Signal Box

One thing about human progress that hasn’t changed in thousands of years is that things are only impossible until someone does it the first time. So many things thought impossible have been overcome by ingenuity and perseverance that the remaining impossibilities should, perhaps, be re-classified as impossible for now.

Humans have been to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench and the lowest point on earth. In the same spirit, humans have been atop Everest, above the clouds, outside the atmosphere entirely, and as far as the moon. One boundary after another has been broken by engineering, turned into a new frontier to explore, such that those remaining are simply a matter of time.

Time itself was one of those unbroken boundaries, at least until the evening Kelsey answered the door to find herself standing outside her apartment. She knew it was her, even though the crow’s feet around the eyes and grey hairs at the temples would still be years off. “Hi, Kelsey, I’m you, but I go by Kay now,” the visitor said.

“How?” she managed to stammer out.

“With this,” Kay said, holding out a device the size of a toaster.

“What the hell am I supposed to … I mean, what do you expect?” Kelsey rubbed her face. “You’re me, so, why would I deliver that to my younger self? Are you going to give me investment advice, too?”

“This is what got me here.” Kay looked directly into her younger self’s eyes. “If you could travel back and meet your past self, what would you want to do?”

Kelsey stepped back, allowing her older self in, and shut the door behind her. They sat facing each other at the small kitchen table. “I don’t know. Maybe go back and do some things differently.”

“That’s just it. You can’t go back and get a redo. All you can do is go back and give your younger self some advice.” She leaned her chin on her hand, an elbow propped on the table. “It’s like one of those guys that tries to throw a switch for a train, to get it on the right track.”

“That’s why you’re here?”

Kay nodded. She put the device on the table and showed her inner arm to her younger self. A scar ran from the elbow to the wrist, jagged, puckered in spots like tissue was missing beneath it.

“What did you … I …,” Kelsey couldn’t finish the question.

“Not self-inflicted, although it was supposed to look like it was.” There was a deep, fearful sadness in Kay’s eyes that was far more intense than Kelsey had ever seen in her own reflection. “Andrew Perlmutter, except I first knew him as just AP.”

“Bad news, huh?”

Kay nodded. “I met him about a month from now. We started out friends, then business partners, then he tried to take over the business. When I filed a lawsuit, he came over with a bottle of whiskey, saying he wanted to talk it out. Instead, he spiked my drink and tried to stage my suicide.”

“It didn’t work, though,” Kelsey said.

“Because of this.” Kay put her hand on the device. “I don’t know who the woman holding this was, just that she showed up, called 911, and then left. She visited me in the hospital and left this, asking me to take care of it. As soon as she handed it to me, she just sort of, faded out of my reality.”

“Wait, why did the time machine stay if she didn’t. I mean, thinking this through—”

Kay jumped in, “—she accomplished what she had traveled back in time for, meaning she had no reason to travel back in time in the first place—”

“—and the machine had no reason to be there, either,” Kelsey finished.

“Careful, I’ve gone nearly insane trying to figure this all out.” Kay pushed the device across the table.

Kelsey eyed the device, keeping her hands away from it. “What do you expect me to do with this?”

“With that, I’m not sure. Take care of it, I guess. With AP, though….” Kay shook her head. “He was the friendliest, most outgoing, most generous person I’d ever met. Right up until he wasn’t.”

“Oh, I got that loud and clear. Stay far away from anyone named Andrew Perlmutter or that goes by AP.” Kelsey slumped. “If you accomplished what you set out to, shouldn’t you be disappearing or something?”

“Probably.” Kay shrugged. “I don’t know how this works. I was hoping I would go back far enough to tell young me to go to the Bitcoin Talk Forum in mid 2009. Someone sold over five thousand Bitcoin for a little over five dollars via PayPal.”

“That’s your investment advice? Go back to 2009 and buy Bitcoin?”

“Well, you know, it’s not much different to telling you to put a thousand into … wait, hand me your phone so I can put it in your notes.” Kay took the offered phone and typed in a company name before handing it back.

“I’ve never heard of such a company.”

“Look them up. They go public later this year, or maybe next year. Either way, their stock starts out cheap, until they nearly drive Nvidia out of the AI chip market.”

“Why didn’t you … I, invest in the first place?”

“Didn’t hear of them until they were already sky-high.” Kay looked at the device again. “Seriously, though, take care of that thing.”

“How does it work?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking about what I was doing back in 2009 and touched it and ended up here. I wouldn’t have known the importance of the date if it weren’t for the fresh dent in the back of the Subie.”

