Submitted for the March 2025 prompt: Begin at the Big Ending

When the spectral blur of the hyperfield dissipated and our surroundings phased back in, we could see that all eight pairs of the readout windows showed flashing red zeroes.

 

Susie pulled at her hair, shook her head, and growled.

 

“Brilliant! Ab-sol-utely brilliant!” she barked, throwing her hands in the air. “This is exactly where we flamin’ well started! And we've already been back to the bloody future — twice! So, what do you suggest we try next?”

 

And, honestly, I was just as frustrated as she was — maybe even more so, given that it was me who was making the suggestions, but I tried to keep focussed and stay positive.

 

“Maybe we should split the difference?” I suggested.

 

Susie stared back at me with her mouth open,  slowly shaking her head.

 

“No, seriously,” I persisted. “We could go some space in the middle, sometime in the middle — and then make the home jump from there.”

 

She closed her mouth, narrowed her eyes, and chewed the corner of her lower lip.

 

“And how, exactly, do you propose we do that?”

 

“Easy,” I said, not at all sure of my ground. “We’d just need to set the space-time control to a mid-phase position… wouldn’t we?”

 

“In principle, yeh — except that we can’t because mid-phase settings are blocked by the chrono-safety lock.”

 

“Okay, so we just need to temporarily disable the chrono-safety,” I said. “I can pull one of the wires to the main servo unit to do that.”

 

Susie chewed her lip some more and stared at me while the wheels in her cerebrum went around.

 

“Right,” she said. “So, we set the space-time shift control to a mid-phase position… and then we put the chrono-safety back on again?”

 

“Yes,” I replied. “I just have to reconnect the servo to do that.”

 

“Right,” Susie said. “But we won’t have proper presence when we’re in mid-phase: we’ll be in some God-forsaken timeless meta-dimensional space! So, how do we do the rewire and then execute the jump back to home reality again?”

 

I paced about for a bit while I thought that through, and then it came to me.

 

“If we run the jumps from a TQL script, we won’t even have to put the chrono-safety back on,” I declared. “We can program in the jump to some mid-phase position and then make the home-jump straight back from there.”

 

“Can you actually write TQL scripts?” Susie asked.

 

“Well, no,” I said. “Not from scratch, no. But I can easily edit one. I just need to find the partition where the jump scripts are stashed, find one that programs a navigation pre-set, and then edit in whatever target coordinates we want.”

 

“And what target coordinates do we want?”

 

“Well … whatever they were when we first came aboard this overheated heap of junk. They’ll be stored somewhere in the temportation log, so we just need to check that.”

 

I pushed Susie out of the way, tapped the primary touchscreen, and then swiped left a few times until I found the temp log container. As I leaned in to click on the icon for the last-dated log file, Susie grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

 

“Hang on a sec,” she said. “I seem to remember that jumps to mid-phase settings can cause weird side-effects – sensory synaptic scrambling, or some such? And that’s why they fit the chrono-safety lock.”

 

“Yeh, that’s right,” I said. “And there’s also a risk of temporal and positional recursion. But we don’t need to worry about any of that. We won’t hardly be there before the TQL script advances and jumps us back home again. So, we’ll be perfectly fine. It’s got to be worth a go, right?”

 

Susie half nodded, let go my arm, and took a pace back.

 

I leaned in again, double-clicked, and then scrolled down through the log file. When I came to the start/return coordinates, it suddenly dawned on me that I had nothing to write with, nothing to write on, and no key-panel strokes that I could recall to allow me to copy and paste.

 

“How’re you at remembering long numbers?” I asked.

 

“Not bad, I suppose,” Susie replied.

 

“Okay,” I said. “So, if I remember the first eight digits, you remember the last eight, alright?”

 

“Right,” she replied, and we both then stared at the display together for a while, closed our eyes, muttered, memorised, and rehearsed. Once we were sure we’d got the numbers good and fixed, I closed the temp log, moved to edit one of the TQL jump scripts, inserted the mid-phase jump command, and then doctored the home-jump coordinates with the number sequences we’d just learned.

 

* * *

 

Down among all the flashing lights and humming machinery, in the bowels of the TX-501, I hit the intercom and connected through to Susie up on topside.

 

“Right, I’m in,” I said. “I’ll leave the intercom open so I can call you soon as I’m done. When you hear me shout that the wire’s disconnected, you click and launch the edited TQL script straightaway.”

 

“Copy that,” Susie replied.

 

And off I then went along the racks of crackling quantum packs and servos, to hunt for the servo with red wiring, the one that linked to the chrono-safety.

 

When I did find it, I was struck dumb and stopped dead in my tracks.

 

Susie’s voice over the intercom jolted me back to life.

 

“Any luck?” she called, clearly impatient, and I yelled back, “The wire’s disconnected already!”

 

“Okay-dokey,” I heard her reply, and then, even as I made a mad dash back up topside, everything went all multi-coloured and blurry.