Released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, 2007

Gever Tulley

I'm skimming down the list of options. Without looking up, I know that the salesman is watching me intently. He notices when I pause over the Power of Flight description and is visibly relieved when I move on. Then I see it: Time Travel - who wouldn't want that? Of course it's the most expensive item on the menu - more than twice as expensive as X-Ray Vision, three times as expensive as Super Hearing. I look up to see him smiling at me.

"Time-travel, my friend, is the Cadillac of super-powers," he starts in with his pitch, "Power of Flight? You run out of places to fly and eventually you are wishing you can fly faster so you can get to work on time. Invisibility? After watching a thousand beautiful women take showers, you start to feel dirty – pretty soon you’re just another trench-coated lecher. Human Torch? A lot of wrecked clothing and a trick you do with your finger to impress chicks at the bar. Super Stretch? You get to choose between being called "Plastic Man" or "Rubber Man", but ultimately you get the last tent in the freak show. Telekinesis - fun for a third-grader. Telepathy - no romance for you. Teleportation - we call it time-travel's ugly step-child - faster than flying, but that's about it."

He's on a roll now, and selling hard. He stands up and paces to the window, "Look at Superman, he chose the combo-plate; Super Strength, X-Ray Vision, Invincibility - and he still needs the fortress of solitude. What does that say about his life? He should have picked time-travel."

I wasn't sure when I came in, I thought I was going to have to flip a coin to decide between flight and invisibility, but now I'm sure. We start the paper-work, and a few minutes later he hands me a manual, a small, transparent spherical capsule filled with a silky gray powder that reeks of nanotech, and a disclaimer that says that the Nihon-Bayer Company is not responsible for anything that happens to me in the present, past, or future.

The manual has all the characteristics of bad machine-translation from Japanese. I prop it open on my steering wheel and decode parts of it on my way home – most of it appears to be generic super-power boiler-plate mixed with frequent admonitions to “user powers for deeds of good only.”

It says to take the nano with a high-sugar soda like Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up, Hawaiian Punch, Mr. Pibb, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up, Sprite, Squirt, Mountain Dew, Orange Crush, or Mug Root Beer – no mention of Yoo-Hoo… I don't keep sodas in the house so I pour myself a nice glass of water; add four tablespoons of sugar, a squeeze of fake juice from a plastic lime I keep in the fridge, stir, stir, stir, and then glug it down as fast as I can along with the pill.

I brace for a dizzy sugar rush, but it never comes. Instead I have the most intense sensation of pins-and-needles - as if every cell in my body is getting a tiny jolt of electricity. I try to sit down and, for one panicked moment, I cannot move. Then the feeling fades and I regain my faculties.

I catch my breath. There is a strange pressure in my head and when I focus on it, a message unspools in my mind; "Time Travel Version 2.36 installed successfully. Thank you for purchasing this product. Say “yes” to continue configuration now, “cancel” to configure later."

Initial configuration takes a few minutes – long enough for me to start to feel stupid for saying “yes” over and over again - and in the last stage I am forced to perform the "return to real-time" thought pattern ten times consecutively and correctly before it will unlock the travel functionality.

Then I do all the obvious things; jump backward 15 minutes and watch myself from the living room. "Boo!" I yell at the earlier me, grinning like a fool as I watch me come to the slow realization of what is happening. Then the historical me says "Cool!" and suddenly I realize that I have no memory of this event. I should have seen myself 15 minutes ago, but I definitely didn't. I initiate "return to real-time" and crack open the manual. After a few minutes reading I finally find the passage I'm looking for under the heading "Temporal Continuity":

Past visits and your existence divides your private timeline into two. You being present oneself the modification where you present oneself instigates resembled another part, it is the chain of the causal relation one compared to, but. As a result if you are restricted longer than that branch, in the difference perhaps do many you than the わ ち become aware, (look at the cumulative effect). The known secondary effects of the existence extended in causalities differentiate include them the psychosis, the dissassociative breakdowns, the headache and the dry mouth."

All manuals suck. I call the 800 number, which connects me to an outsourced support center somewhere in India, and we wrestle with pronoun tenses for half an hour before they read the same paragraph from the manual to me. When I explain that I don’t understand it, they read it to me again, pausing between each word so that the meaning will sink in.

Here’s what I think it means; I go back and yell “boo” and what I am visiting is the timeline of a parallel me, the me that will eventually have the memory of this me yelling “boo”. If I stay too long, I will have the headache and the dry mouth from the accumulated differences as our timelines drift further apart.

