to find out, and anything was better than hanging out with her any longer. I threw the door control and the doors hummed open. Beyond them was a cobblestone street with a fancy horse-drawn carriage clattering down it. The people striding casually on the far side wore Victorian era dresses and suits, the women holding parasols in the light drizzle. It smelled like manure and smoke, much of which lay in the street or was smudged on the brick walls of the tightly packed buildings.

“That is not Cottingham,” I remarked.

“It isn’t even your temporal coordinates,” the lady agreed. I turned to scowl at her, but she beat me to it by scowling at me first. “Are you sure you listened to my every instruction?”

I lifted a brow high but could think of nothing to say. So, she helpfully added, “You were dozing off, after all.”

“I heard everything you said,” I snapped, irritated at the accusation. Then it hit me and I turned towards the doors, gasping incredulously. “People.”

I took an unconscious step towards the doors, gaping at the scene. The carriage had already rattled past, but the people were still in view. Some of the drizzle was even blowing inside.

“Wet,” was all my brain could process at the moment. “Stinks.”

“Are you all right?”

Her innocent question snapped me back to normal. Well, almost normal. I whipped around to confront her. “That’s not a funhouse!”

She scowled in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

I glanced through the doors in alarm and back to her. “That’s not some weird turntable, is it?”

She paused to absorb that, then her brows lifted curiously. “Is that what you thought?”

I looked at the doors again. The giant scorpion could have been an animatronic in an over-sized sand box, and the ferns might just have been a wall of ferns, and she could even have faked the heat or humidity, but there was no way she paid actors to just walk around a Victorian set all day on the off chance that she would want to see that kind of scenery, much less keep a horse and carriage to complete it, and I didn’t care how much money she had to waste. Something much weirder was going on, something that I just couldn’t wrap my head around.

“What’s happening here?” I demanded, getting more nervous by the second. “Where am I, and who are you?”

“I am the interface,” she replied as calmly as ever. “And you are in a Type Eighty Temporal Reconnaissance Capsule.”

I didn’t take the time to process that. Instead, I pointed out the door and demanded, “And that?”

“That is London, circa 1666,” she replied, still calm as ever. “And I’m afraid that is as close as you will come to your correct temporal coordinates. Good-bye!”

The End

“Becker to LaSalle,” the suit’s communicator blurted. “What’s your status, Jason?”

LaSalle tore his gaze off the prisoner and looked at his wrist. “Sorry to report, sir, but you might be leaving without us.”

The communicator paused.

“We have a few minutes left, Jason,” Becker assured him. “We’ll think of something.”

Becker glanced at his crew, who all stared at him with stoic expressions. They each knew they were doomed and were putting on a brave front. He nodded at them gravely.

“We’ll keep working on our end,” LaSalle replied to the communicator. “But, sir, you need to return to the ship when time’s up!”

“We’re not leaving you,” Becker immediately replied.

LaSalle glanced at his crew again and saw their answer. “I don’t think you’ll have any other choice, sir. The ship comes first.”

The communicator paused, then Becker’s voice sounded grim. “I’m recommending you all for commendation.”

LaSalle took a deep breath. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Oh, for crying out loud! They either sold the act a bit too well, or it wasn’t an act! He glared at the pad in his hand. It was never wrong, he reminded himself. But this time, maybe it wasn’t right, either.

“I was only supposed to repair the nitrogen generator today,” he griped, lifting the pad to eye level again. “Not crash into a sun!

“All right, Bitsy, you say there isn’t a sun in our path,” he growled at the pad. “Fine! How do you know there isn’t one?”

“Please restate the inquiry, the pad replied.

For the love of -! He took a moment to compose himself. “All right. What factors do you look for to indicate that a sun is in the ship’s path?”

“There are several factors that indicate the presence of stellar masses,” the pad recited. “Dramatic increase in gravimetric attraction, increase in the level of electromagnetic radiation in the visible and non-visible spectrum, intense thermal increase, catastrophic coronal-!”

“Okay, okay,” he snapped. “That’s enough! So, do you detect any of those things in the area?”

The pad paused. “Sensors detect intense gravimetric increase. Electromagnetic radiation increasing beyond lifeform tolerance levels. Thermal readings above ship’s recommended tolerance level. Indications of coronal discharge -!”

He could barely resist the urge to strangle it as he hissed through tightly clenched teeth, “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Electromagnetic radiation levels increasing beyond -!”

“No!” he shouted at it, startling the aliens. He had everyone’s wide-eyed attention, even orange-head’s, who pointed his weapon with stiff, trembling arms. But he forced himself to ignore them and address the pad instead. “It tells you that we’re crashing into a sun!”

