14:12:06, January 5th, 2018

I know that she specifically warned against it, but I had to go back and check to see if I could just stop myself from putting up the clock. I didn’t get the extreme vertigo or puking that happened the first time, but near the end of the instantaneous transportation I was filled with a brief sense of mind-shattering, brain-melting terror. I’m guessing that is what my double called the rift.

Standing on the street outside my apartment complex, I take a cursory glance at myself and the people around me. My clothes have returned to the way they were before I traveled and the people around me seem normal, one even glances at me and smiles.

Nodding to myself, I burst into a sprint and quickly climb up the stairs to our apartment and then to my room. Bursting my door open, I charge into my room and watch as a semi-transparent duplicate of me climbs up onto a chair and picks up the clock. Guessing that it won’t work, I move towards her anyway and try to push her off the chair.

My arms go through empty air as she grimaces and mouths, ““It’ll be fun. You’ll be able to take the opportunity to make your room your own.”

Grunting with frustration, I instead pull the chair out from under her. The chair easily pulls off the ground, but is replaced with a duplicate shadow chair.

“Yeah, just fucking perfect!” I curse at nobody in particular, except maybe the chair. As if responding to my words, my ghost wobbles slightly on the chair, drops the clock to the ground with a noiseless crash, and keels over dead.

“I… don’t remember it like that,” I mumble, stunned and quickly realizing how wrong the situation is. Without pausing for another second, I close my eyes and disappear into time.

14:15:09, November 5th, 1997

I fall a couple of feet before landing in the dirt lot, sending a lot of dust into the air but leaving me pretty much unharmed. I look around a bit, taking in the smaller buildings, less crowded streets, and grander sky, but remind myself that I’m only at this time and place to figure out what I’m doing next.

Regarding the sign in the center of the lot explaining that soon construction would begin on a new set of low price housing, I began to wonder aloud, “So, what if I went and killed my parents? That’d keep me from setting off the rift, right?”

“No, that’d put me in the same position, after all, if they stopped existing in the past but lived in the future, that seems like it’d mess things up,” biting my lips I begin to pace, oblivious to the staring of onlookers. “What if I prevented them from meeting? Then I wouldn’t exist but my parents would be okay. Wait! But then I’d exist during the time after I kept them from meeting until they didn’t have a child. That could cause problems? I’ll kill myself! Yes, that makes sense, if I die at exactly the same moment I originally stopped existing, it’d be completely fluid.”

Passing by the sign again, I realize, “But what if somebody else moves into the apartment and causes the rift? No, I’ll have to get rid of it too. Parents, apartment, me, in that order. Alright.”

14:02:23, January 5th, 1998

My father calls for me from back in the alley but I can’t be bothered. Passing a café, I push past a dozen teenagers about my age and I snatch a lone duffle bag from atop a table. As I throw it over my shoulder, I can hear it tick quietly and it almost seems like a metronome for my rapid footsteps.

Police. Just traffic control, but I doubt they’d approve of what I was doing. In fact, I know from previous failure they wouldn’t. Crossing back into the maze of alleys, I watch as a single reflection continues forth to be stopped by the police and almost shot. Somehow that is comforting, even if I am several paces behind ghosts that previously failed to make it in time. But what is time to a time traveler?

Coming up behind my apartment complex, which at this time is still in construction, I throw the bag as far into it as I can. Then I sprint away as fast as I can, the explosion going off just seconds behind me. Not taking the time to make sure I destroyed enough of it, I shoot past the majority of my duplicates that do. If I messed up, then all this is probably somebody else’s problem. I do however spare the tiny movements required to empty my pockets into the rubble strewn alleyway.

Rounding back out of the alleyway, I knock an incoming motorcycle policeman off his mount and speed away, reflecting on what lucky timing this was for the fourth or fifth time. Suddenly I’m doing well, very well. Better than I’ve done almost every other time.

Weaving through traffic, my wind fluttering excitedly in the wind, for a fraction of a moment the duty and purpose of my actions fall away and it’s just me, on the run from the universe. And it’s one of those moments that you know is perfect while you are having it. Maybe the rift wasn’t such a curse.

Distracted, I swerve wrong and the handlebar of my stolen motorcycle scrapes against the side of a yellow convertible, causing a loud metallic screech that is soon joined by a dozen automobile horns, which all merges into a robotic symphony of agony. This is new.

Temporarily losing control, I skid into oncoming traffic and, for a terrible second, I am launched up into the air, over a dozen cars, past the traffic jam created by my explosion, and onto solid pavement, tires squealing. This is it. This is the time that I’m going to make it.

Up ahead, warning sirens signaled the distant approach of a train. Pushing down the ignition, my speed approaches 80mph as the flashing roadblocks fall into place. Even over the roar of police sirens, engines, horns, and shouting, I can hear the train in the distance. I can feel it.

Empty threats fall on my deaf ears, as real to me as the four doppelgangers riding behind me, each pantomiming frantically through situations I know all failed. The police are closing in around me from all directions, shouting into their megaphones and car radios. Gunfire opens, the police lobbing bullets at me I’m not sure they want to connect. I consider for a moment letting them gun me down, the timing would be just about right and the visual impact would be strong. But I’d leave too much of a corpse. The original plan remains my best bet, I decide as I lean forward, coaxing the engine to go just a little faster.

“Just a little further,” I whisper to myself as a bullet grazes my shoulder and the train crests the hill in the distance. I can feel the rift closing in, as I do every time I get this close to it, although it is closer now than it was before. It is growing rapidly.

I hit the lip of the pavement at the edge of the train tracks and, catapulting through a hail of bullets, I kick the motorcycle away from me, weightless in the long seconds that pass before I land. I turn fluidly in the air and meet the gaze of the conductor inside the train, who knows in that moment that he is coming in too fast, too close, to be able to alter the destiny I manufactured.

Crashing to the ground unceremoniously, I can here my leg snap beneath me, but I don’t care. I cannot hear the pain. Somehow the motorcycle lands in front of me and I watch it being devoured before my eyes. The gunfire has stopped, or at least I cannot hear it anymore, for the blood pounds so loudly in my ears and in my mind’s clock I can hear the slow tick-tock of time.

“Check-mate,” I inform the world, the end of a game that I’d been playing for a lifetime, a game that never happened at all. In the last moment before the train breaks my fragile body with its hungry metallic form, I whisper to myself, “It was worth every moment.”

14:13:56, January 5th, 2018

Near the end of a barely populated city block, in between two old, unimportant apartment complexes, there is a large empty lot, as if the construction workers just forgot to build something there. Over the years, some garbage has accumulated over the years, although it remains mostly devoid of anything of interest. Amidst the forgotten debris lies a little, outdated tape recorder.

As if of its own accord, the tape recorder whirs alive gently, enveloping the street with an invasive static. There is a sigh, followed by a pause, and finally a voice begins to speak. It is my voice, tinted by the hollow din of electronic recording, “Maybe recording this message will fuck everything up. Maybe if anybody hears this it’ll somehow tear apart the fabric time and space as we know them, splitting them apart right down the middle like a giant paradoxical meat cleaver. But heck, I’m going to die; I’m going to cease to exist… I’m never going to have existed at all. I figure I might as well tell somebody about it. You see, it’s funny how things work out sometimes. Not funny like a joke, well, not really...”