Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Page 9

  He cleaned her up and got the new diaper in place and mostly fastened correctly. He remembered he never had been able to do that completely right even after he gave up drinking.

  He picked her up and she snuggled onto his shoulder. He fetched her bottle from the fridge. Still warming them? Yes, he thought so. He put the bottle in a saucepan and ran some water around it. She pushed herself back from him with both hands and looked up at him. Who are you? Who are you?

  Ah, so that was it. When the blackout was over and the younger guy came back, this child would see it and be frightened. He would never ever entirely make that up to her.

  By the time Sharon came in and tossed her book bag down on the couch beside them, Julia was sinking and rising into and out of her nap on his lap. Sharon came to take her as usual, but Lewis held up a hand and said, “She’s fine. Sit down. Let’s talk.”

  “Oh,” Sharon said. “You again.”

  So, he told her what stocks to buy and when to buy them. He told her to keep the whole thing secret from him. File your own taxes. Tell me nothing.

  “But why should I keep it from you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That just seems to be the way it turns out.”

  His daughter opened her eyes and gave him a sleepy smile.

  “Bye bye, Pumpkin,” he said.

  How to Travel in Time

  Okay, I promised to tell you how to do it, and now I will.

  It’s all about “now.”

  Think about this tricky concept for a moment.

  Now.

  The present moment.

  How long is now? Well, different lengths, you say. But consider. Suppose you say now is a second long. Then surely when it is exactly half over, the start of it is in the past and the end of it is in the future and neither is really now. So, maybe it’s shorter, you say. Okay, just continue with that procedure until you get it down to zero. But that would mean now doesn’t exist at all. Yes, you are right. Now does not physically exist, or is so short we would never be able to perceive it, but it certainly exists as a feature of consciousness, and as you can see, the conscious experience of “now” already contains some time travel.

  Remember that long tube of arms and legs and the swallowed rabbit that we said is what you really are? Well, at every moment along that line, there is something to experience in the present. The trick of traveling in time is to expand now. Make it longer and longer. It takes some practice. Start off expanding “now” to about an hour, and then push on and make it longer still.

  Make it so long that your entire being is one big now.

  Next you must act quickly before you drift off into Enlightenment; if you do that, you’ll lose interest in time travel, and it won’t matter, anyway. Quickly pick a spot along your space/time line and cast your consciousness into it bumping out the consciousness already there.

  Right Now

  “Happy Birthday, Lewis!”

  Backslapping, best wishes, so many people—all of her parts, all of his parts, many of their closest friends, both children, five grandchildren, twelve great-grandchildren. Not everyone was there in the flesh.

  Lewis left his other parts to party and contacted Sharon on a private channel.

  “I know everything,” he said.

  “I doubt that,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “you’re probably right. But I know about going back in time and telling you what stocks to buy. We must be very rich.”

  “Oh, Lewis,” she said, “you old fool. Yes, we got very rich from the stock tips you gave me that day in Tempe before you went into rehab. But it’s been a very long time. I used the money basically to fund our lives. Do you think we got to where we are today out of pure luck or magic or something?”

  It was already gone? Lewis didn’t know what to say.

  She went on. “I put you through school. Twice. Over the years, I ran three businesses while you were writing poetry and programming super computers and learning to play the clarinet. Do you remember the years you lost in multiplayer on-line games as they used to call those worlds back then? Every time I thought you were a total waste of my time, you would do something interesting or lovable and well things just went on and on, and I think it all turned out pretty well, and now I’m ninety-three and today you are ninety-three. And we have balloons.”

  She was right. Things did work out pretty well. He closed his eyes and looked back over his long life and thought here we are, people and things, complete and eternal, scattered around the Big Deck like islands, most of us, the people anyway, forever sweeping.

  “Yes, it’s been wonderful.” He blew a big kiss which sprouted wings and sailed across the landscape and landed on her cheek with a wet smack.

  She smiled. “So, now it’s time the Lewis part of you got a different hobby, don’t you think? “

  “The possibilities are endless,” he said.

  And how had his rehab girl managed to do all of those things? Well, Sharon had a story of her own, of course. He’d missed a lot of it. He hoped it wasn’t too late to go back and catch up.

  Introduction to “Waiting for the Coin to Drop”

  When we did the Kickstarter project that began Fiction River, Kris and I promised we would put our own stories in each volume. We didn’t realize until we started editing that the promise meant we would have to edit our own stories and write our introductions. We solved the editing problem by editing each other’s work, but the introduction problem faces me now. I’ve written more than 100 novels and at least 200 short stories. I have also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and have done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made. Over my career, I have also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books.

  I seem to have two major ways I approach time travel in my own fiction. First is the alternate timeline approach, where any change in history starts a new timeline. My entire series of Jukebox stories works that way.

