Tag Archives: changing history

A Glitch in Time

concert

Jack Gittoes pexels-photo-761543 Concert

This was fantastic. He never thought he’d see Lennon, McCartney, and Starr perform together again. They certainly showed their age, their voices not quite as vibrant as he remembered from childhood, but they were legends.

Oswaldo Gantz watched his grandchildren holding up their smartphones to take photos just like all of the other kids around them. People Oswaldo’s age tended just to watch and listen and experience both the current performance and all of those played through the halls of time.

It was all thanks to him that Lennon was still alive. There was nothing he could do about Harrison’s brain cancer, but it was a virtual piece of cake to arrange for Mark David Chapman to be stabbed to death in a mugging a day before he was supposed to murder Lennon in 1980.

Now that his trial run turned out to be such a success, he’d have to figure out how else he could improve history. Hopefully, he’d be able to fix the little glitch in the system. He never imagined that saving Lennon’s life somehow resulted in the laws being changed so Arnold Schwarzenegger could now be President instead of Donald Trump.

I wrote this for Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner – 2018: Week #23. The idea is to use the image above to inspire the creation of a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 195.

I already wrote one time travel story this morning, so I decided to try another. The image is obviously of a modern concert since you can see people taking photos with their cell phones. That stopped me from sending my character back in time to watch Lennon’s last live concert in 1975, but what if he’d never died? He’d be around 78 years old today.

Just having a bit of fun.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Roger’s linkup still needs a lot of love, so please contribute a small story of your own. Thanks.

Saving Max

truck attack

The Home Depot rental truck used by perpetrator Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov during the 2017 Lower Manhattan attack, the morning after the incident — By Gh9449 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63791131

Owen Craig snapped the magazine into place, held his Glock 19 at his side, and then stepped through the dark mirror. Last night, it had been an ordinary mirror on his closet door, but this morning, it had changed. When he looked at it, somehow he knew what it was, and why it was here.

The retired homicide detective left his suburban Los Alamitos home and stepped out the other side of the glass near New York’s city center. Just then, twenty-nine year old Islamic terrorist Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov mashed his foot down on the accelerator pedal of his rented truck, and started his run at the pedestrians and bicycle riders on Hudson River Park’s bike path.

The would-be victims saw the truck’s mad approach, but would never be able to get out of the way in time. The vehicle was still going slow enough to let Owen jump into its path and fire repeatedly at the driver through the windshield. Moments later, the now lifeless Saipov slumped to his left, causing the steering wheel to turn the truck off the path and slam into a tree.

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Resolution by Time Travel

the time tunnel

Concept art for the 1966 television show “The Time Tunnel”.

“We cannot start over, but we can begin now and make a new ending.” -Zig Ziglar

Operation Tic-Toc physicist Dr. Anthony Newman couldn’t let Senator Leroy Clark shut down the Time Tunnel project. He’d devoted five years of his life working with an elite team of scientists and engineers to perfect time travel, but that was less important to him than the main reason he had struggled so hard to be selected to work here.

He’d lost both of his parents, his Mom to a car accident in 1940 and his Dad nearly eighteen months later on December 7, 1941 during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He’d been raised by his Mom’s sister June Landers in New Jersey but there was nothing she could ever do to fill the enormous gap torn in his seven-year-old life.

He’d been recruited by the government while still at MIT. The brilliant scholarship student who graduated with a doctorate in Temporal Mechanics was first assigned to a think tank outside of Arlington in what he thought was a project involving theoretical mathematics applied to the uncertainty principle and expressed in five dimensions. In other words, science for its own sake with no practical use.

Then on this twenty-eighth birthday, he received classified orders to report to a top secret government facility buried beneath a remote desert region of Arizona: Operation Tic-Toc. Time travel was real. Now he had to help make it practical.

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Taking Care of the Family

counterclock

Image: Odditymall.com

It worked. I changed everything for the better. Now my son Charles marries a hardworking, loving wife and mother instead of a depressed lay about. Now my son Chris makes his career decision five years earlier and gets a tenured position before the recession hits. Now my wife has that business she’s always wanted and the franchise money will make her rich. The Time Changer worked, but with one catch. Instead of me being a successful scientist, I’m a divorced drug addict, dying of lung cancer in the local hospital’s charity ward, a total human failure. It was worth it.

I’ve been writing so much flash fiction over the past few days, that when this idea popped up, I thought I’d take advantage. No prompt, no challenge. Just the way my head works.