Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Apr 9, 2015 20:32:32 GMT -5
Oxfordshire, England, 2009
The air was warm and fragrant above the grassy lawns of a stately Edwardian manor home. In the garden, amongst the leafy azaleas, and the hedges drawn by protractor, tuxedoed servants stood at ramrod-perfect attention, balancing silver platters on their splayed fingers with gyroscopic stability. Between these static, solemn sentinels, the rarefied upper crust of English gentry cavorted back and forth in airy summer dress; carefree swatches of cream, and beige, and fine merino grey.
There were wooden stakes driven into the manicured ground, and coloured balls clattered about under the hiss and thwack of wooden hammer blows. Whoops and cheers rose to celebrate every expert shot, from the sorts of people with the disposable income and the crippling hereditary boredom that allowed them to develop skills in a sport that made shuffleboard look exciting.
Off to one side of the playing field, on a flagstone patio constructed explicitly for the purpose of swapping stock tips and droll repartee, several distinguished individuals were sat upon wrought arabesques of iron and ormolu, sipping at chilled beverages and tittering politely at their own jokes.
"Now then, what of young Master James?" the Earl of Essex was saying. "Finished at Eton with highest marks, as I understand. Where to next, my lad?"
The young man across from the Earl was tall and thin, and wore a chocolate brown three-piece suit beneath shockingly red hair, so that he looked something like a bundle of twigs set ablaze. He had active, intelligent eyes, and he hesitated a circumspect moment before speaking, as though firmly measuring the weight and purpose of his words. Unfortunately, this afforded ample opportunity for the blustery gentleman seated on his right to bowl forward with his own answer.
"James will attend Oxford, of course, and I won't be hearing a word against it, Essex. I know you're a Cambridge man."
"Guilty as charged, I'm afraid," said the Earl, and was rewarded with a round of laughter. "And what about after that, then? You must have some long-term plans in mind."
James opened his mouth to speak, but the slender woman on his left spoke up instead.
"Graduate studies are to be at Harvard," she said. "Not that I can say I'm thrilled about him being in America. How those silly colonials managed to eke out the world's most prestigious law school I'll never know. I suspect a bribe."
Laughter.
The man spoke. "After that it will be on to the firm. Mayhew, Declan, & Koch have already expressed an interest. Not that I'd let them stay in business very long if they did otherwise!"
Laughter.
The woman spoke. "And then it will be about time to enter Parliament, I suppose. He'd make the move sooner, I expect, but I do think a cabinet minister needs to have a touch of grey around the temples, don't you?"
Laughter.
James grinned tolerantly, and unfolded himself from the chair.
"Mamma, would you mind terribly if I was excused? Only I've just remembered I have a call scheduled with the university Chancellor."
"Good heavens, boy!" his father said. "You'd forget your head if it wasn't visible from orbit. Yes, go, go! Don't keep old Patty waiting. Barons are very impatient, you know. Probably because they have such a bloody long wait to wear the crown."
Laughter followed James up the path to the manor, where he entered into the cool, mahogany interior. He walked past the artful statuary and the suits of armour worn by his forebears. Past the undiscovered Caravaggio, and Cézanne's Auvers-sur-Oise (quietly bought off the black market following its theft in 2000), both tucked into a disused corner so as not to distract from proper English paintings of boats and horses. He mounted the endless sweeping stairway, and tramped down densely-carpeted halls, until he came at last to a suspiciously understated door wedged between the gable and the widow's walk.
James unlocked the door with a small brass key, and finally allowed himself to relax his posture and sigh, only once he was safely inside. The room within was lit by dusty sunlight from a hexagonal window high up on one wall. A motley crush of mismatched antiques were scattered about, bursting at the seams with lumpy stuffing and tarnished silver thread. The walls were plastered with yellowing documents, which hung as well from the rafters, like square pennants crammed with tiny black script.
James took his usual position in front of a high, angled table, and surveyed the pages laid out before him. There was a dog-eared copy of The Time Machine laid atop the desk, along with a stack of adventure pulps and novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. James rapped his knuckles twice against the pile in a familiar ritual.
