A Room with a Tap

I wrote this short story in 2005, and uploaded it to the website: h2g2

A Room with a Tap

I sensed the change to fuzzy time. As I gazed at my hand it blurred and elongated towards the direction I would move it and in the direction it had come. My senses expanded from being localised to one instant to being spread out over time. At first I was horrified since I was used to processing data at one time only, and I could not tell what was before and what was after. Things in my time-window were meshed together as a colourful noisy nightmare and I descended into confusion. As I tried to bring order, patterns began to emerge. I was in a hospital where buxom nurses spooned medicine out of my mouth. As my neurons re-arranged and my skills grew I learned to filter-in only the data relating to a single time, say the present, or a time two seconds in the future. I also rediscovered the correct direction of time, and the patterns made sense again.

Eventually I was released from the hospital and I went home to my beloved wife and work. I found that I could reply to the questions of my wife and colleagues before they had asked them, which, oddly, roused the suspicions of my wife, but gave me a tremendous reputation at work. I found myself at the talking end of a lot of one sided conversations, since I tended to fire answers at approaching people who hadn't even asked their question yet. This disturbed and impressed them hugely, but it always bothered me that I could only see a few minutes into the future at most. Then I realised that the future I was seeing was constantly being negated because I was acting upon it before it happened. As I looked further and further ahead my future-sight couldn't keep up with the changes in all the possible futures which diverged like spaghetti so all I could see was a distant tangled mess of superimposed possibilities. Damn: bets on the horses were out.       

However, gambling with foresight was unnecessary, since over a couple of months my amazed colleagues propelled me to the top of my company, I started a religion and my salary increased four fold, but I became so bored with knowing what would happen two minutes before it did, that I took to staring at myself in the mirror, jiggling my head desperately trying to out-guess my future-sight. Then one day I turned on the cold water tap and, for once, looked at the water. I was amazed at the turbulent flow that erupted from it. It was like seeing a coloured flower in a black and white world, because I couldn't forsee it at all! To the dismay of my wife I spent the next few days marvelling at the arrogant freedom of turbulent water. Eventually, the nice men at the hospital gave me a room with a tap.

New Horizon

(An excerpt from my first sci-fi novel, unpublished).

The machine was ready. I connected a charged capacitor, accelerating thousands of electrons down through a superconductor. This huge collective acceleration downwards formed a Rindler horizon three astronomical units up in space, nearly as far away as Jupiter. As I’d predicted everything in a column above my machine also saw this horizon and was attracted to it, including a model spaceship sitting freely on top of the machine. It shot upwards and smashed into the ceiling, which was held in place by its solidity, and I whooped with delight as the pieces fell on me. There was a spate of mad barking from the dog in the flat above, and my neighbour shouted down.

‘What are you doing down there? That bang made my dog jump three feet into the air in shock!’

Ah, the ability of people to fit strange observations into a mundane world view!

‘Sorry, just playing ball!’

I’d overestimated the effect and hadn’t meant to launch spaceships and innocent dogs quite so well. It would be enough to equal gravity rather than beating it. I went back to my desk to do a few simple calculations, looked up at the dent in the ceiling and giggled: there’s something hugely satisfying about knowing something no one else does, especially if knowing it can land you in jail.