Good Evening, welcome to the latest in my series of doing daily writing exercises. Hope you enjoy! Please leave your feedback and your own responses to the prompt.
Prompt: A smartphone app predicts the user’s future by sending them brief glimpses into it.
Genre: Time Travel
Source: 150 Time Travel Writing Prompts — GripRoom
Time Spent: 30 minutes
Word Count: 759
Prompt: A smartphone app predicts the user’s future by sending them brief glimpses into it.
There are few hard points of transition in history, regardless of what certain historians like to argue, but everyone will remember the date when the smartphone app The Day Ahead appeared.
Three years of searching by every government, many companies, and millions of individual people had tried and failed to discover who had developed it. There had been no rumors of it, even in the deepest of dev chatrooms on both the web and dark web, but one day, there it was, The Day Ahead, developed by thefuture, on every app store.
The app was very similar, once a day, at random, the app would display for the user a 10 second video of something that would take place within the following 24 hours. At first people downloaded it and viewed the videos as a joke. But then they started coming true. Not just a few, not just some, but EVERY single video turned out to be completely true.
Often the video of the future was something boring, or inane, like climbing a set of stairs, but not always. Sometimes, however, it was something more serious: a first kiss, an accident, finding something you lost, or even, sometimes, one’s death.
There was no pattern to this, not that anyone could find anyway, but the panic and terror it engendered ground society to a halt virtually overnight in a kind of existential terror. This only intensified when it became obvious that the fate the app showed was all but impossible to avoid. Some of the details might change, like the app could show the user falling down the stairs of the subway and breaking their neck, so they decided to stay at home and instead fell down their own stairs and broke their neck. And that was nothing compared to what happened when it was discovered that, occasionally, the fate could be avoided.
Overnight, whole industries sprung up claiming to offer ways to avoid what was shown in the app and the live insurance industry collapsed and then reformed in the course of a week as companies adapted their plans and policies to accommodate this new reality. Within a year, virtually all of society was organized in one way or another around the app and whole new fields of philosophy sprang up with arguing how to handle this new reality.
I was just getting done with my shift working as a customer service representative at FutureSafe Co., one of the leading firms offering services to help people avoid the worst fates that the app showed them, when I got my daily notice from The Day Ahead.
I had become something of an Accepter in the last few years, treating the app as just an inevitability and not bothering much about trying to avoid, or bring on as some did, what was being shown. With a feeling of boredom I picked up my phone, pulled up the app, and selected the day’s video.
I watched the video three times in increasing confusion. It was night in our parking lot and as I walked to my card, three figures in dark robes appeared from the shadows, approached me, a few words seemed to be exchanged, then we all disappeared and the video ended.
For the first time, I felt genuine trepidation about what would happen next. Even the video nearly a year ago of me breaking my arm had not much changed my routine. Oddly, I felt in that moment that if the app had shown my death, I would have been less scared. Something about the total strangeness of the scene filled me with a weird mixture of terror and curiosity. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever received a video even remotely like this.
I thought, for a few moment, about taking advantage of the various offers and services that FutureSafe offered, and were deeply discounted or free to employees, but something about the sudden appearance and then disappearance of these strange, robed figures, made me suspect in the end that no amount of security systems, safe rooms, or other forms of protection were going to be of much use in this unique situation.
With a sigh, I got up from my desk, packed away my things, and headed out the door. I tried to breath deep, hold, and then exhale slowly to calm my heartrate, but there was no avoiding the nerves within me that made me twitch at every shadow.
Sure enough, just as the app had predicted, as I approached my car three figures in robes seemed to appear in the shadows and they approached me. Up close I could see the robes were a dark grey.
Stopping short of me, the central of the robed figures, addressed me in a deep voice, “Sydney Lambert, I am glad we found you. You must come with us. We only have a limited window in this time period and our calculations say you are our best chance at finding and fixing whatever is destroying the timeline.”
My mouth dropped open in surprise and confusion as one of the other figures pulled from their robes a strange metal x looking thing that had some kinds of buttons in the center and grips on each end.
The main figure seemed almost frantic, “please, I promise I will explain everything to you when we reach The Haven, and if you don’t want to help, we can take you back to right here.”
With a deep breath and a gulp, I reach out and took the un-held handle of the device, which whirred to life and seemed to make time around us stand still, and closed my eyes. That was the last anyone in that year ever saw of me.
I hope that you enjoyed! I would love to read your response to this prompt as well and also what you think of what I wrote! I day late, by the name Sidney Lamber is a nod to the creators of my favorite TV Show, Doctor Who, which were Sidney Neuman and Varity Lambert.
I hope you all have a wonderful day, get the chance to do or experience something creative, and I’ll catch you on the next one.
– Jon
Leave a comment