I have a new story out! “The War on Space and Time” is the July story over at GigaNotoSaurus. And it’s free to read, so why not take a look?
It’s another of my Bletchley Park stories – I’ve been writing a sort of series of weird SFF shorts about the WW2 research at BP because that’s a period of history that genuinely fascinates me. But this story isn’t just about Bletchley – it bounces back and forth between the Park and WW2 Los Alamos. And both the Manhattan Project and breaking the German codes are having strange effects… In New Mexico, the research seems to be stretching the land so that buildings which were once next door to each other are now miles apart, while in Buckinghamshire space is collapsing in on itself… and in both locations, a set of twins is struggling with the war and with each other.
Bletchley Park
Helen woke to a room grown smaller than before. It was no illusion, no result of short sleep and poor light, a head grown soft and malleable under code. Her knees knew before her brain. They barked up against the bed that lay beside her own, the iron of its railings, the thin mattress and the covers all smoothed over.It had not been a large room to begin with. There were too many men, too many women, and all the billets were taken, all the houses filled. Helen never minded sharing – she’d shared with her sisters all her life, six of them, and sharing a room now with only one of them – and that her twin, the closest of all – was a marvel of quiet and space in comparison. Even if it were only a small room, even if it were only two feet between cots and one of those feet gone now: the walls coming inwards, the beds inching closer together and that was something they had tried before, her and V., cuddling together for warmth and comfort when news of bombs came in, and battles.
But the two beds pushed together made it harder to get through the door, so Helen and V. had pushed them back into place, the little narrow beds, and gone to sleep with their arms stretched across the gap, their hands clasped together in darkness. It wasn’t the same, but it was hard to balance themselves together on a narrow bed and sleep when concentration was required of them in the waking hours, in the shifts before Colossus, in the codes and ciphers and breaking of Bletchley. Now, the beds were somehow shifting towards each other again….
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