Some fast fiction for your perusal...

[spudtater]

Here's a short story I wrote during the summer. I originally wrote it for mistersleepless's site, but he didn't run it (he had a load of submissions; maybe he just overlooked mine or something...)   8^P   8^)

I've rewritten it a touch now that I don't have to stick to under 200 words. It's still blink-and-you've-missed-it short, though. Hopefully just enough to get you thinking.

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We have time travel now, and it has confused logicians no end. Any philosophy undergraduate could tell you that time-travel paradoxes should be unavoidable, but for some reason everything always works out. Those visited in the past by their future selves, for example, all succeed in getting access to a time machine, visiting their past selves at the right time, saying exactly the same words.

The leading explanation at the moment is the Richarde hypothesis. "Assume there exists somebody who would go back in time to (let us say) kill their grandfather. They do so, and so they cease to exist. Their grandfather is then left alive, and the person exists once more. We have a contradiction. By Reductio Ad Absurdum, then, our initial assumption is false; such a person cannot exist in the first place."

He appears to be correct. The type of person who would go back and intentionally create a paradox just doesn't appear to exist. Or so I thought until last week. Dr. Elsworth was the first person I'd met who seemed willing to disprove the hypothesis. Mercurial, stubborn, she denounced Dr. Richarde as a fool. She demanded access to a time machine, with which she would attempt to kill her younger self. Intrigued, I granted her access to the machine at my lab; she was due to use it just this afternoon.

This morning, tragically, mundanely, she was run over by a bus.

Comments

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Neat.