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Challenge of the Week XXXIX
You took your smartphone and moved back to 1984. For the sake of the plot, your phone works perfectly, but a condition of your year-long relocation in time is no one can see it, or know about it. You are to report back to 2023 the contrasts: With people, music, overall humanity, anything. Send texts, pics, videos, undetected. The elite group with whom you work has cracked the code of time travel and intervention, and while the race to colonize Mars rages on, your group has decided to instead go back to 1984 to reset the world, so to speak. Before that power leaves a seamless, yet indelible mark on the future, the group has to decide if it's for the better, or to go ahead and let it all run the course it's on, and start looking skyward for continuation. Make it funny, make it deep, make it dark, make it yours. Entry with the most likes takes the $25 wire. Go.
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mmandel321
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Colliding

The unbelievably rotten stank of the alien’s physiology sifted through the breeze outside the crashed capsule, getting up into my nasal passages like a thick and cloying fog. I knew it would take days to wash out, maybe weeks.

The alien’s oily, gray skin and vermilion eyes in its tiny, crouched body didn’t help one bit. It was panting and panicked, its extraordinarily large peepers darting around in abject fear.

“Okay, little buddy,” I said, “everything’s going to be cool,” knowing full well that wasn’t true. Sometime very soon this little technologically advanced critter would be laying on a gurney in some secret hospital being cut apart and photographed by doctors and military people.

I had about five minutes to complete my current assignment. I searched the iPhone strapped to my hand—invisible to everyone else in this time besides myself—for some background data. But, even with the supposedly new open access to UFO records, I couldn’t find jack.

There was nothing like this crash for 1984 of any significance anyplace south of the border and certainly no reports about little, gray beings running around stanking up the alleyways or arroyos of this town.

I coughed and sort of gagged, almost throwing up in my mouth from the stench, before I went on.

“Can you understand me?” I asked.

*Help, please. Us help. Please.*

Christ on a corndog! Telepathy? I hadn’t been trained in that. Why hadn’t they sent back a psychic or a certified remote viewer? They usually just assigned agents like me back for a year to mop up accidental, dangerous spills and unfortunate, way-too-early knowledge.

“How can I help?” I asked, honestly.

*Undo future as past. Undo crash only land. Undo taking away, pushing. Don’t cut apart, don’t cut apart, don’t cut apart…*

That’s when I heard the sirens approaching. Fucking A.

“I’m sorry to have to do this, little guy, but I think this is a hard reset situation. I’m a short-timer only here for a year, but they have included a reset app on this phone.”

*No phone. Reset no. Must survive to show. Must show all.*

“Sorry, man. We can’t risk it. This is the year it all goes south. That’s why they sent us back.”

*No south. No go. Only be…*

Two vehicles, lights flashing and sirens deafening, skid to a stop as I pressed the red button on the app.

*No! Here to help. Nooooooo…*

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