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Kayıp Rıhtım was originally founded on fantasy and science fiction, and today it is a platform that touches every aspect of literature and life. It started broadcasting in the first month of 2008. In addition, they have been publishing a selection of short stories on a different theme every month for thirteen years.
I took part in the March 2022 selection with the theme of Uçan Balon (Flying Balloon) with my story called En İyi İhtimal (The Best Possible World).
Genre: Speculative Fiction / Sci-fi
Word Count: ~1800 words
Reading Time: 7 mins
Translator: Enes Talha Coşgun (Edited and polished by Gizem Çetin)
Original Story: Read “En İyi İhtimal” in Turkish
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She had slept the whole way. It took the drone of the crowd, the announcements reminding overdue drivers of their departure times, and the men wheeling iron carts up and down the aisles selling tea, coffee and every other drink imaginable, before she could finally pry her head off the blue-flowered seat. Even then she had to wait a few seconds to find her balance, squeezing her eyes shut, opening them again, rubbing her temples. If she hadn’t dreaded a crowd of strangers gathering around her, she would have slapped herself.
Once everyone else was off, she stood and stepped carefully out of the bus. Sweat had flattened her hair, and her clothes hung on her like a winter coat carried around in spring. Had she been sure she wouldn’t end up starring in some headline, “You Won’t Believe What This Woman Did at the Bus Terminal! 28-year-old Ç.N. …”, she would have stripped down to nothing. She settled for peeling off her paving-stone-grey track jacket and knotting it around her waist. That helped a little.
Her throat was parched, her stomach ablaze. She walked into AŞTİ, Ankara’s great bus terminal, and headed for the first kiosk she saw. She picked out a sandwich and a juice and handed over a small note. Then she saw the look on the vendor’s face, and her own eyes went wide. A mistake. One careless moment that could ruin everything.
“Miss, this money…” the vendor began.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” She snatched the note back. “You’re right, it’s out of circulation. Wrong one. I was taking it to the Central Bank. Sorry about that. Here you go.”
“God bless.”
She found a seat on one of the perforated-steel benches. Her name was Çiğdem. For a moment she studied the twenty-lira note she had almost handed over. In the margin, faint and pencilled, someone had written:
“Don’t forget Ghazali and Leibniz.”
Çiğdem swallowed and pressed her lips together. She slipped the note into her pocket and started on the sandwich, tearing into it in big, fast bites, as if she could chew her fury away. If she hadn’t been so guarded, so turned in on herself, she would have screamed. If she had let herself think about where she was, she would have torn her hair out until someone locked her in the nearest asylum. To take her mind off things she watched the travellers come and go, until it struck her that the solid look of matter was itself only a kind of traveller, rippling across a sea of probability. She stopped watching. Quantum physics had a way of doing that. She looked up at the giant clock hanging from the ceiling and sipped her juice. Paying attention to taste calmed her.
At twelve noon on the dot, Çiğdem started. She fixed her eyes on the automatic door nearest Platform 58 and waited, running through her instructions in her head. It wasn’t long before an elderly woman in a headscarf and baggy şalvar trousers appeared in the doorway, a boy beside her. His head was shaved, his face smudged with dirt, and he wore a pale blue T-shirt.
The old woman didn’t look like she was catching any bus. She drifted among the passers-by, reciting the same tired lines in a wail borrowed from mournful arabesque songs, nudging the child forward and holding out her palm. Once Çiğdem was certain these were the people she’d come for, she got up, jingling the coins in her pocket, the ones still in circulation, and caught the beggar woman before she could turn and leave.
“Here you are, auntie,” she said, pressing the coins into the old woman’s hand. Out of the same pocket came a small bar of chocolate.
“And this is for you.” She looked the boy in the eye and gave him a small, aching smile. “For the best possible world.”
The boy said nothing. As he fumbled with the wrapper, Çiğdem turned her head away to hide her tears. That was it. That was all she had come to do in the Ankara of two hundred and fifty years ago.
Now she had to board a bus bound for Istanbul and get off halfway, at a lonely roadside stop whose name she had memorised. She had to walk out into an empty field that belonged to no one and find the iron hatch hidden under the dirt. She had to lift it, climb down into the structure below, and climb into ATADÜM, Atom Altı Düzen Manipülasyonu (Subatomic Order Manipulation) to go home to the time she was born in.
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ATADÜM had been designed as a transparent sphere, just large enough for a person of average build to curl up inside it in the foetal position. The smaller the surface area, the less energy it used, and a sphere had the smallest surface of all.
The system worked by swapping subatomic particles for their antiparticle twins. This made it possible to slip loose from the natural current people called the arrow of time, and travel backward or forward along it. It was a little like a hot-air balloon lifting off the ground and rising into the sky, and so its parts had been named to match. The space reserved for the traveller was the basket; the chamber where particles were collided was the balloon; the collision itself was firing, and the shift in time was ascent.
