XSSF

The Second Man

2012-01-17T14:37:00.012+01:00

Nothing moved. Nothing was supposed to move. The earth had only existed for a few megaanna. So there wasn't anything there to do any moving.

A man suddenly appeared out of nowhere on the promontory that jutted up out of the ancient world-encompassing sea. His eyes were wide open, his eyebrows raised, and his mouth open -- not in shock but in anticipation. He looked around, the corners of his mouth rising into an immense smile, before he finally spoke, his voice sounding unusual in the strange atmosphere.

"I did it! My time machine worked! I'm the first man to travel in time! I'm the first man to walk the face of the earth! I..."

He began coughing violently because of the lack of oxygen in the air. As the coughs wracked his body, forcing him to bend over, he saw something laying on the ground. A human skeleton. It was laying there, holding some sort of device that looked like an old adding machine, long since corroded away into a mass of rusted metal and wires. The skeleton's thumb was pressed firmly against a button on the device.

The man was gasping, desperately, for air. He could not stay any longer. He looked down at the much smaller machine he held in his left hand and immediately hit the "return" button.

Nothing happened.

As he was overtaken by waves of dizziness, he realized: Of course. The atmosphere is so different and so much thicker than the atmosphere I'm used to, I didn't think to insulate the machine against the possibility of the air getting into the electronics and rendering them inert.

Trying, but unable, to take the ancient atmosphere into his lungs, he collapsed, falling onto the ground next to the skeleton. He wriggled and kicked for a little while, but by the time he gave up his ghost -- his thumb pressed firmly on the return button -- he hadn't even been there for a full minute.

The third man didn't arrive for quite some time.

Leap

2012-01-01T21:14:00.003+01:00

The ten minute warning buzzer went off and Trey tried not to panic. According to his suit's MPS -- Mars Positioning System -- he was only three minutes away from Farrell Station, but he hadn't seen it yet and it's difficult to believe in something you can't see.

Two hours ago a dust storm had blown a boulder onto his vehicle and crushed it, along with his driver (John? Jim? Jack? Something like that). Fortunately Trey was a stickler for regulations and had been suited up. Unfortunately the boulder had crushed the extra oxygen tanks, leaving him with only two hours of breathable air. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but the radio for the vehicle as well as his suit had been knocked out, so he couldn't contact anyone to come get him. There was no way he could hike all the way back to New Redmond in two hours. However his insuit computer system still worked and told him that there was an abandoned station just under 12 kilometers away to the southeast. He did the calculations in his head, taking into account the low gravity and his average oxygen intake when exercising. It all added up: if he went quickly (but not so quickly that he used up all his oxygen) he should be able to get there before his air ran out.

Being a stickler for regulations had served Trey well. He was perhaps the only person from New Redmond who took seriously the orders to memorize the results from one's physical trials, which everyone had to undergo at least once a year. Trey did it twice a year. The fact that his work involved a great deal of mathematics -- which he loved -- meant that he was in a better position to estimate his chances of getting to the abandoned station than anyone else.

And of course, he reasoned to himself, it wasn't too surprising that he couldn't see the station yet, since he was climbing up what the computer insisted was a hill but he was certain was a fairly sizable mountain. He had almost reached the top, and once he did he would see Farrell Station in all its glory and everything would be fine.

The mountain was so steep for the final few steps that he had to crawl up. But as soon as he was on level ground and stood up, he saw the station. He smiled, took a few steps forward, and then stopped.

There was a chasm between him and Farrell station. He keyed up his insuit computer, and it dutifully told him that the station was 70 meters in front of him, but failed to mention the chasm. It advised him to walk forward for 70 meters.

Trey approached the edge of the chasm. It was so deep that he couldn't see the bottom. He looked across to his goal and sighed. So close. Just then the five minute warning buzzer went off.

He looked across the gap that separated him from the station. The other side was slightly lower than the side he was on -- say two meters lower, give or take half a meter. And the chasm looked to be about fifteen meters wide, or maybe slightly less. He tried to estimate it from the distance between the other side and the station and the distance to the station his insuit computer told him. He finally settled on thirteen meters, give or take two meters.

Mars had a surface gravity of .38. This meant he could jump farther than he could have on Earth. Unfortunately, Trey didn't know how far he could jump on either planet, much less how far he could jump in a pressurized suit which severely restricted his movement. The top of the mountain he was on was pretty flat to his left; a large boulder restricted his view to the right. So he used the space to his left to see how far he could jump with a ten meter running start. He did it several times so that he could get a fair estimate, using his computer to tell him the distance between his take-off point and his landing site.

His best jump was nearly eleven meters, but his average was almost exactly ten. The distance across the chasm, he reminded himself was thirteen meters, plus or minus two. But add to that the fact that the other side was two meters lower, give or take a half meter, so he'd go further. Ten meters might do it if his distance estimate was at the lower end of the margin of error. Eleven meters would be better, and might even get him across if the distance were exactly thirteen meters, but only if his estimate of the other side's elevation was slanted towards the other end of the margin of error -- two and a half meters lower.

This frustrated him immensely. It was possible that he could jump across, but it depended on how accurate (or inaccurate) his estimates were. He tried to estimate his chances, and decided that, since they depended on the width of the chasm being thirteen meters or less, and his estimate was that it was thirteen meters plus or minus two, his odds of making it across were towards the lower end, less than 50%, but he couldn't say anything more specific than that. And of course, it was entirely possible that all his estimates were under-estimates, given his desire for it to be possible for him to jump across.

What decided him was the one-minute warning buzzer going off inside his suit, after which it began to count down the number of seconds he would have access to breathable air.

He stumbled back as far as he could, took a deep breath, and began running forward as fast as his suit allowed. He had it in his mind that he wanted his last step to land right on the edge of the chasm to give him as little space to jump across as well as some hoped-for added traction by pushing off from a non-horizontal point.

He gauged it exactly right.

Time slowed down. He sailed through the air, the other side growing closer, closer. He reached the apex of his jump and began to descend. The lip of the other side was approaching. It was moving up -- too far up. He wouldn't make it. His feet were already below the level of the other side of the chasm.

Then he hit. His arms were outstretched over the other side of the chasm, while the rest of his body slammed into the chasm wall. At first he feared that he would rebound off, but the suit had absorbed nearly all of his momentum, so he just came to a sudden stop, his hands grabbing the sand on the other side. He should be able to swing himself up.

Then his body started pulling him down; his hands started leaving tracks in the sand as he could find no purchase. Martian sand, he remembered, is very fine and very smooth. Solar radiation had broken it down into very small grains, and smoothed them out. This meant it was very slippery. Too slippery for him to hold on.

Sand slipped through his fingers. His life slipped through his fingers.

Then he was falling, the chasm wall only centimeters away. He bumped into it, and it turned him face down. He still could not see the bottom. Then a small outcropping bumped him hard enough to turn him the other way, facing up, towards the sky, towards the light.

And towards the bridge that had been built across the chasm. It was just on the other side of the large boulder that had restricted his view to the right as he stood on the edge of the chasm. If he had just climbed up the boulder, he would have seen the bridge. He had been so focused, so insistent, on solving the problem himself that he hadn't thought to look to see if someone else had already solved it for him.

It was a long way down.

One

2011-12-04T21:25:00.005+01:00

There was once a man -- for the sake of the story let's call him Juan -- who was very dissatisfied with his life, and blamed it on the fact that his parents brought him to church when he was a child. He left that behind him long ago and instead believed that the universe was a closed system with no God outside it. He wasn't an atheist, however, since he assigned divinity to the universe. "God" (always in quotes) simply is the universe, and the universe is God. The point of life is to become one with the universe. So he thought.

Yet his deep dissatisfaction with life raged unabated. Since this was the fault of the naive monotheism he was raised in, clearly he had not yet fully accepted his more enlightened views. He tried to think of a way to ask the universe to help him become one with it, but the only thing that came to mind was itself a theistic throwback. He couldn't think of anything else, though, so he eventually succumbed to it and prayed (sorry: "prayed") to the universe.

"Universe, I know you're all that is and I apologize for coming to you in this format of 'prayer', but I don't know what else to do. I want to be one with you. I want to be united with you and not think of myself as something that stands apart from you. Please help me. Please show me how to be one with you. Thank you."

Of course he wasn't expecting to hear a response. He wasn't really sure what to expect at all, but he kept himself open.

It didn't take long. Within a week he started intermittently hearing a sound, a high-pitched squealing that was almost unbearable. And after a few days he realized that he heard it whenever he was smoking. A few more days and he understood what it was.

The cigarettes were screaming.

They screeched as he took them out of the packet, cried out when he lit them, and then just screamed when he inhaled through them. It was incredibly disturbing for him to cause anything distress, but it was even more disturbing to hear. So he quit smoking. Of course, other people around him did not, and soon he realized that he could hear their cigarettes screaming in torment as well.

He started staying at home more often, but the problem just got worse: it wasn't only the cigarettes. The couch choked off a tortured cry, the rug wailed as he walked across it, the door screamed in agony. Actually at that point, it started getting a little weird. The door, as a unit, screamed, but so did the top half of the door. And the middle third. Any potential division he could imagine was a separate entity that was constantly experiencing unbearable anguish. He knew he could divide it indefinitely -- half the door, half of that half, half of that half, etc. -- and he would never reach the bottom. Each division he could think of was an actually existing entity that was experiencing constant, unendurable suffering. It was infinite and it was horrific.

He committed suicide. Whereupon he went to hell and experienced excruciating, unbearable agony. Forever. And thus he became one with the universe.

Good Intentions

2011-07-11T09:40:00.002+02:00

L. Stanley Farr, "Stan," had grown increasingly frustrated in the last several years. He had invented a time machine, and wanted to use it to right the wrongs of the past, to prevent evil from being accomplished. But no matter what he did, no matter what the evil was that he prevented, when he returned to the present he would discover that his actions had made the world significantly worse. He decided to prevent Anton Vinck from gaining power, but that only led to a more brutal dictator, Helmut Tholcke, taking his place. He tried to get rid of Tholcke, and that only led to another leader, Adolf Hitler, trying to conquer the world and wipe out certain people groups. Every evil he tried to prevent ended up creating a much greater evil in its place.

Stan began travelling farther and farther back in time to try to correct the consequences of his actions, but everything had even worse results than what he was trying to combat. Eventually, he found himself travelling back to prehistoric times, before human beings existed in their present form. Then even further back, to before the Cambrian Explosion, before the origin of life on earth. Eventually, he set his time machine for 15 billion years in the past and turned the key.

He found himself in a void, with no physical objects he could discern. He brought his hand to his face, and discovered that he didn't have any hands. He had no body. And he realized that he had accidentally travelled back in time to before the Big Bang, before the creation of matter and energy and space and time. He was alone in an undifferentiated eternal moment.

"Not alone," said a voice.

"Wait, what?" Stan asked. "Who are you?"

The answer came immediately, several billion years later: "I am who I am. Who else would you expect?"

"You mean you're ... God?"

"Yes."

"Well, how do I get out of here? I mean, how do I get back to my time?"

He had to wait forever before the answer came within moments: "I'm afraid you can't return to time until I create the universe. Then you will have to live through it sequentially."

"You mean you can't return me to my time?"

"I can but I won't."

"What? Why not?"

"For the same reason you should never have tried to make things better by changing the past: it would create a far worse situation than before."

"How do you know?"

"It comes with the whole omniscience thing."

"That isn't fair. In fact, the whole universe isn't fair. All I ever tried to do was to make it better, to take away some of the suffering -- the suffering that you created. Who do you think you are?"

"God."

"But what gives you the right to cause all that suffering?"

"I didn't cause it. You did."

"But the world was already messed up before I tried to change it."

"There were reasons why things were the way they were. I allowed certain evils to take place -- allowed, not caused -- because if they did not, even worse evils happen."

"So it's all my fault? Trying to make things better is a bad thing according to you? Now you can't bring good out of the evil?"

"Of course I can still bring good out of the evil. I'm God."

"Yet you can't send me back to my time."

"Will not; not cannot."

"This is wrong. You're wrong. You have no right to create a universe with all that suffering in it."

"Yes I do."

"Well, you're talking to someone who travelled back in time to stop bad things from happening. As far as I'm concerned, you are the one who makes them happen. So I'm going to do everything I can to stop you. So help me, I will prevent you from carrying out your plans. I will do whatever it takes."

"I know."

"What do you mean you know? How do you know?"

"Again: omniscience."

"Well how are you going to stop me? I don't have a body anymore so you can't hurt me."

Then Stan felt himself moving, if "moving" was an accurate description where there is no space or time. He realized he was being sent away, cast out, cast down, away from the presence of God. And Stan, Louis S. Farr, finally realized who he was.

House of Mirrors

2011-06-14T09:37:00.005+02:00

They say when you're 20 years old everyone is looking at you; when you're 30 they've stopped looking; and when you're 40 you realize that they were never looking at you in the first place. Brendan had heard this, and so was surprised when it didn't work out that way for him. When he turned 30 people still seemed to notice him, and ditto for when he turned 40.

Like most people, Brendan thought that he would make a difference somehow. His background was average -- he had a couple of years of college and had his own small shipping business, which consisted almost entirely of one Mack truck. But he enjoyed it; he liked driving, and he drove all over the United States and Canada. He only spent a total of about two months per year at home. He didn't know how he would make a difference, but he knew he wanted to do good, to make the world a better place. For most of us, such ideas fade as we realize that people aren't looking at us, that they don't see us as something special. Since people kept looking at Brendan, he thought he would have the opportunity to do something to help others.

So when he met a woman who told him she was a time-traveller, it reinforced his sense of destiny. Really, it would have been impossible for it not to. She had specifically travelled back in time to meet him and asked him if he'd be willing to fill out a questionnaire. When he asked why she wanted to meet him, she told him that lots of people want to. In fact, she told him there was a reason he thought people were always looking at him: they were. His whole life, time-travellers had been observing him.

"Then how come none of them have ever told me that they're time-travellers or asked me to fill out a questionnaire like you have?"

"Well," she said, "that's complicated. We cannot interfere with the timeline, and we knew that if you were made aware of your significance before you were 40 then it would have changed things. The calculations are ridiculously complex, and it's funny how small things can make big changes and big things can make no changes whatsoever. But now it won't alter anything to make you aware of us."

"Well, can you tell me why so many people want to observe me? What exactly do I do that warrants such attention?"

"That, unfortunately, we can't tell you yet. Not until you're 50. It would mess up the timeline if we told you now."

So Brendan filled out the questionnaire and answered all of her follow-up questions. He told her his overriding desire was to make a positive impact in the world and help others somehow. She nodded, told him she had to leave, pushed a few buttons on what looked like a wristwatch, and vanished.

But that was just the beginning. Every few days a new time-traveller would arrive and interview him or ask him to fill out another questionnaire. They were always very friendly and encouraging, although it was frustrating for Brendan to know that they knew what he would (someday) do that would warrant their attention, but that they couldn't tell him. Sometimes he had clues. Once a young female time-traveller was riding in his truck with him, she was a student she had said, and at one point she looked around the cab's interior and said, "I can't believe I'm actually in the truck!" He asked her what she meant, but she realized her slip and turned the conversation back to him.

But there came a time, not long after he turned 50, when a man suddenly appeared in his living room during a slow business period and started asking the usual gamut of questions. Brendan answered them as best he could, but when the man had finished he said, "Look, I was told that you couldn't tell me what I'm going to do someday until I turn 50. I'm 50 now, and I'd like to know what it is."

The man looked at him for a few moments, slightly surprised, and then said, "I'll send someone else back to tell you." He reached down to his belt, touched something, and disappeared. But before Brendan could even sigh, an older woman appeared.

"You want to know why we're focusing so much attention on you?"

"Uh ... yes, yes I do. But I just told him that a few seconds ago, how could you ..."

"We can arrive at any point in your life. The people who have been interviewing you did not come in the order that you observed them. The student you were speaking to a few moments ago returned to us a few days ago."

