Saudade

Nobody ever tells you something's wrong until it's too late. Then you blame them. It wasn't your fault, somebody should have told you.

At first it was little things, trivial things, a phone bill quietly mounting up because the phone company never told me that I'd exceeded my price plan for the month. Then, when I get the bill, I stare in disbelief and think; Why didn't anybody tell me?

The bank had done it to me before, I asked them; Why don't you let me know when I'm going past my overdraft limit?

I'd cynically sneer that it was because they wanted money, it's greed. That's how I'd justify it.

When it's gone, when the bill comes, when the bank charges, you're so helpless and you waddle, metaphorical cap in hand, and hope for kindness, for a change of heart. "But they were legitimate charges," they say, and you know they're right. Why are you so incapable of looking after yourself?

I've been sad for years and I've never come to terms with it. I'm waiting for everything to change, and things to go back to how they were before. Because I know it's possible, that's what we were trying to do, we were trying to change the world.

She had stepped into the coccoon, closed the hatch and blew me a kiss.

Then the machine was propelled into the sky and somewhere, up in the atmosphere, I saw it evaporate, sent on its journey through time.

We had calibrated the machine to send her back to the 1960s, a time where we knew she would be able to find the means to return. Where she could find open-minded and understanding people who wouldn't lock her up in some ward, a loony with wild ideas. It was the safest destination for a test drive.

And it worked.

I saw her in a photograph, looking through a book called Brighton In The 1960s, there were images from a student protest in June 1968 and she was there, smiling into the camera, as if smiling out at me, a knowing look that confirmed; "I've made it! It worked!"

Even though she probably knew the outcome of the protest she was still there, still holding a placard, fighting for their rights. Is it worth fighting a battle that's already been won? I wondered.

At the same time I reflected upon the now; that every day I was seeing things I cared about slip away, the malevolence of their disappearing only evident by its silence. As the government tip-toed in and gradually, quietly, dismantled that which made us great. Yet I sat wallowing, thinking it'll all work out, I mean, if it was really going to be bad somebody would tell me, right? Somebody would give me that slap around the chops, warn me.

She never held back from me, that's why I loved her. She'd call me out on every bit of apathetic complacency I seemed to couch upon. Snuggling into ignorance, like a wrongly convicted prisoner who's given up and grown so used to their corner of the jail that - with revolution raging outside - they don't trust a suddenly open cell door and miss their chance to escape. Then, when the revolution has passed, they find themselves - with no fanfare - locked away to be forgotten. A victim of cowardice.

That's why I let her volunteer, we were both capable of manning the craft, both capable of operating the controls. But I was afraid, ultimately selfish, that something would go wrong and I would be hurt. How cruel of me, how cowardly.

Yet how wrong I was. If anything the success has been worse. Knowing she's out there, somewhere in time, and she doesn't want to come back, because if she did she'd be back by now.

And I cannot accept it, even though it has happened, I don't feel like this is what I deserve, this debt, this pain, this loss, even though I earned it by stepping back and doing nothing. I never loved her enough. I only loved myself.

Maybe, in that photograph, she does know that I can see her, but maybe she's smiling because she doesn't have to see me?

We cannot get something back when it's gone. We thought we could go back and change things, undo the mistakes we had made in our lives. In a sense that is what she did, and left me to pay the price for my own.

A Coupling

"It'll just give rise to people marrying their pets or farm animals!" cried Harold Wiest MP, flapping unrelated papers that he clutched in his chubby fist.

This was when social media went into an expected frenzy, people posting memes of a hastily cut-n-pasted Wiest as the groom in various bestial weddings.

Crol held hir brain pod in hir suckers and despaired. This is what shhe had feared this debate would become once it finally reached the parliaments of Earth.

For all their perceived progress, hir progenitor had told hir, humans are unflinchingly irrational. Shhe was resilient, believing that most people are good. Besides, shhe had fallen in love with one of them.

Love, for hir kind, was a - no pun intended - alien concept. Crol had come to Earth to study philosophy, shhe enjoyed the dilemmas that Earth thinkers would pose for themselves and it opened hir mind to analysing hir own kind in a different light. Though, at first, they had felt superior in the regard of being a species that lacked gender, and therefore lacked any inequality between sexes, they soon discovered that they shared many similiar forms of exclusion and repression familiar to humans and, in instances where the two species were incompatible, new and unique forms of division.

Crol experienced this at a young age, with certain regard to hir fascination and obsession with humans. They used to call hir a dirty gene pool, taunted hir with lurid gestures and doodles of what hir mutant offspring would look like and hir ugly, hairy partner.

