The Time Phone

Okay, so they were wrong about the whole black hole thing. 

      All of them, wrong as could be, from Einstein down to Infinistein.

            While it was true that no matter could escape from a black hole, some kinds of energy could.  Microwaves for instance.  All you had to do was pack the energy into quanta that resonated at the same rate as the singularity of the hole and bingo!…the packet went through. 

            Yup, went right through and came out at the other end in some other time and place in the old continuum.  You could cheat history that way but only with a wink and a smirk.  No stealing the Crown Jewels, no taking the bullet for Lincoln, no going down with the Titanic, none of that stuff.  In fact, you could not transport atoms at all.  So much for science fiction.

            But here’s the thing…you could send a carrier wave through and piggyback it with sound vibrations, assuming the frequencies meshed.

            See what it all means?  No?  It means that the geniuses had come up with a time tunnel for phone calls.

            A time phone.

            Well all of that costs plenty you can be sure.  So the fat cats, the big boys, the high and the mighty…they were all using time phones to improve their futures.  To get richer, younger, or smarter faster than the following day.  But the rest of us poor dopes?  Well, let’s just say that time phones were not going to be on sale at the mall any time soon.

            So it was with a real sense of destiny that I gaped at the time phone once I had it in hand.  How it came into my possession is a long story not worth telling, and not exactly above indictment either, but let’s just say that I did not get a sales receipt and leave it at that.

            Once I had the phone, my plan was simple.  I knew that I could not call into the past and change anything that had already happened.  Time paradox, kill your own father and all that crap.  So here was my scam plain and simple…I would use the phone to call ahead to myself a few hours into the future.  If my timing was right, that would be just enough time, the way I saw it, to find out the winning lottery numbers from myself and play those very numbers back in hometime, that is my current time, and get rich real quick.

            Not too dumb, right?  I might even be so bold as to use the word foolproof.

            So in Time One, let’s call it -- meaning now, my time, the present moment  -- I called ahead to myself on the phone, just a few hours into the future, after the numbers had been posted.  Sure enough my future self answered the phone as I knew he would since the plan had already been put into action relative to his time frame.  He recited the winning numbers to me.   I wrote them down carefully, thanked him – that is, me – profusely and then went downstairs to a local store to buy the ticket.  Puffed up with inevitability, I came back and waited for the numbers to be announced.

            I was already planning all the stuff I would buy with my new fortune starting with z – from glitz to girlz – when I had the first shock.

            The numbers were wrong.

            I could not believe that and so I must have checked them a dozen times.  But it was true.  The lottery came and went and I had one of the losing tickets.  The numbers I had given myself were all wrong.

            I wracked my brains to figure out how that could have happened.  Had I misread, misheard, miswritten?  But no, that was not the case.  I was very careful about all that and had spoken clearly and slowly, double and even triple-checked.  And so I came to the only possible answer to the puzzle.

            I had obviously lied to myself.

            That is, just to be perfectly clear here, my future self had not given my present one the correct winning numbers in spite of the fact that he – that is, I – must have known them.  Now people lie to themselves all the time.  Me too, I guess, like when I catch myself in the mirror and think better about what I see than I have a right to.  But why would I lie to myself about this?  What was there to gain by not letting myself win the lottery which was the entire plan in the first place? 

            It simply did not make any sense at all, but by the time I thought all this through it was time for me to answer the phone.  In other words, my present self had passed into Time Two, let’s call it, and there I was waiting for my past self in Time One to call up and get the numbers.  I was just about to look them up when I realized that I already had the correct winning numbers in hand.  I had looked them up back in Time One which of course is how I knew that I had picked the wrong ones.  All this time shifting stuff can get a little oozy.  But no matter.   I had the right numbers now so I stood by the phone ready to give them to my past Time One self all hopeful at the other end of the line. 

            But then I got to thinking.

            Even though I had the correct numbers, I had not given them to myself back there in Time One.  Why?  There had to be a damn good reason why I would lie about this.  Something must have happened in the interim, that thin wedge of time between getting the right numbers and answering the phone, that changed my plans.  Something big.  Something that convinced me to lie about the whole thing.  But what could it have been?  So far nothing had come up and the phone was about to ring.  So I figured that only the future held the secret, as it always does since the future always explains the past. 

            That’s when I came up with a new plan.  Just before answering the phone with the correct numbers in hand, I decided to call myself the next day to find out what had gone wrong.  The Time Three me, in other words, who was one step beyond all this silliness, must have known the reason that the Time Two me – the current me, so to speak -- lied to Time One.