He was close--very close--he could tell.
Hand-written across several thousand pages was his magnum opus. James had no truck with gravity lenses and closed-timelike-loops, nor with the fuss of higher mathematics. But if Time was an illusion as they say, then what matter if the language of its explanation was English?
Several thousand pages, and not one of them wasted. Crammed to the margins with esoteric syntax and rigid propositional logic; narrative causality derived from first principles. Is, Was, Will. The grammar of spacetime, neatly printed on hammermill A4. And, if James was right, only one more page to go.
He wrote without needing to think about the words. The story was in his mind already, he just needed to put it somewhere that the universe could see all at once. If he was right, that would be the end of it. Dot the 'I's, cross the 'T's, and he'd have a working time machine built from wood pulp and ink.
There were still variables to be input, of course. Co-ordinates and passengers to be determined by Setting and Dramatis Personae; calibrations and adjustments to be made with Tipp-Ex. But that was just clerical stuff. The real art was nearly finished. Down, as a matter of fact, to one remaining line. James raised his pen, and lowered it slowly back to the page.
Light blazed out of empty space, and a fearsome gale blew through the cramped room. Cyclones of paper whipped wildly about, and James toppled off the back of his tall stool with a crash. From the floor, he looked up aghast as his life's work was scattered to the winds, and as a shadowy figure stepped into this chaos from out of the light.
The figure stood in radiating silhouette, and as it spotted James it took two steps toward him and extended one hand.
University of Pennsylvania, 1968*
There was a tree. And beneath it, a man.
His beard was as luxurious as the fringe on his jacket, and his long hair was held back by a beaded headband. Around him, adulating comrades swayed to the rhythm of his bongo drum, which he played with the effortless self-assurance of one in tune with the universe. A woman to his left with long blonde hair grazed her fingers up and down his arm.
"Sky-daddy, your tunes are the most righteous tunes around."
"You know it, Cornflower. How about we take this groove to the next level?"
The man reached behind him, and from a rucksack dripping with slogan buttons he pulled out a second bongo and laid it before him. The rest of the circle raised a mellow cheer, and lifted their arms to gyrate in time with the rhythm. Above them, a heavyset man in a labcoat sneered out of a third story window.
"Look at these beatniks. Pete, if I ever look that stupid I need you to send me to Nam, all right? Like, I literally need you to put me on the plane. Copacetic?"
Behind him, hunched over a sheaf of notes, and alone in the otherwise empty lab, a gangly fellow raised one thumb without looking up.
"You got it, Frank. Beatniks. Plane. Nam. Hey, did you finish this Electronics assignment yet?"
Frank pushed off from the windowsill, propelling his wheeled chair back into the lab.
"What, the resistivity paper? Ages ago, man. You still working on that?"
Pete looked up quickly, then made a show of shrugging sheepishly.
"Oh, you know me. Slow and steady, right? Do the work once, and get it right the first time."
"Yeah, well keep at it. The clues are all there. You're turning into a regular Sherlock Ohms!"
Pete stared at him blankly for a moment, then staggered into mechanical laughter.
"Ha ha ha! Yes. Sherlock Ohms. That is a joke that I get because I am a physicist."
Fred laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.
"There's that Pete sense of humour! Love this guy."
He got up and began collecting his books into a bag that had only one button: an election slogan for Richard Nixon.
"Hey, are you coming to the bar tonight? I think Jenkins and Weller are supposed to be there. Should be a good time."
"Sure thing," Pete replied. "I'll see you there."
"Just make sure you get that paper done first. Something tells me you are not going to want to want to work on it tomorrow morning."
"Ha ha ha! Yes. Alcohol. That is a thing that I drink because I am 21."
Fred smiled and shook his head as he went out into the hall. "This guy kills me!"
Pete maintained his studious posture after Frank left the room, scratching idly at his notes and checking against equations in a textbook. After a few minutes had gone by, he pushed his chair back on two legs and craned his neck to peer through the open door. Seeing no one immediate, he slipped out of his seat and glanced slyly down the hall in both directions. He cupped a hand to one ear, but could hear nothing except the distant slam of a door, and the still steady drum beat from outside.
