Antikythera

Prompted by the lovely Webster, a tale of failure set in the future (and also the past; go figure).

Having done a wee bit of travelling around the Middle East, and watching the progress of its ancient civilisations through museum-pieces which show how its memes and its technologies adapt and change, I've always been struck by one apparent anachronism, a piece of technology so wildly out of context that at first glance, it seems to require a supernatural explanation. This is not a supernatural explanation. It's a sci-fi story. But hopefully it's entertaining, at least.

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My last thought, as the waves claimed me, was the hope that my failure might change the world.

My name was Alexandra. My number was 17103987202. Of the ten-billion people who lived on the planet, I was somewhere in the seventeens. Seven billion people have lived and died since the Mark of the Beast - that should tell you something about the apocalypse. It never came. The world only spins forward, I guess.

I was born in Europa, well-educated, well-kept, well-loved. I travelled North America, worked in the Californian Republic for a bit, did the tourist thing round Silicon Valley, but in the end, I just had to return to the great Peloponnesian mountains that had always captivated my heart.

I spent my weekends walking those landscapes, wondering what they must have looked like before industry, before the highways. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a hypocritical Luddite like the Cambridge pack - but those of us who work in time-travel research do tend to wonder about the past.

I was appointed Research Chrononaut by the ECA when I was twenty-eight. That was twenty personal-years ago. Although, given that I'm now drowning in 70BC, I suppose it won't happen for a long time yet. Don't think about it. It doesn't help.

Chrononauts are a boring bunch. We don't need the same physical perfection as, say, astronauts, but the emotional and psychological requirements are far more stringent. The past isn't as changeable as we used to think, but still, it's a strain, going back before cleanliness, before antibiotics, back when the world was a dangerous place.

As a fit and stable Greek, I was chosen to lead the mission to infiltrate and document the workshop of Archimedes, as well as the usual long-term travel-writing schtick. This, you understand, was a cultural mission. Thirty years ago the first Chinese chrononauts returned with pristine Ming artefacts, and the world rejoiced, but it's been downhill since then. We needed to inspire Europa, or risk our budget entirely. Where better to go than the height of Greek civilisation, especially with a Greek President in Brussels?

Insertion's easy; getting back's the trick. The Consolidator Harness - made entirely of fast-degrading plastics - can't keep good enough count, and it's the only piece of future-tech we can take back with us. But before accurate timekeeping, how are you to know when your time's up? When the window opens, you've got to be ready to jump back, or you're stuck. And nobody wants to live out their lives in squalor, not when the tickertape awaits them.

So we devised in-period, if anachronistic, timekeeping. Using only materials available at the time - bronze, and lots of it - we created devices that we could pass off as curiosities that allowed us to know the exact time that's passed.

But even that wasn't enough. We needed devices robust enough to stand a little travel - that's how we almost lost Kronos 13. And with the window of return literally less than a minute in length, well, it'd have to be somehow perfect.

We knew the Ancient Greeks watched the stars closely, and with our cheaters' knowledge of the future, we could buy our way into the company of any astrologer. We overthought this at first, looking for planetary alignments, or comets, or supernovae, or whatever - but the absolute most precise criterion was the solar eclipse cycle. Totality lasts for only a few minutes, and if the last few millennia of observation are anything to go by, can be retrodicted with very great precision. As long as we were in the right place at the right time, we'd jump back at totality. Job done.

The engineers designed a mechanism of interlocking gears, and Helen, the team poet, decorated it with in-period instructions. We adjusted it for the astronomical changes since the BCs and blind-trialled it against our predictions. We calibrated our harnesses to the length between one eclipse and the next. We shook the Culture Minister's hand and smiled for the cameras. And then we jumped.

That was eighteen p-years ago. A lot has happened since then.

Overflowing with notes, still wrapped in our now-flimsy Consolidator Harnesses, and ready to change the modern understanding of the Ancient Middle East, we bought our way onto a trireme bound for Rome, to catch a glimpse of Caesar before the eclipse that would bring us home.

We're always encouraged to contemplate our deaths in the mission. If we died, we'd leave only notes in Modern Esperanto - thin paper, destined to be reused as firelighters - and our bodies, our clothing, and the Harnesses. Only the device would persist. But if some clever-dick found it, they could change the world forever. Imagine a Roman Empire powered by clockwork. Imagine a European Enlightenment in the time of Jesus, a technological revolution powered by our sacrifice.

You can't change the relative-future. You can't change the tides of history. But the device would be a gift from another world.

They threw Helen overboard when the storm-waves rose above the prow. It wasn't enough to quell Neptune's wrath. The captain aimed for Antikythera, hoping to beach the trireme and disembark - but we lost our sails, we capsized, we started to go under.

I grabbed the device and struck out for shore. And for all my training and all my education, I'm sick of the squalor, of these people's back-breaking, primitive lives. I hope we made it close enough. I hope someone can dive down to this place. I hope they find it. I hope to change the world. I'm sorry I'll never see the Peloponnese again, nor my family, nor the future I was born into. I'm sorry to let down the ECA; I'm sorry to have failed in my mission. But maybe, in these last few moments, I can get it close enough to be recovered.

