# I need stimulation - right? Write!



## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

I need mental stimulation! Suggest a title or an opening phrase, and I'll write a piece. This will keep me on my toes and stop my brain from atrophying. Cheers!


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## Bricolage (Jul 29, 2012)

Are you an ENTP?


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## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

Only on alternate Tuesdays. Which is as much as to say that it's one of the half dozen things I've been typed as. Why? Do I seem ENTP?

And are _you_ into Post-Modern collages?


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## Word Dispenser (May 18, 2012)

The Thyme Garden. roud:


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## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

Word Dispenser said:


> The Thyme Garden. roud:


_*The Thyme Garden*_

* *





It was afternoon: a long, gloriously lazy, summer afternoon. The air was thick with the smell of herbs, and bumblebees droned drowsily amongst the roses. From the gazebo came the tinkle of china and the genteel titter of conversation.

Silence fell. It was as though all the noise in the world had suddenly been switched off.

The tall young man strode gloomily off the tennis court. He had been playing a set when both ball and opponent suddenly refused to cooperate, as, it seemed, did the laws of physics. The ball was arrested in mid flight, and hovered insolently over the net, while his partner stood locked in position, as if stricken with a sudden attack of lumbago. He was, in fact, suffering from a bad case of _tennis court-us interruptus_.

The bumblebees hung heavy in the air. He flicked a bumblebee with his thumb. It moved a couple of inches, and then slid back into place. The two women in the gazebo sat as still as if they had been carved out of wax. One nursed a cup of tea in her lap, while the other's hand was frozen in the act of raising a piece of seed cake to her lips.

He gazed gloomily down at the sundial. _Sic vita fluit, dum stare videtur_. ‘Life flows away, as it seems to stay the same,’ he murmured. ‘But does it?’

He had the sense that it had always been thus: that it had always been half-past three on an afternoon in July, and always would be. A summer afternoon, stretched out to eternity, in this garden smelling sweetly of thyme, outside time.

As he stood musing, chin in hand, he heard a whirring and clanking behind him. He wheeled round. That was when the clock struck: swiftly, savagely, and without warning.

It struck first with its minute hand (which, being so small, didn’t do much damage), then with its second hand, then with its third hand, the hour hand. He had leaped backwards before the cuckoo could get in on the action. He was starting to wonder whether he was cuckoo himself. Clocks didn’t do such things. Did they?

Grandfather clocks are not, as a rule, vicious things. True, they may conceal secret passages to mad scientists’ laboratories, or be useful places for hiding unwanted skeletons. But on the whole, they are benevolent instruments whose only peculiarity is a tendency to stop short, never to go again, on the day that their owners die. They do not leap out on people, and pursue them down corridors and into the street, furiously spinning their hands with ill-concealed blood lust. The grandfather clock that galloped after Tim, bounding on its pediment like a sabre-toothed kangaroo, had evidently never heard of the rule; or violated it, along with the rules of probability. Fortunately for Tim, he was a youth fleet of foot and sound in wind and limb.

‘Have you been outside?’ Tim asked, bursting into the town hall. ‘Do you know what’s going on—or what's not going on, out there? It’s like a statue gallery out there.’

The Mayor, who had been listening gloomily to the Professor of Sociology talk at great length about Heidegger’s Dasein and the gendering of time, looked up with relief.

‘The people are frozen!’ he remarked, when Tim had explained how, chased by the clock, he had seen a necking couple rooted to the spot; and a man transfixed in the middle of falling out of a fifth storey window. ‘So why aren't you?’

‘Good question,’ replied Tim. ‘For that matter, why aren't you?’

‘Because this,’ the Mayor said proudly, drawing himself up to his full height of five foot nothing and expanding his chest like a pigeon, ‘is not just a town hall; it is the Office of Universal Bureaucracy. Here, we uphold the laws of the universe. And it is my duty, my responsibility and my privilege to ensure that the whole mechanism proceeds in a regular and ordered manner.’

(Which, he thought, provides ample opportunities for creative business practices.)

There came a pounding on the doors, and the grandfather clock leapt into the centre of the room, its pendulum swinging ominously. The Mayor shrunk back into his seat, his face ashen.

‘That clock is an assassin! It struck!’ shouted Tim.

‘Of course,’ replied a tall, cadaverous looking man; ‘you were killing time. Don’t you know that that is a capital offence?’

‘I don’t care whether its capital is convex or concave; it’s those murderous pendulums that I’m worried about!’

The tall man did not shrug, but looked as though he contemplated the idea. The contemplation was enough. To do more would be ostentatious. This was the Superintendent of Time, charged with measuring each moment and ensuring that it followed the one before and preceded the one after, that a minute was exactly sixty seconds, and not, as some preferred to be, rogue specks of spacetime, awkward seconds which could last an eternity, pleasant days which passed like moments, flitting away like butterflies. He devoured unwary flies—alternate histories, the neverwouldbe and the mighthavewas—and spun each tangled skein into a symmetrical pattern.

Now that the clock no longer seemed intent on disembowelling him on the spot, Tim mustered his courage, and stared at the dial.

