Unidentified Funny Objects 2 (18 page)

As the time machine revs up and jumps, forward and upward, you never once stop to think: Maybe I should stop. Maybe I should try to go back and ask the man I brained for directions. Before I brain him, of course.

Instead, you say: “Onward and upward!”

When the time machine screeches to a screaming halt, you find your senses assaulted by an overwhelming smell of burning plastic before you open your eyes. Something flies by you, leaving behind only an afterimage of green light and a scent very much like battery acid. Something behind you explodes, just as you’re beginning to rev up the time machine. A cold metal hand wraps around your arm. You follow it and find yourself staring into a pair of frosted-glass eyes, set above something that looks like a speaker.

“Throk’to akh-ha?” it blares.

“Aaaaah!” you retort.

The metal thing with the speaker for a face raises its other arm, producing something that looks like a prop gun from a Flash Gordon flick, when a ragged man jumps from cover and cuts its hand clean off with a sword made out of light. The dial of the machine spins and stops short of 180 Mil as you slap the big red button at the center of the dashboard and you’re ejected across time with a severed robot arm that bleeds black liquid onto your lap.

When you finally stop, you’re standing beside a podium. A short man with tiny, beady eyes and a toothbrush-wide moustache looks at you, his hand frozen mid-salute. There’s a red band wrapped around his arm that looks awfully familiar.

“Was is das?” the man on the podium asks with a voice you’ve come to recognize after countless of hours of playing Call of Duty.

Somehow, the Flash Gordon prop’s in your hand and you pull the trigger. Green light shoots from the tip and strikes the familiar man, reducing him to a pile of dust in an instant. As the Gestapo officers rush toward you, machine guns in hand, you’re thinking: Damn! I just killed Hitler!

You say: “Hot diggity damn!”

You pull the lever, not really checking the dial. One of the officers shoots at you and you see the bullet slowing down mid-flight, stopping and then returning back to the barrel, swallowing up the flame that had just propelled it through the air. You jump, and in the time it takes you to blink, the time machine has landed in the middle of a park, in a place that smells like freshly bloomed anemones, with just a dash of hash.

You look around and all you can see are hippies, jangling their guitars to the non-tune of Yoko on the radio, turned to almost-music by the genius of John Lennon. The hippies run, of course. They head for the hills, their reefers forgotten in the grass. Only one girl’s left, staring at you with wide-eyed wonder.

“Where the hell did you come from?” she asks, her voice sounding vaguely familiar. The way she’s dressed, her clothes a mish-mash of beads and cotton threads, complete with a makeshift dreamcatcher hanging from her neck between her breasts, she looks like a pagan goddess, refitted for the twentieth century.

“I’m from the future” you tell her in your most suave tone. “Wanna hop on my time machine?” you give her a wink that you know is embarrassing, even under the circumstances.

“You’re from the future huh, spaceman? Whose arm is that?” she asks, smiling as she looks at the severed robot arm still in your lap.

“Oh that? That’s just a trophy taken from one of my many fallen foes. The future is a dangerous place, after all. Thank goodness for my ray gun, I suppose…” you say, reaching for it, when you realize it’s not there anymore. Frantically, you pat down your jacket, your pants. You open dashboard drawers, spilling out yellowed papers and dog-eared notebooks with gilded lettering. Suddenly, it hits you: The Nazis have the damn ray gun.

You’re desperately trying to consider the implications when the hippie girl walks up to you and her hazel eyes suddenly dawn in your field of vision. Her lips are the color of fresh cherries. She runs her hands through your hair and she doesn’t just feel right. She feels divine.

“It’s okay, you can show off later.”

“Later when?” you ask, as she kisses you and you roll on the grass, your hands all over each other. The entire time, you’re thinking: Eh, why hurry? I’ve got a time machine, for Christ’s sake!

