One Prick at a Time

How far back could I go?

Before Hitler. Before Homo sapiens? Before the Permian extinction? Before the Big Bang itself?

All I need do is continue and stay on task. Not get off this infernal machine, powered by my lassooed chronotons.

All I need do is allow the stroboscopic days and the hypnogogic nights proceed unvisited. Before ice ages, after ice ages, before Pangea. Before Theia took its ball and left.

I was on a mission to change the universe. I really don't like the way this one went. Not at all.

That's a daunting thing to consider. How could a single human being change the universe? Not just the world, but all of creation. And how could he or she do it alone without others' help? What could be accomplished all alone, naked, and lost in oblivion?

Would God mind?

I'm a quantum type of guy. Particle or wave; yes or no; black or white. What you see is what you get: observation is the only driver of quantum determination and the pinprick that collapses a probability field.

(I'd probably diet, but I don't. I'd probably start exercising, but I don't. I'd probably give someone the benefit of the doubt, but no, not for me. For me, these probability fields collapsed by just looking at myself in the mirror.)

Observe me, if you care to: in my seventies, overweight, and out of shape. And yes, as I said, quite naked. Forget anguishing over that one thing you'd bring with you to the past. You go into the past the way you came into the future on the day of your birth.

I had not a guess as to whether this trip was one-way or a round trip--first class or coach--or even guaranteed delivery.

I step into my device and churn the chronotons. They glow with promise and the sizzling starts. I engage full power, for traveling through time too slow isn't smart. When there is a likelihood of lava, or a mountain, tar pit, or even an irrelevant army of thousands in full battle array getting in the way, you want to be traveling fast enough to have your atoms sieve between their own gossamer atoms in the quasi-mix.

Future meeting the past in any more concrete a way simply makes for a really bad day in the present.

And there were mountains, fountains of lava, tar pits, and irrelevant armies in the way, who for their part only felt a slight chill breeze through them. The mountains stood; the lava flowed, the tar pits boiled, and the armies either won or lost whatever they were fighting so irrelevantly for.

"One side, fellas, I'm comin' through!"

If I come back, I'm going to have to look up who those guys were and what they were fighting for. But, God, even though I knew through which epoch of time I was traveling, what did it mean if I couldn't find them--find out who they were? Couldn't ID them because they were some forgotten footnote of history. Irrelevant. Imagine having died in some so-important battle of the time and cause du jour that contributed nothing to the future, was forgotten, and whose legacy was too invisible to register on even a page of a book. Some events and the lives that waged through them were too small for even the smallest print.

Then, of course, imagine having been Bob Hope, at one time one of the most famous human beings on the planet, and no millennials alive even knowing who he was. So it goes. Fame may allow you to be remembered, but not forever, finally becoming so unimportant as to be relegated to the trash heap of atoms made up of those of yours, doorknobs', movie stars', greatest-of-them-all athletes', Nobel laureates', and even everyone's dogs and cats.

Such is the nature of trash heaps. They are made to blow away.

Why don't such people matter forever? Why won't I matter? Or the Grand Unification Theory? Or Ghandi? Entropy always wins, and it's a cruel defeat for those who think they mattered.

And that's the crux of the matter. I just can't abide that. That is the universe I want to change. Every thread in a fabric is important to the whole. Or should be. But not in this reality. Not here. It's worth changing.

My machine whirs on. The days and nights strobe on, then the years, then the decades and millennia. I witness entropy in reverse.

Now the universe is as big as Texas. Now only as big as the Vatican. Now the Titanic, which also ended up not mattering the millions of years later. And now something strange begins to happen.

As the universe and all creation condenses and shrinks, I do, too. It's a nod to Einstein and relativity. I realize no matter how far back I travel, the universe will look the same to me. The universe and I are in this Big Crunch together. Until...

Until I stand on God knows what, separate and objectively distanced from whatever inception is at work. What I see is shimmying. An intangible reality of emptiness scintillating with virtual particles popping in and out. Now I understand: a vacuum is instable; something was bound to happen. In this vaporescent cocoon, I witness the probability field of all that could happen 1 x 10-22 of a second before the Big Bang. All the possible universes. The one I'm from and many others. I look hard and long in a place and a time where neither hard nor long exist. Nor do place and time.

And suddenly an explosion of Guthian inflation blasts me away. I am now back in my infernal machine. The universe is expanding around me, which is all the clock I need to realize I'm going back. It was not a one-way trip.

I was going home.

I was unceremoniously dumped out onto the ground at the same point in time from which I had embarked. I fell flat on my back, exhausted, and slept. When I awoke, several hours later, I sat up and looked.

This was not the universe I had left. It was the same point in time, but this was not the same at all. What I saw was, well, very nice indeed.

"Oh, this is much better," I said out loud to the beings who welcomed me and, unlike everyone in my last universe, seemed to like what I looked like naked.

I had done it. I had changed the universe. For the better. Where everyone mattered, forever. Where struggles and passions and self-actuation lived forever. But how? I didn't do anything, really.

I'm a quantum kind of guy.

I had opened my eyes to the probability field of the universe--all the ways it simultaneously existed. And like any good quantum mechanic with the right quantum hammer, the field collapsed a little better this time.

I simply observed. I was finally home.