During the final year of my Masters Degree, I was asked to submit to the annual anthology. They usually have a theme for each year but for one reason or another they decided that for the 2026 anthology the topic would be open.
his story was one of those times where I started writing, no agenda, and it just flowed. It took around two hours to write and it had very little editing, other than a couple suggested by Ashley Lister.
It’s one of my favourite short stories.
JOURNEY
by Simon Dooley
I took a tentative step out of the portal, it was instantaneous, as though moving from one room to another, but I knew I’d travelled countless light years. It was what I’d worked on for years, a theory that had proven true, not that gloating about it would do me any good now. There wasn’t anyone left to gloat to.
My foot stepped onto the foreign ground; it felt strange, soft almost. It could have been that gravity was likely different here. I saw three suns as I glanced up at the sky – I wasn’t expecting that. I inhaled deeply, if the atmosphere was going to kill me, I might as well find out now. As I breathed in the air, new aromas almost overloaded my senses, too many to focus on just one. I stood still and slowly exhaled; I thought I might pass out from the sheer amount of new information from that single breath. I laughed; a short relief laugh, the kind you might let out when you’ve had a near death experience and survived. The one that actresses used all the time in movies after escaping the relentless serial killer. Of course, their laugh was short lived because quite often the killer was standing right behind them ready to slit their throats.
A sudden dread washed over me at that thought and I quickly looked around. Nothing but the portal. I sighed, then suddenly remembered that I’d be dead and so would this world if I didn’t close the portal presently. Pulling the remote out of my pocket I gave one last glance through the rift at my lab, and beyond, through the window to the world, my old world, that was quickly vanishing into the unstoppable darkness. I pressed the topmost button on the remote and the gateway closed. I stared at the space where the rift had been for what seemed like hours but it was probably only minutes. Sobbing I tossed the remote away, it was of no use now. There was no way back. Even if I could go back, there was no planet left to return to. I was alone, probably the last surviving human anywhere in the universe. Earth had been destroyed.
45 Minutes Earlier
France
Dr Jack Williams walked up to the control panel and gave it a cursory glance, a quick scan to make sure that nothing had changed since the last time he’d checked the readings: which was less than two minutes earlier. He was nervous, not because of what could happen, he was confident that what his peers postulated was nothing but hyperbole, but this was the first time he’d been placed in charge of a project as large as this one.
Two years earlier, in 2038, Jack Williams had become the first physicist in charge of the new Future Circular Collider. A prestigious position and one that he held with pride and professionalism. In forty-minutes the collider would be officially activated after months of testing. The inaugural experiment would be to accelerate matter to the speed of light – the first time this had ever been attempted – and smash that matter into anti-matter in the hopes of discovering the elusive Higgs-Boson particle.
Silicon Valley
Five thousand miles away in San Francisco I, Dr Alex Anderson, was doing the final checks on my project. For the past thirty years I’d been attempting to create time-travel. I’d been obsessed ever since I was a teenager and had seen the classic movie ‘Back to the Future’. It was already forty years old by the time I’d seen it in 2025, but the narrative held my attention and made me determined to create my own flux capacitor. Because of that movie I studied physics and computer engineering.
2025 also brought about a new wave of Artificial Intelligence or AI as it had been described back then. Now we knew better and called it Accelerated Automative Technology, as there hadn’t ever been any intelligence attributed to this applied science; it just became another tool we used. However, it did cause a raft of job losses, mostly in the humanities and arts sectors; authors, copywriters, artists, musicians and so on. There were also huge job losses in repetitive industries such as warehouse staff, civil service, secretaries etc.; if it could be automated, it was. They’d all had no option but to retrain for positions in other industries; no government legislation had been created to protect them. However, this technology had aided me in my research and allowed me to open doors I didn’t know were possible. One of those possibilities I was about to test this evening.
Ever since I’d fed my theory into the physics agentic used by my lab, I had become obsessed with what it had proposed. The autonomous program theorised that, along with my hypothesis of time travel using Quantum Mechanics and the existence of Chronomatter, there was another theory that included instantaneous teleportation through time and space. That had been five years ago and now – with the help of funding from the private sector – I was going to test that hypothesis.
I looked down at the control panel and then through the transparent aluminum window at ‘The Device’ in the sealed room. We called it ‘The Device’ because it sounded more dramatic than its true name, ‘Time and Relative Dimensional Instantaneous Shift’. I’m nothing if not geeky. Everything was showing green which meant we’d be good to go in about twenty minutes time.
France
Jack Williams paced around his lab. Various technicians were busily moving from computers to consoles in an orchestrated dance. Each one completing their task. The constant movement was irking Dr Williams, but he knew the bustle was necessary. It was his own nerves making him feel agitated, nothing more. He took a deep breath to calm himself. It didn’t work. He looked at the watch on his wrist. Ten minutes and he would usher in a new era for science.
Silicon Valley
I walked around the consoles one last time and as before we were good to go. My assistant came over to me with a remote control in her hand.
“Here you go Alex.” She handed me the remote, “I can’t believe you’re going to be the world’s first time traveller.”
I was too nervous to get into a conversation, so I took it from her, thanked her, and stepped into the chamber. She closed the door behind me.
5 minutes to go.
France
Jack Williams got the all clear from every station around the 95-mile-long circular facility. He smiled, “Here we go,” he muttered to himself and flipped the switch. Almost immediately alarms sounded all around him. One of the other physicists slowly backed away from his monitoring station, before turning and running. Jack grabbed him as he tried to pass.
“What is it? What’s gone wrong?”
The physicist released himself from Jack’s arms and said, “Jesus, we’ve created a …”
Jack never heard the rest. At that moment they both winked out of existence into the inescapable void of intense gravity.
Silicon Valley
I pressed the activate button on the remote and ‘The Device’ burst into life. It didn’t need time to warm up. Instantly a rift appeared, a dimensional gateway into another world. Moments before there had just been an arch with a view to the other side of the lab, now it was a plethora of possibility. We had fed the spatial coordinates of TRAPPIST-1e into the system and I assumed that was what was in front of me right now.
I turned to look through the window at my assistant, but all I saw was chaos, people running, but I couldn’t see from what. Then my assistant’s voice came over the intercom.
“Alex, they’ve done it. Those crazy bastards at CERN have done it. They switched it on and instantly created a black hole. Get out of here Alex, there’s nothing you can do. Nothing any of us can do.”
She didn’t say anymore, just turned and ran. I glanced up at the far window to the view outside of the lab. At first I could see nothing unusual, but I began to feel heavier. Then I saw the metal framework of the building slowly begin to bend. The window shattered in the far corner of the lab and outside, in the distance, I observed everything disappearing and darkness quickly approaching. I had no choice; I stepped through the portal.
TRAPPIST-1e
After I closed the doorway back to home, I breathed more of the extraterrestrial air and let out the loudest scream I’d ever done. I looked out at the alien landscape, I was alone; everyone I knew was gone. My home, my life, I had nothing. Suddenly paralysed with grief I slumped to the grassy ground, head in my hands. The temperature was balmy and all seemed calm until I heard a thunderous, frightening, roar in the distance.
I wasn’t alone.