If anything this ultimately made Crol reluctant, to the extent that shhe began to try and suppress and deny hir feelings as shhe found hirself falling for one of hir fellow students. Shhe was ashamed, shhe thought he would undoubtedly be repulsed by hir because of who shhe had lead hirself to believe shhe was. Made incapable of looking beyond the torment of cruel, narrow attitudes.

He didn't reciprocate hir feelings, though he spoke so eloquently in class and seemed so reasonable and understanding he was also unable to transcend the superficial differences that had been created between the species.

We, humanity, had thought we were such an understanding and enlightened species, having fought for centuries to eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, discrimination of all forms. It became obvious to those who had been blissfully ignorant that many of these are battles never truly won, that blinkered tolerance is not the same as true unconscious equality. These beings that came to our planet reawakened a wealth of dormant prejudices that embarrassed us as a species.

People would hold up examples of protest from our seemingly distant past, people picketing against integration, against mixed race couples, against same sex couples, and they would say; "Look how foolish and short-sighted these people seem now." As if that were enough to crumble the foundations of hard-wired bigotry.

It had been someone reaching out to hir in the end. Shhe had retreated, feeling admonished by his rejection, as if he were confirming hir worst expectations, what humans had shouted at hir in the street; "There's no place for your kind here."

When he was questioned about it by his friends they always, with a telling lack of sensitivity, leapt towards the most lurid of questions; "Yeah, but how do you do it?" Tact soon left him and he told his friends to "just fuck off", and this seemed to help them understand.

He had rubbish thrown at him as he walked down the street, names shouted from strangers, threatening letters sent to his home and his family, once somebody posted a dead squid through his letterbox with a note saying, in angry scrawl, 'Why don't you marry it?'

It was in part because they had become the figureheads of the campaign to legalise inter-species marriage, and it was on this subject that Harold Wiest MP was harrumphing like a stuck pig. Those people who bleated the rhetoric of marrying pets seemed to wilfully overlook the issue of mutual compliance and how "Meow", "Moo", "Baa" or "Quack" is no subsitute for "I do".

It wasn't even that he and Crol wanted to get married, they just wanted equality, we cannot live in a world where there's one rule for some and another rule for everyone else. We cannot put in caveats to the detriment, exclusion and alienation of others. It would drive them both insane that people seemed to be afraid of an unknown corrupting force, one that would make them - against their will - change who they are, becoming a prisoner of some imposed way of life that they fundamentally disagreed with. Oh, the irony, that others might be forced to live lives - against their will - that strangulate and confine them, make them behave the way people expect and want them to, to wear masks, to deny their right to be themselves.

"Do you ever stop to think," Crol said, looking towards Harold Wiest MP, who could not hold hir gaze, "what it would be like to not be the dominant kind?"

That's all shhe wanted to say, because shhe didn't enjoy confrontation and despite how much it hurt hir, how shhe trembled inside as shhe saw people trying to prevent hir from being hirself, shhe could never bring hirself to want to dismantle someone else's beliefs. Shhe just wanted them to afford others the same courtesy that shhe gave them.

Shhe wished shhe was a more aggressive type, then shhe'd snatch Harold Wiest MP from his bed and take him back to another planet, one intolerant - unlike hir's - of humankind. He'd be put on show, ridiculed, made to feel exactly how shhe feels when he talks - with no regard for anyone but himself - about putting restrictions on the freedom of others.

And other planets, other species, did hate humankind. They were amused, though wearied, by our enduring intolerance. It was outsiders who brought us interstellar travel, who brought us technology beyond our comprehension, things they were capable of because they had - long ago - moved beyond petty bickering over, what they considered, trivial matters. The ethnicity, the sexuality, the beliefs of others were almost irrelevant to what a unified planet could achieve. Whilst arguments will never cease it is at least more noble to argue for something worthwhile other than the constructed and perceived inferiority of one race or class or gender or persuasion to another.

Other planets thought us petulant, stroppy toddlers, and maybe it's because we're a young planet? A young species. But, still, these differences never really occured to many of them amongst themselves.

Shhe wanted to prove them wrong, he wanted to prove them wrong, they turned their love over as a willing symbol, an act of public defiance and whilst the voice of fear and hatred is often louder and more startling, the voice of hope and reason and love - though shy - is larger, and ultimately stronger. It just needs to push. It just needs to break through.

They held one another close, and waited for the votes to be counted, and waited for the voices to be heard.

The Time Machine

"Ladies and gentlemen, I know there's been some confusion, but let me explain. To travel through time into the past or future is impossible, and ultimately pointless. However, what we all need in our lives is more time. My time machine is capable of generating time. Time between time. For instance, I can split a second down the middle and place another second inside it.

