Number: 24

Title: Echoes

Type: Original Fiction

Psychological Thriller/Horror


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Synopsis:
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A thoroughly mad scientist devises a machine which allows a subject to
travel back in time. He kidnaps a graduate student and uses him as a
guinea pig through a series of time-traveling experiments. The problem
with this method of time travel is in how it actually works. First, a
person must be killed. As they die, a set of energy emissions are
recorded and tracked. An energy pulse is sent into the subject's brain,
and just like that, they are suddenly in the dead person's body.
However, they're in the past. They literally take control of the dead
person at some point in their past. This point can be controlled
precisely by altering the pulse. However, the further back you wish to
go, the more energy is required. Current theory predicts that if you had
enough power, you could travel up a person's family tree, but no-one
knows which body you'd end up in. When the power is cut, the journey is
over. Due to the "Echo Effect," the _length_ of time one spends in the
past is the same as the length of time the pulse is applied to their
brain.

Basically, when a person dies (the donor), an energy pulse leaves the
body. A portion of this pulse, when recorded, can be amplified and sent
into another person's brain. The person receiving the pulse goes into a
deep coma, while all concious thought it sent back in time to reside
inside the donor's body for a length of time. The bad thing is that
current technology can only record part of the energy pulse, and thus,
it cannot be copied and played back at will.

The rest of the Echo Theory is that the dead person's soul is dispersed
over this life--hence the big flashback people experience in near-death
situations is a kind of precognitive view of what they will experience
once they die. When a person becomes a donor for this time machine,
however, their soul is disrupted and returns to the body after it dies,
which means that once the time travel process begins, the donor comes
back to life.

But they're not really alive. Because a part of their soul is missing,
their senses are dulled and their bodies are weak and begin to decay and
die even as they walk around and try to go on living. When the body is
decomposed, a ghost is left behind that can observe, but cannot be
observed, _except_ by the subject who was sent back in time when they
died.

The mad scientist calls the donors (post-use) Echoes.

The grad student calls the voices in his head Echoes. And together with
them, he's going to take down the mad scientist and put a stop to his
operation--assuming he can hold onto his sanity that long. You see,
while killing the mad scientist may stop future 'trips,' it won't get
rid of the Echoes for good, he thinks that maybe killing himself will.
Of course, being on a trip into the past temporarily silences them, so
maybe he'll escape there instead. But he has to kill the scientist any
way. Decisions! Decisions!

As an aside, most of the donors are old people--many of them veterans of
WWII, Korea, etc., and the student gains a great deal of their memories,
and learns from the past experiences. This comes in handy when it's time
to put a stop to the mad scientist's evil plans.