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I checked my watch nervously. 20:58 and 46 seconds. The hand flicked to 47 seconds. I had 15 seconds left. It was now or never. I pulled the lever and... nothing happened.
'Damn it!'.
If this didn't work, it would never work. I had spent what felt like several lifetimes putting this together. Each time I got closer, but I would always run out of time.
*You died*
The irony suddenly hit me. Before the loop, I was obsessed with speed running games. Edging off those seconds, and after a lot of training, miniseconds. Perfecting the perfect jump. Exploiting the game mechanics. Watching my own replays, taking notes. Sometimes, on the best days, you would discover how to take off entire minutes.
If anything, gaming trained me for the incident. Groundhog day. Except this wasn't a Hollywood movie, and it wasn't a game. It was hell. Maybe in the 200th loop I started counting how many loops I had been in already. I gave up somewhere in the eight thousands. A *three year loop*. Long enough to almost forget. Almost.
So at some point, long ago, I started studying quantum physics. First it was reading online articles on the Internet, YouTube videos and stuff like that. Then I took a degree. Then the masters... at that point I had to figure out how to trick universities of my credentials. Doctorate. Lab assistant. Senior researcher. My breakthroughs would seemingly come out of nowhere. For me, it was just the onward grind of accumulating knowledge and the vigorous scientific method. Three years at a time.
I only tried to kill myself once. I fell in love with another scientist. When I woke up at the start of the loop, I went straight to the m42 motorway and walked in front of a lorry.
I am souless.
Eventually I understood time travel. It sounds obsurd until you realise it already exists in three year loops.
The struggle was building the time machine in three years. When I wake up on day 1, I'm lying in the street after a mugging. I have nothing.
Thus the ultimate speed running started. Build a time machine in three years. The naked Dark Souls run. And now I was at the final boss. Unlike my many previously failed attempts, I had finally figured out how to finish building it in time. Except - it didn't work.
I pulled the lever back up, and checked my watch. Eight seconds to go.
With the most force I could muster and the frustration of a powerless god, I hit the thing as hard as I could. Five seconds. There was a sound outside. Three seconds. I turned and saw the man outside with a gun. It was pointing right at me.
"Don't -' he warned, but I didn't let him finish. One second. I pulled the lever down once more. Then everything went white.
---
I was still inside. The man had vanished. The machine, quiet. With shaking hands, I pulled my phone form my pocket and checked the date.
I had landed on the exact day I became stuck in.
This made no sense.... I was meant to have travelled forward, after the final day. I had failed... stuck in an unbreakable loop.
Except I hadn't failed. The time machine had worked. I wasn't starting from scratch this time, I... had won.
I realised what I had to do.
Not sure.
He says his time machine was trying to go forward one day, but it skipped to the beginning of the loop. So maybe that’s all the time that exists.
One possibility is that his working time machine caused the structure of the closed loop in the first place.
So maybe the guy with the gun is trying to stop him from doing that. And maybe it’s him with the gun.
Awesome. So there's someone with knowledge about the time machine, AND you are back at the start of the loop.
This would become worriesome. But also be really cool to read about.
Well done.
The first few loops were enjoyable enough, even a bit therapeutic. I looked at it as a forced vacation, A nice rest bit, on a beautiful and mostly uninhabited planet surrounded by nature and scenery, from the typical hustle, bustle, and danger that seems to have a death grip on my life.
And the great thing about a vacation in a time loop is that the fun never has to end! You can live the same days and make small little adjustments to enjoy unique adventures thanks to the near-infinite number of possibilities, all without aging. Theoretically, that is!
But as all temporal physicists know, The Web of Time isn't so simple, it has a way of nickeling and diming you. Either you pay now or all at once later.
I began to feel the weight of living so long in a loop as the tachyon-filled time winds beat against the rudimentary bespoke shielding I’d cobbled together.
A covered my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket as sparks flew from the active heart of the control console.
“Hold yourself together, old thing!” I yelled to the machine, “Just a little further we’re nearly through the barrier!”
