Author: Alexander Fawn

He took his new girlfriend to see the latest film, followed by meal at a restaurant.

He really enjoyed the date. She, like him, was in her early twenties and was definitely attractive. Previously, they had only known each other by sight. They worked at the same company, but their paths seldom crossed. She worked in Finance as secretary to the manager, while he was part of the team in the IT Department, using algorithms to transform data input, into processed data output, as part of his work. Although he was passionate about this aspect of his job, he tried not to bore her with too much talk of this. He soon saw that she had a very nice and surprisingly relaxed personality. All in all, the evening had gone well.

When he got home, he went straight to his computer. Outside of work, his main interest was the study of how the latest advances being made in statistical analysis, applied to this. He found that he could apply it to anything and everything. These activities were like a private hobby; one that he kept to himself.

This included a program he’d created for assessing members of the opposite sex. Over time, he had come up with fifteen qualities that he regarded as being necessary to measure. He opened his review table with its listed attributes. Each one required him to give a rating from zero to ten.

He had used presentation, punctuality, communication, maturity, humour, fitness, openness, respectfulness, honesty, affection, kindness, loyalty, empathy, values and interests, as critical aspects to measure. Each of these had his own personal ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ ratings already embedded within a complex algorithm. This contained an ordered set of instructions that had been developed to convert and measure all of his descriptive statistic’s values to give a definitive result. He had used this with all previous girlfriends; it served to give him an overall picture of their suitability.

He thought about her again. Despite being quite sure that she would exceed all of his personal criteria, he would see just how well she would rate. He spent several minutes entering his individual evaluations. When he had completed the digital assessment table, he clicked on the button marked ‘Result’.

He was shocked to see the word ‘FAIL’ appear in the centre of his screen.

With a deep sigh, he closed the computer.

Shaking his head, he whispered to himself, “What a shame. Still, you can’t argue with algorithms.”

The day was sunny, ideal for the youngsters to play.

The play area was busy with toddlers clambering, climbing and sliding on the play area’s equipment. The structure was made up of brightly-coloured segments, all cleverly fitted together, making a wonderful set of challenges for the little ones. It sat in one corner of the park with several benches surrounding it. Most of these were occupied by parents; some with even younger children in pushers. A solitary man sat on one of the seats provided. He was an internationally renowned writer of best-selling children’s books; some published in a number of foreign languages. He was watching the children and smiling.

Inside a twenty-minute period, three mothers reported the fact that he was sitting there.

Shortly after, the police arrived and took him in for questioning.

His whole life was about wheels.

When he was 5, he wanted the remote-control monster truck that he’d seen when he’d gone shopping with his mum. When he was 10, he wanted the tricycle he’d seen in a shop when he’d been out for the day with his father. When he was 15, he wanted help from his parents to buy the second-hand motorbike he’d seen advertised in the local paper. When he was 20, he wanted to do enough overtime work at the factory for him to save enough money to buy a second-hand car from the local car yard. When he was 25, he wanted to join the gang that was making money by robbing houses at night, in order to buy a new car. When he was 30, he wanted to be the wheelman for the gang that carried out bank robberies around the country. When he was 35, he wanted to explain that knocking down and killing the panicking woman who ran out of the bank that had been robbed, when he took off in the getaway car with the robbers, was an accident.

When he was 40, he wanted to get out of prison.

… and he was left wanting.

He sat looking out of the window.

He was a writer of short stories, but he couldn’t think of anything to write. Was it going to be a drama or something quite frivolous? So many jumbled ideas were buzzing around in his head; like how the word ‘artery is not the study of paintings, ‘bacteria’ is not the back door of a café, and how a ‘caesarean section’ is not a neighbourhood in Rome. Was this meant to be a humorous piece? On the other hand, there was nothing quite like a nice juicy murder!

He didn’t know.

The garden looked lovely.

Then it came to him.

Surely, he thought, this in itself is a story. A bit too long, he thought. I’d have to shorten it somehow.

I’ll write it…

The program was well underway during the pandemic.

It was the year 2020, when the covid strain was on the rise, that brought about their greatest challenge. Nobody actually liked wearing the masks, especially him. Despite this, the intense training they had received regarding detection avoidance, along with their highly advanced skills in cosmetic applications, would ensure success. Like the rest of them, he had to be patient. Along with the others of his kind, he had to put up with the disgruntled looks from people for not wearing a face mask. None of them knew with any certainty how long the program would need to keep running.

Their venerable leaders, back home on a dying planet, in a distant galaxy, had estimated that by 2035 enough of them would be in place. These chosen ones would hold enough of those specifically targeted roles within human society to take over.

She was half awake when the alarm sounded.

It felt as though she had been only dozing all through the night. She really needed to improve her quality of sleep. Laying there, still tired, she decided to call in sick. She would do some serious research on the subject of sleep. She struggled to get out of bed. A few minutes later, coming out of the bathroom, she had a plan. She decided to get dressed, then go straight to her room with her computer and begin searching for answers. Still feeling a bit drowsy, she booted up. Once on the internet, she began looking at ways to improve her quality of sleep.

She was looking at sites that talked about the advantages of contoured pillows, the softness of bedsheets and how to stop snoring. Despite still feeling dopey, or because of it, she found herself getting sidetracked by a fascinating item about memory improvement techniques. She read about how remembering things can be made easier by thinking of things by using pictures.

