My presumption is that the concept of personal time changes when you’re immortal. You no
longer think in terms of minutes or hours or days. You think in terms of
centuries or longer. Time really does fly by.
For
many thousands of years mortality was the normal condition of mankind. Immortality will be the new normal.
By
the way, I’m not immortal. When my assignment is over, I’ll go back to the year
2020, the year I’m writing this. I may or may not die in 2030. It could be
earlier, or it could be a little later. Timelines can vary in small ways, as
long as the changes don’t cause major ripples in the time stream.
The
universe was made for man, not man for the universe.
You
have a better chance of seeing the light if the world is in darkness. Partial
darkness makes it harder to see the light.
I
had a few more stops to make before my journey ended. First stop was Valleytown.
They were selling green beans, okra and tomatoes at the Farmer’s Market. I
purchased a bag of each and went looking for the hobo camp. I was back in the
middle of the Depression. I went down to the railroad track and started walking
north out of town. Dark clouds were threatening rain, but the rain had not yet
begun to fall. I reached the hobo camp after a short walk and when I got
there, I asked around for Jerome. He was underneath a ragged blanket that he
was using for a canopy. It hung between an elm tree and a large mulberry bush.
He was attempting to get a fire going but his hands were shaking so bad, he
couldn’t light a match. I took the match out of his hand and got the fire
going.
Jerome
said, “Thanks, Mister.”
Me:
“You don’t remember me?”
Jerome
raised his head and looked at me. “Can’t say I do. Should I?”
Me:
“If you don’t remember me, then you’re not supposed to.”
I
handed Jerome the bags of green beans, okra and tomatoes. When I was sure the
fire wasn’t going to die out, I left.
Next
stop was 1924 and a factory in Toledo. I was standing outside the entrance gate
when a man came walking toward me.
He
said, “Haven’t I seen you before?”
Me:
“No, but you will if you don’t listen to me.”
Man:
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Me:
“Quit betting on the horses, stay away from bootleg whiskey, and be careful in
the stock market in 1929.”
Man:
“Huh?”
I
then went back to Valleytown (the same time period as before) and bought green
beans, okra and tomatoes at the Farmer’s Market and then took them to the hobo
camp along the railroad track north of town. When I got there, I asked for
Jerome. Nobody had ever heard of him. I gave away the bags of produce.
I
sense that my time in the past is growing short. I’ve seemed to suddenly
acquire the ability to go anywhere I want in the time period of 1920 to 1970.
Most of what I was assigned to do I have done, though due to the nature of the
enterprise, there will always be gaps that need filling.
I
then go to New York City in August of 1945. Japan has finally surrendered, and
World War II is officially over. I’m standing on a wide avenue. Both sides of
the street are filled with cheering people, exhilarated and exhausted at the
same time. A well-deserved victory parade is in progress and many of the heroes
of the war are in the parade. Millions of pieces of confetti are floating down
from the tall buildings and skyscrapers of Manhattan.
General
Dwight Eisenhower, future president, and recent commander of all allied forces
in Europe, comes riding by in a convertible. Beside him is his wife, Mamie.
They’re waving to the adoring crowd. There are soldiers and sailors, marines
and airmen, as well as women in uniform from the European front of World War
II. They are available to be in the parade because that part of the war ended
in May. There are no servicemen from the Pacific Theater present, but a parade
will be held for them too, at a later date.
Similar
parades are probably going on in many parts of Europe but most of them are
being held in cities where great destruction has taken place. Churches a
thousand years old have been destroyed, office buildings razed, storefront
windows broken, and on and on. But still a sense of joy pervades the
people and their lands.
Night
finally falls on Manhattan after a long day of uninterrupted and unalloyed
celebration. I make my way out of the city and when I reach a point about ten
miles out, I turn around and look back at the city. All the rooms of all the
skyscrapers have their lights on. Then I wonder if someone somewhere has
decided to send a message to time wanderers. For in that moment, every light in
every room in every skyscraper flashes on and off for a full minute. The effect
is startling to say the least. It is perhaps the greatest manmade coruscation
in history. It’s a foretaste of what will happen to the universe.
Next
stop is twenty years forward. I’m standing behind some large boulders somewhere
in the western part of the country. I hear the sound of multiple horseshoes
hitting the ground. There’s an opening between two of the boulders and I see a
group of horses with both men and women riders, all of them dressed in brightly
colored cowboy accessories such as boots, jeans, shirts and ten-gallon hats. The lead
rider is the only one who looks comfortable on a horse and his attire is much
more subdued. I must be in the vicinity of a dude ranch located in perhaps New
Mexico or Arizona. After they pass, I walk down to the trail they were on but
decide not to follow them but to go in the opposite direction.
I
go down into a ravine then cross over a couple of hills. Mesquite trees are haphazardly
here and there. Cacti are more abundant. I see a couple of rattlesnakes and a
horned toad. I don’t stop to visit with them.
