There are two things I hate about a job like this: Carrie, and the viewer-at-home.

That’s not true.  There are dozens of things I hate: network executives, directors, producers, footage editors with their nasally little ‘we could have used a little better resolution here. ”  I hate pretty much everyone involved in a documentary, but it’s the viewer-at-home who matters.  Once that viewer decides they don’t like Carrie, don’t like fish, or don’t like learning, all of us are out of a job.

“There’s the entrance!” Carrie squeals.  If nothing else, she has enthusiasm.

It’s a low-budget gig.  Unlike Carrie up ahead, who was lucky enough to be female, skinny, blond, and (of lesser importance) a marine biologist, Tommy-crap-for-lighting and Joe-the-assistant-camera-guy (that’s me) actually have to lug junk into these tunnels.  The sound guy and lead cameraman are resting cozy on the boat, practically retired.

“Over here,” she calls, swimming smoothly over a long-still turnstile and into the submerged station lobby.  I bring the cameras around an ancient ticket machine but find nothing more than a ragged hole, smaller than a kid’s fist.  “There are thousands of these,” Carrie continues, looking at my headcam.  Who the hell wears makeup underwater?  “Even though their slowed metabolism gives them twenty or thirty minutes underwater, the skeletal structure hasn’t changed much.  If it weren’t for these nests, they’d make easy dinner for anything down here.  A single Long Island Crocodile could take out a whole school in seconds.

Great.  Crocodiles.  I really ought to read a pamphlet or two about this junk before strapping on the cam and jumping overboard.

My comm beeps and the cameraman patches in, private to me and Tommy.  “Can we get a shot of these rats?”

“Carrie, they want rats,” I say, switching frequencies.

“Be patient.”  Her primary concerns always involve creatures lacking higher brain function.

“She says be patient.”

“We’re working overtime here,” he says.  I hear the hiss of a bottle opening.

On the main channel, Carrie’s still rambling science.  “Marine biologists continue their search for the secrets of the tunnel rat,” she says.  “Despite intensive study, their rapid evolution remains a mystery, and we can only hope that in decades to come-”

“Joe, can you get a better shot of that hole?” Tommy comms.

Carrie, caught up in describing the rats’ miraculously pathetic life, doesn’t notice as I clickswitch my handcam to fisheye without turning my helmet camera from her face.

And then, Tommy delivers a kick to the ticket machine with so much force that I have no idea how he pulled it off with flippers.

They crawl and swim, dozens, maybe hundreds, not just from the hole but from the ticket slot as well, from unseen gaps behind and beneath the machine.  An emptying hive of nearly hairless grey and pink rodents, tails swishing and feet scrabbling for purchase as a stream of bubbles trail upward from a corner.

“That’s what we need!” open-comms the cameraman.  “We can edit out that kick, right?”

Only the glow of Tommy’s sidelight lets me see Carrie shake her head.  “You can’t just empty a whole colony like that!” she says, voice weak.  “Do you have any idea how territorial–”

“Look, Carr, we’re making a documentary here,” comes a new voice, the assistant director.  Asshole must have been monitoring everything.

“They’ll only invade another colony, and–”

“Let the marine biologists worry about that junk, okay?  All of you, back to the boat, and–”

“I am a marine biologist.”

“Back to the boat.  Now.”

It’s a month until filming starts on Carrie’s next Learning Channel adventure, and hopefully, it’ll be somewhere warm.

My husband doubts the existence of history.  I wonder why I married this man.

When I woke up to the banshee-screech of a bandsaw, I assumed we were getting another door.  He likes that too, building doors.  But, when I came downstairs in a yellow bathrobe hoping he’d brewed a morning pot, I found no coffeemaker.  In fact, I found no kitchen appliances.  Nor did I find a husband, though a sign reading “time machine” was taped to the garage door.

“Progress calls, sweetheart,” he yelled from the garage.  “Many scientific innovations have failed due to lack of funding.”

“You don’t believe in history.”

“I believe that history, if it exists at all, is subjective, but more likely, each instant is a singular point of awareness suspended in-”

“All right, honey,” I said.

“It’s entirely different,” he said.  “Also, don’t go into the garage.”

One might wonder how my husband learned so much about time, space, or mechanical engineering.  Since most modern philosophers discount his beliefs about the former two and he still hasn’t fixed the dishwasher (won’t, now), one might do well to dismiss that curiosity.

But if he is anything, it’s determined.

After returning from Starbucks with the sense of patience possessed only by those who expect their wealthy in-laws to replace their kitchen appliances, I was greeted by a man with curly, powdered hair.