You’re sharing a joint, when she says: “My name’s Lily. FFFFtttp.” she exhales, letting out a billow of smoke so white, you’d think her lungs had elected a new pope.

“You know, you look like a Lily. FFFtttp,” you say, blowing halfway-formed rings of smoke.

You look at her as she turns, eyes following the arch of her back as you’re passing the roach, when you notice them for the first time: first, the tiny tail, wagging at the small of her back; second, the tiny patch of ink printed above it.

“You know, you’re the first man I’ve seen who didn’t have a tail. FFFFtttp.” she says, half-smiling, as she turns to ruffle your hair.

“What’s that thing on your back?” you ask, as your brain slowly pieces together the design. It’s a tattoo, shaped like a stylized swastika. Please, let this be a post-modern statement you pray.

“What, that? Oh, you like it? It’s a Party thing. They were gonna put it on my palm like everybody else, but I thought why not try something new, you know? Why, where’s your tattoo?” she says, between puffs.

“That’s a Nazi-oh God.”

“Oh please, don’t tell me you’re like one of those Jew-lovers? My fiancé went to one of their rallies once and they shipped him off to ’Nam to kill gooks all day.” Lily responds, matter-of-factly.

“Fiancé? You have a boyfriend?” you exclaim and suddenly, the small details that had escaped you begin to sink in: the color of her eyes, her hair, the line of her neck, the sound of her voice, the derision in her tone. “Where did you say you lived?”

“Over in Jonestown, a ways off from the big city.”

“And your fiancé’s name’s Kurt?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“And your maiden name’s Popowitz?”

“Used to be. Daddy changed it to Lauk, after the war, to get on the Party’s good side. How come you know so much about me?”

And suddenly, it hits you: this woman is your own mother, who’s now a Nazi (like everyone else) because you gave them a ray gun in the first place!

The fourth part toward realizing how you’ve messed everything up is coming to terms with the fact that everything that’s gone wrong is entirely your own damn fault. Also, that you need to stop and fix whatever it is you’re doing, right now.

The fifth part toward realizing that everything is your fault is taking a deep breath and trying to think of a viable solution: finding the man who owned this machine and asking for his help is a solid plan. Thinking about going back in time to the point before he met you and thus risking a paradox, is not.

Guess which one you go for, as you run to the time machine, your clothes bundled under your arm, your own mother chasing after you, screaming: “Juden! Halt, Juden!”

You flip the dials and watch as the counter changes from Mil to Cen to Dec to Yea all the way down to Day thinking: I can do this, I can fix this, I’ve got all the time in the world!

And then your own mother throws a rock at your eye and you hit a switch by accident. The time machine revs up and you watch in horror as the dial flips from Day to Ma, same way kitchen dials do, switching from the lowest setting to the highest. Now the reading has changed, from 450 Day to 450 Ma and before you can utter a single word, you’ve already jumped…

…and landed in the middle of a desert. Then in a city made of rock and wood, where starved men and despairing women scream at the sight of you. Then in the middle of a jungle, set ablaze, beneath a sky the color of charcoal…

The time machine lurches for a final time, crushing something that screeches once as it snaps its neck. Terrified, you chance a look, fearing the worst. Thankfully, it is only a velociraptor caught in its dying throes, shaking its full, colorful plumage. With a great squawk, the majestic thing dies and you sit in your driver’s seat, on the verge of tears. Not only because you have just had velociraptors ruined forever, but because you have also plunged history into a mess that you couldn’t possibly get it out of. How the hell would you find the time traveler? And even if you did, how could you reason with him? How could you get him to stop you from making everything even worse? Why couldn’t time travel be simple like in the movies, where history and time are just obstacles to be brushed aside at the hero’s whim?

You’re too busy feeling sorry for yourself and the entire universe, when more velociraptors burst from the foliage, seeking both to overpower and to devour the strange, weeping thing that just crushed their brother. They look like killer peacocks as they flap their tiny hands and shake their plumage, their claws aiming for your throat. You turn a lever blindly and watch them retreat back into the dense jungle, as you fast-forward yourself to safety.

