Spooky Action at a Distance

The first time it happened it happened to the inventor as a child, woken in her bed at night by a pounding and a splintering sound as if someone was breaking through the door. She peered out from under her My Little Pony duvet to see a disembodied hand punch a hole through the empty air above her. The hand, a woman's, groped blindly over the pillow and over the little girl before alighting on Brown Teddy. The girl held tight to her bear but was not strong enough, the hand prised it out of her fingers and took it from her.

The technique, to punch a hole in time and yank some item into the present, took the world by storm. People retrieved their childhood toys, jewellery that they had gone on to lose, records that had later become collectors items, loved and long missed pets, and, as the technology advanced and larger holes were created, entire people were pulled bodily into the future.

It did not always work out. Deceased parents resumed their disapproval; Hitler refused to repent; Jim Morrison found new drugs; Elvis became fat and embarrassing twice as fast; Mozart claimed the clamour of modern life killed the music in his head; Einstein, who had founded the branch of physics that made his revival a possibility, found himself baffled by the advances that had happened in his absence; Steve McQueen, brought back to star in his own biopic, drove the Ducatti he had been gifted by the manufacturer into a bridge on his way to the set.

There were other problems that became apparent later. Every time a hole was created so was a new universe. The waveform collapsed and a new world was retroactively formed without whatever was taken. The moral consequences dawned slowly, it was easy to take a toy from a child who only existed in a separate plane of reality. It was mooted that things should be taken only just before they were lost anyway, but the older Rembrant proved fat and useless, the LP scratched, Brown Teddy spittle stained and threadbare.

The effect was cumulative. The girl who had Brown Teddy taken from her grew up to take Big Ted from her younger self, and that girl grew up to take Jean Paul Pig, and so on until there was a little girl who's every toy was stolen into nothing by disembodied hands. Worse happened, the universe that survived without the Rolling Stones went on to steal the Kinks from another. The universe that never saw the Mona Lisa stole the Haywain. The universe without the Empire State Building appropriated for itself a second Golden Gate Bridge. The universe that had exhausted its oil wells pumped another's dry.

Finally, the first inventor, while sleeping, was yanked by a separate version of herself bodily through a hole into a world without music or art, a world without equal rights, a world barely out of the dark ages. 'See how you bloody like it,' said her abductor, and, taking Brown Teddy from her, climbed back through the hole to take her place.