Fiction: Selections from the Time Traveler's Dictionary

Unbirthday Party noun /ˌʌn·bɜrθˌdeɪ ˈpɑr·ti/
: The celebration of the unbinding of a Parricide. Celebrated every 3,650 decimal hours, along to her, his, or zir subjective stream.
: (obsolete) any day that is not one's birthday

Subjective stream noun /səbˈdʒek·tɪv strim/
: The course of events as according to the point of view an individual observer, rather than according to the point of view of a hypothetical objective observer. The subjective streams of two individuals may not coincide, such Event A may lie in the past of Observer A but in the future of Observer B, or even never happen at all. FROM timestream.

Decimal time noun /ˈdes·ə·məl tɑɪm/
: A timekeeping system in which there are ten hours to every day, one hundred minutes to every hour, &c. Used by Parricides in place of other systems.

Parricide noun /ˈpær.ɪ.saɪd/
: (slang) One who has been unbound. DERIVED from the stereotypical, though in reality uncommon, means of unbinding (viz. killing one's grandfather before he sired one's parent).
: the murder of a parent or other near relative
: someone who has committed parricide

Unbinding noun /ʌnˈbaɪndɪŋ/
: The act of achieving apotheosis through removing oneself from history. So-called because one is thereafter moves along time only as a matter of will (or has been unbound from time).


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CYOA brainstorming: Otherworldly Land

What is this about?

You awoke in: Deep space
Its two hazards are: Unstable ground and anomalies
Your boon is: The nanite cloud
Its malfunction is: Diabolus ex machina
Your friends are: Automatons
Your two enemies are: Ascendants and cultists
Your escape plan is: Get to the exit
The problem is: Upheaval

Our protagonist awoke in a space station of some sort. A sprawling affair that seems to go on forever. Physical laws are prone to being bent or even broken here, and the superstructure is beginning to decay, so that floors may suddenly give out, walls collapse, or doors jam.

CYOA brainstorming: An Adventure in Time

What is this about?

Alright. This one is going to be pure fun. Hello!

Time machine: Large
Home base: Eh. Let's ignore this one, actually.
Equipment: Universal translator, gold, infinite wardrobe, two sets of futuristic armor
Mission: Magical Nazis
Companions: Socrates, H. P. Lovecraft, Jesus, Laika, Helen Keller

Well! This certainly became loads more feasible of a story than I expected. At least, I would read this thing.

So what's gone on? Well, obviously, magical Nazis. That's what's gone on. Oh, and the protagonist has been displaced by zir home time. Now ze's crossing all time and space with a few special companions. Their time machine is a few stories tall. You know, pretty big. They live in it.

And they travel across time and space in their not-a-house to fight magical Nazis that are trying to break history apart.

Socrates is an absolutely fantastic person to have aboard. Most people only remember him for his intelligence, but back in the day he was famous for his exploits in war, too. Socrates comes from a society where all the men fought, and he lived to old age.

You don't mess with Mr. -tes, is what I'm saying.

I'm going to rule that Laika has been given human intelligence. Somehow. And is a diehard Communist, of course. For the Motherland! This Nazi business is personal, mate.

The CYOA states that "like all blind people, Helen has the potential to become a formidable martial artist and sword fighter." This will be a lot of help in a temporal war against magical Nazis.

And then we've got Lovecraft and Jesus. Obvious choices, really.

I... don't know what more to say about this. Just got to say again, I would totally read this.

Idea: The man who stole a bit of time

A fellow has stolen nineteen days, four hours, eighteen minutes, and fifty-seconds of time. How it happened isn’t too integral to this idea. Decide on your own. Or don’t explain it at all. Perhaps he was Father Time’s janitor and then he decided to nick some neat hourglasses.

But he plans to put it to good use, especially because it wasn’t a clean theft. There are things coming after him, with the sound of shifting sand and spinning gears marching on before them. He’s only ever seen them briefly, because he knows enough to know to run.

Story Notes: Why We Fight

Notes to: Why We Fight

This was, I think, the first story I ever wrote that I was totally satisfied with. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but even so I like it to this day.

Idea: You will live forever, because God will remember you

Heaven is the mind of God, and to travel through it is to travel through both Its brain and Its thoughts, the dreamer and the dream (which makes me think of a setting where Cthulhu is God, or at least His Incarnation). Heaven is, as it were, a sort of computer. Heaven operates outside of space and time as we understand these things and may set aside processing power to simulate chosen lives based on the total data that is available to it and, if so desired, make changes so that it is better-suited to its intended task (if there is any at all). These are the Streets, and they may come into their position as a reward for their services or because their experiences are necessary for a task at hand. At a whim their memories and personalities may be rewritten, which leads some to wonder on such things as authenticity, and many eventually choose to consider themselves separate entities from the mortals they simulate. Because Heaven is beyond our conception of the universe the Streets may be placed in times before their mortal births. Streets may also go offline at times, which they experience simply as an instant transition to the time and place that they are next brought online.

"Angel" is the most common term for God's servants. They are themselves God, or fragments of Heaven, by being a part of Heaven that intrudes into our universe (in one sense they can also be considered Christ). Angels may be Streets or rawer portions of Heaven's substance, and are not quite Heaven itself: If a Street is sent to the universe what happens s that a copy is made here and then, at the conclusion of its assignment it is destroyed/unwritten/deleted and its original counterpart in Heaven is rewritten to include all the experiences of the copy.