So I jump forward a day, back a week, back a year, back a hundred years. It's impossibly cool, I feel like a kid with brand new tennies.

I jump back to 1972; my childhood, and I am standing on the street outside our house in Concord, California. Here I come, out the door like bullet: my seven year old self - what a brat. I turn and follow me up the street. There is a movie-like quality to everything; like the colors are more saturated and the contrast is turned up.

I wander the streets of my youth. Everything looks smaller than I remember. After a few minutes, I notice that I'm destroying my childhood memories. These scenes are replacing the scenes from Concord that I remember. I pop back to the kitchen and do a quick review of favorite scenes from my childhood only to find that my mental image of our house in Concord is now entirely replaced with what I just saw. Ok, no visits to my personal past. Check.

The kitchen makes a good base for time-traveling, I find, after a month of practice. It's a nice place to return to. You can go back to the Dark Ages, peek in on all the scheming at the Vatican, and then just when you are getting disgusted with everyone - bam! - you are back in your kitchen, and why not have a nice cold beer while you are here?

Yeah, time-travel has got it going on. Like it says in the brochure: anywhere, anywhen. I spend weeks jumping around in time, visiting every historical date I can think of; JFK assassination (let me just say that it wasn’t Oswald), Roswell (another cover-up), Lisbon earthquake (what a tragedy), Pompeii (more tragedy), sinking of Atlantis (not where everybody thought it was), opening of the Eiffel tower (nice party), discovery of anti-gravity (not as far in the future as you might think).

I exhaust my personal memory of significant historical dates. What next? I consult the Wikipedia for suggestions, and visit some interesting moments, but they are only abstractly interesting. I decide that I should be more methodical; after all, I’ve got time. I dig out an old notebook, skip over the scrawled notes from some night-class on accounting that I dropped out of after the first class, and write in bold numerals at the top of a blank page: 0000, and that’s where I jump to – the year zero. By the end of the afternoon, hopping by hundreds, I’m already in 800 AD.

It really is endless possibilities, the moral high-ground (compared to Invisibility), a get out of jail free feeling of euphoria, and a heady sense of omniscience.

Except for one thing...

death.

I'm sure it happens to everyone who picks time-travel from the menu. There you are boppin' around the centuries and all of a sudden you start to wonder; am I still alive in 2050?

I know I shouldn't, and I have the distinct feeling I haven't thought through all of the ramifications, but I do it anyway - I hop over to 2050 and start poking around. I look in a phone book; I go to the library and use the public access internet terminals there (noting with disdain that banner ads are still prevalent). I ask a librarian how I might go about finding someone, a lost friend, I say. He shows me how to access digitized microfilm from the internet terminals. But it is no use; there is no sign of me here.

Well, who wants to live to be ninety anyway? I jump back to my real-time kitchen and have a sandwich. I am standing in the kitchen, travel boots marking up the linoleum floor, munching on non-GMO tuna and sprouted wheat bread, but my mind is in 2040. Did I live to be 80? Surely I made 80. I pop the last bite in my mouth and flick up to 2040, skim the global phone directory at a public network access point, still chewing on my 2004 era sandwich, hmm... no sign of me here either. This is starting to get creepy. So it's back to the kitchen for some milk and pondering.

You start to make up rationalizations. At least that's what I did; “I must have changed my name," I say to my avocado green refrigerator, "Marriage customs are no doubt different, and I've taken my wife's name. I'm probably happily married and living somewhere remote and pleasant - I always wanted to get away from the city.”

Or (and I really like this idea), "Maybe I'm living off-planet." Yeah, off-planet. I knew from visits further in the future that we will have colonies on the moon, mars, a couple of dozen asteroids, and in orbit around various planets in the system. Off-planet. I like the sound of that.

A couple of rationalizations later and I decide that there is a good chance I was still alive in 2040. I can stop worrying and enjoy the afternoon. Contemplation of my demise made me feel transient, empty, and morbid.

I consult my notebook and jump to 5400 and find that it looks a lot like 5300; totalitarian mono-government ruling the entire planet and at war with the moon and mars. A hundred years of planetary war - yuck. 5200 had been much nicer. 5200 had frag-metal-tech music blaring out of every house on the block, cheap vat-grown organs, and drug-lords doing flyovers with samples of mind altering drugs. 5200 was a fuckin' paradise.