“There are no stellar masses within sensor range.”

“How can that be when you just described one?” he angrily demanded.

The pad paused. “Please restate the -!”

“A sun is a ball of radiation, gravity and light, right?” he demanded.

The pad paused. “Stars are composed of varying percentages of gases, the most common of which are -!”

“Shut up and listen!” He’d had enough of arguing with it. “The readings you sensed outside the ship are from a sun that we are on a collision course with! Now, analyze those readings and tell me where they could have come from!”

The pad paused. “Sensor readings are consistent with those of a type G stellar mass.”

He gritted his teeth and tried to keep his temper. “You mean, a sun?”

“Affirmative,” the pad replied.

“So, if we’re on a collision course with a sun,” he carefully said, doing his best not to snap the pad in half, “Don’t you think you should correct course?”

“There are no stellar masses within sensor range.”

“But you said -!” He immediately clamped his mouth shut. There was no time to argue. He had to outsmart the system, instead. But how?

“Okay,” he said, thinking on the fly, “So there’s some stuff ahead of the ship, right?”

“Please restate -!”

“Never mind!” No time to argue, and no time to waste. “The sensor readings from outside the ship. Do they pose a danger to the ship and its crew?”

“Affirmative,” the pad replied.

“So, don’t you think you should make a course correction away from the danger?” he desperately urged.

The pad paused.

And paused.

It took forever, but it finally said, “Affirmative.”

“Well?” he snapped. “Make the correction!”

“You are not authorized to -!”

“But you are!” he shouted right into its mic. “Make the correction!”

The pad paused.

“Affirmative.”

The deck lurched slightly as drive systems engaged in a sharp maneuver, but the sensation was brief and gravity plating kicked in soon afterward. LaSalle and his crew glanced all around, wide-eyed, then smiles broke out amongst them.

“Becker to LaSalle,” LaSalle’s suit blurted. “I don’t know what you did down there, but it worked! The ship’s steering clear of the gravity well!”

“Yes, sir,” LaSalle said though a broad smile. “But I can’t take any credit for it.”

LaSalle looked at his prisoner, but he wasn’t looking back. He stared at the deck for a while before taking a big breath, then he sauntered over to orange head. He peered curiously at the weapon still gripped tightly in the alien’s trembling hand, trying not to meet those staring, bugged-out eyes. They were pretty alarming.

He held out his hand to orange head, indicating the weapon with a significant glance. “May I?”

Orange head glanced at LaSalle, who shrugged and gave him an encouraging nod, so the alien eased his grip on the weapon and handed it over.

He looked it over carefully. A simple trigger mechanism. Apparently, a standard no matter which planet you came from. He tossed the pad to the deck and in front of their stunned eyes, aimed and pulled the trigger. The pad exploded in a mass of very colorful and very satisfying sparks.

He turned to orange head, handing the weapon back, butt-first. “I’ve been wanting to do that all day.”

“Got it!” the frail young ensign cried in triumph, holding up the pad in her hand like a trophy. Her smile faded significantly when she saw everyone staring at her with a curious expression. Pointing at their prisoner, she feebly added, “We… we can talk to him now.”

He was suddenly very dizzy and trembling all over. His legs were so wobbly that he couldn’t stand up much longer. Stumbling to the bulkhead, he planted his arms against it, but they shook so much that they could barely support him. His stomach knotted, and he leaned forward, head down and mouth open, waiting for the vomit to churn up from his gut, gasping for air because it was just so damned hard to breathe! Because he remembered.

“They’re not here, are they?” he muttered, his voice hoarse from a dry throat.

“Please restate the inquiry.”

He didn’t have to turn around to know what he would see, but he did anyway and immediately stumbled backward against the bulkhead. He was alone on the Drive Deck. There was no LaSalle. No young ensign. Not even orange head. And the pad lay on deck where he’d tossed it, still fully functional.

He slid down the bulkhead to the deck, folding his legs to his chest. “But they were, weren’t they?”

“Please restate the inquiry.”

“They were here,” he muttered, remembering. Finally remembering. “They were just exploring the ship, and you murdered them.”

The pad paused. “Records indicate Security Services assessed a danger to this vessel and eliminated the threat.”

“You killed them,” he muttered, feeling nothing inside. “They were just looking around, and you killed them.”

“Records indicate Security Services assessed a danger to this vessel and eliminated the threat.”

“Why?” he asked, his throat even dryer. “What did they do?”

“Records indicate intruders initiated a cascade malfunction in cryogenic units resulting in the complete loss of all crew,” the pad replied.

His head dropped to his chest. He didn’t have the strength to hold it up anymore. “Except for me.”