Moving quickly, he snatched up his own bag and ducked out of the physics lab. A number of different sciences shared space in this building, and a little ways down the hall he came to a closed door with "ORGANIC CHEMISTRY" stencilled onto its frosted glass. Pete reached into one pocket and whipped out a set of lock picks, and within seconds he had the door open and had slipped inside.
The lab was typical, decorated in an assortment of glassware and coloured liquids, with sinks and gas spigots embedded in every black epoxy countertop. Pete ignored all of this, however, drawn instead to the row of locked cabinets at the back of the room. A few more seconds spent with the rakes and wrenches had doors swinging open, and drawers sliding out all over the place. Collectively, they held sheaves of formulae, graded papers, past and future exams, a burnished metal tin, and a thick stack of manila folders stamped "CIA - EYES ONLY - MKULTRA" in red block letters.
Pete turned his attention to the last two items. He snapped the lid up off of the tin, and saw neat little rows of plain white pills inside, resembling nothing so much as an Altoids container. Pete raised his eyebrows in interest, but replaced the lid after only a moment's hesitation.
Turning instead to the folders, he started flipping quickly through reams of documentation tracking the Agency's experiments with mind control. Much of the chemical synthesis for the project had been performed here at U Penn, and Pete's eyes slipped with bored familiarity over references to mescaline, lysergic acid, sodium pentathol, et al. Further back in the binder he started to find the really interesting stuff: weird, hybrid narcotics; experiments in meditation and ESP; graphs charting perception of time on stimulants, depressants, psychoactives, and stranger things; men staring at goats.
From inside his own buttonless bag, Pete pulled out more papers with similar content, and began comparing the two sets. There were gaps in both groups of information, but together they began to piece together a larger whole. Together they painted a picture of spacetime's illusory boundary, and the wafer thin barrier between what reality was, and what reality could be.
It slowly dawned on Pete that this was the last piece of the puzzle he'd been chasing. He reached into his bag again, and pulled out an orange plastic pill bottle. Popping the top, he shook out a purple capsule and held it in his hand along with one of the white pills from the tin. Separated they did nothing except augment laser Floyd shows, but together they were so much more. Together these two little pills created a pharmaceutical time machine.
He was so engrossed in this discovery that he failed to notice the three G-Men enter the room, until one of them slammed the door behind them.
Pete leapt up, eyes darting for an exit, but the only windows were long rectangles up high under the ceiling, and the only door was behind three huge government agents with shoulder holsters and bad attitude. He tensed for a fight, then glanced down at the pills in his hand. The men started their advance, and Pete moved the pills towards his mouth.
There was a flash of light and a thunderclap of pressure that sent volatile chemicals exploding out of flasks and beakers in a shower of broken glass. Pete shielded his eyes against the sudden hurricane, and watched through slatted fingers as a figure appeared silhouetted at the centre of the light. The figure surveyed the staggered G-Men, then turned instead towards Pete. It stepped towards him and reached out one hand.
*Yeah, Pete was born in 1952. Go figure.
Dra'Az q'PoFk Station, Second Arm of the Triangulum Galaxy, 1242 BC
The interior of the gunmetal grey cylinder was encrusted by stalls and shanties of every shape and manufacture. Draped in colourful textiles, and fronted by rickety awnings, they arced up on both sides through a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, pinned in place by the steady outward pressure of centripetal gravity. Smoke rose in curling Coriolis plumes from exotic stir-fries, and from mounds of adipocere-looking incense, so that the recycled air was spiced with foreign aromatics in weird and disparate chiralities.
Into this bustling, cosmopolitan environment, a point of light appeared floating in mid-air, and grew rapidly up into a great glowing sphere. Multi-ethnic creatures from beyond the light cone of human existence stepped casually around this crackling impediment, on configurations of feet running from zero up through dodecapodal. The globe hung incongruously still for a little while, then vanished with a faint popping sound, and deposited a curly-haired young man in its place.
