2025 Novella
The wheels spin, and the road unravels. Head down, Joe sees the speckled blur of faded pavement oozing by, his charcoal gray pin stripe pants churning the pedals. The tails of his matching suit coat flap softly in his peripheral vision. He savors the thrill of not looking ahead, of not watching where he is going. Just the ever flowing below, his pumping legs, and black field boots going round and round.
Not that there was much ahead that could get in his way. This highway had been avoided as it led neither to or away from anything significant, just another luxurious ribbon of tar criss crossing a gorgeous land, partitioning forest and bridging streams. There wouldn't be abandoned cars or trucks to avoid, maybe just a white tail deer or a clutch of turkeys ambling away from his whirring bicycle. The tar was cracked and getting brittle, but otherwise still serviceable for the thin kevlar tires of his steel racing Miata. He could stare down and loose himself in the unraveling now, the future was definitely handled.
"I love field work, the wilds, the mysterious ruins, the people," he thought. "I love life and the whole dang world, truth be told. The compulsive planners could stay cloistered, haunt the so called control centers and play at being cosmic beaurocrats. I'd rather be under the sun and stars, alive, present."
Deploying this train of thought as chaff, Joe slipped into a deeper encrypted cognition.
"I am the agent errant, for decades running my own private exploit, the DOG project. From the perspective of my worthy peers, DOG is a wizardly but inconsequential plan B, an eccentric dabbling, a hobby. And why not? Every Clique had a side project or two, whether research or art. Sleepless, stewards of creation, eternal - what could be denied to us? My enthusiasm for the great work is authentic and reliable as evidenced by my willingness to leave the enclaves of my Clique brothers and sisters and get my hands dirty in the field, solo. I am their gifted engineer, mechanic, a zealot! We could use more like Joe, men of action, they opine to each other. For them, my zeal for the field is slightly gauche, even comic. The theory kids are generally contemptuous of mere instrumentality. Design is their thing, implementation an after thought. This gross exposition I offer for an imagined posterity, dear reader, dear leader, dear Clique who are with a little luck soon to respawn. You're welcome."
Glancing up, he notices the highway banking to the east slightly and leans the bike into a sweeping arc. Bringing his head back down, he drops thought and plays his pothole surfing game. At speed, gaps in the pavement come into view in just a fraction of a second. Avoiding a jarring edge impact requires optimal swerves, possible only through virtuosic amygdala activation. Alternately, he could yank up on the handlebars to hop over the chasms, but he feels this is a less than elegant solution. "Rapid and non volitional weaving is more my aesthetic," he muses.
A cloud parts, flooding the brim of his felt fedora with sunshine. Maple branches sway significantly and so the opportunity to adjust the mileau arrives. Joe shifts back into deliberate cognition and palms his iStone. Summoning an icon he thumbs a confirmation. In an educated British accent, a woman's voice says "Teach the future. Local regression is likely. Continue?"
Joe's finger brushes the icon again, clears his throat and starts to speak.
If you could tell yourself something
from this back to then
would you whisper be gentler
or for god sake more sin?
By the side of the highway artifacts appear and slide by in jerky animation. Skulls poking out of sexy negliges, VHS porn movies, Playboy magazines from the 60s, and fertility figurines and finally flowers. Voices of children echo in repetition, at first immediately following what Joe says, then chiming in with him in sync.
if you could rewrite your present
by visiting your past
would you try to be gentler
or kick some more ass?
More artifacts pass by. Battle rifles, hand made bows, then stone axes. A chorus of voices, more joining in.
why mourn that lost lover
heart broken and how?
when another you’s smiling
near here, almost now
The voices are fully in sync, strong and yet there's a radio transmitter quality, as if they coming from far away.
"Again, I'll just break the fourth wall and explain, for the story is subtle and without a friendly voice over you might miss out. I, Uncle Joe have just altered the future by changing kids who are alive now, or to be more accurate, I colonized the future to reach back Michael Brown Presence Process style and alter our experience of the past, our childhood memories. Eerie, eh? You've probably guessed at this point I'm a member of a spiritual elite, and by the standards of sleepers such as yourself we are a bunch of malevolent mofos. I get that! . I'm not going to pull the old cinematic trope of tricking the audience into rooting for the antagonist. Actually, I'm the protagonist of this story, even if I am a rebel angel. Satan rebelled against God, but that's another story, my story is based solidly on science. The science of tomorrow that is. Archetypically speaking, I'm the Trickster. In the Gary Gygax 1974 D and D alignment, I'd be chaotic good, like Coyote. In this story, there are some difficult choices, even for god-like entities. Especially for. I guess I'd like to ask you to hold off on preconceptions and have fun, and maybe if we're lucky we'll all open our hearts and minds.
So in the beginning was the word, so says the bible and in this science fiction post apocalyptic romatic comedy words are a future technology. Back in the 2020s folks were all about AI prompts, the right words given to AIs could unlock super powers, they thought. Except those early AI's were all spiked with BS. A spell, incantation, word magic, lines of code, the logic of instantiation, non instrumentality. If you like Abraham Hicks this whole universe is one humungous riff, hi Ester! Later on we'll attend a People's Poetry Slam that basically reboots oral tradition, but whereas that's only a 'performance', when I use the words in collaboration with this iStone, the words become things, events, outcomes.
What did i change just then? I've guided Christina since she was young, gave her the tools to ride out the events. I've guided others to become vessels for the divine. Maybe multiple goddess, why not? What a wild success that would be. What I did just now, the extinction event has not yet happened, but I'm here in the field preparing for the denouement, which I will have done, but different. I coaxed the leonid neighbors down, but aimed at the Clique hidey holes, what I just did was alter what I was to do, and now it's already done. Now the Clique is weak, and the Daugther(s) of God can show up, and hang around, help the people. More about the why of that later. I taught the future because there was no way to stop me, because now it's already done.
Joe rides to prepare Christina for Gerry, and vice versa. Lots of apocalypses have already happened. The coup de grace of asteroid collision to wipe out the majority of remaining human life on several continents, that either didn't happen yet, or happened backwards according to Joe's hack. The Clique hunkered down, concentrated in several safe zones with the asteroids intended to wreck havoc every place else but where the Clique were hiding. Result, less global catastrophe and dramatic reduction in Clique population.
So the question is, when we meet Joe, has he already done that? Nixed the Clique?