Time Crimes

 I built a time machine to stop a madman. He came from the future to alter the past and ruined the present. He came in the night, raving about fixing things; things that he had gotten wrong.

Only a small thing it had seemed at the time, and yet, by changing that one, insignificant detail, he had altered the course of events that would soon lead to catastrophic results for the entire world.

Who knows for what ends the madman had calculated; perhaps he had wanted to plunge the world into chaos, perhaps it had been just a simple miscalculation.

Whatever the reasons for his actions, the one thing he did not count on was that I had witnessed his mad scheme that night, and that I would travel across and space to put an end to it.

It took me years to recreate his time machine from memory and figure out how to traverse time with it, and by the time I had finally completed my work the world had been plunged into chaos and was now an apocalyptic waste land. I myself had lost so much and so many people I loved, my heart had become a barren waste as well.

There was only hatred in me now; hatred of the man from the future and how he had selfishly taken everything away from the world; from me.

Once I had the machine up and running, I calculated where and when would give the best possible chance to stop the madman's evil plans and I entered the coordinates into the time machine's navigation computer.

It only took a fraction of a moment and I was back in the past, to a time before the world had begun its descent into ruin.

I changed what I figured needed to be changed and was back in the time machine in only a few moments, ready to go back and see if my future had been fixed.

Apprehensively, I pushed the recall button and the machine returned to the exact time and place I had started from.

Nothing had changed, it hadn't worked; my future was still in shambles.

Furious at my failed attempted to right whatever wrong that madman had perpetrated on the past, I went back to try again.

That attempt failed.

So again I went back; again and again, over and over, each attempted failing to make any change in the future.

Each failed attempt was maddening and I became obsessed with getting it right; there had to be a way I thought, one little change that would repair all of what the madman had done!

I made hundreds of trips back, until the one which I came back in the night, going over all of the mistakes I had made, raving to myself about fixing the timeline.

Making my adjustments hastily, I headed back to the time machine to return to the future once again and hopefully see a positive result, and I saw him.

Through the flashing blue electricity that the time machine created to travel along, I saw a figure looking back at me with amazement, just before I winked out of the past.

It had been me.

I had been the madman all those years ago that the younger me from the past had seen.

In my astonishment of the revelation I stopped the time machine in mid-journey; paused in time and space.

Before me, out the view window, the entirety of what I had done was laid out so clearly now.

All my efforts to change the future by changing the past had been in vain. For sprawling outside my precious time machine, in plain sight, were all the different branches of timelines. Each branch leading to a new future I would not be a part of.

In some I had succeeded and the future was bright; in others, most others, my meddling had only made things much worse.

In almost all the timelines I had become the villain; the raving madman I had sought to put an end to.

Only now, here, high above the branches and offshoots of time, could I see it: the only way to fix it all.

Setting a new trajectory, I sped back down to where all the branches had split in the first place; careening toward the very moment I had broken time.

Shockwaves rippled away from the machine as I tore back through the fabric of space-time, on a collision course with me final destiny.

Screeching through the past, a sphere rocketed down from the sky towards where I stood in the dimly-lit street; the same clear-glass sphere as the one sitting in the dark alley in front of me.

In a terrific explosion of glass and blue sparks, the spheres collided and were completely obliterated in a blast wave that blew me off my feet.

Landing in a large pile of garbage bags on the street curb, I stared dumbfounded at the space where the two spheres had been.

Where there should have been flaming wreckage, there was only a shimmering opening, hanging strangely in the air above the wet alleyway.

Getting up out of the bags of trash, I approached the opening cautiously until I could just poke my head through the wavering opening and look at what was on the other side.

Instead of what should have been just the other end of the alley, was a void of sorts, with an infinite number of identical openings; all of them with another version of me, peeking their heads through.

"What the f..." was all we could get out before all time folded in on itself and the tears in space-time closed up, sucking everything in with a blip.

This time, only a passing stray dog was there to hear the faint noise of the timeline correcting itself. It relieved itself on the big pile of garbage bags and continued on its merry way.

Time is Fixed

Time is fixed, he had always said; even if a person could go back in time and tried to change the variables of a specific event in the past, the outcome would always end up being the same.

And even if you did manage to change the outcome of a specific event in time, resulting in a change in the history of events, the future version of the time traveller would then have no need to change events leading up to the event, thus the trip back in time would never have happened to change anything and the outcome would then of course, end up being the same.

He had always said that, that is until the day he had stepped out of the time portal and into past; trying to change the outcome.

All he had to do was to stop himself from leaving the house that day and everything would be fixed. None of the terrible things he had gone through after that day would have to happen and the world would not have to suffer from his mistakes.

It had taken so many years to pinpoint exactly when and where things had gone wrong, obsessively back-tracking events through the timeline until finally, he was certain that this one day, one ordinary moment, would set in motion the chain reaction that would bring about the destruction of the entire world as we know it.

Then there was only the impossible task of creating the ability to open the rift in time and space to be able to go back and undo all that he had done to contribute to the world's end.

