Although propaganda taught otherwise, Earth was nothing more than a barely living planet. Humans also barely lived—infested, really—and they seemed more of a shadow of humanity, rather than the real thing. It had once been said that, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, the only species that would survive would be the cockroach. Roaches were filthy vermin that ate anything, including each other, bred incessantly, and destroyed or decomposed everything in their path. Roaches became completely extinct about two decades previous, because mankind had out-filthed, out-ate, and out-bred even such a vile creature as a cockroach. The result was that now, the only real significant life form left on Earth was man.
The few people that retained all the world’s riches—the culmination of thousands of years of people who robbed, killed, and otherwise manipulated themselves into owning and/or ruling it all—lived, not on Earth, but around it in plush and accommodating satellite homes. There people were educated, and trained to be the next generation of greedy, evil murderers that ruled over the barely sentient cockroach humanity.
Nigel was sitting at his desk, as usual, thinking these thoughts, as usual, and falling deeper and deeper into despair over the conclusions he came to—also as usual. Suicide echoed often into his mind; he was the son of an overlord, taught to be just as everyone he had ever known was: greedy, selfish, uncaring…but in a way Nigel couldn’t understand, those things were just not right. They didn’t feel as right as he had been taught they should be, and he didn’t know why. He only knew he wanted something else, something that wasn’t, and he had no way of setting about to get it. But always, whenever he tried to end his despair, something held him back—that something he also didn’t understand.
Today, as Nigel sat at his desk, he had more than thoughts to attend to, he had a project to work on: the history of time-travel. As he was still a young man, his only real work was that of being educated. Learning was his only comfort from, and with, his ever-reaching mind.
Work had been done several decades previous into travelling to the future or the past, with an interesting serendipity of results. There was, it had been discovered, an actual—although intangible—“stream of time,” a dimension that connected or upheld or monitored, (They weren’t really sure which) everything that was, is, and will be. Interruption of this existence, in order to pass through with the intention of ending up somewhen else, however, proved extremely unsuccessful. Passing living matter through a field developed to bridge their world with the non-realm of time resulted in, when retrieval was even successful, a mass of nonliving, mutated matter. The scientists, after losing far too many test subjects, decided to try sending more probes, instead of sentient lives, through the chasm to gather data on the nature of the return distortion.
Then, a particularly brilliant scientist began to experiment with sending particles, arranged to form a message, to what they hoped was back in time—but with out trying to retrieve it. The result was that instantaneously the message would be received, albeit just as garbled and mangled as human flesh had been.
The eventual result was that someone discovered a way to pre-distort a message, so that the resultant time-traveled version arrived as soon as the first was sent out, but this time in a readable fashion. Since there was no way to pre-distort a human, not and keep it alive anyway, human time-travel was abandoned. However, it was now possible to communicate directly with their space shuttles even when they were at some distance away, instantly, even though the message could take years to travel, it did so in the past, reaching its destination in the present, as intended. The result was the fastest and most reliable form of communication yet discovered.
That was the basic information he had for his report, but he knew all of that already, and undoubtedly so did his teacher. He wanted to put a new twist on it. He wasn’t interested in the space communication breakthrough—all the ships did was dump waste somewhere else and rape other planets of their natural resources, which infuriated him. It was the formula they used to change the formation of what were now called chronoparticles so that they arrived—or rather lasted—correctly, that interested him. The pattern of distortion was decipherable, and they were able to use the formula to compensate. In fact, it wasn’t really the formula that caught his attention in the first place, it was the pattern.
Why was there a pattern in the first place? That was what Nigel wanted to know. No one else seemed very much concerned with the why—but it was a question that haunted him. So, on the grounds of his project, he had procured one of the original, still-functioning portals that did not have an auto convert. Nigel began to experiment, not to gain any sort of advantage or even with a future profit in mind, but to satisfy his own puzzling yearning for knowledge that only he and humans long dead possessed.
Experimenting on the portal device proved difficult, since Nigel wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He sent about a dozen messages into the past, and picked them up on his normal receiver, garbled. But that didn’t prove enlightening since he already knew that was going to happen, and at precisely the pattern of distortion, as well. How do you find out why, he desperately wanted to know. Why was it predictable? How could something as transient and unpredictable as time be predicted? Unless…was time predictable? Preconceived notions began to fall from his mind. It had always been assumed that time was alterable. Was it?
The thought occurred to him that it was virtually impossible that someone didn’t notice nearly a hundred years of messages sent into the past. General receiving technology had changed little for hundreds of years. Why hadn’t their communiqués been received in the past, possibly altering history? The pattern remained the same, and Nigel thought that if history had been altered, even if they didn’t realize it had, the pattern would have also changed. It never did. In fact, as he began to think, a message should arrive to them in the past, before it was sent out, but none ever had. Why? His thoughts raced.
