One Second Soldier

(idea: 2004 / written: 2015)

Second 10,483,200 - A Quiet Day By The Lake

The deer were cautious but unafraid as they nibbled at the new growth leaves and shoots that spilled out from the edge of the forest onto the beach. Gentle breezes stirring the upper branches of the trees providing a calming sigh as the morning light lit up patches of brilliant green and rich hues of brown.

Briefly a heavy silence descends upon the lake and a depression forms in the water just off the beach. A man appears and drops into the water. The silence lifts as he swims the short distance to the beach and the deer watch him walk onto dry land and sit facing the lake.

He is dressed in simple clothes, a grey shirt with a high neck and long sleeves along with black loose pants. They seem to drink the water and soon are dry. His hair is an indistinct shade of brown and straight, falling just slightly onto his ears and neck.

He twists and turns his bare feet covering them in cool sand as he watches the sun rise higher in the cloudless sky.

The deer leave and return, the birds sing their songs and the day proceeds as they often do: uneventfully and without remark. Through it the man simply sits or walks along the beach quietly. He watches the forest but approaches it only once as the sun nears the horizon, to gathers some dry wood and fallen branches.

After a few minutes he has a small but warming fire going on the beach a safe distance from the forest. He sits by the fire and digs his feet into the cooling sand. His clothes seem to thin facing the fire and thick away from it. As the sky turns from blue to black the stars begin to show and he turns his gaze up to them, eventually he lays on the sand next to his fire to enjoy them fully.

As the fires slowly turns to embers and to the sounds of the forest his breath slows and eventually stops.

His mission today was after all quite simple.

Introductions To Be Made

Let me introduce myself, I’m Teller, as in Story Teller. And I’m not from around here. I’m not a god or your creator or anything like that. I’m not even from your universe, I’m just here cause I got bored in mine and found a way to travel. I’ve been here for a while watching you guys and a few others. You guys are interesting, the most interesting I’ve found here so far at least.

But enough about me. I’m going to tell you a story about… well, lets call them estranged siblings. And as it seems is the case everywhere, the younger sibling and the elder don’t really get along. In fact once they figured out how to do it they started fighting and trying to “win” everything that the other had. And yeah, this is a story about you guys: the ‘human race’. Most of this story will take place in the time around your first steps off your planet of birth. Times of flux provide such fertile opportunities for change - both drastic and small.

Which leads me to tell you the setting of this story: two utopian societies fighting in their pasts for what they both say is ‘survival’. Survival… what a sad reasoning for killing yourself. But I’ll let you make your own judgment on that.


Let me tell you about the younger first (as an ‘older child’ myself I think too much is made about the elder child). First, there are few of them for the territory they claim. Spread out throughout their solar system they number only 6 billion. They are functionally immortal through the machines and medicines they have developed. There is no want, no disease, and no crime. They still have ‘drama’ - I don’t think you guys will ever really out grow that - but otherwise a pretty peaceful existence.

No war too… well, at least until their historians figured out a way to ‘do archeology in a new and exciting way’, or so they advertised it as such at the universities. Time travel - strictly controlled but available - allowed them to rewrite the history books, not to change them but to ‘get it right, to record what really happened’. Noble I would guess, but why? The past is the past, the future is the future… and like all life we live in neither but exist in the present.

Regardless, they worked out how to send objects - and yes, even people - back in time and then retrieve them, the future was locked away behind an insurmountable demand for energy. The bigger an object the more energy so they could send a group of archeologies back a thousand years or one five thousand, or a recording device tens of thousands. Retrieval was a bit harder… but doable if it was within about four thousand years. And no, they never lost a single life in their exploration - being functionally immortal had gained them patience and they took all the necessary precautions to prevent loss of life. After all… without their machines and their medicines they wouldn’t last more than a few hundred years.

Thing is… they did it fair and quite smart: they recognized that they didn’t know everything yet about time travel and decided to place an ‘archive’ of what they knew in digital time capsules and place these as far back as they would last. Since it was far more costly in terms of energy to send and retrieve larger objects than small they would send back tiny digital storage devices to stable orbital bodies in the Oort Cloud. There is a network of tiny libraries holding the entirety of human history in orbit around your sun right now. Their belief was that such would let them know if anything changed since they would be placed there before anything could have changed and thus be ‘a true record of what they knew’.

