AlexMcGilvery Array - Nano Bytes

I spent the best hour of my life listening to records and playing with the eight or nine cats that wandered in and out of the room. I even tried my first smoke (yuk) and took a sip of the Wizard’s drink (yum). My parents would have killed me, but I never felt in any kind of danger. The Wizard was as harmless as a pussycat himself, and when I realised that I had to get going, he looked almost sad.

‘Come back anytime,’ he said. ‘We must listen to the whole of The Magic Flute!’

I promised that I would, though what he would make of me turning up on his doorstep in 2015 was anyone’s guess.

I ran back to the Professor’s house, entered by the back door and bounded up the stairs to the attic. Someone shouted after me, but I didn’t stop. I could hear the guitar notes hanging in the air, still, and they started playing faster and faster as if sensing my presence. The world shimmered again, and suddenly I was back in 2015.

The Professor put down his guitar in relief and flexed his fingers. He flipped down the lid on his laptop; Adam, his assistant, was nowhere to be seen.

I pulled the demo tape out of my pocket. ‘Mission accomplished!’ I said. ‘I hope it still plays though–the cat peed on it.’

The professor smiled and shook his head. ‘It was the cat pee that destroyed it first time around. You didn’t get to it in time.’

I suddenly got all excited. ‘Well, send me back! I can try again. I know what to do this time! I can get to the tape before Delilah—’

‘No need, no need,’ the Professor said. ‘The tape wasn’t the main reason I sent you back, anyway.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘The chocolates,’ he said. ‘I will send you back to Garden Lodge again, but next time it will be to 1986 with another box, and then maybe for another couple of years after that … You see, the chocs were heavily dosed with very powerful antiretrovirals–the latest drugs that stop viruses replicating inside the body. I’ve invested most of my money over the last twenty years in medicinal research and development.’

I suddenly remembered what was different about Garden Lodge. When I had used to walk past it, there had been graffiti and often flowers left against the wall … like tributes. ‘Was the Wizard ill?’ I asked.

The Professor shrugged. ‘No, never. You see, with the right treatment, a person with HIV can live a normal, long and healthy life …’

The doorbell rang downstairs, followed by the sound of eager footsteps coming up. The person bouncing up the stairs was humming to himself as he came. I turned round and came face to face with a man in a tracksuit. He was bald, but had a bushy grey moustache and a big grin.

‘Hey, Fred,’ the Professor said.

‘Afternoon, Bri,’ the man said. ‘I’ve just come up with the most perfect middle eight for Back to the Opera, so I just had to run right over and—’

He noticed me gawping at him. ‘Well, hello,’ he said. ‘You look kind of familiar from somewhere. Like someone I used to know back in the good old days.’

‘Oh,’ I croaked. ‘Um, well must be just a coincidence, I guess.’

‘Coincidence?’ the Wizard said. ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

He winked at me. ‘It’s a kind of magic, darling!’

Rob May is a fantasy/sci–fi fan and writer, and one of Wattpad's Featured writers. His current big project is the Kal Moonheart series—a fantasy saga of about twenty books, following the life of Kalina Moonheart–adventurer, card shark and sword for hire. He's currently writing and posting the third book, Sirensbane, right now on his profile. Well worth a look.

It was one of those late autumn days at Southport where the sun is low in the south, grey clouds are in the west and the wind is high, blowing a layer of sand particles so that when you're tramping along the high tide line, you seem to be running in a buff coloured dream of relativity.

The sea to my right was shallow, and great creamy fans of foam made patterns on the shiny wet sand.

I revelled in the huge sky, the brilliance of the sun and the smell of the sea.

Bright as it was ahead, I briefly saw a penetrating vertical spear of blue light hit the sand some mile ahead of me. I waited for the thunder, assuming the flash to be lightning but no sound came. I thought perhaps that the wind buffeting in my ears had deafened me.

I put my head down and settled to a steady tramp into the wind.

Looking up a few minutes later, a glitter of light held my attention, way ahead.

I stopped and the glitter took shape and volume to become a rolling, many sided box apparently blown along the beach by the wind. As it neared me, it became a hypnotic object of beauty, a jewel of azure bright facets, each face picking light from the sun and internally reflecting it to dazzle the eyes and provoke an overwhelming desire to possess such a wonderful artefact.

It was only a foot or so in diameter, and as it was about to pass, I started to run to intercept it. The moment I moved, the object stopped its rolling progress.

As I walked towards it, the jewel, as I perceived it to be, split along the edges of its facets to spread itself in petals on the sand like a flower, and in the centre of the flower was a brilliant electric blue sphere, within which were mesmerising swirling patterns of light and dark.

I was so taken with this transformation that I barely noticed that the object and I were now cocooned in a warm, windless hemisphere of silence. The sand still roiled past the confines of the hemisphere, but soundlessly.

From the central sphere I seemed to hear a voice - not through my ears but within my head.

«Greetings. We wish you no harm but we must have words with you. You do not need to articulate your thoughts but if it helps you, you may so do.»

«I – I», I stammered,«Er Hello, erm, who is we - who are you?»

«This is - or I am, if you prefer to personalise our interaction, an automated robot probe which we send to all planets threatened by carbon life forms.»

«That doesn't answer the question who are you - the ones who sent you.»

The probe seemed to stop. The patterns in the sphere froze in stasis.

I was once more in a bubble of quiet on the sands of Southport beach.

Then the patterns resumed their hypnotic dance within the sphere.

«I am sorry but I have problems of file compression‑I have to exchange information with mother above.»

«Is that where the beings who sent you are?»

«No, she is another, very large automaton.»

«But you called it - her, mother.»

«All the best computers are female.»

«So you're a him?»

«No. I am an it.»

«How's it our defence systems haven't been alerted?»

«We hide behind asteroids and moons. There are always those.»

«But your communications with mother would be detected.»

«We steal bandwidth from your many artificial satellites. There are always those too. Now look, I do not have the time to discuss how we elude your primitive technology. Suffice to say we have and will continue so to do.»

«Oh. Er - so why are you here?»

«We attempt to save planets from so called intelligent, carbon based life forms.»

«It's this 'we' that I don't understand. Is there a life form that created you or initiated this - this mission?»

«No. Not any more. We are self replicating machines that were created by a now extinct carbon life form not unlike you, who realised the flaw in the make up of carbon life forms. Now I do not have much time. Battery charge limits I think you would appreciate.»

«OK - but you must understand I'm completely at a loss to make logic of this - this - whole thing. I can't understand without asking more questions. What can you want of me?»