Nonplussed aliens continued about their days as the new arrival stood up and brushed extragalactic dust off of his jeans. He looked around slowly, taking in the Cantina's-breadth of foreign species arrayed around him. His neck craned back as far as it would go as he followed the curve of floor up over his head, and stood gawping at the rooftops hanging upside-down some distance above him.
The young man forced himself to breathe slowly as he absorbed the truth of what he'd just done.
His invention had worked. A machine that could dig into reality and tunnel out the other side. He'd trounced Wells entirely, and gone skipping merrily past Roddenberry as well, transporting himself through vast reaches of space and time more quickly than a man could climb a flight of stairs. The immeasurable weight of this accomplishment settled like the bricks of a city around him. This was it. This was the mountaintop. Godlike power and infinite knowledge, ripe for the taking. It was unlikely that any sapient being in all of history would surpass the magnitude of this feat. His every wish and dream stood on the cusp of being fulfilled, and came likewise with the potential to tear the length and breadth of reality to pieces with the slightest misstep.
He raised one foot high, and brought it down with the solid solemnity of Armstrong on the moon, then strode confidently forward towards the nearest shopfront, and humanity's first contact with intelligent life.
"Hello. One sex robot, please!"
said the moist, gibbering creature behind the counter. The young man squinted at it.
"Yeah, no, dude, I didn't get any part of that. I don't speak, like, greenaneese. Seriously now, uno sex robot, por favore!"
Without warning, a spark of light snapped into the air beside him, and thundered out into a roaring silver portal. A man stepped through this gateway, his coattails blown back by the rushing wind, and held out his hand.
In three different places, in three different times, three different men listened to three older versions of themselves.
"James!"
"I'm you from the future!"
"Drop that pen!"
"The universe is in danger."
"But ... what? ... What skill is that?" the three men asked as one.
The air was warm and fragrant above the grassy lawns of a stately Edwardian manor home. In the garden, amongst the leafy azaleas, and the hedges drawn by protractor, tuxedoed servants stood at ramrod-perfect attention, balancing silver platters on their splayed fingers with gyroscopic stability. Between these static, solemn sentinels, the rarefied upper crust of English gentry cavorted back and forth in airy summer dress; carefree swatches of cream, and beige, and fine merino grey.
There were wooden stakes driven into the manicured ground, and coloured balls clattered about under the hiss and thwack of wooden hammer blows. Whoops and cheers rose to celebrate every expert shot, from the sorts of people with the disposable income and the crippling hereditary boredom that allowed them to develop skills in a sport that made shuffleboard look exciting.
Off to one side of the playing field, on a flagstone patio constructed explicitly for the purpose of swapping stock tips and droll repartee, several distinguished individuals were sat upon wrought arabesques of iron and ormolu, sipping at chilled beverages and tittering politely at their own jokes.
"Now then, what of young Master James?" the Earl of Essex was saying. "Finished at Eton with highest marks, as I understand. Where to next, my lad?"
The young man across from the Earl was tall and thin, and wore a chocolate brown three-piece suit beneath shockingly red hair, so that he looked something like a bundle of twigs set ablaze. He had active, intelligent eyes, and he hesitated a circumspect moment before speaking, as though firmly measuring the weight and purpose of his words. Unfortunately, this afforded ample opportunity for the blustery gentleman seated on his right to bowl forward with his own answer.
"James will attend Oxford, of course, and I won't be hearing a word against it, Essex. I know you're a Cambridge man."
"Guilty as charged, I'm afraid," said the Earl, and was rewarded with a round of laughter. "And what about after that, then? You must have some long-term plans in mind."
James opened his mouth to speak, but the slender woman on his left spoke up instead.
"Graduate studies are to be at Harvard," she said. "Not that I can say I'm thrilled about him being in America. How those silly colonials managed to eke out the world's most prestigious law school I'll never know. I suspect a bribe."
Laughter.
