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    Chronon
    Chronon
    Chronon
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    Chronon

    By Harris Tobias

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The scene in front of my visor is dark and murky. Like seeing the world through maple syrup, sort of brown and thick. Moving is slow and plodding. I feel like a deep sea diver at a dangerous depth. The pressure of time above me threatens to squeeze me into jelly. My name is Jay Cramp, I’m a chrono-naut and I’m on a mission.
    Time is thick, thick as soup and the deeper you travel into the past, the heavier and denser it becomes. It has to do with the physics of time. Something scientists have been getting wrong for generations, until now. Now we finally understand that time is particulate in nature. A flowing stream of chronons surround and engulf every instant of reality.
    A single month’s worth of chronons can barely be weighed with any instrument. A year’s worth registers faintly on our most sensitive scales. Five years down, the pressure accumulates to several atmospheres. It’s a logarithmic scale like the one they use for earthquakes. At the depth I’m at now, 46.22 years, it’s like being at the bottom of the Pacific. Time is dense, dangerous and the going is slow. We used to think time was like a river, how naive we were. Time isn’t like that at all.
    I wear armor. You wouldn’t last a nano-second in the past without a chrono-suit. The stresses on frail biology are immense, too severe to survive without protection. The past is as inhospitable as outer space. The weight of it wants to crush you like an egg. Special equipment is needed and even then it’s difficult. The past is not a friendly place.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarris Tobias
    Release dateDec 4, 2011
    ISBN9781465900227
    Chronon
    Author

    Harris Tobias

    Harris Tobias lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of The Greer Agency , A Felony of Birds and dozens of short stories. His fiction has appeared in Ray Gun Revival, Dunesteef Audio Magazine, Literal Translations, FriedFiction, Down In The Dirt, Eclectic Flash, E Fiction and dozens of other publications. His poetry has appeared in Vox Poetica, The poem Factory and The Poetry Super Highway. You can find links to his novels at: http://harristobias-fiction.blogspot.com/

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      Book preview

      Chronon - Harris Tobias

      CHRONONS

      15 Time Travel Stories

      by

      Harris Tobias

      copyright 2011 by Harris Tobias

      Smashwords Edition

      All rights reserved

      INTRODUCTION

      There are few more visited themes in science fiction than that of traveling through time. There's good reason for this, it's fun to think about—so many paradoxes, so many possibilities, so many ways to screw up. It's no wonder every sci-fi writer from H.G. Wells to Ray Bradbury has tried their hands at a story or two. It's such a well explored topic, it's hard to be original. A lot of writers shy away from the subject for just that reason. Well, welcome to Chronon, 15 wholly original takes on the time travel theme. If you're a fan of time travel stories, here are 15 fresh approaches to the genre.

      A chronon is defined as a quantum of time--the smallest possible interval of time. I hope you spend a few of your precious chronons reading this book. If you like it, tell your friends and drop me a line at [email protected].

      Thanks,

      Harris Tobias

      Blue Moon

      The marquee outside the hotel reads Lucy and the Jazztones. I’m Lucy. I’m a lounge singer or rather I was a lounge singer. I’m an old lady now, sick, dying. But when I was younger, I sang at one of the new temporal hotels. One of the fancy ones right on the strip. Time travelers dropped in and stayed a while until they faded back to their own time. It was a big business visiting the past, still is from what I hear.

      They’re an interesting lot these travelers from our future, filled with stories about their eras. The further in the future they’re from, the shorter their stay in our present. That has something to do with the physics of time travel. I don’t pretend to understand any of it. All I know was I was singing jazz numbers five nights a week in the hotel lounge. It was a regular gig and it paid well. There was a steady stream of temps, that’s what we called our temporal visitors, and locals drinking and generally behaving themselves. Some of the patrons were actually listening to my numbers. I could tell because I got a smattering of applause after every song.

