Shadows Out of Time

I can see again, though not with my own eyes. Those were left behind on another world. These eyes are artificial, a device with two glass lenses that’s plugged into one of the sockets in my cylinder. Through these lenses, I can see the alien world that Professor Vaughan’s creatures have brought me to. Through a second attached device, one with a metal disc on top, I can hear them speak to each other. They call themselves Mi-Go, and this strange, technologically advanced planetoid at the edge of our solar system is called Yuggoth. Since I arrived, I’ve learned Yuggoth is merely an outpost, not their home world. I don’t know where their home world is, and I get the sense the Mi-Go haven’t seen it in a very long time. Some of them wonder if it still exists.

They communicate in insect-like buzzes and clicks, which the hearing device translates for me. There’s nothing poetic about their language. They speak with cold objective specificity, making no use of allegory or metaphor. Vaughan was right to call them scientists. They’re methodical and precise.

I’ve learned from their conversations that something went wrong on our journey from Earth to Yuggoth. The Mi-Go who was carrying my brain cylinder passed through a spatial anomaly, a disruption in the space-time continuum, and came out the other side insane, or so the others think. When we arrived on Yuggoth, they had to force it into hibernation because it was frightened and confused. It claimed to have been displaced in time, that it was reliving its many thousands of years of life, experiencing every moment of it simultaneously, although with its present-day memories and knowledge intact.

But they’re wrong; that Mi-Go wasn’t insane. It’s happening to me, too. I felt us pass through the anomaly and mistook it for a collision. The anomaly is what broke me into pieces and scattered me throughout my past. That’s how I was given this second chance.

I have to try again. There has to be a way to change what happened. I concentrate, reaching into the blazing white supernova in my mind, and I go back.

After Professor Vaughan’s office hours, Emily slung her backpack onto her back and looked at the framed photo on the desk. Vaughan’s family. The ones whose deaths had set him on his insane quest for Arneth-Zin and its all-seeing watcher. She hated them for dying in that car wreck. If they’d lived, none of this would have happened. She and Sean would be fine. They both would have become doctors. Maybe they would have married and started a family.

Maybe they still could.

“Professor,” she asked, just as she had the first time, “where does that door go?”

“Nowhere,” he replied. “It’s just a small closet for the heating pipes. Why?”

“No reason.” The words were another echo through time, spoken by a weaker, more naïve Emily who didn’t share her current resolve. It infuriated her. Professor Vaughan infuriated her. The Mi-Go infuriated her.