Orphans
I search the still smoldering caravan with regret. Another atrocity in the wasteland. Another crime committed by the cruel remnant of my nation.
She hides in a jasmine bush. A child. An orphaned survivor.
I offer open arms, the self-orphaned son of her enemy.
Timequake
I’m a boy of ten after the timequake.
My family is thirty years younger too. A modern 2020 reboot of my childhood. But only I obstinately remember the old reality… and a wife lost to erased future past.
Then she finds me in gym class.
Also ten.
She remembers.
Aftershocks in Time
We sit in the cafeteria, lunches untouched.
“What’s the last thing you remember before the reboot?”
“The timequake,” she answers. “Your hand in mine. Everything… falling backwards?”
“Like leaning too far back in a chair times a billion,” I nod.
Our hands, now young, reunite.
Tim Trần’s Auto-Magic Marching Band
Tim Trần’s Auto-Magic Marching Band powered on for the judges. Little more than instrument robots with legs, they clattered into a cacophonous rendition of Uptown Funk.
He winced hearing one particularly bad unit.
It became known as the cymbal of his defeat.
DEEP=1
The minisub swept jagged monoliths with a silty beam of light.
“Thousand-foot structures,” the pilot said. “There’s—”
A swarm of humanoid blurs surged from abyssal shadows.
⁂
“DEEP-1, report,” radioed the surface. “What’s happening?”
Static.
Copyright © 2020 by Jason H. Abbott, All Rights Reserved.
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