It was a dark and stormy night- Time after Time E-Book

John Chapman

• Herausgeber: JayDax
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 137

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

You won't believe this, but I'm about to tell you a story that will change the course of history. A story about time travel, secret agents, and paradoxes. It's a story that will start with a chance encounter with a time traveler known as Jack the Ripper, and it will end with the founding of TACO, the Time Agency Chronoclasm Organisation, a powerful agency controlling time travel throughout history.

The second short story tells how I was coerced into joining TACO as an observer on a mission to rescue the Blair witch. It was either that or be slightly dead. Apparently, the Blair witch was also a TACO agent and had been set-up to be almost killed by the good citizens of Blair by BELL, the time travel equivalent of the FBI. They wouldn't tell me what BELL stood for.

The third story, my second time-travel mission, was to make sure the Titanic sank! Over 1,500 died but their deaths saved the lives of millions throughout the timeverses.

The fourth story deals with paradoxes. 1493 wasn't ready for flying machines so Alex Pearin (aka Jack the Ripper) and I traveled to Florence in Tuscany to talk to Leonardo da Vinci about paradoxes and why he shouldn't build the world's first flying machine. Alex and I ended up helping Leonardo complete a flying machine and helping him on its first flight. I also solve a couple of other mysteries and discover I founded BELL.

Leseprobe

"Time is a very elastic thing, Watson. It has the strange property of contracting itself into minutes when one is fascinated, and of expanding itself into hours when one is bored." - Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Speckled Band’

I do hope it won’t take you hours to read this book – Author

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

Story Time

Ripping Time

Witching Time

Titanic Time

Time Flies

Four short and unbelievable time travel stories

By John Chapman

John Chapman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright ©2023 John Chapman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

This ebook is not available as a PDF file which is an unsatisfactory format for reading ebooks. If you are reading this in PDF format, then you are reading an illicit copy.

This book uses UK English, so expect words like ‘favourite’, ‘colour’ and ‘metre’, temperatures in Celsius and expressions such as ‘I put it in my car boot’… but then… I may use US spelling and expressions.

Oh well – you’ll see.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Ripping Time

By John Chapman

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Joseph Goebbels Minister of Propaganda, Nazi Germany

I’ve been told by one of the characters in this story that you won’t believe this. However, enough will stick in minds for it to trigger an idea. That alone will cause the founding of TACO – the Time Agency Chronoclasm Organisation which controls time travel.

Ripping Time 1

It was a dark and stormy night.

Huh! What sort of story beginning is that? I’d better explain. You see I’m an author and, I’ve always been told, that you never start a story with a cliché expression such as ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ No one, with any sense, starts with that line. So that’s why I wrote it and, in any case, – it was a dark and stormy night. At least it was getting dark because the streetlights were on, and it was decidedly stormy because the rain didn’t quite fall upwards. There was no thunder or lightning though, so I supposed that’s what made the guy I was watching try to use his umbrella to shelter from the rain. You’d have thought he would have known better. I’d already watched it invert twice in the wind and been mildly amused by his struggles to put it right again. It’s easy to be amused when you’re not the person getting drenched and almost blown off the pavement.

Suddenly it happened.

Oh God – here I go again. There are some words that just shouldn’t be written in a story and ‘suddenly’ is one of them.

Well, it was sudden! The window rattled with a very [another word authors shouldn’t write] loud bang as the inverted lightning conductor the guy held fulfilled a purpose for which it was never intended. He collapsed in a smoking pile on the pavement.

I took about thirty seconds to get down the stairs from my apartment and hadn’t even finished calling the emergency services before I reached him. I was astonished to find him sitting up, looking around blankly. “Are you ok?” I asked.

“I don’t understand. What happened? Where am I?”

“You were struck by lightning. I was watching the storm. You’re incredibly lucky to be alive.”

“You mean incredibly unlucky to be hit. More to the point where am I? Who am I?”

“You don’t remember who you are? Look, I’d better call you an ambulance if you’ve lost your memory. Are you burnt? With that much power going through you, you must be.”

“I feel OK – just a bit jittery and…,” he said with a grin, “…I’m pretty sure my name isn’t Anne Ambulance. Don’t call for help. I don’t want to go to a hospital. I don’t know why, but there’s some reason I shouldn’t.”

“Well, at least come inside out of this rain. We’re both soaked.”

Just [never to be written word number three] as I helped him to his feet, the storm reminded us with another loud bang of its presence, so we both decided not to hang around longer.

