Orbital
-by Raidne Skuldia, aka Queen Raidne
1. The Traveler and The Machine
The Traveler looked at the great Machine that would bear him upon the waves of time, and felt blood drain from his face. What madness had seized him, that he had the arrogance to flick off God? And why should he dare activate the Machine when he hardly understood it's inner workings? His work upon it had been feverish, performed in adrenaline-filled spurts at odd hours of the day. Always intoxicated. The arcane principles involved fell from comprehension unless he was drunk.
Even now, the Traveler had a bottle of vodka, should he doubt himself.
So he was obviously drinking from it.
The Machine was a filmy thing, built from solid aluminum and brass. The rest of the Traveler's studio - formerly his ballroom - was oak paneling, mirrors, and chandeliers. The Machine had exposed wiring, gaudily-painted commercial generators, and repurposed steel pressure tanks. He felt as out-of-place as the Machine was, already anachronistic.
The principle of the Machine was circuitous, but as best the Traveler could discern, it would separate itself from the flow of time, and then the Machine would gravitate back toward the time stream. It was like throwing a ball: gravity would force its return to Earth, but the more energy you put into the throw, the further the ball travelled.
The Traveler found himself sitting in the machine, outer hatch already sealed, partially-drained bottle of vodka at his feet. He didn't remember entering the Machine, but felt no mystery toward the inexplicable gap in his memory. Nothing arcane had happened yet.
He picked up the bottle of vodka with care, not wanting to damage the exposed circuitry in the control panel.
Should he impose on God, and take up residence with Him? No mortal would— or, no mortal would be allowed— no; no mortal could be considered a mortal still (yes, that was it) with powers over time. His head throbbed mildly. Or maybe he thought his head was throbbing, and couldn't tell the difference.
Even if he didn't follow through, it couldn't hurt to prepare for departure. So he flipped the switch on the generator, primed the electrical systems, and powered the computer system that would stabilize his flight through time. And he turned the knob this way and that. When would he like to go? The future, the past, the near-present? Every time seemed the same. Did it matter if he only went three minutes into the past? Wouldn't knowing that he could touch the universe and change its weave be enough?
To hell with it.
He spun the knob forward.
The Traveler caught himself staring at the knob. He could, with effort, make out the number he'd set it to. That wouldn't do. He spun it again. With the force of a man sure of his next action, he spun it over and over, ensuring that he'd never know the electrical discharge - and thereby the date - it was set to, even if he happened to glance it on occasion. And then, before he could doubt again, he smashed his fist against the button.
A field instantly engulfed the Machine, tearing it from the universe.
The interior was flooded with aquamarine brilliance. They were falling now, reliant upon gravity's subtle hand to pull them back into the Universe and slow time down again. The Traveler felt his stomach churn, perhaps from alcohol, or perhaps from the great speed at which they were moving now.
The Machine arced above the universe, momentum thrusting it into the fifth dimension and speeding it rapidly through the fourth dimension of time. Time does not run backward, nor does it jump from one hour to another, skipping all the minutes between. Therefore, no matter how much momentum the Traveler told the Machine to inject, no matter how far above the Universe they flew, no matter what curves the Universe took in the fourth and fifth dimensions, the Machine would always land back into the time stream. Even if the Machine managed to escape an entire Universe's worth of gravity, and flew in a straight line, they would intersect with the Universe again. Time was infinite, and unless the Universe was perfectly regular in shape and movement (what in nature was ever so predictable?), every iteration of movement would necessarily be executed.
They would crash back into reality.
The porthole glowed with extra-universal light.
It would be a while maybe. Time for the Traveler to calm his nerves. Time for more drinks.
Still the porthole shed its defiant glow.
Surely they would land. It might be a while, though. The light was unsettlingly soothing. Nothing so strange should be so calming. Perhaps it was darkening. Or perhaps the Traveler's eyes were playing tricks on him, adjusting to the light. He'd rather not think about it, so he covered the porthole with a greasy rag that he'd been sitting on for some time.
He wondered how violent the landing would be.
~o~0~o~
The Traveler realized he was awake. Something was blue, bright, and highly annoying. He remembered the rag covering the porthole, and saw that it had fallen. He re-placed it, being more careful to secure it to the sides of the plastic. Groping around, the Traveler found his water canister, and drank greedily. Not too greedily, though, because he already felt pressure in his bladder.
It was when he was in the thrall of half-sleep that his brain suddenly connected the dots, chemicals flooding across synapses. He tore the rag away from the porthole. Light, blue light, blinded him. If there still was blue light, then he was still outside the Universe. Flying in a self-contained pod, cut off from everything. Flying through an impossible space-scape in a vesicle of familiar universe, like cosmic endocytosis. Ridiculous.
They should have landed by now. Something was definitely wrong.
The Traveler was dismayed to find the vodka bottle empty. He tried staring out the porthole, cautiously nudging the rag out of the way.
The extradimensional view was starkly empty. Why shouldn't it be? Outside of the Machine's bubble of Universe, the laws of physics might be completely different. Constants could be altered. How could anything even exist beyond his bubble? How could the Traveler know? What could penetrate the walls of universes?
The Traveler stared as the rag gradually drifted down and away from the porthole. No, it was only drifting away. He was drifting up. They were in free fall. The Machine was falling at the same rate as all the objects inside it. Why hadn't he noticed— oh. The bottle of vodka drifted past him, spiraling toward the ceiling. A solution to his bladder problem occurred to the Traveler.
~o~0~o~
Why hadn't the Machine landed yet?
