24

I’m a on a sidewalk headed toward downtown. I reach the end of the sidewalk. There’s a large red brick Baptist Church on the corner. I turn left on to another sidewalk which takes me straight into the heart of the downtown. The downtown area is in the form of a rectangle. In the center of the rectangle is the town square. The storefronts that face the town square are colorful and promise wonderful things to anyone fortunate enough to enter their doorways. The town square on a normal day is full of trees and grass and various kinds of beautiful flowers. There are benches to relax on between bouts of shopping safaris. But today is not a normal day. A job fair is being held in the town square. But that’s not all. Local Arts & Crafts are on display and barbeque, hot dogs, and miscellaneous other foodstuffs are for sale to the hungry job seeker and art connoisseur wannabe.

Canopy tents are set up all over the town square. Different companies, some local, some from other parts of the state, are interviewing eager applicants. They are mostly young but there are older applicants as well. I stroll around, enjoying the crowded atmosphere. Most of my walking is done on lonely highways and in deserted forests. It’s nice to be incognito in a crowd.

Then I see a sign attached to one of the canopy tents that shouldn’t surprise me, even though it does. It reads:

PSI

Possible Solutions, Inc.

Hiring Now

“You are in our future!”

Sure enough, when I peeked under the tent, I saw the man and the woman of the future sitting at a portable table talking to a young lady who sat across from them. When they saw me, they motioned for me to sit down beside them. They didn’t appear surprised at all. They were expecting me, of course.

As it was, they were just about finished interviewing the young lady. When the interview, was over, they thanked the young lady. Then the man reached into a basket that was sitting on the table and handed her a small white wafer wrapped in plastic as she was departing the tent.

I took a quick glance at the basket and there were several more, maybe five of the wafers, in the basket. I pulled one out. Written on the package was: 'Asteroid Rock, Human Health Bar'.

The Woman: “Try one.”

I took a bite and it was quite delicious. Nothing like I had ever tasted before. Otherworldly, you might say.

Me: “What is it exactly?”

The Man: “It’s a product of our future technology. A human could it every day for forty years and it would meet all his or her nutritional needs.”

I sat and watched as the interviews continued for the next couple of hours. I noticed that each interviewee, about twenty in all, received an Asteroid Rock Wafer Bar at the end of the interview. Yet when I had looked into the basket, there had only been five bars left and I had eaten one of them. At no time during the interviews, had the man or woman refilled the basket.

Me: “Can you explain the wafer bar mystery?” They knew what I was referring to.

The woman: “Better living through better technology.”

I knew better than to push for a more detailed explanation. But I had another question.

Me: “What in the world are you doing interviewing people in the past?”

The man: “We’re gathering information for when the time comes to re-integrate humans and assign them to missions that match their abilities.”

Me: “I don’t remember doing any such interview.”

The woman: “February 28, 1978. You made a good impression. That’s why you here today.”

Me: “I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t recall a thing.”

The man: “You’re not supposed to.”

I helped them fold up the tent, table and chairs and load them on a pickup truck. Then they left. No suggestions, no comments, no hints. That means we would meet again.

Each one of us has in us the makings of an epic voyage. The ticket has already been bought and paid for and not only that, our credit is good. Just remember, once the journey begins, there’s no turning back.

Two identical cups. One has water and one doesn’t. Which cup quenches thirst? A cup by itself doesn’t quench thirst, but water not in a cup will dissipate. Both cup and water are needed to quench thirst.

Any stretch of highway is, paradoxically, where past, present and future meet.

When someone is rehabilitated, you’re in effect changing the past.

Humans are like ice. They can turn into water and flow through valleys and around and over mountains. Or they can turn into steam and float away.

The meeting with Socratic Virtue was still bugging me. He seemed so sure of himself but how can anyone be sure of something happening billions of years in the future? I had a worrisome thought. Was he confident because he believed it was happening sooner? In that case the future that I was in part working for was in doubt. I decided I needed a second opinion.

It was a couple days walk to the nearest land-grant university. The campus was patterned after the Seven Hills of Rome with the different colleges located on its own hill. I was only interested in one hill, that would be the College of Sciences. There I met with an instructor in astrophysics, Professor Nathan Netherbaum.

I was a little taken aback when I entered his office and found it to be very neat and tidy. There was a plethora of books but they were all arranged in systematic order in bookshelves behind his desk. He himself was very neat and tidy. He had longish gray hair, round glasses and wore a bow tie.

After a brief introduction, I asked him, “Do you know or have you heard of a Socratic Virtue?”