And then one day… it didn’t match what they knew. Kinda disconcerting I would imagine, like waking up to find the sheets on your bed to be a different colour than what you remembered going to sleep under.

Much investigation… lots of indescribable math and lots of shouting later, they discerned that history - their history - had changed. It was a small change that had a terrifying impact: there were precisely 83 people that were no longer existing. Their parents never existed… or their parents… and so on for thousands of years. An entire family lineage gone.

And what was worse was that they hadn’t changed their history, there were no changes they had done in that time period. They sent their machines and even a few archeologists to find out what… no, who had changed their history.

A man. Just one man.

They were terrified and kept their distance so they had few details about him, just that he was a he, that he was just below average stature and that he had hair an indistinct shade of brown. They were however able to find out his name: John Smith. I find it sad that these people so enamoured with the past never laughed at this.

They researched their missing families progenitors and found that they had been seeking treatment for infertility but that for some reason the medicine was failing to have the desired affect on the man. It seems that John Smith had gained access to the factory that made the medicine and had tampered with the product. Just one box, just one tab.

It was no accident, it wasn’t chance and it wasn’t a mistake. It couldn’t be, John Smith did nothing else. He just got on a ferry and died while seeming to sleep in a chair.

They went back again, earlier in this families patriarch’s past - to his birth actually - and gained access to the blood tests. He had a genetic disorder that affected how his testicles stored fuel for his sperm and therefore made them less mobile.

They argued for decades but eventually decided to take action: their stored histories they had placed tens of thousands of years in the past said they were missing a family so they would help this family exist again. So as not to let their plan be known to whoever their adversary was they decided to saturate the cities water system with a targeted medicinal virus. This virus would correct the genetic affects in a matter of days rewriting the man’s genetic code in his testicles.

They sent back an updated history containing their original and current records and the plan. And sent the team back to dose the city’s waters.

And then one day… it didn’t match what they knew. Their history had been changed, not just once but twice - the second time by themselves. Their numbers had been restored but the fear of what had be done chilled them. They set out to find who ‘John Smith’ was and why he had wanted a family dead.

And if necessary to kill whoever John Smith was and who he worked for.

Across time if need be.


By the way, the elder sibling sent this John Smith. Just saying. I mean you’ve probably figured that out yourself… but you are a young species with not much capacity for laughing at yourself.

John Smith isn’t even this man’s name, not really. It is just that he comes from a time more than thirty thousand years after your species stepped from its cradle and names are such local things and imbued with local history and meaning. Suffice it that ‘John Smith’ was chosen by his superiors as they determined that it would not arouse suspicion. Since his real name would be meaningless to you I will just call him John in this story if I have need to call him anything.

John is old, though to be honest there are many older than him, and his world has been at peace for at least twenty thousand years. It has actually been at peace for a fair bit longer, but his world has lost its history and since the older person alive was about twenty thousand years old and he remembers never being at war or known crime or disease… well, they decided to call their time ‘The End Times’. No, they weren’t morbid or nihilistic. I’m translating for you and I just don’t have your bias. To them this term meant the final peace, not an ending but a continuation.

They had no cities and most towns seldom were more than a few thousand and none were more than five thousand. They were for all intents a perfect utopia. They lived peaceful lives full of art and music and sports. They worked the soil and ate of its bounty. They still had drama, they gossiped and squabbled… but they knew they had tomorrow to become friends all over again - indeed their motivation was to ‘artistically’ have a breakdown of the relationship so that they could ‘artfully’ build it up all over again. They never did this within their family but the population slowly churned as they all slowly, almost glacially moved throughout the world breaking and making friendships that lasted centuries. Thus their genes survived and the human race avoided genetic destruction through inbreeding.

