Submitted for the January 2024 prompt: Weather Warnings

Nothing. No popping circuits, no acrid tang of seared insulation, not even a ruptured filaments light show. Just a prototype quantum-tunneling regulator inert as a rock.

 

“Trial number,“ Professor Yasuda glanced at the control screen’s counter, “five hundred twelve: unsuccessful.” He re-checked the chamber temperature. Holding steady at a fraction above zero Kelvin, unlike the sweltering heat outside the lab. Maybe another execution code glitch? New bugs seem to hatch between every trial. He initiated three separate code-verification bots.

 

Yasuda breathed deeply, centering himself, trying to quell the simmering despair that he was failing humanity. His holo-screen suddenly lit up like a fireworks extravaganza. What the Hell? Sensors displayed quantum foam perturbations multiplying exponentially. He inspected the prototype. Still inert. What the double Hell?

 

Piercing light filled the lab, then abruptly vanished. Yasuda blinked, trying to clear after-images blotting his vision. One splotch refused to disappear. A person, Yasuda realized, completely sheathed in a light-stealing black bodysuit. The figure peeled away its face cover. Its eyes darted like a frenetic bird before transfixing the gaping professor.

 

“You must stop your experiments,” the man said.

 

“What? Who are you!? How did you evade Institute security?”

 

The man ignored him. “You’re going to kill us all.”

 

“I’m trying to save us all.” Yasuda said.

 

The man tapped icons on his arm sheath. “I’ll show you.”

 

Images filled the air. The man plucked one, enlarging it. Luxurious golden sand nestled right up against a frozen sheet of ice. Yasuda peered more closely, then gasped. Countless people dressed for summer were trapped in the ice.

 

“A flash freeze at Myrtle Beach in July.”

 

The man flicked his index finger. Another image sharpened — a crystalline ball encased the Eiffel tower’s summit, the streets below littered with bodies. “All oxygen in a forty kilometer radius coalesced into a solid lattice. Over a million people asphyxiated.” Another flick. A video showing Tokyo under water. “Water vapor in a five kilometer tall cylinder condensed all at once.”

 

The man paced amidst the images, making them slowly rotate. “The media called them ‘Quantum Storms.’ They make climate change seem like a gentle summer breeze.”

 

“What do these Storms have to do with me?” Yasuda asked, watching truck-sized ice chunks decimate Cairo.

 

“In three months your quantum-tunneling experiments will succeed. But—”

 

“The regulator works?” Yasuda interrupted. “Gaia’s climate control modeling? Twenty orders of magnitude more powerful?”

 

“Closer to thirty. Humanity’s savior, they’ll call you,” the man spat out. He paused his pacing, inspecting a titanium tube on Yasuda’s cluttered work table, before leaning on it like a cane.

 

“But I’ve discovered the truth.” The man turned, eyes fierce. He slashed his free hand, banishing the floating kaleidoscope. Opening his palm a single tableau materialized — what looked like bubbled ice traversed by a web of fractures. “Those experiments cause Planck-scale cracks in the quantum foam. It will take a century for them to sufficiently widen. Then the chaos starts. Massive anti-entropic quantum coalescences percolate up unpredictably from the growing fissures. Events that are physically possible, but so improbable they should never happen? You make them happen. They’re killing us.”

 

“You have data to support your claims?”

 

“Transferring to your holo-matrix now,” the man replied.

 

Yasuda’s brow creased. “A century, you said? Gaia’s current models predict under forty years until Earth is uninhabitable.”

 

The man sighed. “Gaia solves global warming. Just the right mix of interlocking remedies: scrap iron dumped into arctic seas create huge algae blooms for sequestering carbon dioxide; calcium carbonate pellets seeded in the stratosphere reflect more sunlight; carbon extraction ‘farms’ filled with rows of ‘mechanical trees’; hollow glass microspheres sprayed across Antarctic ice prevent melting; and more. Earth’s average temperature will dip below the danger zone for the first time in decades.”

 

“And you would have me stop!?”

 

“I estimate a twenty percent chance Gaia ameliorates rising temperatures even without the increased processing power afforded by your quantum-tunneling regulator. There are always trade-offs.”

 

A ping echoed through the ensuing silence. The code-bots had completed their sweep — more bugs uncovered and fixed. Yasuda walked to the control interface. “Initiating trial—”

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“Beginning the next trial. Twenty percent is not enough. Gaia needs that extra computing power.”

 

“You can’t. You’ll doom us all.”

 

“But you—”

 

The man swung the titanium tube at Yasuda’s head.

 

* * *

 

The man awoke taped to spent liquid helium canisters on an automated trolley. Lingering cold seeped from the metal into his back. He flinched, rattling the canisters.

 

“I’ve found that aikido clears the mind. Though I’d hoped never to have to use it.” Yasuda stood before his holo-matrix inputting new code.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“Adjusting tunneling parameters based on your fracture data and the recordings of your arrival.”

 

“Please, you must stop.”

 

“No! If anyone has jeopardized humanity it’s you!” Yasuda slowly exhaled before resuming evenly, “You miscalculated the fracturing’s temporal origin. Knowing what to look for, I scanned the lab and found minute traces. The fractures do not start months from now. They’ve already begun. In fact, their origin coincides with your arrival from the future.”

 

“I don’t believe you.”

 

Yasuda waved open a new holo-screen. Data marched across. The man frowned. “You’ve fabricated this — it can’t be real.”

 

“Yet you expect me to trust your data?” Yasuda returned to altering parameters.

 

“No, no, no,” the man sputtered, struggling to extricate himself. “You must release me!”

 

“Won't do that — who knows what mischief you’d perpetrate in this time. Can’t send you back either. Another time-jump would make things even worse. I was hoping that informing Gaia about your dangerous future actions would make your appalling timeline disappear and you along with it. Apparently, temporal mechanics don’t work that way.”

 

Yasuda pushed a button. A lab wall panel slid away. The trolley began trundling toward the opening. “Hence, the Institute’s waste-matter reclamator.”

 

The man’s struggles intensified. “In the history books, Professor Axel Yasuda was a man of peace. He wouldn’t harm a fly. Pleeeeease!”

 

“There are always trade-offs.”