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Always Keep a Journal
Journal II by Edwin Larkin
December 28, 2034, 10:33 pm
This winter takes another turn, painting the night in its formidable black. It is dark now, although only for this fleeting mirage that time has become. As the fabric of the time-space continuum continues to rapidly unravel, the light of my memory diminishes to a dim flicker of a dwindling candle. All that I know for certain is what is written in my journal and that my trusty terrier Riley needs to pee, so I will take him out now.
We were instructed to keep a journal. I even try to keep one in my dreams – mostly because I can’t tell the difference anymore. I think it's safe to assume, we all keep journals now. Most people just talk into their watch or their phone. I have a weakness for paper and pencil. My first journal got waterlogged in an unforeseen downpour. So, I must write this down again. Here’s a quick synopsis of some waking memories that I think I need to remember.
1952 May 5-8 – UNESCO meets in Switzerland. The seeds for CERN laboratories were planted. If I slip to any root timeline date before then I will have the slightest chance to fix this timeline.
1990 – CERN Scientist Tim Berners invents the internet. That’s my birth year so if I slip to any date between then and now it can only be a parallel timeline where I do not exist by birth.
2020 – US governments and pentagon officials begin to trickle information about signs that other forms of intelligent life are visiting this planet. Many people don’t seem to take notice, overshadowed by the despair of a looming viral threat and persistent political erosion.
May 5th, 2029 – CERN creates a micro singularity, in a controlled Large Hadron Collider Experiment.
Feb 6th, 2034 –After a long spate of UFO sightings a large unidentified flying craft drops an explosive over a field in Switzerland that covers the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Amazingly the laboratory suffers no significant damage.
March 3rd, 2034 – CERN offshoot EMIT announces that temporal astronaut Enwari Gionatta was sent three minutes into a parallel timeline’s past. He documents the event from his POV camera as he exits his egg-like container and looks out at a wilderness with no signs of human habitation. Most of the public does not know what to make of the nine-minute video. For the gravity of what EMIT is claiming the footage is unremarkable. Many believe that the video could have been easily faked.
March 5th, 2034 – 19-year-old Renwiel Trempasti sends a message to an earth satellite that appears to come from Saturn’s moon Titan. No one knows how he got there.
March 7th, 2034 –People begin to share evidence of conflicting histories. Accounts of the Mandela Effect skyrocket as humanity's collective sanity seems to erode. Italian teenager Renwiel Trempasti claims to have returned to earth and posts videos taken from the surface of Titan.
March 9th, 2034 – CERN announces that EMIT and all its experiments will be shut down.
March 11th, 2034 – France, Germany, and the Italian military launch, what they term, a preemptive bombing campaign on a series of Iranian Nuclear missile sites. The cat is out of the bag. We now know that the military has access to EMIT’s time machine.
March 21st, 2034 – Around the world thousands of missing person reports are filed. People are vanishing, while mysterious strangers are showing up with no records or histories. Many people are reporting similar experiences where they randomly shift to different temporal and parallel realities for varied periods of time. The shifts are called “Slips”.
April 23rd, 2034 – In an effort to correct their mistake EMIT announces the Monochron Initiative. The initiative will attempt to use the time travel technology they created to go back and create a parallel timeline where they will prevent their own germination. Subsequently, they claim they will develop a way to take everyone to their newly created, unadulterated timeline.
The Monochron Initiative is supposed to be available to anyone that wants to go back to a linear timeline, but the chaos of living in a reality where time is collapsing is sufficient to disrupt best-laid plans.
Always Cross-Reference the Date and Time
The perception of time is such a fragile construct. Who would have known that the invention of the time machine would adversely distort the perception of time for all of humanity? All the talking head physicists claim that they anticipated the adverse effects that would ripple out from our efforts to manipulate time travel, but where were they when the EMIT proceeded with their experiments.
Was the seemingly natural flow of linear time just a tenuously connected illusion all along?
If you don’t make an effort to be diligently perceptive, you can slip and remain totally unaware that you just had a nonlinear experience. When the reliability of linear time begins to fray, the sleeping reality of dreams and waking reality begin to bleed into a unified surreal existence. The human brain loses its ability to distinguish waking memories from dream memories. As temporal delirium progresses, our memories become more and more unreliable.
Much of my life before EMIT’s experiment is obscured in the hazy memories of a distant dream, while dreams I had three months ago have taken their place. I can recall the dreams with vivid detail and often mistake them for the real memories of my waking life.
