Hi. This is the first chapter of my novel, to be titled either "And God Said Unto Jacob" or "The Millionth Run" for reasons to be made clear later in the story. This chapter is about Desmond Rodriguez, who is the only 1st person narrator out of six or seven narrators. This chapter frames the plot for the first half of the novel. Hope you enjoy! Comments/critiques appreciated.
The First Fundamental Truth
I talk to you now as a broken man. I was once whole, but my circumstances—one might consider them tragic—have left me a reduced being, transplanted from his rightful place in life. My name is Desmond Rodriguez, and I have unlawfully traveled through time.
A short time ago, I was just an associate professor of temporoneurology at Boston University, one of those few old bastions of learning left to academics such as myself. I’d called the good town of Boston home for just a few months before my incident, having packed up my office and moved my family from California after the state violently separated itself into northern and southern parts. I brought my family with me across the border between Americas East and West, and introduced them to life on the other side, where we had some family, and where I had secured my new post at BU.
Upon settling down in our new home, we got together with our relations in Cape Cod for the usual sessions of conversation in dialects of English which had become mutually unintelligible (I relate my tale to you in this obsolete language because, of course, it is the only one you know). My young daughter, Juliet, had learned some East American in her school, thanks to the growth of the burgeoning industry of private diplomacy in both nations. She patiently interpreted our words for us, and made the occasion one of celebration and compassion, both of which were woefully scarce in our days, at the turn of that century.
We became different people on the quiet, sandy beach. The trials and tribulations of daily life in a world governed by fear and unreason were left by the wayside as we relaxed, a family temporarily reunited. Few other visitors disturbed our peace; the beach was quite predominantly our own. The children built sandcastles, and destroyed them in mock rampage, before the tide could ever get to them. My wife and I conversed with our in-laws on a number of topics, ranging from familial occurrences to politics to our own personal endeavors. My wife’s brother, Joshua, took a pleasantly surprising interest in my pursuits.
“So,” he said, removing his sunglasses. “How is your experiment happening? That…time thing?” He made respectable efforts in West American for someone who’d lived on the east coast all his life. He’d probably learned it just for us.
Now, by “time thing,” Joshua was referring to my temporal serum experiments.
“Very well, thanks,” I told him. “The preliminary human trials haven’t even begun yet, but the rat trials have been promising.”
“You probably must need to stay working late, right?”
“Yeah, but Gabriela doesn’t mind. She knows my experiments are important,” I assured him with a grin.
“Illegal as well.”
“And to you I say, what kind of self-respecting scientist would let a stupid law get in the way of what must be done?”
“You know I support your work, but the Truths exist for a reason,” Joshua said gravely, glancing around as he spoke. “Don’t be doing anything dangerous, Desmond.”
“Don’t worry. I promise.”
* * * *
I went to work two weeks later with excitement beating through my veins, ready to see for myself what the vaunted Boston science department had to offer me. I awoke early, said goodbye to Gabriela, and wished my kids a good day at school––prison of boredom it probably was for them, however. It occurred to me that it was the first day of their new school year. I hoped for their sake they might have a little fun this time around; if only they could have half as much fun as I have doing my job. I jumped on the public bus, whose emptiness allowed me a comfortable seat. I sat in the back corner and stretched my legs out on the cushion. I noticed a newspaper on the floor with nobody laying claim to it, and so I picked it up to read the front page.
Like any written document in the East American Confederation, it had, printed across the top in large, blocky letter, the Three Fundamental Truths of Time. These were the laws by which we were all governed in this era, all supposedly “necessary” after the unfortunate Broken Earth incident. Of course, given the governments’ squeamishness over any sort of cutting edge science (a trend one can trace through history), they had to quash any potential progress in matters of time travel. So, the United Nations decided to kill two birds with one stone, and gather the flock-like citizenry of the world under their omnipresent wing, while simultaneously destroying the prospect of future research. This was all neatly accomplished with the following three Truths:
NO ONE MAY TRAVEL THROUGH TIME EXCEPT LINEARLY AND FORWARD
NO ONE MAY FORWARD THE CAUSE OF UNORTHODOX MOVEMENT IN TIME
ACCESS TO ALL LITERATURE IS PROHIBITED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
Now, you may remember that, in the beginning of this story, I referred to Boston University as “one of those old bastions of learning.” These Truths were the reason for that. The United Nations actually had the audacity––but, of course, the brute bureaucratic force as well––to forbid scholarly pursuit. Of course, there was little the EAC or the WAC could do to stand up to them, themselves having been subjugated by the UN. Hell, after the assassination of Marcus Aurelius Nolan, those administrations pretty much became homes for figureheads who carried out the agenda of foreign conquerors.