‘Don’t you see? It’s communicating!’ he said excitedly. ‘What, after all, is a clock but a communication device: an instrument for communicating to us the passage of time? Now, it may not speak in words, but it can still speak, and that with most miraculous organ! If it couldn’t speak, how would it be able to tell us the time? And, unless I’m much mistaken, those hands aren’t gibbering manically; they’re _semaphoring_!’

‘Yes,’ said the Superintendent, slowly, ‘they are. Come on! There’s not a moment to lose.’

He strode briskly out of the room, down a series of corridors, unlocked a door on the right, and ushered the others in. The first thing that George noticed was the noise. Several hundred clocks _ticking—_at different tempi. Other clocks squatted sullenly, refusing to tell the time or even to tock, and swung their pendulums backwards or gestured obscenely. A sun-dial proclaimed that it was later than they thought, and then sent its gnomon gallivanting across its surface, chittering like a demented sailback lizard. A couple of ormolu clocks bashfully held hands in a corner, while a carriage clock galloped furiously across the floor, causing a fussy little German alarm-clock to have mild hysteria, ringing its alarm and going ‘nine nine nine!’

‘These clocks,' bawled the Superintendent over the cacophony, 'are out of order. Time itself is out of joint. This is not a state of affairs that can be allowed to continue. I can sense the established order of things breaking down. Time has had enough. Time has gone on strike.’

‘Gone on strike?’ spluttered the Mayor. ‘How can it? It’s not a sentient being; it’s a force of nature; it simply _is_.’

‘I’m afraid not. Time is essentially man-made. It’s far more than a mere force of nature. Oh, events occur whether or not we are there to observe them occur—but we are the ones who impose order on chaos. Do you think an hour or a minute exists in nature? Show me such a thing, if you can find it. Why, don’t you realize that our very idea of time would be different if we had fourteen fingers rather than ten, or if we used a decimal rather than a sexagesimal system? We wouldn’t think in days, months, years if we lived on a planet that orbited the sun every five centuries, rather than every 365 days. No, we invented time—we defined time—we invested it with life—and now it has escaped its creators’ control.’

The Mayor looked at him aghast. ‘You mean that time has a mind of its own? Something must be done!’

‘And what do you suggest?’

‘Can’t we have time locked up, or beheaded, or something?’

‘I’m afraid it’s not so simple,’ returned the other coolly. ‘How do you measure the jail sentence of something that _is_ the measurement, that could calmly advance time until its sentence had been served? By the time the jailer had locked the door and fastened the bolts, it would be time to unbolt them again. On the other hand, it could, if annoyed, make our personal time accelerate, and land ten centuries on us in as many minutes.’

‘Very well,’ said the Mayor, drawing himself up with what he fondly imagined was statesman like authority. ‘We must hear Time’s demands.’


It was, or seemed to be, afternoon: a long, gloriously lazy, summer afternoon. The smell of thyme wafted on the breeze, and dragonflies danced pirouettes of emerald over the perennials and forget-me-nots. From the hedges came the sound of someone cutting plants and occasionally cursing as he cut himself instead.

‘Hello!’ shouted Tim.

Round the corner of the hedges came a gnarled old man, with a white beard, a straw hat on his head, and a sickle under his arm.

This was the garden of Time.

He gazed at them without favour, and said truculently:

‘Arr! So the nobs’ve arrived, eh?’

‘Now, then,’ began the Mayor, ‘what’s all this about you shirking your duties? Can’t be having that sort of talk, you know.’

‘Hark at him,’ said Time. ‘All that la-di-dah posh talk, and him only a greengrocer’s son. Coming in here, and trying to lord it over me. Does he, or any of those toffee-nosed gits, know what it’s like to do an honest day’s work? Sitting in his office all day, being read minutes and memoranda, and canoodling with blonde bits of fluff. Ha! When the workers come into their own, there’ll be no use for his sort in our new society!’

‘No doubt,’ said Tim, who had not voted for the Mayor, and found that he did not improve on closer acquaintance. ‘Now, I’m sure you have genuine grievances, so we’d like to hear them, and see if we can reach some sort of accommodation.’

‘Where I could stay for the night? If I slept, the night would never pass. When you mortals sleep, and the night passes, lo, it is day, and you say that it is good. Well, it isn’t good for _me_! No, what I want is Time Off. I’m a working man, and Union laws forbid my employment forever without rest or remuneration. And what do I get? Am I allowed a tea-break every two hours? Am I permitted a lunch hour? No! Because I have to count every minute and every second of that miserable lunch hour. And that’s slavery, that is. And so I’m going on strike until I get better working conditions.’

‘“Until”?’ said the Mayor. ‘How can there be an “until” if time isn’t working? How can there be an “is” or a “was”?’ The thought made him tense, imperfect as it was.

‘That’s merely time, it’s not Time,’ hissed the Superintendent. ‘There’s a sequence of events, but it’s not the time that the clocks tell.’

‘Unless you accede to my reasonable request for evenings off, the weekend free, and twenty days’ holiday a year, nobody will ever tell the time again.’

‘Don’t you think that’s rather selfish?’ demanded the Mayor. ‘How are the people going to live their lives if you’re on strike? How will wives cooking the children and going to bed with the dinner manage? No, it’s quite intolerable, and therefore I forbid it. In fact, if you don’t get back on the job’—which was where he wanted to be, with the pneumatic Inga—‘I’ll sack you, and replace you. So there!’

