The Time Traveler Adventures

EPISODE 7 - TERMINATOR

How do you beat fate, I wondered? My future self had tried to keep Anna Marie and her husband-to-be apart but they always meet. Somehow, somewhere, they always find each other. What is it that we could do to counter this seemingly irresolute chain of events?

I looked at my future self and shook my head. Horrible thoughts ran through my head and I tried to suppress them but my mind kept working back to the same thing. I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my face with my hands. Future Henry took a sip of orange juice and set down his glass.

“I know what you are thinking,” he said with a look of resignation on his face. “I thought long and hard about how to prevent this meeting and it always came back to one thing! Eliminating one of them or the other!” I’m sure by the stricken look on my face he knew that was where my mind was.

“I’m not a murderer!” I managed to say. “I love Anna Marie and I could never harm a hair on her head!”

“I know Henry! Remember, I am you. Emily and I tried to reason this out but we were unable to come up with anything else.”

I raised my head. “Emily knows?” I asked.

“My Emily knows,” future Henry corrected, standing up and walking to the sink. He rinsed out the glass and dried it with the towel which Emily keeps there just for that very reason. He held the glass up to the light and, satisfied, he opened the cupboard and put it back in its place. “Your Emily doesn’t know yet. She just thinks I have somehow gone insane and kidnapped them. I haven’t told them anything. I will leave that to you!”

“Then why did you take them?” I asked. “It makes no sense.”

“I needed to talk to you Henry, alone! I would never have brought you into this if the Time Machine hadn’t somehow deposited me here in your time after I had taken the Golden Arrow. Somehow, things are becoming confused. My future Time Machine seems to have one way or another become one with your machine here, in the past. The more I use the Machine, the more I find myself here! And I don’t know why!”

“Perhaps fate,” I muttered, more to myself that to future Henry. “It seems fate is intervening here too!”

“Could be,” he replied, sitting back at the table. “You may be right and fate led me back to you, my past self. If indeed it is fate, then I have to believe that you have the answer to our predicament!”

“Alright listen,” I said, touching the holographic crystal sphere reader. “Have you shown this to Anna Marie? Has she seen what will happen if she marries this guy?”

“She has seen it more than once. I showed it to her before she met Christopher and she seemed to understand. She knows about the Time Machine and I did take her into the future to see for herself. That was how the Time Machine got damaged. We ran into one of those robotic enforcers. They really are Terminators! We barely got away with our lives. She swore to me that she would try and help. But then, she meets Christopher and it all falls apart. Have you ever tried to tell a young girl, who is in love, that she cannot marry the man of her dreams?

“I kept reminding her about this the whole time they were dating and I begged her to think about what she is doing. All I managed to do was to anger her and drive her away. She stopped listening to me. I wasn’t even invited to their wedding!

“Then I tried my best to get back into her good graces and succeeded. I did want access to my grandson when he was born. Young Henry has also seen this memory sphere. I showed it to him when he about 14. He was fascinated and herein lies the paradox. I think my showing it to him peaked his interest. That incident may just have pushed him into the studies of Artificial Intelligence. I don’t know that he disbelieved what will happen if he invents a true Artificial Intelligence but he certainly ignored it or, at least, minimized the repercussions.

“So you see, nothing I have done can prevent the inevitable. Besides changing the timeline and dooming humanity by saving Anna Marie’s life, I may have hastened it by showing young Henry the future. I have lamented endlessly about even inventing the Machine! I even toyed with the idea of going back in time and eliminating myself.”

That startled me and I looked up at my future self. “Suicide?”

He shook his head no. “Not really, you remember when you were in the hospital after you had your tonsils out?” I nodded and he continued. “I got some lethal poison and went back to that night you lay asleep in the hospital. I even stood in the room looking at you…us…with the syringe in my hand. It would have been so easy! Just inject the poison into the IV and walk out of the room. That way the Time Machine will go uninvented and ….” He left the rest unsaid. I looked up at him and saw the tears in his eyes. At that moment, I understood the look of defeat in his eyes. Three years trying to fix a problem that he…we…created and being unable to do it.

“So Henry, here we are. We have a very big problem which I have tried everything I know, short of murder, to fix. I almost feel as if I don’t care anymore. Why should I worry about it? I’ll be dead in a thousand years when it happens! So what if mankind obliterates itself? Not my problem!”

I certainly understood what was happening inside him and I could almost feel his anguish but I also knew myself well enough to know that he wouldn’t give up. So that dumped the entire problem right in my lap. How do I fix a problem that my future self has spent 3 years trying to fix and can’t. How do I solve a problem where fate intervenes at every chance, opposing and frustrating me?

Now, I will probably remember what happened next for the rest of my life. It is one of those moments that is unforgettable. The Time Machine activated, in the back room. I saw the color drain from future Henry’s face. Confusion must have crossed my face. If both future Henry and myself were here, who had activated the machine? Future Henry leapt to his feet and reaching into his pocket, pulled out a pistol! He glanced wildly in my direction. As he began to run toward the back room, he mumbled one word……..Terminator!”

I tried to remember what those future terminators looked like but my mind drew a blank. I leapt to my feet and followed my future self. As an afterthought, I grabbed at a baseball bat I kept in the hall. I tried to picture one of the robot enforcers but my mind was a blank. What did they look like?

	As I sprinted into the backroom, time and motion seemed to stop for me. I saw in a glance that there was a tall robot enforcer standing beside the time machine. It was made of dark metal but it had a definite human shape. The arms and legs were impossibly thin but it seemed to have all the balance and grace a human would have. My future self was three steps ahead of me and he leveled his revolver at the terminator. Five times he pulled the trigger and five magnum bullets plowed into the metallic monster. Part of the robot’s face was shattered and a section of its left shoulder vanished into shrapnel as the slug tore through it. The enforcer’s left arm clattered to the floor. Almost nonchalantly the creature took a step forward and brushed my future self aside with a swipe of its remaining arm. Henry’s last shot went wide as he flew across the room and into the workbench, where he slid to the floor in a crumpled heap. The swiping motion made the robot pause but it’s head swiveled toward me. The one remaining eye glowed a bright, deadly red…
"...as I stepped towards the back with my future self, a loud screeching clanking sound filled our ears. A low hum, like a jet plane sized bumblebee joined the din. We stood in fear, amazement, and dismay as a 7 foot tall metallic being joined us in the hallway. His body gleamed with the shine of a new quarter, his eyes glowing red behind their large black pupils. You could tell there was no soul behind those eyes. Just a machine's sense of getting the objective done. He slowly lowered the rather anitque but most assurably futuristic weapon, sighting it directly at us. From his non moving, but strangely human looking mouth, he said in a monotone "Henry. I'm here. As predicted.....I've come baaaaaaack".
	I was still moving forward and I thanked God I had stopped to grab the baseball bat. Taking one more step, I swung the bat as hard as I could and I hit the Terminator in the side of the head. The impact was so hard that my hands went momentarily numb but I did manage to collapse the remaining side of the creature’s face. The head tilted and the red light flickered and went out. I swung again at the creature’s head and this time it flew across the room and bounced off the wall. It hit the floor and its momentum made it roll back towards me. The robot’s body was still standing and I swung the bat again and again! The terminator disintegrated into a million pieces, which were scattered across the room. Finally, it crashed to the floor, where it lay still in a pool of blue liquid!

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