The Professor: “Ah, old Socratic. What a character. We were in some physics classes back in college days.” I could tell the Professor was about to drift off into reminiscing about the good old days in college, so I interrupted, “He has a theory about how the universe will end.”

That got the Professor’s attention, “I bet it’s a good one.”

I then explained as best I could the theory. The professor responded, “He might have something there.” The professor put his hand under his chin and gazed out the window, which revealed a verdant section of campus where students were walking to and from class.

I asked, “Can anything be done?”

The Professor, “The only solution I can think of is to enlarge the sphere. More than that really. The sphere has to be in a state of perpetual enlargement. Else once the sphere stops enlarging, just what Socratic theorizes will happen. The universe will devour itself.”

Me: “Any suggestions.”

The Professor: “The bulldozers, as Socratic calls them, cannot be allowed to reverse themselves and move back in the direction they came from.”

The Professor was stating the obvious. But then he added, “The only solution I can imagine is that the bulldozers be somehow induced to move perpendicular to their former direction of movement. If every bulldozer turns away from the sphere in a perpendicular manner, then they will be running parallel to each other again.”

Me: “I see what you mean. A greater sphere will be created. But won’t the same thing eventually happen again when the bulldozers once again run into each other?”

The Professor: “Yes but the solution I’m proposing can be replicated as many times as necessary. It’s a makeshift solution until something more permanent is devised.”

Thanks to Professor Netherbaum, I felt a little better about the fate of the universe. 

In a wooded area not far from the university, I discovered a wild walnut tree. I sat under the tree eating walnuts and contemplating the two issues of 1) traversing the universe and 2) the possible extinction of the universe. Some of what follows may be a rehash, but it seems to me a necessary activity to keep things clarified in my mind.

A.   Faster than light travel – The FTLs (sentinent light beams) will be around for the foreseeable future until such time as earth’s astro-engineers have the wherewithal to partner with the FTLs to develop faster than light technology.  This travel will enable mankind to thoroughly explore the Milky Way Galaxy as well as nearby galaxies.

B.   Speed of thought travel – this will be a tougher nut to crack but will be absolutely essential if humanity has any hope of exploring the outer galaxies. Even with faster than light travel, the time necessary to reach the outer galaxies would be so great that any journey to them would be meaningless in transmitting information back to humanity. To travel this way, humans will have to develop telepathic skills comparable to TLBs (Telepathic Light Beings). TLBs are notoriously flinty, but by becoming telepathic themselves, perhaps humans will be seen by the TLBs as equals not inferiors. Thus, TLBs will be more willing to share some of their secrets.

C.   The fate of the universe – the hardest one of all. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, if the universe ends so does humanity with all its hopes and dreams. Sure, it’s a long, long time off but once everything is gone, it’ll be like nothing ever existed in the first place. But since it’s a long way off, there is time to find a solution.

There’s another big problem. And that’s immortality.

The man and the woman of the future didn’t tell me in so many words, but over time I’ve come to the conclusion that bio-engineering had been outpacing astro-engineering and by the time of the man and woman of the future, the former is several centuries ahead of the latter. The problem is that immortality means more people on earth. Many, many more, so many in fact that earth’s resources will be strained to and beyond the breaking point. In a perfect world, the gains of bio-engineering would equal the gains of astro-engineering. In such a perfect world, the overflow crowd could travel to other worlds that orbit around other suns.

But faster than light travel proved more difficult to achieve than thought possible. Until the FTLs came along. And then the immortality project as well as the Onward to the Stars project recommenced.

You can’t make sense of this if you think logically. You have to imagine that time is also a place that you can travel to like you might travel to Ohio. That’s how you can explain how I went back in time (second) to make the future time (first) I went to remain the way it was. But in a sense, it does make sense. If cause and effect propel the past into the future, then the reverse of that, effect and cause, will propel the future into the past.

Concerning immortality, it was figured out how to give it to humans, but there was great trepidation in doing so, because if it was only given to a few, so as not to unduly overpopulate the earth, it might cause massive riots and disturbances. The only answer was universal immortality. So, a deal was made. Everyone couldn’t be done at once but a promise could be made that the dead would live again. With a DNA sequence and MPC chip, anyone could be brought back to life. You could die with a smile on your face knowing that all was not lost.

What about bad people? Well, they would be brought back too. But only under the condition that they would live in a confined space and submit to being rehabilitated, and eventually becoming a law-abiding member of society. This process would last as long as necessary, no matter how long that might be and would apply to anyone breaking the law. As time goes by, it will get harder and harder to break the law, especially once humans master telepathy.

It’s important to realize that human nature will be the same so the struggle of good vs. evil will never end. Unless, of course, the universe ends.