“Bonjour, madame,” he said.

I knocked on the door to the garage.  “There is a Frenchman in my kitchen,” I said.

“I know.”

“Well, so long as you know.”

“Thanks, dear,” he said.

My husband isn’t good with sarcasm.

I sat the man in the living room, set the television to Nickelodeon, and went upstairs to read.  I let my husband deal with his own problems, until the police or fire department get involved.

When I finished my book, the living room was filled with Frenchmen.  Again, I knocked on the garage door.

“There are more Frenchmen,” I said.

“I know.”

“Where did they come from?”

“France.”

I needed more coffee.  “Did you invent a time machine?” I asked him.

“I did.”

“Even though you don’t believe in time?”

“Yep.”

“Are you going to send them back?”

“As soon as I invent an un-time machine,” he told me.

“Maybe you should invent someone who knows what they’re doing.”

The silence suggested he believed that science did not concern women.

Since I couldn’t cook without an oven, stove, or microwave, I ordered pizza for the Frenchmen.  All in all, they didn’t seem disturbed by the displacement-in-time thing.

The next day, I found not just Frenchmen, but several Russians as well.

“Honey, there are Russians in my living room,” I said.

“I know.”  I heard a whirring sound, then a thud.  “I’ve almost got the ‘specific time’ thing down.”

“And this will empty out my living room?”

“I’m getting Americans next,” he said.  “I heard that they both did some crazy stuff during the Cold War.”

“You heard.”

“It’s not like I believed in history,” he said, cross.

I went to buy coffee.  I also bought several boxes of donuts.  The Frenchmen were still transfixed by the television.  The Russians, from several points in time, were eagerly exchanging stories.  In the garage, my husband was negotiating his own little cold war.  I took a leisurely stroll and had reached the town park when the solution occurred to me.  I hurried home to tell my husband.

“Dear,” I said.

“I’m busy, darling.”

“Why don’t you invent a future time machine, and ask someone how to do it right?”

There was a long silence.  “I don’t believe in the future, sweetheart,” he said.

The voices in the garage resumed.

Today marks the start of the fourth year of 365. We hit a lot of milestones in the last twelve months, including our 1000th story, which was reported on boingboing.

Whether you’re a new reader or you’ve been here since the beginning, we’re glad to have you around. Thanks for a great three years, and we hope you enjoy the fourth!

Now, lets say that after a bit of poking around, you decide to start at the very first story and move on from there.  A fine task for an afternoon, right?

Wrong.

A fine task for a weekend, right?

Wrong.

You’d better put on a few pots of coffee, because if you spend five minutes reading each story posted here, you’ll have a fine task for three and a half days.

Today, 365tomorrows turns 1000 stories old.

Would you like to bake us a cake?  If so, you’ll need about two pounds of birthday candles!  Would you like to print the stories into one book and keep it on your nightstand?  It’ll be almost as thick as three copies of Moby Dick!  Would you like to mail me an American quarter for every story written?  You’d better have a lot of postage handy, because that package would weigh thirteen pounds!

That’s about as much math as my liberal arts major brain can handle in one night.

Whether you’ve been a fan since the beginning or you’ve only recently found the site, we’re grateful for your support and we hope you stick around for many years to come.

-Kathy

Nate Sorelli ruled the playground like Napoleon ruled France: with an iron fist and a mind like a laser-cut scalpel. With the knowledge of Sun Tzu and strategies selectively culled from the Roman and British Empires, Nate Sorelli was an architect and a general. He had a loyal army of boys who let no one tread on his territory, and his territory didn’t stop at the schoolyard’s boundaries. To the colony’s children, it was Nate Sorelli and not his parents who owned all of Shi.

In the early days of the colony, physicians played it fast and loose. Frontier medicine had different rules, and when his early tests showed mild retardation, his parents didn’t even need to pull strings. The neural implant had never been approved for children, but if Nate Sorelli was any indicator, that lack of approval was a terrible oversight.

Nate had a network. He didn’t need to threaten kids for their lunch money: they willingly handed it over. A quirk of his lips could start and end playground fights, but Nate never threw a punch. He didn’t like getting his hands dirty.

The teachers, too, were under his thumb. They didn’t realize it, of course, but he could redirect lessons with a few choice words, and he steered the curriculum like a rudder steers a boat. They thought it was their idea to move him to the C class with the older kids, and the following year, they thought they made the decision to bump him up to B. There wasn’t a test he couldn’t ace. The colony’s library had been committed to memory, and the only thing keeping the wealth of the internet out of his mind was the communication delay between Shi and Earth. It was no surprise when the home world sent a team of doctors to study him.