For you see, idyllic as it was the human race had stopped exploring, stopped growing, stopped… well, just stopped. They still worked furiously at art and growing things… but there were no universities, no factories and indeed nothing that wasn’t absolutely necessary for life. Oh yes, there were ‘eccentrics’ that still worked at some of these ‘ancient endeavours from man’s past’. But humanity as a whole had lost interest in such. They had gone back to their cradle and numbered less than two billion. Humans lived until they either decided it was time to artfully die, or until inexplicably their bodies just started to fail and then they would spend a decade saying goodbye to their family and their friends and euthanize themselves.

None wanted to experience the breakdown of their bodies that while it would take more than a century for it to happen was filled with the only pain and fear that their world knew. And similar to how the younger sibling did not laugh at the name ‘John Smith’, the elder sibling died from not having the machines the younger took for granted. I bet you’re not laughing at that either.

It was one of the eccentrics that discovered how to look back in time. He bred an animal to help him track the vast quantities of information he had collected over the millennia regarding the past. His uncle was the second oldest person alive and told stories of stories and he wanted to collect all the stories of humanity and try to see how they all fit together, to find the meta-story of the human race. Not an easy task and one that took him thousands of years and many many friendships. But eventually he had it, the meta-story of the human race.

Only it didn’t turn out to be quite what he thought it would be. He had expected a grand artistry, a tapestry of tales that like alchemy would show a species transmuting from lead to gold. But that isn’t what he found. Alchemy it may have been but it was uranium transmuting into lead, the  fading of a masterpiece from the vagaries of time. The more he studied it the more he found that the human race had lost its vibrancy. After decades of studying this meta-story he decided to share what he had learned.

It took centuries before enough had learned, before the meta-story became fully known by those still possessing the genes for action. It took another millennia before they had bred enough animals to study the matter in detail. That was when they, these few dozens of people realized that they could with their animals discern what had actually occurred in the past, that their meta-story wasn’t just history but a direct reflection of the past. Within another millennium they found a way to send an animal back in time. It had to be a living creature though, nothing inanimate every arrived in the past and they could not bring anything forward or indeed send anything to the future.

One day their animals were distressed and needing soothing, some were inconsolable and they had to be euthanized. The meta-story had errors, inconsistencies that hurt their animals, they found that the animals had conflicting stories of things that both were and were not true.

They worried about this and argued and shouted. You humans seem to shout a lot about a lot of things.

They bred new animal that could tolerate the errors and inconsistencies, that could help them discern with greater details the differences within the inconsistencies. And what they found made them afraid: someone was altering their past.

They had to act and act quickly.

It took them only three centuries to make their plan to send someone back to correct the past. Because it was only possible to send someone back they decided they couldn’t send a healthy person back but only one who was going to die. They couldn’t chose an artist as they didn’t seem to have the qualities necessary and besides… they couldn’t take from them their artful way to die.

Actually, they just couldn’t convince any that going back in time was an artful way to die. Humans and their art. For some reason ‘starving to death’ was frequently chosen as the most artistic way to die as it gave the opportunity to preform for an extended time.

Eventually it was a dancer whose body began to fail him that they were able to convince, but only because his family seemed particularly vulnerable, well due to it’s size it was little wonder. 381 children in his generation alone with many thousands of them alive through their generations.

They offered him an opportunity to ensure his families survival and in a world where family was the only true foundation upon which everything rested to a man with the largest family in existence he just couldn’t say no.

They had years to plan for this and years more through their waiting to refine their plans. Condense what was left of their volunteer’s life to a single year, revitalize them and empower them. Like putting a candle in a room of pure oxygen what was a simple and gentle light becomes a blinding flame so to they did to him.

But what could only one man do? There were countless errors and inconsistencies in the meta-story and it took centuries to find one person to volunteer. So as they reworked his body they also reworked their plan. When he was ready they would have him sit day by day in a state of readiness and then slice off his life second by second from the end to the beginning of his being ready. In the moment of transit they would prepare him with all that he would need to know, all the skills that would be required.

And then suddenly it was time, time for the first transition. A test was required and a reward was due to their volunteer. The took their first second, the last second of the man’s life and gave him a quiet day by a lake. It would be his last day of life and the earliest day and provide himself later with a means to an end.