Five minutes later we were seated in my living room, in front of the gas fire, drying ourselves as best we could with towels while the kettle boiled for coffee. My guest, who wasn’t Anne, clad in a dry shirt and a pair of jeans of mine, was examining his partially melted umbrella, his ruined glove, jacket, trousers and left shoe, each of which bore carbonized stripes where the lightening had tracked down to the ground. [Hmm. That last sentence was definitely a run-on sentence. I may need to change that.]

“So have you remembered your name yet?”

“Not yet, but I know who I am. You probably know me as Jack the Ripper.”

Ripping Time 2

For the second time, I began to question my guest’s sanity. This was the man who used an umbrella in a furious thunderstorm and now told me in 2015 that he was the serial killer who murdered London women of questionable morality in 1888.

I looked carefully at ‘Jack’, He appeared to be in his 30s. “No – I don’t think that’s possible. You’d have to be at least 140. You can’t possibly be Jack the Ripper.

“You can if you’re a time traveller.” He replied.

“Yeah – Right,” I said. “I somehow suspect that time travel isn’t possible because if it was possible – where are all the time travellers?”

“Right in front of you.”

“I think you’ll have to persuade me on that. Right now, I prefer an Occam’s Razor solution where the simplest solution is likely to be correct. The lightning has affected your brain, and you’re nuts.” (Perhaps, telling him that wasn't very wise. I tell a crazy man, who believes he's a violent killer, that he's nuts!)

“It’s coming back to me now. I’m not nuts; I can prove my story, and I will, even though I don’t need to. I’m grateful for the warmth and clothes.

“OK,” I said, “I presume you are now going to show me some gadget that allows you to travel through time. So, get your cell phone out and show me the app you use.”

“Cell phone? We’re in England. Don’t you mean ‘mobile’?”

“Sorry – I’m an author and if I use the term ‘mobile phone’ then readers in the US won’t understand me or think I’ve made a mistake and give me bad reviews. I’ve got used to using American terms like cell phone instead of mobile and trunk instead of boot. But we digress – show me the gadget you use to time travel.”

“I can’t. It’s inside me. The time travel field only works over very short distances, so I have to have lots of them built into me which all have to work on a molecular scale. You can’t see them.”

“How very convenient for you. No visible machine. HG Wells obviously hadn’t planned that one out very well. So how are you going to prove it? Travel forward in time a couple of minutes?”

“No. I can’t do that. It takes too much energy, and I’m not fully charged yet. Got a set of bathroom scales?”

“Need to find out if your diet is working?”

“You obviously doubt me then. No, I’m not on a diet. We both look about the same body mass and are a similar height. The difference is that my body is full of nanotechnology, tiny devices which allow me to time travel, and you don’t have them. The nanomachines are quite heavy and will show up if I’m weighed.”

I went and got the scales. Being entirely Mr Average I knew I was 150 pounds, my guest weighed 225 pounds. Unless he had solid gold underwear, something was decidedly odd about him – apart from surviving a lightning strike apparently unharmed. I began to revise my ‘he’s nuts’ theory, but I still wasn’t convinced about the time travel bit.

“OK. You’re heavier than you should be – much heavier – but that doesn’t prove you are a time traveller. I can’t believe that. If I did and you’re Jack the Ripper, then you need locking up!”

“It’s my job – I had to do that because the survival of the human race depended on it. I’ll get to that later and prove I’m not a monster. First, I need to prove the time travel bit. That is a lot easier in this era than it would have been in 1888. You have computers now.”

“I’m glad you’re not a monster,” I said. “But apart from your extra weight, you’ve yet to prove anything.”

“OK – apart from the time travel capability the nanomachines in my body interface with my brain and give me some rather special abilities. You have a calculator app on your phone. Set it to scientific mode.” He waited until I had done so, then continued, “I know every current phone number, including all the ex-directory ones. Your mobile is ex-directory, as is your mother’s home phone. Multiply the two numbers together and you get 11,157,161,861,955,525,018.” He wrote the number down for me. Sure enough, he was correct.

“Impressive, but you could have memorised that,” I said. “Now try that again with my next-door neighbour’s number and my Uncle Jim’s number.”

“Is that your uncle James Chapman or James Marr?”

“Chapman,” I said, now aware that this guy knew a lot about me.

He reeled off another huge number before I had even finished entering the first one in my phone, then said it again more slowly so I could check. He was spot on. He then told me my car registration, make, model, insurance certificate number, my National Insurance number, the name of my doctor, the date I last visited him and why I went.

“All this information is stored on computers, and the records are available to me,” he said. “By the way you are twelve pounds forty-three pence overdrawn at the bank because the royalty check you deposited hasn’t cleared yet. You’ve got a letter about it.”

