A Visit from the Future

The End.

It was raining that night when he first appeared to Johnny. One of those cold, wet nights where you can't have enough blankets on the bed. Johnny was dreaming about something, but when he awoke, the dream vanished from his memory like tumbleweed in an old Clint Eastwood western.

Johnny sat up groggily in his bed, scanning the room for the clock as a bolt of lightning erupted somewhere outside his window. The flash of white brilliance illuminated something in the corner--something that looked strikingly like a human figure. Johnny sat bolt upright in bed, kicking the covers off and that dizzy spinning sensation that follows being scared half to death.

"Hello? What are you doing in my room?" he called out into the darkness. There was no answer. Another flash of lightning briefly illuminated the room, but the silhouette was gone. Johnny chuckled to himself and told himself he was crazy for calling out to the boogy monster. Quit being a little sissy and go back to sleep, he told himself.

And then he heard it. The cool, almost sinister voice in the dark. "Hello Jonathon."

Johnny leaped to his feet and retreated into the corner, feeling for the light switch. "Wh...who...who are you? What are you doing in my house?"

"So we meet at last. Face...to face. We have alot to talk about, and so little time." The voice seemed closer than ever, almost inside his head. His fingers found the light switch, and searing light flooded the room. Johnny put his hands over his face and squinted, beholding the figure in the opposite corner of the room. The man was sitting in his easy chair, hands folded on his lap and staring calmly at Johnny.

"Who are you?" Johnny asked. He was scared, but not by the man's appearance. The very fact that the man was sitting in his room as he slept didn't scare Johnny. There was something deeper and more sinister that he couldn't see. The man gave a hint of a smile. "Who am I? Why Johnathon, I am you."

"What? What do you mean 'you are me'?"

"I mean precisely what I tell you. I have come from the future, Johnny. I am yourself...thirty years from now."

Johnny snorted an audible laugh. "I don't believe you. Okay, prove yourself. Tell me something I'd never tell anyone."

"Okay, when you were sixteen you ran over the family dog in your mother's station wagon and told them the neighbors did it."

Johnny was taken aback. He'd never told anyone that he killed Spud. His little sister would have hated him forever. "Okay..." he said cautiously, "I still don't believe you. Tell me more."

"You were born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and you are the oldest of three children. Your father had a love child with a previous partner as well. Even you don't know about that yet. But now you do." The man smirked. "Since you were five you've wanted to be a scientist. You know more about biology and chemistry than anyone you know. You are taking night classes at the local university, but you feel that that is 'not enough'. You want more, but you lack motivation. Well, my friend, I am your motivation."

"Okay then, if you're me...tell me my future."

The man raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure you want to know?"

Johnny smiled. "Well, I already know that I'll live at least another thirty years, don't I?"

"Fair enough. You will drop out of college after your parents die in a tragic automobile accident involving a drunk driver, four cars, and a bridge embankment. You become isolated after the accident, rarely leaving your house except to go to work--as a clerk at the local gas station, I might add--and in your spare time you work on an 'invention'. You don't even know what you are trying to build at first...your ideas seem to come to you subconsciously. But the real truth lies in the papers."

"What papers?"

"These papers." The man hands Johnny a stack of fifty or so pages of diagrams and charts.

"What is this?"

"This, my boy, is how to build a time machine. When you are forty you come across a government research project involving time travel. You will get in way over your head. Of course, they will never actually attempt to send you back or forward in time, but they will perform experiments of other sorts on you: brain waves, magnetic charges, and others. But you are just too curious, and you begin to snoop. You discover that there is indeed a finished product, and you steal the blueprints. Yes, my boy, you steal the most important and sought after documents in the history of modern science. For the next ten years you work on building your own time machine."

"Why would I do that?"

"So you can go back in time and give yourself the blueprints. Think of the potential! You could be the pioneer of the time travel industry. It would be the greatest invention in the history of mankind, and you would be the mastermind behind it."

"Does it work?"

"Well, that's...complicated. I don't exactly know whether it does or not."

"How could you not know?"

"Well, I know that you will dismiss me as a hallucination and throw those papers away. I know that by paying you a visit, I have somehow set off a warped system of memory between us. I know that you are subconciously able to 'remember' things that will happen in the future, but I don't know why. This is how you are capable of building the time machine without the blueprints. Here's how the rest of the story goes: One day I...you...we...woke up and started building. I didn't know what I was building or why, but it seemed to flow out of my mind. I was using formulas that I had never learned, and experimenting with chemicals I had previously never heard of. It was surreal, and I felt that I was either on to something big, or having a nervous breakdown. Then one day I was down at the clinic when I saw a sign advertising the time travel research. I was drawn to the meeting by some unknown force. It was at that first meeting that I suddenly realized what I was inventing. It was a time machine. I became obssessed. To make a long story short, I had reached a standstill in my inventing process. I just couldn't go any farther. And that's when I heard that the prototype was ready to be tested. I had to do something. I won't get into all the details here, my friend, but to make a long story short, you will steal the blueprints and torch the lab, destroying everything but those original blueprints."

"I don't believe you. If I supposedly build this machine off the top of my head, wouldn't I remember this conversation? Wouldn't I already know what I'm going to do? If that is my future, this conversation should clear up every bit of confusion that I will ever have regarding time travel."

The man seemed deep in thought. "Yes...I can't explain what has happened. It seems that I have two memories for every event after this conversation. I have your memories, and I have my own. You will learn all too late that traveling back in time is a serious catastrophe."

"Do I have a choice but to do what you tell me will happen?"

The man shrugged. "Yes and no, I guess. Technically you have a choice, but I already know what you will choose. As you progress through your life, you will become aware that you are living outside the realm of time. You will be able to see your life from a divine viewpoint, because you are living your life in a loop, rather than a straight line. It is a disaster. You will die, but you will not pass on to another world. You will simply find yourself wandering around at another point in your life."

"Why did you do it? Why did you build the machine?"

The man stared at him blankly. He seemed to be flooded with memories and regrets. "I...don't exactly know. Look at it this way: I built it because I built it. Like I said, traveling back in time opens up a rift, a flaw. There is nothing you can do to undo it. If you travel back to when you were ten years old, then everything from that point on will reflect decisions you make in the future. If I tell you to cut off your arm, you cut it off because I told you to. But the reason your future self told you to is to justify why my arm is missing. It's a never-ending loop, and it is torture to live inside it."

"So what can I do? I mean, is there any escaping this future?"

"I'm afraid not," said the man, "your time has been predetermined. All your decisions have been made, and you must spend the rest of eternity making them over and over and over again."

Johnny awoke with a start. He had a splitting headache--must've drank too much last night. He sat up in bed and looked at the clock; it was four-thirty. Time to get up. He had another long day ahead of him.

He turned on the light and walked over to the machine. Was it almost finished? Maybe. Or it could be half-done for all he knew. He sat next to it for a moment while he sipped his steaming coffee. I wonder what it'll be, he thought. As he stared at it, a flicker of recollection danced through his brain. Then it was gone. Oh well, he thought, I'll figure it out later.

Johnny was forty-nine years old. The machine seemed to be nearly finished, but he still hadn't determined its purpose. The memories flooded his mind during every waking moment. At first he didn't notice it, but now it couldn't stop. His past was a haze, and so was his future. They seemed to come at him all at once, ambushing his brain and besieging his every waking thought. The machine was his everything. It always would be.