by Jessy Randall
Strictly speaking, I did deceive him. But it was for his own good.
***
The most amazing thing has happened. I know it will sound impossible, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s only implausible, not all the way impossible. I mean, if it was going to happen, why couldn’t it happen to me? Why shouldn’t it happen to me?
My girlfriend has appeared to me from the future, from the year 2040 to be exact.
It’s the single most important technological advance of the 21st century, and I am a vital part of it. Or, I will be. Or, you know, the usual time travel paradoxes and so on, but it’s actually perfect, since I’m one of the few people equipped to handle the responsibility. At last, fate is handing me something I deserve! Of course, there’s a bit of hassle to get through, not my favorite way to spend a Saturday. My gaming time will be cut down somewhat.
Time! Time travel is coming. I mean, of course it is, but sooner than any model predicted. It seems I will get to try it in about twenty years, since I’m right in the center of the universe-changing moment. It’s a bit disappointing not to be the Chosen One but being the father of the Chosen One is a close second. Interesting that the Chosen One turns out to be a female; I’d never considered that possibility, but it’s all right. Shouldn’t really matter.
I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Let me go back to earlier today.
I was jacked into TortureWar, so when I felt the tap on my shoulder, I assumed it was part of the VR setup, which is hyper-realistic. The equipment cost me a couple of paychecks but it was totally worth it—full body sensors, lightweight headset, surround-sound deep-set earbuds—actually it was quite a lot of stuff to remove in order to talk to Sherry and I was feeling a bit miffed at having to do it, which in retrospect is ironic. I mean if I hadn’t disrobed and de-teched it would have been a tragedy of massive proportions.
Sherry tapped me on the shoulder, made me take off all my gear, and insisted I needed to listen to her. I was preparing my “I am listening” face when I noticed she looked different. Older.
Actually, a lot older. Like, past her prime. Women hit their physical prime between 18 and 25. Sherry, my own regular Sherry I mean, in my own time frame, is probably a 7 or an 8 on a good day, but when it comes to intelligence, she’s more like a 6. That’s why we make a good team. I fill in her gaps. But the Sherry who spoke to me this morning, Future Sherry, had gained weight, probably around ten pounds. And her clothes were different. Shiny, and tight.
I noticed these things before she began talking to me, because the visor comes off before the earbuds, obviously. That’s just common sense. So I missed the beginning of what she was saying and had to tell her to start over. I’m usually ahead of whatever she’s saying, that’s just my nature, but in this case, because of the earbuds, I was slightly behind. She seemed to be telling me I had to break up with her, immediately, that day.
“Go back to the beginning, hon,” I said. I often have to be patient with Sherry—she assumes everyone’s priorities are the same as hers, which just isn’t logical.
“Rob. Listen carefully. I am coming to you from the year 2040. I don’t have much time. Please believe me when I say the universe depends upon the action you take in the next few hours. You must break up with me in your present day. I may cry, I may beg you to change your mind, but you must stand firm.”
“Sherry, what are you talking about?”
Of course I was skeptical. Maybe one of my TortureWar buddies was playing a trick on me? There are a lot of pranks in TortureWar circles. Like, this one time Meetz and I convinced Berk that his server had a glitch, and we were able to get hundreds of clicks ahead of his team while he ran diagnostics. Another time, Berk and I introduced a line of code that caused all the other soldiers’ uniforms to turn bright pink. It was hilarious. But I digress.
Sherry got that look on her face, you know the one. The “you’re not listening to me” face. “I am here from the future,” she said. A bit crossly. She doesn’t realize how adorable she is when she’s cross. Even overweight, she was attractive to me at that moment—and the shiny outfit was rather distracting.
***
To make myself look twenty years older wasn’t difficult, because he doesn’t really see me anyway. I wore no make-up and put some temporary gray in my hair. If he’d touched the gray it would’ve come off on his hand, but luckily, he didn’t.
***
“There’s no time to explain,” Sherry continued. “Just please, please, you’ve got to believe me when I say that the safety of the universe hangs in the balance. You need to change your path today. If you don’t, civilization as you know it will crumble. You are the key to the future of humanity, Rob. You are the father of the Chosen One. Or you will be, if you do as I say. Now listen very carefully.”
