By Myna Chang
I hate rye bread. Those weird little seeds get stuck in my teeth, and then I spend all afternoon trying to suck them out. Too bad I didn’t notice they gave me the wrong sandwich. I’ve already bitten into it, excising a precise half-moon from the top right corner. Guess I’m stuck with it.
The infirmary door slides open and I walk in, chewing unhappily. Someone is sitting at my desk. She looks just like me: same frizzy hair, same rumpled lab coat, same unfortunate sandwich. She’s staring wide-eyed at a bloody cut on her fingertip. Her gaze snaps toward the med bay. Another version of me appears, only this one is older, wrinkled. She points a surgical laser at the “me” at the desk.
What the hell?
Wrinkled Me fires the laser. Desk Me lurches, knocking files and her lunch on the floor as she falls. The silhouette of Wrinkled Me fades, disintegrating into nothing. Desk Me draws a shuddering breath. Her frightened eyes lock onto mine before she, too, disappears.
I gawk at the empty space. I’d call for help, but who’d believe me? Pulse pounding, I drop my sandwich on the desk and collapse into my chair. It still holds the warmth of my predecessor.
I survey the room, noting the fallen files; patient charts, data sets, my updated resume. Everything else is just as I left it, including the PRx diagnostic tool I’d been tinkering with before my lunch break.
Damn it, I left the access panel open!
Worth more than I’ll earn in a million years, the PRx uses synthetic brain tissue to predict medical outcomes. It opens a window into the future—a fragile window. You’re not supposed to mess with the tissue compartment; you’re damn sure not supposed to pry it open and leave it exposed to airborne contaminants. My curiosity will get me in real trouble someday.
I rush to close the panel, but a sharp edge slices my finger. I yank my hand back with a hiss. Then I see it. A drop of my blood quivers on the edge of the latch. No! It drips into the open compartment, blooming crimson across the milky white tissue. The synthetic brain mass pulses. A frisson of energy surges.
Wrinkled Me shimmers into existence in the med bay, pointing the laser at me. She’s focused, confident, wearing an employee badge with a stylised red and white logo. She fires.
Pain sears my chest, and I slam into the desk as I fall. My sandwich lands on the tile near my face. A new version of me stands at the door, with a dark rye seed wedged between her front teeth.
My world dissipates.
***
I stand in the infirmary doorway, watching my look-alike vanish. There’s a mountain of spilled sandwiches on the floor, each with a neat bite taken from the right corner. I consider the sandwich in my hand. How many times has this happened?
The PRx is wide open on my desk. That’s stupid. I shouldn’t have left the delicate tissue exposed. I hurry to close the latch. Ouch! Damned rough edge. I shove my fingertip in my mouth, and then I see a bead of crimson blood dripping over the lip of the panel. It sinks into the creamy synthetic tissue. The colors blend and the brain mass shudders. A wave of energy envelops me. I try to run, but another, aged version of me is already there. She fires, and I fall.
The pile of rye sandwiches fills my vision. It should have tipped me off when I first walked in, but I ignored it. I need to warn the next iteration of me, make her see the danger in time.
Oh, she’s already in the doorway, mouth half full. She gapes, and I realise how awkward I look with my mouth hanging open. I turn my eyes to my finger, where a smear of blood glistens.
***
There must be forty sandwiches on the floor. I hate rye bread. I toss my sandwich in the trash and then spit the half-chewed bite into the bin as well. My doppelganger was so focused on her bloody fingertip. That must be important.
The PRx is open! I hope she didn’t spill any crumbs in there, or — or a drop of blood! I grab some thick biosafety gloves from the supply cabinet and nudge the sharp lid shut. It latches with a click.
I sigh and sit, glaring at the logo on the PRx. Wrinkled Me had the same thing pinned to her lab coat: a stylized blood-red PR superimposed over a precise half-moon—the exact same shape as the missing bite from all those sandwiches.
A quick search shows the maker of the PRx is hiring temporal medical researchers. Curiosity piqued, I forward my resume.
Something tells me I’ll get the job.
About the Author
Myna Chang
Myna Chang writes flash and short stories in a variety of genres.
Her speculative fiction has been featured in Best Indie Speculative Fiction 2020, Daily Science Fiction, Antipodean SF, Mad Scientist Journal, and Twist in Time, among others.
She is the winner of the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction for 2020.
Read more at <MynaChang.com> or find her on Twitter at <@MynaChang>.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Timothy Dwyer is an American science-fiction writer living in New Zealand.
Haneko Takayama is an award-winning Japanese writer. In 2009, her short story “Udon, Kitsune tsuki no” was a runner-up for the Sogen SF Short Story Award. 
Kerrie Noor was born in Melbourne Australia in 1960 but has spent most of her adult life in Scotland.
Amy Logan's first work was published on October 29, 1970. It has been a bit of a dry spell since, so she is very excited to have the opportunity to contribute to AntipodeanSF.
Keech has been writing fiction and poetry for 40 years, and is currently working on a speculative novel of the Afterlife, focusing on Victorian literature, though it is technically set in the near future.
Bruce is an older Australian, living in Adelaide, who enjoys reading and writing, especially short stories and flash fiction.
Umiyuri Katsuyama is a multiple-award-winning writer of fantasy and horror, often based on Asian folklore motifs.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
