Commie Conspiracy

Source

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He surrounded the cup to disguise the trembling of his handcuffed hands, and yet the chain tinkled against the metal table. The room, lined with yellowish padding, was barely furnished with a steel table screwed to the floor and chairs. On the longest wall, a large mirror reflected the occupants of the tiny room.

So you come from the future to stop a Soviet conspiracy that began 60 years ago.

—62. Again, the Soviets found a way to travel through time and allocated monumental resources to finance the project. This caused a dent in their economy and years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union. But they had foreseen it, they considered that once the world was conquered, any negative economic consequences could be eliminated by traveling to the past.

—And you claim that the project was successful to a certain point.

—Of course, can' t you see? Communists are everywhere, they dominate the media, they ask for abortions, they pass laws, they smoke cigars, they control the world. But it was a partial success, only Soviet women called chrononauts travel in time. Men, for an unknown reason, go mad when they travel.

—And did you manage to travel successfully?, are you sane?

—Absolutely, don't I look like one?

The man sipped some warm coffee, sighed incredulously and looked tired at the mirror on the wall. On the other side, in the darkness, a man lit a cigarette and after much meditation, said to his companion:

—Despite your diagnosis, I believe what your patient says.

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This is the translation of a micro story written for the MicroCiFi256 contest organized by @trenz. In it, participants must write a sci-fi story based on an assigned topic in a maximum of 256 words, this time the topic was "The Chrononauts". Unfortunately, translations from Spanish to English are impossible using the exact same number of words so that condition is not fulfilled here.

This time, the theme has a particularity that I can not translate due the difference between Spanish and English and how we treat genders. In Spanish, we use "los" or "las" as a way to indicate gender but in English, this does not happen, so in this particular case "The Chrononauts" are women. I hope you enjoy it