Governments are currently working on drugs to cure Temporal Delerium but for now, the journals are helping. I also tape lots of pictures and newspaper clippings to the wall in my house. Just like a crazy person, I guess.
I think I have a daughter. In my last journal I wrote the dates:
May 26th, 2034 –Anna has slipped.
May 27th, 2034 – Anna is still gone.
June 12th, 2034 – Anna is gone.
There are multiple photos around the house with myself and a smiling young girl at my side. She looks about seventeen years old. At some point, I posted a piece of paper above one of the photos, “Anna-Larkin?” Why can’t I remember you?
In earnest, when I concentrate, I can remember her, but it feels like the gossamer recollection of a long-faded dream.
Sometimes I wonder, do I have a wife? Currently, there are no pictures on the wall of anyone who fits that description. But I can remember a dream where all the pictures on the walls were different and there was a woman of approximately the same age who was with me in some of those pictures.
The last four pages of my first journal are too water-damaged to read. I was trying to write when a sudden downpour struck. Foolishly I tried to finish my thought and ended up losing it anyway to water damage. This is what I can remember:
The summer of 2034 was a spiraling chaotic web of unbridled insanity. No one was entirely immune to the deluded mirage of temporal delirium. Public figures, celebrities, politicians all fought to cling to any tangible shred of reason. Suicide became an easy exit for those who could not adapt to the anachronistic reality. As survivors, we all straddled on a tightrope of sanity lain taught over an endless chasm of madness. And there were casualties, many casualties. Besides those whose minds fractured from the distorted perception of reality, some just slipped and never returned.
Through the washed-out pulpy mess, I think I can make out this another interesting entry, I will have to rely on my memory to fill in the missing pieces.
September ?, 2034 – Today I was walking Riley near my friendly neighbor Balick’s house. In the distance, I noticed the crooked silhouette of an old man standing in front of us. As we moved closer, I recognized him. It was Balick, his head and face were more hair than skin. I looked deep into the two small islands of dried skin that surrounded his eye sockets. We stared at each other for a moment and then habitually checked the date on our watches. According to my watch, it was still 2034 so it was apparent that he was the one who slipped and not me.
We did not speak. We both knew exactly what was going on. Balick looked as if he was from a future forty years ahead, which means this type of experience was not unique to him. Something distracted Riley, and I looked away for a moment to see what it was. When I looked back towards Balick, he vanished like a ghost.
Everyone experienced the disintegration of time differently. Some people slip less frequently far into the future or back into the past while others, like me, experience far more regular micro-slips sometimes only a few days or weeks ahead or behind. At first, I would only slip for a few seconds before I would slip back to my root timeline, but the duration of my slips has been expanding with each slip.
Stay in Areas of Historically Consistent Geography
Here is a personal account from my friend Andrew that I will relay as best I can from memory.
October ?, 2034 One moment he was cooking in the kitchen in his ninth-floor apartment and in the next moment he was falling. His slip was into a distant past. Fortunately, the area where his apartment complex was, had once been covered in water. He described a primordial ocean that stretched as far as the eye could see. He said he had just enough time to adjust for impact. He stiffened his body into the shape of a pencil and pierced the vast green wilderness of waves. He closed his eyes as he went under afraid of what prehistoric beasts he might find and as quick as he could, swam back up to the surface. The water was warm but with no land in sight, all he could do was tread water and hope to slip back before he grew tired and drowned.
We all drifted somewhat randomly through time, like the unfortunately buoyant detritus in the flood of a hurricane.
Fortunately, Andrew slipped back and has since moved out of his apartment to avoid drowning. Eventually, all the cities dispersed. To stay on anything but the ground floor in a high-rise building was a dare no one wanted to take. People began to abandon the use of motorized transport for similar reasons. The two country acres of land where I live in Sullivan County NY became a commodity. Every day I receive offers from people vacating the city wanting to buy my house and the land it sits on for amounts I would have never imagined. But I’m not interested in selling. My home is one of the few constants in my life.
When Andrew moved out of his apartment, I let him stay with me, but he was only with me for a couple days before he vanished. A few weeks later I walked into the living room and he was just standing there. We both looked down at our watches and when I looked back, he was gone. I had a similar experience with a strange woman who appeared in my kitchen, however, my memory of this event is rather vague and I’m not sure if it really happened. This house is filled with shadows and ghosts. If I were squeamish to such things, I would have already gone mad.
Check for Root Timeline Landmarks
I am walking Riley through our regular wooded path and suddenly the familiar forest around me begins to change. My flashlight is still on, but the sun is now up. The snow-covered saplings are full-grown with triumphant autumnal plumes and many of the old-growth trees that I remember lay along the forest floor in different stages of decay. I look at my watch.
