IDEA - 10-2-2020
by
Patrick Ryan
1,448 Words
A man named George P claims he's a time traveler. He insists that he successfully developed a time travel process in the year 2100, but the framework he thought would return him home has failed. Sitting across from this man at my kitchen table, I have questions. Why did he seek me out? I'm a 22-year-old college student. I don't have a background in science, only political science. He said specifically speaking to me was important to him. He couldn't tell me why, for fear of altering my future or worse, we might be catapulted into an alternative universe. "Is there some way to prove you're from the future? Tell me who will win the Super Bowl? "He says it'll alter the future. "Show me some future tech? "He says I'd never recognized it; after a giant solar EMP wiped out all technology, it had to be rebuilt differently. So we sit, uncertain how to proceed, but then I got an idea. He couldn't have been more than 30-year-old, which means he was born around 2070, his parents, grandparents, or great grandparents would be alive. Let's look and collect some DNA. He says, "My parents were born in 2042 and 2044, but my grandparents were both born in 2011." That's it; we have it; we're going to visit his 9-year-old grandparents and inquire about DNA testing, but he wants to stay away from family for fear of destroying himself. We decide to walk, maybe seeing how much the world has changed will ignite something and prove his story. As we're in the park, he says everything's different; it’s all skyscrapers, as far as the eye can see. It's a giant metropolis from New York to Boston. He swallows his tongue. I ask, "What's your fear? He responds, "Look; I didn't think it would work, I was on my first trial, I figured it would take a lot of iteration, so I didn't intend to prove something. I still couldn't say whether he was from the future or whether he was a delusional nut case who was going to kill me in my sleep; no matter what, something made me give him my couch to sleep on; he didn't have anywhere else to go. We grabbed dinner, an Italian restaurant across the street. He maintains that food from the past tastes better; future food has too many chemicals. With overpopulation and lack of adequate food supply, society has to produce food chemically in the future. When paying the bill, I know I'll have to pick up the tab. He says there's no money in the future, but some collectors have bills from this time, they have value as antiquities. I wake up with a fantastic idea; I told him, "What if you write a note to yourself like like in the movie, Back to Future? Then, when you read the note in the future, you won't build the time-traveling machine. He claims it's dangerous. What if it creates another universe? We spend the afternoon together. Questions like, "Why, 2020?" He claims he didn't choose the date, but it must have some cosmic meaning. When we pass a bar, he pauses, "Brownstone Bar?" I nod, he says, "This was the sight of a massive fire, it was famous because the fire killed a celebrity. "When I was a kid, I remember reading about the fire," he responds. Afte explaining some recent films, the pandemic, and politics of the moment, he replies, "the Eurlamier Meteor, of course!" "What's that?" I ask. "In 2022, a meteor lands in the United States. It's a big occurrence as they forecast it weeks in advance, it lights up the night sky; that'll confirm that I'm from the future!" "When in 2022?" "I don't know the date, but it's certainly in 2022." George moves in, gets a job under the table as he's undocumented, and even had a girlfriend. 2022 came and went without the meteor. How could it be possible? Does he have the year wrong? Wasn't he a time-traveler? All tried to reassure him, but his story was doubted. He shared all kinds of facts about the future, but they were never widely believed. So lived George P, from the future, trapped in a time where he doesn’t exist.
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