Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Read online

  She narrowed her eyes at him but then looked away and didn’t reply.

  Aha, he thought. He kept bouncing eyebeams off the top of her head until she looked up again.

  “Oh, stop it,” she said. “Just stop it.”

  Wait a minute, he thought. Maybe she’s waiting for a password or something!

  He didn’t yet know the password.

  “The Big Deck,” he said.

  She widened her eyes a little but didn’t answer. He was not sure, but he thought she might have moved her head a little in the gesture for nope.

  Well, it had been a shot in the dark and worth a try.

  The Big Deck

  Lewis and Sharon had been wayward teens together back in the last century. They had met at a halfway house for recovering drug kids. They had both been seventeen, but she was a few months older than him. The facility was a three-story Victorian style house out in the coastal range of Oregon. The property had been given over to its current use by the WWII millionaire who built it back in the 1950s.

  Not much was known, at least by the kids, about the dead millionaire. He built his mansion right in the center of the five-acre property. Then he covered every remaining square inch with a huge wooden deck. Who knows how many houses could have been built with the materials he used for that deck?

  The rehab kids knew every inch of it since it was their job to sweep it. The deck was so large that it had a geography of its own. It might have started off as a nearly level surface, but by the time Lewis was sweeping it, it had rolling hills and valleys. They divided it up into a grid of sectors and each of them swept one sector a day. There were never enough kids to sweep the whole thing every day, and even if there had been, what with the stuff that blew in from the forest, it was a never-ending job.

  The day Lewis from the future came back in time and took over his boy body, Lewis the boy sweeping the Big Deck had been dreamingly gazing at Sharon over there in her own sector. She was sweeping furiously as if she couldn’t get her part clean enough. She was probably not thinking about him. He wondered if he could talk her into running away with him. They could go to California. Live on love.

  Then he was gone.

  Simply gone. Blacked out. He would get familiar with blackouts in his twenties but this one was the first and not like the others in that he was completely sober and had been for some time. He would not come around for almost a half an hour.

  Lewis from the future became aware of the girl sweeping. He felt the broom in his own young hands. Seagulls and crows screaming at one another. He felt the sunshine on his head and smelled the wet forest. When had his sense of smell been this strong? Not for a long time. He pulled the air tinged with just a hint of the ocean into his lungs and moved boldly out of his sector and walked up to the girl. Yes, it was his Sharon, looking so young and sexy in her lime green overalls.

  Swoosh swoosh swoosh.

  He reached out and stopped her broom, and she yelped and shot him a fight or flight, mostly fight, look.

  “The fuck you doing, man?”

  “Listen,” he said. “You’re going to come away with me when we leave this place.”

  “Yeah, like in your dreams,” she said.

  But she had smiled. He had taken her by surprise. He could see she was thinking he was just trying to get into her pants, and that he could go fuck himself, but he was kind of nice, she guessed, and he sounded suddenly a lot different from the stumbling goofball who had muttered at her before and given her the big puppy dog eyes.

  “I have big plans,” he said. “It’ll be wonderful.”

  All those years ago. Lewis had never known until now what he’d said to her. His younger self had not been present for this encounter, after all, and Sharon always just said things like, “Oh, you know.” And he’d never wanted to admit that he had blacked out and didn’t remember a word of their conversation.

  “We’re going to be rich,” he went on. “We’re going to travel. We are going to live a long long time. We are going to be many people. We are going to leave all of this behind.”

  “What? Are you going to rob a bank or something?”

  He laughed. And that got the attention of Morris, the big officer supervising the sweeping, and Morris yelled for him to get back to his sector.

  You are so beautiful, he almost said, but thought, no, wait, everyone must tell her that. I like your outfit? Absolutely not. Too early for talk of love.

  “You are so nice, Sharon,” he said and moved back to his spot before the huffing and puffing steam engine that was Morris could get there and scream into his face.

  As easy as that?

  You are so nice?

  And she comes away with him and sticks with him through all the bad years and then through the good years and the children and some more bad years and the real possibility they both might get lost in all the people modern people can be all at the same time and the way they always maintained the Lewis part and the Sharon part.

  Strawberries for breakfast.

  Nice.

  The Dragon

  One of the big surprises of the 21st Century was the elasticity of consciousness. As we connected with the world-wide net of all information, and as we incorporated external memory modules and augmented our brains in all kinds of new and interesting ways, we discovered that the personalities we could create in any number of virtual and physical worlds were conscious themselves. People began speaking of the Merging. This was an experience new to humanity. You sent your various parts off to do other things and then they all came together in an orgasmic Merging of experience, and you were all of them at once. New forms of art developed to take advantage of this. The point of the modern novel, for example, was when you merged all the things you had read simultaneously and comprehended the whole in an aha moment that seemed to transcend everything.

