A rainy Sunday. I did the New York Times crossword, I watched a little Red Dwarf, I did a little editing for Kaleidotrope*, and I wrote this:
Waiting for a train that never comes is an occupational hazard for a temporal operative, time loops being anything but a freak occurrence on this kind of job. There are whole chapters dedicated to it in the standard operating procedures, endless shelves of academic books detailing their adverse (and, on rare occasion, surprisingly useful) effects, and no time agent is ever graduated without first experiencing at least one such linearity-fracturing event first-hand. But it was still starting to piss Veronica off. She needed to be back uptown in half an hour, and her agency handlers weren’t going to care if that half hour for her simply failed to occur. That was from her perspective, and her perspective alone, and the agency had a habit of simply not caring about any individual agent’s personal experience of cause and effect. If the time loop didn’t end, then she was damn well obligated to break free from it on her own.
Which wasn’t going to be easy. One of the reasons that time loops filled the pages of so many books was that were just so many different types of them, endless indices enumerating the various causes and remedies — and misjudging either one of those could just make matters worse. Some loops were the product of over-ripe neutrinos (whatever that meant); some were caused by more fundamental problems in the time-stream, fractures and tears at the subatomic and even quantum level. And Veronica was no physicist, just a covert operative caught in the wrong place at the wrong constantly-repeating-time. The only supplies she had were the handful of documents she’d packed for her meeting uptown, coded reports and tedious spreadsheets, and the pocket umbrella she’d brought along because they’d promised to send her back to last Thursday when the meeting was over. She seemed to remember that last Thursday it had been raining. Nothing she was carrying was going to set the time-stream back on its course; none of it was going to make her subway train appear.
Based on this writing prompt from my friend (and fellow writing group member) Maurice. I did not manage to work the word “confute” in there, however.
* Have I mentioned that starting in 2012 I’m almost definitely taking the zine all digital, dropping the print edition in favor of what will probably be a quarterly online version? I may have just hinted at this over Twitter. Anyway, that’s the likely plan, once I get through the next three (fully booked) issues. I’ll talk about it more soon, I’m sure.