My last thought, as the waves claimed me, was the hope that my failure might change the world.

The Last Days of Surrey

Courtesy of the lovely Webster, who gave me a prompt here, and whose matching (albeit much better) piece Let's Spend the Night Together you can find here.

 

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They fell from the Heavens like the wrath of God, and every man of Woking fell to the ground in awe and terror. In their pain they roared like the devils they surely were, battering our crops with their hot breath. Great wings of smoke unfurled high into the sky, casting all of Surrey into shade. I’ll admit, that did scare me, just a bit.

The priest cried that none should approach; that we must flee, or else scourge ourselves in repentance. I don’t know if his own whipping helped his soul, but I heard he fell dead a mile down the path, and landed face-down in a ditch. Anyway, I never was one for priests. So I went to look.  

Of course, after a lifetime of spouting nonsense about the French, the King and the evils of wanking, just this once, he was only bloody right. The common and the nearby wood were scourged dry, their airs choked with ash, and the earth at the heart of the crater glowed like the Pit. Everything screamed to stay away from that place, not least the thought of my Martha.

But if it’s the end, and you’re going to God anyway, you might as well go doing something that’d annoy the wife.

After a while the smoke cleared, revealing some sort of great black barrel. That’s a funny-looking devil, I thought, just in time for it to crack open and disgorge something much more familiar. It spilled out onto the ground, greyish, shapeless, and clearly in pain, and lay there panting and moaning.

Now me, ever since that bloody business with the Cornish, I’ve had nightmares about the sound of screaming. And that thing’s keening, let me tell you – it might have been an enemy of God and King, a creature so vile that even a Frenchman might rightly spit on it – but in that moment, I wanted to help it, even if just to put it out of its misery.

Fortunately, I wasn’t forced to choose, because at that moment, a hundred of the King’s Yeomen stamped up on their horses to kill it with halberds.

And then they told me to get lost, and because they had halberds, and I’d just seen them kill a devil, I did.

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The dark cloud that settled over the land turned the days that followed into one great long night. Cold and starving, grey with ash, we tried to get the crops in, but the exodus from Guildford put paid to our harvest almost overnight. That lot told us of greater monsters, stretching up past the treetops, glaring with hate-fuelled eyes that burned men to dust. We must have been lucky – we only got a little one.

Presently the story got round that I’d seen it, and people came to hear the tale. Crowds gathered at my house, and when some little scrap from Godalming called me ‘Sir John’, it stuck.

It wasn’t long after that – and it didn’t take much prompting – before the story went round that I’d killed it. Well, that changed things. Men gave me gifts, women gave me kisses, children gave me great teary hugs – and everyone, everyone, looked to me for our next move.

Giant-killer or not, Sir John and his growing family of hundreds had to eat. There was nothing left in Woking, so the dispossessed of the Last Days of Surrey would have to run away. We settled on invading Berkshire; after all, there had to be food in Reading. We’d work out what came next after that.

We were much surprised to find Reading missing, replaced with a great field of thorny red weed. We slept fitfully beneath once-green hedges that night, and by the morning, the distant Downs were bloody with it.

All the world turned to red, then. It grew like a great thick net, making a chore of walking anywhere, trapping us in that ruined town. Panic spread, tempers frayed, fists were thrown. And then, at the last moment, as violence seemed certain, one ferocious voice shouted down both mobs. Martha, my Martha, sitting on our eldest lad’s shoulders, bit into one of the bloody runners, and declared it safe to eat.

And that’s how she became Lady Martha to our desperate followers, and how we all became the blood-drinkers of New Reading Town.

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Life in Hell turned out to be much the same as life on Earth. Wake up, say your prayers (perhaps with a certain new urgency), break your back to gather up food, cook it ‘til you can stand the taste. We soon found the red weed went with turnips, which was good, because bugger-all else had survived.

After a month or so, a few tattered soldiers came by to tell us there was a new King. To our great surprise, it wasn’t Beelzebub, who presumably chose Paris for his court – no, just the young Henry Fitzroy, the last Henry’s bastard, the first bugger to reach the throne after the devils all started dying of dropsy. Of all things, dropsy. The mind boggles.

Anyway, best of luck to him. The red weed died off in the winter, and as the great and undisputed heroes of the hour, myself and the missus got made Mayor and Mayoress. Not by the King, far away and pointless – but by our own people, our own friends and family. That’s true honour, you know. So Mayor John it was, and bollocks to anyone who said otherwise.

So that’s my story. The rest, you know, that’s just sweat and dirt. Our Humphrey bought a flock and moved them out onto the Downs. Our Fulke lost his sight and went off to be a monk. Agnes, Isobel, and little John – they’re all well. So are the folk of New Reading, who we stumbled to safety with, when Hell came to earth in the summer of… oh, fifteen thirty-something.

And that’s about the shape of it. God bless you and keep you, my friend.