The site gave the example of the way to recall the three things, a mouse, a door and a table, when asked about them at a later time. It went on to say that a person should imagine opening a door and finding a mouse sitting on a table.

Still yawning, this reminded her that she’d promised her neighbour to get the collapsible card table from the junk room and have it ready for her to borrow on her next visit…

She was wondering just where she had put it, when she fell asleep.

The great puzzle of life; dealing with what is here and now.

For some… they look for what is lost. For some, the endless toleration for something not there. For some, there is something not quite right with the great cosmic order. A missing piece, one might say. A certain lacking in the great assembly of things. The shop has sold us a mega multi-piece jigsaw, with just one piece missing. More of a concern… the fact that it was not stolen; not taken from the box. The plastic bag that holds all of the pieces is intact, still sealed. This item was never there. What terrible fear this brings for some. Knowing that what is missing will not be found. Its invisibility being its attribute that ensures this. For some, there is a great unfairness to it all. Something that was never complete; never completely right within its foundation.

A mystery for most; its constant lack of presence remains unhindered.

So many maladies, all turning on the one unseen pivot.

When they met, mid-afternoon, they should both really have been elsewhere.

He was embarrassed by the thought that he’d snuck out from the office for a break. She, on the other hand, had taken time out before delivering the papers she’d been asked to hand in at the solicitor’s office. He felt they should have some kind of cover story that would avoid awkward questions. In fact, he said he had worked out what he would say.

“Go on,” she said, with a concerned smile.

“I’ll explain that I’d been in town shopping for extra-large lengths of balsa wood,” he began, “I would say that it was material that I needed for the full-size model of the cockpit of a combat-ready fifth-generation, Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighter jet, that I am building in the spare room of my flat. Which is going really well, by the way. Yes, I would say that when I saw you about to enter the solicitor’s office across the street, I felt compelled to run over and ask you if you’d like to take time out from your busy day.”

She nodded, slowly.

“What would you say?” he asked.

Slowly putting her empty cup down on the saucer, and knowing that this would absolutely never happen again, she said, “I’d say that we met in a coffee shop.”

The crime was a strange one.

Although basically a break-in, there were peculiar aspects to it, and despite having a brief description from a neighbour, they never actually found the perpetrator. It began when the Bair family, the parents and their son, left their house and went out for their regular morning walk. They would do this during the Winter months, when the weather allowed. The idea was to take a brisk walk together around the local streets for twenty minutes or so, then return home to a hot breakfast. On this particular occasion, when they entered the house, they were surprised to find that things had been disturbed.

First, they found an empty bowl. It would be Mrs Bair’s habit to prepare three bowls of porridge oats soaking while they were out. Returning, she would microwave them. The bowl in question was still warm and only contained a used spoon. It was also noticed that the oven door had been left open.

Next, when things had been put right and they sat down to their hot food, one of the chairs toppled over because one of the legs had been broken. It was then that the mother had got angry and shouted at her husband to call the police. Before he had a chance to do this, they all heard noises coming from upstairs.

At this point, the three Bairs climbed the stairs together. In the main bedroom they found the window wide open and signs that someone had been asleep on the bed.

What did the Lead Detective on the case think.

“Yes, as you say, looking back, it was a strange case. It seems that on that occasion, the family, that’s the parents and their son went out without locking the house. We suspected at the time that the girl who was seen entering, was just a street person, sleeping rough, when they saw the opportunity to go in. Not much of a description except she had a shock of golden hair. The girl didn’t do much really just ate a bowl of porridge, broke a chair, then had the cheek to fall asleep on one of the beds. We were asked at the time how she got away. We were never really sure, but suspected the commotion going on downstairs by the three Bairs, when they found the empty bowl and damaged chair, woke the culprit up. She probably went out through the bedroom window, climbed down the drainpipe and legged it. We spoke to a number of homeless people. Most of them said what a nice kid she was. One of them told us she had died her hair. As you know, she was never caught.”

He spent night after night in the shed at the back.

The time machine he’d been building was finally ready for the much-awaited test. It was something of a personal disappointment for him that it was not able to take him back in time, but the fact that his calculations were telling him that travel to the future was available, made up for it. Climbing in, he set the dial for a mere seven days. He wanted to take it easy at first. With an intake of breath, he thumped the large red button that he was particularly proud of, and both he and the machine disappeared. It was when he clambered out at what appeared to be the very spot that he’d left, that he had grave doubts about whether he’d accomplished anything at all.

Moving across to the bench where much of his technical equipment and experimental pieces of apparatus were spread out in a jumble, he caught sight of himself in grandma’s full-length mirror stored in the corner. Knowing that he was only twenty-eight made it all the more preposterous that he was looking at a man in his late fifties!

He stood wondering for several minutes about what had happened. Obviously, going forward for a week in one reality had taken him forward a couple of decades in another. This didn’t sit well with him at all. He didn’t like the idea of being robbed of such a large chunk of his life. When he got back, he would need to focus on the issue of these dual realities.

Climbing back in, he hesitated for a moment, thinking about the fact that he was not able to travel back to the past, but could certainly return to the point in time when he left. Because of this, it was critical that the return setting was painstakingly accurate. Knowing this, he spent several minutes before satisfying himself that the exact time had been entered before pressing his beautiful button.

The resulting coming together of time machines from the two quite distinct reality modes did not go well…

The explosion was enormous.

The piece of ground simply smouldered.

The shed was gone.