Rob Tyler
The night Godzilla blew through town, Jake fought claustrophobia with a hundred other people in a bomb shelter beneath the basement of their cold-war-era apartment building. The ventilation was bad and the only light came from a string of bare bulbs hanging from the vaulted concrete ceiling.
He sat on a rusted iron bench next to the cute blonde he’d seen coming and going from 7b.
“This room was designed to withstand a 20-megaton airburst directly overhead,” he said.
She turned to him. “Godzilla could crush this building like it was made of papier-mâché and bury us alive under 30 feet of rubble,” she said, “We’d suffocate in hours.”
She had pale skin and big hazel eyes. He liked her shape.
“What do you do for a living?” he asked.
“I’m a salad holographer,” she said.
“Is there much call for that?”
“Vegetables are scarce and they don’t last. People pay me lots of money to take holographs of fancy salads they make for special occasions. To decorate their dining table, or whatever.”
The all-clear sounded. Someone opened the lead-lined blast door and they filed up a dank, narrow stairway to the laundry room, between rows of washers and dryers, past a wall of electric meters, and up another set of stairs into the lobby.
“What do you do,” she said.
“Retroscopy. I’m a relevancy evaluator.”
“Relevancy of what?”
“People,” he said. “DOD nineteen sixty-five to two thousand fifteen. The Hindsight Project.”
They walked out to the street. The sun was setting behind the shattered downtown skyline. A warm breeze, bearing the minty smell of benzene, came from the river.
“Cool,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “What, exactly, makes someone relevant?”
“If they might have made a difference.”
“What kind of difference?”
“You name it. There are thousands of criteria. I evaluate for precognition.”
“No kidding.”
Across the street, debris crashed to the sidewalk. A small Asian man in a dirty white tee-shirt and khakis shoveled drywall and a broken toilet through a crescent-shaped gap in the wall four stories up.
“They made Godzilla movies a hundred years ago,” Jake said. “Incredible likeness—same fiery breath, same screechy cry. Someone precogged him.”
“A lot of good it did us.”
“That’s just it,” he said, “they had no idea what they were dealing with. Ya gotta wonder, what else has been overlooked?”
“So…you’re a government agent, rummaging through the past, trying to change the future?”
“Did I mention,” he said, “that if I told you all this, I’d have to kill you?”
She laughed. They walked to the corner and crossed to the park, wending their way past splintered maples and a dry marble fountain.
She said, “What do you do when you find someone relevant?”
“Send back a message. Point them in the right direction. Help them prevent this,” he said, spreading his arms. “For what it costs per kilobyte-year, we can’t say much, but it’s better than nothing.”
Michael Crichton left the nondescript ranch house in the LA suburbs and headed home to his place in Monterey. He’d just spent four hours on the astral plane with a spiritual guide, traveling through time. The experience had left him exhausted but exhilarated and absolutely convinced—after years of doubt and experimentation—that there were vast realms of psychic power that were being ignored by the scientific establishment.
He’d just published Travels, which had been received with mixed reviews by readers who had come to expect from him a steady stream of science fiction and fast-action thrillers. By contrast, in Travels, he explored his adventures across careers and continents, and to the puzzlement of many, his experience with psychedelic drugs, altered states, and prognostication. His editors urged him to stick to what he was best known for—money-making page-turners like The Andromeda Strain and Westworld. But his imagination extended far beyond cheap entertainment.
Ideas blossomed in his head as he drove. He was in a unique position to change conventional thinking about the capabilities of the human mind. He had scientific credentials, celebrity status, and wealth. He envisioned a foundation for psychic research, funded in perpetuity by royalties from his novels and movies…
When he got home, he sat down to compose a message to his agent. As he waited for his PC to boot, his modem came to life.
“What the hell,” he said, “That’s not supposed to happen.” Then the monitor turned itself on. QUIT SMOKING, in blocky DOS characters, flashed across the screen.
He’d never been hacked before, but there was a first time for everything.
“Fuck you,” he said, and shut down. He lit up his 35th cigarette of the day and concentrated on balancing his chi. If his computer was compromised, he’d buy another. Meanwhile he could develop his ideas for the foundation. He took a deep drag and exhaled with satisfaction. There was plenty of time.
ROB TYLER lives in a barn on thirty acres of scrubland in Upstate New York. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in Jersey Devil Press, The Chamber Magazine, 10 By 10 Flash Fiction Stories, Pif Magazine, the Schuylkill Valley Journal, and elsewhere, and have been produced as podcasts by Manawaker Studio and by Disturbing Frequencies, a project of Rochester Speculative Literature Association. When not writing, Rob can be found wrangling his feral cat, pulling up knotweed by the roots, or shooting pool at the local watering hole.