The man spoke. "After that it will be on to the firm. Mayhew, Declan, & Koch have already expressed an interest. Not that I'd let them stay in business very long if they did otherwise!"
Laughter.
The woman spoke. "And then it will be about time to enter Parliament, I suppose. He'd make the move sooner, I expect, but I do think a cabinet minister needs to have a touch of grey around the temples, don't you?"
Laughter.
James grinned tolerantly, and unfolded himself from the chair.
"Mamma, would you mind terribly if I was excused? Only I've just remembered I have a call scheduled with the university Chancellor."
"Good heavens, boy!" his father said. "You'd forget your head if it wasn't visible from orbit. Yes, go, go! Don't keep old Patty waiting. Barons are very impatient, you know. Probably because they have such a bloody long wait to wear the crown."
Laughter followed James up the path to the manor, where he entered into the cool, mahogany interior. He walked past the artful statuary and the suits of armour worn by his forebears. Past the undiscovered Caravaggio, and Cézanne's Auvers-sur-Oise (quietly bought off the black market following its theft in 2000), both tucked into a disused corner so as not to distract from proper English paintings of boats and horses. He mounted the endless sweeping stairway, and tramped down densely-carpeted halls, until he came at last to a suspiciously understated door wedged between the gable and the widow's walk.
James unlocked the door with a small brass key, and finally allowed himself to relax his posture and sigh, only once he was safely inside. The room within was lit by dusty sunlight from a hexagonal window high up on one wall. A motley crush of mismatched antiques were scattered about, bursting at the seams with lumpy stuffing and tarnished silver thread. The walls were plastered with yellowing documents, which hung as well from the rafters, like square pennants crammed with tiny black script.
James took his usual position in front of a high, angled table, and surveyed the pages laid out before him. There was a dog-eared copy of The Time Machine laid atop the desk, along with a stack of adventure pulps and novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. James rapped his knuckles twice against the pile in a familiar ritual.
He was close--very close--he could tell.
Hand-written across several thousand pages was his magnum opus. James had no truck with gravity lenses and closed-timelike-loops, nor with the fuss of higher mathematics. But if Time was an illusion as they say, then what matter if the language of its explanation was English?
Several thousand pages, and not one of them wasted. Crammed to the margins with esoteric syntax and rigid propositional logic; narrative causality derived from first principles. Is, Was, Will. The grammar of spacetime, neatly printed on hammermill A4. And, if James was right, only one more page to go.
He wrote without needing to think about the words. The story was in his mind already, he just needed to put it somewhere that the universe could see all at once. If he was right, that would be the end of it. Dot the 'I's, cross the 'T's, and he'd have a working time machine built from wood pulp and ink.
There were still variables to be input, of course. Co-ordinates and passengers to be determined by Setting and Dramatis Personae; calibrations and adjustments to be made with Tipp-Ex. But that was just clerical stuff. The real art was nearly finished. Down, as a matter of fact, to one remaining line. James raised his pen, and lowered it slowly back to the page.
Light blazed out of empty space, and a fearsome gale blew through the cramped room. Cyclones of paper whipped wildly about, and James toppled off the back of his tall stool with a crash. From the floor, he looked up aghast as his life's work was scattered to the winds, and as a shadowy figure stepped into this chaos from out of the light.
The figure stood in radiating silhouette, and as it spotted James it took two steps toward him and extended one hand.
*****
University of Pennsylvania, 1968*
There was a tree. And beneath it, a man.
His beard was as luxurious as the fringe on his jacket, and his long hair was held back by a beaded headband. Around him, adulating comrades swayed to the rhythm of his bongo drum, which he played with the effortless self-assurance of one in tune with the universe. A woman to his left with long blonde hair grazed her fingers up and down his arm.
"Sky-daddy, your tunes are the most righteous tunes around."
"You know it, Cornflower. How about we take this groove to the next level?"
The man reached behind him, and from a rucksack dripping with slogan buttons he pulled out a second bongo and laid it before him. The rest of the circle raised a mellow cheer, and lifted their arms to gyrate in time with the rhythm. Above them, a heavyset man in a labcoat sneered out of a third story window.