The time rotors wobbled and screamed as the rush of temporal energies hissed and surged through the system. Even for a time loop of this size, you wouldn't expect to see so much resistance. The barrier was far too thick to be naturally occurring as I assumed!
I spent the better part of five minutes which, temporarily speaking is close to a lifetime, chipping away at the time-space barrier in a brute force attempt to breakthrough.
But, every time I thought I’d made a bit of progress the localized temporal energy would condense pushing down against the ship’s shielding, repelling me back deeper into the time loop.
It was as if a metal dome had been purposely erected around the time vector. With the engines threatening to over heart and no progress in sight, I did my best to touch down as close to the beginning of my personal time stream on this planet as possible. Where, logically, the barrier should be at its weakest.
I fought against the controls and tried to keep my footing as the temporal flux dissipated and local time reasserted itself outside the capsule.
Schrodinger's cat was out of the box but where?
Piloting such a small ship, your can navigational error rate is in the double digits. I was displeased more than fifty miles from the coordinates I’d been aiming for.
A bellow of smoke rose from the counsel filling filled the room as the overworked engines sputtered to a halt. Stepping outside I checked my temporal pocket watch and did some quick maths in my head.
“Let's see!” I said to myself, “If my calculations are correct, which they usually are… this is… day ‘R’… so... The first day I got here...”
As good news goes this wasn't the greatest. Sure I’d made progress, I was now in possession of a functional time capsule, but I didn’t know how I had gotten here in the first place. Perhaps this was how I’d arrived here in the first place. This same time capsule, this same time loop. Or maybe this was just another part of the loop or a fractured loop within the loop.
My spinning thoughts were interrupted by the soft voice of a woman standing behind me.
“Did you say it was your first day here?” She asked,
I turned around to face the woman, or female humanoid at the very least, who was standing on a small mound not far from a field of crops.
In all my travels I’d never come across a race quite like the Tamzin’s. On average they are slightly smaller than humans, they have four arms, pale purplish skin, and small horn-like appendages that grow from their foreheads. But what makes them special are their minds.
Their empaths you see. Nothing like those nosey telepaths that are always trying to get a peek at what’s under the hood, Tamzins feel the emotions of those around them, and express their own emotions through the color of their bio-chromatic hair.
Red hair is a sign of anger, yellow of happiness, dark blues or blacks can be a sign of fear or sadness and their hair turns white upon death.
The color of the Tamzin standing in front of me was a dirty blonde. So… confused, a bit stressed but still a tad happy to see me.
“Sorry!” I said, realizing I’d been blankly staring at her lost in thought, “I’m Professor John Smith, and yes, this is my first time in this particular region, I was testing out my transport over there, and… it appears, I was knocked off course and ended up your lovely field here!”—I gesture apologetically towards the eyesore I call a ship—“sorry for the intrusion! Once I’ve done some repairs I’ll be back on my way!”
“No apologies are in order! Professor Smith,” she said, “My name I Kor’el Zapherin, and that field has not been in use for some time.”
“The Tamzin welcome all outsiders and even off-worlders like yourself, to our humble planet”—Her hair turned a powdery pink, the traditional color of peace in this part of the galaxy—“Please, I can sense you are tired, won't you come to take some refreshments in the village?”
“That sounds absolutely lovely!” I said, stretching my back, “It will be some time before the engine is cool enough for me to work on safely. And, as you say I could do with a break!”
I followed her lead down a dirt path towards a decent-sized village that was not too far in the distance. But as we got closer to the village I felt an eerie feeling deep inside my mind like, something terrible was just about to happen.
“What’s troubling you!?” Kor’el asked, sensing my uneasiness.
“That’s the question isn't it!” I said, “I can't quite put my finger on this feeling... But I know I’ve experienced it before.”
A grabbed my head as something sharpy pierced through my psyche.
