Tomorrow Does Not Change: A Short Horror Story
Fiction of the twentieth century indicated that time travel would come about through the construction of some bizarre machine, a device capable of pinpointing a particular time period and magically transporting an individual, or team to that era, allowing exploration and bringing them home safely. That is not how time travel came about! I grew up in the twenty-second century, I would love to say it was a perfect automated world, or even a worn-down dystopia, but it was a time much like any other; littered with territorial and political wars, rife diseases and dominated by new computer technologies.
Our buildings were much the same as the twenty-first century and fashions revived and lost as always. Universities had become led by government initiatives and at some point, some scientist or another decided that to travel backwards in time would be impossible due to paradoxes and interferences from the traveler. So, a decision was made to travel forward in time. There was no desperate need or reason, simply a desire by those heading the state faculty to attract more funding. I am not a scientist, nor even an academic. I was a volunteer, born Charlotte May in a London ghetto.
By volunteer I do not mean that I volunteered. People stopped volunteering for studies following a failed drug trial some time in 2040. Supposedly a new cure for cancer, in reality all it did was significantly lower the population of Ealing. Nasty business, before my time. There wasn’t much work about back then, unless an adept programmer, computers took over the jobs. So, to get ‘welfare’ one had to agree to the ‘lotto’ and, as needed, people were selected at random to take part in new trials. My name come up and I was selected to travel into the future.
Not nearly as exciting as it sounds! Initially the scientists at London’s Conglomerate University experimented with black hole technology. At the same time, they were working on a zero-gravity pen. Things went awry when the Republic of Russia announced that in zero gravity, they used pencils. The AngloWelsh government looked foolish, money was stopped and there was a bit of bad publicity. The funding for black hole technologies was substantially reduced and it was decided instead to freeze the guinea pigs in cryostasis and develop a plan for waking them in the future. A bit pointless, there you go!
My welfare was lodged in an interest account and I must have got the short straw as I was elected for the two-hundred year trial, the longest trial. I was given a multitude of injections, they did hurt, at some point sleep was induced and my body frozen. As planned, I awoke two hundred years later, last month. I awoke to a world much the same as the world I left; a few new diseases and trends, a smattering of wars. The worst part is my body has not adapted, so I am imprisoned in this clean room.
Written by Immortalis, Kerry and Brett Dyer
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