A graduate student, substitute teacher, and librarian in Poway, California, James Steimle’s speculative fiction has appeared in such magazines as Black Petals, Tales of the Talisman, MudRock, Midnight Times, Gateway SF, Nova Science Fiction, and The Kit-Cat Review. Visit his website: The Shadow Dances of James Steimle.

Tip shivered with incredible fear at first, yet he knew that to enlist was his duty; he understood why the war meant everything to the present and to the future.  He had chosen his mate from the list of application.  She supported his departure, of course.  She would not be fighting right away.  Her list of applicable mates increased by the day -- and to think in ancient times, people worried about population growth!
     "Bring me tens of millions!" said the Collective Mind, the oneness.  "Produce even billions!"  For the thought of no war engaged panic in all.  In the year 3001, there had always been a war.  There would always be a war this year.  The battles raged endless and forever, and for good reason.
     "But who is the enemy?" Tip had asked as a child of six.
     "We are," said his teacher of twelve.
     Then he had turned sixteen and married a woman.  She left for the war.  He wed himself a second bride, and she departed to do her duty.  He wept on his seventeenth birthday as he chose a third mate.  Seventeen, he would leave this woman fertilized and young.  She did not weep, but waved from the window before accessing the list of application.  Tip had not entered his car before she accepted a new man.
     "I just don’t know if I can do this," he said as the train carried him beneath the flat city.  In front of him and behind stood other soldiers enlisting on the Ides of May.  They steered their attentions around.  They sneered at him.
     Spilled into the Army Depot, each man was fitted with training gear and nutrition injections.  For three days without pause, they slept warfare.  Tip dreamed how to move, how to breathe, how to live.  He saw people far below, so high above, at his face.  He rammed headlong into the virtual enemy and studied their weaknesses.  Neurons fired when commanded by the gear.  His mind collected data.  And he practiced.  Kill, kill, kill.  And by killing, survive.  For to lose this battle meant ... what?
     That was the fear.
     Long ago, a man once posited the argument that time travel was logically impossible, because if time travel could ever be invented, it would have been invented in some future day, and travelers would endlessly have visited our past already.  He was right, but not in the way he thought.
     During Tip’s school years, the details of the war had been explained to Tip as meticulously as was necessary.  Time travel was impossible, except that light traveled through time.  Particles traveled through time.  Yet a man, or even a tiny machine with all its molecular complexities, could never breach the past.  And yet ...
     The training ended with a jolt of such force, reality seemed the dream into which Tip woke.  He wept for a moment, holding his tears and wondering why he cried.
     All government had been done away, only the Collective Mind existed, and that in purity!  No more king and fiefs, no more presidents, political parties, voting.  Everyone not aborted, for genetic weakness, attached to the Mind at birth.  So the needs of all weighed fairly, and no one argued against the betterment of individuals.  The Mind secured and protected.  The Mind knew all there was to know.
     So the problems of traveling through time did not stand long against the Collective Mind.  Once the mystery was solved, how to go back, how to experience, see, and even stay, people began to travel directly.  The travelers went everywhere, and just as instantly the war began.
     But no one traveled in the flesh.  Indeed, the first step of time travel was death.
     "Maybe I shouldn’t go," Tip said.
     "Nonsense," said a laborer opening the lid to a Temporal Drop Box.
     Tip knew what to do.  He had trained for this all his life.  Every single baby grew up ready for war.
     "I hear you don’t feel a thing," said the worker placing his hand on a panel.
     "How old are you?" said Tip.  "When do you go?"
     The assistant swallowed and blinked against the reality of his too leaving 3001.  "I go ... I am sixteen and a half."
     "Twelve more months," said Tip.
     "Yes."  He smiled at Tip.  Twelve months was a long time with many mates.  He gazed at his splayed fingers on the panel.  "You know what to do."
     "But why?" Tip said as the fibroid glass closed over his body.
     "You know."
     "To fight in another time?  To die in another world?  To fight in a war that can never end?"
     The words came out of the worker.  "Is there some other way?  Fare you well."