I let the police pick me up on a routine sweep - I'm out past curfew (which starts at 2 in the afternoon, a sure sign of social decay) - and I yell "Remember 5200!" while they cram me into the boxy police wagon. I wait until they have me in a cell and then jump back to my kitchen. It's almost midnight and I'm tired.

Brush my teeth, wash my face, go to sleep - some things time-travel doesn't really help. I've tried sleeping in another time, but it just doesn't work. I always end up back here as soon as I drift off. If I bothered to read the manual, it would probably explain why.

Before I get undressed, I pop back up to 2040 - just a quick look to see if I'm dead yet. I spend a few minutes (on Google as it turns out) in a public network access terminal. To my dismay, the only reference to me is a posting I made to a technical support forum for a programmable remote control that I will buy in 2008. Dang.

I am sullen as I slump in the bed and watch a rerun of a talk show that I hate. Why do I watch this crap? I could go to the 3000’s and immerse myself in one of those sensorium dramas, but instead I watch Letterman toss softball questions to the latest “it”-girl. Sleep comes slowly and just before it takes me completely, I have the briefest moment of "where will I wake up" panic before I remember that I am in my own time line.

The next morning I am chock-a-block with resolve; I will not be sneaking peeks at my own personal future (I will, however, buy Google stock). I look at my calendar, no appointments - good. I can work on my centuries project (I quit my job weeks ago, once I figured out how to work the stock market – time travelers with day jobs are losers).

I dawdle over breakfast. I don’t want to go to 5500 and find a continuation of 5400. Totalitarian regimes, I know from my explorations, have an inertia that gives them an advantage over democracies, socialism, Marxism, Nefism (a brief and very boring period in the mid 3000's - don't ask), and anarchism. On a bright note; in 3200 or so, Iceland discovers the world’s richest vein of diamonds, cheaper even than manufactured ones, and immediately out-sources all work, leaving its people to indulge in what can best be described as state-mandated Hedonism; free drugs, free sex, free housing, free food. That was (will be) great. I still make monthly visits to that golden era, jumping up there whenever I have certain, uh, needs.

5500... I don't want to get there and find more military regime. I load the dishes into the dishwasher. I go online and buy some Google stock, move some money around, approve the default bill paying. 5500. I drive down to Safeway and get some supplies. Fill up the tank. Get the car washed. Put the groceries away. Toss out some stuff that has gone really bad.

Alright, 5500 it is. I jump.

At first I can't see anything and wonder if I've landed in a cave. Then there is a bright flash followed by a sound which picks up my body and throws it into a bush. A broken branch pierces my calf and I scream but cannot hear myself. Dark, shadowy forms loom before me, and try to lift me out of the bush. I flail my arms, screaming, kicking my one good leg. One of them leans in close and his blackened face devolves into two bright white eyes. He is yelling at me, I am yelling at him. I can't understand what he is saying. He puts his finger to his lips and shushes me. How can I shush?

"I've got a branch through my leg!" I yell.

He leans back a little, says something to one of his men, and out of the corner of my eye I catch a swift movement - and I am knocked unconscious.

"Get up!"

The voice is very close, I can feel the breath on my ear, smell the acidic tang of coffee and blood. I open my eyes and struggle to focus on the face floating above me; a woman. She gives me a quick smile.

"You are awake," she says. It is a statement of fact, meant to be helpful to those who might otherwise think they were dreaming.

I see now that I am in some kind of makeshift hospital. I sit up, and look around. A cavernous room, some kind of warehouse perhaps, filled with beds, dim lights on stands, and the wailing and moaning of terribly injured people.

"Where am I?"

She is dressed in surgical scrubs that are stained with blood and she gives me a sardonic smile as she moves around the foot of my bed, "If I told you that, I'd have to kill you."

"Really?"

"No. But that's the best I can come up with," she pushes a gurney next to my bed. I think she expects me to get on, but then I see that it is already occupied.

"Get up," she says again.

"I don't think I can, I hurt my leg."

"I patched that up yesterday, now get up and help me get this guy into your bed."

"Don't you want to change the sheets?"

She chuckles, "I didn't change 'em for you, and I figure this guy only has another couple of hours left in him."

"Who are you?" I ask.

"I'm the one telling you to get up."

"Are you a doctor?"

"Sometimes."

My leg hurts when I stand on it, but it holds. My pant leg has been cut open to gain access to my injury. The pant flares like an exaggerated bell-bottom, and with each step the cloth parts to reveal the ugly mess on my leg.

