Bill Drennan


Time-travel update, October 2011

Report, 7 October 2009: baguette chunk fired in LHC, pigeon fired for negligence: "i was set up & wrongfully dismissed," said the pigeon. "somebody or something moved that piece of bread. i noticed an alarming number of UFOs appearing in religious art & that ruffled my feathers, making me wonder if i belonged there at all. so it was easy for me to get out. i was hungry & i was bored. i didn't care about the consequences. now i don't mean to be giving a sermon here but for some unfortunates the spiritual flame is fired by rocket fuel & this shouldn't be used in just any old accelerator ring. but this is what they use here. & get this: my bagette was not fired; it could have got up & walked to where it was found for all i know, but it was not fired. the official line is definitely wrong in this respect; it is right in that i was fired, from my job as circuit janitor. & yes, i set the baguette chunk up to be fired. but no. it was not fired. now i like my baguettes well-fired but that chunk of baguette was just found lying around, & it was more or less dead. that is surely negligence on the part of the officials. it wasn't even warm. but the 'experts' are not coming clean on any of this. i'd sooner have been fired in the 27k racetrack myself. i've never been one for a stable life. not that i want to be fused with god particles or anything. so next time i join the race ..."

This post received 4515 hits - not, I take it, because it's anything special, coz it's not. Over the past few months it felt like some fucking vampire had its teeth sunk into the pigeon’s poor neck. I limited the audience for a wee while and that worked like a squirt of Holy Water. Then – PUFF – it just dissolved. Did I use too much of the Holy shit? Even though the post would be just over two years old, had it remained, most of the hits were recent and came from the Ukraine and Russia, quite possibly bombarding, etherially spraying, the post faster than the speed of light - as the latest scientific 'evidence' confirms (or not) in relation to the time it took for neutrinos to travel from Geneva and shed spots of light on a big lead wall in Italy. I quote from a Guardian article, September 22, 2011: "If we do not have causality, we are buggered." Wish I'd put that in the beak of the pigeon after it says, "i didn't care about the consequences". Before its disappearance, I modified this article by removing a link which, in late 2009, reported the apparent lack of response by the authorities on the appearance of a pneumonic flu that had hit the Ukraine at the time. Nasty stuff. Thankfully, it didn't last, but it did take a number of lives. A sense of helpless panic hit me in the gut at the time. I had thoughts of swinish bioweapons. Garlic sales rose quite considerably in the affected area. I remember going in search of a Tamiflu hit. But going back and removing the link, I felt purged of the kind of fear that's very easily accelerated, especially during a depression event of the mental variety – a fact of life at the time. I love garlic. It's got more uses than fear. Apparently it was put to use in the good old days of the Black Death; on the subject of which: I read recently (can't remember where, maybe a parasitic tabloid) that the genetic code for this particular plague has been cracked. The bug was resident in ancient bones. Archaeological time-travel. Resurrection. Who do you trust with these codes? Makes you wonder. Things getting into the wrong hands. For example – and I hate to be so obvious: a dictator captured by a trained mob and gangsterised to death has been interpreted by my ball-breaking code-busting logic machine as the equivalent of unwanted knowledge being thrown out of court just before it arrived in front of the judge – another time-travel of sorts, a shadow profile fired through a time-tunnel and aimed at the invisible wall of democracy. So I travelled back in time to take out some of the nasty stuff I no longer wanted contaminating my nice clean space fiction project. I went back and retrieved it, pulled it out of limbo and planted it back on the the strange and estranging planet that has been the source of its many attacks. It is said that mingling with the enemy is the best form of attack. Now, you may or may not agree that violence against neutrinos is fine: even though they’re knocked into shape by the extreme violence of protons, some of them find a moment of illumination as they collide with the density of the lead wall, while most of them escape as man-made entities, free for life to ghost it through the gaping wind-tunnels of hylic formations. So why did I even mention the big bloody dictator story that's been the cause of so much pandemic jubilation? Tell you why: buggered by causality rather than its absence, by the slippery cause and effect of oleaginous geopolitics. Better than a school geography lesson, more edifying than hypocrisy, more tasty than garlic and vampires, more organised than chaos and occupation. But I’m a natural-born coward. I don't want blood and germs and rumours of bioweapons on my hands. No, it's time for the antibac handwash. I'm clean. And remember: space is more infinitely more useful than grease and slime. Out.

Bill Drennan has more space fiction at Hypoetics.
 
 
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