Kelsey’s eyes opened wide in shock. “What dent?!”

“The neighbor’s kid backed into her with his pickup. He left a note with his information.” Kay smirked. “The dent was still there when I met AP. He recommended his friend’s shop for the repair.”

“And you went there?”

Kay shook her head. “No, his friend’s shop wanted to charge three times as much. But it was his way to make an introduction.”

Kelsey pursed her lips. “City Auto Body?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take it there tomorrow. See if I can’t get it fixed before the party.”

“That should….” Kay’s voice disappeared along with her.

Kelsey looked at the device sitting on the table. It looked like a prop toaster with no bread slots, no buttons, and a finish that looked like dull metal. She opened her phone and looked at the notes app. The name of the company was still there.

She stared at the box, wondering what she could or should do with it. Yeah, having a few thousand bitcoin would be nice. She could retire right away. But didn’t Kay, her older self, say that’s where she was trying to go in the first place? And where does the device stop? When does it cease to exist? When it has fulfilled its own purpose — whatever that may be?

She wondered if undoing every bad thing that happened to her would change who she was. There were things she could’ve handled better, sure, but Kay said that all she could do was talk to her younger self, not be her younger self.

It was while she was thinking about it that she found herself in the hallway of her college dorm, right outside her room. Down the hall, she saw Stan, the guy with the weird name that OD’ed . He leaned against the wall across from her door and slumped to the floor.

Kelsey knew the night. This was the night he died outside her door. Still not 2009, although it was close. September 2010. She knelt next to Stan with the weird name. He looked close to dead, but she saw him take a shallow breath.

She pulled his phone out of his pocket and tried to turn it on, but it had no charge. Her own phone was still sitting on her table in the apartment, and she doubted it would work in 2010 anyway.

She pounded on her room door. Kelsey had been asleep while it happened and had woken to sirens of the ambulance showing up too late.

Her younger self opened the door, bleary-eyed. “What?” She blinked twice. “Am I dreaming?”

“No. I’m you from the future, but right now, you need to call 911! Stan’s OD’ing in the hall right now!”

Younger Kelsey grabbed the phone from the nightstand and made the call. Meanwhile, Kelsey knelt back near Stan and rubbed his chest, trying to keep him at least a little awake. “Keep breathing, Stan, keep breathing.”

She heard the ambulance outside the dorm. Her younger self knelt down next to them. Kelsey looked at her younger self. “Keep him breathing.”

“Yeah. How did you … I …?” her younger self asked.

Kelsey felt the irresistible call to pass the box on. She handed it to her younger self. “This. Take care of it. I have to leave before someone else sees me.” She thought of something she wanted to say before leaving.

“Oh, Bitcoin was cheap as hell in 2009, and it’s worth a whole hell of a lot more in the future.”

Kelsey realized she’d just said that to her empty condo and wondered why. The thought of Bitcoin, though, made her log in to her financial records. That, in turn, led her to think of Stanwick. He’d been so grateful for her calling an ambulance, and so horrified by his OD, that he’d handed over his Bitcoin wallet as a reward, and to keep him from spending his last six-thousand Bitcoins on more dope. At the time it was worth a little over a thousand dollars.

She’d held on to it all through their last year of college, and had tried, repeatedly to give it back. Stan hung on for the rest of the year, barely graduating, then went to rehab, never to be heard from again.

When Bitcoin topped one-hundred-thousand dollars, she’d hired a financial planner and a private investigator. The financial planner’s efforts left her where she was now, with a nine-figure account, two-thousand bitcoin still in her wallet, and an envelope with investment account paperwork for Stan. His account was worth more than hers at this point. The PI, though, had given up when, after three years, she was unable to locate Stanwick. Kelsey hoped he was doing well.

Kelsey had a momentary memory of a metal box. It might have been a dream she’d had once, but she could remember the feel of it in her hands. She shook her head to clear it, then picked up her phone and opened her notes app to make a reminder to herself to go back to the rehab Stanwick had gone to after college and try to trace him from there.

She found a note with the name of a company she’d never heard of or seen before. How it got there was a mystery, but she left it. Ever since the unexplained pounding on her door that had awoken her all those years ago and led to saving Stanwick’s life, she paid attention to such mysteries.

Kelsey typed the name of the company into a search engine and began to read about a ballsy startup doing the impossible: building their own AI computing chips. Something told her that she should buy in as soon as they went public. Not if, she just knew it was a when.