The bathroom had turned back into a kitchen again. That was the problem with this new fancy-schmancy superpositional plumbing, Sarah reflected. It was all great and space-saving and efficient (a pipe is a pipe after all, regardless what’s going through it) until it all malfunctioned. That’s when you ended up with – best case scenario – someone suddenly finding themselves pooping in the sink in front of a terrified cereal-eating shipmate and – worse case scenario – finding themselves body-horrored halfway into a porcelain bowl, with a cistern where their vital organs were supposed to be. Sarah had just given up flicking the manual override switch on the wall, which only seemed to make the kitchen flicker a bit, like a cheap hologram. She squinted and yes, there it was: the beautifully utilitarian military-grade shower-toilet combo, somehow occupying the same space as the kitchen and yet also not, messing with Sarah’s depth perception and causing her stomach to lurch, as though it wanted to leave not only her body but the strange doubleroom itself. But Sarah had priorities. She closed one eye completely and started moving slowly around the room. The existence of the kitchen and bathroom both seemed to wax and wane periodically as she moved about, trying to find the ideal spot. Aaaand... there. She opened both eyes and found herself standing in what was unquestionably a bathroom. She breathed a sigh of relief, before the question hit her. The question of how she was supposed to use the toilet from two metres away.
She was distracted from her thoughtful contemplations on non-Euclidean bladder voidance and context-sensitive geometry by a great wailing siren rose up from the ether. She swore loudly as the bathken was bathed in amber light. Biological functions be damned, her ship was in trouble.
Captain Sarah Li of the Starship Centauri strode out of the room with what she hoped was an air of composed gravitas. She then, with all the dignity that her high ranking position granted her, struggled to remove some of the kitchen-roll/toilet-paper that was stuck to her heel with her other boot (one thing that did not change with the room was the paper, which was equally coarse and sandpapery in each of its purposes). She marched down the corridor, sirens still crying all about, with bodies bustling and voices barking. The corridor widened to present a massive door that slid open before her. She entered the command room. Here the panic was even greater, the orange flashing all the more dramatic, throwing bold shadows of the various ship officers moving and yelling and commanding and sweating. Various control desks and monitors all circled a hologram in the centre of the room showed a wireframe schematic of their ship slowly rotating, dire red text arrowing out of it all over. The ship model then exploded, and not in the schematic sense.
Sarah did her best to appear assertive, commanding and in control, which is difficult to do when you A) have absolutely no idea what is going on and B) you’re absolutely bursting for a piss. But if she was one thing, it was professional.
‘Attention!’ she bellowed out. The din quietened down. ‘Someone, gimme a sit-rep.’ This was captain for ‘I’m confused and scared and human, but I really need you to not know that right now’.
‘We’re under attack, Captain,’ the little ratty-faced Rep Officer Branley piped up from behind a display twice his size. ‘One assailant, about naught three GUs behind us. Must be a stealth ship, popped right up on our tail withou-’
‘What’s the issue?’ Sarah interrupted. ‘Have they not tried to open communications with us?’
‘No Captain. They’ve opened fire.’ His voice crackled a little from fear. ‘A 85 quad-megaton warhead.’
‘Christ. Can our defences handle it?’
‘No, Captain. It’s a military grade KL6, same as ours. Can turn a planet to dust, and it’s way too fast for our anti-missile missiles. We have maybe twenty seconds until we’re-’
‘Dust, got it.’ Think, Sarah, think. They couldn’t take it down and they certainly couldn’t outrun it. She scoured her brain for a course of action. There was only one, and she knew it, but she really, really didn’t want to go there.
‘Captain?’
‘Shut it, Branley. I’m thinking.’
‘It’s just th-’
‘Complete destruction, I’m aware.’ Sarah did her best not to sigh out loud. It wasn’t very captainly. ‘Janowski, listen up.’
Chief Tech Officer Janowski attempted to snap a salute at Sarah, but mostly achieved launching a rivulet of sweat off her hand at one of her crewmates.
‘Y-y-yes Captain!’
‘Stop quivering and listen up, Janowski. We’re gonna hit the T-Drive and get the fuck out of here.’
‘Captain? The... T-Drive?!’
‘You’re making a puddle, Janowski. Yes, the T-Drive. I know, I know. But right now we don’t have much choice. We warp or we die.’
‘There’s no chance we can get a safe route that fast!’
‘Then get us a half safe one. Now, Janowski!’ Sarah looked around the room. The sirens still wailed, but the terrified hubbub had died. All eyes were on their Captain. ‘Anyone have a better idea? No? Then do what you’re told.’
Janowski was struggling, typing furiously at her station, eyes shooting from monitor to monitor, sweating profusely. Other tech officers were checking calculations and running simulations, making rapid guesses and heuristic analyses and just plain old shots in the dark. The hubbub was rising again, the fearful intensity boiling up higher than ever. Some crew members were even crying, praying, saying their last goodbyes. If we somehow get through this, Sarah thought, those lot are getting fired.
