2025 Chapter Guy on Bike

Here is the opening line of the first paragraph. This is the first word spoken. The next story starts.

Prequel: star stuff, gaseous consolidation, magma cooling, primordial goop. An ocean was here, then a mile high glacier. Eventually, the ocean evaporated and the glacier melted.

Those old stories are echoed now in dunes of quartz sand, rippling against an overcast sky. Clusters of trees and grass cannot completely arrest the skittering haze of sand lofted by the wind. This place is still fluid and migrating, slow and steady. Stories always move.

On the far horizon, rapid change. A bicyclist reprises the sine wave of undulating dune, gradually climbing up, swooping down and then up again. His authentic 20 century business suit flaps comically with the pumping of his legs and the breeze of transit.

His head is down. He gazes into bike spokes smearing transparent, and the terrain changes. Ridiculously thin tires roll first over cracked pavement swept by sand, then bare earth, cracked concrete and grassy footpaths. The wheels spin, the now spools out like spider silk and drifts away.

Joe stares into the speckled blur of faded tarmac oozing by, his charcoal gray pin stripe pants churning the pedals. The tails of his matching suit coat snap 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, the blur of wool sheathed thighs, and scuffed 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, clacking transit. The surface of the road is 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 easy unraveling, 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 bureaucrats. I'd rather be under the sun and stars, alive, present."

Deploying this train of thought as chaff, Joe slips into a deeper encrypted cognition.

"Talking to myself now. 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 glittering 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," they opine to each other, "men of action.". For them, my zeal for the field is slightly gauche, jest worthy. 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 gaze 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. The weave, like good old Trumpy.

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, stone fertility figurines [Venus of Willendorf] 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 tinged with the ambiance of a radio transmission, as if they coming from far away, bouncing off the night sky and colored by the chill light of stars.