The Time Travel Chronicles (49 page)

Danny Wong used it to his advantage.  I guess we all did, but he was creative.  He expanded his parents’ restaurant business and turned Wong’s Wok into the national chain it is today. You know the jingle,
You can’t go wrong with Wong
. Everybody loves their crispy lo mein.  I know,
Chinese
restaurant
, that sounds cliché, but keep in mind he had a secondary study in business.  You may be thinking he uses the flop for the fortune cookies, and I wouldn’t blame you.

But that’s not what he’s doing.

Ever wonder how they deliver so fast?

He precogs all of the delivery orders each day for the entire chain and has them ready to go when the customers call, actually set them up long ago.  He told me that everything has been entered into a computer for years to come.  We’re talking zero waste, bulk buying, and optimum staffing.  When he goes public, we all make a killing.  There’s a tip for you.

And Marty?  Marty was bright and would have received his PhD regardless of the flop.

His downfall was his hunger for power, over the world around him, over himself.  He alienated everyone with his thirst to know what he couldn’t see and the compulsion to control what he could. In his aspiration to be a god he leveraged everything he saw, but you can’t know what you haven’t seen.  Marty was ultimately rejected by the world as a recluse and a fool.

On numerous occasions I’ve caught myself thinking of Marty and wondering how often Marty visited his inevitable end, if he thought he could avoid it, overcome it, see past it.  And then I’ve pondered if Marty’s gone at all.  We’ve all seen our mortal end.  He has no future or present but his past exists alongside mine.  Like the hooded figure on the bridge, he could go forward and backward in time at will, whenever he wanted.  Maybe he just traveled back to his youth, or some other time, and in that way is still alive.  I would have liked to have asked him, but I never did, and I never do.  I wonder if he’d know the answer.

By knowing past, present, and future, we are removed from our lives.  We were all cursed, not blessed.  We play walk-on roles in a moving picture.  No surprises, no unknowns. There are no wives or children, just visitations with our past and future selves.  I suppose that’s because life became less interesting.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

Me, I don’t travel much anymore.  Not physically anyway.  There are too many tentacles.  I rarely leave my brownstone.  It’s in a part of Manhattan that will remain safe and undisturbed for some time.  I play the market, if you can call it playing.  I buy and sell things, commodities, stocks.  While Marty may have dwelt near the end, I visit the beginning, that house and our youth in the student ghetto.  And I eat a lot of crispy lo mein.

You can’t go wrong with Wong
.

A Word from Daniel Arthur Smith

Meta fiction, magical realism, slipstream, science fiction, speculative fiction—literature that leads the reader through a maze of reality has always intrigued me.  We can accept plainly that a maelstrom can cast a very old man with enormous wings from the sky, that a blight can make the population blind, or ponder whether androids dream of electric sheep.

Recently I read, for the countless time, Philip K. Dick’s
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
where false and real memory distort reality for the protagonist and the reader.  On that story’s heels I serendipitously read Robert Coover’s contribution to the
New Yorker
, “Going for a Beer” (
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/14/going-for-a-beer
) a tale that utilizes Meta Fiction to offer the reader a visceral nonlinear perception of the narrator’s life, outside of space and time.

I was inspired.  A question I’ve pondered is what would happen if someone achieved the level of enlightenment that gave them full perception.  The story “The Diatomic Quantum Flop” references the Dalai Lama, the Kalachakra Tantra, and touches on his said capability to see the states of past, present, and future at will.

What if that’s true?  And what if a regular person, a college student, suddenly possessed such a power.

The mystique of the psychedelic trip is ripe with the mythos of aliens and time travel.  Throughout history, people have endeavored to break through the doors of perception.  Many religious traditions involve a journey to the other side, to a place of enlightenment and transcendental awareness.

Freud and Jung mimicked Shamanic rituals to further understand the conscience, as did Carlos Castaneda and Terence McKenna.  Timothy Leary inspired generations of hippies and college kids to Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out.

But transcendental experimentation has not been limited to intellectuals and psychedelic astronauts.  The CIA-run Project MKULTRA manipulated the mental states of the unsuspecting by altering brain functions with psychedelics and sensory deprivation tanks.  And the Nazi’s were rumored to have traveled to Tibet to learn about the Kalachakra Tantra and how it related to time travel.

Recent scientific understanding (or gaps in our understanding) of Dimethyltryptamine, more popularly known as DMT, has led scientists and pseudoscientists alike, to speculate what exactly this chemical can unlock.  In my novel
Plane Drifters
future agents of the Homeland are modified with cyber technology similar to that in “The Diatomic Quantum Flop”, and with its assist are able to traverse to planes beyond our current perception, and to see those resident beyond our peripheral.  But the agents of
Plane Drifters
only touch on premonition, never achieving full omniscience. This story was my experiment into the implications of that omniscient perception.

In this story a riddle is asked, and a possible answer is given at the end.  The better question asked throughout the story is whether the lives of the characters are determined before, or after, they first drank the vials.  And what is not discussed, are the implications.  What does it mean to at will see a pleasure repeated?  Or a horror?  Did our characters affect the world around them, past, present, and future?

Do we have free will or is the quantum structure of time determined?  If the past, present, and future exist, could it be possible that those thought dead are alive?  Does that change our definition of death?  Are we only designed to perceive a fraction of reality?  If there is more to reality than we perceive, how much more is there?

We should be careful not to bring up what we cannot put back down.