      One night a handsome temp about my age came up to the piano and stuffed a hundred dollar bill in the tip jar and asked me to sing Blue Moon for him. It’s an old jazz standby so I smiled and said, sure thing, honey. For a hundred dollars I’d sing Old Mac Donald Had a Farm all night long. So I sang the song for the guy and judging from the applause I didn’t do too bad a job. Anyway, after the set I was sitting at the bar taking a break when the handsome temp comes over and offers to buy me a drink. I get my drinks comped by the house but I didn’t tell him that. He was so good looking and sweet, I let him feel like he was doing me a favor. Sure, why not? I said, It’s your nickel. What’s on your mind?

      Can’t a guy buy a lady a drink without an ulterior motive? he asks.

      In my experience with men there’s always an ulterior motive. I tell him taking a sip of my drink. Maybe it’s different where you come from or should I say when you come from. When is that anyway?

      About thirty three years from now, he says. The name’s Rob by the way, Rob Burns

      Like the poet? I ask.

      He smiled and lifted his drink, Not only beautiful but intelligent too. He looked deep into my eyes and I felt a shiver go down my spine.

      So, Mr. Burns, I said, how are you enjoying our quaint present?

      It’s much as I expected. It was only a generation ago so it’s not all that different from my time. It’s good to see you though. In my time, you’re quite a bit older.

      Well, I hope I aged well. It’s good to know I’ll still be around thirty years from now. Hey, I thought it was against the rules for temps to talk about specifics. You don’t want to screw things up for yourself.

      This was the big danger for time travelers. If they did anything weird or talked too much about their time, they risked altering the time line and not being able to return to it. Do anything to screw up the sequence of cause and effect that leads to the your personal future and you risk not being able to return to it at all. Temps can play at being tourists, hence the temporal hotels, but if they interact too strongly with our present say by robbing a bank or murdering their parents or trying to make a killing in the stock market, anything like that, then a new future is created that simply doesn’t include that version of themselves.

      Some other future is created and the one they came from ceases to exist. Don’t ask me what happens to them, it’s physics and it’s complicated but it has the effect of keeping the temps pretty docile. The final result is temps stick close to the hotels and don’t wander too far afield. It’s a strange thing but nature doesn’t tolerate any paradoxes. Screw around with the past and you change your present. The past is fixed, the future is fluid, something like that anyway.

      Don’t worry, Rob said, we’re going to meet pretty soon anyway.

      Oh yeah, how?

      I can’t tell you. he said giving me the sexiest smile.

      Well, let’s see. You’re about my age...what, 32, 33? So if we’re to meet in a few months, you’ll be two or three years old? A little young for me don’t you think? Rob just smiled that smile of his and sipped his drink.

      Now don’t think for a minute I wasn’t curious because I was. Everyone wants to know their future and here I was face to face with a guy who knew mine. It was rare to meet a temp who knew you personally. Temps avoid that kind of contact. The temptation to tell all is too great and too dangerous. If he warned me not to do something or to do something different, it would change his time line and put him in danger. So he played it cool and didn’t say anymore and I didn’t push him. Break time was over and I had to get back to work.

      There’s a mathematical ratio between how far in the future a temp’s present was and how long he or she could stay in ours. The further the distance between our now and theirs, the shorter the visit. Rob’s thirty year distance gave him about a two day window before his chronons broke down and returned him to his own time; and, providing he hadn’t messed up his future, he’d be back exactly where and when he started.

      Another thing that wasn’t lost on me was that time travel was expensive. It was a plaything of the rich. There wasn’t all that much to be learned visiting the recent past so scientists pretty much gave up on the technology. it became a status symbol for people with money to spend on an expensive vacations. A weekend in Las Vegas thirty years before your time was considered a thrill. I had to assume that Rob had lots of money in his own time. I was happy for him. Money was something I never had.

      I sang another set and, on my break, there was Rob sitting at the bar handing me a drink. I clicked his glass and said, So we’re going to get to know each other pretty soon?

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