"To an observer, as I will demonstrate, your perception of time remains unchanged. Whereas for me - FUCK YOU - I have an extra second.

"Now, my invention is not limited to a flimsy second here and there, by adjusting the dosage I receive I have inserted amounts of time up to..."

I stepped out from behind the podium, walked towards the audience, their faces drowsy with slowtime. I scan them all, one by one, taking in their expressions which, the last they knew, were looking at me delivering my lecture in front of them. Playfully I swap notebooks around on their desks, pull pens from hands and nestle them behind ears, I finish someone's coffee, take a bite from a cookie, wander the entire lecture hall and return to my podium.

"...ten minutes."

It takes a moment or two for them to realise things have changed, and the commotion is quite jolly and good-natured as they swap their belongings back, or discover other suggestions of my mischief.

"You see, time is relative and our ability to move within it is a construct of our perception of reality. My machine - implanted into the hypothalamus - and my formula directly effect the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which controls our circadian rhythms, and warps my perception of time. Depending on the dosage the more time stretches. I am able to move - at what you would experience as - faster-than-light within this continnum that I have created."

After the lecture I signed some copies of my findings, a quite vague essay that belied my reticence to reveal my invention and give the gift of time to everyone. The more people who would travel at slowtime, then the more slowtime becomes like normal time, and I treasure slowtime because it means I can escape.

When I was younger I'd say that I was born in the wrong time, I used to pine for the past, I had such hopes for the future. But I can never go back, and tomorrow keeps letting me down. If I could exist forever inbetween the moments then I think I'd be happy. If I could find a way to slow down time for me indefinitely then I'd be happy to grow old there, to live and die in the blink of an eye.

As the last of them shakes my hand, congratulating me on my work, I brush the hair from my eyes and move a pin to hold it in place. I could never afford to make enough formula to spend the next fifty or sixty years in slowtime, the only way I could would be to sell the patent, to give it to the people. Perhaps if the world became hooked on slowtime then I'd enjoy the days as they are? Rather than feel myself burdened, weighed down by each and every second.

Ten minutes, that's all I can make for myself each day. Ten minutes of time to myself. It would take me 144 days to save up enough for a day off. 52,560 days for a year away. There's never enough time.
My mind flutters with daydreams about how I could generate the formula itself within slowtime, meaning it would perpetuate more quickly. If there was some way of creating a pocket of slowtime that I could interact with in normal time, an ever-expanding bubble that I could use to harvest the formula. If there were a way to create a wormhole between moments, from the present via the expanded time between a second and then the present again so that as soon as the process begins the results are achieved.

I've always been impatient, most projects go unfinished because once I can visualise the goal in my mind I lose interest in the efforts required to attain it. This formula, this machine, it was an accident. A George's Marvellous Medicine concocted as I played mixologist with my prescriptions. I began to experience affected perceptions of time, but then noticed that it wasn't just perceived time that moved slowly, it was time itself and if my head was clear then my speed would remain at a constant whilst everything slowed down around me.

If anything it gave me hope, the meds had taken that from me. I'd been dulled down, too calm to care, and controlled by the wagging fingers that warned me of coming off of my medication. I wanted to die, that's why I mixed them, I wanted to go to the place where time doesn't exist, where my consciousness doesn't exist, I wanted to feel the nothingness. At first I thought it was a cruel joke, that I was a ghost stuck in a moment, and I had to haunt that frozen point in time for the rest of eternity.

Between time I'm free, I'm happy. Nobody really looks at me - they can't - and nobody is aware that I'm gone. It's like I become someone else, and each time I return to the same time as everyone else I have to remember who I am, what everyone thinks of me, their superficial perceptions and judgments, and I have to wait, wait for the next moment to escape.

Life Outside

I run a bath, tickling my fingers in the water, checking the temperature is just so. As the tub fills I pace the bathroom in my robe, daylight framing the closed shutters on the window. There's a weary glumness to the light inside the room, a sombre sadness to this early Summer afternoon.

Afterwards I try to find Tilly and the children, they're somewhere in the house, but with our wealth of rooms they could be anywhere, and my cries are swallowed up by the expanse. Eventually, I hear Margot's laughter coming from one of the guest bedrooms, and I discover, to their great amusement, that they've turned the bed's blankets and pillows into a fort.

"No Daddy!" Alex commands as I step forward to search for them, "You can't come in."

After a circular discussion in which I try to bargain my way into the fort I go downstairs to the dining room. Lunch has been served, and I ring the bell to let the family know, expecting the temptation to bring them running.

