The Time Travel Chronicles by Robert J. Sawyer, Stefan Bolz, Ann Christy, Samuel Peralta, Rysa Walker, Lucas Bale, Anthony Vicino, Ernie Lindsey, Carol Davis, Tracy Banghart, Michael Holden, Daniel Arthur Smith, Ernie Luis, Erik Wecks Read Free Book Online Page B

with a faded orange block, turning it over and over between my fingers, staring hard at the ground while saying all the things I couldn’t while Abi was still alive. “Eventually we all get crushed beneath the weight of the past. But I was too weak to tell you that.”
    “I needed you to stay.” Moisture pooled in the corner of my eye. I didn’t look up. “To give me a reason not to go back myself. ‘Cause as long as you were here, I didn’t feel so bad for staying.”
    “I miss you both,” I said, but neither Mati nor Abi acknowledged my admission. “Your absences…these memories of moments I can’t fix, they’re grinding away at me. And yet I’m too afraid to join you, ‘cause all I keep thinking is: what if they were wrong?”
    “Does choosing to stay make me weak?” I paused, waiting for assurances that would never come.
    How much longer can I last?
    I thought of Zoe and Maddix, of their inescapable futures; we all carried our crosses. I couldn’t abandon them. Couldn’t leave them incapable of rewriting that wrong.
    Abigail searched the floor with questing eyes. I handed her my orange block and she took it, smiling.
    People still needed me. That, I suppose, was reason enough to stay. For just a while longer, at least.

     
    A Word from Anthony Vicino
     
     
    We’ve all wanted it at one time or another. To go back and try again, to do it better, to do it right.
     
    Whether that be after your first thorough heart stomping when the one you love said, “It’s not me, it’s you”, and left you bitter and hurting and clutching at the burnt out remains of that once beautiful thing; or the time you were faced with mortality in the suffering eyes of a loved one you just assumed would always be there, living forever because surely death is something that only happens to other people, not to you or the ones you love; or perhaps it was the time you made a decision so costly that the price is one you’ll be paying for the rest of your life.
     
    Time travel fascinates me because we all do it in some form. Reliving memories, playing them through our mind’s eye, forward and back. Sometimes pretending we said something different—something funnier or something more heartfelt. Other times nothing changes, and we relive a moment precisely as we remember it. Whether that be the blissful moment of a father first holding his newborn daughter, or the self-flagellating punishment he felt when she came home from school in tears and there was nothing he could do to make it better; we all live in the past to one degree or another.
     
    When it comes to time travel, and changing the past, it’s rarely the case that we want to alter those moments of happiness. Relive them, sure. But change them? Nah.
     
    The moments we want to change are the ones that hurt us.
     
    In “Extant”, I set out to create a world where that was possible. Where certain people could travel back short distances in time to reweave the fabric of reality. The drawback, however, is that regardless of how they change the past, they retain the memories of all those moments undone.
     
    They can save a loved one from the car crash that would end their life, but they still remember how the ice in their gut felt the instant they heard the news. How a part of their heart cracked a little when they found out their sister had died. That pain cannot be undone, cannot be forgotten; it’s a part of them.
     
    “Extant” is, above all else, the story of those people who must shoulder the weight of the past alone, and what happens when that burden becomes too much.
     
    Many thanks to Samuel Peralta for the opportunity to share my story with you all, and to Crystal Pikko Watanabe for her fierce editorial red pen. To the cadre of fantastic authors assembled in these pages, it is an honor to have my words touching yours.
     
    Keep in touch by joining me at my website, www.onelazyrobotblog.com, where I ramble about all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. To