When you think you’ve reached a safe place, you stop the time machine and climb off it without turning the dial. Choking back your tears, you sit beneath the shadow of a great oak tree, looking at the instrument that you have just used to doom everything. You get dressed, take a deep breath and start going through the drawers all over again. The majority of the manuals and notebooks have been left in the field where you’d met Nazi-Lily. If the time machine had ever had an instruction booklet, it has been lost along with so much else.

No way around it, you think. I’ll just have to find the time traveler myself.

You’re too busy stuffing what few papers are left back inside the glove compartment, trying to come up with a solid, viable plan that would allow you to restore history back to its original, less-terrible state, when you notice the shape of a man, creeping up behind you. You’re about to turn, to talk to him, when you hear the distinct noise of a shovel being dragged across the ground and then swooshing through the air, going for your head. You needn’t turn around to know exactly who he is.

“Oh, you stupid, stupid, bas—”

Whomp.

Story Notes:

“How You Ruined Everything” is the kind of story I've always wanted to write, but had never got around to (until now, that is). We're all plagued by the constant thought of how different our lives would be if we had made our choices differently, if we perhaps had had the guts to walk up to that cute girl in the coffee shop (or that guy in the gym) and had asked them out; what our lives would have been like if we perhaps had not opted for that Bachelor's degree in Philosophy or a BA in English. Other times, we might slap ourselves in the face at random intervals, thinking about how we ruined our chance at that Dream Job. Oh, how different, how much more joyous and fulfilling our lives would be, if we had a time machine to right old wrongs!

But it wouldn't. Because deep down, we know that our new choices would have spawned new regrets, new lines of hindsight and a secret longing for what we had BEFORE we fixed everything. We'd purposefully seek out to undo all the choices we made just so we could go back to our old path and lament our choices all over again. Human beings are an odd lot, really. Makes you wonder how the hell we made it so far in the first place.

Konstantine Paradias is a jeweler by profession and a writer by choice. Plagued by an over-powering sense of hindsight, he finds himself constantly second-guessing his every choice and secretly knows that getting himself a time machine would be a pretty terrible idea. He vents his frustrations and dreams on his blog, 
Shapescapes
, instead.

by Jody Lynn Nye

“Uh, oh,” Detective Sergeant Dena Malone thought, as the five witnesses’ faces lit up at her approach over a Japanese plank bridge. At first, all they would have seen was a small woman with razor-cut brown hair and pale skin, wearing a police uniform tunic. Then they recognized her. Dena felt her face grow hot. It seemed to take forever to cross the expensively landscaped and gardened roof of the ultra highrise, the largest green space she had ever walked on in the city. “Here it comes.”

“Cool!” said a tall man with a tattoo that ran from his left temple to his jaw. “We get the reality show cop! How’s your baby doing? Can we hear your Salosian talk?”

Dena felt the inevitable roiling in her belly as K’t’ank shifted when he heard his name. The meter-long alien lived in her peritoneum, implanted there by the Alien Relations Department of Earth. She had been identified as an ideal host in spite of being pregnant at the time. K’t’ank’s optic nerves were connected to her own through her spinal column. Where most human beings might see a meter-long rose pink parasitic snake, Dena knew him as a scientist and a galaxy-class busybody. She had been fooled into thinking hosting K’t’ank was a temporary arrangement. It wasn’t. She reached for the platinum bracelet that provided the alien with his sole means of communicating with the outside world and switched it off.

“Malone!” K’t’ank protested, his voice now only audible through bone conduction.

“Let’s get the facts down first,” she said, firmly, settling her wrists on her growing abdomen. As if it wasn’t enough for a working cop to have to host a visiting alien, she was also five months pregnant. “Then we’ll all have a nice chat. So, want to tell me what happened here?”