The man on the gurney looks like he has been crumpled up and then (unsuccessfully) smoothed back out again. I gingerly lift and guide his legs as the sometimes doctor unceremoniously plops her end of the patient on the bed, eliciting a pitiful groan.

"What was that?" she asks.

The patient says nothing.

"I thought so."

She puts her hand on the blood spattered forehead of the injured man. "I wish you peace," she says earnestly, and then she looks at me, sizing me up.

"Come with me."

I look at the patient, then at the sometimes doctor's hands.

"Shouldn't you be wearing gloves?"

"Gloves?" she looks at the dried blood under her nails, "Gloves would be so nice."

She walks briskly, deftly maneuvering the gurney through the maze of beds, improvised lighting, and shocked families of the injured. I hop-skip behind her, distracted by the endlessly repeated sight of mothers wailing over the broken bodies of their full-grown children.

Then it hits me - yesterday? I hobble quickly up to my guide and grab her shoulder.

"How long have I been here?" I demand.

"I don't know when you came in," she replies, "but I sewed you up yesterday."

"Yesterday? Are you sure?"

"Yes," she resumes her rapid transection of the huge space.

"That's really odd," I say, not meaning to say it out loud. Not for the first time, I wonder, why aren't I in my kitchen?

I focus inside my mind and request a diagnostic - no reply. I focus harder. Still nothing. Another revelation - I'm trapped in the future.

"Hey!" she yells, "Are you coming?"

I have no other options, "Sorry," I say, and hop-skip to catch up to her. We cross the cavernous space in silence. At the far wall we walk through a metal framed doorway, ripped hinges still dangling from the frame, and into a wide dimly lit corridor with a worn linoleum floor. My leg is loosening up. I test it more with each step until I am walking almost normally. At the end of the corridor, she stops at a chained double door.

She hefts the sturdy lock in her hands, turns it over so that I can see that it is a combination lock of some sort. I notice that her shoulders are hunching rhythmically - she is crying.

"Are you ok?"

"Yes," she says, "no. No, I'm not ok. I'm just sick and tired of this," she shakes the lock for emphasis.

"You’re tired of the lock?"

"Yes. I am tired of this lock," she looks up, "this door," she turns, sweeping her arm to encompass the whole world, "this hallway, and this place... everything." She reaches out, and I move to take her in my arms and offer comfort. I flash on the difficulties of managing a temporally complicated relationship, and, too late, I catch a glimpse of the syringe in her hand. I pull away, twisting, but the needle finds its way through my shirt. I stagger and slump to the floor, my major muscle groups tightening.

"I'm sorry," she says, still crying, "I hate this part most of all."

<What are you doing?>, I yell through my clenched teeth.

"Well," she leans down and picks up my feet, "we need people like you. And I feel just sick about it, but we're desperate and there doesn't seem to be any other way."

She begins to drag me slowly away from the wall, letting my head down very gently onto the cold, dirty, linoleum floor.

<People like me?>, I ask. It sounds like "eehole ike ee?" But she is obviously accustomed to interpreting the garbled talk of the recently paralyzed, and she answers, "Yes, people like you - time travelers." She drags me over next to the gurney.

<What are you talking about?>

"Well, we get quite a few of you, you know? And you're all so easy to spot with your strange clothes and funny accent."

I try to kick my legs. It's no use, so I scream at her. That's no use either. She releases the lift-latch on the gurney and it drops down to almost floor level. I can't see it any more since my head is pointed slightly away. My eyes feeling the effects of the paralysis now and I have trouble focusing them.

<Why bring me out here?> I ask the ceiling.

"We don't want anyone to overhear. Some of those parents, loved ones, or wounded out there are most assuredly spies. If they heard we were gathering time-travelers, well, that would make things just that much more difficult for us."

It's almost impossible to talk now, but I force out one more question, <What will happen to me?>

I can hear the note of desperation in my voice.

She lets out a little sob, sniffs, and then, with surprising facility, flops my body onto the gurney.

"We can't make the nanotech anymore," she explains, "but if we have any hope of defeating the Highborn Council, we'll have to stop them before they start. So... we need what is in your cells."

<No!> I yell, but it barely comes out. The paralysis has seeped into my lungs, my throat.

<You can't change your past>, I want to say, <Read the manual!>

Unable to turn my head, or even move my eyes, I hear her unlocking the chain.