Out of the mouths of babes and innocents indeed, thought Tim! (Or, more precisely: middle-aged womanisers, guilty of graft, corruption, extortion, blackmail, and simony.) This little blob of fat had unwittingly hit on the solution.

‘Eureka,’ he murmured.

The Mayor looked at him in astonishment. ‘Why, whatever is it?’

‘My dear fellow! Don’t you realise? You’ve done it!’

‘Oh, dear, I’m very sorry.’

‘No, no, it’ll clean up. You’ve hit on the right idea: a replacement!’ He turned to Time. ‘Look here, what about taking on an apprentice? And getting an automated system? They’re all the rage, you know. You won’t have to do all the tedious number-crunching yourself, but get a computer to do it for you. All you have to do is drink mint juleps and whack it with a spanner every now and then.’

‘Oh,’ crooned Time, gazing into the future, ‘I see it all now! Seconds my deputies! And, to entertain my leisure, a bevy of beautiful hour-is, sloe-eyed daughters of Paradise. Ha, I’ll become an old Athenian, and amass a fortune. Yes, I’ll be a Grecian earner, and finally have enough money to marry Silence.’

And so it came to pass, and they all lived happily ever after and before.


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## ForestPaix (Aug 30, 2014)

Once upon a time, in a wild, faraway land covered in mist, there was a...


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## tanstaafl28 (Sep 10, 2012)

Integral Operating System


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## EmpireConquered (Feb 14, 2012)

It was year 2050, and humanity had reached a point of complete despair.

Water had become an ever precious commodity, and had became the international currency by which humans do trade.


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## Discovery (Jul 3, 2014)

Fantastic work, @Cosmic Hobo 

do you have a website or blog where you post short stories?

Proposed title:

Blinding Image


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## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

*Blinding Image*


* *





In a wild, faraway land, covered in mist, there was an Integral Operating System. The whole land was covered in mist. Not a tree, not a rock, not a blade of grass, could be seen. People, if there had been any, would have spent their days tripping over boulders, tumbling into crevices, and generally injuring themselves in entertaining ways. But there were no people. Only the massive square bulk of the IOS, blotting out the sun, with mist pouring out of its multiphonic orifice speakers.

It had seemed a good idea at the time. Mist (the designers explained, trying to get funding) looked cool. ‘Listen, man! It’s got that authentic mad god giant computer vibe. Genuine apocalyptic stuff. All is dark, fog moving over the surface of the earth, when WHAM! Two enormous red lights, like eyes. (Red’s OK, baby? We can do green or pink if you like. Or what about fluorescent strobe lighting? You like red? Terrific!) And then there’s a massive sustained chord that turns you into a human tuning fork—enters your head, hits your boots, and makes pregnant women deliver on the spot. And a voice—I’m thinking electronic, synthesised basso profundo, although I can do you a nice deal on a vox humana, or even a theremin, for that choir of angels ethereal touch—booms out: ‘Tremble and despair, mortals!’

This was in the dark days of the 2050s, when there was plenty of despair to be had. Despair was in, in a big way. Not the usual cosmic angst despair, when trendy young things dressed in black and sat around in coffee shops debating the general meaninglessness of life. No, this was world-shattering apocalyptic despair. 

The planet was dying, poisoned by pollution, climate change, and the general stupidity and short-sightedness of the human race. The Himalayas had melted; the Poles had gone up in steam; and Africa and Australia sizzled. The Atlantic Ocean had shrunk to the size of a small pond. One could have traveled across that cracked and bleeding wasteland from New York to London—but why bother? Those cities had long since been abandoned, when their dying rivers became oozing morasses of plague and silt.

Water had become an ever precious commodity, and had become the international currency by which humans traded. Nobody passed water, if they could help it. The wealthy—those who could afford running water—ostentatiously drank glasses of their own urine, bathed in it, and were remarkable for the subtle odour of uric acid which hung about their persons. The very wealthy went one better: they bought expensive bottles of imported urine from the French and Swiss Alps, renowned for its life-enhancing and extending, health-giving properties. The seriously megawealthy hired people to urinate for them. Nanobots scampered merrily around their tissue, reconstituting this, changing the chemical structure of that, and adjusting the metabolic rate of the other, as they converted human waste products into shiny grey green cubes. Even the dead were not wasted: every day, conveyor belts processed hundreds of corpses in hydration plants, in an effort to squeeze the precious 65% of water from the human body.

The world government watched these catastrophes from the safety of the moon. Faced with the imminent prospect of the extinction of the human race, something had to be done. And so teams of policy advisers and scientists, under the coordination of the world super-computer, thought busily. The computer’s internal processors rapidly ran through the data, calculating possibilities and eventualities (and ignoring pop-up ads for hardware enlargement, alarmist suggestions that it might have a virus, and importunate letters from the widow of the President of the Seychelles, who had secretly stashed the Indian Ocean in a riverbank before his sudden and extremely violent demise). It arrived at a possible solution, checked the logical consistency of the argument, deliberated, pondered, weighed the pros and cons, and then presented its recommendation. The world government listened, at first with skepticism, then with reluctance, and finally, with resignation, acted. They had little choice.