"Oh. Of course. Sorry, I hadn't really thought about that. It's kind of obvious now that you explain it to me."

"Let me ask you again: are you sure you want me to tell you why we're travelling to observe you? It will no longer have a significant impact on your future actions to know it, but it's not necessary for you to know. In fact, we advise against it."

Brendan was almost giddy. "No no, I really want to know."

She cocked her head to one side as she considered him for several seconds. Then she said, "Have you ever heard of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector?"

"What? Uh, no, I don't think so. Is it from the Bible?"

"The gospel of Luke."

"Well I read the New Testament once a long time ago, but I don't remember very much from it. But what does that have to do with ..."

"A Pharisee and a tax collector went to a temple to pray. Pharisees were the holy men -- you understand? -- and the tax-collectors were sinners. The Pharisee thanked God that he wasn't a bad person. 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men -- robbers, evildoers, adulterers -- or even like this tax collector. I obey all of your laws.' The tax collector, however, would not even come close or raise his head, but beat his chest and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' The upshot is that it was the tax collector who went home justified before God, not the Pharisee."

"OK. That's interesting. I mean, I don't really see anything wrong with thanking God for not being a bad person."

"The reason why the Pharisee is not justified before God is because he thought he was a good person while other people were not. He thought that since his actions were good, he was therefore a good person. He thought that since he didn't sin he wasn't a sinner."

"Well, that kind of makes sense."

"Except that 'sinner' is not a label of one's actions but of one's essence. The Pharisee thought that he was defined by his actions. But there's more to who we are than what we do."

"OK, whatever. What does any of this have to with why I'm of interest to time-travellers?"

"Because the first thing to tell you is that we're not time-travellers."

"Wait, what?"

"We're not time-travellers. That is, we're not from your future. It's impossible to travel backward in time in one's own universe. We are from other universes."

"That's ... that's ... I don't know what that is. But then why did everyone tell me they were time-travellers?"

"Because it's close to the truth: we are from futures of universes that are similar to this one. I am from the year 2661 and my universe numbers years the same as this one. So, in a qualified sense, we do travel in time. However, we could not tell you all of this before now because it would have interrupted this universe's timeline if you had known it before you were 50."

"That's so weird. Why?"

"We have no idea. I'm sure you've been told that small changes can have enormous impacts while enormous changes can have no impact at all. We have artificial intelligences which can calculate the details, but it's beyond the ken of sentient biological organisms."

"OK. But now, why do you want to travel to another universe just to observe me? What do I do here that affects your universe?"

"Well, technically it doesn't. Universes can't influence each other. That's why it was so important that we not tell you any of this until it would not have an impact on your future actions."

"OK, I got that, but my question is still why would you travel to another universe to observe me?"

"Because you exist in other universes as well. Or, to put it another way, other universes have versions of you. You existed in my universe's past, or a version of you did. We cannot travel back in time in our own universes, but we can travel to other universes to observe you."

"That's just ... that's beyond comprehension. So you're travelling to all the other universes to interview different versions of me?"

"No, only to this one."

Brendan furrowed his brow as he tried to make sense of this. After several seconds of thought, he said, "I don't understand. If this universe has no influence on your universes, then nothing I do here should be of interest to you. It's only if what I do here is similar to what I do in other universes that it could possibly be important for you to know. But you're not travelling to the other universes, only to this one." He paused again and took a deep breath, but before he could ask another question, she answered it.

"We travel to this universe to observe you because it is unique; not because of what you do but because of what you don't do."

"What? What do I do in all the other universes that I don't do here?"

"In all of the other universes you are the most prolific serial killer in human history."

"What! No! I've never even hurt anyone! I could never kill someone!"

"That's why this universe is so interesting. It is nearly identical to universes where you rape, torture, and murder hundreds of people."

"Hundreds? How could it be possible for me to kill hundreds of people?"

"In most universes you start when you're 16 years old. By the time you're 17, you are killing someone approximately every two weeks. At least it averages out that way, but sometimes you kill several people all at once or go several weeks without killing anyone. In a few universes you don't start until you're in your early 20s, and in a very few others you're caught after about fifteen years. In most universes, however, you're never caught, you live a long life and die peacefully in your early 90s."

"That's impossible. A 90-year-old man couldn't kill someone every two weeks."

"Ah, yes that's true. You slow down when you're approximately 78 and only kill every three or four months after that. But you were in remarkably good condition for an old man, and were still able to kill right up until you died."

Brendan was silent. A person every two weeks would amount to 26 people per year. And if he was killing that many by the time he was 17 and continued until he was 78, that meant he killed 26 people per year ... for 61 years. That meant ...

She finished the thought for him. "In most universes you kill over 1,600 people."

"No. No. That wasn't me. I never killed anyone!"

"Of course you did."

"No I didn't! I'm not responsible for what other versions of me did in other universes! They're not me! Only I'm me!"

"But 'you' are not just who you are in this universe. 'You' are who you are in all universes. Your personal identity is not merely a matter of what you choose to do with the circumstances that are given to you -- the circumstances being outside of your control, after all. Your personal identity also involves what you would do in circumstances that you never experience. And when you are given a choice, you choose to wreak horror and evil on others. The fact that you were not presented with that choice in this universe does not change the fact that if you had been presented with it you would have made the same choice you made in all the other universes. It is who you are."

Brendan was crying now. "It's not who I am! I didn't do it! I didn't do any of it!"

"Yes you did."

Brendan buried his face in his hands, sobbing. After a few moments he looked up and said, "What is it? What is the choice I don't make here that I make everywhere else? What's different here?"

"We can't tell. It's something minor. We think at some point in your early teens you were interrupted from following a train of thought that you were able to follow everywhere else, or vice-versa. But really that's just an educated guess. There's nothing particularly special about this universe in terms of your background. In all the other universes you experienced pretty much the same things and chose to become the most evil human being who has ever lived."

"Wait, you said I'm almost never caught. Then how do you know it was me? Maybe it's a case of mistaken identity ..."

"You're only discovered centuries later when we develop the ability to travel in other universes. You are observed committing all of your crimes. It wasn't someone else. It's you."

"But how could I do the same thing in all the other universes? Aren't there an infinite number of possibilities, an infinite number of ways I could turn out?"

"That's a common misunderstanding. There are, we think, an infinite number of universes. There are all kinds of variables, but there are also all kinds of constants. For example, you live in this house and drive that truck in every single universe we've observed. Theoretically you could live anywhere, but as a simple matter of fact, you always end up here. Just because there are an infinite number of possibilities doesn't mean that you ever act on them."

"This, this just can't be. I can't even imagine killing someone. How could I be a murderer in all of these other universes but not here?"

"That's why we're studying you. Human beings have an innate repulsion to killing another person. What we've discovered is that while this repulsion is very strong, it is also, in another sense, extremely delicate. Touch it in just the right way under just the right circumstances and it pops like a balloon."

"So, wait, other people are like this? It's not just me?"

"Well, all people would choose to do evil under some circumstances. Perhaps they would have to be brainwashed or threatened. So for other people there are conditions -- sometimes extreme conditions, but not usually -- that, when actualized, cause them to choose evil, even great evil. But I'm not here to tell you about other people, I'm here to tell you about you. At any rate, your situation is not one of extreme conditions. In every other universe that you exist in, you choose to commit horrific atrocities over and over again."

Brendan lowered his head. He tried to think of something to ask, but everything that came to his mind sounded trite. Finally, he whispered, "Was there any ... purpose to it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Was I trying to rid the world of people I thought were evil? Was I trying to eradicate those who I thought were making the world worse?"

"Oh no. You varied your methods and the type of person you targeted constantly in order to prevent others from even realizing that there was any connection between your victims. That's why you're able to go undiscovered in your time. The closest thing to a constant is that you tend to pick helpless people, people who can't fight back."

"Oh God, no."

"When you felt free to just kill anyone, you almost always killed children ..."

"Stop."

"... and after you killed them, you cannibalized their bodies. You ate them."

"STOP!"

The woman cocked her head again as she looked at him. "I asked you if you were sure you wanted to know why we study you. If it makes you feel any better, the children you murdered aren't murdered in this universe. They grow up. Many of them become people who do wonderful things, they make the world a better place for everyone. In the other universes, they suffer and die horribly, but here they do not. Of course you can't take credit for their accomplishments, but perhaps it can give you some comfort."

Brendan was sitting on the floor. He didn't remember how he got there. He was numb with shock. He barely heard the woman tell him she was leaving, he barely noticed her disappearing. All he could think of was her words: "'You' are not just who you are in this universe. 'You' are who you are in all universes. Your personal identity is not merely a matter of what you choose to do with the circumstances that are given to you -- the circumstances being outside of your control, after all. Your personal identity also involves what you would do in circumstances that you never experience. And when you are given a choice, you choose to wreak horror and evil on others. The fact that you were not presented with that choice in this universe does not change the fact that if you had been presented with it you would have made the same choice you made in all the other universes. It is who you are."

He was alone in his house, but the spectres of all his other selves were there with him. They looked exactly the same as him, acted exactly the same as him. He wanted them to look different, to look empty, with dead eyes, as if they had been overpowered by something beyond their control; but they didn't. He looked around at these reflections of himself, these incarnations of evil that he could not deny were himself.

As he continued looking at his reflections, and as they stared back at him, he wondered Who am I? And then, as he opened his mouth to say it aloud, all his reflections said it with him:

"Who am I?"

And he knew the answer. Weeping once more, he lowered his head, beat his chest, and cried out in utter despair, "God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

Two Reductionist Conversations

2011-02-15T22:01:00.003+01:00

1.

(Inspired by "The Conceivability of Mechanism" by Norman Malcolm)

"How did you get in here?"

"Your wife let me in."

"No, I mean how did you physically enter this room?"

"What do you mean? I opened the door and walked in."

"But that's an automatic door. It opens when someone steps in front of it. So you didn't open it yourself."

"Oh. But I pushed on it and felt resistance."

"You must have pushed on it at the same pressure that would have been necessary to open it."

"Well, I turned the handle anyway."

"No you didn't. The handle automatically turns too. When someone steps in front of the door, the handle turns and then the door opens."

"But ... I felt pressure when I turned it. It felt like I was really turning the handle."

"Well, again, you must have used the same amount of pressure that it would have taken to turn it if it hadn't turned automatically. And you still haven't answered my question."

"What question?"

"How did you get in here?"

"Oh. Right. I can't say I opened the door; I can't say I turned the handle; well, at least I can say I moved my hand on the doorknob and moved my legs when I walked in here."

"Can you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Weren't those actions caused by preceding physical conditions?"

"Well, sure."

"Then those conditions caused your hand and legs to move."

"Well ... those conditions don't mean that I didn't move my hand and legs. I mean, maybe I caused the conditions."

"Except that those conditions had conditions which in turn had conditions, et cetera. Pretty quickly it leads to conditions external to you. In fact, we can trace them back to before you were even conceived. The conditions a hundred years ago inevitably led to your hand and legs moving a few moments ago. All of these conditions were inevitable. You didn't contribute anything to them. They caused it; you didn't."

"But, but ... isn't there anything I did?"

"Isn't there anything who did?"

***************

2.

(Inspired by "The Man Born Blind" by C. S. Lewis)

"I'm starting to think that 'sight' is a conspiracy."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, not a conspiracy. A myth. An illusion."

"Again: what do you mean?"

"I mean that no one has ever been able to explain it to me."

"Well, you're blind. I don't know how they could."

"Why not?"

"It's outside your experience."

"Why should that matter? I've never experienced Antarctica. I've never experienced being dipped in a vat filled with milk and corn flakes. I can still understand such experiences."

"That's not ... it's ... hmm."

"Tell me what 'sight' is and I'll let you go back to your book."

(Sigh) "Fine. Let's see ... light waves bounce of an object, traverse the distance between the object and your eyes, and then impress the image of the object on your retina."

"But that's touch."

"What?"

"Impressing something on a part of your body is the sense of touch. Sight is just a subcategory of touch."

"Maybe I didn't describe it well. Sight allows you to perceive all kinds of qualities, such as color, that you can't perceive through touch."

"All that means is that the eyes are particularly sensitive, sensitive enough to feel the impression of light waves. If the rest of our bodies were as sensitive we would 'see' with our whole bodies."

"Dude, that's crazy. Sight is different from touch."

"How? By allowing you to perceive things you don't perceive through touch? We've just seen that's not the case. Sight is reducible to touch, therefore sight is not a separate sense. Seeing just means feeling things that come into contact with you. I can do that. You just have a greater sense of touch in one part of your body than I do."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I'm not really blind. You can't really see. There's nothing to see, there's only something to feel, and I can feel. The difference between you and me is like the difference between someone with 20/20 vision and someone who's near-sighted."

"But that would apply to hearing as well."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, hearing is feeling the sound waves bouncing around inside your inner ear."

"That's true. Yes, that's true. You're right. Hearing is reducible to touch as well. We really only feel sound waves in a particular part of the body where we're sensitive to it."

"That was meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. Obviously hearing is different from touch."

"'Obviously' it's not, if all there is to it is feeling sound waves. Feeling is already a sense. If hearing is just feeling of a particular type, then it falls under the category of touch. We don't hear anything for the same reason you don't see anything: there's nothing to hear or see."

"But you can hear the difference between certain types of sounds, certain qualities, certain timbres ..."

"All of which are reducible to sound waves which are felt by the inner ear."

"This is insane."

"Not at all. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, it would apply to smell and taste as well. Both of these senses are feeling something impress itself upon us, right? It's just that the organs that smell and taste are very sensitive and so can feel things, certain refined qualities, that we can't feel with the rest of our bodies. Thus, taste and smell, along with sight and hearing, are subsumed under the sense of touch. That's all there is. Touch."

"So food doesn't taste sweet or sour? Scents don't smell good or bad? Music doesn't sound pleasant or unpleasant?"

"What you call 'sweet', 'sour', 'good', 'bad', 'pleasant', and 'unpleasant' are just a type of feeling. They are reducible to touch. Everything you see, hear, smell, and taste are illusory. All there is is touch."

"Then how are we having this conversation? I mean, you're hearing the words I'm saying, and responding to them, right?"

"Well ... hmmm. That's an interesting point. Hearing is just feeling, so why should my feeling the sound waves you produce have any more value than feeling something? There's nothing to hear, ergo, I can't hear you."

"Right, and that's crazy. Obviously you can hear me."

"..."

"Right?"

"..."

"Dude, are you OK? Can you hear me?"

"..."

"Um, why are you wiggling your finger?"

Going Down

2010-09-08T20:27:00.001+02:00

Evan sighed. The elevator was stopping on every possible floor. The doors opened for what seemed the hundredth time and a deformed man stepped in. "Deformed" was too slight a word; the man's face was completely disfigured. His body was all out of proportion. Evan tried not to look, and casually moved to the back corner so that a few people were between him and the deformed man.

The doors opened again, and as some people got off, another deformed man stepped in, much worse than the first one. He was making some kind of choking, gargling sound in the back of his throat. Constantly. It was bad enough to look at him, but having to listen to it was almost more than Evan could stand. He considered saying something, but realized the poor guy probably couldn't help it.

The doors opened and another man got on as several exited. Evan couldn't tell if this one was disfigured because he wore a trench coat that covered most of him. He was far too round though. Nobody ever got that perfectly round. And then Evan realized that every few seconds some liquid gushed out from under his trench coat onto the floor. It wasn't urine -- he couldn't identify the smell at all, but it was terrible -- but the effect was no less disgusting. He tried to back even further into the corner.

On the next floor several more got off, and two more got on. Although the number of people exiting the elevator was greater than those getting on, it was getting fuller and more crowded. Of the two that got on, one was making a sound like a high-pitched squeal, while the other ... you couldn't call him -- it -- a man. With a shock of horror, Evan realized that the elevator was full of them, unmen, horrific realities that shouldn't exist. The only one that was a man was the first deformed man he had noticed a few minutes earlier. He glanced around frantically, trying not to draw any attention to himself as he did so, looking for him. He finally saw him, on the other side of the elevator near the doors. It seemed like he was miles away.