  Then I have the theory that time is tied to mass and energy, with anything physical having a complete tie to an instant of time and energy. And if something is changed in the past, it resets the next instant. I developed a series of stories that are space opera starring Captain Brian Saber around this second approach to time and mass. “Waiting For the Coin to Drop” approaches another side of time being tied to mass and energy. A slightly ugly side.

  Waiting for the Coin to Drop

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Nick stared at the sign on the antique gumball machine near the door in Donna Hayman’s living room and sighed.

  Wait for the Coin to Drop.

  If he waited for a coin to drop in that machine, he would never live long enough. Sometimes he really wished mechanical things would work here. Anything. But nothing mechanical did work, nothing electrical, nothing that required a moving part, even down to simple door hinges.

  Just to get into Donna’s apartment, he had had to use a sledgehammer and smash open the door. It took a crowbar to open a refrigerator, and that was after removing the screws on the hinges.

  Now, after almost a year of living in this apartment building, he had almost every apartment open so he could come and go with ease. Counting Donna’s, there were only six more apartments on the top floor left to open, six more hidden lives to explore, six more adventures to take before his research was finally finished and he could go home.

  He stopped inside the door and glanced around at Donna’s apartment. He could almost smell the uncut Canadian bacon and pepperoni pizza on the coffee table. He knew that wasn’t possible, since he needed special implants and a breathing device to even breathe or walk or see light through the air of this time period. Air molecules that didn’t move were as hard as steel. And since nothing moved, no smell could move to his nose either. Without the special implants, he would have died instantly on arriving in this moment in time.

  Outside the cl
ean window, the city of New York spread out, the deep canyons of the buildings tightening down in the distance. No sound came from the city, since it too was frozen in this moment, this instant of time, as was everything else around him.

  He shook his head. It still smelled like pepperoni pizza in this apartment. He hadn’t had a bite of pizza for almost a year. It hadn’t occurred to him to bring any with him, or program it into his food replicator. No wonder he was imagining the smell. But he did remember to bring along his fine cigars and best whiskey. And after each day he allowed himself a few sips and a cigar, so life without pizza hadn’t been all bad.

  He had no idea if Donna Hayman was home at this very instant in time, but it sure looked like she was. He hoped she was. If nothing more than to give himself another beautiful woman to look at for his last few weeks in the building and in this time period. He knew, from his files that he had brought with him from the future, that Donna had been good looking at one point in her life.

  He doubted she would be as good as Betty in apartment 310, or Sandra in 241, or Kitty in 608, whom he had found in the shower, her head thrown back, her naked body frozen in a moment of showering, her almost perfect body covered in a silvered sheen of water.

  He had to admit, he had spent far, far too much time in that bathroom, staring at her, a woman long dead as far as he was concerned. Kitty would never realize that for a fraction of a fraction of an instant in time, she had had a visitor from the future staring at her in a very private moment.

  At first it made him feel a little perverted. But his job here was to study the people and he had decided there was nothing at all wrong with admiring a perfect human form.

  After a time, he thought he had actually fallen in love with her. An impossible romance, since the only way a person from his time could travel back to another time was inside an instant, a fraction of a second too small to even measure, where nothing moved, and the laws of conservation of mass and energy wouldn’t allow anything to be changed from one instant to another.

  That fact, that reality, solved all time paradoxes.

  And that allowed for middle-aged writers like him, with far too much time on their hands, to go back in time for a year to study the people who lived in a crowded apartment building in New York and write a book about their long-dead lives of 2015.

  Granted, studying people in the past was nothing really new or original. But that wasn’t his focus. He had decided that for his book, he would put a special spin on the idea of ordinary people’s lives.

  He would study their secrets. He would learn their hidden desires, their fetishes, their affairs, and their faults.

  Every person, either in 2015 or 2259 had secrets. And a lot of people loved reading about other people’s secrets. His challenge to research his book called “The Secrets of Lexington Avenue” was to look into everyone’s lives in this building, and then through historical documents, if possible, learn how ten of these people fared with their secrets.

  So, for almost one year now, he had lived in a special time bubble set up in the lobby area. And every day he left that time bubble and broke open people’s doors and cabinets and everything else they kept secret and closed off and hidden from their neighbors.

  Of course, in the next fraction of an instant of real time for this building and these people, the universe would reset everything as if he had never been here, broken down a door, or even existed in this moment.

  It was impossible for him to do any real harm in this time.

  And to him, all these people were long dead, including Kitty in 608. And to Kitty and everyone else in this building, he was below notice.

  He had been surprised that living alone in a city of frozen, uncaring people had bothered him for the first few months. But eventually he got used to it.