Çiğdem climbed into the basket and waited for the machine to register her. She heard the chime of confirmation. Then the world began to darken, and to go quiet, so quiet that she could no longer hear even her own breathing.
The most beautiful part of the journey was about to begin.
Lights bloomed everywhere at once, the way a universe might burst from a fertile void. The flood of light looked like coral tangled up in fireworks, and it seemed to be every colour at the same time: purples, blues, melon-oranges and greens folding into one another, pinks and tangerines rolling in waves. There was no telling how far away any of it was. Everything was sharp and blurred at once. One moment it was like gazing at a star at the far edge of the cosmos; the next, it seemed pressed right up against the glass.
Her ears filled with high, thin sounds. She seemed to hear, layered on top of one another, a little girl screaming, a baby crying itself raw, fingernails dragged across floorboards. Strangely, it was harmonious, and it didn’t hurt to listen. It came from nowhere in particular: wherever she turned her face, the sound seemed to come from there. Sometimes it came from inside her own head.
Çiğdem had trained hard for this mission, and she knew the sounds and the lights were her own brain at work. The flames she saw were her own dreams; the screams she heard were her true inner voice. Subatomic order manipulation cut the body off from the outside world and interfered with the signals passing between nerve cells.
The journey had another effect, too: it could undo some of the changes made within the manipulated stretch of time. Usually the effect was minor. If Çiğdem had cut her hair at the bus terminal, for instance, most of the change would have survived.
In a paradox, though, the effect was overwhelming. A traveller who went back and killed her own grandfather would simply evaporate on the return trip. So would one who visited her childhood self and passed along certain information.
The trick was never to cause a self-paradox. As long as a time traveller did nothing to affect her own existence, she was safe. Within that limit she could change the past and, through it, the present. She could kill someone and erase the shadow they cast in the present day. She could hand someone in the past knowledge of the future. But there was no margin for error, and every act, however small, had to be weighed against the near-infinite consequences it might set in motion.
No one could become a time traveller except agents who had completed the required training and passed the examinations. Only a handful of changes, chosen by computer, were ever permitted. And every change had a single purpose: to find the best possible outcome. The best in the long run, for the whole universe. Some of the laws drawn up after ATADÜM’s invention had taken their inspiration from Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity.
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All of that was in the regulations. But there was one quality a time traveller was expected to have that was written down nowhere: the willingness, if it came to that, to erase her own existence. It was unwritten, but the law demanded it all the same. Harm to the agents themselves was never valid grounds for cancelling a necessary change.
At the ATADÜM center there worked an agent who would breathe in the scent of his fiancée’s hair, kiss her one last time, and send her off on a journey carrying the very orders that would unmake him.
“Find the beggar and the boy in the blue T-shirt at the designated place,” he had told her. “Delay them. My great-grandfather and everyone who came after him will never be born. That chain of events will set off the consequences that lead to ATADÜM never being invented.”
It had begun when the system decided to eliminate itself. Every probability it ran showed terrorists abusing the system in the near future. The change in the past, then, had to prevent ATADÜM from ever being invented. Holding up a beggar boy for a few minutes as he passed through AŞTİ sometime in the 2000s would produce the least destructive chain of cause and effect.
The only significant side effect was that a certain marriage, long ago, would never take place. The agent’s great-grandfather would never be born. The agent and his family would never exist, but the catastrophe would never happen.
To Çiğdem, it was madness. She had taken her fiancé’s hands and begged him. “You can’t destroy our future to save the universe’s.” And: “Just because some idiot computer says the system is bound to be misused someday, we’re supposed to wipe it out completely?”
He had accepted it with quiet composure. In the days leading up to the journey, he tried to calm her. He spent every hour with her he could, held her and kissed her as if he could never get enough. Not that refusing would have changed anything. Though he hid it well, he was afraid. This wasn’t death. It wasn’t having existed once and then being struck from the ledger of the future. It was being erased from the timeline entirely. Nonexistence was an unknown the mind could not hold.
“God doesn’t forget,” he would whisper to himself, trying to get past the fear. “God never forgets His servant.”
When the day came, Çiğdem told him she meant to secretly write his name on the banknotes she would carry as part of her cover. That way, even if she lost him, his name would still be written down somewhere.
“Don’t write my name,” he said. “You won’t even remember why you wrote it. Just don’t forget Ghazali and Leibniz: this world could not have been made any better.”
Those were the last words she heard from him. The words she wrote on the money. Don’t forget Ghazali and Leibniz.
She came out from under the reign of the lights. The basket opened. The journey was over. Çiğdem stepped out into her own time.
She froze, and bit her lip.
The place was empty and cold. The lights and the heating were dead; the power had been cut. On any ordinary day ATADÜM blazed with light and was always crowded. Scientists and agents never left the center empty.