The doors opened, and as a few more monstrosities stepped on, the deformed man stepped off. No! Evan thought. Please don't go! You're my last connection to humanity! Please don't leave me in here with them!

The deformed man, as if he had heard his thoughts, turned around and looked directly at Evan. And smiled.

The doors closed.

And the elevator continued its descent.

The Blessing

2010-07-10T23:01:00.002+02:00

(Inspired by The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, "Soul Mate" by Lee Sutton, and "Two Heads Are Better Than One" by Spider Robinson)

I was born with a curse, but it wasn't until I hit puberty that it kicked in. Doctors have told me that it's almost certainly genetic, and is probably similar to epilepsy. But they can't tell me more without examining the "attacks" I have, and if they're unlucky enough to be near me when I have one, they never want to see me again.

When I have an attack, all of the psychic boundaries between me and other people break down. That is, I experience their psyche as intimately as they do. I know everything they do, feel everything they feel. I know their darkest secrets and their most disturbing fantasies. And they know mine. Suffice to say that it is infinitely worse than the dream where you're naked in public.

Also, when it happens in a crowd, it's absolutely horrific. I experience each person's psyche from the inside, and they experience mine ... as I experience everyone else's. In other words, there are suddenly dozens of other people in your head with you. You'd be surprised how many people have sexual fantasies involving torture, mutilation, and murder. Fortunately, there are warning signs for a couple of hours before I have an attack, kind of like before migraines (yes, I get those too), so I haven't had an attack in a crowd since I first started having them.

And again, I first started having them when I hit puberty, the very worst time to have your thoughts and feelings broadcast to your peers. Once everyone in school knows "what evil lurks" in your heart you can't really go back the next day.

As you could have guessed, it was impossible for me to have personal relationships. My parents kicked me out and told me never to come back once they discovered what a jumble of horrors they had raised. I've had several nervous breakdowns. Pretty soon I realized that if I stay in rural areas I can more easily get to isolated places when I feel an attack coming on. I've gotten better at it, but "getting better" entails trial and error. That can be hard when each error is a little glimpse of hell.

Eventually I was able to settle into a pattern. I managed to save enough money to buy some isolated land that no one in their right mind would ever want, put barbed-wire fences all around it, and built a little shed in the middle. When I feel an attack coming on, I drive out there. As long as no one comes inside the fence while I'm having an attack, then I don't experience anyone else's psyche. I just experience a kind of draining, as if my mind were melting away. It's actually very unpleasant, but compared to what happens when other people are nearby, it's nothing. This works out pretty well. I have attacks every couple of months or so, they only last for a few minutes, and my "range" appears to be about 500 meters; that is, if no one is within half a click of me, they're safe. And before you ask, it only works with people, not animals.

Once I was able to get into a more normal style of life, I started getting to know people the old-fashioned way. I earned enough money to get by, and started taking night classes to finish high school. Once I had that done, I started working towards a college degree. That's where I met Moira.

She wasn't beautiful, but she was almost pretty. That sounds bad: what I mean is that if you just saw a picture of her, you wouldn't think she was attractive; but when you actually saw her walking around, talking, doing things, there was something about her that was very appealing.

I had a class with her in one of those big stadium-size lecture halls. I noticed her on the first day because she came in late. The next class session, I sat in the spot next to where she had sat in the first class, and fortunately my scheme worked: she came in late again and sat in the same seat. During the second half of the class, she nodded off for a bit, then startled herself awake. She looked around, then at me, so I said, "You didn't miss anything." She smiled, and after class we walked out together, talking.

After that we started hanging out together -- not really dating at first, but just spending time at various places on campus. Eventually, though, I told her I wanted to buy her dinner. My heart was beating very hard when I asked her this (and still was several minutes later), even though it was pretty obvious she would say yes.

I fell in love with her fairly quickly, but I always had the nagging idea that if I had an attack near her, I would discover things about her that would horrify and disgust me, not to mention what she would discover about me. This really isn't in doubt, because everyone has things in their mind like that. Getting to know people by talking to them only allows you to know what they want you to know; to think about them the way they want you to think about them. They're filtering out what they don't want you to know, and trying to make you have a certain opinion about them. My curse has made me very cynical about human nature.

But with Moira it was different. She was very open, not ashamed or embarrassed about herself. Her personality just made it impossible for me to believe that she had a dark side that she was trying to hide. Well, not impossible, but difficult. After a few months, I was in a quandary: I wanted to know her more and more, yet I didn't want to because I knew what I'd find. And with all of this came the knowledge that the longer we were together, the harder it would be to avoid her when I have my attacks.

So I decided to break up with her. I took her to a restaurant where we'd never been to before so she wouldn't have bad associations with the places we went to more regularly. Although I did allow for it to be a Mexican restaurant, since both Moira and I love Mexican food. I think everyone loves Mexican food.

While we were eating dinner she suddenly put down her utensils and looked at me. I thought maybe she could tell that something was up because I was acting funny or something, but when I asked her what was the matter she surprised me by saying, "I have to tell you something about myself." I very cleverly responded, "Uh, OK, go ahead."

She paused for a while, and I could tell she really didn't want to tell me. Then she said, "I have a curse, and I can't keep going out with you unless you know about it and are willing to accept it."

I'm pretty sure that my mouth fell open after she said this. My first thought was that she had the same curse I have, but immediately discounted it as absurd. She probably means something much more normal, like she wasn't able to have children or something. So I said, also very cleverly, "Could you explain exactly what you mean by 'curse'?"

She sighed and looked back at her food for a few minutes. I waited patiently, since it was obviously very difficult for her. Then suddenly she raised her head, looked right into my eyes and said, "I time travel."

I blinked a few times while I tried to figure this out. Then I said, "You time travel? You mean in the science-fiction sense?"

"Yes."

I thought about it for a moment, then I asked, "Why is that a curse?"

"Because," she said, "because." And she started to cry.

Then she explained to me that she had no control over it. When she was in a particular place with someone she cared about (and it only worked with people she cared about, for whatever reason), she would somehow travel to that person's death. The particular place was different for each person: it was, or would be, the place where that person would die. So somehow, being with a loved one in the place where that person would eventually die, would send her years, decades -- or sometimes only days or minutes -- into the future to see that loved one die. She had seen the death of nearly everyone she had ever cared about. One time, she told me, she arrived and her sudden appearance actually caused her loved one (an uncle) to have the heart attack that killed him. The worst was when, as a teenager, she was talking with her mother in the kitchen, when she suddenly "skipped" ahead in time. But everything was exactly the same, except for the fact that she was a few feet closer to her mother, who was looking at her, surprised. Then she heard her own voice behind her say, "Oh God, no, not again." She turned and saw herself, wearing the exact same clothes she was wearing, except with tears on her face. Then, as she slowly realized what was about to happen, she turned back to her mother, her mouth opening in horror, to see her suddenly gasp, grab her head, and collapse on the floor. The two of them ran to her, crying, and tried to perform CPR, but her mother had died of a brain embolism. And then, before she could even call her father downstairs, she suddenly disappeared, and found herself standing in the kitchen, looking at her mother, alive as ever. Then suddenly, another "her" appeared a few feet in front of her. Moira said, "Oh God, no, not again," and then you already know what happened. She had to experience her mother's death twice.

I was a little skeptical about this, but not as much as some people would be. For one thing, I knew Moira, and she was obviously not making this up; she really believed this happened to her. For another, my curse has made me a little more willing to accept that other people have bizarre problems that I can't imagine. But of course, it made me immensely curious. I asked her, "So I assume that you're not able to warn that person about their death when you return to the present, right?"

She looked sharply at me, thinking I was making fun of her. "I can prove this, you know. I have several sworn statements at home from people that have seen me suddenly pop out of existence. Or you can ask my family; nearly all of them have seen me do it. And I've seen plenty of doctors about it, and I've had brain scans which determined that I have several severe abnormalities, but nothing they can do anything about. I'm actually the subject of a study back home, with several doctors trying to figure it out. But I've asked them to keep it quiet until they find a cure." (until? Even with a curse, she was optimistic) "I have most of my medical records at home too you can look at."

"It sounds like you have an awful lot of verification of this at home."

"That's because I find myself having to prove it on occasion, and even then nobody ever believes me." Pause. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"No, I believe you."

She looked shocked. "What? How could you? Nobody's ever believed me when I just told them."

And with that, I realized that I'd opened myself up. In order to explain why I was able to believe that she had a curse, I'd have to tell her about my curse. I remembered that I had originally planned to break up with her tonight, but now that seemed far away. She had a curse too, and when she realized we were getting close, she didn't run away like I was planning to. She told me about it.

So I told her. I won't go into it again, since I've already explained it. But then I said -- this was part of her affect on me, I was completely honest -- that I had been thinking that we should break up because if we experienced each other's psyches it would shatter what we have. She dismissed this immediately as ridiculous, and I realized it was. But then I asked, "What do we do about it then?"

She responded, "Well, I don't know off the top of my head, but we'll figure something out." And I knew that I loved her and that I was going to marry her.

Our wedding took place ten months later. I sent an invitation to my parents, along with a letter, but they didn't respond. For all I know they had moved away. Moira's family was slightly kinder, but not by much. They lived in a fairly big city, and couldn't understand why we couldn't get married there and move back there. We didn't tell them about my curse, and Moira took full responsibility for wanting to stay in the small town where we lived, but it was pretty obvious that they blamed me for it. I was terrified that I would feel an attack coming on the morning of the wedding, but I was fine. It wasn't until after the wedding that I saw one coming, and left the reception by myself to head out to my shed, leaving Moira to explain why her new husband had to leave for several hours.

Because of Moira's curse, she had to fly back to her family's city every two or three months to see the doctors working on her case. We had been married for eight months when she came home and told me that the "severe abnormalities" in her brain had moved beyond the curse, and had begun spawning tumors. She was going to have to go back in one month for exploratory surgery.

This terrified me, but she was my strength through it all. She knew the doctors and trusted them. I guess what scared me the most was that if something went wrong, I wouldn't be able to come see her. If she died, I wouldn't be able to be with her.

But she came through it all right. They'd been able to remove a few of the tumors, but many of them were in places where it was just too dangerous to cut them out. While she recovered in the hospital, we talked on the phone every day. It was hard for me to be apart from her. We had only known each other for a couple of years, and when she wasn't with me I felt like I couldn't breathe.

Before she left the hospital, they did another brain scan and discovered several new tumors that hadn't been there before. She was healthy enough to leave, but whatever was happening to her was spreading. She came home, but had to go back in two weeks for another brain scan. All the tumors were growing, and there were a few more new ones since her last scan.

Over the next year, we spent more time apart than together. She had to go back and forth to the hospital in the city for various tests, treatments, and occasional stays of one or two weeks. The doctors finally told her that the travel was making her condition worse, and that she had to stay nearby. Then she asked them, "And if I do, will I get better? Or will I just live a few days longer?" They hemmed and hawed, but finally admitted that there really wasn't anything they could do for her condition -- they still had no idea what was causing it, or even what it was.

So she made a command decision: "I would rather die at home with my husband." When she told me that she had chosen me I just broke down and cried. No one had ever cared about me before, not that I could remember. And yet I only had a little time with her. They guessed that she had between one and four months left.

She surprised them -- not to mention me and herself. It wasn't until seven months later that she was no longer able to get out of bed. We talked together, quietly, and she told me she knew this was the final stretch. I just couldn't imagine living without her, my life was just a house of horrors without her, but she wouldn't let me get depressed. "No matter what happens, we've had the time together that we've had. Nothing can take that away, nothing can change it."

"I can appreciate that when you're here with me, telling it to me. But what do I do when I don't have you and I can't bring it to mind?"

"You can if you try."

I had no response to that. But then she said something that terrified me. "I want to see your shed."

"What? No! I go there all the time, what if I eventually die there? You could travel to my death! I don't want you to have to go through that. Why in the world would you want to go there?"

"Because it's a part of who you are, and I want to know you completely. It's a place that you know intimately, but that I've never seen. I've always felt that it's a barrier preventing me from knowing you, and I want to know you."

"No you don't. How can you say that? That's where I go so that I don't have to know people completely. Knowing someone completely is a hell that you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy."

She shook her head, and then took my hand. "Please," she said. "I want to understand you more, and that place is something that's always stood in the way. Please."

I couldn't deny her. Later that day, I carried her out to our car and drove out to the property. The shed is very small, one room, with a bed, a chair and a desk (which I almost never use), a few books, and some dried foods. I parked the car, carried her inside, and put her on the bed. She looked around and smiled. "What are those books?"

I looked over at them. "Oh, nothing. Just some novels in case I forget to bring anything with me when I come out here."

She nodded and continued looking around. It didn't take too long for her to see everything there was to see. Finally, she looked at me and smiled. "Thank you. You don't know what this means to me. To be able to see this place where you've spent so much time."

I nodded and smiled at her. "Well, the time I've spent here hasn't been pleasant, you know."

She laughed. "I know. But I wanted ..." She stopped talking and her eyes opened wide.

"What? What is it?"

She looked over at me, her face contorting, like she was about to cry.

Then she disappeared.

I sat there, staring at the bed, the pillow still indented by where her head had been moments before. She had traveled to my death. And if I die here, in the shed ... then it probably means that I'll be having an attack when it happens. She would experience the depth of my psyche, the horrors that make me up. And I would experience hers, and have all my love for her boil away as I see the terrible depths of her soul.

Basically, it was the worst thing that could ever happen.

I continued sitting in the same position, staring at the bed, for at least an hour and a half, though it felt like days. Suddenly, without any warning, she was laying on the bed again, in the same position, her eyes wide open, but looking exhausted and drained.

I spoke to her, but she didn't respond. She was in shock. I carried her out to the car and drove home. She didn't say anything for three days. I couldn't believe it. Undoubtedly, she now hated me, having learned what a horrible person I am, but she only stared straight ahead, allowing me to spoon food into her mouth on occasion.

On the morning of the fourth day, I woke up to find her already awake and looking at me. "Are you OK?" I asked.

She continued looking at me for a few seconds, and then gently nodded her head.

My voice quavering, I said, "Can you speak?"

Another pause. Then, "Yes."

I was afraid to ask her the next question: Do you still love me? But before I could she said something that seemed a complete non sequitur. "I want to go to church."

"Church?" We had never gone to church. I think her parents took her there when she was young, but it didn't take. One thing we discovered fairly quickly about each other: when you have a curse, you simultaneously disbelieve in God and hate him.

But if I couldn't deny her before, I certainly couldn't do it now. "Yes, of course. This is Friday, so we can go in two days. Or do you need to go now? To talk to someone?"

She smiled. "No. Two days is fine. I want to start going to church." The look on my face must have been easy to read, because she said, "I know I'll only be able to go a few times. But I want to."

I nodded, but before I could say anything else, she put her hand on my face. "My true love. You'll be OK. Trust me on that."

Of course I broke down again.

Church was unimpressive. There was no flash, boom, no voice from heaven. The sermon was boring, at least the parts that I listened to, and it certainly didn't "convert" me. But Moira just drank it all in, like someone coming home after a long time away. We went the next week, too, to much the same effect.

It was the following Wednesday when I felt an attack coming on. I was overdue for one, but I didn't want to leave Moira alone, especially when she obviously didn't have much time left. I walked into our bedroom, and told her, "I'm sorry, but I have to leave for a few hours. I going to have an attack pretty soon."

She was barely able to move her head to look at me. Then she said the last thing I expected. "Take me with you."

"What?"

"Take me with you."

"Moira, no! Not again! I don't want you to have to go through that again!"

"I need you to take me with you."

"Please, please, don't ask me to do that."

"I'm not asking, I'm demanding."

It was almost funny hearing her say that, since she was too weak to move. But, of course, I gave in. I've always been a weak person, but at least with her, it was safe to be weak.

When we arrived, I put her on the bed again, then sat in the chair. But then she said, "Lay next to me here." It was a small bed, but I moved her over and lay on my side, looking into her face, stroking her hair.

