Ripples in Time
A Flash Fiction by Jonathan Chew
It was a dry heat kinda day. Aaron wiped the sweat off his brow. The hover tractor had broke down again and he stared at the innards of the engine to reckon what was wrong… to no avail. He called his daughter over, who he knew was far smarter and far more handy than he had ever imagined she would be. She drove over in one of those new dust bubble contraptions that zing around like gravity was nothin’, and took one good 5 second look at it and also couldn’t figure it out.
“Looks like you’ll have to trade it in for a new one Dad…”
“Can’t do dat Peggy darlin’, this hear hump of junk has been wit’ us since the month when you was first born… she’s practic’ly like family…”
She remembered the stories of how her dad had moved to Jupiter Nine, a terraformed asteroid orbiting the planet Jupiter, a while back in 2154. When their communications array went down, he had to keep her mom and her alive. And soon they became the only surviving family still left, so she had learned to fend for herself over the years.
“Perseverance and Persistence,” he always used to tell her…
“…are my two other favorite children whose name start with ‘P’,” she chimed in, completing her father’s sentence, “After me of course!” And winked trailing off with a small chuckle and a heavy sigh.
She had heard that same saying many, many times before, and it always seemed to be triggered whenever something broke down, but just hearing it always made her happy.
Peggy paused, turned around, and said, “I sure miss this place…” and started to look around at the farm house where she used to live before she left, and the crops that were grown in her childhood.
She removed a device from the belt she was wearing. It had 3 smaller blue-ish buttons and one larger red button. She hit it, and for a split second the world seemed to stop, and then, all of a sudden, everything was moving backwards.
“I’m going to save you one day Dad, I promise…” and she began to wonder how the past 37 years had been for him, to never know that you were stuck in a time loop, and the only way you could be kept alive was to live out one day, and then live that same whole day backwards, and then repeat it again in exactly the same way.
She had been working on a possible solution for quite some time now, and had come back to the asteroid for the first time in a while to remind herself of the lessons her dad used to say to her, the details leading up to the accident that created this ripple in time.
Hearing this one last but familiar quote, it suddenly dawned on her, that her dad had already given her the answer all those yearsago… she WAS the missing “P” that completed the equation: Perseverance, Persistence, and Peggy…. and all she had had to do was come back.
She paused, looked around her, and noticed that time seemed to be moving forward again. She felt a hand on her shoulder, turned around, and saw her dad smiling back at her for the first time in 37 years.