The study lasted three minutes: as long as it took to process the data from the CAT scan. Three Shi doctors lost their licenses. His parents were fined extensively, and paid twice that in bribes to maintain custody of their son.

Despite the setback, he maintained his rule. The other children continued to revere him, and although the scandal was teachers’ lounge gossip for weeks, they considered the decline in test scores a result of the stress of publicity. No one saw the first cracks in his empire. Certainly not Nate Sorelli.

Lunch money came more slowly. Paper bills turned to coins, which turned to crinkled wrappers. Without funding, the army of children grew restless, but it was over a month before they disbanded. There was no coup. No new ruler, no interim leader. Political issues were eclipsed by video games and dodgeball. The teachers noticed the change, but there were no complaints. The other kids’ performance improved. Overall, Shi’s school was well-ranked among the colonies.

At recess, Nate Sorelli took to playing jacks. His reflexes were still sharp, and he liked the smooth texture of the rubber ball. His previous loyal subjects played hopscotch and football in the nearby field as his hand shot out, snatching three silver stars before catching the ball in its descent.

They’d followed the grishna since the beginning of time. Their elders described uncountable days and night, each lasting several lifetimes, since the first keeper had been formed from hard-packed snow and melted by the grishna’s breath. They had never neglected their duty. They hibernated with the large creature, curled up in a vast pile of limbs between the grishna’s tusks, and when they woke they gathered food to care for the endless being. It never spoke. It was a god, so it never had to. When they spoke it was in whispers and gestures, mimicking the silent movement of the grishna’s several mouths with the one tongue they possessed, and this was what fascinated the linguists.

The first outsider came during night, while they slept. Before they awoke a half-dozen had arrived, with boxes that trapped voices and forced them to perform at will and other boxes that clicked and whirred, frightening the grishna. Once, it tore through the outsiders’ enclave, reducing their boxes to brightly colored shards, but everything was quickly replaced.

With time, they learned to live with the newcomers. The grishna adjusted to their presence, and the keepers followed suit. They accepted that the new beings must have been charged to follow them in the same way they were charged to follow the grishna, so they did not interfere.

The first word the linguists learned indicated the most solid snow, the kind that could best hold the grishna’s weight. The kind they’d been carved from, at the dawn of time. The second word was the word for heat, particularly the heat of the grishna, though they believed it also applied to fire. After that, the words came quickly, and although the outsiders lacked the limb used to indicate the passage of time, they could communicate their origin.

And the keepers communicated theirs.

More arrived. Too many to count. Again, the grishna was frightened. Again, the grishna adjusted. The linguists offered food in exchange for words spoken into the box, and the keepers no longer foraged. The grishna was fed as well, food that it seemed to prefer to what the keepers had always gathered. The outsiders were no longer outsiders. They became a part of life. Some of the keepers learned the methods of the boxes, some even learned the second language. They were told about the light, how it came from far away, and how the stars did not mark the days of the grishna’s life. New words were created, to describe new ideas and new objects. When the first one was taken away to be studied, he returned with stories that terrified and thrilled the others.

All of them wanted to see the lights and feel the nauseating movement. Many of them did. The elders waited for this to pass, knowing that all things passed, but some of the younger ones never returned. If they did, they wore coverings over their fur in shades no keeper had seen. They no longer hibernated. They spoke words no keeper’s tongue should be able to form. The grishna grew restless. Nobody studied the grishna.

When the elders left, the linguists noted it with interest. The smaller footsteps of the oldest keepers made small indentations in the larger footsteps of the grishna as they walked away from the lights and boxes just before another uncounted nightfall. They’d followed the grishna since the beginning of time. They had never neglected their duty.

He’d always known about them.

When it snowed, Arwik lived in abandoned buildings. He slept in the rusted creases of abandoned subway tunnels to escape their satellites, and he ate whatever he could forage. He found a lot in disposal bins, but he’d never tried to eat it. People poisoned that stuff, he knew.

They injected tracking devices into his skin when he slept. Often he’d find an unexplained pockmark on his body, something that looked like an insect bite, but he knew what was inside of it. He used to try to gouge it out, but he soon realized that they’d used nanites. Thousands of silicon creatures, eating him from the inside out.

No one believed these things.

At first, he’d tried to warn people. He tried on the subways and on the streets, but everyone walked by with their eyes firmly on the ground. They could come for anyone, he said. They could come for you. Arwik hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt.

Now, it was about survival.