"Moira, I don't want you to have to go through this."

"I don't want you to have to go through this either, but it's not something we can avoid."

"Well, we might have been able to avoid it, if we had tried harder."

"No, you don't understand. I don't want you to have to experience me dying. But you are, and that's why we're here."

"You mean ... right now? You're dying now?" She slowly nodded her head. I held her to me and just wept like a baby. This was the only person who cared for me and I was losing her. But even that thought showed me how selfish I was: she was dying, and I was concerned about how it would affect me.

She turned her head to look at me and smiled. "Don't worry. It's beautiful."

Before I could ask her what she meant, my attack began, springing into full force. I was with her in her own mind, and she was with me in mine. I saw all of the horrors about her that every person has, the things that make them horrors themselves, and she saw mine. But, somehow, those things didn't seem to define her. She was who I always thought she was, infinitely deeper of course, but still the same person. And she saw who I am, and loved me the same.

Do you understand what we were given? We long to be with our loved ones when they die, to comfort them and hold them. But all we can ever hold is their bodies. We can never hold them in the innermost part of their being. But my curse allowed me to truly be with her, to really hold her, as she died. We were given something everyone who has ever loved has wanted.

But that's not all. When someone dies, you can be with them, but then, of course, they can't be with you when you die. But her curse allowed her to travel ahead to be with me when I die, and for me to be with her when she died. And since I'll be having an attack when I die, she'll be with me in the innermost part of my being when I die, just as I was with her when she died. I know this because as we lay there, I could see in her mind, her experience of a few weeks prior, of traveling to my death and being with me. And from that, I could see my experience of her death, as I was experiencing it. I could have followed it infinitely, like looking into the mirrors on opposite walls of a barbershop, but it seemed unimportant at the moment. We held each other so intimately, it's almost profane to even mention it.

And then slowly, slowly, she turned and entered into eternity. I was suddenly alone on the bed with my wife's dead body next to me. The attack was over after a few minutes, but I didn't want to leave. I just held her body in the same position, but knowing that it wasn't really her. Wanting that closeness that we had experienced to go on. I was too exhausted to cry. Eventually, I carried her body back to the car and drove to the hospital. We buried her a few days later.

I almost stopped writing there. But there was something about her experience that I didn't mention, something even more intimate, more sacred than what I've described so far. It is this: when I had the attack, and experienced her very psyche as intimately as she experienced it herself -- she wasn't alone. It wasn't just her and me: there was a Third.

The Third held the both of us, encompassed us, intertwined himself with us, while we held each other. He knew the depths of our depravity just as surely as we knew each other's, but he loved us with an undying love. Looking into her experience of my death, I saw that she had the same experience when I died. That was how she first experienced the Third. Which is kind of strange, since I first experienced the Third when she died.

She entered heaven, and for a moment, I experienced the unlimited joy and peace with her. The direct line was open. But then she smiled at me one last time, turned away, and she was taken from my awareness. But for a moment, just a moment, her body was still alive and I was aware that the Third was still there. And then he died in her place. He died for her, so that she wouldn't have to experience death. He will do the same for me when I die. And he will do the same for anyone else who asks him.

I'm only in my 20s and I'm already a widower. I know that I'll live into my 80s and that I'll never marry again, because I saw this as part of her experience of my death. So I have a long wait ahead of me, a wait that I wish I didn't have. But now I know that I won't have to go through it alone. I know the Third is with me, knowing me as intimately as I know myself, seeing every horrific thing about me, and yet His love for me is not diminished in the slightest. I'm not usually aware of Him, but when I have my attacks, there he is, never having left, holding me, protecting me.

I have been given the greatest gift of all.

Flash

2010-06-01T10:32:00.005+02:00

I've heard there are two kinds of people: those who have vivid dreams, dreams of things and events, some impossible some mundane, some joyous some horrible -- and those who have the same kinds of dreams but don't remember them. I'd give anything if I could fit into either category.

I remember my dreams, but "dreams" is a misnomer; it's the same dream every night. And it's not even a dream of a series of events. It's just a snapshot, a moment, a flash photo. But it's a snapshot I can't look away from, an eternal moment in which I experience indescribable horror. I can't remember not having this dream. It's been my companion my whole life.

I'm in some room I don't recognize, and in the middle there's a kind of hole or vortex. But it's not a physical hole. And out of it is arising some horrific monstrosity. It doesn't see me yet, but it's about to turn its attention to me. And I know that when it perceives me, it will take me to hell with it to experience unbearable torment for eternity. It's the moment before the demon sees me. And I'm filled with an absolute terror, the terror of someone who knows he is damned forever.

Every ... single ... night.

Ironically, as a teenager, I started getting very interested in the occult. You'd think my dream would have had an adverse affect on that, but, for whatever reason, I just never connected the two until much later (and when I did, it wasn't in the way you'd expect). It certainly didn't spark my interest. But as I grew older, I pursued my occultic activities more and more. By my early thirties, I was already one of the more advanced students in the craft.

By my late thirties, however, I noticed something disturbing about my dream. It wasn't exactly the same. I remember as a child the demon was facing away from me -- not that it had a face, but its attention was on the opposite side of the room from where I was standing. But now, it had turned. Its attention was on the side of the room to my right. It was still just a snapshot, but I could tell it was in the process of turning to face me and be aware of me, and I knew the moment it did what would happen.

I started thinking that my dream was a premonition. This was my destiny, my doom. Yet I didn't have the power in me to move off of the path I was on, to avoid such a confrontation. It was almost as if the dream and my life had no connection. I was barely able to bring my dream to mind during my day-to-day activities. When I turned fifty, I realized the demon had almost completed the turn. Its attention was almost upon me.

But then my conception of the dream started changing. I had been thinking that my life was the reality and the dream was a foreshadow or a message from another time in my life. But the opposite was the case. The dream was the reality and my life was just a message. I don't mean that my life was just a shadow of some deeper reality, although I suspect that's true. I mean something even weirder.

You know how some people say that when you die your life flashes before your eyes? That's what my life was. I was living, reliving, my life in the moment before the demon saw me. I was experiencing my life flashing before my eyes. The dream that I'd been having all my life wasn't a dream. It was the present moment. I had been playing with religion and had summoned a demon that would take me to hell. And in my final moment, my life was replaying itself.

Except there was a difference. If you keep choosing to be angry, or hateful, you'll eventually reach the point where you can no longer choose not to be angry or hateful. Slowly, as we live our lives, we are taking away our own freedoms, and eventually becoming the people we will be forever. I had spent nearly all my life making particular choices and selecting certain courses of action. I realize now that my choices were not just a turning towards the occult, but a running away from -- I don't even want to say the word -- God. I had been rejecting him with every conscious thought for so long that I was no longer able to accept him. I had taken away my ability to choose him.

And yet, somehow, I realize now as I approach my doom, that I am being given the power to choose God. I don't want to choose him. But I know that I can. I am being buoyed up so that the effects of a lifetime spent rejecting him no longer force me to continue to do so. I can choose. I can actually choose.

And a still, small voice inside me asks, What do you choose?

Inflammable

2010-05-16T15:59:00.009+02:00

Andrew put his dishes in the sink, planning to wash them later, and turned to go back out to his study in the shed behind his house. It wasn't until he opened the sliding glass door that he looked up and saw the shed engulfed in flames.

He froze for a few moments, then cried out. He ran out into his backyard, but realized immediately there was nothing he could do. Quickly, he turned around, ran back into his house and called the fire department. As soon as told them his address, he hung up, grabbed a fire extinguisher he kept in the house, and ran back out. Pointing the nozzle at the front of the shed, he squeezed the handle. A short stream of what looked like shaving cream spurted out about two meters and then immediately died out. "Dammit! Dammit!" He shook up the extinguisher and then tried again. Nothing.

Andrew looked up at his study and saw his life's work burning away.

He was too close and the heat was too much for him, so he went back inside to put the sliding door between him and the flame. He had spent decades exploring anti-gravity, all of his notes were in the shed, along with the "device" (as he called it) which he had recently constructed. He had been powering it up for several days, and was planning to run an experiment tomorrow to see if he could actually create an anti-gravity field. The applications and benefits would be enormous, as would the monetary value.

All lost. He could try to reduplicate his notes, writing down everything he remembered, but there was no way he could recall all the details, all of his findings that allowed him to hone his measurements and construct the device.

There was a banging on his front door. Andrew ran to it, opened it, and saw a fireman standing there, along with several others running around, some to his back yard with a hose, others to (he supposed) the fire hydrant down the street. The fireman at the door asked him some questions, and Andrew answered them as best he could under the circumstances. His life's work, gone.

He walked back through his house to watch from behind the sliding door as the firemen began to shower water on his shed. It seemed to have no effect, and that confused him, and them as well. The shed was constructed out of lead siding with electrical wires running all through it. Thus, when the device created an anti-gravity field, it would be contained within the shed, the wires and lead creating a sort of boundary that would prevent it from going beyond it. The lead obviously wasn't burning. He had plenty of books and notes in the shed, but not enough to produce the conflagration the firemen were impotently trying to fight.

The police arrived, and came to the back yard. They spoke to one of the firemen at first, then came up to his sliding back door, so Andrew opened it as they approached. They asked many more questions which he tried to answer without going into any detail about his research and the device. When they asked exactly what his research was, he said, "I can't really say; it's under contract by the federal government, and they've labelled it top secret," which was true. Of course, he also didn't want to give away the results of his research so that he could be properly credited with their discovery, but that didn't seem relevant to the policemen's queries.

They thanked him, and he closed the sliding door, as much to escape the situation as the heat, and tried to imagine what could have happened. Could it have been arson? Could someone who knew what Andrew was doing have sabotaged him? It seemed too conspiracy-minded, but he couldn't imagine how else it could have happened. Even if all of the wiring in the walls were suddenly exposed and sent all of their combined electricity into his books and papers, it shouldn't produce an inferno on this level.

There was suddenly some movement among the firefighters, and they began shouting to each other. And within several seconds, the hoses were finally able to do their job, and the fire died down rather quickly. They continued showering the shed with water, but were obviously concerned about something. One of the policemen ran to his back door so Andrew opened it again and said, "Yes, what's going on?"

The policeman answered, "The firemen said they heard someone yelling in there! Who would have been inside?"

"What? Uh ... nobody. I'm the only one with access. There are several locks on the door, I don't see how anyone could get in. But ... that's horrible! How could someone have survived that fire? It was burning for nearly an hour!"

"I know. It doesn't seem possible. And they said that as the fire finally started to die down, the voice became calmer, like the person was angry instead of, well, burning alive."

"Was it just yelling? Or did they hear any words?"

"They said it sounded like someone talking, but they couldn't make any sense of it. Like the person was drunk."

"I don't understand how that could happen."

"I know. Could you come out to the shed to verify that it's still locked?"

"Of course."

They walked out together, and as they approached the shed, one of the firemen handed him a cloth. "You won't want to touch the metal directly. It'll still be very hot." Andrew nodded numbly, took the cloth in one hand, then took his key ring out of his pocket with the other. First, he folded the cloth over several times, then tried to turn the door handle. Nothing.

He turned to the policeman. "It looks like it's still locked. Let me try the deadbolts." Andrew took one of the keys and tried to insert it into the appropriate lock without touching the metal. He failed. He jerked his hand back as soon as he felt the cool metal on his fingers, then opened his eyes in astonishment. He pressed the palm of his hand against the metal. Several of the firemen shouted at him, "Are you crazy? Don't touch it!" But he turned toward them with his hand resting on the metal door.

"It's not hot! I mean, at all! It's cool!"

They looked at him in astonishment, and then started to fan out, gingerly touching the walls at various points. None of it felt hot. It was bizarre.

The policeman said to him, "OK, look, try the rest of the locks. Maybe someone broke in there and then locked themselves in."

But Andrew was shaking his head. "It's a double door. Two of the locks are not accessible from the inside. You can't lock yourself in with them."

"Why the hell would you build it like that? You could lock someone in so that they couldn't get out!"

He sighed. "I figured someone wouldn't try to break in if I was there, so the extra locks were for when I wasn't there. Besides, no one ever went in there except me. No one has the keys except me. I wasn't worried about it."

"I'm worried about it. I'm wondering whether there was more to your research than you're telling me. How do I know you didn't keep someone locked up in there?"

"Oh for God's sake! That's crazy!"

"Then what about the shouting they heard from inside?"

Andrew didn't have an answer to that. He quickly unlocked all of the locks, and opened the door. As soon as he did, something fell out at his feet. It was smoking and burned, but he could tell it used to be a human body.

The policeman put his hand on his holster and said, "Sir I'm going to have to ask you to come down to the station with me."

Andrew couldn't take his eyes off the body. After several seconds he shook his head, and said, "Wait, just let me go inside and see what happened, OK? You can see that this is the only way in, there's no way I'll be able to escape." The policeman looked skeptical, so he said, "Look, this is my life's work! I'd have a better idea of what happened than anyone else. How would me locking someone in there explain why the walls cooled down so quickly? How would it explain that the person didn't start yelling until the fire had been burning for nearly an hour? Something's going on, and if you want to find out what it is, I'm the best person to do it."

The policeman still looked skeptical, but then briskly nodded his head. Andrew turned towards the door and realized he had to step over the body to get inside. He felt he had to say something about the loss of life in order to avoid looking like a murderer, so he asked, "Is there any way to find out who that is? Was?"

The policeman nodded again. "Dental records. Perhaps some DNA survived, although with that blaze I don't see how."

Andrew tried to look inside the shed. It was dark, he couldn't see more than a few inches past the doorframe. He stepped over the body, cautiously, and then stepped inside.

It didn't smell burnt. The floor was covered with water. He walked around, trying to see if anything survived the inferno, but there were only ashes. The bookshelves and his desk had been completely burned up. He dimly registered the door closing behind him, and wondered why they would do that. But he could hear voices talking outside and wasn't worried. His mind was preoccupied with the destruction before him.

What about the table? Andrew turned and saw that it was still intact. It was also made of iron, and the device was lying on its side, on the floor next to it. It was no longer plugged into the wall socket. He bent over to look at it. It was about fifteen inches wide and tall, and twice that deep. The front was dominated by a cone going into the device. The cone would spin around, at very high speeds, and would (theoretically) create an anti-gravity field. He would have been able to test it for the first time tomorrow.

As he stared at the device, trying to figure out what happened, he was suddenly struck with a spray of water. The firemen must be hosing the shed down again. "Hey! I'm still in here! There's no fire, stop with the water!" This had the opposite effect, as he was soon being hit with water from all sides. He sputtered, continued yelling at the firemen to stop, and was trying to get out of the line of fire when he realized something.

The water was not coming from above. It was coming off the floor. It rose to the roof of the shed in large quantities. It ran up the walls, and in places he could see small drops of water. Falling up, not down.

At first, Andrew was elated. Somehow the anti-gravity was working. But if there were anti-gravity, the water wouldn't be the only thing falling up towards the ceiling. He would fall up as well, as would the device and the iron table and the ashes. And when he glanced over at the device, the cone was not spinning. It wasn't even plugged in. So it couldn't be producing anti-gravity.

Then, as he watched, the cone slowly started to turn. Which was impossible. Suddenly the device began to rock back and forth. The electrical cord started moving. Nothing was making sense. And then he had several sudden insights, one right after the other.

First, he realized that relativity showed that there is a relation between gravity and the passage of time: the greater the gravity, the slower time passed. And if you reversed gravity -- if you had anti-gravity -- then you'd reverse time as well.

Second, he realized that the device made no allowance for this fact. So if the device produced an anti-gravity force, and time began to run backward, the energy it had been storing up for several days would be explosively released.

Third, he realized who the dead body was.

And with that, the device sprang into the air, its cone spinning faster and faster. It settled itself onto the table as a spray of water emerged from it, while the cord jumped around wildly and plugged itself in. And a spiral jet of flame emerged from the cone.

Andrew screamed and ran toward the door. But the whole room was engulfed in flame, and he knew he only had seconds to live. He reached the door and realized that, of course, it would be locked from the outside, and there was no way to get out.