  And now, after almost a year, he had come to like the people of this building, for the most part. He hadn’t expected that. He had expected them to just be statistics in his research. But by looking for their secrets, looking through their hidden lives, they had become more than frozen flesh and data. They had become human to him.

  And he had no doubt that was going to make his book a much stronger book.

  Of course, there were a half-dozen he had also come to hate when he discovered who they actually were. So far he had found two child molesters living in the building. Even though they would never notice, he had cut off their hands. It made him feel better, even though in the next instant of time, everything would reset and the monsters would continue on in their own time.

  But screw it, it made him feel better doing that.

  Even more surprising to him was that over a quarter of the people in the building had very few, if any, secrets. They simply lived their lives, many of them very sad and dull lives.

  Just as life treated them, he was sure he would go home and just forget them. They would live on as nothing more than a few notes in his research. He had come to realize that in many cases a person without secrets, without desires, without courage, was not worth studying.

  Or remembering, for that matter.

  However, a large number of people in the building lived interesting lives, had fascinating secrets, and often varied sex lives. He knew his readers would be interested in that, so for each person he tried to determine what their sexual desires and secrets were.

  There were twelve gay couples in the building and at least sixteen men and a dozen women who liked to look at pornography on their computers. Eight others were heavily into different aspects of bondage. Some had pornographic pictures in hidden boxes or in the back of drawers, often of themselves with some unknown partner.

  Fifty people in the building played musical instruments and another dozen were travel freaks, people who seemed to live to do nothing but leave town and see the world beyond the confines of New York City.

  Six were working on novels and from what he could tell, none of them were any good. And three were working on plays, none of which were ever produced that he could discover.

  Almost half of the people in the building were having money trouble of one sort or another.

  He had no doubt he would have trouble focusing on just ten people in this building for his book.

  Maybe Donna would end up being one of those top ten most interesting. He could call her the “pizza woman” since that pizza really seemed to have invaded his imagination. Nothing could smell or feel hot or cold in this instant of time. And if not for his specially contained living bubble that sucked energy from his own time period and allowed him to live in his real time, he wouldn’t even be able to shower or eat.

  He had once tried a bite of a steak in one of the first apartments he had broken into. It had tasted like sawdust and his special implants had warned him away from such action by instantly causing him to throw it all back up all over the plate of the apartment occupant.

  Nick ignored the imagined smell of the pizza and forced himself to really look at the apartment around him. He needed to find out just how human Donna Hayman of apartment 719 really was, and what her secrets were.

  Just as he was doing now, living in the past, Donna clearly also had lived in the past in her life. Every detail screamed out another era long before 2015. From the old gumball machine with its strange sign telling someone to wait for the coin to drop to a huge mural on one wall with the pictures of Gone with the Wind stars taken at the opening of the famous picture in Atlanta.

  The furniture was of the 1940s, overstuffed and comfortable-looking. A Shirley Temple doll sat on one chair and a game of Monopoly with metal pieces and wood houses covered an end table, looking like it was half-played.

  The room looked lived in, with the pizza on the coffee table and Coke in an old bottle beside it. His stomach rumbled as he got nearer the pizza. He was going to have to call the day early and head back to his time bubble to get some dinner.

  “You want a piece?” a woman asked from behind him.

  He spun, his heart threatening to explode out of
his chest. It had been almost a year since he had heard another person’s voice, even though he had talked to the frozen residents all the time.

  Facing him was a woman with a very nasty-looking knife held casually in her hand like she was used to using one in all different ways, including cutting pizza.

  Not possible.

  She was moving and breathing and blinking and doing everything a live person would do.

  Not possible. He was inside an instant of time, a random instant. No one else could be here at this moment.

  His mind just wouldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then finally he caught his breath and realized that the live person he was staring at wasn’t Donna Hayman, the resident of this apartment.

  “How?” he asked, which was just about all he could manage to get out.

  He lowered his hand slowly and let it hover over his emergency recall button covered with a protective cap on his belt. He had thought about hitting that button that would send him back to his normal time a great deal during those first lonely days, but after three months, he had sworn to himself he wouldn’t give up on this idea or this book.

  The woman smiled at him and her face seemed even more attractive in a classical model way, except for the fact that the smile didn’t reach her green eyes. She had on a knit yellow sweater and shorts that allowed her beautiful, thin legs to stand out. She was barefoot and her long, blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

  Damn, she was the best-looking woman in the building.

  He was dreaming. This wasn’t real. It simply couldn’t be real.

  “Don’t bother to hit your recall button,” she said, her voice low and husky. “You’re inside my bubble now and it won’t work.”

  He shook his head. His mind was reeling. This could not be happening. It was against all the laws of physics that he understood, and he had spent some time studying them before he was allowed to take this research trip. And this was really, really against the laws of time travel.