A Trip Through Time

This is a short i did in 1994 or 1995, just a quick study of time travel.

Some things are so weird, so completely unbelievable, that they have to be true.  No one has the imagination to make them up.  Hitler is a good example of the unbelievable.  Who would have thought that a young Jewish artist named Adolf Hitler would have become a genocidial conquerer?  Not I.  The story that I am about to unfold for you is that type of weird story – and one I witnessed with my own eyes.  It is not a long story, nor is it a “deep” story with some inspirational spiritual message to parlay, but it is a story of actual events which happened to me.

The setting is in Tucson, Arizona and the cast involves a few of my old friends.   The major players are as follows:  One of my best friends (who will also attest to the complete truth of this story) Eliot Tucker, myself (Peter J. Wacks), An old gaming buddy Robert Schultz (if you read this I hope your limp is better), and a friend of ours Daniel Ghoza (who to this day – five years later – is still listed in the FBI’s files as a missing person.)  Now I like to think that I am an intelligent person – as are the majority of my friends.  I often get into philosophical debates with my friends, and just as often I gain my friends by getting into great conversations with complete strangers.

It was one of those conversation nights for the four of us.  We were sitting at the all night Dennys off of Speedway and Alvernon (the one across from Zia Records) and we were in the middle of a viciously raging debate concerning the nature of time and whether or not time travel would ever be possible or feasable.

Too much coffee, too many cigarettes, and some inspiring conversation were making an all out success of the evening.  During the high point of one of Daniel’s arguments – that the only possibility for humans achieving time travel was for us to train our minds to think non-temporally and non-linearly – a man approached the table.  He had a buzzed hair cut (almost military in appearance), deep set dark brown eyes, and was wearing a haunted look on his face.  He pulled up a chair and sat down while letting his gaze wander thoughtfully over the four of us.

Finally his eyes settled on Daniel.  To explain why the man’s first statement took us all by surprise I will have to tell you our ages.  I was only nineteen, Eliot was twenty-one, Daniel was twenty four, and Robert twenty-nine.  None of us were particularly old.  Anyway, the man spoke before any of us decided to.  And what he said left us all thinking he was just some crazy who decided that we would be the mark tonight.

Looking strait at Daniel he said “Hello grandfather.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”  As a smile crept across his face I could clearly see the resemblance between the thirty year old looking stranger and one of my best friends – which was the first of my doubts that he actually was crazy.  “Or should I say that it will be a while before I see you.”  Then he reached under his coat and pulled out something was obviously a gun.

The only thing was that it resembled a gun about as much as an old German zepplin resembles an F-14 Tomcat fighter.  It was sleek, black, obviously deadly, and looked like it was straight from the set of some futuristic science fiction movie.  He sighed and I noticed that his hand had begun trembling, but he seemed to find his courage again from somewhere deep insinde his head.

“I can not let you destroy the world.”  To our credit we managed not to laugh.

Daniel looked the guy right in the eyes and sarcastically said in that no bullshit accepted tone of voice he has “Okay then.  I won’t.  But, um, how am I supposed to not destroy the world?”

The man sighed again while a look of hopelessness crossed his features.  “It is unfortunately unstoppable unless you die.  The line of reasoning you are pursuing tonight is, in fact, correct.  The human mind is capable of creating quantum fields which distort temporal causality and then we can “ride” the resulting probability waveforms through time.  When you finally get around to sharing this knoweledge, it – of course – falls into the wrong hands.”

The man looked disgusted.  “Any hands are the wrong hands.  All of the changes to the timestream made by stupid and greedy people doing stupid and greedy things things have left the future a tumultious cauldron of chaos.  The universe doesn’t bother fixing paradox or destroying itself.  It just collapses the alternate timelines.  Unfortunately people’s memories remain intact.  Time travel is ripping the fabric of the human conciousness apart.  Memories not matching reality is quickly driving people insane.  In the future roughly one out of every three people are institutionalized, laying in mental hospitals and wearing alpha wave dampers over their heads.  Another forty percent of the populace is diagnosed insane – but the hospitals and old prisons are full.  Time travel is driving the human race insane.  Your gift to humanity is destroying us unstead of setting us free.  Less than thirty percent of the population is strong enough to actually cope with waking in a different world than they fell asleep in.”

Daniel looked thoroughly disgusted.  I found the voice to say what all of us were probably thinking.  “Then why are you why are you trying to do what everybody else is doing?  Why are you being stupid too and trying to change the future when it is unfixable?”  Looking back on that time it was probably idiotic to bring his attention on me – even so I’m glad I did.

He swung the gun towards me and locked gazes with me.  He looked thoroughly pissed.  But he visibly calmed down and then thought for a moment.  “I suppose because this is the last hope for the future of humanity.  If I kill him I’ll be the only person left who knows how to travel. Then I kill myself and no one can travel.  Eventually humanity will heal.”  And with that said he swung the gun back to Daniel and squeezed the trigger.

The gun’s shot was actually kind of anti-climatic.  There was no bang, no burst of laser light, just a fairly quiet “Pssst” sound.  A quarter sized hole appeared through Daniel’s chest.  The wound went right through the heart and was gushing blood.  Robert jumped to the side and covered Daniel’s corpse while I  swung out of the booth and kicked the man’s hand.  The gun went flying but he didn’t react.He just sat and stared at Daniel for the next few minutes, then he started crying.

He finally looked to us imploringly and in a shaky voice begged “Please tyr to understand why this had to be done.  I loved him very much but he had to die in order to save the human race from extinction.  Please try not hate me too much for doing what I had to do.  With the past undone perhaps the future can survive.  I had to martyr him.”  Then he closed his eyes, shimmered, and vanished.

Naturally this was very, very confusing to the group of us.

Eliot sucked in his breath then exploded at Daniel “What the Hell just happened here?  We all just watched you get killed.  But obviously you’re not dead.”

Daniel’s grin broadened. “While he was talking I figured it out.  Time travel is that easy.  Kind of ironic that my own grandson coming back in time to kill me was what ended up filling in the missing pieces for me – kinda makes me think that maybe causality does work and the reason the future is so screwed up is that not everything has happened yet.  Anyway, once Peter distracted him, it was a simple matter of going back about three hours and teaching myself the trick.”

Daniel did a fair impression of the chershire cat.  “Then before we came here tonight I hopped forward in time and equiped myself with the neccesary devices to make it looked as though he had in fact killed me.  The original me that traveled back to warn me died when he hopped back, at least I can only assume that’s what happened to him.  Interesting thoery there… I wonder what will happen if he survived.  But then that reality collapsed or created a divergent reality and the one in which I already knew time travel is the reality that survived, or at least the one we are in.”

Daniels’s grin was about a mile wide now.  “Well guys… between me and my grandson you have all the necessary clues to figure it out.  Catch up to me in the twenty seventh century if you do.”  The he closed his eyes, shimmered, and was gone.  The three of us stared in renewed shock at the empty spot in which he had been sitting.  He was gone.  Just vanished.  Supposedly he was off to explore time.

And none of us has seen him since.  But I think I may finally have an Idea of how the clues he left actually fit together.  It seems that the gun which the timetraveling son left behind was the final clue for me.  Once I am finished writing this I am going to try it myself.  So… if you are reading this then I have gone – probably and hopefully never to return to this portion of the time stream.  But now you have the clues as well, and perhaps I’ll be seeing you around some time.