Prompt 5 (from Chapter 1: Time and Place): A time traveller from the future says that he needs your help to right some wrongs in the past. Do you trust this stranger and help him on his mission? Why or why not? After your decision, what happens next?
Story:
I was just sitting down to have some tea and watch something horrible on TV when a loud rapping sounded at my door.
This concerned me because I live in an apartment and no one should be rapping at my door under any circumstances unless it’s a neighbor warning me of a fire, warning me of another neighbor on a crazy rampage, or perhaps warning me that they were themselves about to go on a crazy rampage. The bottom line is it couldn’t possibly be any sort of good news and while I went to the door to deal with whomever it was my tea would grow cold. On the plus side, I wouldn’t be watching something horrible on TV. So lose-win. I didn’t like it but it seemed an obvious conclusion that I would either have to answer the door or tolerate the rapping until the person/talented bear/my fevered imagination gave up. And I am not a patient person, really.
I went to the door and looked through the peephole. A person wearing silvery clothing stood there, fist poised to rap again. My footfalls had undoubtedly silenced him for the moment.
“Yes?” I said, careful to not open the door. I eyed my tea and mourned for its coming tepidness, then turned back to the peephole. The man lowered his hand.
“I need your help,” he said. His voice was not unpleasant, having a kind of “Would you like fries with that?” lilt to it. Inquiring, but gentle.
“Do you need money for the washer?” It was the first thing that came to mind, as I am forever one coin short of what I need to run a load and it irritates me to no end. No matter how many times I swear to get and keep sufficient change, I always manage to find some way to use that last quarter. “Here,” I’ll say to a couple of friends while we are out on a lark, “let me show you a trick.” Then I’ll do a little flip with the quarter, intending to make it appear to vanish and instead I will fling it away, then scramble after it as it hits the ground and rolls into a sewer drain, to be ingested at some later time by one of the mythical crocodiles that inhabit the pipes below. My friends will chuckle and one of them will think himself very clever by asking, “Was that the trick?” to which I will grimace, knowing I will have to wear dirty socks for another day.
The man in the silvery clothes said nothing for a few moments. He looked to be thinking. Finally he said, “No, I don’t need money for the washer.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Because I haven’t any. But the woman at the corner store down the block will give you change for a five. Not for a ten, though. She’ll just yell at you if you have a ten. Chase you out if you’re shorter than she is, too. But you should be fine.” Only just, I thought.
“I don’t need any change. Or rather, I do. But I need your help to exact the change.”
“How do you exact the change? That doesn’t make sense.” I held up a finger to indicate a pause in the conversation, realized the man in the silvery clothes couldn’t see my finger, and put it back down. “I’m going to get my tea. It’s just over here, so keep talking. I’ll hear you.” I went to get my tea.
“What I mean is I need your assistance to enact a change in the past, a change that will affect future events.”
“Change can’t really affect past events, can it? I mean, the past has already come and gone.” I sipped my tea. It was no longer hot but still acceptably warm. I sipped again, relishing the taste and aroma. For a moment I could imagine this odd little man wasn’t standing on the other side of my door. Then he ruined the effect by speaking again.
“I’m from the future,” he said.
“Of course you are.”
“I know it’s hard to believe but–“
“You can prove it?”
“Well, no. I mean yes, but not right now.”
“Convenient.”
“Not really. It makes it more difficult to persuade you to help.”
“You do realize how daft you sound? I’m not likely to open the door to someone daft.”
“If you don’t help, the future will turn in a terrible way. And when I say the future I mean my present.”
“So you’re essentially asking me to fix your problems? Why should I care? If you’re from a thousand years in the future, I’ll be long dead before your little issue or whatever it is comes up.” I sipped more tea. It was soothing but insufficient. I would need a cookie soon.
“I’m from ten years in the future.”
I raised an eyebrow. The man could not see this either, but it was an involuntary reaction. “If you’re from only ten years in the future, why are you dressed like an extra from a 1952 science fiction film? I know fashions evolve and I still don’t understand how leg warmers ever became a thing again, but I just don’t see silvery jumpsuits becoming fashionable in the span of a single decade.”
“The suit is necessary for time travel.”
“You’re quite certain you weren’t just at the disco?”