He was disappointed at how long it took to burn to death. His last thought was that the policeman would be very surprised at the results of the dental records.

Mark 6:4

2010-01-21T10:36:00.005+01:00

It started with the Ko'ah. They weren't the strongest of species, but they were more intelligent than most. This allowed them to survive in a universe where the only law was "might makes right."

While some of the stronger species simply tore through the universe, killing or enslaving every species weaker than themselves, the Ko'ah had to tread more carefully. When they encountered a new biosphere, they spent many years studying it, determining the strengths and weaknesses of its inhabitants, and then using this knowledge to ... well ... kill or enslave them.

They had been observing this one planet for decades. The intelligent inhabitants had almost no technology, but there were a lot of them, and the Ko'ah leaders had only been willing to spare two battalions (of 20,736 troops each). They could certainly kill all the inhabitants, but they could only do it by making the planet uninhabitable; and they wanted to inhabit it. So they were taking their time, cataloguing all their strengths and weaknesses. They had hundreds of spies in virtually every culture and country on the planet.

One spy had been observing (from the inside) an apparently pacifist group rebelling against the political and religious leaders of their culture. This was an interesting case because the political and religious leaders were actually opposed to each other, but they had teamed up long enough to kill the leader of the pacifist group.

A few days after the leader's death, the spy was in a room with some of the group. Suddenly, the leader appeared before them. He spoke with them, ate with them, interacted with them. The spy was dumbfounded. There was no way any civilization on this planet had technology that could bring a dead man back to life. It was impossible.

Just then the leader told his followers to go into all the world and tell others of the good news. He then walked up to the spy, put his left hand against the spy's neck, his right hand under the spy's arm, and said, "All the world."

Putting one's hand against another's neck was a Ko'ah gesture indicating one had complete and absolute authority over the other. The second gesture indicated almost the exact opposite: that one was committing to be someone else's servant in perpetuity.

The spy started spreading the word among the Ko'ah, and within weeks over half of them had gone native, becoming followers of the Way. Soon, too many of them refused to continue the project of studying this planet in order to conquer it. The battalions were ordered to return to a Ko'ah planet, and the battalion leaders were brought up on charges of gross negligence. But not before they became followers of the Way themselves. When they were put to death, they did not show any indication of anxiety. Indeed, they died smiling. Or at least, the Ko'ah equivalent of smiling.

But with so many followers now assigned to other duties, the new religion took over Ko'ah civilization. Combined with the witness of the battalion commanders' deaths, this led to a revolution. Within only a few years, nearly every Ko'ah in the universe had become a follower of the Way.

The other species of the universe swarmed in to take over. The Ko'ah did not fight back, but simply let the invading armies destroy them. Again, with smiles on their faces. This could not go on long without some of the invading forces wondering how they could face their own deaths so calmly and even happily. Their investigations revealed the Way to them -- and so the invading forces were slowly converted to the alien religion.

It went on like this for centuries. Some species were less prone to accept the Way, but when power is all that matters, and the only power you can exert over someone can no longer take hold of them, it sparks a revolution. While light has a finite speed, some species had discovered methods of transmitting information across any distance instantaneously. Within 2500 years every species, every civilization in the universe had been slain and born anew.

Ironically, due to absurdly poor logistics, the planet on which the Way had started had been entirely ignored since the Ko'ah abandoned it. The civilizations decided to send an emissary fleet to thank them. Of course, they could not have a representative from every species or civilization -- such a fleet couldn't even fit into the planet's solar system -- but many of them. The Ko'ah were very glad to send an emissary of their own.

The inhabitants of the planet had spread out from their home world and occupied several other planets, moons, and artificial satellites, but all within their system. When the emissary fleet arrived they were shocked. They hadn't realized that there were other civilizations in the universe. Which is kind of funny when you think about it.

When the emissaries first explained their purpose, there was a great deal of confusion. The inhabitants didn't know what they were talking about at first. But eventually they managed to figure it out.

"Oh, that," they said. "There haven't been any followers of that religion for nearly 200 years. It's just so obviously false."

"What do you mean?" asked the emissaries.

"Well, a worldview like that is so obviously inconsistent with the discoveries of science."

"We don't understand. How is it inconsistent with them?"

"Well, it's just obvious."

"Wait a minute. We're more scientifically advanced than you. In fact, nearly every civilization in the universe is more scientifically advanced than you. Obviously the Way doesn't conflict with science."

The inhabitants collectively chuckled. "We're sorry. It's just that it's a remnant of a pre-scientific age, and we have advanced beyond it. Maybe you will too. Someday."

The emissaries returned to their ships. As they were leaving the solar system, one of them turned to another and said, "I'm a little sad. They were given more opportunity than any other species in the universe and they squandered it."

"Indeed," the other said. "But remember the words of the Master: 'The Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.'"

The first smiled. "'The heavens declare the glory of God.' But only if you're willing to listen."

The Statue

2009-11-22T00:20:00.008+01:00

He was an exceedingly average man. He had sometimes done good deeds and had sometimes done bad deeds. He had built up bad habits and good habits, neither outweighing the other. He was just average.

If anyone had asked him he couldn't have said why he decided to go through the Museum of Modern Art in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. It was almost completely deserted, his footfalls echoing as he walked from room to room. He didn't see anything he particularly liked; or anything he particularly disliked for that matter.

He walked into one room and drew up short as he saw the statue against one wall. It was very big and very ugly. It was roughly humanoid, but it was a caricature of a person, almost like a cartoon, vividly colored. And yet it was made in such a way that it seemed like something ancient, as if it was made thousands of years ago. It's face had a ridiculously long proboscis, hanging straight down past its chin. It was about twenty feet tall, but its waist was only about five feet off the ground, making its torso three times longer, and much broader, than its legs. It just looked ... wrong, for lack of a better word. It didn't belong here. Not "here in the museum," but here in this universe.

He realized he'd been staring at it for several minutes. He shook his head and turned away to look at the other pieces of art in the room. He walked along, trying to pay some attention to them, but he realized he was still thinking about the statue. He had such a strong reaction against it, yet the fact that it gripped him as it did showed that the artist did something right. He wondered whether this is what art aficionados meant by "good" art -- art that was so bad that it grabbed a hold of your psyche and wouldn't let go.

He kept trying to look at the paintings and smaller sculptures in the room, but his mind kept drifting back to the statue. Finally, with a sigh, he turned back to look at it again.

The statue was staring at him.

No, no it wasn't, but God it had looked that way for a moment. The statue had its eyes looking at a particular place and he had inadvertently wandered into its field of vision. He walked sideways, facing the statue but moving away from where he had just been standing, and the statue's eyes did not follow him. They continued staring at the same place. His heart was beating fast and he laughed at himself for being so spooked. The laugh echoed through the room and those beyond. He turned away from the statue again and looked at some of the other pieces in the room again. Eventually he worked his way to the doorway at the other end of the room where he had entered. As he was about to step through, he looked back at the statue for one final glimpse.

The statue was staring at him.

It's head was turned and it was staring at him. And its expression had changed; before it had been blank, like a soldier standing at attention. Now it looked ... disgusted. Offended. Contemptuous.

He walked back into the room, but the statue didn't move. It's gaze remained on the doorway where he had turned back to see it. He didn't want to, but he walked up to it. He was thinking he should touch it to see what it was made of, but he didn't want to. He wasn't sure why, but there was something about the statue that made him afraid to touch it.

He had the sudden thought that it must be partially mechanical, able to move slightly, as a part of its "artistic value." The thought came with a wave of immense relief. That would explain it. Perhaps the artist would move it remotely when someone was in the room in order to get a reaction. Perhaps he was on film right now. At some point, there would be a collection of reactions to the statue on video, his included. He wondered whether an audience would have been able to see his disgust when he first saw the statue. Whether the moments of terror he felt the two times he turned around and saw it "looking" at him had shown on his face.

Well, he didn't want to be a part of some hidden camera event, even if it was artistic in a sense. "Hello?" he said. "I don't want to take part in this. You don't have my permission to show my image anywhere." He waited while the echoes of his voice died down. There was nothing, no sound at all. "Hello?" he said again. Nothing.

He didn't want to take his eyes of the statue, but he wasn't going to stay in this room any longer. He walked over to the doorway he had first entered the room by and leaned out of it, holding on to the doorframe, and called out a third time. "Hello?" When no answer was forthcoming, he decided to just walk through the room and exit at the far side. He turned around.

The statue's face was five inches from his.

He screamed and fell back, banging his head against the wall. He scrambled away, but the statue didn't move, it's eyes continuing to stare at the place he had been moments before, its mouth parted in an impossibly wide grin, its teeth so big that they were actually bigger than the nose. Much bigger. There was no way those teeth could have fit inside that mouth when it was closed. They were sharp, the teeth of a predator. It had bent over at the waist, its obscenely long torso allowing it to place its face right next to his without its legs moving at all. It should have been completely off-balance by this, but somehow it stayed frozen in place.

He continued to crawl away from it until he reached a wall which he used to stand up. He inched his way along the wall towards the far exit. Despite his panic he was still able to hold on to the idea that the statue was mechanical and was being moved around for some purpose. "Hello? Stop it! I want you to stop it! This isn't funny, I don't want anything to do with you or this statue or this museum! Do you hear me? Just stop!" He continued moving along the wall, his eyes fixed on the statue, afraid to look away. It didn't move.

He got to the doorway on the opposite side of the room, probably fifteen meters away from it. The distance made him feel safer, but not much. Keeping his eye on the statue at all moments, he slowly eased his way out of the room. He was not going to look away, his view of the statue would only be broken when the wall came between him and it.

He was now standing completely in the next room over, but he could still see the statue, crazily bent over at the waist, its face and maniacal grin all the way across the room, looking at the spot where he had stood about two minutes before. He slowly took a sideways step. Now the wall blocked him from seeing its head (thank goodness), but he could still see its torso and legs. Another step, and only its waist and legs were still in view. One more ...

And he could no longer see it. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself, and then made a decision. He was going to get out of this museum right now. He was going to walk quickly, very quickly, to the exit, and he was never going to come here or anywhere nearby ever again. He turned.

The statue's face was four inches from his.

He screamed and fell down on the floor for the second time. The statue's face had changed again. Before it had looked at him in disgust, as if he were some type of repulsive insect. Now its face showed a different emotion.

Fury. Rage.

He scrambled away, trying to get out from under the statue's gaze as much as to get away from it physically. He moved to his left and the statue remained utterly still, staring at the space he had just occupied. He got to a wall, and once again used it to stand up. He crept along it, his eyes fixed on the statue, but with the idea that he had to get to the door behind it. He wasn't sure why, but he was not in a position to think through it rationally. It wasn't until he got to the doorway that he realized why he had gone there.

From this doorway he could see the statue, still motionless. But he could also see into the first room, where he had first seen the statue. From this vantage point, he could keep the statue in view and look at where it had been. If he could see the statue in the first room, while also seeing this statue in this room, he would know that there were several of them positioned around the museum to trap unwary patrons. That was the only way he could keep the idea alive that this was all some bizarre artistic experiment.

Except the space where the statue had first been was now empty. The statue in this room was the same one that had been in that room. In the five or six seconds that it was out of his view, it had somehow moved from the first room to this room, somehow come up behind him without passing him, and without being seen. It was impossible.

He shrunk into himself. He didn't know what to do; the moment he took his eyes off the statue, it would somehow move, while staying motionless, to another position. He backed up, into yet another room, but still with the statue in his vision. A thought occurred to him: Run. Just turn around and run like hell. The apparent benefits of this overwhelmed everything else, so he obeyed this impulse.

The moment he did, the statue was in front of him again, its face full of the same fury and rage, as well as a visceral hatred he had never felt towards another, nor been the recipient of. Its teeth were bared again, and it looked to him like the statue was going to consume him. Devour him. All this he got in a fraction of a second as he checked his forward motion, and fell back against a wall. This time he didn't scream. He was beyond that now.

He stood there, staring at this monstrosity, and despaired. "This isn't fair," he said. Then louder, "This isn't fair! I'm just an average man! I didn't do anything bad enough to deserve this! It's not FAIR!" His voice, the only sound in the museum, echoed, making it seem louder. Somehow, this gave him back a bit of his dignity. He walked back up to the statue, looked it right in the eye, and yelled, "Move, damn you! I know you're going to get me, so just MOVE!"

And the statue began to dance.

It was impossible. Its motions were contradictions. Not just strange, but actual fulfillments of logical impossibilities. It couldn't possibly exist. And he knew it was here to take him into its nonexistence.

His last coherent thought before entering his eternity of insanity was that even average men can go to hell.

And the demon pounced.

Why It's a Bad Idea to Travel Back in Time to Kill Hitler

2009-08-24T19:58:00.001+02:00

The time machine worked, but it only worked in one direction. You could only go to the past. And there was no coming back. So if John really wanted to use it, he had better do something important. He tried to think of wrongs that he could right, atrocities he could prevent, evil he could avert.

He was a child of his generation. The greatest evil? Hitler. The worst atrocity? The Holocaust. It was obvious. If he could use the time machine for only one thing, he would use it to kill Hitler and prevent the evils he committed from happening. What that would mean for history -- how it would change the resulting past and create a different time line -- was an interesting question, but one John wasn't able to generate much concern over. Stopping Hitler took precedence.

It took a full week for the machine to power up sufficiently for a jump of that many years. He took the time getting the right clothes and haircut and learning as much of the details of German culture of the time. Fortunately John could already speak German, otherwise he would have had to wait months or years before he used the time machine. Of course, he'd arrive at the same point anyway, but he was anxious to get there and finish it.

Everything went according to plan, but it took quite a bit of time getting to the point where he would have access to Hitler, longer than he wanted to spend. He used his knowledge of future events to become rich and donate much of his money to the Nazi party, slowly gaining access to its more important and higher-up leaders. Eventually he was able to maneuver himself into a private appointment with the Führer himself.

John had never killed before, but this was Hitler, after all. He walked into the room, and as the door closed behind him, the man he had seen in a hundred news reels walked towards him, with his hand out. John took his hand to shake it, and with his other hand took the knife he had up his sleeve (actually he had one up both sleeves, just in case) and stabbed him in the upper abdomen, pushing it up hard, as high under his rib cage as he could.

Hitler fell to the floor and looked up at John with a look of pure gratitude. Then, as his eyes rolled back in his head, he collapsed and exhaled a long breath. He didn't breathe again. John stared at his body for a full minute. He hoped he could escape, but he wasn't really expecting to. He was willing to sacrifice himself for this greater good. He turned toward the door.

Two men were standing right behind him. He hadn't noticed them in the room when he came in, and he hadn't heard any doors opening. But they had probably been hiding somewhere to protect their Führer. Caught already.

"Sir, you are guilty of a horrendous crime. You will have to pay the penalty." Something was wrong with what he said, and it took a few seconds for John to realize what it was: the man hadn't spoken German. He had spoken John's own language.

"Wh...what? What do you mean? Who are you?"

"We are time police. Our job is to protect history by ensuring that people do not travel back in time to alter the past. The repercussions of such an act would tear the universe apart."

"But..." John began. Then, he shook his head as if to clear it and said more forcefully, "I'm afraid you're too late. I've already killed him. This monster will never live to kill six million Jews. It's over."

"Sir, we couldn't arrest you before you committed a crime. We had to let you actually do it in order for you to be found guilty."

"Found guilty by whom?"

"Us. We have the authority to arrest and punish, to confine and convict."

"Fine. I'm willing to suffer whatever penalty you can think up. It's a small price to pay to rid the world of this devil."

They looked at him in pity, and said, "Sir, there is a mirror on the wall to your left. Would you please look into it?"

He did. He opened his mouth, and the reflection did the same. His eyes widened and so did the reflection's. He raised one arm and waved it around, the image in the mirror copying his act as he did it.

The image of Hitler.