I hadn’t opened my mail yet. Sure enough, he was right. I still wasn’t convinced though. “If you worked for the security services or had pretty good hacker skills you might have been able to find all that out. Tell me something that hasn’t happened yet Jack.”

“I’m not supposed to do that,” he said. “The best I can do is write something down which hasn’t happened yet and show it to you after the event. Telling you about things that have not yet happened can cause all sorts of problems and then someone like me must travel back in time to fix it. I have to be very careful how I interact in this time if I’m not to cause problems. By the way, I’ve remembered my name now. The nanomachines are resetting after their charge. I’m Alex Pearin.” He wrote something on one of my many notepads, folded it up and put it in his shirt pocket where I could see it.

“So, what have you written?”

“It hasn’t happened yet – give me another five minutes.”

“How do you know I won’t snatch it from you and read it to get knowledge of the future?”

“You won’t. You would much rather find out about the Jack the Ripper mystery.”

Ripping Time 3

“Well, you are intriguing me so far, so go on then. Tell me about Jack the Ripper. Why all those grisly murders had to take place.”

“It was all the Time Agency Chronoclasm Organisation’s fault. That’s the organisation I belong to – TACO.”

“Sounds like one of those food things in the US.”

“Strangely, we have our headquarters in Irvine, California, which is where that company is based. But do you want to hear the Jack the Ripper story or not?”

“Sorry – I won’t interrupt again.”

“You will. Anyway, TACO commissioned a new agent to go back to Victorian times and collect a copy of the first issue of the Financial Times. He was supposed to stay and record the opening of the International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry in Glasgow, May 1888 and chose to stay in London. The selection team did a rotten job profiling him, or they would have known of his fondness for women. He, shall we say ‘dallied’, with various street women there and managed to infect them with nanomachines. A few months later they had children like Superman. Tremendous mental powers, physical strength, and an ego the size of Everest. Each wanted to be top dog, they couldn’t cooperate and had little in the way of morals. They and their descendants caused a war that practically wiped-out humanity.

I was sent back to fix things with the instruction to find and kill four women, remove the nanomachines and make it seem like the work of a serial killer.”

“Why couldn’t you just have stopped your agent before he infected the women or gone back and stopped him being sent on the mission?”

“Told you, you would interrupt. I wish it were that simple, but time won’t allow two incursions at the same instant. I could explain, but you don’t have the temporal math understanding needed.”

“You said you went back to kill four women. I thought there were a lot more killed by Jack the Ripper.”

“No, I only killed four. None of them suffered. One instant they were alive and aware and the next they were obliviously dead. The removal of nanomachines took place after their deaths. If I hadn’t killed them, they would have died during the birth of their children in total agony. They lost a few months, but since their lifestyle wasn’t very happy, really, I did them a favour.”

“What about all the other murders Jack the Ripper was supposed to have done?” I asked.

“You obviously have no concept of how dangerous London was at the time. There were lots of murders during that period. The newspapers of the day knew the value of fear and blamed every murder for miles around on the Ripper. They sensationalized the stories making them increasingly gruesome and generating the 'Ripper' aspect. If anything, I’m kind of offended because the first three killings were very neat. The last, I was instructed to be a little untidier to give the impression of a deranged killer.

OK - the news is starting. Watch the stock ticker at the bottom and compare it with this paper I wrote.” He pointed at the paper in his pocket but didn’t touch it.

I took the paper and read it – a list of stock prices with their rise and falls. It matched the newscast exactly. I began to believe him. There was no way he could have known.

“Why are you telling me all this? Isn’t that likely to cause a chrono-whatsit?”

“Chronoclasm – something out of place in time – like Julius Caesar looking at his wristwatch. No, you won’t cause a chronoclasm.”

“How do you know? I’m an author. I might write about this.”

“You will. The story will be called… No, I better not tell you that. I can tell you you’ll put it on Amazon – Kindle Unlimited at first, and it will be very popular for a while. A bit slow to start though. No one will believe it. They’ll think it’s pure fiction. You’ll get criticism for your writing style, mostly because it’s written in first person, has too much passive dialogue and an odd start. It’ll make people think, though, and someone will figure out how nanomachines can twist DNA to cause a wormhole that makes time and distance travel possible. In effect, you will be responsible for me being here. Because of that I’ve been given special permission to answer one question about your future. I know what you are going to ask – don’t ask it yet. The nanomachines are almost ready for the next charge and then I can return to the future.”

“This isn’t my question – how do you charge the nanomachines?”