Maybe…maybe nobody in the past ever noticed because they were all dead. No, dead didn’t describe what he meant, since he was including past versions of people alive. Well, maybe they weren’t dead precisely, but gone. Done. What had happened in the lives of the past was over, and nothing, at least not chronoparticles, could change that. Yet, the past was there…or was it? Nigel thought for a moment, sorting out the details of what he was thinking. Maybe the past was there, but not like they thought—maybe it was more like a reflection, a record of what had been, equally distant in time relative to the present, but no more alterable than a book or a movie is to its audience.
The distinct and predictable pattern that chronomessages received could be a result of the reflective nature of the past—like time was a crystal prism that reflected the light of their particles.
The ideas were hitting Nigel rapidly, giving him a sense of euphoria that no drug could equal.
Was that it? Had he solved the mystery? It felt right. Except…what of the future? What was there? There hadn’t really been much in the way of research in that direction—once it was learned that a person could not time travel, all interest was lost. Was the future predictable, unalterable, like the past?
Nigel started to send chronoparticle messages into the future. Retrieving the messages from the future proved difficult, and in the end, he had to settle on sending his beam of information only a day or two into the future, for him to receive, in a day or two. Weeks went by; his report long-finished, (He decided not to include his new ideas, until he was able to gather proof) but still he recorded the data on the future distortion, studying, analyzing, comparing, hoping…hoping for what, he didn’t know, but he hoped for it anyway.
Nigel’s outlook on life slowly improved as the time went by, as well. Everything around him still assaulted his inner senses—but he was looking forward to the unknown, what will be surely will be better, he told himself time and again. With his eyes on the future, the present seemed to let him be, ever so slightly.
Two years passed, and Nigel reached the completion of his education. His high spirits from being almost able to understand his culminating information, fell abruptly. As an adult now, he was to begin his life’s work under his father—a future that he was too well aware of. He would start working as an overseer of one of his father’s farms, and as soon as he was able to be successful at it, he would be the head over all the farms, until it would finally be owned by him at the time of his father’s death.
Nigel knew he couldn’t do it. The only animals left on Earth were those sneaky enough to hide from man, orthose vicious enough to be able to survive, and there were not many of either category. The only readily accessible meat for people to eat were people themselves, and his father…his father farmed people for mass consumption. Nigel hadn’t touched human meat since he was nine years old, he couldn’t bear the thought of eating someone just like him. He couldn’t fathom why he seemed to be the only person who thought as he did. And now, the time had come when he was expected to actively endorse—further—something that repulsed him more than any other occurrence he had witnessed. Nigel had finally decided: in two days, before he was officially to receive the position at his father’s farm, he was going to take his own life.
His only reason for the forty-eight hour delay was because he wished to finish the puzzle of time. It wouldn’t matter, but his work felt like the only good thing he’d ever done—and Nigel wanted to end his life doing good, no matter how pointless it was.
Thirty-six hours before he planned to die—using the instantaneous neural disrupter all the farms used, painfully fitting, —all the mathematical formulas, all the half-patterns, all the pattern detector programs he’d been using started to sum up. As he worked by hand and monitored his computers—he saw revealing itself a solution. Nigel was so astounded he started to cry. His answer, at last:
No.
The future was not set in stone—and furthermore, there was obvious deliberation. Time was an it, but behind that it—there was a Who.
As Nigel examined the evidence, he became more and more certain of his conclusions. Time was being monitored, and adjusted, basically tended to by someone. Someone outside of time, someone who wasn’t affected in a linear way—someone Nigel really wanted to know.
There really was only one thing he could think of to do: Nigel set the portal to the future, and stuck as much of his body that would fit, in. It would kill him, all the physical evidence suggested. No matter, he would die anyway. He was hoping that he would gain the attention of the Time Keeper. A chance was all he had, and he took it.
As soon as his head entered the portal, an awareness came over him—as if part of his mind were unfolding and overpowering all else. He tried to look around, but he couldn’t see, or hear, or even feel his body—he could only perceive in a manner completely alien to him. The first thing he perceived was a not-really voice.
“Nigel,” it said.
“Who are you?” Nigel tried to say, but he found he couldn’t speak, either. The being seemed to hear, anyway.
“I am He Who Causes to Become—the Creator,” was the reply that he sensed.
Nigel’s mind processed that answer, and when he finally understood, a multitude of questions bombarded him, but they combined together into just one word: “Why?” he asked, pleadingly.
There was an answer. “I see all possibilities, I cause reality—you are a possibility. It will not be as you have lived. But you—you who are good, the last good man—I will remember you. You will become.”
Nigel wasn’t sure he understood, and he wouldn’t have the opportunity to, since the moment the Creator’s words ended, so did Nigel and everything he had ever known.
***
Nigel sat at his desk, gazing out his window, lost in thought. His eyes moved across the beautiful forest less than a mile away, and the snow-capped mountain in the distance—but the information didn’t register on his mind. Instead, he was thinking about the words he was about to write. After several moments more, his pen moved across the paper forming the words:
Praise Jah
Creator of Paradise
Rescuer of Man
Praise Jah
The Watcher of Time
Nigel wasn’t sure why he thought of that to write, but he liked the feel of it. Nigel smiled, as usual, with a heart full of gladness, as usual.
Copyright © 2003 by Michaela Wright