“What? No. Look, I haven’t much time.”
“If you’re a time traveler, wouldn’t you in fact have an endless amount of time? Just keep turning back the clock.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Convenient.”
“No, it is not convenient! It’s terrible!” He was sounding irritated now and I confess that was my goal. I hoped he’d move on to one of my neighbors, perhaps one about to start a crazy rampage.
He was not to be deterred, however, and pleaded once again for my assistance. I went to the kitchen to look for a cookie.
I found a bag of chewy chocolate chip cookies. Not my first choice but they would do until I made a run to the store. When I pulled the bag out of the cupboard I discovered to my horror that it was empty, save for a few crumbs. I tried to recall when I had eaten the last of the cookies and more importantly, why I had set myself up for crushing disappointment by placing the empty bag back into the cupboard. I could not recall the former, but the latter was quite common for me, some latent inability to let things go, perhaps. I knew somewhere in the back of my fridge I had a bottle of Coke that had at most a few drops of liquid in it. One of my quirks.
The man in the silver suit was rapping again. I let out a loud, dramatic sigh and went back to the door.
“Just tell me what you need me for and I may help you,” I said, silently adding that I really wanted a cookie and I’d have to leave the apartment to get one, making the dismissal of this person all the more important.
“I can’t tell you, it would corrupt the time stream. But it’s very important. Critically important.”
“On a scale of one to ten, with one being not important at all and ten being the most important thing ever, how does this rate?”
“A ten,” he shouted without hesitation. Whoever or whatever he was, he certainly had conviction.
“If I open this door, you’re not going to do anything weird, are you? You’re not going to attack me? I’ve got a very large knife here.” Somewhere in a kitchen drawer. I don’t have much use for it, as I mostly eat take-out and generally don’t need to carve large slabs of meat. Like the one babbling on the other side of my door.
“No, I won’t hurt you. I need your help. But we must move quickly.”
I peered through the peephole again. He was darting his eyes left and right, left and right, then his entire head began to do the same. He looked like a deranged cuckoo bird.
“They’re coming!” he said. “Let me in!”
I looked around for something to defend myself with. The closest thing to a weapon was my cup of tea. I quickly finished it then held the cup in a menacing sort of way as I unlocked the door. The man in the silvery suit reacted to the click of the lock with a strange whimper. I opened the door. He flew in past me, turned on his heels and told me in an urgent sotto voice to close the door and lock it.
I did so and he relaxed very, very slightly. I went to the peephole and saw two men dressed in gold suits walking up the hallway. They came to my door, hesitated for the briefest moment, then continued down the hallway, disappearing through the door that led into the stairwell.
“There were two men dressed like you, but in gold instead of silver. Is that a higher rank or something?”
“No,” the man said. “They’ve followed me back to try to stop me from acting.”
“All right,” I said. “Now that you’re safe, I’m going to get some cookies down at the corner store.”
“Cookies?”
“Yes. They still have cookies ten years in the future, don’t they? If the answer is no, please don’t tell me.”
“Here, hold onto this.” The man in the silvery suit was holding what looked to be a glow stick, the type you’d see in a dance club. He wasn’t offering it to me, exactly, it seemed more that I was to grab hold of it while he also held onto it.
“What is that?”
“It’s difficult to explain.”
“Could you try?”
“I don’t have–“
“Time. Yes, I know.” I decided it was best to humor the man. I kept the tea cup handy just in case, but this little charade would end soon. I needed that cookie.
I placed my free hand on the glow stick and felt nothing. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I felt a little foolish.
The man’s expression shifted several times, as if it was trying to settle on the correct level of anxiety. He was very worried looking when he next addressed me.
“It’s not working,” he said.
I agreed, since nothing was happening.
He turned toward the kitchen and for a moment tugged me along, as I was still clutching the glow stick. He told me to let go and I did so, gladly. But I didn’t like him traipsing into my kitchen. He paced about the floor, giving me time to observe that I had not swept for quite awhile. Was that a spider near the stove or just a large bit of burnt toast I hadn’t picked up? What was that stain? It looked like gravy but I don’t like gravy. So many questions.
The man had produced a second glow stick and busily screwed the two together, the end result now looking more like a light saber. It glowed a faint green. It had not glowed at all before.