“Affirmative.”

He was working on the nitrogen filters back then, too. Seemed like he was always working on the nitrogen filters. Every damn waking cycle.

“How long?” he murmured. He barely had the strength to ask. Maybe, he didn’t want to hear the answer. But in his heart, he knew it had been ages since he spied on them from the ventilation system as they moved about the ship. They were curious things, so much like him and yet so different. He was on maintenance rotation when it happened. That’s why he wasn’t asleep If the aliens had boarded an hour later, he would have died with the rest of the crew. But he’d been lucky, or so he told himself back then.

It must have happened… what? A hundred sleep cycles ago? Maybe more? He’d lost count. But his memory was still coming back. He slept for a long time between wake cycles, too long according to the pad, although he didn’t yet remember for how long. It would explain why he was so dehydrated when he awoke, why he’d forgotten what had happened before, even the mental breakdown that made him imagine that they were still alive, and that the ship was headed for disaster. The pad had once told him that they were symptoms of prolonged cryogenic sleep, just as it had tried to break him from his delusion by playing along. But he’d forgotten about all of that, until just now.

“Please restate the inquiry.”

He paused. Did it matter? Did it matter whether he slept for days, weeks, or centuries? Did anything matter? He was still alone on the ship, no matter how the pad answered.

“Never mind,” he mumbled.

And he sat there, waiting for Security Systems to lift the bulkheads so he could finish his job and go back to sleep. At the next wake cycle, he would forget everything that had happened anyway. His psychotic episode. The aliens. His loneliness. Everything. Erased, like they had never happened.

It was a small mercy, but it was all he had.

Conundrum

“Henricksen?” LaSalle urged. His tension was leaking through his calm exterior. He either believed his own story about a collision course with the sun, or he was the best actor ever.

While LaSalle edged closer to the young ensign to take a peek at her pad, their prisoner shuffled uneasily from one foot to the other. There was a simple way to figure out if they were telling the truth, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to give away the one advantage he had left. The pad could easily tell him if they were on course or if there was a massive and incredibly energetic obstacle in their way, but it could also potentially give them access to ship’s functions if they managed to force their will on it. They had eluded Security Services, after all. Except… if they could do that, then why couldn’t they access ship’s functions and steer it away from their sun? It wasn’t making any sense.

“Look,” he told the aliens, even though they wouldn’t understand a word, “I don’t know what you want, but if the ship is going to crash into a sun, can’t you do something about it?”

That got LaSalle’s attention. Briefly. “Henricksen?”

She looked up from the pad and directly at their prisoner. “Okay, I need you to tell me who you are and where you came from, and I need you to tell me like I’m only five years old. Got it?”

What a stupid thing to ask! But he sighed heavily, glanced at the weapons still leveled on him, and said, “Look, I’m just a low-level maintenance worker. I specialize in duct work and plumbing. But even I can see that if you’re in a hurry to get off the ship, then asking me these dumb questions isn’t going to get us anywhere. Besides, if you could hide from Security Services, then why can’t you fly the ship to safety? Tell me that, wise guys!”

Okay, probably not a good idea to call his captors names, but at least, according to the fury with which the young ensign tapped her pad, they weren’t able to translate it, yet. But he would have to watch his language once they could.

Their urgency was still troubling, though. They believed what they told him, enough that he was teetering on the edge of believing it, himself. He absently touched the pad, still attached to his belt, making one of the armed aliens twitch.

“What’s that?” the armed alien demanded. He was very pale with orange hair, spots on his face, and wide green eyes that stared unblinkingly. Definitely on high alert, unless that’s what his species always looked like. Security Services would like him, especially the way he stabbed the weapon towards their prisoner like a spear.

“Easy, midshipman,” LaSalle reassured the orange head. “It’s just a compad.”

How did -? Oh. Right. They used them, too.

LaSalle turned to Henricksen. “Any luck?”

She shook her head, biting her lips on the inside, her fingers flying across the pad. She was committed to the bit. A little too committed.

He sighed heavily. It wouldn’t make any difference keeping the pad a secret if they ended up incinerated for it. Besides, they already knew what it was. But before he could take the plunge, LaSalle beat him to it.

“That compad,” he said, pointing at it. “Can it bring up command prompts?”

He didn’t know how else to reply, so he nodded. It was better than dying a fiery death in… what? Fifteen, twenty minutes?

“Could you redirect the ship’s course?” LaSalle asked, trying to keep a lid on his anxiety. “Steer it away from the sun’s gravity well?”

He gave the pad the side-eye. How could he explain that the pad was… problematic at times? Oh, screw it!