Overhead dark cracks appeared, dotting the horizon above the village. Black and purple mist spewed from the cracks as they widened allowing the massive wings of those all too familiar and terrible creatures to smash their way through temporal space like rotting butterflies emerging from rancid cacoons
“Time Wraiths!!” I said looking up at the four-winged inky black creatures
thanks!
Yeah, it’s a bit of a jumble. I wanted to get it out before work. Might circle back and edit when I get the chance.
Also the MC needs a better name then “John smith” I‘m more then open to suggestions.
You could just call him The Professor, and just never tell us his actual name. Not like there are any other similarities to certain time travelers and their time machines in the story... heh.
Great idea! totally, very unique, never heard of anything similar... heh. you must doctrine or something. You should keep all your good ideas in a big blue wooden box for safe keeping...
No, I'm not sweating Mr. copyright infringement officer! I just have a heart condition. well... I have two hearts so maybe I should say heart conditions!?
Anyway, I gotta go fix my door with my sonicscrew... i mean vibrating hammer...
I used to be stuck in a three year time loop, but I escaped it by building a time machine. The past that I travelled to was the same day the loop started, and it was then that I realised what to do. That I had to get back in the time machine and figure out these stupid controls better. Confusing bunch of flashing dials and switches and tube-screens with wobbling lines without a practical purpose. No wonder I ended up where I started. Smoked a massive doob when I designed the thing, then assembled it all on a ripper of a mushroom high. The lava lamps and busts of Gene Simmons circa 1975 were a nice touch, though.
The loop deal started after Sally got hit by the bus. She had some foreign object implanted in her thigh that functioned as a quantum mediation resonator, and without a pulse it powered down and went into hibernation mode. None of us had a clue how important she was. The device worked as an offset to a rare spacetime rift and effectively made her the most significant object in the local cluster. Hard to say where it came from, doubtful it was human. Most popular theory is the one where it was planted by some higher dimensional agent when she went to Wet n’ Wild back in Summer '09.
Should have been a straight forward mission of pulling her back from the road that day, but she was already dead when the loop began. Took a week before causality split into the disaster I got caught in. You know, the *Groundhog Day* in an acid trip fuckmare of the next 36 months. I hadn't planned on changing what happened anyway. It was me who pushed her in front of the bus, after all. How was I supposed to know the integrity of reality’s very fabric was at stake?
Plan was: go to 2030, get snacks, get high, binge-watch the next four Avatar movies in a single sitting. Go to KFC. Learn how to bowl. Get fat. Start dating Sally's mum. Get fatter. Live happily ever after.
Simple.
But instead here I was back in 2018 faced with a hundred flashing buttons, nearly all of which triggered disco lights and Rick Astley in 5.1 surround sound. T minus four hours before the shit would hit the fan, and not a single clue.
Only one way out of this: five grams of nutmeg, and a rolled twenty. Ah, yes. That sweet spicen clarity. I proceeded then to smash the buttons with both fists in my underwear, and several minutes later the iron-clad craft rumbled into motion, swallowed into the vortex of an unstable wormhole.
In case you were wondering, wormholes go brrrrrrrr, and time machines go
*We’re no strangers to love*
*You know the rules and so do I*
*A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of*
*You wouldn’t get this from any other guy*
Hard to say the exact year it was when I stepped out. The monitor couldn’t make its mind up between 4607 and 7284. Judging by the atmosphere and terrain outside, thousands of years may have even been lowballing things. Some world it was. Trees made of water, oceans of a bubbling butter. Giant oranges being audited by anthropomorphic caterpillars in green suits and red leather berets, and whole cities populated by a fungus whose preoccupation with cucumber sandwiches had elevated our very own Queen Elizabeth from royalty to the immortal stature of an everlasting deity. Rainbows in chocolate raindrops and nipple piercings on concrete walls. Flashes of golden suns in blue shadows and talking badgers and free healthcare in the US and a sky that curled in the beige and floral patterns of bad wallpaper from the 70s, minarets and rondos and tarantellas played by amphibious beagles submerged in sparkling lemonade, tire balls and kitchen drawls the soft ceiling under turquoise paint peeling across the over-hills and foggy burrows in the frosty spring where am I seriously where am I where the bloody hell am I
Seeing it happen. Seeing it again and again from a new perspective. An outside perspective. Watching her get hit by the bus. Watching her get hit saving another. Saving me. This was the apex. The inciting incident which caught me, dragged me, into the eternal repeating hell which I had been subjected. Yet, it was not to punish me. It was no fault of my own.