These questions and themes have long taunted me and appear consistently in my work.  You can find my works in speculative fiction, slipstream, action and adventure on my website
http://www.danielarthursmith.com
or you can also subscribe to my newsletter
http://www.danielarthursmith.com/newsletter
to receive news and Advanced Reader Copies before anyone else.

by Michael Holden

C
OMING DOWN OFF THE ESCARPMENT above Collingwood, I glanced over at the old woman and down at her liver-spotted hands resting on her purse. The joints on her fingers were swollen with arthritis, and she rubbed anxiously at the clasp where the gold paint had partially worn off. Seeing me looking, she crossed her arms protectively over the handbag. She didn’t trust me. That much was clear.

I remember feeling pretty good that morning as I drove up her laneway. She was waiting on me, standing on the porch looking down toward the side road as if she was expecting somebody. I grabbed my work gloves and got out.

“Come inside, Jimmy,” she said from the porch and slowly led me in, pushing the inner door open with her cane.

That’s when I heard the other car. “Have a seat,” she said, “we need to have a little talk.”

Uh-oh.

So I sat on her chesterfield with my gloves on my knee, listening to somebody getting out of their car and knocking on the door.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, already on her way. I turned to look and in comes that big bull cop, Palmer, with a cheesy grin on his chops.

They had me dead to rights. Laid out photos of me in Keady reselling the stuff I had stolen out of her barn.  She also knew, to the penny, how much had been in the change jar she kept in the high kitchen cupboard. Set it all out like a lawyer, plain as day. Said she would lay charges unless …

“You ought to lay charges, no matter what, ma’am,” Palmer said. “We’ve had him in before, more times ’n I can count.” He turned to me. “Ain’t that right, Jimmy? Jesus, this lady here gives you a job—and there aren’t many would do that with your record—an’ you treat her like this here. He shook his head. “Man your age, stealing from his employer—”

“Well, be that as it may, Jimmy and I have to talk,” she said, cutting him off. “I’m not yet ready to lay charges. There’s some nice fresh ham in the fridge and some bread I baked yesterday. Why don’t you help yourself to a sandwich?”

“You sure about this?” Palmer said. “He ought to be locked up for good—”

“I’m certain, Officer,” she said, smiling at him.

Palmer shook his head at me as he passed on his way out to the kitchen. I noticed he left the door open. Eavesdropping. Typical cop.

Grace had waited, watching me rubbing my knuckles. Reform school tats, L-O-V-E on one hand and H-A-T-E on the other. I’d regretted those a week after I got them and I’d spent nearly a half century rubbing at them. I quit fidgeting when I saw her looking and laced my fingers together, chewing over what she meant by that “unless.”

I am getting too old for this
, I thought, kicking myself.
Christ, I’m almost sixty-five and still getting caught. Shoulda got better at it, not worse.

“As I was saying,” she continued, staring pointedly into my face, “unless you do as I ask I am prepared to press charges.”

“What do I gotta do, kill somebody?”

“Nothing that dramatic, believe me. I just need you to drive me somewhere … take me somewhere. Today. I’ll need you the whole day.”

“What? You want me to—”

“Oh, don’t look so worried! I’ll pay expenses. Even see you have enough for a bus back.”

“But wh—”

“I want you to drive me where I want to go. They won’t let me drive anymore,” she said, staring at me through her thick bifocals. Made her eyes all big and creepy looking. “Don’t think you have much choice. How many theft charges have there been now?”

“How d’you kn—”

“Oh, I know. You think I didn’t look into your background before I hired you?”

“Well, why didya hire me then, if you knew?”

She paused a moment, leaning back into the stiff, wooden chair she sat in, even though there was a plush looking chair facing the big screen TV. “Because I wanted
you
, Jimmy.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I have my reasons. Don’t you think I could hire a teenager cheaper than an old crook like you?” She leaned forward, peering at me. “Least they wouldn’t steal from me. Now, don’t worry about that old wreck of yours. We’ll be taking my car. I’ll pay for the gas.”

She sat back and waited. I didn’t know what to say.

“Well, what’s it to be?” she said, sipping her coffee and watching me over the rim of her cup.

I was thinking there was something a little weird about all this, but I didn’t want to go back in. God knows what they would throw at me if she pressed charges. Had so many arrests on my sheet, they’d probably lock me up for good.

“If you knew … then that’s entrapment,” I mumbled, all belligerent. I never have stood for people making a fool out of me.

“Oh, you do wriggle, don’t you? It’s a drive, you foolish man, and you don’t have to break your back hoeing my garden. An easy day and the charges disappear.”

“Well,” I said after a moment, “if that’s all I gotta do—drive you somewheres and drop you. Take the bus back, you say? And no charges?”

She smiled at that and said, “No, I won’t … be in a position to lay charges. Of course, you won’t be working for me anymore, but you’ll be a free man.”

She had me there.

“All right,” I said finally.

Palmer came to the door of the living room. There was a half puzzled, half angry expression on his face and half a ham sandwich with a bite out of it clutched in his meaty hand. Cops! All greedy sonsabitches. He was shaking his head at her. “No, Mrs. Clark, you oughta—”

Before he could go on, she dismissed him, saying, “I think we’re done here. Jimmy and I can handle things from now on. I will be all right.”

Palmer clearly wasn’t happy, but he left anyway. He was obedient, like her family. Might even have been a relative, for all I knew. They all did as they were told around her. People said it was because she had plenty of dough. Money talks.