OUT OF TIME: Part I

Author’s Note: My new serialized short story is called Out of Time. It’s about what can go wrong when people attempt temporal transportation. There are only 10 very brief chapters, which will be posted every other day. So here’s Part I …

February 8, 2013

When the police found him, he was cold and hungry and huddled in the back of a Blockbuster Video store in Bensonhurst. History has it that the location would, in a month or so, become the last Blockbuster in Brooklyn, but that is neither here nor there.

He had been wandering up and down 18th Avenue, up and down Bay Ridge Avenue, up and down 70th Street, walking more or less in circles, trying to stay warm. He found some money in his pocket (a lot of it actually–10 ancient-feeling twenty dollar bills) so he bought some soup in a noodle shop. Then he began walking again. He couldn’t have told you why. It didn’t occur to him to look for a hotel, not that he would have found one within the limited parameters of his route.

The area was unfamiliar. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who he was. And he didn’t know what was supposed to happen next.

It was only when it started to snow that he took shelter in the Blockbuster. He knew that videos were things to be watched, but he couldn’t imagine that such things would be contained in the small, flat, brightly-colored boxes on display.

He read some of the packages. He knew the language; it was English. He read about Ariel, a mermaid princess, who has adventures with her friends Flounder and Sebastian. When the police asked, he took Sebastian as his name.

He had no idea Sebastian was a crab.

When they asked for his last name, he glanced at the rack near where he stood at the time, and saw an edition of the old movie “Tommy Boy.” So he took the name Farley. It could have been Spade, but Chris Farley had top billing.

Thus, Sebastian Farley began his life anew, by being escorted out of the very last Blockbuster in Brooklyn and sent on his way.

He got by.

He stayed in shelters, spent his remaining currency on food. He got some odd jobs, the types that were–and still are–available to the undocumented. Dishwashers. Janitors. He spoke English–that was a plus.

He spent hours upon hours at the Highlawn Public Library which had books in many languages, although he didn’t recognize any of the others. The boxy computers there were agonizingly slow, the internet connections even slower. But it turned out he knew computers. He didn’t know how, but he did. He was intimate with their architecture, could commune with their souls, empathize with their peripherals. When they failed to do his bidding, he could think like them, figure out the reasons for their refusals.

When the PCs in the library–the public ones or the administrative ones–got balky, he could diagnose the problem and fix it. The staff began to rely on his expertise. When they wanted to hire him, they helped him (through a pro bono lawyer) to get a birth certificate and a Social Security number. When they wanted to pay him, they helped him get a bank account, and then a low-limit credit card. When they wanted to be able to contact him, they got him a cell phone.

They helped him find an apartment over a Chinese restaurant whose owner was a frequent visitor to the library as he studied to become a citizen.

And so life went on for Sebastian Farley. And just like that, ten years passed. Chronologically and sequentially.

We can only hope that Sebastian enjoyed those years.

——

From the SeBlog
by Sebastian Farley
Posted October 23, 2017

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my pet peeves is the insistence of otherwise intelligent, rational people on thinking time travel might be possible.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The only way time travel makes sense is if you believe everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen has already happened … and is happening even as I write these words.

Listen: in order for time travel to work, the future has to exist. Otherwise, you could not travel back in time, because where would you have come from? And where would you return to?

But if the future has already happened … is happening … then that means everything is predetermined and we’re just going through the motions. And as much as I’d like to believe in time travel (just as I’d like to believe in unicorns), I don’t want to believe in that.

And so I am willing to state on the record that there is no such thing as time travel and never can be. It’s not a matter of developing the technology, it’s just how the world works, how it has to work.

That’s all for now.

——-

The above excerpt from Sebastian Farley’s blog pretty much encapsulates his thoughts about time travel.

Which are very difficult to reconcile with the arrival of Test Pig #1.

To continue reading, click here …

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