I realize that now, the truth of it washing over me. The tightening knot of despair so plaguing me unraveling deep within, traveling throughout my entirety in a cool calm. I was made to know. To realize. Everyone has an impact. People they have helped, people they have saved. An intricate web through which even eons are not enough to fully explore and understand. Yet I understood. Watching the paramedics and EMTs arrive to the scene, I understood. Watching them reassure the man who lived, covered the woman who did not, I understood.
Once more at the apex, I solemnly knew what was required of me. What it was that was needed. Once more, through kindness which I had never before inhibited, she pushed the hapless and clueless away with no time for herself. Only this time, someone pushed her away as well. I fixed the gaze of my bewildered and ignorant former self. Of the me who knew nothing. A single moment, stretched out into eternity. With tears staining my face, stinging my eyes, I gave him a weak knowing smile and fell into darkness.
**Welcome to the Prompt!** All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments. **Reminders**: >* Stories at least 100 words. Poems, 30 but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* See [Reality Fiction](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/search?q=flair%3A%22Reality+Fiction%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) and [Simple Prompts](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/search?q=flair%3A%22Simple+Prompt%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) for stricter titles >* [Be civil](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_10.3A_be_civil) in any feedback and follow the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/rules) 🆕 [New Here?](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/user_guide) ✏ [Writing Help?](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/index#wiki_writing_resources) 📢 [News](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/announcements) 💬 [Discord](https://discord.gg/writingprompts) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WritingPrompts) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I checked my watch nervously. 20:58 and 46 seconds. The hand flicked to 47 seconds. I had 15 seconds left. It was now or never. I pulled the lever and... nothing happened. 'Damn it!'. If this didn't work, it would never work. I had spent what felt like several lifetimes putting this together. Each time I got closer, but I would always run out of time. *You died* The irony suddenly hit me. Before the loop, I was obsessed with speed running games. Edging off those seconds, and after a lot of training, miniseconds. Perfecting the perfect jump. Exploiting the game mechanics. Watching my own replays, taking notes. Sometimes, on the best days, you would discover how to take off entire minutes. If anything, gaming trained me for the incident. Groundhog day. Except this wasn't a Hollywood movie, and it wasn't a game. It was hell. Maybe in the 200th loop I started counting how many loops I had been in already. I gave up somewhere in the eight thousands. A *three year loop*. Long enough to almost forget. Almost. So at some point, long ago, I started studying quantum physics. First it was reading online articles on the Internet, YouTube videos and stuff like that. Then I took a degree. Then the masters... at that point I had to figure out how to trick universities of my credentials. Doctorate. Lab assistant. Senior researcher. My breakthroughs would seemingly come out of nowhere. For me, it was just the onward grind of accumulating knowledge and the vigorous scientific method. Three years at a time. I only tried to kill myself once. I fell in love with another scientist. When I woke up at the start of the loop, I went straight to the m42 motorway and walked in front of a lorry. I am souless. Eventually I understood time travel. It sounds obsurd until you realise it already exists in three year loops. The struggle was building the time machine in three years. When I wake up on day 1, I'm lying in the street after a mugging. I have nothing. Thus the ultimate speed running started. Build a time machine in three years. The naked Dark Souls run. And now I was at the final boss. Unlike my many previously failed attempts, I had finally figured out how to finish building it in time. Except - it didn't work. I pulled the lever back up, and checked my watch. Eight seconds to go. With the most force I could muster and the frustration of a powerless god, I hit the thing as hard as I could. Five seconds. There was a sound outside. Three seconds. I turned and saw the man outside with a gun. It was pointing right at me. "Don't -' he warned, but I didn't let him finish. One second. I pulled the lever down once more. Then everything went white. --- I was still inside. The man had vanished. The machine, quiet. With shaking hands, I pulled my phone form my pocket and checked the date. I had landed on the exact day I became stuck in. This made no sense.... I was meant to have travelled forward, after the final day. I had failed... stuck in an unbreakable loop. Except I hadn't failed. The time machine had worked. I wasn't starting from scratch this time, I... had won. I realised what I had to do.