“I’ll try,” he replied, pulling the pad from its holder, making the orange head twitch.

“Computer,” he said, eyeing the orange-haired alien warily. “Alter course away from the sun.”

“Command authorization is required for course alteration,” it dutifully replied.

“Henricksen?” LaSalle curtly asked.

“Still working on it, sir,” she said a bit irritably, her eyes glued to her work.

He tried to ignore them. “Even if we’re going to crash into something?”

“Command authorization is required for course alteration,” the pad repeated.

“But we’re going to fly into their sun!” he snapped. A bit too loudly, though, and he took a cautionary glance at orange head to make sure his trigger finger wasn’t getting too itchy.

The pad paused. “Please rephrase the statement.”

“What?” he snapped, directing his full ire on the pad. “I said we’re going to crash into their sun! Can’t you see that?”

The pad paused. “Detecting no stellar mass within sensor range.”

“What?” That couldn’t be! “That can’t be! There must be a sun in our way! The aliens can’t be pretending that well!”

“Detecting no stellar mass within sensor range,” the pad dutifully repeated.

“You’re malfunctioning, then,” he spat. “Take another look and tell me what you see!

“Unless you need command authorization for that, too,” he muttered under his breath.

“Command authorization is not required for access to sensory data,” the pad replied.

“Then show me!” he snapped.

The pad paused. “Please rephrase the inquiry.”

He took a slow, deep breath. It wouldn’t do to throw a temper tantrum in front of armed aliens, especially the orange haired one.

“Scan the surrounding area,” he said in a very controlled tone. “Especially ahead of us, and tell me what you see… uh, detect.”

The pad paused again, and he took another deep breath to maintain his composure. Those pauses were eating up precious time, but there was nothing he could do to prevent them.

“Course clear of all navigational obstacles,” the pad finally reported.

“What?” he demanded, his own anxiety begging him to snap the pad in half. “How? How can that be?”

“Ship’s course was programmed to circumvent all known spatial obstacles,” the pad explained.

“Maybe their sun wasn’t programmed into the system?” he desperately asked. “What then?”

“Navigational controls are programmed to compensate for unknown variables,” the pad replied.

“Then, compensate for that sun!” he ordered.

“No stellar masses detected within sensor range,” the pad replied.

“Henricksen?” LaSalle curtly asked.

“Almost there,” she absently reported, her fingers flying. “… I think…”

“Prove it, Bitsy!” he snapped. “Or do I need ‘command authorization’ to look out the window?”

“Please rephrase the inquiry.”

“Show me what’s out there!” he snapped. “I want to see what’s out there!”

The pad paused, then an image of space popped onto the screen, and he had to swallow the deep melancholy that it invoked. He hated the sight of infinite black space, with no stars or sun. He’d rather have an atmosphere over him and solid ground beneath his feet, but that was pretty much why he was aboard, so he forced his way through his own personal little anxiety to study the screen, and his brows knit together.

“Where is it?” he muttered.

“Please restate -!”

“The sun,” he snapped. “Where’s the sun?”

“There are no stellar masses -!”

“Show me more,” he interrupted. “Show me what’s all around the ship.”

He couldn’t tell if the view shifted or not, until he saw a brief glimpse of the hull pass at the bottom of the screen. The movement made him nauseous, and the external feed took too long to pan left. They were losing precious minutes that way. He had to be smarter about things. “Show me what’s right in our path!”

The image flickered, then showed an image of more endless black. He swallowed hard at the sight. It showed no sun, or any other object, in their path. He glanced at the aliens in confusion. They had been so convincing! Or maybe, he’d been too gullible!

“Are you lying to me?” he demanded. “What did you think you’d get out of me? Command of the ship? I don’t have the authority! I can’t even get this piece of junk to do anything without an argument! So why don’t you tell me what’s really going on and stop lying to me!”

“Henricksen?” LaSalle demanded.

She looked up from her pad and grimly shook her head.

“Lieutenant Woo to LaSalle,” LaSalle’s suit blurted.

LaSalle startled before quickly composing himself. “Go ahead, Woo.”

“Sorry to report, sir,” Woo stiffly said. “All bulkheads are down. We’re sealed in.”

LaSalle momentarily closed his eyes to keep his composure. “Understood. Get back to the group.”

“Aye, sir,” Woo curtly replied.

LaSalle turned to their prisoner. He looked so much like someone in distress that it was impossible to tell if he was lying. “Please, you must help us! Time’s running out!”

Not according to my pad, he wanted to reply. Instead, he swallowed hard. Their act was too convincing. But the pad was never wrong. What was he supposed to do?

“Gods damn it,” he cursed. “Why me? I’m not cut out for this!”