20th Day - The better Dream
Reading time: 3 min
Even as I said it, I knew this was the last thing I’d ever say to her.
“Is your dream as important as mine?”
I felt disgusted, not because I had articulated my thought into a sentence, or because I didn’t count to ten before spitting out whatever angry answer came to mind, but because I believed it. I really thought that my dream was more important than hers.
She didn’t reply.
She stopped weeping—maybe the strength of my selfishness had been enough to wipe any last drop of affection from her heart—and just left, leaving me there with my machine.
She could never understand; she wanted a family, a normal life, but she should have known you can’t have a normal life with me. What about my gift? How could she ask me not to use it?
I had built the machine a year before and I had travelled through spacetime to test it. It had worked perfectly. I landed in Cape Canaveral on July the 16th 1969 and watched Apollo 11’s launch from a field nearby. Simply majestic. What I didn’t anticipate, though, was a bizarre side effect.
I forgot where I came from. After a great deal of effort and countless mistakes, I landed in my back garden; nine months after I left.
The selective amnesia caused by the machine is of a sort I’ve never encountered before. It erases every practical memory—phone numbers, routes, acquaintance’s names—but it retains emotions. That’s why I know I’d been to Cape Canaveral on that specific day. I remember the event; I remember how I felt when I saw it, so, once I got back, with a quick Google search, I found out where and when I was. That’s also why I could never forget Margaret. I love her. But I can’t stop travelling, not even for her.
I told her hundreds of times. “I won’t forget you, only how to come back.” But she wouldn’t listen. She made me choose, so I did.
I’m sitting in the machine, sipping coffee. I’ve always wanted to go to space, so I’ve set the coordinates to the most ambitious destination I could think of: the peak of space colonization, whenever and wherever this might be.
When I push the button, it’s like being sucked through a narrow void. It’s uncomfortable but brief, and worth every loss of cerebral function.
I need a minute to feel whole again, then I jump out and realise I’m in an enormous city floating among Venus’ clouds. It’s a bit disappointing because I feel like I’m not as far as I should be. But how would I know? Where do I come from? What galaxy?
Still standing next to the machine, I immediately notice that something’s wrong. The tentacled being walking around me are not people. I gulp and the air burns my lungs. I’m dying, fast. I need to go back. But where?
Mars? The habitable Dyson Sphere around the Sun? Andromeda? Basingstoke? And when? Four million years or thirteen weeks ago?
With a kick, I push the button and the void sucks me again, but it’s too late. I’m coughing out ashes—my organs, I suppose—and all I can think of is Margaret and how much I’d like to tell her I was wrong.