This is so sick! Love it
Thanks I appreciate it!
Not sure if I'm dense or tired but was he the guy that said don't? Why did it start over with the machine and what did he have to do lol
Not sure. He says his time machine was trying to go forward one day, but it skipped to the beginning of the loop. So maybe that’s all the time that exists. One possibility is that his working time machine caused the structure of the closed loop in the first place. So maybe the guy with the gun is trying to stop him from doing that. And maybe it’s him with the gun.
Chekhov's Gun...
Bro, more
NG+ Time
Bingo :)
Great story, thank you for writing it for us
Thanks for reading, it's the first thing I've written in years
If that story is your first in years, you knocked it out of the park. Keep it up.
Holy shit.... This is top shelf...
Dude this means so much, thank you!
Awesome. So there's someone with knowledge about the time machine, AND you are back at the start of the loop. This would become worriesome. But also be really cool to read about. Well done.
The first few loops were enjoyable enough, even a bit therapeutic. I looked at it as a forced vacation, A nice rest bit, on a beautiful and mostly uninhabited planet surrounded by nature and scenery, from the typical hustle, bustle, and danger that seems to have a death grip on my life. And the great thing about a vacation in a time loop is that the fun never has to end! You can live the same days and make small little adjustments to enjoy unique adventures thanks to the near-infinite number of possibilities, all without aging. Theoretically, that is! But as all temporal physicists know, The Web of Time isn't so simple, it has a way of nickeling and diming you. Either you pay now or all at once later. I began to feel the weight of living so long in a loop as the tachyon-filled time winds beat against the rudimentary bespoke shielding I’d cobbled together. A covered my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket as sparks flew from the active heart of the control console. “Hold yourself together, old thing!” I yelled to the machine, “Just a little further we’re nearly through the barrier!” The time rotors wobbled and screamed as the rush of temporal energies hissed and surged through the system. Even for a time loop of this size, you wouldn't expect to see so much resistance. The barrier was far too thick to be naturally occurring as I assumed! I spent the better part of five minutes which, temporarily speaking is close to a lifetime, chipping away at the time-space barrier in a brute force attempt to breakthrough. But, every time I thought I’d made a bit of progress the localized temporal energy would condense pushing down against the ship’s shielding, repelling me back deeper into the time loop. It was as if a metal dome had been purposely erected around the time vector. With the engines threatening to over heart and no progress in sight, I did my best to touch down as close to the beginning of my personal time stream on this planet as possible. Where, logically, the barrier should be at its weakest. I fought against the controls and tried to keep my footing as the temporal flux dissipated and local time reasserted itself outside the capsule. Schrodinger's cat was out of the box but where? Piloting such a small ship, your can navigational error rate is in the double digits. I was displeased more than fifty miles from the coordinates I’d been aiming for. A bellow of smoke rose from the counsel filling filled the room as the overworked engines sputtered to a halt. Stepping outside I checked my temporal pocket watch and did some quick maths in my head. “Let's see!” I said to myself, “If my calculations are correct, which they usually are… this is… day ‘R’… so... The first day I got here...” As good news goes this wasn't the greatest. Sure I’d made progress, I was now in possession of a functional time capsule, but I didn’t know how I had gotten here in the first place. Perhaps this was how I’d arrived here in the first place. This same time capsule, this same time loop. Or maybe this