This is a story by David Hammond.
This is a work in progress. It's extremely unfinished and will hopefully remain so for eternity.
A long, long time chronologically prior to the moment of writing this, according to what you might value as the definition of “chronologically”, there was a bunch of nothingness, according to the what you might value as the definition of “nothingness”.
Both of those definitions are almost certainly wrong.
You see, the understanding of physics that is to be achieved chronologically latter to this point in time, according to what you might value as the definitions of those terms, shows that time as we know it is like a pancake. All of time is together, meaning that each point in time is touching every other point in time. The model to explain this was first proposed by the famous Dr. Skchazack, who had also invented a spectacularly unspectatably thin pancake to satisfy the analogy, one would assume.
It is also important to note that when you commit vehicular animalslaughter, as appears to be a popular hobby for many, the itty bitty components of the flattened animal are not necessarily the same components that made up the live animal. An instant later, the components may be different again. This is because many subatomic particles are constantly “flickering” among many different time sleeves. Something can only shift to a new time sleeve if there is exactly enough “no-space” for it to fit, considering both mass and the precise volume occupied by the something.
This is where Dr. Skchazack coined the most important aspect of his paradigm-deloitering theory: the interchronion. Interchronions aren't actual things. Rather, the term “interchronion” has come to refer to how we can make use of a time-traveling particle. Because particles can only shift time sleeves when there's exactly the right no-space available, there's typically no noticeable effect from the time shift: two identical particles from two different time sleeves merely switch positions. However, a particle can have properties other than simply mass and volume/shape, and in certain rare or artificial conditions these properties can allow significant data transfer between different time sleeves. When a particle switch provides such data transfer, the matter occupying that space is called an interchronion.
The discovery of interchronions has been widely regarded as one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of knowledge, next to the discovery that placing punctuation outside quotation marks often provides better clarity. Many celebrities have raised concerns about the implications of harnessing the potential of interchronions, but other celebrities have argued that much more damage was caused by the great punctuation blunder of '38 when three billion people accidentally voted “no,” as opposed to “no”, on the proposition regarding whether or not to relocate an occupied planet to six kilometers from the sun in order to improve the effectiveness of their solar power plants, and the state-of-the-art computer systems misinterpreted the three-character votes as a “yes”. Some celebrities pointed out that the possible destruction of the entire universe by misuse of interchronions would be more significant than the destruction of a single planet by a punctuation mishap, but the most influential celebrities won the argument by criticizing the other celebrities' lack of sensitivity to the living relatives of the crispy citizens.
As previously stated, in the beginning there was nothing. Not even space. So the universe as we know it was just a bunch of no-space. This allowed room for particles from the future to diffuse and fill up that no-space. This is how the universe began according to a very small minority group of scientists. Most others have settled on slope theory.
There were many absolutely, spectacularly, unbelievably amazing things in this universe. One of them was a rock. Another was a living cell. What is a cell? A cell, to the untrained eye, is a really, really small blob of goo called cytoplasm which is surrounded by one or more membranes and contains all of the other things that make the cell tick, such as a nucleus, ribosome, mitochrondria, and the like. However, to the more well-trained eye (or at least through a very good microscope), there is also a mostly undetectable communication station called the whackjammy and about two to a billion strings called whimzimmies. The whimzimmies are where interchronions were first found in nature. The particles on the strings flicker among different time sleeves and retrieve information for the whackjammy to process. The result is then sent to the nucleus so it can make proper adjustments to the spuzz. The spuzz, which often sit on strands of DNA, contain the reproductive instructions for the cell.
Once the spuzz have been altered, a trace amount of fluid is secreted to begin the protein replication process, where half of a DNA strand, complete with its spuzz, is sent to the ribosome to be remade into a complete set of DNA and shipped out to wherever it is needed.
The cell's use of interchronions is a motivating factor for evolution. Rather than genetic information mutating in a completely random fashion, it attempts to force positive mutations that will benefit the cell in the future. Unfortunately, since the information gathered is only relevant to the future state of the individual cell rather than the entire organism, this process really only benefits single-celled organisms, and even then the benefit is usually negligible. But it was still a cool discovery.
Interchronion-driven genetic mutations aside, there were other factors that drove evolution forward. And so that one cell began to grow in size and complexity until it evolved into countless elaborate masses of cells. Sadly, these masses of cells were so extremely hampered by cellular bureaucracy that evolution had declined to a mind-numbingly slow pace. Furthermore, the protection of society had all but eliminated the natural process of survival of the fittest, so any mutations that occurred were left unchecked by any natural forward-moving process, and nearly all of those mutations were simply left floating in the stagnant gene pool. Our absolutely, spectacularly, unbelievably amazing cell had evolved into some quite boring masses of cells.
One of these boring masses of cells lived on a small blue-green planet floating by itself in an out-of-the-way solar system. This planet was not called Earth.
