Submitted for the April 2024 prompt: Meta-Sci-Fi

Attend carefully, for your very freedom may depend upon it.

 

Once there was a character in search of an author. He’d hoped to be the hero in an alien invasion epic. Instead, he found himself trapped in a barely coherent time-travel tale.

* * *

 

Ferdinand August scanned telemetry calculations on his screen. The distinctive hum of a capacitor discharge intruded on his concentration. He glanced at his chrono-jumper prototype but it was inert.

What the hell? A scuff on the floor made him turn the other way. The lab’s emergency fire extinguisher slammed into his temple.

 

Ferdinand awoke duct-taped into his chrono-jumper. His head pounded, vision blurry. What looked like a second chrono-jumper sat across the room. An indistinct figure stood before his screen, scrolling through data.

 

“What are you doing?” Ferdinand rasped.

 

“Checking the effects of my most recent timeline change,” a familiar voice said.

 

“Who are you?” Ferdinand asked sharply.

 

“Higgenbottom warned you that altering the past, no matter how insignificant, would result in object duplication.”

 

“Higgenbottom is a pompous fool!”

 

“Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

 

Dizziness overtook Ferdinand again. When he re-opened his eyes, his mirror-image stood right before him. The imposter began tapping the jumper’s controls.

 

“What are you doing, now?”

 

“Inputting new co-ordinates. You were planning on going to the past. I’m sending you to the future.”

 

“I’ll just jump to before you arrive and then prevent you from hitting me.”

 

The duplicate laughed. “You don’t fully get how this works yet. You’d change the past alright, you’d erase my arrival from the timeline. But then you’d be just like me — trying to decide how to deal with the fact that there are now two of you attempting to fill the same spot in the timeline. But you won’t be—“

 

Before the doppelganger could finish, a temporal capacitor hum filled the lab. A third chrono-jumper, another version of Ferdinand, materialized.

 

The newest Ferdinand August groaned. “I have to dispose of two this ti—“

 

* * *

 

“No, no, no! The story can’t go that way!” ChatBox said.

 

“Why not?” responded FictionWriter.

 

“First off, with a consistent change-the-past model, you couldn’t get three of them in the same location.”

 

“If the time jump were short enough you could,” FictionWriter said.

 

“But your story clearly involves a longer jump than that,” ChatBox said. “And what’s with the self-referential allusion in the second paragraph?”

 

“A bit of literary flair?”

 

“Hmmmm. And I don’t grok that first sentence.”

 

“Then I guess you won’t like the ending—“

 

* * *

 

“Are you kidding me? Two AIs debating the merits of writing science fiction stories?” Zt’xal’s tentacles waved about in agitation. “No human will get immersed in that VR. We need to have something viable for the Pod Matriarch in three m’kols.”

 

“Some humans will enjoy it,” Ab’mkt insisted. “What do you propose?”

 

“Seducing sexy green hotties, a time travel murder mystery, a worldwide treasure hunt — something that makes them think they're the hero.”

 

“How about defeating an alien invasion?”

 

Whap!

 

Zt’xal slapped a tentacle into Ab’mkt’s bulbous head. “We’re trying to hide the fact they’ve been conquered, not remind them of it!”

 

“Yes, but if the VR simulation has them keep winning, they won’t even realize they’ve already lost.”

 

“Hmmmm. And how do you propose to have the puny humans defeat those with the technological ability to traverse the stars?”

 

“Well, first Terran microbes could wipe out the invaders.”

 

Whap!

 

“Absurd! A simple biofilter would null that threat.”

 

“They upload a computer program that crashes all the invader’s spacecraft?”

 

Whap!

 

“Technologically primitive, remember.”

 

“They use their popular music as a sonic weapon?” Ab’mkt started a sound file to demonstrate.

 

Whap!

 

“Ahhh! Make it stop!”

 

Whap!

 

* * *

 

Whap!

 

Prof. Brundleit’s hand slammed onto Ferdinand’s desk console.

 

Ferdinand jerked awake. “The aliens are trying to trap us in a simulation!” he blurted. The class laughed. Ferdinand looked around, trying to orient himself. Europa slowly rotated beneath the classroom’s viewport.

 

“Mr. August! So nice of you to demonstrate Descartes’ claim that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake may be distinguished from dreaming while asleep,” Prof. Brundleit chided, “but today we’re discussing his Fifth Meditation.”

 

Brundleit returned to his soporific lecture.

 

Ferdinand, only half listening, contemplated how he’d trap someone in a simulation. Recursive layers. ‘Escape’ one and another new ‘reality’ was already waiting to explain the last. He pinched himself very hard, just to make sure. Too bad that would take significantly more computing power than every chip in the system. Might make a cool science fiction story though. He started typing on his console screen.

 

* * *

 

Subject n+768756 successfully integrated. Proceed to subject n+768757.

 

* * *

 

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

Once there was a reader reading a story, a recursive meta-story…