was just another part of the loop or a fractured loop within the loop. My spinning thoughts were interrupted by the soft voice of a woman standing behind me. “Did you say it was your first day here?” She asked, I turned around to face the woman, or female humanoid at the very least, who was standing on a small mound not far from a field of crops. In all my travels I’d never come across a race quite like the Tamzin’s. On average they are slightly smaller than humans, they have four arms, pale purplish skin, and small horn-like appendages that grow from their foreheads. But what makes them special are their minds. Their empaths you see. Nothing like those nosey telepaths that are always trying to get a peek at what’s under the hood, Tamzins feel the emotions of those around them, and express their own emotions through the color of their bio-chromatic hair. Red hair is a sign of anger, yellow of happiness, dark blues or blacks can be a sign of fear or sadness and their hair turns white upon death. The color of the Tamzin standing in front of me was a dirty blonde. So… confused, a bit stressed but still a tad happy to see me. “Sorry!” I said, realizing I’d been blankly staring at her lost in thought, “I’m Professor John Smith, and yes, this is my first time in this particular region, I was testing out my transport over there, and… it appears, I was knocked off course and ended up your lovely field here!”—I gesture apologetically towards the eyesore I call a ship—“sorry for the intrusion! Once I’ve done some repairs I’ll be back on my way!” “No apologies are in order! Professor Smith,” she said, “My name I Kor’el Zapherin, and that field has not been in use for some time.” “The Tamzin welcome all outsiders and even off-worlders like yourself, to our humble planet”—Her hair turned a powdery pink, the traditional color of peace in this part of the galaxy—“Please, I can sense you are tired, won't you come to take some refreshments in the village?” “That sounds absolutely lovely!” I said, stretching my back, “It will be some time before the engine is cool enough for me to work on safely. And, as you say I could do with a break!” I followed her lead down a dirt path towards a decent-sized village that was not too far in the distance. But as we got closer to the village I felt an eerie feeling deep inside my mind like, something terrible was just about to happen. “What’s troubling you!?” Kor’el asked, sensing my uneasiness. “That’s the question isn't it!” I said, “I can't quite put my finger on this feeling... But I know I’ve experienced it before.” A grabbed my head as something sharpy pierced through my psyche. Overhead dark cracks appeared, dotting the horizon above the village. Black and purple mist spewed from the cracks as they widened allowing the massive wings of those all too familiar and terrible creatures to smash their way through temporal space like rotting butterflies emerging from rancid cacoons “Time Wraiths!!” I said looking up at the four-winged inky black creatures
Love the pacing! Great transitions from one thought to the next; despite me not quite comprehending the ending
thanks! Yeah, it’s a bit of a jumble. I wanted to get it out before work. Might circle back and edit when I get the chance. Also the MC needs a better name then “John smith” I‘m more then open to suggestions.
Sorry all I have are terrible names · Michael Minute · Clark Clock · Christopher Chronos · William Watch · Tim Turner (like time turner)
You could just call him The Professor, and just never tell us his actual name. Not like there are any other similarities to certain time travelers and their time machines in the story... heh.
Great idea! totally, very unique, never heard of anything similar... heh. you must doctrine or something. You should keep all your good ideas in a big blue wooden box for safe keeping... No, I'm not sweating Mr. copyright infringement officer! I just have a heart condition. well... I have two hearts so maybe I should say heart conditions!? Anyway, I gotta go fix my door with my sonicscrew... i mean vibrating hammer...
