It was 2420. I was locked inside a one-way viewing time-tank. I held my cigarette and inhaled deeply. I was smoking again after some delinquent bastard had followed me back to my twenty-second century home and killed Marie.
Before she’d died, Marie had purchased a surprise birthday present for me. She left it wrapped on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, where I’d found it the day after her funeral.
A time-P.I.T.C.H.
The acronym stood for Portable Incremental Temporary Chrono Hopper— the gadget became my last link to Marie. She’d given me the top of the line model for my P.I. work; it had programmable voices. With the time-pitch I could move freely into different time-zones without having to wait days or even weeks to book a time-tank.
“Two minutes to maximum mobility, baby,” said Rhonda, the voice programmed into the pitch. “Remember to wear your time-fogs. I can’t save you every time you forget to put those glasses on.”
After Marie’s death, I’d found Rhonda’s voice a nice distraction. Lately, though, she wouldn’t shut up, but she was right about the time-fogs. If I forgot to wear them during a time-transport then I slowed right down, unable to move—much.
“Don’t look now, baby,” she said warningly, but someone’s entering your time-tank.”I freaked as I realized someone had entered the rear of the tank. I cursed myself, cursed my luck, and cursed the intruder as I stood mostly immobile, only able to smoke. I remained helpless while a hand slipped around to the left inside liner pocket of my black leather duster coat and stole my time-pitch.
Rhonda disappeared and so did my chance of getting home.
When the time-tank finally released me, I stepped out into the hall and noted the slick eyeballs of the security cameras observing me. A bantam-bot, about the size of a house cat, skittered up to me and squeaked, “Halt.”
I lifted my Doc Martians and anticipated the delicious crunching sound the little bot would make when I crushed it, but the little robot scanned the ID on the sole of the hovering boot and scuttled away.
Disguised as a teacher, my job brought me to Lincoln High, school for the underage criminal. Tucked up under the black leather sleeve of my duster, a syringe loaded with nanobots seething to create medical mayhem awaited their target, any target, but at the moment I didn’t care about any of that. I needed a coffee and a smoke, or I was going to lose it, and then I remembered that this century banned coffee. I wanted to bite something.
Author’s Bio
Rhea has published many speculative fiction and poetry pieces: Evolve, Tesseracts, 1,2,6,9,10,17, On Spec, Talebones, Northwest Passges, Masked Mosaic, and Dead North. She has received honorable mentions in the Year’s Best Horror anthologies and was reprinted in Christmas Forever (edited by David Hartwell) and twice made the preliminaries for the Nebula Award. She edited poetry for Edge Press and hosted the Vancouver Science Fiction and Fantasy (V-Con) writers’ workshops. She is a teacher of creative writing. Her new works for 2015 include: Second Contact, Clockwork Canada, Art Song Lab and three Indie novels, The Final Catch: A Tarot Sorceress series. Twice an Aurora nominee, Rhea has a MFA in creative writing.
Happy Horrors
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