Yet, he had done it, almost stumbling upon it, he had uncovered the way to shift the fabric of space-time and open a portal to the past.

Now, after so many lost decades, he was through and standing in front of his old home; looking just as he had remembered it, an unassuming house on the wooded street of an exclusive neighbour in western end of the city.

At that moment, he knew the past version of himself was just making his way down the stairs to the kitchen to make himself breakfast before heading to work at the lab only a few short minutes away down the road.

However, this time, he would make sure he never did.

Looking like a gaunt and ghostly version of himself, he gripped the handle of the pistol tightly to make sure it was still there and started to make his way to end things before they ever began.

As he went to step away from the shimmering portal, a hand grasped his arm from behind and he jerked around to see who had grabbed him. A familiar looking arm was protruding out from the portal and he looked up from it in shock to see a cleaned-shaven and healthier version of himself staring back at him through the portal.

"I'm sorry about this." His other version said in a sincerely apologetic voice just before he heard the squealing of car tires to his right.

He was barely able to comprehend that the driver of the car was also him, though an even more dishevelled and crazed version then himself, before the car struck him and he flew into the air like a ragdoll.

Screaming like a madman as he swerved the car wildly, he watched as his other self landed with a sickening thud, his neck twisted and broken, onto the pavement in his rear-view mirror.

Looking back ahead, he saw another version of himself standing in the dead center of the road and he yanked hard on the steering wheel to swerved and avoid hitting himself on instinct. The tires skidded out of control on the wet road from the previous night's rain, and the car careened off the road and crashed headlong into an old, unyielding oak tree.

The other version of himself stood calmly in the center of the road and watched the car crumple and explode with the impact, then turned to see the past version of himself coming out of his house to see what all the commotion was about.

As he rushed out of the house in his housecoat, he saw the flames of the wreck in the trees just to the east of his front yard and then scanned back along the road to see himself standing there looking back at him from the middle of the road.

He nodded at himself just as he faded out of existence, as did the other him laying prone on the pavement a few steps away from the first. The noise of the fiery wreck suddenly stopped and looking over at where it had been, he saw only the tall trees standing undisturbed as the birds chirped their morning songs to each other.

Stunned, he went back inside and sat down on one of the kitchen bar stools. After a long while just sitting, thinking about what he had just seen, the toaster on the counter dinged and popped out two well-done pieces of bread, startling him from his thoughts.

What had he been thinking of? He could almost remember, but it slipped away from him. Oh well, he was going to be late for work at the lab if he sat around too long. No time to waste! 

The Machine

Switching on the machine's power unit, Barry took a step back as the silver sphere began to hum with vibration from the harmonics regulator and lift off the concrete floor to hover a metre in the air.

The cables and wires attached to the docking cradle held the sphere from rising much higher and Barry's eyes widen with delight as the vibration waves became visible around the curve of the orb's surface.

The humming from the machine grew as did the vibrations, until the entire sphere was a silver blur that began to fade in and out of vision.

It was working.

Barry quickly scanned his laptop screen and saw that all the output readings were within the optimal limits, finally; after so many failed attempts he had finally fixed the stress level harmonics and brought them into alignment. And now, his machine was actually working!

Looking back to the fading sphere, he saw it dissolve right out of existence and leave only a void where its silver shape had been.

The hum stopped abruptly and for a few moments, all sound seems to be sucked out of the room, leaving only a pure silence, devoid of any noise save for the sound of Barry's own breathing in his ears.

Then, with a pulsing wave of air and sound, the sphere reappeared and hovered peacefully where it had been only a few moments earlier, a layer of frost crackled on its surface.

After a moment of hesitation, Barry took a step toward the machine before a figure of a man popped into being right in front of him.

It was him, another Barry; only this one was dressed in what looked to be a well-worn, leather motorcycle outfit and sporting an eye patch over his left eye that hide a long, jagged scar.

The other Barry also looked tougher somehow, harder. Perhaps it was all the spiked studs adored his leather outfit, or the rugged beard, or more than likely, the homemade-looking rifle slung across his back.

In any case, this Barry seemed to mean business, and he came at Barry shouting.

"You have to shut this machine down, you fool!" Tough Barry yelled and he closed in on him, but even as Barry quickly stepped back to get away from the crazed version of himself, Tough Barry seemed to make sure not to come close enough to make actual contact.

"You hear me!?" Tough Barry shouted again. "Tear the machine down or everything and everyone we knew and love will be destroyed!"

Barry felt himself hit against the work bench and he reached back to the machine's power unit as Tough Barry continued to shout at him to turn it off.

"Okay." Barry stammered as he found the switch and flicked it off.

Instantly, the hovering sphere dropped back into its docking cradle with a metallic clunk and the other Barry popped out of existence just as suddenly as he had shown up.

Barry sighed with relief as his cluttered basement workshop was quiet once more.

Well, that was a close one, he thought to himself as he began to disassemble the wiring connection of the machine's main power supply.

When a crazy, alternate-timeline version of yourself comes from the future to tell you to shut down your time machine, you listen.