The Time Traveler Adventures
EPISODE 6 - SEEING INTO
THE FUTURE
Dropping my keys on the floor, I raced to the back room and
there was the Time Machine and sitting in it was my future self. I was tempted
to grab a wrench or something and explain to him how angry I was that he had
taken my family. But he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and smiled.
“Henry, I’m pretty sure you are mad enough to kill me
but I do come in peace! We need to talk!”
“I have nothing to say to you until I get my family back!”
I almost shouted. “Where are they?”
My future self nodded and climbed out of the Time Machine.
“They are perfectly safe,” he assured me, shutting down the machine and
turning to face me. “In fact, they’re right here, in this apartment but they’re
about 48 hours in the future. If you were to do nothing, then I believe you’ll
catch up with them in about 2 days.”
I looked at my future self and didn’t like what I saw.
Even taking into account he was older, his face looked terribly worn and there
was a visible slump in his shoulders. But the thing I noticed about him were his
eyes! They gave him a look of defeat.
“I suppose you would like to know what is going on?” he
asked. He ran his hands through his thinning hair and gave me a questioning
look. “How about we go into the kitchen and talk. I really could use some
orange juice.”
Now orange juice happened to be my favorite drink. Emily
usually kept 2 or 3 cartons in the refrigerator just so I wouldn’t run out. It
sounded strange to hear him ask for orange juice but then I remembered he was
me. My likes would be his likes. I had begun thinking of my future self as
another man but he wasn’t. He was me.
Seated at the table, he took a long drink and sighed.
Looking at him, I was reminded of my Dad. Our Dad! The thinning hair was the
same and so were his gestures. Although I didn’t see the resemblance to my
father in me, I sure saw it in him.
We stared at each other for a moment and then he said, “Henry,
we have a big problem!”
“What kind of a problem” I wanted to know.
“We, you and I, have doomed mankind to extinction!
Inadvertently, we have set in motion a catastrophic chain of events that will
only end in tragedy! Do you remember about a year after you brought Emily and
Anna Marie back from the past, that Anna Marie got very sick? The doctors couldn’t
even put a name to her illness so you swiped her hospital records, took the Time
Machine deep into the future and came back with a cure? Do you remember Henry?”
“Of course, I remember,” I told him. “I wasn’t
going to let anything happen to my family!”
“You’re not going to want to hear this but saving Anna
Marie has doomed mankind!”
“You’re insane!” I shouted at him, angry that he
would even think such a thing. “How can you even say that?”
“Just calm yourself Henry! I had the same reaction as you
when I found out but I have been trying to fix this problem for the better part
of 3 years! I have traveled forward and backwards in time but I have been unable
to change what we did. As of right now, mankind is scheduled for extinction in
about 1000 years!
“Why?” I was able to choke out! “What have we done
but save a little girls life?” My future self took another drink of orange
juice and reached for the carton to refill his glass. I grabbed his arm and held
it down on the table. “Why?”
With his other hand, he pulled my hand away and continued
to fill his glass. “It doesn’t seem that something so insignificant could
change the course of history but it has and mankind is traveling full bore
toward total destruction! You see Henry, you and I possess a strand of DNA,
which makes us super intelligent. You’ve heard the word genius before, Henry.
We hate it but that’s what we are! Well, we have passed this tiny strand of
DNA onto Anna Marie. This means nothing right now but it will when Anna Marie
gets married and has children of her own. You see Henry; she meets a young man
named Christopher Matthias. They fall in love and get married. They have a son,
who they name Henry, after me…us…I’m proud to say! Our young grandson
turns out to be a most extraordinary boy.”
My mind was whirling. Here Anna Marie was barely two years
old and already I’m hearing about her marriage and children. Christopher
Matthias??? For some reason, that name was familiar to me.
“Christopher Matthias?” I asked my future self and he
laughed.
“Yes Henry, you know that name because his father is an
acquaintance of yours….ours. Christopher Matthias Sr. He is head of the
electronics school down at the state college. You have met him a few times.”
“Right!” said, remembering a tall, gangly man who was
definitely living in his own world. Everything to him was equated to circuits
and transistors! A real geek! And I chuckled in spite of myself. Others have
called me a geek and I wonder if Dr Matthias thinks of me that way.
