Collapsing myself into the quantum froth was just the beginning of my troubles.
It's all very well to engineer a miraculous technology that augurs a new reality for humankind, but unless someone comes to believe you actually did it, it's just exactly like you haven't done it at all. Parallel universes diverge, a right-hand infinity of them where my discovery is recognized, and another equally vast infinity to the left where I am just a freak, a schlub with an incomprehensible gadget in my garage.
This present Me - call him Me-Prime in a jaunty excess of the Anthropomorphic Principle - is inhabiting one of the latter universes and experiencing some not inconsiderable envy of all my success-selves and all their infinite Nobel Prizes and endless profile cover-pieces in Forbes, the magazine of great achievers.
There's no reason at all to doubt my breakthrough. I have two doctorates, one in applied physics and another in electrical engineering. I was a professor in a prestigious university. No names given, by court order. That was all before my trouble. I have credentials, bona fides up the yinyang, and an invention in my garage that actually works.
But there's nothing much that's sexy about time travel and displacement of the self through alternate realities when it's presented as the humdrum banal fact that I've made it. This is the sticking point. This is perhaps what causes the resistance.
In all those comic books and movies, 'the multiverse' is all very spectacular and bold, with bright bubbles and colors and whooshing vortices of adventure. But when you collapse yourself into the quantum spume the sorry actuality is that it's a bit dull.
Maybe it’s me. I can't really hype it up the way it needs hyping. I've had a couple of VC investors drop by, but they soon wrinkle their noses and back off. Perhaps it's the unwashed laundry in the garage. I’ll have to do something about that.
Timid and retiring angels from the money world, utter indifference from academia. I've sent my paper for peer review, but no peer of mine wants to review it. My work smells like stale socks to them. And in any case people are attached to our habitual reality even though it brings them pain, our present world so like a pre-existing debilitating condition that we've all grown used to. What I offer is an unprecedented opportunity to wander in forgotten time, but maybe time is best left forgotten.
The spume of the world is pitiless, it accepts no excuses, no might-have-beens or shouldas. It just is, frothing with its bubbles of possibility that inflate, exist and burst, billions of might-haves going pop-pop-pop in every instant.
I'll spare you the technobabble. I stare into the apparatus and I collapse into a frothy ocean of turbulent waveforms. That's it. Only my consciousness can travel; my body is bulky and unquantumish, much too thick and massy to squeeze into these interstices of spacetime. So how do you know it's true? Trust me... or try it for yourself.
Toil and trouble. Through the froth and foam, through the spumous broth of times past and present, but never into the vetoed future. I find myself always here, at this physical location - which is odd, because within the cosmic structure, 'here' is always somewhere else. Maybe it's the apparatus itself that tugs me back to this place, or maybe it's just nostalgia. The most powerful force in the universe.
Sometimes I find myself in a quag with spiny chitinous arthropods, nightmarish in their flouting of the rules. Single eye on a penile stalk, bobbing through the greeny sludge, with paired spikes raising ripples as it seeks for jellyform preycritters.
Sometimes it's a ferny glade with turtleish placid saurians chewing sisalgrass. Steelbeaked stabbers swarm in on them from the sky and the glade becomes darkblue-crimson with their richly oxygenated blood.
Sometimes a dusty waste, with beetlebrowed hominids scratching under rocks for grubs, chubby with juicy matter. Their genitals hang menacing and ripe as they present their vivid rumps to the primal male. Could be that this is the future and not the past. I shouldn't be here. Veto broken and taboo violated. I return.
But once in a thousand trips into the spume, once in a million, toiling and troubling through all the effervescent lather of tiny time, I find the one moment I'm seeking. It's like being born into a teetering miracle, a needletip life blessed with all the gifts.
I'm in my yard. The trouble hasn't come yet, or it's a world where the trouble never came. No shattering of skulls, no midnight skids through lifestopping grief into the other side. I'm present in my yard as a watcher, and also as a body to be watched.
I watch myself romp round the yard, ridiculous and glad, it's a late afternoon with the sun glancing through the backyard trees and glowing over the rhododendron bushes, and she's there, my daughter's there, she's five, she's six years old, she's skipping and running and falling, she stumbles and falls and starts to wail but then thinks better of it, she looks up at where I romp around like a fool to please her and smiles, she smiles at me, she wants me to see that she's not hurt, that she's happy to be there in this yard with her silly daddy as the sun goes slowly down.
And time travel is possible. And all my researches have brought me here, and not in vain. The spume on the sea of time expanding for us to swim through, and all the many little bubbles of our lives will never burst.
==================[ SPUME / END ] ==================
If you enjoyed that, why not try…?
Deepwish
The white whale cruises stately through the deepest avenues of krill and hears the wishes in the water of other whales. These wishes are songs of yearning which call for food or companionship or mates. There was a time when this old white one would call his own songs, singing his vivid wishes out for miles and miles, but he has no wishes any longer.
Imagination is the spume and our salvation from reality.