“Wait! How did you—are you telling me there’s time travel, and you yourself time-traveled! How did you do it? How does it work? Where’s your machine? Can I watch you when you go back? Can I come too?
“ROB! FOCUS! I told you, there is no time to explain. I only have about five minutes before the space-time continuum becomes unstable and very bad things happen.”
“Okay, but at least show me your ship. We can walk there while you talk.”
“No, Rob, we can’t. If you are within a certain radius of the device, you will be at risk. If you even see it, there can be problems.” As she said this, her hand went to her wrist. She was wearing a plain-looking clear rubber bracelet. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed, but I am actually quite observant. Now I saw that as she spoke, she touched different parts of it and seemed to be manipulating it.
“I know this is going to be hard to believe,” she said, “but you have absolutely got to break up with me tonight. Not tomorrow, not the next day. It has to be tonight.”
“How can that possibly be important to the universe? And also, wait, what?”
“We’ve run all the scenarios and in order for you to complete your destiny, you have got to be single by 10 p.m. this evening. There are some variations in the next steps after that, but the crux of it is, it has to be over between us tonight.”
“I am supposed to see you later—but—”
“I know. I know what I’m going to wear, and I know what you’re going to wear, and I know what we’re going to order, and I know that by 10, ideally by 8, you need to be single.”
“Why are you putting it like that? How can my relationship status possibly be important to the future, or the universe, or whatever? And—back to the time machine—how does it—”
“No time, Rob. We have only a few moments left before I need to return to my own timeline.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll do it, but can you at least tell me why?”
“It’s like this. The person who is going to save the universe needs to be born within the next couple of years. The exact birthdate isn’t known, but we know the child is born before 2026. And the thing is….”
“Sherry! What!”
“You’re the father.”
“Wait—you and I? Are we—”
“No. I’m not the mother, but you are the father. That’s why we have to get you freed up to meet the mother. These things take time, and this is the last possible day to get the gears turning fast enough for your DNA to conceive the Chosen One.”
For someone who didn’t have time to explain, she actually spoke for quite a while, maybe longer than I’d ever heard her speak before. The gist of it is, I have to break up with present-day Sherry as soon as possible, so that I can meet another girl, name not given, in time to impregnate her, and then the child of that union—a daughter, apparently, name not given—is going to stop some sort of apocalypse in the year 2039.
No matter how I begged, she refused to show me her time machine, saying it wasn’t safe. She told me I had to immediately reactivate all my profiles on all the dating sites, and she sent me out to buy flowers or chocolates to ease the blow when I break up with her. I suppose in this case she knows best, and if flowers or chocolates will make it easier on present-day Sherry, I can afford either one. The grocery isn’t too far away.
I have plans to meet present-day Sherry for dinner tonight, so I’ll do it then. It’s a sacrifice, of course, to give up my relationship, but when I measure my own personal contentment against the fate of the universe, it almost goes without saying that the universe has to come first.
I hope she takes it without too much fuss. Future-Sherry says I must not invoke her visit when I do it, so that Present-Sherry doesn’t hold out false hope that we might get back together. I didn’t really understand why that would follow, but I know better than to talk to Present-Sherry about time travel, anyway. She doesn’t differentiate between fantasy and SF and she doesn’t follow the sub-genres. But that’s okay, I mean, I don’t pay attention to her TV shows or her stories about what her friends are doing or her work or whatever. That’s not how our relationship functions. I mean functioned.
***
You have to understand, I’d tried to break up with him so many times. I’d told him we were a bad match, that it didn’t feel right, that it wasn’t him, it was me, that he’d be better off with someone different. I’d told him in person, by phone, by email, by text. I hadn’t actually spent any time with him in over a month at this point, and yet he still considered me his girlfriend—his wench, something in his bag of holding along with the spears and axes and swords and gold. The time travel story was my last resort. I figured he’d get hung up on the technology of it, so I cut a ring out of the plastic yoke from a six-pack of soda and put that around my wrist. It looked just futuristic enough to do the job.
***
We met at our usual sushi place at the scheduled time. Sherry was already ensconced in the horigotatsu, the sunken seating area, so she didn’t get up to kiss me as she normally does. Probably for the best, I thought. I wondered for a moment if we should even order food, but decided I needed to make our goodbye memorable and special. So I ordered the giant sushi boat, figuring I could take home the leftovers.
