Dust

Sydney was erased three months ago.

Apparently it sounded like glass breaking, or old bones shattering. But no-one who heard it first hand is still around.

We just watched it on TV. One of those weeks where the 24-hour news channels actually have a reason to exist. Not that the vision was all that dynamic. Endless live footage of not-Sydney. An endless plain of featureless land, levelled and polished smooth as glass. Nothing to see there. Even the harbour was gone. Boiled. Flat. Featureless. Everything looked like one of those little patches of sand that people rake smooth to stay calm.

And they kept playing that one video. Some shaky footage of teens being idiots, committing crimes or dancing for Tik Tik or something. One of them falls over and they all laugh, happening to have a camera phone pointing the right way to capture it all. On the video it’s just a flash of light that knocks everything out for a long second, and then screaming. When whoever’s filming stops flailing, you can see the poor kid who was laid out on the ground. She must’ve been on the edge of whatever happened. The half of her over the line disappeared with everything else.

No-one knew what happened, just that five million people, and the world around them, had been annihilated. Once people got in there, through military checkpoints and in their fully encapsulated suits, they figured out that everything had been pulverised down into sand. Dogs, their owners and the cars they chased now all swirled together as nondescript grains.

I suppose we all end up in the same place eventually.

The first time a real storm came through the place it scattered everything every which way. I stood on my verandah and watched little motes fall across the lawn. They all looked the same, even though my yard was now blanketed under tiny bits of train, or brain, or modern Australian fusion restaurant.

Maybe Laura’s there too.

She was almost ready to come home. We were moving to Melbourne together in the summer to work together.

By the time we’d gotten together I’d already settled into life in a lab. We’d actually met when she came through on a tour of the place - the company trying to lure the best students as they wound up their degrees - and she’d hit me with a million little questions about my work.

We got dinner. She made fun of me talking so loftily about my dreams of invention while working such a mundane job. Sure, I said, but it paid the bills and still counted as science, right? The lab I was building in my garage, to do some real experiments on the weekend, didn’t seem to impress her.

Something must’ve though, and we were happy together.

But she wasn’t like me. Complacent. She wanted to work in a lab too. Not like mine, squirting make-up into tubes all day. So she went to Sydney, chasing a Master’s Degree and some respect. She said she’d miss me and I believed her.

Everyone warned us long distance relationships were hard. It’s comforting to think that part of her has come home, at least.

She’s all around me, really. There’s so much dust in the atmosphere now that the planet’s cooling down. People are saying we might have time now to sort out our emissions.

Laura was so worried about climate change. She’d be happy to be helping.

There’s been a weird radiation over there in not-Sydney which has slowed down the investigation. The usual conspiracy theories are online, obviously. My mother-in-law shared a meme about the concentration of 5G towers in the Sydney CBD, and had a crack at blaming vaccinations somehow. The Qanon weirdos are saying this was a weapon, a false flag set up while everyone was in lockdown during COVID. The really scared people just reckon God did it - because we let gay people marry or women be priests or something.

But I know what really happened. Right now, I’m the only one.

Because they finally got to the centre of it all today, sifting through the sand to find a cause, a detonator, an angel, anything.

They found a little gold locket. Shaped like a heart. Shiny and new like it had just been minted. Hanging from a fine gold chain.

It was just there, in the sand. The only object to survive, right at the heart of the storm, as it were.

I watched on the news as the officer picked it up. We all watched, perched vicariously over his shoulder through the long lens of the TV cameraman hovering in the helicopter above.

It swung there in silent space, dangling from the chain now wrapped around his gloved, rubberised finger.

He grabbed it with his other hand, and then he was gone. He flinched first, like he’d been bitten on the heel by a wolf he hadn’t noticed stalking him. He sort of stuttered in place, like when cartoons can’t afford proper animation, and for a tiny little second, he was just bones and light, but then he was gone. The locket fell back to the sand.

That’s all we’ve seen so far.

Thing is, I have the same locket in my garage. Laura gave it to me when she left. She made a cheesy speech about leaving her heart with me and rolled her eyes when I pointed out how cheap the thing was. A little heart with a star engraved on the front. She put a little picture of herself inside.

Honestly, that’s what gave me the idea of how to make my time machine work. I’d been trying to send back apples and pears and things - organic stuff, because I was working up to testing it myself, but it never worked. Everything was pulverised down to sand. Destroyed by the energy needed to push them back through to the past.

But wrapping something in a metal? That could shield them and make it all work. You could go back in a capsule and step out unharmed, ready to change history. Like using a diving bell to visit the ocean’s floor.

I was planning a test next week. A little piece of apple in the locket. Just to see if it would work. Just a short jump. And it looks like, well, it has worked. It will. Kind of amazing really. I wish Laura was here to see it.

Except it feels like, instead of the apple getting destroyed, the locket has flipped it somehow. Now everything around it is dust.

I need to not do the experiment, right? If I never send the locket back, this won’t ever have happened and Laura will still be alive. She always said doing nothing was one of my special skills.

Thing is, though, there’s no time to do nothing. They said on the news that oxygen levels around not-sydney were dropping, and no-one knows why. But I do. The locket doesn’t belong in this time, and it’s destroying everything nearby that does. Including the air.

It’ll take them a little time to figure it out, but as the air goes, more rushes in to fill the void. That’ll cascade until, in about three days, parts of the world will find the atmosphere around them is too thin to breathe. We’ve got about six days until the only people left are the trillionaires in their pressurised bunkers, coming up to fight for the right to keep breathing.

So, maybe I do nothing and it all snaps back to normal, but if I’m dead by then, there are no second chances. Anyway, I’d forgotten to take Laura’s photo out of the locket until the other one came back, so future me probably left it in. That means they’ll find me pretty quickly anyway, right? No chance to change anything from prison.

So I just have to correct the experiment. Send the locket back properly this time, to replace the disaster with something more benign, and erase this from ever happening. I’m sure that’s how this works. That way Laura won’t die, and she’ll come home the right way. I’ll get to see Laura again. I’ll send it back in the morning.

That’s how this works, right?

Right?