Extant by Anthony Vicino

Anthony Vicino is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. So when he sent me this story and asked if I would read it I said of course! then I realized I already owned it..I know, it’s sad when you get a book more than once. Don’t deny it, you know you’ve all fought with Amazon demanding to buy a book that they refuse to let you click on, and then after 10 minutes of you being sure that the whole system is broken and you’re convinced you are going to have to call customer service you finally read what’s on the screen and you realize that it’s been trying to tell you this whole time that you already own the book. No? That’s just me? Okay then moving on…

Let’s start with the blurb, totally snatched from goodreads: Manipulating time always comes at a cost. For Special Agent Kaelyn Kwon, Blinking means living with one foot in the past and one foot in the present. Torn between memories of what was, and what could have been, she must use her power to decide what is yet to be.
A 10,000 word short adventure filled with action, time travel, and intrigue!

It is a shortie, I originally owned it in an anthology called The Time Travel Chronicles but since I still haven’t gotten around to reading the whole thing I’m going to stick to just talking about this story.

What I really liked about this book was the concept. You’ve got this place where people can control time, but it’s limited to 32 seconds (there are reasons for this, reasons I accept) and three different abilities. You have ones who can move forward in time, backwards, or freeze time. My favorite part was when three of them were working together, it was backwards, forward, forward, forward, backwards, stop, forwards, (please don’t quote me on that order I just made it up) but it felt like a rush constant time flipping I felt the craziness of that and loved it. Also as Anthony does so well there was an standard plot rescue mission and then the deeper psychological plot of how time travel effected the traveler.

This story did leave me with many questions about the world and the players within but it was a great read and from what I understand a great set up for the next book to come. It’s on sale now for $0.99 from Amazon, you know what I’ll even be nice and throw up a link for you to go grab it. Support your local indie author today, and read a fun short story, everyone wins!