Sometimes he saw the cops on the street and felt their sideways glances. Sometimes he couldn’t see them at all, but felt their eyes as they watched him through the scope of a sniper rifle. Arwik had seen those rifles, watched them in movies as a child. He knew the power of invisibility.

Once, they’d cornered him on the L train. The trackers, he knew. The goddamn trackers. They always knew where to find him. They offered help, but he knew what help meant. Scalpels and brainwashing. His eyes held open with wires as he would be forced to watch propaganda. Drugged with truth serum and forced to confess to everything he knew about them. He’d be executed in an electric chair, or shot at point-blank range in a seedy alleyway. Sometimes he wished that he hadn’t been smart enough to figure them out. If he hadn’t known the truth, they might have left him alone.

Arwik ran, dashing up slush-covered subway stairs until he found a dumpster in a trash-filled alleyway. The metal lids scrambled the signal, and surrounded by fish bones and plastic bags, he knew that he was almost protected. They could have used dogs, but they didn’t. That time, he’d gotten away.

It’s impossible to know who’s real. Some of them are brainwashed, or have given into the nanites. Some of them might even be cyborgs. Arwik has nowhere to turn. No one is ever safe.

Most of them come at night. They assume that their objective would be easier to complete while the target was fast asleep, so we increase security at dusk: three guards outside of the bedroom door and two inside, and another dozen on patrol. Sometimes they have bulletproof clothing. Sometimes they have guns that can burn a hole straight through a body. Our scientists spent weeks analyzing them, but we can’t replicate the battery. It’s unfortunate. Technology like that would be useful on the front lines.

Some of the travelers are scrappy, with banged up equiptment that looks older than they are. From their actions, we assume that they are rogue. They bring their wallets, and based on their ID, most of them date from the 2700s. The other ones, the ones with polished weapons and uniforms, carry no identification. From the manufacture dates on their equipment, we’ve determined that they come from the late 2600s. Words and names are written in Chinese, but the ID cards say America.

At first, this caused concern.

We’ve tried to predict our future based on their existence. We will win the war. Victors don’t make assassination attempts. We know that at some point in the 2600s, the American government realized that their program would be unsuccessful, and the remaining equiptment fell into the hands of private citizens. We know that China and America share military secrets. We can find no trace of Japan, so we assume that they lost their war.

We haven’t shared this information. If they have a protection force similar to ours, they’re keeping it to themselves. If they don’t, we can assume no attempts have been made on the Emperor’s life.

Our greatest concern is assassination in the years before our division was founded. However, the Leader remembers no unusual events, and his ancesteral line was unaltered. We’ve theorized that another group of temporal soldiers protected him then, but left it in our hands once he rose to power. Our records would be invaluable to future generations, and eliminating us would wipe those records from existence.

We haven’t been able to interrogate them. The soldiers who aren’t killed commit suicide in seconds, and their bodies disappear in a flash of light. The rogues’ bodies usually remain, and autopsies have revealed significant changes to their biology. Implants made of an unidentified material. Evidence of advanced surgical techniques. Unfortunately, we can’t use this knowledge to our advantage without the equipment to properly analyze it.

With every attempt, our efficiency increases. Assurance of victory raises morale, and every dead traveler is proof that the Leader will not be killed.

Eric Hayton was not happy. In fact, his unhappiness was palpable: it could be seen in the four empty coffee cups on his desk, in the disgust with which he regarded his wall of monitors, and mostly, in the overfilled ash tray positioned on the corner of his desk. Smoking was illegal in the colony, but if he didn’t get this weather bug sorted out, he would have bigger things to worry about than a misdemeanor fine.

Almost a century ago, the first wave of emigrants suffered through perfectly stable weather. Although the colonists were expected to enjoy a sempiternal spring, the lack of seasons only reminded them that their world was artificial. The Monarch system, written a decade later, swept the programming awards and was immediately put into use. It projected the weather for an entire imagined planet, then used the colony’s temperature and humidity controls to match the weather for a hypothetical longitude and latitude. Because it was self-reliant, the only people who studied it were eccentric techno-anachronists and third year programming students. Even Eric, the colony’s chief meteorologist, hadn’t read the output in years. It was stable. Reliable. There had never been problems before.

Judging by the two feet of snow outside of Eric’s window, there was a first time for everything.

“Linz, can you put on another pot?” he called as he gnawed on the end of his stylus. He’d run out of cigarettes a few hours ago and run out of sleep twenty hours before that, but for now, his coffee reserves were holding. It was his responsibility to track down the bug, but introducing new code to the Monarch system was dangerous. Sure, he could stop the snowfall with a few keystrokes, but since the simulation built upon itself, one clumsy move could cause floods and droughts for centuries to come.

