[by ROBBIE MARTZEN]<\/p>\n
To him, time travel had only ever been about the past.<\/p>\n
He wanted to peek from behind the blood-red velvet curtains while Marie-Antoinette was having her cake and eating it; he wanted to hide in the gator-infested swamps to see Armstrong boarding the spacecraft, still blissfully unaware that being the first man on the moon would turn out to be both a blessing and a curse.<\/p>\n
No inclination on his side to see the future, to find out whether the silver screen artists had got it right, to confirm the painful suspicion of what those ruined buildings scattered across dead and empty plains might have been in the past. Of what apes roaming the windswept beaches might think of their distant relative.<\/p>\n
Of course, there were the rules. No interfering when going back. No killing your grandfather, obviously. And so he\u2019d seen dictators rise and fall, wars start and end, peace treaties being signed and broken, and, increasingly, humanity\u2019s failure to harness its own inventions. And then, one day, he\u2019d simply seen enough.<\/p>\n
Today, he\u2019d go forward for the first time. The only time. He stepped into the device, and the sync software, sensing his mood and intention, put on Pink Floyd\u2019s \u2018Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun\u2019. That\u2019s where he was going. Most people didn\u2019t realise that \u2018heart\u2019 wasn\u2019t just a figure of speech.<\/p>\n
He could feel the sun\u2019s pulsing rhythm and his own, and soon both tunes would fuse.\u00a0 Five billion years left to get there before the final darkness, but he knew he\u2019d be there in the blink of an eye. He\u2019d run out of hope for himself, but not for them. He\u2019d left the plans for the machine behind, and they\u2019d find them when they came looking for him, neatly laid out on the coffee-stained workbench in the old garage.<\/p>\n
After that, it was up to them what they\u2019d do with their future \u2013 and their past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[by ROBBIE MARTZEN] To him, time travel had only ever been about the past. He wanted to peek from behind the blood-red velvet curtains while Marie-Antoinette was having her cake and eating it; he wanted to hide in the gator-infested swamps to see Armstrong boarding the spacecraft, still blissfully unaware that being the first man […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,106],"tags":[108,115,78],"ppma_author":[119],"class_list":["post-1141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-solarpunk-anthology","tag-anthology","tag-robbie-martzen","tag-solarpunk"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/COVER_TESTSINGLE.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"authors":[{"term_id":119,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"robbie-martzen","display_name":"Robbie Martzen","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":"Robbie Martzen lives in Luxembourg and studied modern languages and literature in Brussels and Dublin. Several of his poems and short stories have been published in anthologies and journals, both in Luxembourg and abroad. He likes nature, animals, and sometimes people. He also enjoys writing about all of the above. \r\nSome of his writing can be found at wildfire-words.com\/, cahiersluxembourgeois.lu\/, and www.blackfountain.lu\/, the rest is in his drawer, which, incidentally, is bigger on the inside."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1141"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1148,"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions\/1148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1141"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anerwelten.lu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=1141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}