Dreams

So humans and aliens finally make contact - in a horrific starship collision, where the warp fields of the two ships interact in such a way as to draw them inexorably together into a gravitational singularity.  As time dilation effects spread out differentially from the engine cores, giving everyone more than enough time to realise their fates, the aliens resign themselves to the inevitable, while the human captain (yours truly) figures out a way to save his ship and crew, while dooming himself and the alien craft - and takes it.

The aliens respond, punishing the captain by trapping him in a time loop, where every morning he awakens to find an unfamiliar pistol on his dressing table, and slowly comes to the realisation that he is trapped in a time loop on a strange planet, with no way out, no way to ever see his family again, no escape except to end it all with a bullet to the head, whereupon he awakens to find an unfamilar pistol...

And manipulates the idea of quantum immortality to survive his own death, escape the time loop and the growing gravitational singularity both, and return to the real world, where he finds that he has been reading a little-known story by Fritz Leiber (or George R. A. Murray, whoever he is) in a small-press limited-print collection at Galaxy Bookshop, the old one on Bathurst St, where his 19-year-old self is trying to update his store discount card, only they won't accept his identification, and he has to get his mother to sign for him.

I don't think my mother ever set foot in Galaxy, though I do remember her buying Dragon magazine for me, back in the day.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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