WHEN STING HAS STUNG
It’s 2020, the official year of hindsight, and when it comes to executive-class time machines you’ve got two solid options: the Phantom and the Axion.
Honestly, the Phantom and the Axion have oodles in common. Both are made by the same esteemed manufacturer, and are built from the same impossible materials. Both boast show-stopping design concepts by the same “starchitect” and offer general off-the-charts opulence. Both feature cabin chairs so comfortable that even people with unreasonable expectations for chair comfort are impressed to the max.
Either of these time machines will reliably get you to the past and back, and neither is recommended for roundtrip future travel.
The only real difference is in how they land.
When the Phantom travels through time, it appears out of thin air at the desired coordinates. Meaning you get in your time machine and strap in and you’re just there before you know it, at a place in the past like you flipped a switch in time. For a borderline-unreal achievement in science and existence, it’s an admirably efficient teleportation method. Understated, even. But not everyone’s into understated. See, people bring a lifetime of expectations and fantasies to their time travel experience, and the Phantom’s landing wasn’t enough of a landing for some of them. It lacked a certain magnificence. Anticlimactic was a word tossed around more than a few times.
So the Axion was introduced as an ultra-climactic alternative to the Phantom. The Axion enters the past through a portal in the sky, so you can soar across ancient horizons like woooosh before touching down in impressive fashion. There have been zero complaints about the Axion’s landing, which is why it’s premium-premium, and doubles the price tag. Now, plenty of people don’t care about the Big Landing and go with the Phantom.
Sting is not one of those people.
So it’s an Axion, The Desert Rose, that tears through the sky in 7th century Egypt. It makes the kind of spectacular landing that can’t go unnoticed. So it goes noticed. And a crowd has already gathered as Sting follows Roxie, his white bengal tiger, down the ramp.
You’d be right to think that in a situation like this, with a native population confronted by a rakish sky-person and his fierce exotic pet, you’ve got three main options: kill him, worship him as a god, or kill him then worship him as a god. The ancient Egyptians, bathing in Sting’s aura, an aura that transcends cultures and time, decide on option two: worshipping sans killing. They are enraptured, overcome by his beaming alpha pacifism. The Egyptians get the vibe that he’s god-like in a way that requires a bit of space to stay god-like. It’s like he—Sting—is transmitting a silent psychic signal that tells them, to a man, that he appreciates the instant devotion, that he knows himself to be worthy of the adulation, that it humbles him, but also that he would feel un-comfy with too much fuss about it beyond this moment. Because he’s got things to do.
It’s no accident that Sting arrived just in time to help invent the lute.
After a brief walk to get his bearings, Sting follows his immaculate internal compass through a maze of dusty streets and finds the door he’s here to knock on. Behind which door an instrument maker will soon put the finishing touches on the first lute in existence. Sting knocks. The door opens. Sting introduces himself. “I’m Sting.” He’s invited in, greeted with a hug and a chalice of wine. Then they get to work.
In comparison to the making of all ensuing lutes, the making of the first-ever lute would have been equally uninteresting, except for the fact that Sting leaves his soul fingerprints on this one. Roxie looks on as her passionate master breathes into the hollow body of the lute, purring as the not-impromptu essence-transference ceremony unites Sting and the lute in a place out of time, a pocket of intertwined tonal energies, a cosmic connection on levels both musical and molecular.
And that was the plan.
Or the first part of it.
The second part of the plan is for Sting to go back to the future and, after an extended meditation, possibly a period of years, to wander into a friend’s recording session where he knows there’s going to be a lute, but to not let on that he knows the lute will be there, and to pick it up like it’s an accident, and to say something like “Hey I’ve never played one of these before, can I goof around on it for a bit?” and to start playing. And any man or woman in the studio will see and hear that Sting and the lute were meant for each other. That it is the the most perfect pairing of man and instrument. Ever.
That’s Sting’s plan. And it succeeds. Which is why when it comes to naming the truest harmony in the history of the world, you’ve got one option.
This is a story from Jokebook by Michael Grant, a short story collection that he’s probably going to maybe get around to publishing. Original illustrations by Nathan Heigert.