“Is it working now?” I asked.
He thrust it out at me. “Take hold, now. Please.”
Once more, I grabbed onto the stick. My other hand was beginning to tire from holding the tea cup, which struck me odd as a tea cup isn’t exactly heavy. Perhaps I was gripping too tightly, tense from the possibility of not getting to the store before it closed. If I had to drive across town to the shopping mall to get a bag of cookies it would be too much bother and I’d just wait until I did a full grocery run and that wouldn’t be for days, leaving me sans cookies for much longer than I’d like. And why might this happen? Because a man in a silvery suit was asking me to hold his light saber.
Once more nothing happened. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. There was a knock on my apartment door. But I think the timing was coincidental. I let go of the stick and headed to answer it. The man urged me again in sotto voice to not do so.
I looked into the peephole and the two men in gold suits had returned. One looked slightly annoyed, the other was more nonplussed.
The annoyed one knocked. I turned to the man in the silvery suit. He shook his head. He seemed very afraid.
I was at a loss now. I think more than anything I just wanted to climb back into bed and start the day over again. It wasn’t that late, I could do it, pretend none of this had happened, except I’d already know I had no cookies and could just go straight to the corner store when I got up.
“We know he’s in there. Let us in,” said one of the gold-suited men. He didn’t sound threatening, more just explaining things.
“I don’t usually let strangers into my apartment,” I said.
“Make an exception,” said the other gold-suited man. Again, there was no hint of threat in his voice. The way he said it made it seem like a brilliant idea.
“No, I don’t think so. What if you’re a pair of nutters come to rob me?”
“We are not. We only want to talk to the person you have with you.”
“I wouldn’t say I have him with me. That sounds almost intimate, doesn’t it?” I realized I had surrendered information I hadn’t intended to. Oops.
“We won’t be long. Time is ticking.”
God, would they stop saying things like that?
“Fine,” I said. The man in the silvery suit was waving his arms at me, the way one might if marooned on a desert island and was trying to signal a plane overhead. I ignored him. Time–see? I can do it, too!–to end this nonsense one way or another.
I opened the door and the two gold-suited men strode in and past me, the nonplussed one offering a quick nod. I turned my head to follow and saw the man in the silver suit running toward my living room window.
“Not a good idea. We’re four floors up.” I very much hated living four floors up. It was high enough that I greatly preferred using the elevator, but the elevator in this building is so slow it sometimes feels like you aren’t moving at all. Sometimes this is because you really aren’t moving at all. It breaks down a lot. Every time I come home I wrestled with the dilemma, stairs or elevator?
The man in the silvery suit pushed up the sash of the living room window, something I hadn’t done in about six months. The lock was sticky and to be honest I’ve been too arsed to have a look at fixing it. The man in the silver suit had no trouble at all, perhaps because of some technology invented ten years hence that makes opening things much easier.
The gold-suited men were closing in on him, moving quickly but not running. They carried themselves with confidence. Their suits sparkled brightly.
The man in the silvery suit made it out the window and the other two immediately followed. I listened for splats or crunches but heard nothing, save for the sound of traffic drifting up from the street. I went to the window and looked down.
All three were gone.
I closed the window and went to the corner store. I bought a bag of oatmeal cookies.
When I returned to the apartment I made some fresh tea and put two oatmeal cookies on a plate. I skipped the horrible TV altogether and just sat on the couch, drinking my tea and dipping my cookies. Would the world change in some catastrophic way in ten years? I didn’t think so, but at the same time (I would never be able to use that word again without cringing internally) the three men were clearly on about something. Or perhaps just on something. In the end the only determination I made was that the subject was something not to be pondered on an early weekend afternoon, especially when there was tea and cookies.
I finished the second cookie when there was a knock on my door.
“Oh, come on,” I muttered. I almost hoped it would be a neighbor going on a crazy rampage this time. After the second and third knock I reluctantly got off the couch (partly due to how it sags far more than any piece of furniture should) and went to the door, gazing once more into the peephole.
It was the man in the silvery suit. “I need your help,” he said.
“No bloody way,” I answered. I snapped around, returned to the couch, sat down and waited for the end of the–
