That whichs frightens me, makes the better written story, for I know it best and it knows me better.

I’m not ugly – but I do have ‘severe appearance deficit.’

There’s something awe-inspiring when fiction (especially time-travel) and non-fiction (actual historical events) criss-cross. Begun in 1995, but left unfinished following Christopher Reeves riding accident, I’d heard five or six years prior about how ‘Somewhere in Time,’ screenwriter/author Richard Matheson, came up with his story-line.

In 1975, while visiting Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nevada he saw a photograph of the late actress Maude Adams. Having become smitten with her, and using her penchant for reclusiveness as a focal point, he created Elise McKenna, Richard Collier and William Fawcett Robertson.

However, and since Robertson’s character never came with a full backstory and odd things were said by and about him, I’ve always fancied him a time-traveler, too. Thus, I created a new story-ending some 24-years in the making (or is it 39-years…)

Robertson stood quietly beside the partially opened door, allowing only a fracture of light from the hallway to stab its way into the vacant hotel room. He knew Collier would be walking by at any moment, all he had to do was listen.

Collier’s steps were heavy on the stairway and even heavier as he rounded the corner leading to the main hallway. Robertson palmed the penny in his left hand and waited for the younger man to pass by.

Suddenly, Robertson sprang on Collier, striking him hard in the head with his right fist. The blow, though landing directly against Collier’s temple, did not immediately knock the man down as intended.

Robertson fell on top of Collier, striking him again and again. It was not Robertson’s intent to inflict harm on the man, rather to simply keep him confused so as to slip the coin into one of the man’s pockets.

Having finally succeeded, Robertson stood up and backed away. To his surprise, Collier rushed him, fists swinging.

One of the blows struck Robertson in the jaw, driving him backwards and to the carpeted floor. His head swimming, all he could see was the younger man towering over him, directing him to get up and fight or perhaps instructing the dazed man to stay away.

It did not matter to Robertson what the message was as he rolled over and using the wall, climbed to his feet and stumbled towards the lift at the far end of the opposite hallway. As he retreated, the ringing in his ears subsided and he could suddenly hear Elise crying from someplace behind him.

This was Robertson’s fifth jump into the past. He knew that there was no way to know how he might have altered Miss McKenna’s future, until he returned to his own time.

Once outside and far enough away from the Grand Hotel and the possibility of being seen, Robertson withdrew another coin from his pocket and held it up so that the reflective glow of the moon fell upon its shiny face. Robertson first looked at the great man’s profile, Abraham Lincoln, then to the date, ‘1979.’

He felt the uncomfortable pull of gravity and the dizzying slide in his mind as he twisted backward to the date on the copper-colored penny. He soon awoke in the deep-underground Laboratory Nine of Area 51 in southern Nevada, having returned from 1912 and laid there looking up at the several faces of the many concerned scientists.

After a few hours of rest, Robertson readjusted to the confusing effects of moving between space and time. The journeys back-and-forth had left a toll on him and he was informed that he would never again be allowed to travel either forward or backward in time again as it may cost him his sanity, since the process used nothing more than the mind and self-hypnosis.

“I’m sorry,” Project Director Matheson said, “But we still weren’t able to redirect the past, creating a different future for McKenna. Seems her fame piqued and she faded into obscurity exactly as she always has following the last four jumps.”

“Well, we gave it a good shot,” Robertson relied, “I’m happy to know that mankind is still far to small to have any real effect on the world’s outcome, either now or in the past. Any idea yet on how Collier is making his jumps?”

“Me, too,” Matheson said, as he looked over the pages of compiled notes, before answering, “There’s a rumor that he’s freelancing, using a book by Jack Finney called ‘Time and Again,’ as some sort of instruction manual.”

“Finney, the sci-fi novelist?” Robertson said with an air of incredulity, before adding with a smile, “You know, with a good writer and editor, all of this would make a damned good piece of science-fiction work.”

Matheson snickered, “Yeah, maybe.”

“You could call it, ’Bid Time Return,’” Robertson grinned.

“That’s what I like about you — you’re always thinking ahead,” Matheson said, looking up at the man entering the room behind Robertson.

The time-traveler never heard the man, nor the explosion the bullet made as it blasted from the barrel of the gun, piercing the back of his head. History would never recall his name.

Everytime I get in the shower naked, I turn it on.

Not all fairy tales begin with, ‘Once upon a time…’, some start with, ‘I promise that if elected…’

The day began as any other. We caught the school bus and after riding half an hour north picking up other kids, we turned south doing the same, finally arriving at the grade school, tucked back off the highway in a small valley.

Soon, school would be out for the summer, however the thought and excitement of vacation was filled with an abstract fearfulness. The sky of our school was filled with flying bugs, biting each child that spent any time in the sun and who hadn’t retreated to the shade of the nearby building.

The sound of crying could be heard of those who had been attacked and swarmed without mercy. Many of us entered the bathrooms from the outside doors, only to find the inside doors leading to the hallways locked.

Soon the bathrooms were crowded with children, both boys and girls sharing the same space, all fearful of the growing swarms outside the doorways. When the bell rang telling us that recess was over, there was a hesitation to leave our sanctuary.

“Where are the teachers?”

“They don’t care about us!”

“Don’t they see them?”

Finally, two kids decided that they didn’t want to get in trouble and went outside towards the doorway that lead to their classrooms. Their screams and cries could be heard, echoing down the cement walkways and walls of the school yard, until they faded to whimpers then silence.

