FICTION: Premature
This is some fiction. It's not up to much, but what the hell.
I was born in the wrong time. Lots of people say that, but I mean it in a literal sense. My mother took too many Anachro pills in the second trimester and at 32 weeks I was ripped out of the womb by a temporal spasm and deposited in the early 21st century.
As luck would have it, I materialised just a few millimetres above a soft warm bed just a short dash away from London's best maternity ward. Most Anachro-abortion babies don't survive the journey - mostly they die from premature birth, but occasionally they're just unlucky in terms of location. I could have materialised deep in the ocean or 1000 metres above the ground. It may be arrogance or pure egotism, but I think I was spared that fate for a reason.
Nowadays of course, the risks of taking Anachro pills during pregnancy are widely known. And by "nowadays" I mean 140 years in the future, after the first few studies on the drug's side effects were published. Back when my mother was pregnant, pregnant women were constantly popping Anachro pills along with everyone else. Of course the technology was known to be unreliable. There was the constant risk that you could take Anachro whilst paranoid or depressed and end up materialising in prehistoric times and find yourself clubbed to death by a confused neanderthal. But on the whole, Anachro users have some kind of vague mental control over their destination. They turn up throughout history, wandering into strange landscapes and making them a little bit stranger, before disappearing as quickly as they arrived.
Nobody notices them very much. If you could travel through time, would you seriously want to get involved in complicated historical and political events? How many of us deliberately get involved in complicated historical and political events in our own time? My foster parents don't even vote. Mostly, Anachro users are just tourists in funny clothes with funny accents who arrive on the scene looking bemused before wandering off to fuck a serving wench. Anachro users, incidentally, are single handedly responsible for the 22nd century's revival of hundreds of diseases which were thought to be wiped out over a century before.
I know all this thanks to the orientation pack which arrived on my sixteenth birthday. It was received via Anachro download directly in my central cortex. The download not only explained what had happened to me, it also informed me that I was entitled to compensation of 500,000 Eurodollars. Unfortunately, with reverse inflation, that came to just over £400, which was deposited by a temporal direct payment into my bank account. Still, it was a lot of money for a sixteen year old to receive.
There were two more vital components of my orientation pack. One of them was a video from my birth mother, which mostly consisted of her weeping uncontrollably. The other was a confidentiality agreement. In return for the £400, I had to accept an agreement to say that I would not attempt to unravel the mysteries of temporal mechanics, because if I tried to return to my original time point I would have succeeded in inventing time travel 80 years early. And that would really mess with the status quo for people in my mother's time.
Once I accepted the agreement - it was £400 after all - I was granted access to an encyclopaedic knowledge of human history spanning the period between my birth in 2011 and my conception in 2145. At first, I wasn't particularly interested. I was sixteen years old and had £400 to burn through. After I'd pissed it all away on iPods, cider and eyeliner, I tried not to think about any of it. Being a time travel baby didn't change the fact that I still had to worry about school, boyfriends and my foster parents' impending divorce. I still had a 21st century life to lead, on top of all this other shit.
And then one day it got the better of me. I took a peek, and before long I got addicted. The truth was so much more fascinating than any story I could ever read. I can't go into it in any detail, but let me tell you, you will not BELIEVE how things work out in the Middle East. Or what happens when the truth about what happened to Luxembourg comes out. Or the pivotal role of Ke$ha in all of this.
I spent weeks in my bedroom, only rarely leaving to eat, drink and use the bathroom. That's not to say I've exhausted the encyclopaedia in my head. A lifetime wouldn't be long enough to exhaust even a tenth of it. But I know enough. I skimmed the cliffnotes and picked up the main themes. And now I know what I'm here for, in this time of paranoid people who live in fear of themselves and each other.
I'm not saying I can change history. Or the future, to be more accurate. But then, how do I know I haven't already changed the future? How do I know my encyclopaedia isn't constantly updating itself to reflect the changes in reality that are caused by the ripples of my actions? So I keep trying, using the knowledge I have of the future to make an impact. I speak out, I protest and I watch out for the signs that it's all coming true.
I've lost count of how many journalists, politicians and influential figures to be have felt the icy touch of my electronically-charged fingers on their shoulders in what would have been crucial moments in history. The technology to do this already exists, the scientists just haven't put the pieces of the puzzle together yet. I've invented plenty of things before their time, turned people away from their destinies and stopped history in its tracks. And yet I'm still here.
Maybe I can't stop the complex trail of events that lead to my Anachro abortion. Maybe it's just too big a train for one person to derail.
Or maybe, just maybe, I'm the reason why it all happens.