"The best way to predict the future is to create it" *

Damn cellphones were going to be the death of me. The last five years had seen a steady decline in the number of people who stopped to use me. At first, it had been almost like a bad joke, until their reception started to improve.

I remember when I first came out, I was billed as cutting-edge because I had push buttons instead of a rotary dial. Now, with their little handhelds, people don’t even have to get out of their cars. They sit there, or get out and lean on the side, mocking me.

But that fateful day when history was changed (maybe), it was done with nothing but good old reliable me.

There I was, just minding my own business, but hoping that something interesting might actually happen for a change, when she just appeared out of nowhere. I swear, one minute there was nothing but the usual endless desert wasteland outside of my little glass booth, not even a car or dust cloud on the horizon, and the next, poof, there was a lady standing there. A lady obviously in some distress, appearing dazed and confused, in torn clothes that hung on her like a bundle of rags.

As I watched, she briefly closed her eyes and shook herself, almost like a wet dog trying to shake itself dry (in case you’re wondering, my booth used to be at a summer camp, just up from the lake… now that was a prime location). 

But back to the strange woman. Her shaking had managed to reinvigorate her, and she spotted me from across the lot. Approaching at a run, her clothes alternately looked like they were the only thing holding her together and upright, or that they could sluff off her thin frame at any moment, with her falling to pieces along with them. She was too pale to have been out in the desert long, and her face was painfully thin. For one in such dire shape, she looked steadfastly determined as she skidded to a halt, kicking up dust around my booth.

In a rush, she grabbed my handset, lifted, and tucked it between her chin and shoulder. As she dug a roll of quarters out from somewhere beneath her ragged clothes and began feeding them into my coin slot, I basked in the essence of it all.

Her excitement was contagious.

Oh God, the feeling of being useful again! My dial tone called out across the scrub brush, a cry of life in this wilderness.

But I keep forgetting, this isn’t really my story, it’s hers. I was like a fly on the wall, watching.

She fed the entire roll of quarters in and had another at the ready before she dialed. Pulling up a ragged sleeve, she revealed a number, 202 area code, Washington D.C.

I could still feel her excitement with every number she punched, but an element of fear mixed in came through as well.

As I began to ring, echoing through to the other phone, she didn’t exactly wait patiently, but paced the couple of feet that my handset cable allowed. When no one had answered after four rings, I thought she might have a stroke. I rang seven times before a man picked up on the other end.



“Hello.”

“Mr. Koskinen?”

“Yes, this is John Koskinen. To whom am I speaking?”

“John Koskinen, President Clinton’s Y2K, ah… czar or chairman or something?”

“Yes, and you are?”

“My name is Lisa, Mr. Koskinen. And I have some very important information for you.”

“And what might that be, young lady? Are you going to inform me that Y2K is all a hoax, because I have already been told that many, many times.”

“Oh, no. Y2K will be real, and you will do a wonderful job of addressing it.”

“Ah, so from your choice of wording, might I assume you are a ... fortune teller?”

“Not quite, but I’m coming to that.”

“Well, you might want to make it quick. I am on my morning commute, so I suppose you are lucky in that. I don’t have anything else pressing for my time at the moment, but there are only three more stops before I get off, and that is where I hang up.”

“That’s probably more time than I’ll have anyway. I’m going to be honest with you sir, so please hear me out before you just figure I'm some nutjob.”

“That’s not a particularly encouraging introduction, but fair enough. I’ll listen.”

“OK, so here goes. Like I said, Y2K is real, but it’s not the threat you think it is. The real threat is much, much worse. I know it sounds crazy, but there is an alien invasion coming, and they’re planning to use the Y2K problem as a diversion.”

“An alien invasion? And you know this how?”

“I know it because I’ve been a slave to those same damned aliens my whole life. I was born in 2002, to what was left of the world, what will be left anyway, in just a few months.”

“So you are…”

“From your future, yes! Please say you believe me, if just a little.”