Marcus Aurelius Nolan. He was a remarkable figure in my day. Well, he would have been, of course…timelines are very delicate threads… Anyway, this man was the last President of the United States of America. We elected him in 2092, and again in 2096. He was possibly the single most visionary figure in American politics, and spearheaded such successful projects as the World Hunger Elimination Program, the Jovian Colonization Project, and even the Temporal Mobility Research Initiative, in which my own father was an instrumental figure. As I skimmed the newspaper, I reminisced over those fleeting, exciting childhood times, when my father would return home, regaling us with stories of successful human trials and intriguing data points, and other such things. All was well until a sweet summer day in 2099. I was what you might equate to a high school student in this era, and I was studying for a physics test with the InterTV tuned in to CNN in the background, inattentively listening, when I heard an unfamiliar yet foreboding sound, which preceded a masculine voice saying, “This is CNN breaking news.”
The proceeding report told of the violent assassination of President Nolan. He’d been gunned down by an anti-Temporal activist at a highly-attended lecture in Washington. The whole nation reeled from this blow, much as some of your generation mourned another good man whose name escapes me at the moment. Both Nolan and this other man were beacons of hope, though Nolan’s demise led to far unhappier circumstances. It was after his death that another activist group, the “Temporal Freedom Front,” sought revenge. Using a set of compact, prototype suitcase time machines––stolen from several research facilities––in tandem with a black hole bomb powered by hyperaccelerated protons, they executed a devastating attack on the anti-Temporal headquarters, in—well, what then ceased to be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The attack had far worse consequences than anyone had ever dreamed of. Besides the annihilation of all who were present, the black hole maintained an extremely dangerous singularity. It wreaked total havoc and––well, this is the fascinating part, for a scientist at least––it bit a chunk out of the Earth. It was analogous to someone taking a bite out of an apple. Unfortunately, this chunk turned out to be a gigantic circular crater stretching from Manhattan to Nashville. Millions and millions of people simply vanished, drawn into the singularity in an instant. Such was the absolute loss and terror of the Broken Earth incident.
So, when I was going to work that day, I was continuing research of the most illegal kind. I was also breaking my promise to Joshua. I was going to do something dangerous; I was going to fix the timeline which had gone so dangerously wrong and somehow given us the death of Nolan and the Broken Earth tragedy.
Now, back when temporal research was the big thing, it wasn’t done how I chose to go about it. Back then, they used actual portals, laboriously constructed and at great expense. People could go into these portals and, given a set of coordinates, end up somewhere-or-when else, for the time machines doubled as teleportation devices, manipulating the silky-grainy smooth-rough fabric of space-time to the operator’s will. How they worked, I cannot tell you, as it’s been a long time since my father was around to share his knowledge about them with me, and any literature written about them was systematically destroyed. Somehow, though, the Temporal Freedom Front generated such a massive spacetime anomaly that it led to a singularity being left behind.
The method I use is radically different. My temporal serum is a complex chemical solution in which I painstakingly dissolve small quantum irregularities. Given a certain configuration, (a recipe, if you will) I would inject an amount of it into the brain of my subject, thus transporting his consciousness to a different time in which its vessel—its brain—existed.
This was all going to culminate in my own personal journey, back to the year 2099. I was going to step in front of the bullet which had felled Marcus Aurelius Nolan. My plan seemed foolproof to me at the time, given the success of my preliminary trials. I had been lying to Joshua about not trying it on humans yet, for I had actually been injecting myself. Call them practice runs for the main event, which was going to be that very day, if all went well.
All did not go well that day. I returned home, hopeless and dejected, a sample of my defective temporal serum in my suitcase. I looked forward only to the prospect of a nice, quiet dinner at home with my family.
* * * *
“This is breaking news, from Eastern Broadcasting Corporation,” read an urgent-sounding voice on the Inter. “More nuclear skirmishes have broken out between the rogue states of Dallas and Oklahoma-Kansas. These are the most recent in a spree of violence which has broken out between the central rogue and border states. Chandra Wilson with more, reporting live from Fort Worth.”
That was it, I thought to myself. Something snapped inside me. I had seen enough of society’s deterioration. How could people who once had control of the space-time continuum possibly be reduced to warring factions once more? How did something so abstract and physically formless as history still have such a grip on us? We were better than this…I was better than this.
I excused myself from the dinner table, shut myself in my bedroom, retrieved the syringe I kept under the bed, filled it to the top with temporal serum, and took a deep, deep breath.
Then, I stabbed myself in the head.
* * * *
“That’s how I arrived here,” I finished, turning to the driver of the 1969 VW Beetle. He had picked me up after seeing me standing in a puddle beside the road. I surely must have looked like a homeless person.
“Woah, man, that’s fairly trippin’,” he said, in a language whose idioms were lost on me.
“Hey, you’re coming to my place, and I’m gonna show you something on TV.”
“Thank you very much for your generosity.”
It was that night, a warm, summer night in July, when I shared in the revelry of a country much like the one I grew up in, one that basked in the glory of the betterment of humanity, and that still held hope for the future; I even held out a little hope for my own.
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