Short story

What follows is a little story I've begun to write, don't expect too much of it, knowing me, I'll just get stuck after two or three pages, but I thought I owed it to myself to publish at least something of what I've written, besides these blogs. So I hope you enjoy it and fingers crossed, it might just have a proper ending!


"Now you have all the time in the world"
 These days advertisements were everywhere. We thought we had it bad in the early days when it was just Internet that was flooded with spam and e-advertisement. Now, the whole world was wrapped into one commercial. Phones, cinemas, traffic lights, building exteriors, rooftops, airplanes, the works. But all ads of food, drinks and movies paled in the sight of the Tempus Enterprise wall-to-wall ads.
It was around ten years ago that scientists cracked the code to the space-time continuum. It began as a military application, like so many other technologies, but after it became clear that the enemy had developed similar technologies, they decided time-travel based warfare was futile, since the other side had the same power over time. Every move could be anticipated and negated by each other’s action. So the idea was quickly abandoned and siphoned through to the corporate world.
After the patent was thrown up for sale, Tempus Enterprise was formed out of three competing companies who decided it was more profitable to cooperate than to allow a single company to gain a monopoly. One year later TE launched Personal Time, an over-the-counter time travel device. Of course, this early prototype didn’t have the capacities that the new model has, but it was enough for now to please a desperate crowd. After all, who wouldn’t want a chance to do things over, to correct past mistakes?
The first model allowed the wearer to go back ten seconds and the same amount to go forward. However small this timeframe was, it was enough to keep the crowds pleased for at least three years, during which Tempus Enterprise continued to expand its grasp on the fabric of time. Because of the high price of Personal Time - it had a six-digit number - not that many people profited from this.
Tempus Enterprise knew this and in order to avoid cheaper knock-offs they launched Me-Time, with its catchphrase “Now you have all the time in the world”. But because of the large number of people who would be causing discrepancies in time, the PERL code was established. PERL stood for Paradoxal Elimination and Rectification Licentiate. In short, in guaranteed that all paradoxes were nullified and that any time distortions were to be corrected by Me-Time’s artificial intelligence. The world however, didn’t really care about that. All it wanted to do was control the last bastion that the scientific world had to offer: time itself.
Everywhere in the world people began going backwards and forwards in time. The timeframe was expanded to allow at least ten minutes into the past or future. Time travel on a massive scale definitely had its consequences. Scientists who had designed the PERL code thought they had everything covered, but they didn’t consider the effects of millions of people simultaneously breaking through the fabric of time. Pretty soon, time storms began to form across the world, rips in the fabric of reality where the laws of time and space no longer applied. As time travel continued, the rips widened and multiplied. Soon, across every continent, entire areas were quarantined because of their temporal instability.
The first city to be ravaged by a time storm was Paris. The storm suddenly formed over the Seine and aggressively expanded its borders to encompass the entire French capitol. Three days later, the storm dissipated, but the city was gone. It had been removed from the timeline, as scientists later proclaimed. The storm had shattered the city into billions of pieces and flung it forwards or backwards in time, but either way, it was no longer a part of this present.
Soon governments across the world began to fear similar catastrophes and finances were diverted into the fabrication of barriers capable of withstanding these time storms. But it was too late.