Millennia passed. The moon orbited the earth orbited Sol orbited the Milky Way (or part of it; we don’t have several hundred million years to spend). To the descendants of the settlers sent out early in the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century, the planet Earth had become a myth, its name half forgotten, its location completely forgotten.

Until the day that an intrepid young pilot on the Betacalufron–Sfax shuttle route, answered a signal from a small blue-green planet. 

Renta Held had drifted off course, thanks to a freak incident involving the lissom gynoids of Thorulox XVII, and a spirit-fuelled séance which left him with a headache as bright and burning as a nova, and a mouth as furry as the slavering merkin of Galvanos. Trying to regain his bearings in this stellar backwater, he had intercepted a signal, broadcast on a broad frequency range. Too structured and rhythmical to be anything but artificial. Three short, three long, three short. The universal distress signal!

As his ship neared the planet, he felt it shudder and lurch. For a moment he thought his head was coming off. Checking the instruments, he realised that the cabin was spinning. He tried the controls, but they would not respond. He was caught in the grip of a force beam, dragged down to whatever fate awaited him on the planet below! Down, down, down he went…

He awoke to find himself lying on a pallet in a grey metal chamber. He struggled to sit up, but found that he could not.

‘Do not try to move,’ said a voice. ‘You are under a forcefield.’

Standing over him was possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. True, she was clinical, humourless, and wore her skin with an air of distaste—but nevertheless, a goddess.

‘At last you are awake,’ she said. ‘We have been expecting you for a long time. We trust that we did not discommode you. I am Vreela.’

Vreela… What a beautiful name, he thought groggily. He gazed blearily around him. The walls, which were made of a metal he did not recognise, glowed softly with an internal light.

‘Where am I?’

‘You are on Earth.’

‘Earth? But Earth’s a fable, a fairy story for kids!’

‘This is Earth, and you are in IOS.’

He shook his head. ‘Listen, sister, I don’t know where I am, or who you are, or what IOS is, but I answered a distress signal. Next thing I know, my ship’s been pulled down, and I find myself here. What gives?’

‘The distress signal was our lure for intelligent life. When someone from the outside arrived, we knew that the time of return was at hand. The time when we can return to the material form! And now you have arrived! Our centuries of waiting are ended. You: the Chosen One!’

This doll, he thought, was seriously screwy. The way in which her eyes shone, the Messianic fervour…

‘You will, of course, be sacrificed,’ she continued, ‘and your body and brain drained of energy. But in a good cause.’

That, he thought, figured.

‘It doesn’t seem like a good cause to me. Did I enlist for your cause? No! And, anyway, what is your cause?’

‘The return of the human race!’

‘Ever been into space, sister? That’s where you’ll find the human race, out among the stars. We’ve got no need to return. And, frankly, we’re nothing very special. In a universe this size, who’s got time for grand ideas about humanity? We’re just part of the galactic flotsam and jetsam, another bit of plankton swimming against the space winds.’

‘But this is Earth, and Earth is the home of the human race!’

‘Yeah, and I’m a pilot from Alpha Centauri. Listen, Earth doesn’t matter. It may be where the human race began, but it’s a lump of dirt. If the stories are true, it’s not somewhere I want to hang around; it’s over-crowded, polluted, and there’s no water.’

‘Evidently you do not understand. Listen! In the twenty-first century of the Common Era, the Earth was as you say. The scientists of that time consulted the super computer, which reached this conclusion: Since human life on this planet was no longer sustainable, human life must be replaced. Pioneers and explorers were sent off in spacecraft to colonize other planets. The intellectuals, scientists, and artists were upgraded. They were turned into electronic signals, based on their brainwave patterns, and their minds uploaded into the computer.’

‘And what about the rest of the human race—those who weren’t explorers or brains? Were they turned into binary and stored on a microcircuit somewhere?’

‘They were unnecessary for the survival of the species. They exterminated themselves, fought, died, and devolved.’

‘Full of heart, aren't you?’

‘This was many hundreds of centuries ago. It is of no concern. The intellectual elite were in symbiosis with IOS. IOS is both the Integral Operating System and the Integrated Operating System. It is the fusion of humanity and machine: the creativity and unpredictability of the human mind linked to the rigorously logical circuitry of the computer. Together, we have achieved the great purpose of the human race. Every piece of information in the universe has its correct place in the model. We have discovered the Theory of Everything!’

‘Have you just? Listen, toots, I’m not a theory man; I’m just a poor working joe who knows the workings of a ship’s engine, and the interstellar trade routes. It seems to me that you’ve been sitting here thinking to yourselves, while the rest of the world eats each other. We pioneers’ve been out in space building ourselves a new future. Ever seen a Dyson sphere? Ever seen a ship go into hyperspace? We’ve done that, while you’ve…’

‘Those Dyson spheres, and that hyperspace technology, were the product of human thought. Evidently you do not understand the plan of the computer. Explorers would be sent out into the galaxy, while the intellectuals were part of the computer. Both had their function. When conditions changed, when one of the explorers returned to Earth, the human race would resume corporal existence.’

‘You keep saying “corporeal”. Are you some sort of hologram?’