  Like so many people one season, I became fascinated with a novel from the past that a researcher named Clarice LeBlue had plucked from the mass of all data on the net. I had, along with most of my parts, read it as a modern novel, and we had had a satisfactory Merging, but then I had myself, Lewis who is writing this report, that is, follow LeBlue’s advice and had read the book in the old fashioned way—one word at a time in the order the author had written them. That had been a very strange and unsettling experience. By the time I was done, it was obvious to me that there was something going on with time in regard to the book—not the least of which was that the main character was named Clarice LeBlue. Oh and there was Lilly, the time traveling, snow-white winter dragon.

  I poked around, the way we do, and one thing led to another, and I found Lilly who turned out to be an aspect of LeBlue and a physics professor. I signed up for her Introduction to Time course. I became fascinated with the subject. You might even say “obsessed.” A lot of my parts and Sharon and Sharon’s parts began to tell me they were worried about me. I ignored them and took Lilly’s follow-up course. I became good friends with the dragon, but none of my parts ever met LeBlue or any of her other parts.

  The details of time travel were not secret. It was not even particularly hard to understand. It was quite difficult to do, however.

  Let me boil down what Lilly told me about the way things are.

  The universe is both simple and complex. This is the simple part. Everything we think of as the universe (aside from the puzzling dark matter and energy which make up most of it and which we still don’t know so much about) exists in space/time. That is, anything you can point at has three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. You yourself are this tall and that deep and so wide right now at this moment. If we could somehow look at all of you from your beginning to your end, there you would be—a human tube with arms and legs getting bigger and then smaller. You look a little like some kind of snake/centipede who has swallowed a rabbit. This has always been you and it always will be. The underlying physics tell us there is no real difference between the “past” and the “future”. Things just are what t
hey are at their coordinates in space and time. The present in some sense doesn’t exist at all, and in another sense every moment is the present.

  Which leads naturally to the bad news and the good news about free will. No, we do not have free will. The future is as fixed as the past. Yes, we still have to make decisions because we cannot remember the future, so from a personal point of view, it’s exactly as if we had free will. I came to understand these facts and eventually took comfort in them.

  There are other things to think about like why that egg is whole here and broken there but the broken egg is only at a time coordinate in the “future” direction and not the “past” direction. The reason is the second law of thermodynamics that says entropy in the universe will always stay the same or increase. That is pretty well understood. Why the entropy of the universe was lower yesterday than it is today all the way back to the Big Bang is still a mystery. I think it has to do with the multiverse, but we already have too much to think about, and you won’t need to understand that to travel in time anyway.

  The thing is, Lilly said, you can focus your consciousness back to points in your past. When you do, you displace the consciousness that is already there. The displaced person will experience a blackout or a nap or nothing at all if they are already in deep sleep.

  So, okay, I thought, how do I use this to get rich?

  How To Get Rich With Time Travel

  All Lewis remembered of this particular blackout was coming to in the Los Angeles Airport. He was sitting in a baby blue plastic airport chair. There was a stern looking woman with a blurry nametag leaning down over him. Her face seemed huge. She wanted to know if he was all right.

  No, he wasn’t all right. His hands were shaking. But he needed to get home to Phoenix. He needed to convince this airport official that he was okay to fly. Somehow he did convince her since she let him on the plane. He didn’t remember how he had managed that. He remembered they wouldn’t give him a drink on the way back to Arizona.

  Now he cast his consciousness in that direction and took control of the young body just as his younger self was raising a small glass toward his mouth. Lewis stopped the motion and put the drink down on the bar. He took a look around. The place was dim and smoky. The bartender was down at the other end looking at a magazine in a small cone of light from a lamp. There were two shadowy shapes of other drinkers down at the other end. Lewis felt like he had some kind of metal band or too tight hat on his head and he reached up to check but felt only his hair. Where the hell was he? He gathered up the change on the bar and stood up. He located the exit and set off for it. He had to twist around and grab the bar or fall down. The bartender gave him a sharp look but then went back to his magazine. Lewis tried again.

  Walking was like driving a huge machine with wobbly wheels. You had to be all the time compensating. He made it to the door and into what looked like a shabby hotel lobby. By the time he got to the street, he thought he was doing pretty well.

  Then he was outside, and the sunshine slapped him in the face. The California sunshine, he thought since there was a big sign on the building that said “Califor...”

  He was in Santa Barbara, he realized. One of his crazy schemes. He’d read about the famous photography school in this town, and he’d come to check it out. Where had the money come from? Sharon’s cookie jar, no doubt. She wouldn’t be so happy to see him when he got back to Phoenix, he remembered.

  Lewis found his way to the beach. He settled down on the sand not too close to anyone and took some deep breaths. He must clear his head. He needed a way to tell his younger self to stop drinking and buy these particular computer stocks. He wrote the stock exchange symbols in the sand with his finger.

  Like that was going to work.

  He lowered himself back onto the sand and closed his eyes. What would happen if he, Lewis from the future, fell asleep? That would probably end the time trip. Young Lewis would wake up on the beach. He didn’t think that had happened. Therefore he probably wouldn’t fall asleep. Instead he would keep his eyes closed, and he would breathe deeply and while he wouldn’t be exactly sleeping, he wouldn’t be drinking either. He would use the time to come up with a scheme to leave his younger self some messages.