     No pain?  How could the Collective Mind be so wrong!  For the moment Tip was shipped to war, he felt himself torn quite distinctly from his body.  It was as if the light inside the core of his mind -- only the needful part of consciousness and memory, to be sure! -- was pulled out in splinters, wrapped into a tight ball, and shoved through the eye of the smallest needle.
     Yes, there should not have been pain.  No body!  No nerves, brain cells ... so explain?  There was no science to do so, nor would there ever be, for him.  He was born again, inside a ship that could serve only one purpose.  The craft incubated for a time with a few hundred others beneath the surface of a watery plane.  Then automated, the hulking beast tore away and flew into the air.
     An armada of crafts spinning past one another without hitting, they rose and rose, and surveyed the world of war.  The hum of wings filled the air.  But other sounds caused waves which pounded them, other temperatures shook the frame of Tip’s ship.  He drove upward, onward, scanning for the enemy.
     The enemy, who are they?  Us.
     Long ago, in the future, people learned to send consciousness back into the smallest of organisms.  Therein they found no other awareness, no other control, but machines perfectly built for their powers.
     Were the first microscopic?  Were they mites?  Were they flies?
     The Collective Mind did not tell.
     Yet the presence of one cognizant soul from the future had the ability to disrupt the entire timeline.  Bite an ant here, and see how he turns.  Bite it to death, and create a ripple effect that does not stop until 3001 is altered!  Sting a man, or stop the sting of another insect -- then what happens?
     The only thing to do is to attack the others, to kill and kill forever.
     Tip did not even see the craft that swung him down, down toward a ground far away.  Would the impact rip off his wings?  Would he loose his landing gear?  Or would his part in the war end just after beginning?
     He turned his ship round and set the forceps to grappling.  He pierced with lances.  He shook and wrenched.  He pulled apart his enemy, and broke free.  Screaming a cry of triumph, he returned to the space and watched his adversary plummet to death.
     Changing his venue, he witnessed a coarse army of military tanks all red and shiny.  Ants, more ants, endless ants working together.  He found no way of communicating, so stayed high overhead.  "Are they with me, or against?  Or are they mindless machines?"  He asked but no one answered.  He shouted against the roar of mighty engine wings.  He paused his ship on a vertical ramp.
     Who built the first ship?  Did it come from the Mind?  How was he to know the enemy?  His ship came to life with lights and new warmth.  Raw engines grew fresh with importance.
     Another was coming, falling down, diving fast toward his stern.  An attack?  No, something else.
     He watched with wonder as this twin ship docked with his, mating for sure, preparing the building of other ships in other waters.
     "Hello!" said Tip.
     No answer from the hum, from the tired wings that settled.  In silence they stayed, the ships communing automatically.
     "You are on my side," said Tip.
     Again, no reply.  He imagined a woman there, perhaps his first bride.  But the likelihood of that was so impossible as to be forgotten as soon as it was hoped.  Yet he dreamed...
     The enemy is us, he thought over and over in his mind.  This balancing act is a joke.  How could the Mind fail to understand?  Could humans have come to this in the end?  A future war in the past to keep 3001 static?
     He thought long on these questions until quite suddenly the second ship disengaged and flew away.
     "No more," Tip said.  "I need not fight.  It will do no good in the end.  Even if we win this battle, I still leave for war in the future.  I still leave my spouses.  If we lose the war, perhaps I shall never exist!  That simply will not do.  Instead, I shall settle my ship here by the water.  I shall wait for my war to be through."
     The enemy is me, he thought.  Well I don’t care.  This world has brought me nothing.  What a short life, so much despair. 
     In time, his ship deposited a brood of new ships to develop beneath the water’s surface.  He burrowed his craft to one side.  He watched other ships soar, lay their larva, and then fight and die.
     Tip observed the war from the ground.
     In time, his craft yawned and sighed closer to the earth.  The landing gear gave first.  The wings, when tested, hummed but did not lift him.  Then they even failed to hum.
     "What happens to me now?" Tip said.
     No one answered, not even himself.  And he wanted to sob, but felt only a pale emotion within him.  So he waited ... to see ...

© 2006 James Steimle