Good news from the European National Lottery Foundation

by Luc Reid

As scams go, this one was lousy. But only one person had to fall for it for it to work.

“Hello, this is Arthur Gentry from the European National Lottery Foundation,” I said when she picked up. “Is Mr. Thomas Geiger in?”

She said the usual thing.

“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. Actually, I wasn’t. Sometimes Geiger wasn’t dead, and on those calls I just hung up. Angry dead men unnerved me.

“I’m sorry to disturb you at a time like this,” I said, “But I may have some very good news for you. Did Mr. Geiger tell you about the European National Lottery Foundation ticket he purchased on July third? No? Then, perhaps you can find the ticket? I’ll wait.”

When she finally gave up forty minutes later, I resumed the patter. I assured her that if she could supply proper identification, she could still get her prize, after some legal costs.

“… I know,” I said at the end. “I don’t understand it either, but gold bullion is what the lawyers said.” Wait, and … laugh. “So, overnighted today, all right? OK, then. Yup. Buh-bye.”

I hung up, then took out the pocket universe hopper and chose the next universe in the sequence, at two hours behind the one I was in. The hopper could create any time shift I wanted between two universes, but two hours was about the most I could manage without getting violently ill.

I already knew what the new universe would be like: all the others. Very little changes from one version of reality to the next. That’s why I was working the same scam over and over, in universe after universe. Pretty soon I would have enough to set me up for life.

I jumped.

The jump left me with the usual harsh, queasy feeling, and I was taken by surprise when someone slapped the hopper out of my hand from behind. Then he spun me around and kneed me in the stomach. I collapsed, wheezing, as he picked up the hopper and put it in his pocket. The funny thing was, he had a bulge of the exact same shape and size in his other pocket.

He was old, maybe late sixties, but built like a side of beef. “Mr. Geiger?” I finally managed to gasp. But if he already had a hopper, that meant he was going to take the hopper he’d just gotten from me and hop back in time to give it to himself–

“I want to talk to you,” he said, “about my wife.” And he leaned over me like a falling piano.

The Voice of Europa

by Edd

It started three days ago when the Statue of Liberty uprooted itself. Shaky camphone footage showed it shivering, gouts of broken concrete fountaining up around its base, then it simply floated upward, one hapless tourist from Indiana caught inside.

The same thing happened to the Great Pyramid of Giza a few hours later, a lone archeologist unable to escape with the rest. A small submarine on display at the Teknorama Museum in Stockholm was next. A sixteen-wheeler in Venezuela, houses in Milan, Osaka, and Capetown, Cinderella’s Castle from Hong Kong Disneyland.

Each of them with one passenger. It was enough, people said, to make you think it was done on purpose.
Telescopes tracked the Pyramid, the largest of the lot, as it sailed through space. Astronomers tracked its course, said it was destined for Europa, sixth moon of the planet Jupiter.

And then there’s me, Lydia Parkhouse of Melbourne, a City Circle tram driver. Two hours ago I was caught up with my streetcar and pulled across the solar system without so much as a how do you do. My car’s not airtight, but not a drop of air escaped.

Europa, at least that’s what it had to be, expanded in my windscreen. It’s grey, with ice at the poles. Red lines crisscross it like map lines that almost make sense. I land in a cluster of odd objects dominated by a pyramid at one end and a castle at the other. When I emerge, still breathing, the voice tells me, tells all of us, what comes next.

We look at one another, we lonely long distance travelers, before entering our vehicles once more.