“After this round,” Eric’s daughter called from the other room. Through her headphones, he could hear the muffled sounds of her video game. When Lindsay appeared with a fresh mug of coffee, he gestured to the largest monitor and a tap of his stylus froze the code in place.

“You see anything there?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s self-correcting though, right? It should work out the kinks in a week or so,”

“We don’t have a week or so,” Eric said. He picked up the mug. “Everything’s shut down. The whole colony’s snowed in.”

Lindsay shrugged uneasily. “We only started learning Monarch this semester,” she reminded. “I barely know anything. Are you sure you didn’t leave yourself logged in at a public terminal?”

Eric shook his head. “Aside from the computers at City Hall, his is the only machine wired in to the sim.”

“I guess it’s just a natural bug, then.” Lindsay wrapped her arms around Eric, giving him a quick hug before turning back to the living room. “Good luck,” she added.

Lindsay closed the door behind her and pulled on her headset as she dropped onto the sofa.

“I’ve only got time for one more run,” a static-laced voice said. “We’ve got to finish tomorrow’s codework.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Lindsay said,with a glance to the closed door. “School should be cancelled for at least another week.”

“I feel bad saying it,” another guildmate grunted, “but we’re damn lucky this bug happened when it did. Gives us some time to catch up with that guild on Reki 5.”

Lindsay’s avatar joined the rest of her guild at the digital battleground. “Let’s show them what we’re made of.”

“You haven’t changed a bit,” Aja said, though her eyes avoided her sister’s face. Saj noticed the hesitation, noticed the way Aja’s bangs (gray and black, like soot-streaks on the walls of a bombed-out Akari factory) hung thin, revealing a forehead creased only with the lines of age. Saj’s hair was short and black, the standard military cut, and the slashed-circle brand of the soldier caste was glossy and pink above her eyebrow.

“How would you know?”

“You still look like you’re sixteen.”

“I’m nineteen. And I’ve changed a hell of a lot.”

Saj’s voice was tight, somewhere between the tone of a defensive child and a fierce adult, but there was no conflict in the duality. Saj kept her head high, her expression arrogant and indifferent to the curious stares of the few other teenagers in the café. None of them were branded. The caste system had been eliminated twenty years ago, when Saj was seventeen and light years away in the dying months of the war.

“You’re a doctor now,” Saj’s eyes remained hard on Aja’s face. “A plastic surgeon. Is that what happened to your mark?”

“Don’t do this, Saj.” When she frowned, her face looked like the wrinkled crust of the ice moon of Omnaki. Aja would never see that moon. No Salal would ever see it again. “The war is over, now.”

“Your war.”

“Our war.”

“The only people who shared that war with me died in the massacre on Soulon 5.” Saj’s expression was stony, and her dark eyes had narrowed into slits. “This isn’t my home. This is some world that you made, you and the rest of them, after I went away.”

Saj stared at her sister’s hands, which seemed even more alien than the leathery flesh of the Akari. Liver spots, wrinkled skin, fingernails painted mauve. It was hard to believe that they’d shared a womb, nineteen or sixty years ago.

“There’s a place for you here,” Aja whispered. “I’ve been saving. You can live with James and I, and go to University. We can get rid of your brand.”

“This isn’t my world,” Saj repeated. “And no one’s touching my brand.”

A cold silence fell over the café, and Saj realized she’d spoken too loudly for the enclosed space. She pushed herself up from the table and it creaked at the force of her muscular arms.

“Remember the river, out behind the house?” Aja said. “Where we used to swim in the summer?”

“You’re older than Grandma was.”

“We built a raft once, to see if we could float away from the colony.”

“If I’d drowned, you would have been firstborn,” Saj snapped.

“And I would have gone instead of you.”

Aja’s voice was calm, but Saj pushed away from the table and whirled, her boots squeaking against the floor as she stormed towards the glass door.

“I’ll wait for you.”

“You’ll be waiting for a damn long time.”

“I’ve been waiting for sixty years.”

This time, Saj hesitated, her hand on the doorknob. She stared back at her sister, something indefinable flickering behind her dark eyes.

“Come home,” Aja said.

Saj gritted her teeth and turned away. “I don’t have a home.”

She slammed the door before shoving her hands into the pockets of her jacket and tightening her fingers around her cellphone. Its directory was empty, aside from Aja’s number and the Social Service Center. She wanted to break it, to watch it explode like a photon grenade, but she didn’t move. Saj was cold and tired, and she didn’t know what to do next.