Immaterial Graffiti
“You’re late.”
“Late? You’re damn lucky I came at all. I don’t take kindly to a perfunctory summons, especially at this hour.”
“You’re sure you weren’t followed? You took precautions?”
“Yeah, yeah, I got the whole ‘Moscow rules’ vibe from your snappy ‘Come immediately to Red Square’. I mean, an outdoor chess park at midnight, what’s not to like? OK, what’s so important we had to meet again after eleven years?”
“We, ah, we don’t exist.”
“We don’t what? Please tell me I’m not freezing my butt off just so you can discuss the philosophical ramifications of espionage. Of course ‘we’ don’t exist, our entire presence here is based on a tissue of lies. What’s wrong? Dissatisfied with your persona in the twenty-first century?”
“No, you don’t understand. Events are diverging from history so greatly I don’t think we’ll exist when this new ‘future’ catches up with us. What have we missed?”
“Nothing! Look, we’re cooling our heels because the Bureau still thinks Hurst is lying low, waiting to throw a temporal spanner in the works. Our little jaunt is strictly hands-off, passive trace only, so…hang on, hang on. Could you, have you, stepped over the Heisenberg threshold and altered events by monitoring them too closely?”
“I… I just wanted to be sure. A man like Hurst doesn’t escape into the past and do nothing to prevent the Bureau coming after him. There are only three key changes that would see the development of unregulated time-travel, and I haven’t spotted any interference. It’s the basics that are screwy - CERN hasn’t even discovered tachyonic particles yet.”
“You’re saying that development of chronomatic technology is off-track? That makes no sense, unless-”
“Paradox shielding! It’s the only way Hurst can survive the causality black-blast his sabotage will trigger. He’ll erase us from history.”
“Shit. OK. We start spraying messages at the sites the Bureau monitors – will monitor – and hope they pick us up. Then we come back, even earlier in this timeline, and start over.”
“But I’m sick of this place!”
“You and me both, Banksy. You and me both.”
Martin Clark is a freelance writer and occasional poet.
He is the author of supernatural noir novellas produced by Eggplant Literary Productions and short stories in recent Third Flatiron anthologies. He also contributes to several online publications including Mythaxis.co.uk and Kraxon.com. His range of subject matter includes science fiction, urban fantasy, romance and westerns. He puts this down to the somewhat eclectic mobile lending library where he grew up.
He works as a local government officer in south-west Scotland but still finds time to be an evil stepfather.