Somewhere on a planet not called Earth lived a mass of cells. It was of an especially destructive species which possessed the ability to control its environment to a dangerously large degree. Many members of this species found profit in the mass enslavement and systematic murder of animals to serve as a fuel source. Others found profit in the mass enslavement and systematic murder of plants for similar purposes. Certain long-haired nomadic varieties took significantly deeper offense to the former than the latter for reasons many of them had difficulty articulating.
But this story focuses mostly on one particular member of the short-haired variety. Most members of the species utilized certain verbal references to identify individuals, and this individual was often publicly refered to as “Stupid”. However, that was not because he was stupid. It was because he had a unique type of intelligence which everyone else lacked. However, this intelligence grew to be such a distraction that he often forgot what he was doing at a given moment and found himself bumping into chairs and lawyers. The worst part was that the intelligence resided in his subconscious, so while it distracted him, he didn't even know that he was thinking about anything.
This mass of cells wasn't always called “Stupid”, however. At times, he had been called “Dummy”, “Klutz”, “Moron”, “Idiot”, “Crazy Drunken Freak”, “Guilty Of All Charges”, and other such references. Upon his birth, however, he was called “Drudle”. The mass of cells liked this reference much better than the others, and he decided to use it when signing things like checks and apology letters to lawyers he bumped into.
One day, Drudle was happily munching on a piece of dead animal when he heard a peculiar hum overhead. Actually, it was more of a “him” than a “hum”, with a bit of a “hom” trailing behind.
Drudle looked up. Above him spread a white, textured surface. It was a brighter white in the middle, where a couch-sized hole had been a year before. Luckily, Drudle hadn't been munching on a dead animal at the time the couch-size hole was made, else he might have become a dead animal with a possible likewise fitness for consumption. Drudle pondered this for a moment.
The hum sounded again. Drudle's eyes widened and he rotated his head in several quick, paranoid movements.
Then followed three sounds which reminded Drudle only of falling couches.
“Hello?” Drudle called.
A muffled voice came from a location Drudle was unable to pinpoint. “May I speak with you, sir?”
Drudle grabbed ahold of his plate sporting the dead animal muscle. “Are you requesting permission to fall through my ceiling?”
“The door would be more convenient,” said the muffled voice.
Drudle lifted his plate and carried it to the front door. He opened the door and dropped his plate in surprise. “My god! What a hideous couch!”
“I am not a couch,” said the voice which had suddenly mastered the art of being unmuffled. “My name is Trutt. I'm from the government.”
Drudle cocked an eyebrow, then leaned toward Trutt and, squinting, scanned him from head to toe. “Which government?”
“Yours.”
Drudle stood back and began to panic, suddenly realizing the nature of the situation. “I mailed it yesterday!”
A look of shock struck across Trutt's face. “The chain letter?”
Drudle blinked. “No.”
Trutt let out a sigh of relief. “So it hasn't happened yet. Drudle, I need you to come with me. I'll explain along the way.”
Drudle stepped over his fallen plate and followed Trutt to the car.
The common definition of a government is a group of people who have convinced others to yield power to them. Politicians typically propose that they are more capable of effectively utilizing that power than ordinary citizens, while in truth a politician is seldom capable of much beyond the art of persuasion itself. On occasion, however, politicians will recruit competent individuals if there is a serious pressing need to boost the politician's popularity or prevent a major disaster in the polls.
Several dozen minutes of silence passed as Drudle painstakingly adjusted his air conditioning vent. Cautiously satisfied, he turned to Trutt. “Are you taking me to the government?” he asked, with a slight quiver in his voice.
“We have come under the suspicion that a grave threat to our national security is underway. For the last several years, we at the Department of Time Travel have had access to a masterfully skilled interchronion researcher who has foreseen a tremendous disruption to our economy coming in the near future. This disruption could leave our nation in a complete and utter state of poverty. Our basic facilities will cease to function. Countless people will die from starvation and dehydration, and most importantly, our department's funding will likely be cut.”
Drudle fiddled with the air conditioning vent. “Won't market forces sort it out?”
“There is a large demand for society to function, we are currently in the best position to supply the means for it to, and we would personally benefit from doing so, so it would be accurate to say that market forces are driving us to act.”
“Now wait a minute,” Drudle contended, “when someone says, ‘let market forces take care of it,’ doesn't that mean to do nothing? Since when are market forces interactive? And what does any of this have to do with me?”
“I think you'll come to realize your significance in time. At the heart of this matter is a trigger known as Mankind's Obsessive Reflex Of Nonchalant Submission. It's the same observed behavior that generates the income in mass-invasive marketing models like those medication e-mails promising to increase the dimensions of your genitalia. You would think that most people would just delete those messages on site, but a surprisingly large number actually feel compelled to follow through on the offer.”
Drudle nodded, “It is surprising, considering they never work as advertised.”