‘No longer; I resumed corporeal existence earlier to-day. It is an impure existence. The digestive process is repellent: the ingestion of food and its excretion. How do fleshly humans adjust to viscera? And half a cycle spent in a coma seems wasteful.’

‘You get used to it, sister. Besides, the human body has its compensations!’

‘I do not think the others will be used to it. Many of them see no purpose in returning to the flesh form, even though this was decided millennia ago. Instead, they desire to be self-sustaining, to outgrow the need for material energy sources. Organic lifeforms are regularly harvested, and transformed into energy. That includes you.’

‘Hold it right there, lady! Before you stick my body in a blender, and serve it up with coleslaw and fries, why the opposition to being in the physical world? Do they just lack guts?’

‘Oh no; they argue that now that the purpose of the universe has been discovered, material existence is irrelevant. The IOS was built to discover the nature of the universe. It has achieved that purpose. The material world is a construct. We discovered that, as human beings inside the computer had been transformed into signals, so all life consisted of similar bioelectric signals. We looked closer, and discovered that not just life, but the cosmos itself, was reducible to four strings of computer code.

'The universe is a computer simulation, run to solve a problem. That problem has been solved. This computer has become self-aware.

‘Some units will pass out of this universe into the universe that built the quantum computer. Others will return to corporeal form within it.' She produced a short stubby-barreled blaster, and leveled it at him. 'And you,’ she said, smiling happily, ‘you will be sacrificed.'

(_CLIFFHANGER, if you want a happy ending. Otherwise, END.)_


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## Discovery (Jul 3, 2014)

@Cosmic Hobo

END. "Sa-cri-fice! Sa-cri-fice!"


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## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

And for those who want a resolution:


* *





Held convinces Vreela that when she was reconstituted, something went wrong with the process. If the minds in the computer are meant to reunite with the pioneers outside, why kill him? Something is interfering with the computer's programming. She takes him to the CPU, where they discover that either 1) the computer has been infected with a virus, or 2) some of the minds inside the computer have gone mad. They do something very clever and cure it / blow it up / solve the problem. They are then faced with a choice: either rebuild society, or go through the computer into the next universe.
But two questions remain: did the beings who engineered the universe computer intend the world to go BOOM? And how will they react to a self-aware sentient computer?


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## Coopsickle (Sep 12, 2014)

It's snowing here. I've just been hanging out of my upstairs window watching the snow fall; as stupidly mesmerised by it as I was over 40 years ago...

The air smells of winter and ice and woodsmoke and I still want to catch a snowflake in my hand and see the unique shape of it before it's gone forever.
And I want snowflakes to land on my tongue, just to see how they taste... although the grown-up in me knows they'll taste like...well...nothing...but tonight, they may taste like something! Like pine needles and hot chocolate and Narnia...

Bit more than a line, sorry!!


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## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

(untitled)


* *





It’s snowing here. I’ve just been hanging out of my upstairs window watching the snow fall; as stupidly mesmerised by it as I was over 40 years ago.

The air smells of winter and ice and woodsmoke and I still want to catch a snowflake in my hand and see the unique shape of it before it’s gone forever.

And I want snowflakes to land on my tongue, just to see how they taste…although the grown-up in me knows they’ll taste like…well…nothing…but tonight, they may taste like something! Like pine needles and hot chocolate and Narnia.

For too long, though, everything has tasted of wardrobe. You can see the marks of my molars and bicuspids in the panelling; I’ve been picking splinters of mahogany out of my tongue; and I’ve hadnothing to eat but mothballs (which, although highly addictive hallucinogens, are not very nutritious, and kill you in the end).

And then I opened the wardrobe. I’ve gone through the wardrobe.

This isn’t an extended gay 'coming out of the closet' metaphor. I didn’t fling open the door and say ‘Hello world, I am what I am!’ This isn’t that kind of a story. This is a story about time travel (which is a lot more interesting).

For, you see, I have gone forty years into the future. It was snowing when I stepped through the time machine; and it was snowing four decades in the future. So much at least is similar.

The window, too, is the same. Note that I said ‘my window’. It may no longer be my window, but I still think of it as mine.

But everything else is different. This is my house, in which I have lived for—more than forty years. Its internal architecture has not changed, but what is in those rooms is beyond my imagination. Strange glowing machines that hum. Conduits and circuits and cylinders. Abstract paintings. Lava lamps. Ormolu clocks.

I go looking for myself. That, after all, is why I came: to discover what will become of me. Time, by my calculations, is linear; if I know my own future, then I can plan ahead.

At last, I find myself. There is no doubt. He may be forty years older, his face may be lined with the ravages of time, his hair grey, his back bent, and he may use a walking stick, but it is indisputably my older self.

‘Hello, old man!’ I say, jumping out at him. He stares at me, aghast.

‘W—who are you?’ he demands.

I explain that I am he, and he is me, and we are all together. Man (I go on) you've been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.

He stares at me aghast. ‘Impossible!’ he cries.

Now, some smart aleck will assume that I’m wrong; that this is my long lost nephew from Australia, or some hitherto unknown identical twin, or my son who has contracted lipodystrophy or Werner syndrome. This is undoubtedly me. And yet, if what I know of time is true, then he should recognise me; more, he should remember. After all, he has been me, standing where I am now, looking at my older self. I say as much to him.