"Look at these beatniks. Pete, if I ever look that stupid I need you to send me to Nam, all right? Like, I literally need you to put me on the plane. Copacetic?"
Behind him, hunched over a sheaf of notes, and alone in the otherwise empty lab, a gangly fellow raised one thumb without looking up.
"You got it, Frank. Beatniks. Plane. Nam. Hey, did you finish this Electronics assignment yet?"
Frank pushed off from the windowsill, propelling his wheeled chair back into the lab.
"What, the resistivity paper? Ages ago, man. You still working on that?"
Pete looked up quickly, then made a show of shrugging sheepishly.
"Oh, you know me. Slow and steady, right? Do the work once, and get it right the first time."
"Yeah, well keep at it. The clues are all there. You're turning into a regular Sherlock Ohms!"
Pete stared at him blankly for a moment, then staggered into mechanical laughter.
"Ha ha ha! Yes. Sherlock Ohms. That is a joke that I get because I am a physicist."
Fred laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.
"There's that Pete sense of humour! Love this guy."
He got up and began collecting his books into a bag that had only one button: an election slogan for Richard Nixon.
"Hey, are you coming to the bar tonight? I think Jenkins and Weller are supposed to be there. Should be a good time."
"Sure thing," Pete replied. "I'll see you there."
"Just make sure you get that paper done first. Something tells me you are not going to want to want to work on it tomorrow morning."
"Ha ha ha! Yes. Alcohol. That is a thing that I drink because I am 21."
Fred smiled and shook his head as he went out into the hall. "This guy kills me!"
Pete maintained his studious posture after Frank left the room, scratching idly at his notes and checking against equations in a textbook. After a few minutes had gone by, he pushed his chair back on two legs and craned his neck to peer through the open door. Seeing no one immediate, he slipped out of his seat and glanced slyly down the hall in both directions. He cupped a hand to one ear, but could hear nothing except the distant slam of a door, and the still steady drum beat from outside.
Moving quickly, he snatched up his own bag and ducked out of the physics lab. A number of different sciences shared space in this building, and a little ways down the hall he came to a closed door with "ORGANIC CHEMISTRY" stencilled onto its frosted glass. Pete reached into one pocket and whipped out a set of lock picks, and within seconds he had the door open and had slipped inside.
The lab was typical, decorated in an assortment of glassware and coloured liquids, with sinks and gas spigots embedded in every black epoxy countertop. Pete ignored all of this, however, drawn instead to the row of locked cabinets at the back of the room. A few more seconds spent with the rakes and wrenches had doors swinging open, and drawers sliding out all over the place. Collectively, they held sheaves of formulae, graded papers, past and future exams, a burnished metal tin, and a thick stack of manila folders stamped "CIA - EYES ONLY - MKULTRA" in red block letters.
Pete turned his attention to the last two items. He snapped the lid up off of the tin, and saw neat little rows of plain white pills inside, resembling nothing so much as an Altoids container. Pete raised his eyebrows in interest, but replaced the lid after only a moment's hesitation.
Turning instead to the folders, he started flipping quickly through reams of documentation tracking the Agency's experiments with mind control. Much of the chemical synthesis for the project had been performed here at U Penn, and Pete's eyes slipped with bored familiarity over references to mescaline, lysergic acid, sodium pentathol, et al. Further back in the binder he started to find the really interesting stuff: weird, hybrid narcotics; experiments in meditation and ESP; graphs charting perception of time on stimulants, depressants, psychoactives, and stranger things; men staring at goats.
From inside his own buttonless bag, Pete pulled out more papers with similar content, and began comparing the two sets. There were gaps in both groups of information, but together they began to piece together a larger whole. Together they painted a picture of spacetime's illusory boundary, and the wafer thin barrier between what reality was, and what reality could be.