Finally, someone unlocked the inside doors and frightened children poured into the hallways. Many, crying, called for their parents, while others in shock, simply slunk against the walls or sank to the floor, too fearful to move any farther.

In the distance we could hear the flying insects dance, their legs and wings tapping along the windows of the sunshine side of the ‘L’ shaped building. That dancing eventual became loud thumps as the insects continuously dove headlong into the thin pieces of glass that separated us from them.

It wasn’t too long after when the violent shattering of glass was heard. It began as a dull crackling sound, growing louder until the smashing of fragmented glass reverberated throughout the hallways.

Along with that breaking of glass, came the shrieks and deafening screams of terrified children and teacher, knowing that the winged horde had found their way inside our retreat. However, they never came for us — and instead were found dead the next morning when we were finally met by rescuers and parents alike.

The lack of sunshine had been our unwilling savior, though no one every could explain why a lack of sun lead to their extermination. Gladly, they never made it from the classroom that they first entered and as nighttime fell, they died en mass, their black bodies littering every corner of our little lives.

“I saw three soldiers from the nearby military installation using flamethrowers to fight the swarms off,” Dad later told us in somber and hushed tones, “The burning bugs started a number of grass and house fires. When their tanks finally ran out, I couldn’t watch what happened to them.”

He refused to talk about it until the day he died.

And to this day, no one talks about it. There’s no record of it in the newspaper and it only exists in the memories of those who were there and sadly we are growing old, dying off, knowing that one day soon, no one will be left who remembers.

Dogs and I and Spring’s rain.

Desert-locked gull
Giving a loneliness cry.
Only coyote listens.

at mornings first light
everything is already here
even pain is found

There’s a large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, capable of synthesizing the particle known as the Higgs-Boson.  There’s also one at ‘Area 51,’ the super top-secret site that has grown out of the dry-salt flats of the Groom Lake Test Facility, in southern Nevada.

The collider forces particles, ‘fired’ at each other, into creating outbursts of radiation when smashed together, that some equate with the ‘big bang theory.’  Others call these outbursts the ‘God Particle.’

It was once thought that matter could only exist in one place at a time, however the particle slit test of progenitors proved otherwise. A particle accelerator is used to eject protons between one of two microscopic slits.

It was assumed that the protons would pass through either slit A or slit B, and when directly observed, the premise was corroborated. However, when an imprint background was installed to bypass direct observation, it found an unexpected detail.

The particles produced what is known as a wave, or interference pattern on the imprint like ripples in a pond. This means that the particles interfere with themselves while simultaneously passing through both and neither of the slits.

It was at first thought to be a false-negative, but thousands of repeated experiments all reached the same conclusion. There is no denying that matter can exist in more than one place at a time and that reality is altered simply by perceiving it.

With electrical stimuli and coordinate based geo-synchronization, manipulations of these particles, transferring locations were made. When combined with a suitable processor and digital interface, it soon began decoding encryption and translating mathematical cipher in a fraction of the time of anything before it.

With a binary converter, it wasn’t long before human physiology itself was deciphered and converted into convenient little anagrams and simplistic formulas. This gave the machine the ability to replicate human tissue and organs from fetal stem cells.

And it wasn’t just organic material either.  By rearranging the number of protons in the atomic nucleus, the given element’s atomic weight was altered, thereby turning it into another element altogether.

This led to testing other hypothesis’s.

It took months of development, but soon a simulation program was created. It was modeled to be an exact copy of our world.

Test subjects interacted to their own ‘loved ones’ within the program. Post-interviews showed that no one could perceive that they were in a simulation.

Two questions were raised from these simulations and a new task given: how did we know that our own universe was not the result of the same process and is our reality a simulation? To answer them, instructions came to develop the ability to break through the boundaries of our suspected simulation and make contact with whoever or whatever.

Our reality is based on laws; motion, attraction, an of physics and cannot be broken accidentally, but through quantum technology, they can be manipulated. Further, the two concepts of space and time are synchronous: where there is space there is time and where there is time there is space.

One of the earlier discoveries made is the concept of time reversal.

The opposite of matter isn’t nothing, but anti-matter, which is the material that fills all the gaps where matter does not. So, if an opposite of matter exists, then an opposite of time must does too.

With the quantum computer and particle super-positioning, the ability exists to send protons back in time, causing them to appear where they once had not and in two places simultaneously. These are the operational parameters which were set within the computer.

A seed was placed in a container within the chamber, with the idea of reversing the symbiotic metabolism, causing it to revert to a zygote state. Seconds after the power was turned on,  the seed shrank to the point it was no longer visible with the naked eye.

The computer alerted those concerned that the task had been completed. But suddenly, warning sirens began sounding and light started flashing.

A single program loading bar came up on the computer’s main monitor.

All attempts to restrict the download failed. Finally, orders were issued to shutdown the computer, but it continued without an external power source.

The progress bar soon signaled that the download had finished and the message, “Unknown file type. Do you wish to execute the file?” flashed across the monitor. All attempts made to bypass the prompt failed, so with nothing else to do, directions were given: open it.

The computer rendered the file, taking eight minutes and 10 seconds. Entirely in binary code, it eventually translated to the single message: “אהיה אשר אהיה” — Hebrew for, “I will be who I will be.”