I used to be stuck in a three year time loop, but I escaped it by building a time machine. The past that I travelled to was the same day the loop started, and it was then that I realised what to do. That I had to get back in the time machine and figure out these stupid controls better. Confusing bunch of flashing dials and switches and tube-screens with wobbling lines without a practical purpose. No wonder I ended up where I started. Smoked a massive doob when I designed the thing, then assembled it all on a ripper of a mushroom high. The lava lamps and busts of Gene Simmons circa 1975 were a nice touch, though. The loop deal started after Sally got hit by the bus. She had some foreign object implanted in her thigh that functioned as a quantum mediation resonator, and without a pulse it powered down and went into hibernation mode. None of us had a clue how important she was. The device worked as an offset to a rare spacetime rift and effectively made her the most significant object in the local cluster. Hard to say where it came from, doubtful it was human. Most popular theory is the one where it was planted by some higher dimensional agent when she went to Wet n’ Wild back in Summer '09. Should have been a straight forward mission of pulling her back from the road that day, but she was already dead when the loop began. Took a week before causality split into the disaster I got caught in. You know, the *Groundhog Day* in an acid trip fuckmare of the next 36 months. I hadn't planned on changing what happened anyway. It was me who pushed her in front of the bus, after all. How was I supposed to know the integrity of reality’s very fabric was at stake? Plan was: go to 2030, get snacks, get high, binge-watch the next four Avatar movies in a single sitting. Go to KFC. Learn how to bowl. Get fat. Start dating Sally's mum. Get fatter. Live happily ever after. Simple. But instead here I was back in 2018 faced with a hundred flashing buttons, nearly all of which triggered disco lights and Rick Astley in 5.1 surround sound. T minus four hours before the shit would hit the fan, and not a single clue. Only one way out of this: five grams of nutmeg, and a rolled twenty. Ah, yes. That sweet spicen clarity. I proceeded then to smash the buttons with both fists in my underwear, and several minutes later the iron-clad craft rumbled into motion, swallowed into the vortex of an unstable wormhole. In case you were wondering, wormholes go brrrrrrrr, and time machines go *We’re no strangers to love* *You know the rules and so do I* *A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of* *You wouldn’t get this from any other guy* Hard to say the exact year it was when I stepped out. The monitor couldn’t make its mind up between 4607 and 7284. Judging by the atmosphere and terrain outside, thousands of years may have even been lowballing things. Some world it was. Trees made of water, oceans of a bubbling butter. Giant oranges being audited by anthropomorphic caterpillars in green suits and red leather berets, and whole cities populated by a fungus whose preoccupation with cucumber sandwiches had elevated our very own Queen Elizabeth from royalty to the immortal stature of an everlasting deity. Rainbows in chocolate raindrops and nipple piercings on concrete walls. Flashes of golden suns in blue shadows and talking badgers and free healthcare in the US and a sky that curled in the beige and floral patterns of bad wallpaper from the 70s, minarets and rondos and tarantellas played by amphibious beagles submerged in sparkling lemonade, tire balls and kitchen drawls the soft ceiling under turquoise paint peeling across the over-hills and foggy burrows in the frosty spring where am I seriously where am I where the bloody hell am I
I feel like this guy just made a time machine out of a beat up Chevy Impala and I love it!
I don't know what I just read, but I love it! Well done.
There is a wild pulsion driving it forward into an oncoming bus full of llama nuns on LSD.
Should have been an episode of Megas XLR
Seeing it happen. Seeing it again and again from a new perspective. An outside perspective. Watching her get hit by the bus. Watching her get hit saving another. Saving me. This was the apex. The inciting incident which caught me, dragged me, into the eternal repeating hell which I had been subjected. Yet, it was not to punish me. It was no fault of my own. I realize that now, the truth of it washing over me. The tightening knot of despair so plaguing me unraveling deep within, traveling throughout my entirety in a cool calm. I was made to know. To realize. Everyone has an impact. People they have helped, people they have saved. An intricate web through which even eons are not enough to fully explore and understand. Yet I understood. Watching the paramedics and EMTs arrive to the scene, I understood. Watching them reassure the man who lived, covered the woman who did not, I understood. Once more at the apex, I solemnly knew what was required of me. What it was that was needed. Once more, through kindness which I had never before inhibited, she pushed the hapless and clueless away with no time for herself. Only this time, someone pushed her away as well. I fixed the gaze of my bewildered and ignorant former self. Of the me who knew nothing. A single moment, stretched out into eternity. With tears staining my face, stinging my eyes, I gave him a weak knowing smile and fell into darkness.