“You see, Henry,” my future self continued, “the man
Ana Marie marries carries a similar DNA gene in him and they combine in our
grandson, who I am proud to say, may just be the most intelligent person who has
ever lived. By the time he was 12, he was doing graduate school studies. He
actually got his PhD at 17. He’d always been fascinated with computers and
then, in his early 20’s something clicked inside his head and he created the
first true artificial intelligent machine. It was almost human. It could learn.
Learn Henry, not just be reprogrammed but actually LEARN! And, as far as I can
figure, that was the beginning of the end.”
“I don’t understand?” I told future Henry. “Why
would that doom mankind? Wouldn’t that be a boon? Wouldn’t a true mechanical
intelligence help mankind?”
“This might sound silly Henry but I’m going to remind
you of a very popular movie that played in about your time era. We always liked
that movie but we thought is was far-fetched and could never happen to us but
Henry…It will happen unless we do something about it! It was an Arnold
Schwarzenegger movie called “The Terminator”.
“You mean to tell me that machines are going to unite and
exterminate mankind in a war and our grandson was responsible?”
“Responsible yes but he was guiltless. By the time this
came to pass, we were all long dead. We’re talking 1000 years in the future,
Henry! As I said, I have spent the last 3 years of my life trying to fix this. I
thought the Golden Arrow was the answer. I believed I could use it to sway our
grandson. I wanted to make him not invent that darned machine but stealing the
arrow messed things up almost worse. It created an evil empire that in another
50 years would’ve destroyed the earth in nuclear warfare.”
I was shaking but something didn’t sound right. “Listen,”
I said, “I have been to the future! It isn’t like that at all!”
But Henry,” my future self continued, “When you went to
the future, you hadn’t saved Anna Marie’s life yet. That was a different
time line. Once you administered the medicine, we moved to a different future!”
“I don’t believe you!” I said. “That’s
ridiculous! Terminators! Hah!”
My future self smiled and reached into his pocket. Holding
his fist out, he opened it. In his palm was a round clear crystal about the size
of a large marble. He pointed at it with his other hand. “A memory sphere,”
he said. “Everything I have said is documented on this sphere. Just play it
and you will see!”
“That’s going to awfully hard to play in my
computer’s disk drive!” I told him, picking up the sphere with my fingers.
“It doesn’t look like it will fit in the VHS player either! We’ll need
something to play this on!”
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"I snatched the crystal from my future self's hand and popped it into the Hologram Crystal Reader. I had to know the truth!! As the lasers shined through the sphere, my heart sank. It was true!!! What a horrible future we have to look forward to. We simply must work together to find a way to undo the horrible wrong we have done...."
Crystal Sphere Player
by Jeri (Had to include this since she did take the time
to write part of the story!) |
| I was in shock! I sat
silently watching the events of the future played out in graphic detail.
The destruction of mankind seemed to be total and I was responsible for
starting it! All I had wanted to do was save my daughter! And I did and I
don’t regret doing it! I love my family and I will do anything to make
sure they are safe! But this? How does one fix the total destruction of
mankind?
Future projector by Barlekis the Wizard
|
 |
 |
Once the memory sphere stopped
running, we both sat in silence. I knew if I had to do it again, I would!
I would save Anna Marie’s life a thousand times because that was what a
loving father did! So there had to be another way! I looked at my future
self.
"Can’t we just prevent Anna Marie from marrying this boy?” I
asked! “That shouldn’t be too hard!”
“That was my first thought but there is something happening here I don’t
understand. I have moved our family 5 different times to 5 different
places but this boy always finds Anna Marie. If we stay here, they meet at
the university. So, I moved us to France and I took a job at the
university there and they met while Christopher was on a summer study
trip.
“So I went back and moved us to Santiago Chile. I was able to get a job
as a consultant with Bascunan software company. The boy shows up one day
with a new program his father sent and they meet in the hallway and fall
in love!
“Then it was Sydney Australia! Same thing. I do everything I can to keep
them apart and they meet on a bus! In Florence Italy, they meet in a
museum and in Los Angeles they meet in a coffee shop! I never believed in
fate but I’m beginning to!
Seeing the Future by Lady Bladecroft |
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