            Well guess what?  I placed the call and found that I was right!

            After putting me on hold for an impolite amount of time, my future Time Three self explained it all very clearly.  He told me that after winning the lottery with the correct numbers, I was robbed as I tried to cash it in and killed for that very ticket.  A dismal murder too, front page news, buckets of gore.  Yeech!  I could never stand the sight of blood and I -- all my selves in fact -- knew that. 

            So there it was.  That is why my Time Two self lied…to prevent my Time One self from buying the winning ticket and getting killed.

            What a relief! 

            It meant at least that I wasn’t going schizo on myself or acting out some masochistic nuttiness.  I was simply protecting myself.   It made perfect sense and as soon as I hung up the phone, it began to ring.  I answered knowing that it was my Time One self asking for the lottery numbers.  I could hear the yearning, the desperation, in his – I mean, my – voice but what could I do?  I couldn’t tell him what was going to happen because, knowing him as I did with that coy

intimacy with which one can only know oneself, I knew that he was stubborn and would try to figure out a way around it.  Suppose he made up his own numbers and hit the jackpot just by chance?  Then he would be killed for the ticket and he and I and all of us would be doomed.  I had to act selfishly here, you see?  So I made up a bunch of fake numbers and gave them to my Time One dupe.  He suspected nothing and seemed so excited about the future as he thanked me profusely that I could barely sleep that night for all the guilt I felt.

            But I did fall asleep and awoke to the phone ringing again.  Dazed and confused, I wondered if the whole thing had been a dream.  Had I already asked for and given the lottery numbers or had I imagined the whole thing?  Then I realized that it was not the lottery hopeful calling at all.  Time had passed and I was now my Time Three self.  The ringing phone meant that it was my Time Two self calling me in his present to find out why I – I mean to say why he – had lied about the lottery numbers to our original self.

            But here’s the problem, at least as it presented itself to me in my semisleep. 

            Since it was already Time Three and I obviously did not win the lottery the day before, no one had killed me for the ticket.  All well and good.  The past led to the future.  But since I did not in fact win and therefore no one had killed me – here I was a living loser after all -- what proof was there to support the murder theory?  The phone was ringing from a fellow – my perturbed self in Time Two – waiting for an explanation and I didn’t have one.  I did not have any information about winning or losing or being killed or anything.  All I had was a slight headache.

            Yet apparently I was about to answer the phone and talk about my own murder of all things!  How did I ever come up with such a tale?  Had I gotten drunk or dumb or loony in the next interim?  The whole thing seemed preposterous to me.  How would I know about it anyway?  I only knew what there was to know based on what did happen, not on what did not.  The past was my past as it presented itself, not some buffet of possibilities.  So the way I saw it now – I mean then at that moment with the phone ringing – was that there was no story to tell, no murder at all, and therefore no reason for me in Time Three to tell my Time Two self to lie to my Time One self.

            Unless there was such a reason.  But what could it be? 

            There was only one way to find that out and, naturally, it did not make things any simpler.  I answered the phone, then immediately put my Time Two self on hold and called ahead.  Yes, called ahead to my Time Four self to see if there was any reason that I – me, that is, my present Time Three self – should make up this cockamamie story about being murdered.

            My Time Four self, answering the phone, was more than a little ticked off.  Maybe the whole rigmarole was getting to me – to him I mean – or maybe I – he – was really losing his – my – mind.  In any case, hissing with contempt, my Time Four self explained the whole thing to me.  To tell you the truth, I could not really follow the entire line of argument.  I was getting a little lost in the old maze of happenstance here.  But the gist of it was this…my future Time Four self had realized that time had passed and he – the future me – obviously had not won the lottery.  That at least was a rock solid fact and there was no way around it.  But it was still the future and he – I – was as hard for cash as before.  And the only way that could be the case is if the numbers we had picked had been wrong in the first place. 

            With me so far?  I hope so because I was hanging on by the slimmest of threads.

            Now the only way the numbers could have been wrong was if I had given myself incorrect ones.  Why would I do that, my future self mused out loud?  He waited impatiently for me to answer but I didn’t have a clue and said so.  Disdain dripping from his voice, he explained that the only excuse for me to be giving out the wrong numbers was to accomplish the past.  In other words, I had not won the lottery, obviously, and therefore had to lie to myself to make that the case, ipso facto.

            The only way to get the numbers wrong, her said, assuming you had a time phone, was to lie about them.  And obviously, I had gotten the numbers wrong.  So obviously I had to lie.  The future depends on the past.

