The Importance Of Proper Planning
by Brandon Paul Salinas
The plan was simple. He would go back and change it all. He would prevent the collapse of his world, prevent the deaths of his family and everyone he ever knew.
The virus created by those damned white supremacists wiped out nearly everyone, but if he could just go back one month and shoot the bastard who created the thing, he could prevent the tragedy from ever occurring in the first place.
When the thought first came to him, he dismissed it as the desperation of a grief-stricken scientist who thought he was more capable than he actually was. But the more he considered it, the more convinced he was he could do it. The world’s most advanced laboratories were open to him now. There were so few people left, he could harness whatever materials he needed. And there were plenty of robots left without work to do; they would be more than happy to help him on his quest.
So he assembled his robots. He gathered his materials. He walked through the corpse-strewn entryway to CERN’s magnificent laboratories and commenced his work.
It really wasn’t that hard. He was surprised no one had done this work before him.
And that really should have been his first clue. If time travel wasn’t all that difficult, why had we never seen evidence of future travelers in our own time?
But he did not think of that.
The machine was unstable – usable but unstable. It would destroy itself in the process of sending him back, so he would only get one shot at this. But he was completely certain in his calculations. In fact, he had never been more certain of anything in his long and successful career. Even when he created the quantum computer for which he won the Nobel Prize, he was not as confident as he was right now.
He tracked the origin of the disease to one man: Jesper Cunningham, a disgraced biologist who sold his services to a hate group in East Texas. In the days it took for the virus to kill the planet, there were rumors that Jesper never intended it to be as effective as it was, but that didn’t really matter, did it? Jesper would have to die.
The robots kept the internet working, so he was able to find out where Jesper lived. It would be simple to walk into the man’s house in the middle of the night and shoot him while he slept. But what if he botched the job? What if Jesper woke up and fought back? He would need practice shooting a moving target.
He convinced a few robots to let him train on them. They were thrilled to oblige him. Bullets could not do much damage to them and robots really loved running and jumping. There wasn’t much cause for them to do so in the normal course of their duties.
After a few days of this, he felt he could handle the job. He was surprised to learn that he was a naturally good shot, and the training only made him more so.
There was nothing left to do now but get the job done.
The robots flew him and the machine to East Texas. They set it up in a long-abandoned warehouse that was only three miles from Jesper’s house. They hooked it up to an immense power source they stole from CERN.
While the robots readied the machine, he walked the three miles to Jesper’s house and took a short tour of the place. If he was going to sneak into this place in the middle of the night, he wanted to know what to expect. He was shocked when he discovered Jesper’s shriveled corpse in bed. He shot him once in the head for practice and walked back to the warehouse.
The robots asked him how his walk had gone and he said it had gone well and then he stepped into the machine and closed the door behind him.
The device was fully enclosed, which was necessary but sort of unfortunate. The floor of the machine was three inches thick. He reminded himself to prepare for a three-inch drop when he went back in time. It wasn’t much, but enough to twist an ankle and screw up his finely crafted plan.
He had never felt so calm, so clear, so assured of his purpose. It was a simple plan: travel back one month, walk to Jesper’s house, wait for nightfall, sneak in, and commit a murder that would save the world.
There was no way this could go wrong.
The robots waved goodbye to him, though he could not see them from inside the machine. They hit the switch.
A flash of light, a lance through the brain, guts roiling like an angry mass of snakes.
Then, nothing. Black. Silence. As his oxygen-starved brain rattled through its last thoughts, he recalled a quite important fact he wished he had remembered earlier: the speed at which the Earth moves through space is difficult to determine since its speed is affected by its rotation around the Sun, the Sun’s rotation around the galactic center, the galaxy’s rotation around the center of the local group, etc. But roughly, the Earth moves through space around 800,000 miles per hour. And then you have the fact that space itself is expanding, which complicates matters even more.
So, basically, what was supposed to be a three mile walk from the abandoned warehouse to Jesper’s house had suddenly grown in scope. If his calculations were correct (and that was debatable given the fact that his brain was rapidly losing control of itself), Jesper’s house was now about 580 million miles from his current location.
Damn, he thought, I guess that explains-
Then he died.
The Importance Of Proper Planning by Brandon Paul Salinas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.