A New Stitching by Thomas Trang

from Time is a Dog's Breakfast: a Pistol Jim Press series

A New Stitching by Thomas Trang

This guy Jenkins was nuts. No doubt about it.

“Back in 1997, the Corporation began work with NASA on a joint initiative trying to boost the sensitivity of the optical telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. That’s the official version. Unofficially? What we were actually trying to do was recreate something that happened almost ninety years earlier in the middle of Siberia. Have you ever heard of the Tunguska Event? A huge explosion in June 1908. Enough to clear the forest for miles. You had the skies across Europe lit up for days afterward. I’m gonna give you two words. A name. Nikola Tesla. You know who that is? One unintended consequence of his research was the creation of enough energy within a confined area to modify what’s commonly known as the space-time continuum. It took us nearly a century and billions of dollars to retro-engineer what that crazy Serb fuck did by accident.”

“Let me ask you something…” Ranglin speaking carefully now. “Just so we’re on the same page. You’re talking about time travel, right? Futuristic George-Jetson-Stargate type shit.”

“Don’t ask me to explain it. I’m just a pilot, not an architect. Far as we can figure it out, it’s not possible to go back to any point in time where you already exist. You can jump back a hundred years and meet Henry Ford, but you want to see what last month looks like, then you’re shit out of luck. There’s a certain logic to that. You can’t have the same physical matter occupying the same space.”

“I saw a Van Damme film where that happens.”

“This isn’t as dramatic. The machine basically craps itself then shuts down.”

“Okay, but you could travel back seventy years, maybe go kill your grandmother, create some screwed up paradox and break the universe.”

“The fuck would you want to do that for?”

“I’m just thinking out loud. You dropped this in my lap. I’m trying to see the angles.”

“It’s 1941. Where’s your grandmother?”

Ranglin thinks for a moment. “Pensacola, Florida.”

“We’re not going to fuckin’ Pensacola, Florida. Relax.” Jenkins takes a pen and draws a single line on a paper napkin. “Think about it like this. This is us right now, 8:53 AM, at one end. There is no future from where we are. It doesn’t exist.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Look, some asshole comes through here on a flying skateboard and stock tips, I stand corrected. That work? Forget all that parallel universe stuff, too. There’s only one line, and we’re on it.”

“So you can’t change the past?”

Jenkins shakes his head. “Of course you can. Even just by being there you’re altering it.”

“That means there’s more than one line. One for every time you go back.”

“Sure. Chaos theory. The butterfly flaps its wings in Belize, and a soybean farmer in South Bend shits in his overalls. The flipside to that, everything we know is in flux all the time. We’re not trying to go back and stop Pearl Harbor. Maybe you could. Nobody really knows. Maybe our reality,”—Jenkins air quotes the word—“maybe it’s changing all the time and we don’t even realise. Maybe JFK wasn’t supposed to get shot in Dallas. Maybe in the real world, red is blue and Corn Flakes eat people. There’s one line as far as we’re concerned. One reality. Tampered with, but only in very subtle ways. Think of it like a quilt with new stitching.”

“What kind of stitches?”

“Remember that Nazi bullion a few years back?”

Nearly $300 million worth of plundered gold recovered along the border between Romania and Ukraine. It was all over the news at the time.

“This is all about gold?”

“It’s about a lot of things, but all I need from you is an answer. Are you in or out? I can give you twenty-four hours. You say no, we go our separate ways. Smart guy like you, I’m guessing you have contingency plans. You could even make a dash for it right now. Pretty sure you could outrun an old guy like me. But where would you go?”

Bio

Thomas Trang is an author currently based in the UK. He was born in London but has lived all over the map: Sydney, Paris, Singapore, New York, and Manchester. He is the author of the novel DARK NEON & DIRT, and his stories have appeared in FutureQuake, Rock & A Hard Place, Full House Literary, Punk Noir, and Shotgun Honey.