He had come in that morning and sat in readiness, they had all talked as they had breakfast before hand laughing how here at the end was the beginning, that they really should have said their goodbyes the first day. And at the end of the day for the last time he gave his life that his family might live.

And he simply just vanished.

Year 6143, Day 73 - Thinking About Past Mistakes

Davyd woke to the smell of a pine fire. He like the smell and as it reminded him of his trip to the home world when he was younger. He went camping, climbed a mountain and saw the wildlife.

This was a right of passage amongst his cultural group like the tattoos the Maori in the Enzi orbitals. You were supposed to visit the home world and see the sites, drink the water and bring home a souvenir. This resulted in a great deal of petty theft that the caretakers had learned to turn a blind eye to, though Davyd and other thought that they may actually leave things out that they just didn’t want any more. If so, Davyd wasn’t going to complain.

Davyd got up and slipped on a robe as he left the tent he slept in and squatted down by the camp fire to warm his hands. Looking up he surveyed the sky.

“Highlight the course for me please, Geoff”

A light blue line arc’d through the deep blue above him and connected to a slowly flashing point.

“We should arrive at the destination shortly before lunch” responded Geoff. “I was planning a cowboy’s brunch in the mess. Your daughter will be there with the rest of the crew by 10:30”

“Thanks, Geoff. Tell Lu I’ll be there early for coffee if she would like to review the approach course.”

“Got it. Camp coffee again or something palatable?”

“Never you mind.”

Davyd rose and walked over to the slow stream that was fed here in the local eddy by a hot spring. He stood there and watched the sunrise light rolling hills with mustangs congregating on one of the nearer ones. As the false dawn gave way to full and golden light began to glare upon the dew laden grasses he let slip his robe and stepped into the water.

An hour later, dressed in his ship’s uniform Davyd walk to camp fire and kicked dirt onto it smothering the flames.

“Off” he commanded and with a whisper the Asian steppes vanished to be replaced with his stateroom. “Warm me up some coffee please Geoff, I’ll be at the mess in a bit. Is Jolly in her quarters?”

“Yes, but she has requested privacy”

“Send her a little birdie and let her know the captain’s in his way. Thanks.”

Davyd collected his gear and slipped his link onto his wrist as he left his room. Today the weather in the ship was on the chilly side. He looked up to assess the clouds.

“I wasn’t planning on any rain today, Davyd. Just enough of a mist to invigorate the crew.”

“Thanks, Geoff. But hasn’t it been rather cool lately?”

“It has been a long cruise and I didn’t want the crew to become tired. The cool weather has encourage them to have their cabins warm, they have nearly all been basking on beaches or in Jolliene’s case stuck in a mountain cabin during a blizzard. She and Collin haven’t been able to escaper due to the snows.”

“Let me guess, the Rocky mountains?” Davyd smiled at the thought of Jolly stuck in a cabin. Jolly thought any place that didn’t have nitrogen snow was balmy. “You said nearly all. Lu been refining her approach course the entire time?”

“Almost. I was able to convince her to spend a week on a beach, but only a week. She did manage to find and correct the flaw you left for her to find. Then she search for another, convinced that there was a second.”

“Was there? Jolly was planning on testing her.”

“Jolly made 3 adjustments, two errors and an improvement. Lu and corrected the errors but as the improvement was embedded in one of the errors she deleted it and failed to find it.”

As Davyd approached Jolly’s stateroom her door opened and she stepped out. His executive officer was a tall woman with white skin, white hair and the palest blue eyes he had ever seen.

“Morning captain. Another balmy day?” He noticed her eyes were red with lack of sleep as she teased him.

“Is Collin going to live? Will he be able to find his way back from your mountain hide away in that storm?”

“Collin? That dear boy died of exhaustion days ago.” Jolly unzipped her jacket, glanced at the sky and decided not to take it off. “Geoff, why is it always water? You know I hate it.”

“Yes… but Davyd is the captain. And Davyd likes the rain.”

Jolly glared at Davyd.

For the remainder of their walk to mess they spoke of Lu’s course and Geoff’s report on her revisions.