It slowly dawned on Pete that this was the last piece of the puzzle he'd been chasing. He reached into his bag again, and pulled out an orange plastic pill bottle. Popping the top, he shook out a purple capsule and held it in his hand along with one of the white pills from the tin. Separated they did nothing except augment laser Floyd shows, but together they were so much more. Together these two little pills created a pharmaceutical time machine.
He was so engrossed in this discovery that he failed to notice the three G-Men enter the room, until one of them slammed the door behind them.
Pete leapt up, eyes darting for an exit, but the only windows were long rectangles up high under the ceiling, and the only door was behind three huge government agents with shoulder holsters and bad attitude. He tensed for a fight, then glanced down at the pills in his hand. The men started their advance, and Pete moved the pills towards his mouth.
There was a flash of light and a thunderclap of pressure that sent volatile chemicals exploding out of flasks and beakers in a shower of broken glass. Pete shielded his eyes against the sudden hurricane, and watched through slatted fingers as a figure appeared silhouetted at the centre of the light. The figure surveyed the staggered G-Men, then turned instead towards Pete. It stepped towards him and reached out one hand.
*Yeah, Pete was born in 1952. Go figure.
*****
Dra'Az q'PoFk Station, Second Arm of the Triangulum Galaxy, 1242 BC
The interior of the gunmetal grey cylinder was encrusted by stalls and shanties of every shape and manufacture. Draped in colourful textiles, and fronted by rickety awnings, they arced up on both sides through a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, pinned in place by the steady outward pressure of centripetal gravity. Smoke rose in curling Coriolis plumes from exotic stir-fries, and from mounds of adipocere-looking incense, so that the recycled air was spiced with foreign aromatics in weird and disparate chiralities.
Into this bustling, cosmopolitan environment, a point of light appeared floating in mid-air, and grew rapidly up into a great glowing sphere. Multi-ethnic creatures from beyond the light cone of human existence stepped casually around this crackling impediment, on configurations of feet running from zero up through dodecapodal. The globe hung incongruously still for a little while, then vanished with a faint popping sound, and deposited a curly-haired young man in its place.
Nonplussed aliens continued about their days as the new arrival stood up and brushed extragalactic dust off of his jeans. He looked around slowly, taking in the Cantina's-breadth of foreign species arrayed around him. His neck craned back as far as it would go as he followed the curve of floor up over his head, and stood gawping at the rooftops hanging upside-down some distance above him.
The young man forced himself to breathe slowly as he absorbed the truth of what he'd just done.
His invention had worked. A machine that could dig into reality and tunnel out the other side. He'd trounced Wells entirely, and gone skipping merrily past Roddenberry as well, transporting himself through vast reaches of space and time more quickly than a man could climb a flight of stairs. The immeasurable weight of this accomplishment settled like the bricks of a city around him. This was it. This was the mountaintop. Godlike power and infinite knowledge, ripe for the taking. It was unlikely that any sapient being in all of history would surpass the magnitude of this feat. His every wish and dream stood on the cusp of being fulfilled, and came likewise with the potential to tear the length and breadth of reality to pieces with the slightest misstep.
He raised one foot high, and brought it down with the solid solemnity of Armstrong on the moon, then strode confidently forward towards the nearest shopfront, and humanity's first contact with intelligent life.
"Hello. One sex robot, please!"
said the moist, gibbering creature behind the counter. The young man squinted at it."Yeah, no, dude, I didn't get any part of that. I don't speak, like, greenaneese. Seriously now, uno sex robot, por favore!"
Without warning, a spark of light snapped into the air beside him, and thundered out into a roaring silver portal. A man stepped through this gateway, his coattails blown back by the rushing wind, and held out his hand.
*****
In three different places, in three different times, three different men listened to three older versions of themselves.
"James!"
"Pete!"
"Matteo!"
"I'm you from the future!"
"We have to hurry!"
"There isn't much time!"
"Drop that pen!"
"Drop those pills!"
"Buy that sex robot, that's awesome!"
"The universe is in danger."
"Only you can save it."
"Only you have access to one very, very specific skill."
"But ... what? ... What skill is that?" the three men asked as one.
"Only you can go to Hungary!"