Then she noticed someone waiting a little way off, an agent. When she realised she knew him, her heart began to pound so hard it felt like it would split her skin. “Erdem…” she said, running to him. “Erdem, you’re…”
Erdem was her fiancé. The agent whose birth her journey was supposed to have prevented.
But in his eyes there was only a deep disappointment. “May I ask what you’re doing here?” he said, in a flat, hollow voice.
Çiğdem’s mind stopped. “I…” she stammered. “I did everything you told me to. Everything the computer wanted. I did it knowing it would cost me you.” Her voice rose until she was shouting. “I held up the boy in the blue T-shirt. What’s going on? What happened to this place?”
“Knowing it would cost you me?” His face had softened, but the way he stood was still a stranger’s. “Were you given an assignment, then?”
Çiğdem felt the urge to tear her hair out. “Have you lost your mind?” she screamed. “Why are you talking to me like that? Like I’m a stranger?”
“How else should I talk to you?” he said, bewildered.
“What do you mean, how else? We. Are. Engaged.” She leaned on every syllable. “I… I don’t understand. When reality changes, both of us should adjust to it. If you don’t know me in the new reality, then I shouldn’t know you either. And the computer’s plans have never once been wrong. You were supposed to be gone when the mission was over. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad to know you, but… something has gone badly wrong.”
He had listened with a smile that kept widening, and now he burst out laughing. Çiğdem, her nerves in shreds, could do nothing but swallow and stare. He fought the laughter down. “I’ll explain,” he said, breathless. “One last question first. What was the change for? What made me willing to cease to exist?”
As Çiğdem explained the mission, the business about stopping the terrorists, the disappointment in Erdem’s eyes gave way to wonder, and then to joy. He went down on his knees and lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them, just like in the old days, again and again…
“What are you doing?” she said, pulling her hand away. “You say you don’t know me, and then…”
“In my reality, I loved you from a distance. I was too afraid to tell you how I felt, because you were so cold. So I played a part around you. To see that you love me this much… it’s like a dream.”
“I was so scared I was going to lose you.” It was the last thing she managed to say before she dissolved into tears and threw her arms around him.
“I’m here, sweetheart,” Erdem said. “We’re together now…”
After a while Çiğdem drew back, wiping her eyes. “Why is the power out?”
“Because there isn’t a center anymore. There’s no ATADÜM.”
“What?”
“In my reality, I was the one who went on the mission,” Erdem said. “Same mission, same goal. I was going to stop that boy in the blue T-shirt at the bus terminal in Ankara and keep my great-grandfather’s marriage from happening. ATADÜM would disappear, and so would I.”
Çiğdem said nothing, and listened.
“I was calm when I left. Being erased frightened me, but I didn’t really care. I thought about you. I wished you happiness. I thought it would be like falling asleep. And yet here I am.”
“What happened to me?”
“Nothing. The only explanation is that either you were erased somehow too, or there’s a parallel you still living on in our old realities, with no idea any of this happened.”
“So where are we…” she started.
“We’re in the balloon!” he said cheerfully, throwing his arms wide. “There’s no power because there’s no outside. We’re in a sealed-off parallel universe.”
“What do you mean, there’s no outside?”
“See for yourself. Pick a direction and run.”
Çiğdem took a deep breath, stepped forward, looked at Erdem one last time, and ran for the exit. There should have been a door ahead of her, but there was only darkness. Wherever she passed, the dark lit up, as if a lamp were burning somewhere inside her belly. Then the darkness fell away completely, and Çiğdem came running back to Erdem from the opposite direction.
“What the hell?” she gasped.
“I’ve run every way there is. Tried everything.” Erdem folded his arms. “The laws of physics seem to work the way they always did. But there’s no one here, and no way out. We can’t get past a certain boundary.”
She was staring at some vague point in the distance, thinking.
“We’re in the balloon,” he said. “A tiny balloon drifting free between universes.”
“What are we going to eat? What are we going to drink?”
“Huh?”
“We can’t get out. We’re going to have needs. We don’t have time to wait for bacteria to evolve.”
“I…” Erdem put a hand on his stomach. “I never thought about that.”
Çiğdem’s face had soured. “Come here,” Erdem said, pulling her close and holding her against his chest. “We’ve got three days before thirst drives us mad. Maybe in three days a source of water turns up. Maybe the laws of physics are different here and our bodies won’t need water anymore. I don’t know. I don’t care, because I’m with you. With you, who loves me. The only thing that could hurt me now is seeing you suffer.”
She opened the eyes she had closed. “Have you tried going downstairs?” she said, with sudden hope.
“No.”
“If the lower level is still there… it’s the shelter, remember? There was a storeroom. There might be something down there.” They took each other’s hands. Çiğdem couldn’t be sure whether she was truly in some other reality or simply having a very vivid dream. But whichever it was, she was inside a balloon, and she meant to enjoy the ride. And what was a dream, after all, if not a balloon let loose into the skies of the unconscious?