He looked to the ground where Hitler's body had fallen. It wasn't there. He and the two time police were the only people in the room. He looked back into the mirror and saw his mouth, Hitler's mouth, working as he tried to say something, anything. Finally, he managed a single word.

"No."

"I'm afraid you don't have a choice sir. You have been found guilty of trying to alter the past. That is a crime against humanity. In order to protect the time stream, you will take the place of the man you sought to kill."

"I won't do it. Even if I look like him, I won't give his orders. I won't commit the crimes he did. I won't..."

"You have no choice. You are locked in to his destiny. You will find yourself giving the orders. No matter how desperately you wish to stop Hitler's atrocities, you will commit them yourself. You will not be able to resist."

"No, please. I'll do anything. Please, don't make me commit such horrendous acts. Please, please, please!"

"You have no choice. It is your own fault for trying to change history, effectively trying to uncreate the world that gave you birth." They both reached down to their belts and pushed some buttons John hadn't noticed. They began to shimmer, as if they were disappearing. "We leave you now to your doom."

John cried out, "Wait, please! Isn't there anything I can do?"

The time police slowly faded from sight, but the voice continued a few moments longer. "Yes there is something you can do. You can hope and pray that someone else will travel back in time to kill Hitler as you did. Then they will kill you and take your place. That is what your predecessor did. And the two hundred thirty-seven before him."

Listen

2009-04-14T12:00:00.001+02:00

He awoke suddenly in a strange room. But "awoke" is a misleading word; he just came to his senses, realizing that he had been lying there, with his eyes wide open, for awhile. He had no idea how long that was, what he was doing here, or where "here" was. There was no sound.

How did I get here? he thought. The last thing he remembered was going to bed last night. He tried to turn his head and couldn't. There weren't any restrictions -- at least he couldn't feel any -- but he simply was unable to move his head. The fact alarmed him, so he tried to move his head with his hands to see whether there was something restricting his movements or not. This attempt did not even get off the ground, as he quickly discovered he couldn't move his arms either.

His alarm level increased greatly at this point, and he tried to move any and every part of his body. Nothing worked. He was just lying there, staring at the ceiling, unable to look away. He tried to close his eyes, and found he wasn't even capable of that. He wasn't blinking. He was completely immobile. There was no sound.

As alarm transitioned to fear, he realized that something was missing. Analyzing himself, he found that he wasn't experiencing the bodily reactions which accompany fear. He should be hyperventilating. But he wasn't hyperventilating for the simple reason that he wasn't breathing. His eyes would have gotten wider at this if they could have, but they didn't.

Am I dead? he thought. His brain still seemed to be working. But how could he be alive if he wasn't breathing? He tried to force some air out of his lungs, to force himself to make some kind of noise, but nothing happened. And he realized that, as terrified as he was by his paralysis, he was even more terrified by the complete absence of any sound. He couldn't hear, or even feel, his heart beating. In such an utter silence as this, he should have been able to; it should have been very obvious in fact. But it wasn't. He wasn't breathing and his heart wasn't beating and he couldn't make any noise to end this fast from all sound that had somehow been forced upon him.

He panicked and would have thrashed his body if he was able. It was like being a claustrophobic in an enclosed space. But nothing made any difference. If he could just hear something, it would be OK. It would be a balm on his psyche. But there was nothing to hear. Just the ceiling to look at, endlessly, for all eternity as far as he knew. He would have wept if he could.

Then the noise stopped.

A growing sense of horror enveloped him. There had been a noise, all that time, there had been a sound. But he hadn't noticed it because it had just been there in the background. He had been desperate to hear any kind of noise, and there had been one all along. He had been a blind man dying of thirst while surrounded by unseen water. And now, now, he was totally without any kind of sound. He wanted to scream, Bring it back! Bring back the noise! I'll do anything, just let me hear something!

Then the second noise stopped.

He would have cried out if he could. There had been another noise, but in his desperation brought on by the loss of the first, hadn't noticed it either. But that...that might mean that there was a third noise going on right now. If he just listened, he might be able to hear it.

He strained desperately, trying to hear whatever sound might still be there. But he couldn't hear anything. And yet he hadn't heard anything before when there were two sounds going on. If the sound is just always there, how can you notice it? It was like the music of the spheres. Some ancient and medieval natural philosophers claimed that the heavens made music, but others asked, if that were the case, why can we not hear it? The answer was that the noise was always there, so we weren't aware of it. But if it stopped, then we would; and it would be cataclysmic. It would be like someone who never noticed that he was breathing, suddenly being unable to breathe.

He thought he was going insane. He didn't care what it was, he just wanted to hear something. Anything.

Anyone.

And then he heard a voice. It wasn't a sound, though; he just heard a voice in his mind that he was very familiar with but had never noticed before. It had been there with him his whole life, but never imposing itself on him. Just waiting for him to be open or desperate or crazy enough (or all three) to hear it. It said something very brief and to the point:

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

***********************

"Yes, can I help you?"

"Yeah, I heard that you guys were doing an experiment, some kind of psychological experiment. And that you would pay $500 for an afternoon?

"Yes, that's right. We're testing people's responses to paralysis and silence. We'll give you something that will cause a complete paralysis of your muscles and most of your bodily organs -- not the brain, of course -- and put you in a soundproof room. We'll also give you a drug which causes temporary short-term memory loss, so you won't remember signing up for the experiment."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the drug will erase your memory for about twelve hours, so the last thing you'll remember is going to sleep last night. But as I say, it's temporary. Your memory will come back completely within about one week. You hadn't heard about this before today, had you?"

"No, I just saw the flyer in the history building. About fifteen minutes ago."

"OK, good. If you had, you might be able to figure out what's happened to you, and we need you to be completely disoriented."

"And paralyzing most of my bodily organs? Isn't that dangerous?"

"Oh no. I'm sure it sounds like it, but with contemporary drugs and medical technology there is virtually no physical danger to you. They wouldn't allow us to do this test otherwise. What we'll do is run your blood through a heart-lung machine that will oxygenate your blood and circulate it in place of your lungs and heart. The machine will actually be in another room so you can't hear it; your blood will be brought to it and back to you through tubes. Again, I know it sounds dangerous, but it really is no problem."

"Right."

"No, really. We have several medical techs you can talk to you if you want to verify it."

"Well...are there any side effects? I mean, what's happened to the people who've done this already?"

"They've had no medical problems."

"OK, any other kinds of problems?"

"No, no. It's not a pleasant experience of course. Most people are a little shell-shocked for a week, but it seems to fade as their memory returns."

"That's it?"

"Mostly. The only really odd thing is that many of them come out of the experiment believing in God. But we expect that will fade with everything else."

madmans memoirs

2009-01-29T11:47:00.002+01:00

i think ime crazy / this is actually the only thing that makes me think i may not be crazy / crazy people never think thare crazy / so since i think ime crazy, i dont think ime crazy /

a long time ago i was in some kind of a war / i dont remember it but i do remember remembering it / some aliens attacked earth and in one of the battles i was captured by them / but apparently my peple thouht i was dead back home so no one looked for me and evryone got over it / i remember remembering my captors showing me some news stories about somone who was my wife remarrying / i was brouht far away, far from any human habitation / it took twenty years to get here / eventually i was put in a underground prison on a planet where no one lives / they went to great trouble to keep me alive and extend my lifespan beyond what humans live / i was captured a hundred and eihty years ago / ive been here for a hundred and sixty years /

they torture me every day / i used to have a voice, and they woud have contests to see who coud make me scream the loudest, or with the highest pitch, then thade all laugh / after a while, tho, they cut out my voice box, so i havent been able to comunicate with anyone for a long time / thave disfigured me so i dont look human anymore / so for a long time i dident beleive in the god because if the god exists he woudent let my captors torture me / he woud rescue me /

my captors tell me that no one knoes ime here, and that no one will ever knoe what ive been going thru for the last hundred and sixty years / it will be like it never happened / and i cant say anything / but i cant beleive it / there has to be someone who knoes what ive been going thru / if there isent then the only person who knoes is me / and when i die noone will knoe / it will be as if all my pain dident matter / but i knoe it does / so after a while i started believing that there was some kind of god who sees whats happening to me /

but then, pretty soon, i started getting really mad at this god / i mean, if he knoes ime here, and if hes the god, then he coud do something to get me out / at least he coud let me die so i dont have to be tortured anymore / maybe he cant do anything but then what the hell does it matter / the reason i beleived in him was because it meant that what i was going thru had real signifigance / i mean, if what ime going thru is actually bad, if what the captors are doing to me is really wrong, then there has to be a absolute standerd that thare braking / if its just wrong because i say so then its not really wrong / so if the god isent absolute then my life is nothing and all the pain was just nothing and it wasent really bad / but i knoe its not nothing and i knoe that it is really bad / so the god must be able to do something about it but he hasent /

so for the next few decades or so i woud curse the god every day / if he lets me stay in here then hes one of my captors, and thare evil / the god must be evil because he dosent let me go / i woud cry a lot too, and beg the god to please let me die but i never heard anything back / so every day i was tortured, and i woud cry to the god to let me die until they cut out my voice box and then ide just make funny breathy noises that made them laugh even more /

the reason ime writing this is because i just realized something that i hadent thouht of before / ive been calling the god evil because he keeps me here / but if hes evil, then theres no reason to think that what ive been going thru is really bad / the god was the one who made all the torture and pain actually bad instead of just my opinion / so how coud he be bad himself / and thats when it hit me / theres two gods / the low god, the god of the air, is the one whose keeping me here and hes evil / but theres another god, a high God, who makes what ive gone thru mean something / and since the high God is the author of the standerd that my torturers are braking, he hates my pain as much as i do / this got a little confusing because the high God still isent doing anything to get me out of here / if he hates me being here that much why dosent he get me out or let me die / but evrytime i tried to call the high God evil i had to think of another God even higher than him that makes what ive been thru matter /

so now i have to make a choice / thave told me that my body is finally giving out and they wont be able to keep it alive much longer / so thare going to try to remove it and keep my head alive / they laughed and said it will be better than just being a brain, because ile have my senses but wont be able to move or do anything / it will be like ime paralized or frozen / they think thale be able to keep me alive that way for a thousand years /

so i have to decide which god ime going to serve / the lower god might let me out if i promise to serve him / but then hes the bad one / if i promise to serve the high God he might let me out / but he hasent so far so he probably wont / so again i have to ask myself which god will i serve /

but before i can anser that qestion i have to anser another / just how crazy am i

The Letter

2008-10-31T15:04:00.002+01:00

I’m going to tell you about something that happened to me in college, and some (but not all) of what I have concluded from it.

I went to a Halloween party at someone’s house, but I didn’t really know anyone there. A friend who couldn't go himself had told me about it that afternoon, and I scribbled the address down on a slip of paper since I didn't have any other plans. I was wearing a green mask of a goblin or something, largely because I couldn’t think of anything else to dress up as, and the mask was available. I was pretty much just standing near the front door and trying to drink some spiked punch through the mask, watching everyone else. I had been there for only about a half hour, but I hadn’t met anyone. I’m kind of quiet, it’s hard for me to socialize. The front door was wide open, and people were coming and going freely. I was thinking of leaving myself.

Anyway, a guy walked in the front door, looked around, and then saw me. He came up to me and said, “I think this is for you,” and held out an envelope. I was surprised, and asked him, “What is it?” He just said, “I don’t know, but it’s for you. Here.” With the last word, he pressed the envelope into my hand, and then turned around and walked back out the door.

The envelope was blank, and it wasn’t sealed. There were several pages inside, and I took them out to read. It was handwritten, although I didn’t recognize it as the handwriting of anyone I knew. Whoever wrote it was a lefty apparently. The first page started like this:

Dear Marwan,
Please follow the instructions in this letter. I know you’re feeling a little uncomfortable by the fact that I know your name. I am afraid I have to make you even more uncomfortable. Remember the time...

And then it described something I did when I was 15, and have never been able to forgive myself for. I’m not going to tell you what it was. But to read a description of your own actions, actions which you’ve never told anyone else about, and which you have done everything to divorce yourself from, is a little unnerving. I couldn’t imagine who wrote this letter, because as far as I knew, nobody knew about that event.

OK. So this is apparently some bizarre form of blackmail. I had stopped reading the letter as all this sank in, and as I dropped my eyes back down to continue reading I saw that my hands were trembling. The description of what I had done had brought me to the back of the first page.

I know you’re thinking this sounds like blackmail. It is not. I am not going to tell anyone else about what you did. Ever. No matter what. I love you, and I would never do that. The reason I described this event to you is just to communicate two things to you. First, this is not some random letter to some random person. It is for you Marwan. Second, you can trust me. Even if you burn this letter right now, I will not tell anyone what you did. But I am asking you to trust me, and to follow my instructions. It’s important.

I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what an appropriate response to this might be. I don’t know what you would have done, or what I should have done. But I can tell you what I did. I decided to follow the instructions. Perhaps this was because I was so unsettled by what it said.

So I looked down to the next paragraph, and continued reading.

Leave the party. Just walk out of the door to the sidewalk, turn right, and walk three blocks. Then turn right on Stiller Avenue. Don’t look at the next page to read the next set of instructions until you’ve turned right on Stiller.

This was frustrating. I had been assuming (for the last, what, ten seconds?) that I would read the entire letter, and then follow the instructions. But it wanted to deploy me blind. But, as I said, I had made up my mind to follow the instructions. So I took off my mask and threw it on a pile of coats that was nearby (that thing was really uncomfortable), casually walked out the door, to the sidewalk, turned right, and began walking. The party was on the other side of campus from where I lived, so I didn’t know the neighborhood very well.

When I had walked three blocks, I got to a street, and tried to find a sign to identify it. Sure enough, “Stiller Ave.” So I turned right and continued walking, and then looked at the next page.

All right. Just keep on this street for a while. Turn this page over when you hear the dog barking.

Very strange. I walked for about two and a half more blocks, when I heard a dog bark in one of the houses I was passing. So I turned the second sheet of paper over.

TURN RIGHT NOW.

Immediately, without thinking about it, I turned right and took a couple of steps. Then I stopped. I was in the middle of the block, how could I turn right? I would have to walk through someone’s yard. And besides, how could someone writing a letter know that I should turn right at the particular moment when I was reading it? How could they have known when a dog would bark? Well, maybe they knew the neighborhood, and knew that the dog at that house barks whenever someone passes by. Maybe.

Then I looked up, and saw that there was actually a little worn path making its way between houses. I don’t know whether it would be trespassing, but it looked like I could walk between the houses to get to the street behind them. I started walking (the dog was still barking, since one of the houses I was walking between was his) and looked down at the letter to read some more.

I know you’re wondering why I didn’t just tell you to go two and a half blocks and then take the path between the houses. The reason why is because you would not have followed those instructions. You’re nervous now about whether you’re trespassing. But by surprising you like that, you took a few steps down the path, and so, in your mind, you figured you were already part way down the path, and might as well just go the rest of the way. Of course, that’s not a very rational line of thought, but it was the easiest way I could get you to actually follow the path.

For a bizarre situation, this was getting increasingly more bizarre. I don’t know whether it was true that I would not have followed the path if the letter had just told me to. But the description of why I decided to follow the path since I’d already taken two steps...that was just spooky. I did it subconsciously, but as soon as I read that description in the letter, I realized that was exactly what went through my mind.

I was getting a little scared, frankly, and was hoping this adventure would end soon. When I reached the end of the path, I took out the third sheet of paper to read.

In front of you is a long block. Cross the street and follow it until you get to the street where all the streetlights are burned out. Then turn right.

It didn’t say not to read the next set of instructions, but I didn’t anyway. Maybe I had been “trained”; or maybe I was just afraid and didn’t want to know where all this was leading.

I reached the street where all the lights were burned out and turned right. I looked down at the letter, and (of course) couldn’t read it anymore because there was no light. A house a block ahead had a porch light on, and a few people sitting on the porch, dressed up in various costumes, drinking, smoking, talking with each other. One was even wearing a mask a little like the one I had left at the party, except his was brown. So I walked down the sidewalk until I was standing in front of the house, and used the light from their porch light to read the letter.