September 3rd, 2076 – Forty-two years, I don’t usually slip this far and Riley…Damn, where’s Riley? I scream out for Riley but he is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he did not slip with me this time. I need to check my watch again to see if CERN exists. CERN is my timeline landmark and knowing whether it exists is one way to tell if I’m still stuck on this train-wreck of a timeline. My watch isn’t showing anything. Maybe the internet doesn’t exist anymore.
I begin to run home. When I exit the forest, I notice that all the neighbors’ homes seem abandoned except Balick’s house. The heavily bearded old man is standing in his yard. We make eye contact and then he looks down at his watch. I don’t have to look at mine I already know that it is me who slipped this time.
The outside of my house is overgrown and barely recognizable. I am afraid to enter. If this isn’t some rare Monochron fixed timeline then it would most likely be a timeline where I once existed but have since perished or one where I never existed. I look back through my journal posts. My last dated post was from December 28, 2034. I close my eyes and pray to slip back to that date. There can be nothing good for me here. I’m afraid to enter my house, I’m afraid to find my own bones.
Then I notice a dim flicker through the window of my house. Is there somebody in there? Perhaps a squatter has taken residence. With a strange and sudden charge of territorial courage, I approach my house and open the front door. Much to my surprise, the inside of the house is just as I left it the day Riley and I stepped out for that winter walk. Except everything is stricken with forty-two years of dust and entropy. I know now that I will never slip back to that day. This will be my only return.
There is an old survival radio in the kitchen that I listen to for updates. I wind it up for a few minutes and then I listen. There are no customary live broadcasts only an automated loop, “The Date is September 3rd, 2076. If you are listening to this broadcast, then you are still on a CERN timeline and in the vicinity of an open Monochron Access Portal. The portal will be open for 4 more hours. The location is in Nyack NY, GPS coordinates…”: 41° 05' North and 73° 55' West
Nyack, I think it's about ninety minutes away. I have to check if my electric motorcycle is still in the garage. I feel as if I am being watched. I turn around and she is there. I look down at my watch and say aloud.
“September 3rd, 2076?” The girl does not check her watch. She stares at me and replies,
“Dad!” It is the girl from the pictures on my wall, my daughter.
“Anna?” I reply.
“I’m so happy to see you dad!” Warmth emanates from her face in the shape of a smile as she comes closer to hug me. In her embrace, a memory of the dream crystallizes.
“Did you hear the message on the radio?” I ask her.
“Yes, I was waiting… hoping you would come home...I charged the battery for your bike.”
“Your Mother?” I am afraid to ask, afraid to reveal my absence of memory.
“She was here,” Anna paused, “I asked her to wait here with me… for you but…she was confused. She didn’t know who I was. She couldn’t remember us. I couldn’t make her stay.”
We do not speak much more, knowing that there is little left that words can express and we know our time is limited. I brush the thick dust off my bike and examine its rideability. The tires are empty, but the bike is on a stand, so the dry rot hasn’t totally ruined them. Anna gives me the charged battery and then opens the garage doors filling it with the afternoon sunlight. I test the horn with a quick honk and Anna smiles. For the first time in a seeming eternity, I feel hope.
We speed down the autumnal framed abandoned Highway 287. Anna holds me tightly and memories start to rise out of the shadows of my mind. How could I have forgotten her? If I remembered her, I would have spent every waking moment searching for her. Now that she is with me again, I can’t risk losing her. I pray that neither of us slips back during this transit. A slip now would not be survivable. We must make it through that Portal.
As we approach Nyack we can see the sun touching down on the Hudson Valley. A piece of the sun looks like it landed on the earth less than a mile ahead of us. We stop at a gate. Men in suits take our names and prick us for DNA samples. A humanoid-looking man wearing obnoxiously large sunglasses guides us to another Monochron Official who instructs us that we can’t take any technological devices through the Portal. We remove our watches and I hand over the keys to my bike. In return, the man hands us two pairs of very dark sunglasses. After we put them on the official gives us the clear and instructs us to walk towards the portal.
I take my daughter's hand in mine and we proceed into the portal. We have no idea what reality lies before us. Only that the fabric of time-space reality will be returned to its natural linear order. It will be a reality where much of the technology that we are familiar with no longer exists. No internet, smartphones, or watches.
We step deeper into the portal, as light swells around us enveloping us in its radiance. Memories flood into our souls until at last the memories of our past and the dreams of our future are aligned once again.
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