I am not, I say, responsible for what occurs next. He clutches at his throat, his face turns an interesting shade of puce, and he falls down dead.

So this, it seems, is my future. I have created a time loop, in which my older self is killed by my younger self. 

So I think as I stand over the corpse, looking down at my aged remains.

And then the wallpaper changes. The whole house, in fact. What had been a rather tastefully decorated room, the sort of room I’d dreamt of having if I were rich, with Jivaro tsantsas, and a nineteenth century chemist’s laboratory set, suddenly isn’t. Neither is my future self’s corpse.

The wallpaper is peeling, the house reeks of mildew, and cockroaches scuttle across the floor. It is obvious that the house hasn’t been tenanted for—shall we say forty years?

The doorbell rings. It rings again. The door then explodes, showering the hallway with scraps of smoking tinder. Through the doorway zooms a robot.

‘Brrktz!’ goes the robot. ‘Frrrrrzt!’ And also ‘Zot.’

‘Who are you?’ it demands, holding me in its claw and passing a light beam over my face. That, it seems, is a question everyone seems to ask. No doubt I am having an identity crisis. Perhaps this story is an Existentialist allegory. I tell the robot my name, and explain that I’m living here.

The robot seems puzzled.

‘Records show that the whereabouts of the biological organism which you designate with the appellation which you also apply to yourself and to which you refer in the first person have been unknown for four decades. This building has not served as a residential domicile for an identical period of time.’

_Whirr ktartartatr frart zip splungee._

Having served its primary purpose as deliverer of exposition, it promptly explodes.

The room then switches back. The door is in its proper place; noxious fumes are still emanating from the glorified chemistry set, and, regrettably, from my dead body, which is decomposing at a rapid rate. Yes, I’m back to being dead on the carpet. Well, one of me at any rate. No, it isn’t. Yes, it is. There goes the wallpaper. Now it comes back again. Now you see it, now you don’t.

What I need is a stiff drink. (Or, better still, some mothballs.)

Very well. Let us consider the situation. I have three possible options. I can stay in the future, and create a new identity for myself. This assumes that I can adapt to this future. I know nothing of this society, and, given the growth rate of technology, I may not have the necessary skills or knowledge to survive. Moreover, if I stay in this future, I effectively delete the timeline that existed when I first arrived in the future: the timeline in which I was an old man. This would explain why the house changed. The robot told me that I disappeared forty years ago; therefore I did not live through those forty years in order to create that future.

I could return to my present, the time from which I came; however, that existence was intolerable. That, after all, was my reason for coming to the future: to determine whether my personal future would improve. It does not seem to have done so.

There is one final course of action: to change the past. I have a time machine; with this time machine, I can, theoretically, change my timeline. (True, I may inadvertently create a paradox; if I in the past change my future, I would not be able in my original present to invent a time machine in order to travel back in time to change the past.) I can go back into the past, but I cannot go back into the past. This seems paradoxical, but there is a difference between subjective (personal) and objective time. I cannot go back to being who I was—but I can change the past, so that my present self does not exist; or, if it does exist, it will do so only in an abortive timeline. At any rate, it shall not be me. Although my present self will be erased, I do not see this as a form of suicide. Rather, it is correcting an error, and creating a new possibility.

It seems increasingly probable that time is not (as I had originally thought) linear, but fractal: there is not one reality, but an infinite number of possible timelines. What seems to be certainty is merely one among many possible timelines. Each choice we make, or do not make (since the act of not choosing is itself a choice), creates a new reality. Therefore, whatever I do, the nature of the universe being what it is, something will change. There will be at least one universe in which I have made the decision to change my past.

Do I, then, have free will? The multiverse demands that every possibility exists somewhere, and every possibility arising from those possibilities, _ad infinitum_. As soon as any possible course of action is considered, there exists a universe in which that possibility has occurred. I have free will in this at least: that I can choose to make that possibility occur in this universe. (This may be equivocation, but there’s comfort in that at least.)

And so, I write this from somewhere outside the space-time vortex. From my vantage point, I can see the infinite paradoxical paths of continuity and discontinuity cross, intersect and divide, creating new timelines here while over there other realities fracture and splinter like a spider’s web under ice, pristine in its glacial purity. The mighthavebeen and the neverwas. And somewhere, somewhen—several somewhere, several somewhens—is myself. Or rather selves. And so I will find a fixed point in this maelstrom of conflicting realities.


* *




_(Alternative extra ending) _
What, though, is reality? Reality is not real; reality is an interesting theoretical construct. How do I know that the universe exists? I have never been to India, yet I will attest that it exists; I have seen photographs of it, documentary films, eaten at Indian restaurants. And yet I deny the existence of Middle Earth, even though I have seen films of _The Lord of the Rings_, seen people wandering around dressed as Gandalf, and the internet is full of fluent speakers of Sindarin and Quenya. Ergo, there is as much justification for believing in Middle Earth as there is in believing in India; both are equally real and unreal. The universe is, then, in a state of quantum.