This is the last set of instructions. Once you’ve finished reading this, put the letter back into the envelope, and ask the people on the porch if one of them would deliver it to the monster at 4587 Windham Road. You’re going to have to give them the $100 you earned this week tutoring. I know you had plans for that money, but this is important Marwan. Remember, I love you more than you can imagine. This is the only way I could save you.

Save me? Save me from what? But there wasn’t any more. That was the end of the letter. No signature. I put it back in the envelope and looked over at the people on the porch. I didn’t even wonder how the letter writer knew I would read this last set of instructions in front of this particular house. It was just one more weird event in a profoundly weird evening. The people seemed pretty drunk or stoned or both. One of them was looking at me (I was standing in front of their house after all), but most of them hadn’t even noticed me. I cleared my throat and said, “Uh, excuse me?”

The one looking at me said, “Yeah, what’s up?”

“Um...Could I ask you to do something? It would be a big favor. Could you deliver this letter to...” I thought back for a moment, “...the monster at 4587 Windham Road?”

They looked at me blankly. I had been hoping that the letter had been wrong about the $100, but it had been right about everything else (and how did whoever wrote it know I even had $100?). So I said, “I could give you some money if you’d do it.”

Another one spoke up. “How much?”

“$100.”

They looked around at each other, then the one wearing a mask said, “Heck, I’ll do it for $100. That’s just around the corner, anyway. I’ll be back in about a minute and a half.” I held out the letter to him, but he didn’t even stand up until I dug into my pocket, took out the $100, and held that out as well. He took it and said, “The monster, huh? Dude, it’s Halloween. Do you know how many monsters there are tonight?”

“I know, but...I mean...”

“Hey, don’t worry about it, man. The price is right. Be right back, guys.”

He began walking down the dark street. I looked over at the other people sitting on the porch, and they were ignoring me. It was pretty clear I wasn’t welcome. So I started walking back the way I came.

When I got back to the long block that would lead me back to the path, I turned and started following it. But then I had a sudden shock: that letter described what I did when I was 15! And it has my name on it!

I turned around and started running. Why did I do all of this? Why did I trust some letter writer I had never met just because he knew those details about me? If someone else read that letter, it would be the worst thing that could ever happen. I actually cried a little bit.

When I reached the house with the porch, one of them called out to me, “Hey, it’s done, man.”

I stopped and looked. The man who said that looked familiar, but he wasn’t the guy I gave the letter to. “What?”

One of the others turned to him and said, “Dude, you took your mask off. He doesn’t recognize you.”

He grinned. “Oh. Right. Yeah, man, I took my mask off on the way over there. That thing is really uncomfortable. Anyway, it’s right around the corner, like I said. It’s done.”

I looked down at the ground. Whoever had the letter was reading it right now. It was too late. I turned around and started walking back the way I came again. The guy called after me, “You’re welcome, man. Geez.”

I reached the long block, and turned again. At about the same spot where I had turned around, I suddenly realized why the guy who was wearing the mask looked so familiar.

He was the one who gave me the letter at the party.

I reached into my pocket, and took out the slip of paper I had written the address of the party on that afternoon. It said, “4587 Windham.”

*********

So that’s what happened. I was in such a daze I don’t remember how I got home that night. I went back the next day to talk to the guy who had delivered the letter. He didn’t live at the house with the porch, but he lived nearby, and the people who did live there told me where. He thought I was crazy, and insisted that nothing unusual happened: I gave him the money to deliver the letter, he walked into the party, handed it to “some guy” with a mask, and then came back. And he really thought I was crazy when I kept asking him if it only happened once.

I walked the route I took that night again. It was basically just a circle. Three blocks, turn right, two and a half blocks, turn right, the path (no longer caring whether I was trespassing), then one long block, turn right, and then after a while the house with the porch is ahead, and the place where I started from is around the corner. I actually walked it several times, taking great care to time myself. Especially when I walked along the dirt path (that dog barked every time). But nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Anyway, I said I would tell you some of my conclusions. The first is that at some point during the walk, I must have skipped about twenty minutes into the past without noticing it. I gave the letter to the guy before I had received it. I used to tell people this conclusion more freely, but no one has ever agreed with me. They ask me, “Why did you follow the instructions? I wouldn’t have.” Or, “Didn’t you realize you were walking in a circle?” As if answering such questions to their satisfaction would somehow resolve the problem.

Some people have thought the guy who delivered it to me must have been playing some kind of prank. But I had never seen him before, how exactly could he have orchestrated this whole thing? How did he know how I would react when I turned down the path? How did he know that I had $100? How did he know my secret?

But to me, the more important question is obvious: who wrote the letter? I mean, think about it. It began to exist whenever I arrived twenty minutes (or so) in the past, and ceased to exist when I began the skip back. And even if we ignore this, there's still the question of how did the writer insert the letter into the loop? The only time it wasn’t in my hand was when the guy who delivered it to me had it; and according to him, he had it for less than a minute.

Think of it this way: at no point was there not a sufficient cause for the letter. I was holding it, having received it from another person, who had received it from a third person, who turned out to be me again, etc., ad infinitum. To explain how I got the letter you don't need to refer to anything other than the guy who gave it to me. And to explain how he got the letter you don't need to refer to anything other than me giving it to him. Every step had a cause.

But obviously there’s still something missing. We still need to say there was a cause for the loop itself, and a cause for the content of the letter. Simply explaining it by pointing to the infinite link of causes within the loop doesn't really explain anything.

But after thinking about this for a while, it occurred to me that this doesn't just apply to the letter. It applies to the universe as well. Even if the universe has always existed, and every event in it has a cause, you’d still need a cause for the universe itself, and for it to be the particular universe that it is. Just as there must be someone outside the loop who made the loop and wrote the letter, so must there be a cause for the universe that’s outside the universe who made it and gave it the particular content that it has.

So my bizarre experience forced me to think about things I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. I think I know who wrote the letter now, and I know I wouldn’t have come to these conclusions, these beliefs, without it. I know this because the letter said this was the only way he could save me.

And that he loves me more than I can imagine.

Brilliant

2008-09-26T12:24:00.001+02:00

Once upon a time, there was a group of people who lived on top of a very high mountain. Because they lived so high up, there was always snow and ice everywhere, which was constantly evaporating and forming a fog or cloud that completely covered the top of the mountain. This resulted in snow and sometimes hail being showered down on the people. You might think that it wasn’t a very wise place to live, but the group of people insisted there was no other place, since the cloud prevented them from seeing very far in any direction, including up. They maintained that the people from other groups that came to the top of the mountain from time to time just lived a bit further down the side of the mountain.

Every time the group of people heard a word they particularly liked, they would use it to describe themselves by adding it to the words they had previously used. Eventually, they were calling themselves the “Brilliant, Undaunted, Learned, Liberated, Sophisticated, Highly Intelligent Tribe.” However, this name lent itself to stammering, and the word “Tribe” sounded too primitive for them; so the people eventually just took the word “Brilliant” and changed from “Tribe” to “Society.” The other words were confined to their official creed and their official anthem.

Now the top of the mountain, as incredible as it may seem, was a trade center where people from outside the Brilliant Society would come to barter. You might think again that this wasn’t a very wise place to have a trade center, but the Brilliant Society had demanded that it be so -- and when the members of other tribes argued that the Brilliant Society should send its people to the trade centers already established all over the world, the people of the Brilliant Society would laugh and say there were no such places, and if the others didn’t come and trade on the mountain they were being discriminated against, and complained, and threatened, and whined, and eventually it just became easier to make the top of the mountain a trade center than it was to listen to them anymore.

There was a particular member of the Brilliant Society who enjoyed arguing with the people from other tribes and insisting that there was nothing except the top of the mountain. He would contrive extensive arguments to prove that all of the stories the people from other tribes would talk about weren’t true. When, for example, he would tell someone his scientific proof that the structure of plants would not allow them to grow more than a few inches above the surface of the ground, they would say to him incredulously, “You mean you don’t believe in trees?” He would then chuckle quietly (though not so quietly that they couldn’t hear him doing it), and say, “No. Nor do I believe in fairies or hobgoblins or Hottentots.” Most people would simply walk away at this, which gave him and his followers the impression that he had won the argument.

One day, this Brilliant Society member, or BS’er, was out strolling alone through the snow and ice during a particularly nasty hailstorm when he saw someone from another tribe who was looking around him with a frustrated, confused, and melancholy look on his face. The BS’er had encountered many people making this facial expression before when they were overcome with the pitiful environment at the top of the mountain. He saw this as an excellent opportunity to approach the individual who was making the face, and demonstrate to him that the top of the mountain was the only place there is.

“Hail, friend!” said the BS’er. “You look distraught. Is there anything I can help you with?”

The individual responded the same way everybody did when the BS’er said this: “Me? Oh no. Well ... yes, perhaps there is. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, this area seems like a remarkably unpleasant place. Why exactly do you and your people choose to live here?”

The BS’er smiled widely and said, “Well, as to its unpleasantness it certainly doesn’t compare to our dreams and imaginations -- but this is hardly something to hold against reality. And as to why we choose to live here, where else would you have us live? The top of the mountain is all there is.”

The individual’s facial expression changed to surprise (which was what everybody’s face did when the BS’er said this), and he responded, “Oh, sir, you have been sorely misinformed. There are many places beyond here. I myself live on the bank of a river in a beautiful wood twelve days journey south of here.”

“River?” said the BS’er. “Yes, I believe I’ve heard visitors speak of this before. Isn’t that a place where the snow and ice move sideways instead of falling from above? This seems to violate the law of gravity, does it not?”

“Well, not exactly.” said the individual. “It’s not really snow and ice, but water, that is, ice that has become warm and is no longer solid.”

“But when the snow and ice become warm they turn to steam and go back up into the cloud.” said the BS’er. “If you’d care to stay here until this storm subsides, I’m sure you’ll see it happening. It is a fairly common occurrence. But then, I’m sure you’re already aware of this affair, since you live on the mountain yourself.”

“Well, no sir, I don’t.” responded the individual. “I live on the bank of a river. I just told you that. And the river is neither snow nor steam, but water. This is usually what happens to snow and ice when it gets warm. It changes from snow to water then from water to steam. Sometimes, it does indeed change directly from snow to steam, but that only happens up here on top of the mountain.”

“Ah!” said the BS’er. “So the laws of nature only apply to the place where we just happen to be right now! Elsewhere, the elements behave differently! How convenient! But of course, this is not true here and now, but in some magical land of centaurs, minotaurs, and matadors! I hope, sir, that you will forgive me for saying so, but this ‘river’ of yours seems a remarkably unpleasant place -- since I do not wish to have much in common with non-existence!”

“But ... look here,” said the individual. “Surely you know that water exists in liquid form, do you not? What do you drink?”

“We make wine from snow and moss, and sometimes we drink milk brought from the other tribes. We also eat snow at the end of every meal. But if you wish to bring us some of your ‘water’ feel free to do so, and I shall immediately recant of all I’ve said. Or would it ‘just happen’ to become ice again once it comes in view of the mountain?”

“Yes, of course it would freeze by the time it came up to the top of the mountain!” said the individual in an annoyed voice.

The BS’er only chuckled, and said very condescendingly, “Sir, I beg your indulgence. I had no intention of depriving you of your dearly-held doctrines. But surely, you have some affection for truth? All of the visitors from further down the mountain have claimed to love what is true. Would you do me the courtesy of listening to me a bit longer?” Then the BS’er told the individual a scientific proof he had contrived which proved that water was inherently unstable in liquid form, and thus could never occur as such. “Well?” said the BS’er when the individual had a sufficiently puzzled look on his face, “What do you think? Can you refute my argument?”

“No I can’t,” said the individual. “I’m not much of a scientist, I’m afraid. But surely you don’t expect your argument to counter my experience of living on the riverbank, do you? I’ve been there. I know it exists. I’ve often swum in its waters.”

“You may have experienced it, but I have not. How ever shall we get past this stalemate? If only there was evidence to support one of us over against the other ... oh wait! There is! My scientific argument which you cannot refute!” As the content of this sentence makes clear, the BS’er said this in a very sarcastic tone of voice.

“But your lack of experience doesn’t argue against my positive experience. The fact that you haven’t experienced a river or liquid water doesn’t mean that they don’t exist -- it means nothing more than that you haven’t experienced it. The fact that I have experienced it proves that they do exist; otherwise I could not have done so.”

“I exhort you sir, please do not bring your dreams and fantasies to court and defend them as real. If I grant that you are not lying, which I do not, the fact that you have ‘experienced’ them proves that you experienced something -- precisely what I don’t know, though a breakdown seems more likely than not. Moreover, what becomes, then, of my scientific argument?”

“Well, what becomes of my experience?”

“Delusion, illusion, imagination, hallucination, take your pick. Now again, what of my argument?”

“Well ... just because I cannot refute your argument off the top of my head doesn’t mean that it is true. Isn’t it more reasonable to believe in the river (seeing as how I’ve been there) than it is to disbelieve or even doubt it?”

“Reason, sir? You speak of reason? I have heard many stories of ghosts, banshees, and pygmies but I don’t believe them despite the ‘experience’ of those who tell them. Pray, what difference is there between these stories and your ‘river’?”

“Did you not say that you have met many other visitors from other tribes before, sir?”

“Yes, I have.”

“And have any of them spoken of liquid water?”

“They have indeed. It is a most powerful myth,” said the BS’er, and chuckled (he really enjoyed chuckling).

“Well,” said the individual, “shouldn’t we prefer to accept what they claim to have experienced rather than hold that everyone who challenges our world view is either lying or delusional?”

“What that fails to take into account, sir, is that, while their stories are similar, they are never the same. Some speak of liquid water being still, like glass. Others speak of it as a small trickle moving delicately. Others (such as yourself) describe it as a deep river, in which we can immerse ourselves. Some even tell of the ‘sea,’ where the water is constantly ‘waving’ towards the ‘shore.’ (They don’t realize that nearly all the ancient myths have stories of the ‘sea’ in them.) Obviously, all of these stories cannot be true.”

“But surely, just because all of them cannot be true, it doesn’t mean that none of them are true. It would be very odd to insist that, since everyone tells a very similar story, the truth must lie in precisely the opposite direction, would it not? Besides, I’m not sure the stories do contradict: perhaps they are just describing different aspects of the same thing.”

“And yet, they all maintain that they are describing the whole. No sir, thank you sir, I prefer not to give anymore credence to these stories than to those describing dragons, gargoyles, and Eskimos.”

“Um ... is there anyone else in the Brilliant Society I can speak to about this?” said the individual. “I hope you will not be offended, but I don’t find this conversation very enlightening”

“How dare you sir! I’ll have you know that I am considered one of the more brilliant members of the BS! I have BS flowing through my veins! I have BS coming out of my ears! I’m completely full of BS! Look, even my eyes are brown!” (Brown was the official color on the official flag of the Brilliant Society.)

“I don’t understand.” said the individual. “Why don’t you come walk with me, and I’ll show you my river.”

“I would be happy to, sir, as long as I am home in time for supper.”

“Well ... it is a long journey of nearly two weeks, and one must pass through many hazards to get there.”

Once again, the BS’er chuckled. “Of course. One can only experience your river by undergoing a long and dangerous trip away from one’s hearth and home. And one cannot know whether he is being made a fool of until he reaches the end of the journey. One must step out blindly, with no assurances. Why should I have expected more?”

The individual shook his head as if to clear it. “Why are you so intent on not believing this?”

“Because, sir, I have my pride. I do not want to make myself a simpleton who could be taken in by childish stories of werewolves, ogres, and Rastafarians!”

“But surely you want to believe it, don’t you? Don’t you wish you could be taken out of this horrible place and go to a more favorable climate?”

“Why would I want to go to some land where the snow moves sideways and smother in it? Your river sounds ghastly, and I won’t believe it. I won’t! I believe in reality!”