In the mess they found Lu sitting on the floor surrounded by equations floating in the air around her. She glanced up as they stepped in and smiled. “Is Collin alive?”

“No, Jolly ate him when the food ran low.”

“You’re morbid, dad. But I guess the Mad Oort King is expected to be so.”

“Rank has it privileges, kiddo. Show us what you have before the rest of the crew shows for breakfast.”

“Geoff can you please load the latest set and prep it for delivery to Collin pending the approval of the Captain and XO? And can I get some fresh coffee?”

“Breakfast tea for me, Geoff. And can you please have Collin meet us 15 minutes before breakfast too, please” Jolly shed her jacket and sat next to Lu and started tracing the numbers before them as she mutter under her breath.

Collin arrived on time to find them arguing with Geoff over merits of considering the drift of interstellar gas flows upon the Oort Cloud or if these were meaningless in practice. Collin listened for a few moments and just smiled. He new better than to get into that argument since it was the favourite way amongst the probational navigators to bate their supervising officers. Besides, Jolly and Lu had this argument down to a science; neither even bothered with english and stuck to expletives, hyperbola and the odd rude gesture.

Jolly caught him smiling behind a mug and glared at him. “What are you smiling at? You want a piece of this? Go load up Lu’s numbers and set it to execute. Geoff, double check his numbers and don’t let him eat before it’s done.”

“Can I give him a donut? Collin is slow without his breakfast.”

“One, but keep him away from the powdered ones. Last time it took me a week to clean it off my console. And keep him away from my console!”

Collin just grinned harder, snagged a donut on the way out of the mess. He and Jolly been together for nearly a millennium and knew the difference between Jolly having her claws in or out.

Davyd wondered if Geoff had a hand in timing the rest of the crew arriving just as Collin left or if it was coincidence. Regardless, they seemed to all arrive at once. Breakfast was always a boisterous affair after a long coast, some of the crew hadn’t seen each other in more than a month and they were soon swapping stories about their vacations.

It was a joyous time and Davyd let it fill the rest of the morning. The final approach wouldn’t start until late in the day and he wanted to visit with his crew.

. . .

Everyone was ready well before hand and Geoff had completed the last systems checks as Lu began reviewing her numbers again.

“Easy, kiddo. The approach is good. Remember: when a job is done and ready to run is not the time for last minute changes. After you can do a comparison analysis if you want to find ways to improve it.”

“Fine, fine. I just had a thought is all.”

“Then jot yourself a short note and set it aside for later. As I’ve said before, if you need an example of how to wait then study Jolly. Our XO learned her patience hunting polar bears on the ice flows.”
“Don’t believe your father, Lu. I learned it hunting boys on the beaches of Milan”

Collin pulled down at his shirt collar. “See, I still have the tan marks.”

“Thats what caught my attention, you were the only one wearing a balaclava on the beach.”

Lu smiled, made her note and started chatting with Geoff visibly more relaxed.


As the ship enacted the final steps of its dance with time capsule there wasn’t a single flutter in the gossamer wings that stretched out for a thousand kilometres all around it. Not once did the engines interact with the delicate power collection or matter collection devices. Davyd was proud of Lu.

Geoff and the simple intelligence that ran the time capsule talked and determined what the time capsule needed in way of supplies while the time capsule carefully ejected a data core. The data core took more than a day to travel the kilometre to the ship and then seconds to have the contents copied into the ships library. Immediately crew from all stations that were free began the analysis and comparison seeking differences in history.

So it was that Lu began her search.



“Dad?”

Davyd immediately stopped his conversation with the maintenance engineer. His daughter’s voice had actually squeaked. “Problem?”

Lu didn’t answer, just sitting there staring a her screen. Jolly started over to Lu’s station the same time as Davyd arriving moments before him. Davyd and Jolly studied the data on Lu’s screen and each recognized it as a family tree for Davyd’s family.

It took a long moment, but eventually they figured it out. Seeing what is missing is harder than seeing what is there.

“Dad, where am I?”