_Brrzz kkkk brrz… In other news: a man was found in an upstairs wardrobe of a house in Islington. He claimed to have travelled in time through the upstairs wardrobe, and repeatedly questioned reality and the nature of the universe. He is now being treated in a lunatic asylum for extreme delusions caused by mothball addiction._


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## tanstaafl28 (Sep 10, 2012)

How the Bismark Era (1860-1890) in Germany directly influenced the outbreak of WWI and WWII.


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## Clyme (Jul 17, 2014)

Cosmic Hobo said:


> I need mental stimulation! Suggest a title or an opening phrase, and I'll write a piece. This will keep me on my toes and stop my brain from atrophying. Cheers!


Her eyes shifted anxiously as new axioms developed. I traced every parcel that my neuroticism intercepted, hoping to find Houdini for some much needed advice.


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## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

Clyme said:


> Her eyes shifted anxiously as new axioms developed. I traced every parcel that my neuroticism intercepted, hoping to find Houdini for some much needed advice.


I've worked out the parcels.


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## Cosmic Hobo (Feb 7, 2013)

@_Clyme_: Houdini story


* *





Her eyes shifted anxiously as new axioms developed. I traced every parcel that my neuroticism intercepted, hoping to find Houdini for some much needed advice.

Houdini was the one man who could help. Harry Houdini, the master magician who had turned his genius from bamboozling an audience with dazzling displays of deftness, to the worthier goal of exposing the charlatans who preyed on human weakness and credulity; to wit, mediums, cardsharpers, bogus spiritualists, and other members of the genus fraud, with cheesecloth down their throats, wires at their knees and ectoplasm up their sleeve.

I said as much to Dr. Pilkington Strange. I lay recumbent, he sat facing the other way. In this position, we talked for an hour a week, and then parted, me less neurotic and somewhat poorer, him richer and covered in boiling gravy.

‘Houdini,’ I told him, ‘is the one man who can help us. Yes, Houdini! And I am the man to find him!’

‘And why the parcels?’

‘Why, there’s the genius of the thing! This is the elusive master of escapology, a man so slippery he can tie eels into knots and wear them as his tie. A man who has escaped from mailbags, milk cans, and beer barrels; who has been buried alive. But,’ and here I lowered my voice to an impressive whisper, ‘_has he escaped from a small brown paper parcel done up with string_?’

Dr. Pilkington Strange looked at me with what I knew to be awe. I could not see him, of course, since I had my eyes closed, and even with them open, I could see only the back of his leather chair. But I knew him to be looking all the same.

‘Gadzooks and lawksamercy!’ cried he, this Teutonic wunderkind who had been under Freud.

‘Indeed,’ quoth I. ‘And so I have challenged him. The gauntlet have I well and truly thrown down. Yessireee, I wrote him a letter; more, I have bombarded him with cablegrams and telegrams and singing delivery boys, all to the same tune. I bet you six hundred freshly minted crisp greenbacks (said I to him) that you cannot squeeze yourself into a parcel, have yourself mailed to my forwarding address, and escape en route. What could be simpler?

‘But—and here is the clever part—I have intercepted every parcel he has sent in the past six weeks. Yes, I have lived in the mailbox outside his home. In this guise, I have trailed him through this great city of ours. I have fossicked in trash cans, and dined royally on fish heads and potato peelings.’

‘And why do such a thing?’

‘Simple! To stop him from escaping. Would you trust a man who has escaped from the belly of a whale, or sat for an hour and a half in a locked safe at the bottom of a swimming pool? If I intercept the parcels, then he cannot escape from them before they are delivered to my address. True, he has not been in any of those parcels, and none of them have been addressed to me, but one day, he shall! And then my hours of diligence and vigilance will pay off.’

‘Mr. Quodge,’ said the good psychiatrist, ‘you are the cleverest idiot I have ever met. Tell me: what has brought you to such a desperate pass?’

And so I told him. Harkee, O fretful porpentine-type listener, and I will a tale unfold that'll outdo the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Yea, and with an albatross thrown in, forsooth!

I had first met Madame Zuleika six months before. 

My name is Hasdrubal Quod, lecturer in physics at Columbia. My wife had died in a freak accident involving the laws of physics, a cucumber and a rubber band. Her body had simultaneously exploded, imploded, combusted, and her constituent atoms spread to every corner of the universe. She had turned into a singularity, and (after absorbing the furniture and next door’s cat) collapsed in on herself, vanishing with a transcendental wibbling noise and a wobbling of reality.

Good Lord, cried I, this is too bad. I had heard also of Madame Zuleika, the famous medium, and determined to consult her.

It was Friday the thirteenth. The weather, as befitted a day of ill omen, was dire. Sudden squalls in the street, tore up the autumn leaves and flung them bitterly into the faces of passers-by, like the letters of a love affair grown cold and bitter. Dark clouds scuttled across the face of the sun, plunging the day itself into Stygian gloom. 

The lights of the house were dimmed, throwing the old and musty house into a pool of shadow. The candles were lit, their golden gleam serving only to illuminate the hidden terrors lurking in the gloom. The sweet dreaming vapour of incense hung heavy upon the shrouded air, drifting in mist-clouds through the hallway and echoing rooms.

Into this welter of purple prose I entered.

In her dark and gold-gleaming parlour, Madame Zuleika held sway at the centre of a circle of devotees, who watched her with rapt attention, bound to her with cords of majesty and arcane power as she squatted, spider like, on her throne on a raised dais. 