The kitchen staff have shyed away from me recently, since I dismissed Tiago - my last lunch chef - to the outside. They tend just to notify me once the meals have been served, and the waiting staff - at dinners - have perfected an almost invisible art of clearing plates and presenting the successive courses.

"What did he do?" Tilly had asked, removing her jewellry as we prepared for bed that evening.

I told her that he had this neck tattoo, a bloody skull, I hadn't noticed it before, and I'm sure it wasn't new. Perhaps, I posited, he had been covering it with make-up and it had slipped his mind. Tilly agreed that it was most inappropriate, not something we would want the children to be exposed to.

After lunch I logged into the office cloud, I had a meeting with the other MDs, each beamed in from their respective studies. I made sure that I was framed by my bookshelf in the webcam's view, father had told me that this would give off a positive and knowledgable perception, and I carefully noted what my colleagues had chosen as their backdrops.

There was a flat beige wall, a world map, a garden view, a Miro painting, and another had also chosen a bookshelf, though his was less impressive - mine heaved with hardback tomes, his was rife with paperback page-turners; I considered flagging this up to the Chief Executive as an item of concern.

More frustrating though, Alfred - who lives in a very pleasant pile near Haslemere - was clearly wearing his pajamas to the meeting, whereas the rest of us were in suit and tie. I scribbled a note, to remind myself of this.

After the meeting I went into the garden, the sun was at its apex, so there was a warm, flat light over the grounds. I enjoy this time of day best, since having the high walls installed I've missed sunrise and sunset, but in the summer especially this time of day is most pleasant.

Tilly had come out into the garden to, she was in a lounger by the pond.

"Were you kicked out of the fort?" I asked, strolling over and taking an orange from the fruit bowl besider her.

"The kids got bored, realised it was a lovely day and wanted to play outside."

I dig my finger into the skin, it resists my efforts to tear a chunk away and begin peeling.

"Where are they now?"

She looked up and scanned the garden, my eyes followed, and we found Alex throwing a dinosaur up in the air near the sandpit, and then Margot over by the guardhouse.

I was a little out of breath when I got to her, checked she was okay, and aside from a look of panic - probably a reflection of my own - she seemed fine. I stared up at the guard on duty, a short man, but broad, with a neat grey beard and round glasses.

"Afternoon, sir," he nodded at me.

"Please don't talk to my daughter."

"I hadn't, sir. She was talking at me."

I ushered Margot back towards her mother, standing my ground, watching the guard glancing at me but keeping his eyes fixed on the monitors that showed the perimeter, outside the walls, that showed the people idling around.

"Can't you do something about them?" I asked.

"There's a 10pm curfew in the summer months," the guard said reaching for his tea. "Other than that they can do what they like most afternoons. Got to give the inmates a bit of free time."

"But they could be made to work, do something productive."

"Ay, they do, eight until one in the afternoon, then lunch. Well, they try to. I was talking to a warden, he says it's getting harder to... Well, I shouldn't gossip."

"No," I sized the man up again, "you shouldn't." I tried to make the warning clear, he was lucky to be getting that.

I turned and made my way back to the house.

"Have a good evening, sir," the guard called after me. "Any plans?"

Perhaps it was the jovial tone in his voice, but something about his farewell crawled under my skin. I couldn't sleep that night, tossing and turning in the sheets, which felt damp and clammy against my body.

Tilly called to me from her bed, asked if I wouldn't mind sleeping in another room if I was going to be so restless.

"Are you going to report me?" I joked as I took my quilt and a pillow elsewhere.

I made myself comfy on the sofa, despite the guest rooms I rather fancied falling asleep whilst watching some television. I ordered a hot chocolate from the night staff and went to draw the curtains.

At the end of the garden, by the guardhouse, I could see a light - the tip of a cigarette - the audacity of that man! Smoking on my property without permission. I moved to the phone, but hesitated at the last moment, and I'm not sure entirely sure why, but I suddenly felt that - despite everything - I didn't want to send him away, I wanted to keep him here, this guard, this insipid stranger, as if something about that was a form of punishment.

I went back to the window, the figure had returned to the guardhouse. I drew the curtains, and when I returned to the sofa there was a hot chocolate steaming on the side table.

Turning on the television there was a high pitched whining, a test signal, and a card that read 'Due to unforseen circumstances all programming has been suspended', and behind that a spectrum of colour bars.

I lowered the volume so the whine was barely audible, yet its presence gave me a little comfort, I pulled the quilt over myself and snuggled onto the sofa, sipping at my hot chocolate, letting it softly warm me inside.