We chatted about the usual stuff, but halfway through the meal I decided I couldn’t string her along any further. I told her, gently and reasonably, that I needed my freedom, and that if she thought about it, it was inevitable that this day would come, because—
But she interrupted me at that point, probably too upset to want to prolong the evening. She said she understood, and got up and put on her shoes, and before I could even climb out of the horigotatsu, she was gone.
***
I hope I haven’t unleashed a monster on the dating world. I recognize that I may have simply passed a problem to someone else, rather than solving it. Well, good luck to the Chosen One’s mother. I’ll watch his relationship status on Facebook, and if he doesn’t get a girlfriend soon, maybe I can put on the shiny outfit again and deliver some advice from future-me, like to skip the cologne, and to maybe ask HER some questions on the first date, instead of talking about himself the entire time.
***
I’m glad I didn’t have to see her cry, because that would have been difficult, presumably. Maybe I’ll track her down once my daughter is born, give her a hint of the part she has played in saving the universe. Because without her warning from the future, all could’ve been lost. First things first, though: I need to find the mother of my daughter. There’s a gorgeous woman who shows up in TortureWar sometimes who’s always flirting with me. I’ll try DMing her.
Bonus: Weird Stories from Armadillocon
We’re bringing you a few bonus stories this time. These are prize-winners from Space Squid’s legendary flash fiction contest at Armadillocon in Austin. In this contest, writers are given a prompt and a scant five minutes to scramble up their best compelling flash story. Winners walk away with bragging rights and a small jumble of white elephant trash from the Squid vault, anything from a weird t-shirt to a little vial of fish sauce.
The Festival of Orion
by Denman Netherland
Desi wandered through the market, eying jewelry, fingering cloth and sniffing bottles of perfume. What to buy for someone you’re supposed to love or at least like, but in fact rather resent and wish would keep her opinions to herself and her presence elsewhere? Her mother-in-law wasn’t a bad woman; she just had a way of getting under Desi’s skin with snide comments about clothing and exercise and the desirability of children.
If Max understood, it wouldn’t be so bad, but Max thought his mother walked on water and pissed wine.
Still, the festival of Orion was one of those holidays when you couldn’t do nothing. Finally, past the jars of olive, Desi’s eyes landed on a display of sauces.
There at the bottom sat a 50-gallon barrel of fish sauce.
Johnson’s Meat-O-Rama
by Matthew Bey
The sound of buzzsaws echoed through the killing floor. Of all the abattoirs in Chicago, Johnson’s Meat-o-Rama had a reputation for the worst working conditions and hygiene. An entire generation of USDA meat inspectors quivered in terror at the name of the JMOR. Every day, a metric ton of viscera squirted from the industrial effluence tubes into Bubbly Creek, which emptied into Lake Michigan in a greasy sludge.
This day, despite being a state holiday, had full staffing all up and down the processing line. Jim the Gut, a worker skilled in eviscerating, had already lost the feeling in his hands from all the evisceration he’d been doing. That’s when he saw his neighbor Bill come down the conveyor belt.
Because people are being sent to the meat markets where the purple eaters buy them.
About the Creator
Jessy Randall is a librarian at Colorado College. Her stories have appeared in Nature, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Frankenstein monsters don’t get enough genre love. How would you revive the Frankenstein trope in the 21st century?
Jessy: I feel like this question was written before Poor Things was made, and before the current season of What We Do in the Shadows. I think the Frankenstein trope is doing pretty well in the 21st century. That said, I don’t believe there is a Frankenstein equivalent of the children’s book Bunnicula. So I think we need a picture book about a Frankenstein-style pet. Obviously, the title would be Fluffenstein. Or Frankenfluff.
What’s your favorite imaginary sound?
Jessy: The sound of other people’s regret.
Jessy Randall’s book comes out SOON
Women have always worked in technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. Sometimes they made important discoveries and breakthroughs; sometimes they simply managed to exist and persist despite endless obstacles and a criminal lack of acknowledgment. Carefully researched, thoughtful, pitch perfect and precise, these poems about historical women scientists are hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time.
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