At this point, the individual made another facial expression which the BS’er saw at the end of all his debates, and recognized as victory -- although it was, in fact, pity. Then, the individual turned and walked away shaking his head. The BS’er went back to his home, very pleased with himself for winning another argument, to have a dinner of moss wine, bear meat and snow. That night, as he drifted off to sleep, he muttered to himself, “Water ... river ...” and chuckled again as he fell asleep.

Witness

2008-08-24T19:37:00.001+02:00

"My great-grandfather witnessed a few events when he was a small child of only five years old. They played a large role in his life, and he never forgot them. I was born when he was ninety years old. I used to sit on his lap, and listen to him tell me of the events he saw. He died when I was ten and he was one hundred.

"The stories my great-grandfather told me played as much of a role in my life as they did in his. He told them to me many times, and I remember how he would close his eyes and his mouth would widen into an immense smile when he recalled the events that happened in his youth. Just as he remembered in his old age the events he witnessed, so I remember him telling me about them.

"Now I am here, an old man myself. I was born eighty-five years after the events my great-grandfather witnessed, and have reached the age of ninety-five. This means that I have heard a first-hand account of events which took place 180 years ago.

"I know you react with skepticism when you hear this. Everyone does. I simply ask you, which step in the process makes it so absurd? Certainly both I and my great-grandfather have lived to great ages. But this is true of most of the men in my family, who did not have their lives cut short. It is not odd that he would remember the events accurately, or tell others about them, as they would be nearly impossible to forget. Perhaps you might say it is not any individual claim I am making that is implausible, but the confluence of them. But surely, with as many people in the world as there are, there is bound to be a man who remembers something from his childhood and lives to an old age; who tells a grandchild about his memories; and this grandchild then lives to an old age as well. It is certainly a fortuitous chain of events, but not impossible or even very implausible.

"Think about the current year, what number it is. Now subtract 180 years from it. Think about what was happening in the world then. I have heard about events from that year from someone who actually experienced it.

"I stand before you in this arena, sentenced to death, the last man alive who was taught about our Lord Jesus from someone who saw his face, touched his hand, and heard his voice. When my great-grandfather was five years old, his father's home was where the Lord and his apostles ate the Last Supper. He saw the Lord crucified for our sins the next day. Afterwards, he saw him again, as did many others. He never forgot. He told me about it. Now I'm telling you."

Proof

2008-07-17T00:30:00.001+02:00

I was watching TV in the common area in my dorm when I met Evil Steve. I had heard of him of course; he had a reputation as a very eccentric loner who was studying particle physics, but I had never spoken to him.

His room is adjacent to the common area. I was frustrated because I'd just gotten a test back (organic chemistry), and although I hadn't failed, I didn't do nearly as well as I had expected to. So I wasn't in the mood for what happened. Evil Steve's door opened, and when I looked up he was standing in the doorway. He pointed his finger at me, and said "Ha!" Then closed the door.

After trying to put this into some sort of context for about a half minute, his door opened again, and he came out into the common area. He was obviously very excited about something and looked around, seeming to be a little disappointed that I was the only one there. Starting to get a little angry with him, I said, "What's the problem?"

He looked at me, beaming, with a huge grin on his face, and said, "I just invented a time machine!"

I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. "Really? That's interesting. So why are you telling me instead of exploring the Paleozoic era? Or the distant future? The heck with the distant future, why don't you just tell me who wins the next presidential election?"

He was so excited he didn't realize I was being sarcastic. "Well, it's just a prototype. Very rudimentary. It only has a range of about a minute, minute and a half. But still! Actual time travel!"

After the test and his previous outburst, I just wasn't in the mood. I blurted out, "Don't give me that crap. You didn't invent a time machine. You're just trying to weird me out."

He looked at me like I had insulted his mother. "What? I'm not...but...I did invent a time machine! I can prove it!" And with that, he angrily stormed back into his room and slammed the door.

About ten seconds later, his door opened for the third time, and with a triumphant look on his face, he said, "See?"

I thought about it for a minute. Then I did.

Don't Answer Your Cell Phone While Driving

2008-06-12T11:37:00.001+02:00

I'm speeding down a country road late at night through a slowly building fog, speeding because I'm tired and want to get home. Normally I wouldn't even be here, but a colleague suggested this shortcut. I'm a lawyer at a firm that deals with work injuries, involuntary manslaughter, car accidents, and the like. Despite having my headlights on, visibility is starting to cut out as the fog slowly gets thicker. I'm just beginning to consider slowing down when my phone rings, interrupting my thoughts.

The man on the other end is gibbering about having been in some sort of car accident. I get calls like this all the time. The man is panicky, as they always are, and I'm waiting for him to take a breath so I can ask who he is.

The man's voice suddenly stops, but I sense there's something wrong, and so don't say anything. After several seconds, he whispers, in an obviously terrified voice, "Who is this?"

I'm about to answer when suddenly, out of the fog, a body approaches and strikes my car. I slam on the brakes as the body arches away and disappears in the fog. I just hit somebody with my car.

This is bad. I was speeding through a fog with no visibility while talking on a cell phone. We handle cases like this, but all we can really do is damage control. I start racking my brain, looking for an excuse that a court might buy when the thought comes to me: You may have just killed someone!

I jump out of my car, and, hanging up on whoever had called me, frantically try to dial my law firm's senior partner. Really, I'm just punching numbers. I'm pretty panicky, and I just run straight ahead, looking for the body to see if whoever I just hit is still alive. The phone picks up on the other end, and I say, "Oh my God, I just hit someone with my car! I might've killed him! There's this fog and it's dark and I didn't see him and I might have killed a man! What do I do? I can't find his body because of the fog! What do I do?" I babble on for a few more seconds as I run down the road, looking for the body.

Suddenly I stop talking because I experience a shock of déjà vu -- not a "sense" of it, but a "shock". The words that I'm saying, the panicky, desperate descriptions I'm giving over the phone -- these are the words I heard right before I hit the man. This is the phone call I received while driving down the road in the fog.

Into the phone, I whisper, "Who is this?"

On the other end, I hear a sharp bark, and the sound of tires squealing. Several seconds of silence. Then a car door opening, and the phone goes dead.

And where's the body? I should have found it by now. I turn around to see how far I've come from my car. I can see the headlights about fifty meters away.

And they're getting closer.

The Angel and the Monstrosity

2008-04-30T18:00:00.001+02:00

There was once a man -- his name doesn’t matter; if you have to, call him Manny -- who was obsessed with whether he was going to hell. He was terrified of the idea of hell, and desperately wanted to avoid it, as we all do when we’re willing to think about it.

So, one day, he took to drastic measures. He prayed to God. He laid his heart open to him, saying he knew his terror of hell wasn’t the best reason to want to go to heaven, but he was sorry, and he’d do anything if he could just have some peace about it. He sat there, concentrating intently on the corner where the wall met the ceiling in his living room, waiting for God to respond. Every now and then, he caught his mind drifting, and this made him even more desperate, wondering if now he’d offended God, or perhaps the answer had come, but he missed it because he wasn’t paying attention. No answer came. Eventually he just went to bed.

He had a very strange dream that night though. It was impossible to put into words, but it was kind of like God saying, “You don’t really want to know whether you’re going to heaven or hell; trust me on this.” To which he responded, “Yes, I do, I really do.” God responded back, “Don’t you trust me?” And he said, “Well, no, not really, but I’d like to.” And after that it was just incoherent. At any rate, the dream was very different from that, but that’s as close as one can get to describing it. You know how dreams are.

When he woke up, the dream was the furthest thing from his mind. He drank some coffee and ate some cereal. He showered, brushed his teeth, got dressed. When he stepped out of his house, the first thing he saw was a monstrosity. His bile rose, and he almost screamed, but instead his terror froze him in place as it walked straight towards him. But at the last moment it passed by him, saying “hi” as it did so. The voice was that of a woman. In fact, it was that of his neighbor. His hot neighbor. That was his hot neighbor who just walked by. And then, without knowing how he knew it, he realized that he saw her as she would be. She was going to hell, and she was slowly becoming a monstrosity.

Then he looked around him, and realized that the street was full of monstrosities, the damned, moving about their daily lives. Now that he realized what they were, he wasn’t scared of them -- they were so completely pathetic -- but they were so ugly he was scared of being infected by them.

But then he saw…he didn’t know what to call it, it was so perfect. Maybe it was an angel, but if it was, the word “angel” didn’t communicate the beauty, the depth, the quality of life that this being did by simply existing. It was the mailman. He was seeing him as he would be, a heavenly creature.

As he walked to work, he saw more and more of them, monstrosities so ugly that he had to fight to keep from vomiting, and angels so glorious that he had to fight to keep from falling at their feet and worshipping them.

When he passed the grade school, it started getting a little strange. He saw the children in the playground, and they, like everyone else, were either monstrosities or angels. But then one of them switched from a monstrosity to an angel. As he stared at them, another changed from an angel into a monstrosity. Then back again. In fact, they were all flipping back and forth like that. What he was seeing then wasn’t their eternal destinies, but where they were headed at that moment.

But then why wasn’t everybody else doing it? Well, because as people get older, they become more set in their ways. That was all there was to it. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he did. As he walked around, he did notice a few people change, but they didn’t flip back and forth constantly like the children.

It wasn’t until he got home that the thought occurred to him: What would he see if he looked in the mirror? The thought horrified him, but once he had it, it wouldn’t leave him alone. Several times he walked into the bathroom, but then left without turning on the light. Finally, he went in, turned on the light, and saw his reflection.

As he gasped at the beauty of his reflection, it changed.

As he opened his mouth to scream, it changed.

He began to cry out with joy, but then it changed again.

His cry turned into a shriek of horror; and it changed again.

And by then, he was out of air, and his visage was constantly flipping back and forth. He finally turned away from the mirror, turned out the light, and ran out of the bathroom.

He hyperventilated for several minutes, trying to understand what happened to him. The children flipped back and forth, but not as quickly as he had. What was it about himself that caused it? That night, he covered up all the mirrors with tape. That’s hard to do without looking at them, but he managed it.

The next day, walking through a mob of demons with a smattering of angels, he realized he was walking next to a storefront with a window. Afraid to look, but desperate, he slowly began to turn his head. He could see his reflection now, but just as a shapeless form; he couldn’t tell whether he was a monstrosity or an angel. But he could see enough detail to know that, whatever it was, it wasn’t flipping back and forth; it was a steady reflection.

He turned his head the rest of the way, and the most glorious being he had ever seen turned into the most horrific and disgusting. Then back again. Fortunately, at that point, the storefront ended.

He spent several days trying to understand all of this. Why, when he looked in the mirror, did he change from whatever state he was in to the other? Why did it not happen when he wasn’t looking at his reflection? He wasn’t really that bright of a man, but he did finally come up with the answer.

For him, the terror of hell was the only thing that drove him to salvation. His terror was a sufficient impetus to make him heaven-bound. The knowledge that he was damned terrified him and turned him around so that he was no longer damned. But the knowledge that he was saved took away this terror and turned him back towards hell. So when he knew he was damned, he was saved, and when he knew he was saved, he was damned.

So…what could he do with this? In order to avoid hell, he would have to think he was going to hell. But then, if he thought he was going to hell, he would know that he was going to heaven. But if he thought he was going to heaven, he would go to hell. How do you make yourself believe something, if by believing it, you knowingly falsify it? Basically, he had no idea whether he was going to go to heaven or hell.

Which was exactly the situation he was in before. Except now, he wasn’t constantly terrified of going to hell.

Maybe he should have listened to God.

Creak

2008-03-31T21:06:00.001+02:00

The inventor was frustrated. He had spent years, decades, creating a time machine (which was about the size of a shoebox), but now that it was finished, no one would believe him. When he tried to explain his theories to others, they would always respond by saying that if he had really invented a time machine, it would be possible to create a paradox by, say, going back in time and killing one’s grandfather before he had any children. Since this was ridiculous, he couldn’t have invented a time machine.

So the inventor decided to conduct an experiment: he would travel five years into the past and kill himself -- his self from five years ago, that is. This would prove that travel into the past only allowed observation, and so such paradoxes could not arise.

He went out into the hallway outside his office, turned the number dial on the time machine to "5", the units dial all the way up to "year", the directional switch to "past", and activated it. Not much changed, but he hadn’t expected it to; he had always relished continuity (which made it a little unusual that he, of all people, would invent a time machine), and so his furnishings had remained almost entirely unchanged over the thirty-plus years that he’d been living in this house. He expected to find himself at work in his office, and so walked over to it. The door was open a crack, and he was able to look in and see that, yes, he was indeed sitting at his desk, looking at something. He raised the pistol, pushed the door open, and before his old self could react to the sound of the creaky hinges, he shot himself in the head. His old self.

He paused for a moment to see if he noticed any differences: did he have any new memories? Did he still exist? Would one notice if one stopped existing? At this last thought, he chuckled, stepped into the room, and then pushed the return button on the time machine. Apart from the disappearance of his body -- his old body -- and the door closing most of the way behind him, nothing changed. After pausing again to see if he noticed any differences (he didn’t), he went over to his desk to record the results of his experiment. He looked at the time machine and called up the exact coordinates it had recorded, and began writing them down.

But something was wrong. As he finished writing the coordinates, he looked back at the time machine to see what it was. The first thing he noticed was that, although he had pushed the directional switch down for "past", the switch was sticky and it hadn't clicked over. The second thing he noticed was that, while he had turned the category dial all the way up to "year", he accidentally pushed it too far, so it went beyond it, resetting to the smallest unit.

He hadn't set the time machine for five years in the past. He had set it for five minutes in the future.

And behind him, the door hinges creaked.

The Equation

2008-02-29T09:14:00.001+01:00

The mathematician finished calculating the equation, the equation to which he had devoted the last several years of his life. With it, he would be able to determine the exact motion of every single subatomic particle in the entire history of the universe, Heisenberg be damned. Specifically, the equation used the present location of particles and atoms to calculate their past and future locations and movements.

First, he had to test it, and since he couldn't test the future he would have to do so by seeing if the past locations of atoms that the equation “predicted” matched the historical record. After a few hours, he was able to determine that it predicted past events with complete accuracy. Both major and minor events lined up perfectly with what history recorded. Unfortunately, the historical record was less specific and woefully incomplete -- for now -- but the events the equation calculated lined up perfectly.

As the magnitude of his discovery sank in, he began to wonder whether he could use the equation to determine the thoughts people had had in the past. Thoughts, after all, were just the movements of atoms in the cortex. Why should the movements that take place within our skulls be radically different from those that take place outside them?

(Of course, this raises the question of how he knew the physical event “Molecule A interacted with Molecule B in Fashion C” translates into the thought “My soup is cold”. This is a story in and of itself. Unfortunately, it's a long and boring story, so we'll skip it.)

He tried it out, and to his delight, received amazing results. He determined what Julius Caesar’s last thought was (the Latin equivalent of “oh crap”), what young Marco Polo’s thoughts were when he was first brought before the throne of Kublai Khan (strangely the same), and what Mozart’s thoughts were when he was composing his 40th symphony in G minor (which wasn’t as interesting as just listening to it). He determined the exact time and date that Copernicus first seriously considered the heliocentric system over the geocentric one.

This last step got the mathematician thinking. Calculating the equation made him one of the most important scientists who ever lived. What would he find if he used the equation to determine what his own thoughts were when he finished calculating the equation? Since this was the very recent past, it didn’t take that long to figure out. But the answer baffled him.

According to the equation, he calculated the equation wrong.

A Warning to Future Time-Travelers

2008-01-31T09:19:00.001+01:00

A man invented a time machine. He debated whether to travel to the future or the past first, and decided he’d already seen the past. At any rate, he’d have plenty of time (ha, ha) to see both. So he set the time machine for one month in the future and activated it.

Unfortunately, during that month, the earth had moved from its location in its orbit around the sun. And the sun had moved from its location in its orbit around the center of the galaxy. And the galaxy had moved from its location as the universe expanded.

So he appeared, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere. He knew it would take about fifteen seconds for the vacuum and extreme cold to render him unconscious, but was surprised at how long and terrible those fifteen seconds seemed.