‘In the meantime: computer, open a broadcast channel. Unencrypted, on all frequencies. Begin transmission. To whomever just opened fire on a military vessel: congrats. You’re already dead. End transmission.’
‘Ten seconds to impact!’ yelled Branley.
Even Sarah could feel a trickle of cold sweat down her back. Janowski meanwhile was nearly hyperventilating when she finally blurted out ‘Warp systems ready! Well, I mean...’
‘It’ll do. Hit it.’
Kowlaski’s finger hovered over the big red button. Sarah wondered would she have to be the one to do it. K was a good tech, but wasn’t exactly spectacular under pressure.
‘Five seconds to impact!’
Janowski closed her eyes and pushed the button. Everything got weird.
For centuries and centuries reputable physicists the world over declared time travel impossible. Many won important prizes for proving how impossible it really was. The only issue was that the more prizes they won, the more futurefolk that showed up at these scientists’ homes to make fun of them.
The first person to prove that time travel was definitively doable was Jreel Dartull. Dartull was walking to work one icy morning, when he suddenly slipped and somehow fell into the moment of his own birth. Shortly after the hospital staff had powerhosed Jreel’s mother off the maternity ward walls work began on reverse engineering the event. The resulting method was an odd one, furtively ignoring the laws of physics in the hope that nobody important noticed. This tech was the basis of the T-Drive, capable of warping a cruise vessel to any given point in space-time, provided the drive was given a few minutes to calculate a safe path and it was feeling nice that day. If it wasn’t – well, the vessel coming in contact with even a single unaccounted-for molecule would cause instant and violent annihilation. Even at its safest (i.e. not very safe at all) warping through space-time felt a lot like getting forced through a straw with the gentle encouragement of a sledgehammer. At it’s worst it felt more like-
More like her skin was tightening inwards, crushing and suffocating her organs. Her muscles tensed and ached and her bones felt as though they’d be ground into powder. The lights became overbright, scorching her retinas, but her eyelids were pulled back so hard she couldn’t close them. All around her Sarah saw more and more warnings flash on screens, scrolling sidewards and backwards. In that slow orange strobe she could have sworn she saw Janowski rapidly de-age into a baby (not that it made a huge difference). Sarah’s body pumped out all the adrenaline it had and in a fraction of a second a million regrets went through her mind. She regretted not taking the time to open her heart, to make real friends, to find love. To be do more than just work and climb her way up that ladder. Above all else she regretted not having a personal toilet installed in her office.
And then it was over. The siren had changed, taking on an even more urgent tone. Red text flashed on every screen in the room. The orange strobe had turned a deep brick-red. And yet, somehow, they were all still alive.
‘Janowski,’ Sarah croaked out, rubbing her rapidly decompressing throat. ‘Where are we? When?’
‘Eh... exactly where we were, maybe thirty, thirty-five seconds ago?’
Sarah looked around. People were crying tears of joy, hugging, breathing sighs of relief. Do these people do any actual work?, Sarah thought bitterly. Like most discerning sci-fi readers she hated time-travel. Plus, they still had an unknown assailant to deal with. ‘That siren isn’t sounding so good.’
‘No, no it’s not,’ piped up Bramley. ‘Every system on board is screaming. Multiple catastrophic errors. Oxygen and main engine are still online though, so we might be alright. Also, I don’t think the calendar is fit to deal with rapid jumps.’ He pointed at the right-hand wall where the display claimed it was ERRORth day of a month whose name appeared to be rendered as a small cocker spaniel.
‘No, but we got bigger fish. Where’s our little friends?’
‘We got a lock-on on their ship. Naught-three out. And they haven’t fired yet.’
‘Perfect. We got these pricks with their pants down. Open fire.’
‘But-’
‘Branley, how many times do I have to tell you to shut up? I don’t know who these cuddlefucks are, but they’re trying to kill us. So we gotta kill them first. Open. Fire.’
Munitions Officer Kotei yes Captained and pushed the big red button (you’d be surprised how many big red buttons there are on the average spaceship). That’s what Sarah liked about Kotei. That’s why he was the munitions head. He didn’t fuck about, he just did as he was told.
‘Missile out and inbound on our target. Impact in T minus twenty.’
‘Thank you, Officer.’ Sarah smiled over at Branley. She couldn’t wait to fire him. Into the nearest sun, preferably.
But Branley was busy manipulating the ship’s status display, intensely examining where they were, where they had been (or would be; logic and tenses are the first out the window when time travel comes knocking). Then he looked at his captain. Something was dawning behind those beady little rodent eyes. His jaw very slowly dropped and his eyes very slowly widened. It was only then that it hit Sarah. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
‘INCOMING BROADCAST’, the intercom announced.
Sarah closed her eyes and remembered the good old days, when this job was straightforward. Before time travel. When she could go to the bathroom in relative peace. The past, she reflected, isn’t what it used to be.
The broadcast began:
‘To whomever just opened fire on a military vessel: congrats. You’re already dead.’
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from Short Stories http://bit.ly/2WV8QRV
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