Second 10,481,043 - Pawn Takes Pawn

A depression formed in the water causing the current to form eddies near the riverbank. John fell into the water noiselessly and swam to shore with a few firm strokes and made his way out of the water.

John glanced up at the under lit clouds reflecting the pale sodium orange light from the city a few kilometres away and began to walk quietly up the bank and towards the road he knew to be near by. He noted again for the first time the acrid smell to the air and wondered how people ever survived this era.

As he walked west along the road heading to the city the sun rose above the horizon behind him and briefly shone bright arcs of light before passing above the cloud line. The promise of a gentle rain providing a coolness on his skin.


Reaching the city he made his way to a suburb near the southern part of the city and found a bench at a bus stop to wait at. He had nothing to do until the morning crush of people heading to work neared its peak.

He was shortly to die and thoughts of his family were close to mind. Children started to leave houses and walk with their parents down the street. He marvelled at how many there were even on just this one street - during his own childhood there was only one other child born in his region of the world. Watching these children laugh and fight, run and play all while their parents talked with one another or drank from mugs amazed him at the vibrancy with which the children moved.

He rose from the bench and starting to make his way to the intersection near by where he had a short role to play.

He had no fear of what was to come, he knew the reasons for it and understood. He also knew he would fell little pain due to the adjustments given him to make him very susceptible to shock.

John arrived at the intersection on time and as he stepped out into the traffic he wondered what the children would make of his death, would they think it artful enough?

Second 90,243 - Placing An Advert In A Paper

The moon shone weakly on the beach as the sounds from the surf became muffled. A few moments later the crash of the waves sounded out again. John swam along the shore enjoying the smell of salt in the air as he luxuriated in the swim.

Hours later as the sun came over the mountains and touched the waters of the Pacific ocean John finally swam to shore and sat on a log upon the beach. His grey shirt darkened where the sun touched it as he waited for for the day to start. He had a three hour walk back down the beach to the ocean side town.

As he walked down the beach with his shoes tied together hanging on his shoulder he reviewed his mission - wondering what it would be like to live in this time for nearly a year. The mission data was replete information about his “family” in this time, how for over a century his reclusive uncle had lived on a small ranch just outside of the town he was walking to. He wondered what it would be like to meet himself. He was to meet his older self and get ID and money while becoming a part of the legal fiction of this time.

Before leaving the beach John walked down to water for the unpleasant part of starting this mission. Leaving his shoes on the beach, he stepped into the shallows and crouched before taking a deep breath and making himself vomit. Little but some bile and the end of a string came out. John slowly pulled on the string until a small transparent bag came out. He washed the bag off and headed back to shore.

He retrieved from the bag an exquisite ring that look like it was a millennia old and three large uncut diamonds. Such has the modest wealth of his “family” in this time been supported for over two centuries. Small objects that could be passed as family heirlooms and results of mining each thoroughly searched for before being sent back to ensure that there was no recorded history of them. They must be able to vanish into history so as to not accidentally cause disruption. Only the small but intentional changes could be allowed to shape the future, to correct history.

John put on the ring and pocked the diamonds before putting on is shoes and leaving the beach.


It was mid morning when he reached the ocean view park and found his “uncle” looking out over the water from a shaded picnic table. He sat silently, at a loss of words.

“I know you don’t know what to say… I didn’t when I met the previous ‘old John Smith’ when I arrived six months ago. Here, take these.” He put small stack of cards on the table. “You are John Smith the seventh… they will likely remark on the name when we get to the bank. I’ve already let them know that another heir has reach his majority and will be inducted into the family account.”

John picked up the cards and found photo ID, a birth certificate and two bank cards. All were aged and worn with the photo ID proclaiming a need to be renewed in 17 months. Pocketing them he looked at himself sitting across the table from him.

‘Old John Smith’ sat calmly and returned his gaze. John had never seen anyone that looked so worn, with white and grey hair in amongst a short hair cut. Watery eye beneath droopy lids that are almost lost in the wrinkled flesh of the face.

“You will see many in this time that appear as old as me, except they’ve come by it naturally. Now, it is time for us to leave.” He glances at his watch, “we have an appointment in 25 minutes.”