~o~0~o~
Some time later, having exhausted most of the songs that he could remember, the Traveler's thoughts returned to his predicament. He'd missed something. Not that he knew how to fix it, and anyway, even if he did, there wasn't much he could do. The Machine needed a solid anchor to launch from. He wasn't sure why, or even really how the Machine launched, but he knew it needed an anchor. If he probed the subject, his mind threw barriers up, and he found himself despairing. He wanted another drink.
Even if he could lurch the Machine in one direction or another, he wouldn't know where to lurch to. That he'd somehow missed the Universe was obvious now. In the realm of things concerned with gravity, movements were circular, not linear. Paths were marked by loops, arcs, and spirals, not straight lines. He needed to go down again. Which meant launching not in a downward direction, but a backward one. However that he'd missed the Universe, the action that caused him to do so was an increase of momentum in one direction. If he killed his momentum, gravity would win and bring him down again. But — and here was the other problem — what direction was "backwards"?
The Traveler glanced at the porthole again. Uniform, pale blue light. Useless. The formerly emptied vodka bottle drifted into sight. He wished he could go back in time and find a better solution to his bladder problem. Which only made him want another drink more.
Frustrated, he stared blankly at some dust grains dancing erratically and without weight in the cerulean light. Behind them, the blue light began to take on a greener tint. Or were his eyes deceiving him? He mentally photographed the color of his white shirt, closed his eyes, waited a minute, and looked at it again. Yes, it was definitely greener.
He stared out the porthole again.
The space was definitely green outside of the Machine. And streaks of other colors began asserting themselves, too. Here a brownish smear, and a long, winding silvery gray one over there. The entire view wasn't replaced with green, he noted. Just the bottom half, so that there was a sort of aethereal horizon between —.
It occurred to him then that he was seeing the Machine's reintegration with the Universe. And that he had no idea how to slow down. Nor whether or not he even needed to slow down.
He buckled himself back into his seat, just in case.
Details outside the porthole started to come into focus. Things began to arrive at a certain amount of clarity. Everything was still very streaky outside the porthole, but now he could very clearly see that the green was some form of grass, and the brown was trees, and the silver a river.
Casting about the control panel, he found a small button that had "STOPPING" in his own handwriting scrawled in permanent marker underneath. He pressed it. The generator gave a throatier growl, clearly under more strain. The view out the porthole distended like a circus mirror.
Even so, things began to get decidedly less streaky. It was only when one of the streaks resolved itself to be the path of a bird that he understood. Mostly. Somehow, the Machine was slowing through time. Perhaps there was some form of spatial drag that it made use of. That seemed familiar. Mostly.
Things began drifting downward, slowly coming back under the influence of gravity, at any rate. The Traveler felt like a lab rat exiting the maze and at a loss to explain the world.
The Universe was approaching its normal speed through time. Things outside the porthole only moved jerkily, like in an old-time movie spun through the reels at the wrong speed, rather than at nearly-indistinguishable-streak speed. The carnival-mirror effect was dissipating, too. Seconds later, he was very glad that he'd buckled in when the Machine juddered violently. Time outside the porthole stayed constant, but the view became blurry again. It slowly refocused, and there was another fit of violence while the view unfocused again.
The Machine was bouncing. After that long fall through the fifth dimension, it was bouncing. The — he decided to call them spatial flaps — must only have slowed down their passage through time, and now they were rebounding back and forth into the Universe like a two way door into its groove. Probably. Which meant, for as long as he'd been outside of the Universe's stream, that the final impact would probably be very violent.
Hell, they were going to crash.
The Traveler braced himself, but the final crash wasn't much worse than a metal-denting (terrifying, that was) shudder. He came through unscathed.
The Traveler had stared out the porthole for a good five minutes before actually opening it. Just because there were trees didn't mean the air was breathable this far into the future. He presumed it was the future. It would take a great deal of energy to even slow down against the momentum of the rest of the Universe's journey through time, let alone travel backwards. And he presumed that he was far into the future solely based on the length of time the Machine had spent travelling. Well, that and the fact that his house wasn't there anymore.
Eventually, however, relief at being wrong won out. He hadn't missed the Universe. The concept seemed absurd now; how can you miss something as massive as the Universe? Maybe, he thought, he ought to lay off the sauce.
It probably wouldn't be necessary, though.
So the Traveler opened the door and was startled at the tropical fog of heat that enveloped him. Strange birds and insects made stranger yet sounds. Something moved in the underbrush, rattling leaves and small branches indiscriminately. He caught sight of a beast's leg, thick and muscled, gnarled, calloused ,and scarred.
The Beast vanished shortly after the Traveler had caught sight of it. After a moment of terrified rigidity, the Traveler whirled around and hunted in the capsule for something with which to defend himself. Even the vodka bottle, in this instance, would be very useful. A nearby presence caused the Traveler to spin back around in half a moment, clutching a pen and rag.
The Beast loomed eight feet tall directly behind him. It had four incredibly thick, obviously muscled limbs and was hunched like an ape. The head, a smallish triangular affair with beady eyes and three-inch razor-sharp needles for teeth, was mounted atop a long neck. Rather than one uniform color, the Beast's skin was mottled browns and greens.
Once again, the Beast demonstrated its remarkable swiftness. The Traveler thought that perhaps it had even anticipated his own actions. For, as the Traveler was whirling around to face the Beast, the Beast had simply stuck out a tree-trunk-sized arm and let the Traveler's rotational inertia do the work. The Traveler was knocked out cold.