“Young lady, what I believe is that you’ve probably seen the Terminator movies a few too many times.”

“Look, you have to believe me! We’ve tried contacting others, but it never works. They all think we’re just crazy.”

“And I can understand why. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to include me with those others. I’m hanging up now, so good luck…”

“TEN DAYS AGO A MAN IN RAGGED CLOTHES APPEARED IN THE WHITE HOUSE ROSE GARDEN WAS SHOT AND WOUNDED BY SECRET SERVICE AGENTS THEN DISAPPEARED BEFORE ANYONE COULD FIND OUT WHO HE WAS OR WHERE HE CAME FROM!”

 “……”

“Mr. Koskinen?”

“OK, I believe you...if only just that little bit you asked for. I don’t know the details of what happened ten days ago. Not many people do. But I do know that what you just told me is significantly more than is public knowledge.”

“That man was my brother, Harry. He was trying to get to President Clinton to tell him the same thing I’m telling you, but no one gave him the chance.”

“Well, I’m listening now.”

“He died after he faded back. But at least he’s free now.”

“I’m sorry, Lisa. I don’t know…”

“There’s no time for that! I’ve got to make this fast, before I fade back…”

“Fade back?”

“We stole this time travel technology from the aliens, but we can’t control it. It only works for a few minutes for us, so I haven’t got much time. The aliens are going to go after the satellites. They’re probably in orbit already, but their ships are hidden.”

“You mean cloaked?”

“I don’t know what you call it, just that your satellites and radar can’t see them. But they can’t get to the surface without turning the system off that keeps them hidden. That’s why they’re going to knock out the satellites, and probably the radar. We don’t know how, just that they manage to do it, and in the confusion, it gets blamed on Y2K, or at least for long enough that they get to most of the world leaders before anyone really knows what happened.”

“So they kill all the leaders…”

“No, they don’t kill them. They don’t really have weapons like you would think of them. But what they can do if they get close enough to a person, they can control their mind, get them to do whatever they want. They turned all the humans against each other, started a global war…”

“Wait, so if they can control people’s minds, how is it that you escaped and stole their time travel technology?”

“I didn’t escape! There’s so few people left that the aliens don’t even bother controlling us. They’re our keepers. We spend all our time mining rare elements out of the earth for them, which is the only reason they let some of us live at all. And we managed to steal their technology because they don’t even try to hide it from us. They don’t see us as any real threat, so all their knowledge, history, everything is out where we can access …”

Mid-sentence, and much in keeping with her sudden entry to my little part of the world, the ragged lady I now knew as Lisa, vanished. One moment, my handset was being clutched tightly in her somewhat frantic grip, and the next, it fell through open space, banging jarringly against the back glass of the booth. Koskinen was still on the line, and I could hear him call out a few times, before finally giving up and disconnecting.

I was torn, distraught by my sudden return to loneliness, yet equally overwhelmed by the significance of what had just happened. I might be nothing more than a simple pay phone, wasting its remaining days at a nearly deserted truck stop far from any real civilization, but if what this lady had been saying was true, I could have been not just a witness to history, but an integral part. Through my buttons and across my mouthpiece may have passed, arguably, the most important phone call in mankind’s existence!

If mankind continued to exist. I should be enshrined in the Smithsonian, an appropriate historical plaque declaring my place in history:

Pay phone used by time traveler, known only as Lisa, on July 29, 1999 to warn the United States government and the World of the pending alien invasion that was successfully repelled on December 31, 1999

Or something like that.

It was going to potentially be a long five month wait.

That day, I wondered if I would even know the outcome from my desolate little corner of the world.



But less than a week later, a black SUV pulled up, and three guys in dark suits removed me from my post, loaded me into the back and whisked me away. Somebody must have taken that lady seriously.

Thank God for *69. I may get my plaque yet.



*title is a quote from Peter Drucker, or possibly Abraham Lincoln