She moaned softly in the dark. The devotees, drew in their breaths sharply, expectantly, as the pulses quickened fast and hard as hammer-beats; while she, this massive and much bejewelled woman whose presence dominated them all, sat in slow and silent stillness.

I noted with interest how quickly the pendulum of the clock moved, murdering time with clinical precision. Yet the circle did not notice how time passed; its members sat in a temporal void, an absence of existence, moving through slow, thick treacle.

Madame Zuleika opened her lips. The voice that issued from those fleshy protuberances was not the unidentifiable Mitteleuropänische-Franglais-cum-Queens mélange to which her circle was accustomed. It was deep, rich, hoarse.

‘Are you there, Gertie?’

A figure stirred in the dark, amidst much rustling of skirts.

‘Gertie, the clock is open.’

The effect upon Gertie was electrifying. She surged to her feet, toppling the chair as she rose, and screamed, pale hands pressed to her heart, hesitating between her bosoms and her face. She stumbled around, seeking some escape from this trap into which she had unwittingly walked. ‘The clock is open, Gertie… The clock is open…’ With a tremendous burst of effort, Gertie leapt from the circle, and, caring not which figures she fell over in the dark, ran blindly to the door, flung it open with a crash, and rushed out, her high-heeled shoes clattering on the marble floor of the hall.

I cared not; this was not why I had come. I hoped to see ectoplasm. Ectoplasm dripping from the ceilings, sloshed all over the walls, creeping under foot, surging over the carpets and engulfing the furniture. I also wished to contact my wife. But mostly I had come for the ectoplasm.

And so I sat in the darkness, listening to the medium’s irregular breathing and waiting for her to achieve ectoplasm.

‘Hasdrubal Quod!’ she said. ‘There is a message for you from the beyond.’

Axioms poured out of her. Formulae issued from her mouth in a glowing stream of symbols and equations, and hung in the air. Ideas that made the theories of Silberstein, Eddington, Weil and De Sitter, of Bertrand Russell, yea, of Einstein himself, seem commonplace and childish. This was higher mathematics on an inconceivable scale, beyond anything that any mathematician or physicist in the early years of the twentieth century could imagine. And they came out of the head of a woman who made her living by gulling* the mentally negligible. This was too much!

*: I lied. It's a member of the Laridae family, not a scion of the Procellariformes.

I determined to find Houdini, who had recently debunked both the Blavatskyites and the Trotskyites; and promptly booked myself in to see Dr. Pilkington Strange, to stop myself from going mad.

‘Mr. Quod,’ said the latter, ‘rather than this elaborate rigmarole, why do you not approach Houdini directly?’

I replied that the thought had never crossed my mind.

‘Not your conscious mind,’ said he, swinging his chair round, and wagging his finger at me, ‘but it has certainly crossed your subconscious mind. You are an intelligent man; more, you are an ingenious and rational one. Is hiding in a mailbox, eating garbage, and intercepting small brown paper parcels done up with string an easier way of getting help from someone than simply asking him? This is what we call a ritual. You are performing actions that give the illusion of being meaningful, which are in reality pointless. With your rational mind, you see, you want an answer; subconsciously, however, you do not. Your conscious mind wants Houdini to prove that Madame Zuleika is a fake; but your subconscious does not want Houdini involved, in case he cannot debunk her at all.

‘Then there is the fact that Houdini has been dead for nearly ninety years.’

‘Ah, but he was buried alive, and escaped. Surely he can rise again?’

‘Now, Mr. Quod, I am the man to help you.’ He pointed at the door. ‘Read that, please.’
_PILKINGTON STRANGE:
ALIENIST_
_FRMSC RMB CGSQ VD, VD (cured), VD_, _GPI_

'Mr. Quod,' said this singular syphilitic, his nose falling off and bits of him splattering with a viscous squelch onto the furniture, 'what is an alienist?'

'An alienist,' I replied, 'is an old-fashioned term for a psychologist, a headshrinker, a loony-doctor!'

'Wrong, and yet also right! I am an alienist in every sense of the term. I,' said he, grasping his lapel, striking an oratorical pose, and blithely plagiarising, 'am not just a student of human nature; I am a professor of a far wider academy of which human nature is merely a part. I am not merely a psychoanalyst; I am an expert in extraterrestrial life! And Madame Zuleika’s mind has been taken over by aliens.

'That is why we must kill her. We must blow up her... I beg your pardon, we must blow her up! With fifty thousand pounds of gelignite, carefully concealed as the city of London. Only when we have reduced the entire western hemisphere to a smoking crater can the planet be safe!'

'And why must she be dealt so drastic a blow?'

'Because she is an alien! All aliens are the enemies of mankind! They must not be allowed to come here and pollute humanity with their slimy, multi-tentacled alien ways; they must not be allowed to piss in the human gene pool, and cram screaming toddlers into their ravenous maws. Their depravity must be ended!'

'You bigoted alienist scumbag!' 

Not wanting to be party to a hate crime, I heaved him out of the window, and exited left.


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## suneyed (Dec 6, 2014)

He successfully found a rift in time and now, Gertha's last wish can finally be done.


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