YESTERDAY MAKERS: A Story From A Time Machine
I MADE A TIME MACHINE AND I MADE A YESTERDAY
Qualia picks up a book, or what passes for a book in her strange land, and reads... And we're plunged into nested universes where time runs out. There's nostalgia and revenge and wordplay, a romp through different worlds where appearances can be deceptive and realities are built by interface engines. But Qualia finds enlightenment...
Paxton wants vengeance, and his time ship—which he barely understands—can give it to him. And all without the paradoxes. But there's less to Paxton’s world than he realises—much less. Pierce is Paxton’s mentor. Pierce is smart and charismatic and highly evolved, but he can’t help Paxton. And Pierce has bigger fish to fry. A creative act—a weird collaboration between a woman and a machine—underpins everything. But everything has a cost...
Multi-layered time travel to undermine your reality…
Qualia picks up a book, or what passes for a book in her strange land, and reads... And we're plunged into nested universes where time runs out. There's nostalgia and revenge and wordplay, a romp through different worlds where appearances can be deceptive and realities are built by interface engines. But Qualia finds enlightenment...
Paxton wants vengeance, and his time ship—which he barely understands—can give it to him. And all without the paradoxes. But there's less to Paxton’s world than he realises—much less. Pierce is Paxton’s mentor. Pierce is smart and charismatic and highly evolved, but he can’t help Paxton. And Pierce has bigger fish to fry. A creative act—a weird collaboration between a woman and a machine—underpins everything. But everything has a cost...
Multi-layered time travel to undermine your reality…
YESTERDAY MAKERS (the start)
Warm breezes blew in and played across Qualia’s face, carrying unsmelt perfumes, and unheard insect drones. Beyond the arched and open windows of her cliff-top castle, an un-blue ocean slept. And above its waves, a great and glassy ship, like a vast and upturned greenhouse, sailed by with sightless eyes.
She picked up a book—or what passed for a book in her time—and began to read.
I climbed down the gangway and into my old bedroom. It looked good. The books were there, dusty on sagging shelves, just as I remembered them. The bed was unmade. And my old lizard, a caramel-coloured Cordylus cataphractus, sunned himself under a bulb. He eyed me warily, then slid off his rock and pushed his nose to the glass. He recognised me, even though I had changed so much. I was now an engineer, not an aspiring zookeeper—and far older and richer than I ever expected to be.
I looked back at the metal gangway as it wavered and cut through the translucent zone of wallpaper. It was forged from an exotic alloy—one that could survive the Boundary—and it led to my ship, which hovered outside, parked in an invisible siding in a different space.
I wanted to explore, but I only had five minutes—any longer and I could be trapped. And I wanted to survive. I wanted to visit other times—and a minute had already gone. I tore from my bedroom and raced down the carpeted stairs—echoing a childhood nightmare—and stopped by the yellow front door, its paint bright and fresh. The church opposite rippled through the frosted glass, and I wanted to check that it was properly built. I opened the door, walked across the small front garden, grabbed the creosoted gate—rickety even in this time—flipped the latch, and stepped onto the pavement. A car—angular and small and long since crushed—chugged by spewing thin fumes. Its driver—old and hunched and smoking and long since dead—stared straight ahead.
I looked at the church, and I concentrated very hard, because the brain always plays tricks and fills in details that might not be there. I counted the individual courses for the height of an arched window. Valuable time, I admit, but time well spent. There was no skimping in the rendering, no artistic suggestion—the building was carefully drawn, not lightly sketched. Every stone and brick was there. This place was real.
A man and his Scottie dog walked along on the other side of the road, by the church railings. They both looked up, and the man smiled: if this were the real past that would have been enough to tear up history and destroy my time machine. But there was no history extending out from this place, for this was a bubble world: a place with no future—and very little past. And I had very little time here...
continue reading YESTERDAY MAKERS
Warm breezes blew in and played across Qualia’s face, carrying unsmelt perfumes, and unheard insect drones. Beyond the arched and open windows of her cliff-top castle, an un-blue ocean slept. And above its waves, a great and glassy ship, like a vast and upturned greenhouse, sailed by with sightless eyes.
She picked up a book—or what passed for a book in her time—and began to read.
I climbed down the gangway and into my old bedroom. It looked good. The books were there, dusty on sagging shelves, just as I remembered them. The bed was unmade. And my old lizard, a caramel-coloured Cordylus cataphractus, sunned himself under a bulb. He eyed me warily, then slid off his rock and pushed his nose to the glass. He recognised me, even though I had changed so much. I was now an engineer, not an aspiring zookeeper—and far older and richer than I ever expected to be.
I looked back at the metal gangway as it wavered and cut through the translucent zone of wallpaper. It was forged from an exotic alloy—one that could survive the Boundary—and it led to my ship, which hovered outside, parked in an invisible siding in a different space.
I wanted to explore, but I only had five minutes—any longer and I could be trapped. And I wanted to survive. I wanted to visit other times—and a minute had already gone. I tore from my bedroom and raced down the carpeted stairs—echoing a childhood nightmare—and stopped by the yellow front door, its paint bright and fresh. The church opposite rippled through the frosted glass, and I wanted to check that it was properly built. I opened the door, walked across the small front garden, grabbed the creosoted gate—rickety even in this time—flipped the latch, and stepped onto the pavement. A car—angular and small and long since crushed—chugged by spewing thin fumes. Its driver—old and hunched and smoking and long since dead—stared straight ahead.
I looked at the church, and I concentrated very hard, because the brain always plays tricks and fills in details that might not be there. I counted the individual courses for the height of an arched window. Valuable time, I admit, but time well spent. There was no skimping in the rendering, no artistic suggestion—the building was carefully drawn, not lightly sketched. Every stone and brick was there. This place was real.
A man and his Scottie dog walked along on the other side of the road, by the church railings. They both looked up, and the man smiled: if this were the real past that would have been enough to tear up history and destroy my time machine. But there was no history extending out from this place, for this was a bubble world: a place with no future—and very little past. And I had very little time here...
continue reading YESTERDAY MAKERS
YESTERDAY MAKERS: insights and spoilers
Qualia is a robot in a robot world, using her time machine to create bubble universes. These worlds sprout from the trunk of history, but in the process their internal geometry gets fractured and distorted, allowing fractal leakage across their dimensions. In the cracks of these damaged worlds, consciousness flourishes, for awareness happens in those spill-over dimensions. It's a commentary on how consciousness is trapped in our heads, and outside it's a zombie universe.
The interface engines generate our perceptions, grinding like great turbines in the hulls of our minds, making sense of the world. And there's a suspicion that beyond our world is a greater world. We might hope that this over-world is full of compassionate gods. But they're just automata...
Qualia is a robot in a robot world, using her time machine to create bubble universes. These worlds sprout from the trunk of history, but in the process their internal geometry gets fractured and distorted, allowing fractal leakage across their dimensions. In the cracks of these damaged worlds, consciousness flourishes, for awareness happens in those spill-over dimensions. It's a commentary on how consciousness is trapped in our heads, and outside it's a zombie universe.
The interface engines generate our perceptions, grinding like great turbines in the hulls of our minds, making sense of the world. And there's a suspicion that beyond our world is a greater world. We might hope that this over-world is full of compassionate gods. But they're just automata...