Flash Fiction Challenge – Race the Date #1
This story was written for the first “Race the Date” a flash fiction challenge, (a weekly flash fiction contest hosted by Cara Michaels )
The Universal Truth of Time Travel
They say that time travel is difficult, if not impossible, but they have never tried to conjugate a verb into the pluperfect-past-participle, present indicative, future imperative tense. Now that’s difficult.
Sometimes I honestly believe that other races stay clear of time travel, not out of any actual sense of responsibility or respect for the potential power involved, but out of fear of the language requirements necessary to properly express the process, and the activities one will have had previously participated in to actually proceed with creating such a process, let alone trying to actually unravel the mystery of, what is in truth a philosophical matter.
Then there are the legal ramifications. If one were to simply invent a machine that would allow time travel, they would need to patent it, but… having patented the original plan, there is nothing stopping someone from transecting a linear progression and inserting a new reality based on the actions they will have had to have done to interrupt the process that will have resulted in the patent being awarded not to its originator, but to a competitor, thereby tying the entire process up in legal red tape, which by the way, is the actual force that binds the universe together.
The final hurdle to get through in developing time travel is not the science, but managing to transverse the morass of binding contracts and red tape that was put there to keep all potential paradoxes in line. It also currently holds at least twenty-seven time travel patents in a holding pattern over a black hole in the gamma quadrant at any given moment.
And, in case you’re wondering… time travels in a space ship, just like everyone else
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