Krishna kumar Mani - SFS2 - Science Fiction Short Stories

I set the same time and date once again and entered into the time machine. I stood there only a moment before it started.

I closed my eyes. A loud noise started so I covered my ears with my hands. Suddenly I felt like I was flying at the speed of light in the dark. Then everything was quiet. I felt again like I was on the earth.

I opened my eyes and looked around. I could see ultra-modern building, flying cars, and there were a lot of robots. The robots were cleaning the roads, taking pets for walks and there were a few cars in the road but they were all driverless cars. I started to get excited. Yes, it seems to be 2200. No one even gave me a second glance. I started to walk down the street and wonder what else I could find here in the future.

I saw a few people and kids standing near a tree and looking at it so I walked over there. And then I saw it. My monkey was still there making noise with the air horn. I was so proud of my invention. I didn’t want to stand there too long otherwise the monkey might see me and walk over to me. I covered my face so he couldn’t see me and began to walk down the road. By chance I noticed that the relativity device which I had tied onto the rat was on the ground. Now I understood why there had been no updates. The rat had gotten free of the device and someone had trampled on it, breaking it. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

I walked for an hour and saw things I’d never even dreamed of. I saw a restaurant that I wanted to get a taste of and knew it contained the food of the future. But I didn’t know the value of money here. My credit cards were long past their expiration date and they probably didn’t even use paper currency here anymore. Regardless, I didn’t bring my wallet so I bypassed the restaurant.

I walked for so long my legs got tired. I took tons of pictures with my cell phone. I decided to go back home. I knew I couldn’t go back to before the 18th so I decided to go to the 19th of December 2013 , the future. I checked the number on the remote and it said “December 18, 2200.” Oh god. I couldn’t go back to 2013 because now that was in the past. I could only go forward. My half of an invention left me half of the way. How could I have been so stupid? Now I understood why scientists never experimented on themselves.

Year: 2200

Mobile phones are a thing long forgotten. Instead, nano-chips are inserted into the ear and take their power directly from the human body. With your voice alone you can accept, reject and even make calls. You no longer have to worry about forgetting your phone at home or running out of battery in the middle of a call. Video calls and mobile applications use a holographic illusion that interacts with your body. There is not physical display. Every human being now has an IP address, ten digit phone numbers are a relic of the past. Computers, robots, all are mapped with human names similar to website domain names. And they’re inexpensive. Only the poorest cannot afford multiple robots.

The holographic screen appeared and the computer let the station know they had an incoming call. The dispatcher answered the call after seeing the caller’s photograph, name and address.

“Emergency services, how may I help you?”

A woman’s face appeared on the screen. She looked sad and had obviously been crying for some time.

“Officer, my son is missing. I have no idea where he could have gone. Please help me find him.”

After scrolling through the woman’s personal and family details, the officer came across a page with a family number named Stephen, a ten year old boy.

“This call is about your son, Stephen, then?”

“Yes, that’s right. Today’s a holiday for him so he went to play outside with his friends. I didn’t think anything of it because sometimes he gets distracted and doesn’t come home for lunch and eats with them or at one of his friends’ houses. But now it’s five o’clock. I’ve called his friends’ parents and they say they haven’t seen him.”

The officer tried reaching him from an adjacent screen. An error message popped up with error number 404 saying that the recipient was currently unreachable.

“Did he walk when he left to go see his friends?”

“No, he was riding his bicycle.”

“Alright. I will see what I can do. I will get back to you as soon as I have any information that I think will help.”

The police officer checked the last incoming and outgoing call information for the boy’s IP address. He did a broad spectrum search using Stephen’s photo and facial recognition to pinpoint his location with any surveillance cameras that might have seen him. One camera had photographed him just after noon. At one o’clock his number had become unreachable. He messaged the control room of the station nearest to where his photo had last been taken and relayed the information.

It only took an hour for the police to find the boy’s bicycle at the edge of a nearby lake. They thought perhaps he had gone for a swim and might had drowned. They made a precursory effort to find him in the water and searched all around the bank. The dive team wasn’t available until the morning, so they had to wait a few hours before resuming the search of the lake.

By then, Stephen’s mother had been apprised of the situation and she had gathered community members to come help search the lake. Stephen had been her only son. If she had to dive down herself, she’d find out if he was in that lake or not. They called off the search a few hours after midnight, vowing to come back the next morning and help the dive team. Stephen’s mother was distraught, but traveled home to try to get some sleep regardless. Stephen’s father had died four months earlier in a shuttle accident. She hadn’t taken it well.

Early the next morning, the boy’s mother and her neighbors came back to the lake to meet the dive team. Soon the dive team had recovered the body of the boy in the water. The community said they had looked in that spot and there had been no body then. The police told them that it had been late at night when they were searching and probably had been too tired to find the body. The police said they’d know more after the autopsy had been performed.

The autopsy results came quickly. The medical examiner confirmed that the boy had died after he entered the water around 1:30pm to 2:00pm. There had been a small mark on the head but said that it happened postmortem and hadn’t contributed to the boy’s death.

The police closed the case as an accident. But Stephen’s mother and her neighbors argued that it should be reopened and investigated further. Two days later, the boy’s mother got a letter in her mailbox without a postal stamp or address. The letter read, “I will bring your kid back to life. You must, however, agree to never reopen the case.” She immediately took this letter to the police. They agreed that it was strange and also agreed that they would re-examine the body and the area where Stephen had died.

Before they could get to the lake, a forest fire had broken out. The police were suspicious and believed that it had been a case of arson to hide any evidence. But they had no clues to go on. The news was all over town. Everyone now believed that Stephen had been murdered somehow. The news picked up the story. Eventually the police commissioner called the investigating officer.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions in this case. Where do we stand on it? What can you tell me about this mark they found on the boy’s head?”

“We haven’t been able to figure out what that is. But we’re still certain that the death was an accident.”

“Well, what about the letter his mother found?”

“It may be that someone did that as some kind of sick joke. They might also have wanted to confuse us or waste or time.”