  The most straightforward thing to do, he thought, was write himself a letter. He would tell his younger self what he must do next to put his life in order. He would tell him what he could do to get rich. He would tell the young drunk to pay more attention to Sharon.

  He sat up. He felt terrible. He knew a drink would calm the body and stop the panic and the roar in his ears and the light stabbing him from every surface, but he was not going to give in to that. He was still more like a driver in a machine than a person with a body. He climbed to his feet and looked himself over.

  He was wearing a cheap black suit. He twisted around and saw sand all over his legs and butt. He took off his jacket. In the inside pocket, he found his wallet. Some ones, some fives, a ten, his driver’s license. In the other pocket he found an airline ticket from LAX to PHX. He brushed sand off himself and walked back to town. He found the bus stop and spent a lot of his money on a ticket to LA. There was a gift shop, and he bought a notebook and a pen. He sat down to wait for the bus and opened the notebook.

  “Dear Lewis,” he wrote.

  Back to the Drawing Board

  Well, that hadn’t worked. It should have been so simple. I would just go back in time and buy the hot computer stocks when they were selling for pennies. And then suddenly in the here and now, I would be rich. But the trouble was I didn’t own the stocks and never had. Either I hadn’t seen the note I’d finished on the bus and left in my jacket pocket, or I had seen it, thought it nonsense, and tossed it in the trash.

  When I asked Professor Lilly about it, she blasted me with her fire breath and set my hair on fire and called me an idiot. Had I not been listening in class?

  All right. Okay. I get it.

  It was now clear if I went back and told myself what to do, I would remember being told. I would remember the note, the tape, whatever. If I had bought the hot stocks, not only would I remember doing it, I would also be already rich. So, something else must have happened instead.

  Maybe I go back to an early blackout and hide some money so I can’t drink it up. Then I go back to a later blackout and buy the stocks while I’m still the guy from the future and hide them from my younger self.

  Yes, that could work.

  It must be the case, I reasoned, that I have never sold the stocks in question. Otherwise there would have been tax issues (not to mention being rich). So I must still own them!

  But wait.

  How had I bought them in the first place? Well, I would have needed an account with a stockbroker, and that would have left some kind of record. The brokerage would still be holding the stocks. But if that were the case, they would have been sending me reports over the years.

  Maybe I’ll take the unusual step of getting the actual stock certificates themselves. Real paper.

  What would I have done with them?

  If I rented a safety deposit box, I would have to pay the yearly fee. And even if I figured out how to do that automatically, it doesn’t seem reasonable there would be no communication at all over the years, and these days, there are very few banks you actually walk into. Meatwise, I mean. What in the world would you do there? Please let me take out my old stock certificates from some tin box you have locked in a big vault somewhere?

  And I would never be so stupid as to bury them in a treasure chest somewhere. Think of the rain! And the burrowing animals!

  But I wouldn’t have to bother with any of that. I could already see none of it would work.

  Clearly, I was missing a piece of the puzzle.

  The Missing Piece

  At last there came the final straw. Lewis remembered coming back to himself that last time in their apartment in Tempe, Arizona. He had been elsewhere. He had simply not existed. And then he was back.

 
Sharon was going to school at the university. She was waiting tables. And there was the baby. Lewis was holding baby Julia. The child looked terrified.

  Sharon stood in the doorway looking at the two of them. She looked exhausted. But something else, too. Expectant? Lewis was chilled to his soul with fear about what might have happened while he was blacked out supposedly watching the baby until Sharon got home. Did he drool and flop around on the floor while blacked out? He might have dropped Julia. He might have thrown her against the wall. Splat! Daddy’s little girl. Was that why she was frightened?

  Sharon came to the couch and took the baby from him.

  “That’s it,” he told her. “I’m going back to rehab.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Of course, she knew, he thought, remembering that turning point in his life. He had just completed his final trip in time and had told her he would be changing everything and this time it was for real.

  When he arrived, he’d been slouched on the shabby couch with the baby in his lap. Her diaper was dirty and the cramped little living room reeked of shit. Julia was fussy, clawing at the air and squirming and glaring up at him with her mother’s clear blue eyes. So, this is where all that anger came from, he thought.

  “Hey, Pumpkin,” he said softly. “Hey.”

  He got up and ducked into the tiny kitchen. He put Julia down on the wooden table they could never get to sit level no matter what you shoved under the short leg. He turned around trying to remember where the baby supplies were. Sink full of dirty dishes. Surely they had baby supplies. He felt sudden panic. What if they didn’t have supplies? No, they always had supplies. Sharon made sure of that. He let his mind go blank, and he let his body do the walking, three quick steps to the left. Keep one eye on the baby. There were the clean diapers. Here were the wipes, the lotion, the powder. And under here the plastic bucket with the lid for the dirty stuff.