New Story! "iTime," At Redstone SF!
Ever wonder what happens when Macintosh develops the first personal time-travel device, and it lands in the hands of rich college kids? Well, wonder no more, for my story iTime has finally been published at Redstone SF – and you can read it for free!
An excerpt:
I’d say that my roommate Rochelle had to have the latest in technology, but that would be incorrect. Rochelle had to have the most expensive thing, and the trendiest thing, but it barely mattered what her accessories did so long as they didn’t clash with her cheerleader’s outfit. When she got a personal biometric scanner, I wanted to use the data to generate a customized probiotic treatment to optimize the bacteria in her lower intestine; she used it to send scans of her boobs to cute boys.
As assigned dorm mates, all we had in common was our love of hardware. That was why I was the first person who got to see her new iTime. It was made of white enameled metal, shaped like an old stopwatch, smooth as an egg except for the plug-timer on top and the recessed nav-wheel on the front.
“You got one?” I asked. “Isn’t there a waiting list?”
“Daddy paid four hundred thousand on eBay for an unbonded four-hour model,” she said, puffing out her chest. “He said it was worth it to get me something that was guaranteed to bring up my grades. I begged him for the eight-hour version, but he didn’t want to clean out my college savings.”
I reached out to touch it; it flickered away underneath my fingertips like a hologram.
“Oh, that’s the safety feature!” Rochelle squeed, clapping her hands in joy. “The salesman said it was bonded to my personal timeline; it doesn’t really exist for anyone but me. Otherwise, you could do all sorts of nasty things to me if you found it.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. He tried to explain, and I got bored. But ask me that question tomorrow, and I can rewind time back four hours to before you asked me, and everything would happen again just the way it did before I rewound. Except that this time, I’d read all the instruction manuals and stuff before I got here – so when we finally re-met and you asked me what things the iTime could do, I’d know…..”
The full tale is over here – and if you like it (and only if you like it), do me a favor and post a link to it on Twitter or Facebook or, I dunno, I hear LiveJournal’s still kicking around. But hopefully you will like it. Enjoy.