            I hardly had the energy to argue my case and in any case, was not at all sure who I was arguing for or against.  Even so, all that did not explain the murder story.  Where did that come from?

            My Time Four self went over that theory rather quickly because he was afraid my Time Two self, on hold in the time phone and waiting for an explanation, would get fed up and disconnect.   Then where would we be?  What he said was that I had to come up with a clever lie that would absolutely convince my earlier self back in Time Two not to question the deceit.  If he doubted the numbers, or my motives, and made up his own instead, who knows what could have happened?   Therefore, Time Four said coldly, I had to lie and my previous self had to lie in order to make the future come out the way it, in fact, did.

            I was tired and bobbled and in no condition to argue, so I quickly came up with the murder story and felt pretty good about protecting my self – all my selves – from the quirks of occurency.

            Which was all fine and dandy until some time passed and I became my Time Four self with this very theory, answering the phone to a rather irritating chap I knew to be my own contrary self in Time Three looking for reasons for the deception.  But I did not really have any good ones.  I knew the whole line of attack of course.  My Time Four self had explained it all to my Time Three.  But here I was having become my Time Four, knowing the call was about to come in, and I was suddenly filled with doubt.   Did it all really have to depend on the way things finally worked out?  What of free will?  What of alternate futures?  What if you did change what happened…then what?   Maybe I would be here in the present rich as a king, laughing at my ability to bend fate itself to my own desires.

            I had my doubts about all of it, the doubts included, of course.  But by then I understood something that all timecallers come to know, I suppose.  That the future leads to the past and not the other way around.  In other words, the answer, the resolution, to what is happening now is always to be found once it has already happened in the future.  That is the only way the universe perseveres.  

            The upshot?

            I called ahead to Time Five to see if anything had happened that established once and for all that this entire cunning argument made sense and that I was indeed lying to save myself.  Needless to say, something had.  At least it certainly seemed so to my Time Five self.  I tried to counter his entire line of reasoning, hoping to convince him to convince me to drop this theory and let me win the lottery after all.  I thought I was presenting my case rather forcefully but we

got into an argument and the bastard hung up on me.  I had no choice but to wait until I had passed into Time Five and then call ahead to Time Six to resolve the dispute. 

            I think you can pretty much guess what happened next.  My Time Six enlisted the aid of Time Seven who…

            But rather than lay out all the sordid details, suffice it to say that the questions and answers, and theories and lies and accusations and arguments continued in endless phone calls to the point that I no longer knew what time frame I was in or even who I was anymore.

            In no time flat – a terrible misnomer since as you can see it’s bumpy as hell -- I was having conversations with my future selves well into the next year.  And with each call I was getting more annoyed at bothering myself constantly with questions about what to do yesterday to correct past effects of future consequences that had not happened yet!  Eventually this whole debacle went way beyond the lottery numbers and into marriage plans, financial investments, health decisions, even where to stand on a particular day to avoid getting flattened by a concrete block that would fall off a construction site according to a future news report.

            I had no one else to blame, of course.  I alone was responsible for the whole mess and I must admit that things got quite a bit worse when I realized that the phone allowed you to make conference calls.

            Soon my whole life had become the calls and nothing but.  There was little time left for anything else.  Nothing could be done or decided upon or pursued without opening up an incessant chain of phone calls.  Talk about decision by committee!  You can’t imagine what these were like…battles and debates, theories and counter-theories, name-calling and bruised egos, and lies and mistrust all around, backwards, forwards, then, now, and forever.

            Finally one day, I had had enough.  I remember it clearly because I was standing by the window and listening to the cacophony of voices all jumbled and jivey in the phone and I just could not take it anymore.   So I opened the window and heaved the phone out.  I could still hear all the voices nattering as I watched it fall like a dead bird all the way to the pavement where it smashed into a gazillion shards of plastic and microchipery.

            It was a beautiful sight.  

            And sound there was none.

            Good riddance, I thought to myself.  Yes, goodbye to the lottery but farewell too to that mire of wanting and trying and lying.  Goodbye to the sheer contention of it all.  It was quiet again and I saw this in my mind’s eye as a kind of resolution, a shuddering of all my time selves back into one neat, solitary, momentary, pack of me…here now, right now, unburdened by the future.

            It was a marvelous feeling.

            Even better than winning the lottery.

            That is, until I started to get that ringing in my head.  Inside, I mean, like it was coming from the cortex itself.  And I realized that by the day after tomorrow, or one of the ones after that, they probably wouldn’t really need phones anymore…