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.
-----
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.
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.
-----
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.
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