© Kathryn Forbes 2009
“Why we’re doing this again, Wyatt?”
“We’ve done this countless times, Josue…take a real artifact and substitute a fake in order to maintain our timeline. If we let any evidence remain of alien visitors to ancient Earth, it would drastically change history and you and I might never exist.”
Wyatt Ellison and Josue Hunter were historians working for an agency that maintained timeline integrity. Whenever the Temporal Event Indicator at their lab lit up, it meant they had another job ahead of them. Today, they were removing the extraterrestrial circuitry from an Egyptian artifact. Actually, it had been in storage in the basement of a museum in London for decades, but tomorrow it would be examined in detail for the first time.
“There. Done. We can go home now Josue old boy.”
“Just once I’d like to see what would happen if we didn’t respond to that pesky light. Oh well.”
Wistfulness and carelessness went hand in hand. Josue followed Wyatt back to the future not noticing he’d left a small but vital control chip behind.
Ellison and Hunter shot forward through the centuries until, crossing over the moment each was born, vanished into the realm of probability.
I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fiction Challenge of October 8, 2017 (yesterday). The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 198.
For this one, I decided to dust off a couple of characters I introduced here. I wrote three stories using them and then hit a dead end. Occasionally, I bring back old characters when I find a new use for them. Sadly, Josue’s mistake ends their adventures before they begin (although since they are fictional and I am their creator, I can resurrect them any time I feel like).
To read other stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.
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Ah, such power in the hands of a mere mortal! Yes, at the outset of the next story you could turn the current story into a nightmare premonition from which one of the characters awakes. You could even pitch it as a virtual-reality training simulation prepared by their bosses to continually re-impress upon them the dangers of their work. Or, if the new timeline were not too different, you could have a different team (second-string backups?) go back to correct the anomaly of a bit of alien tech found where it didn’t belong. They could then be surprised when the first team reappears, if they themselves didn’t disappear or find themselves in different jobs altogether.
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Or, as it is fiction, you could simply ignore logic and write the story.
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Yes, you can play some nasty tricks with time travel.
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Ah yes, one of the great problems of time travel
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Be careful with what you want. You may not live long enough to see the results. Good story
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Thank you.
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