The closest that anyone can figure out about God's motives is that It is "drawing the universe toward Itself" as if it were some kind of Omega Point in order to transform our universe into a counterpart and true equal, or else integrate itself into and in some sense assimilate our universe. Regardless, there are a number of situations in which its angels have bred with non-Heavenly lifeforms, which behavior can be explained by either hypothesis.

Idea: Displaced Time Travelers Taking the Slow Way Back

Yes, more time travelers. Yes, more vampires.

But no stable time loops this time, oh no sir.

Where did they come from? Or when? A long, long time hence, of course. Or tomorrow, or somewhere in-between. But on an otherwise-routine trip their machine malfunctioned and they found themselves stranded in the past. A few seconds was all that it took to confirm that help wasn't on its way. If it were, then it would have arrived before they even discovered the malfunction. That meant that they were totally on their own.

They refused to accept this.

The machine was truly a masterpiece of technology, far beyond anything that we could conceive. That it was unable to return them to the past was a horrendous spat of bad fortune, but that didn't mean that the whole machine was down anymore than a broken engine in a car means that the brakes and battery are also irreparably damaged. The machine was built to affect the biological structure of things in order to produce food and adapt its passengers' bodies to whatever circumstances they found themselves in.

Its capabilities were far beyond what was considered to be required for most missions, but the quasi-singularitarian technology of their day was even more advanced, and it was no trouble at all to outfit the machine with such potential. It was the passengers' one spot of good luck (though perhaps it was no luck at all, but had secretly been intended for just such a contingency as this, some of them wondered) and they used it to re-engineer themselves biologically. Their memories were doubled in their junk DNA, their lifespans were lengthened, and they were given the ability to infect others with this same condition so that their own DNA would be altered in select places. Each generation would carry the memories of the next.

Unfortunately the process didn't work completely beneficially. Errors crept in, consequences of dabbling in sciences a little too advanced than they were familiar with. Their diet, for example, was totally screwed up and they find it impossible to digest anything more substantial than a fine paste. Sunlight will give them a massive case of sunburn within seconds, and prolonged contact with cancer them up like you wouldn't believe.

Their aim is to survive the long thousands of years between where they were and where they had come from, and they're prepared to do it by any means possible. They've been playing with history, pulling these strings and cutting those ones, all to accelerate our advancement (and doing about as good of a job as anyone who didn't get a PhD in historical puppeteering). They don't care who they have to kill, how many lives they have to destroy.

Because in the end? It won't matter one bit.

History can still be rewritten. They're in the alpha timeline, if you want to call it that, the one that simply had to come before there could be a timeline where they were rescued. And so long as they're willing to pull the trigger, they can be the cavalry they knew that there was no point in waiting for.

(note: to be clear, the "vampire" concept is as novel to them as it is stereotypical to us. they messed up history like you wouldn't believe and there were no such stories in their timeline.)

Idea: Vampires, the Neil Armstrongs of Time

Time travel is utterly fatal. If you travel back in time, even by a second, you will die. No special effects. No horrifying bodily trauma. No marks, no mess. Just dead.

Now, this was wonderful for the weapons industry, but not so great for the "going back in time and seeing the past" crowd. The best that you can do is set up some probes and then call them back, but time travel messes up electronics something bad. You won't always get clean recordings, and you won't even always get your recorder back. You can always let your recorder take the slow way back to your time in order to avoid giving it a nice wash in the timestream twice, but the longer it'll take to reach you the more time it'll have to be destroyed in some other, more mundane, manner.

Thankfully, there's a wonderful solution. Vampires are totally dead, contrary to every scientific law which would like to have a word with them about animated corpses that sustain themselves on blood. And while nobody was expecting them to actually exist, it wasn't two minutes before the secret was out before some crazy scientist said what all of the other crazy scientists were thinking. "Let's send them back in time."

It wasn't as simple as grabbing vampires off of the street and throwing them into the past. There had never been very many, and there were even fewer now. An even bigger problem was that you couldn't trust them. As soon as a few had been collected, though, a solution to both problems was easy to fashion. The crazy scientists recruited crazier personnel, trained them for the missions that they would shortly undertake, and turned them into vampires.

Of course, how did vampires come to exist in the first place? They should be impossible. And to lesser beings, they are. Or were. And would be. But time travel makes temporal tense a tricky thing. Billions of years from now, the universe will be coming to a close. Our descendants will have scratched the ceiling of possibility and uncovered every secret. They were content, because it would have been useless to be otherwise. But they were not going to leave the doable undone. And though it was still impossible to travel through time and live to tell the tale, it was slightly less impossible to create something that could act, think, persist, and yet be dead.

It's funny what the universe will let you get away with, in the end. Our descendants created vampires, and they sent the first vampires back to the dawn of history. Not to do anything that would be considered spectacular in any other circumstances. Just exist, and keep existing, and bring more people in as necessary to keep it going. But history was rewritten by that simple, continuous act. Not that our one-time descendants minded. They had done all that they could. Their history was full. But by granting this gift to their dim and distant ancestors, they could create a history fresher and more full than their own, a history with billions of years of time travel against a universe of light, not huddled around the last remaining, manufactured stars, waiting for the darkness to come in.