I
end up at an old miner’s shack, long abandoned but thanks to the dry air and
scant vegetation, still maintaining its primacy as the place to be in this part
of the world. If this shack falls apart, we all fall apart. When the world
ends, this old shack will document it.
The
oldest things must survive. They give value to all things living. You have to
start somewhere and if you don’t remember where you started, then you’re really
nowhere.
In
order to travel the universe at the speed of thought, we face the difficult
task of transitioning to a universal consciousness, while at the same time
retaining our self-consciousness and individuality. If we lose our individuality, we might as
well call the whole thing off. The universe is not looking for and does not need any
more bright, unthinking objects.
Immortality
is not a luxury. The only reason for immortality is immortality. Otherwise
intelligent existence is ultimately meaningless. Immortality and an infinite
universe go hand in hand and are made for each other.
Next
stop is the Shenandoah Valley, east of Washington, D.C., in the late 1940’s
when families in America were first starting to look at the big box in their
living rooms. I’m beside a busy mountain highway about to enter a model city.
This city was built after World War II and was funded by the government. Its
purpose was to highlight all the great new gadgets that would be for sale in America in the next few years. One of those was the television set. As ubiquitous
as it later became in America, in the 1940’s it was still relatively rare. Most
homes had a radio and most families still went to the movies when they wanted to
see filmed entertainment. But TV was catching on fast and the upward trend has never
abated.
The
model town symbolized the burgeoning technological zeitgeist of mid-twentieth
century America. A purveyor of scolism made the sarcastic remark that religion
needs to keep up with technology. “Better technology makes better religion.” To
be fair, both religion and technology are symbolic in nature and for anything
symbolic to have meaning, it must have something solid to stand on. In the case
of technology, among many new and exciting things, you had the solid state
television set. But I’m again being anachronistic. Time traveling will do that to you
as well as the tendency to repeat yourself, which is perhaps the essence of
time travel. But I digress. Which is also…
Let’s
get to the point of why I visited the model town. I wanted to see the latest
and greatest state of the art television set that was around in 1947 or
thereabouts. The department store I chose to do my searching was very busy and
all the sales clerks were occupied. This gave me the chance to spend a little
alone time with a television set. I chose one in the corner, away from the crowds. It
was a demo set, plugged in and attached to an outside antenna (it said so on
the decal attached to the set). It also said in bold red letters, “Try Me!” I
turned on the set, switched it from VHF to UHF (I’ll leave it to you to look up
these ancient terms if you are so interested). I then turned the knob to
station 51.
To
my astonishment, two bright, shiny apparitions shaped in the form of a human,
appeared on the screen. They were TLBs.
The one to the left said telepathically to me, “Hi, mate, we’ve been waiting to talk to you.” Strangely enough, he was talking in an Australian accent.
The one to the left said telepathically to me, “Hi, mate, we’ve been waiting to talk to you.” Strangely enough, he was talking in an Australian accent.
The
one to the right said, also telepathically, “Don’t be so rude. Tell him who we
are.”
“We’re
James and Matilda.”
They
must have given me the ability to answer back telepathically, “The only TLB I’ve
run into wasn’t the friendliest guy around. What’s changed?”
James:
“We’re actually talking to you from the future. We’ve been working for almost a thousand years with the humans helping them to develop their telepathic
skills and during that time we’ve grown quite fond of them. We’re not bogans,
you know.”
Me:
“How far in the future are you?
James:
“No can tell. That’s classified.”
Me:
“Why do you speak telepathically with an Australian accent?”
Matilda:
“That was the tribe of humans we were assigned to. Australians are a fun bunch,
especially at their barbies. James is usually the heat for the meat.”
Me:
“You must have an official reason of some kind for contacting me.”
James:
“We’ve been monitoring you the last the few days. We thought you might enjoy
initiating and managing your time jumps so we transmitted that ability to you.”
Me:
“How long will I have it?”
Matilda:
“It’s already expired.”
Me:
“I guess you also implanted in me the desire to visit this department store and
look at this particular television.”
Matilda:
“Righto, mate!”
Me:
“So what’s up?”
James:
“Take a look around at the people in the store. Do you notice anything
different from when you first entered?
I
stood and gazed around the store. Sure enough, everyone had a bright, yellow
halo.
Me:
“What’s going on?”
James:
“That’s humanity’s new tracking protocol. The halo, which is invisible to the
human eye, except when we allow it to be seen, records the individual’s DNA sequence, a MPC
(Memory, Personality, Character) chip, and a highlight film that contains the
significant moments and events in his or her life, especially the ones that
were life-changing. When the individual dies, his or her halo is stored in a
cyber unified force field, CUFF for short, for retrieval at a future date and
is used to reconstitute the individual in preparation for immortality
conditioning.”
Matilda:
“Off the Cuff is the term we use for bringing them back to life.”
It
didn’t take long to dawn on me what they were really saying.
Me:
“So I and others like me are no longer needed?”
I
think James was responding telepathically, but his voice was faint, and a
darkness began descending…
Even
if I could no longer see them, the night sky was filled with coruscations.
The End
