Saturday, May 3, 2014

The Time Machine


The Time Machine

     The time machine has always existed.
     The time machine will always exist.
     Even in the dreams of men who lived before machines there was the wonder of what could have been.
     The hidden doorway to time travel existed behind every advance of our collective efforts at technology until the inevitable happened as the inevitable always will.

     The time machine has always existed.
     The time machine will always exist.
     Its discovery was accidental.
     They were trying to perfect the theory of teleportation.
     In underground research facilities that never see the light of day or get the attention they deserve but do not seek, experiments are conducted that would strain your faith in what you think you know about the world you live in.
     Have you ever heard of a government program called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?
     Probably not.
     Most people haven’t.
     It doesn’t matter.
     They do what they do regardless.
     The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA as the tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists that know and love it call it in their “secret” chatrooms, is an actual government agency.
     It has a budget, and if you can manage to get through the two-hundred and eighty-two page itemized budget report you can see what their annual budget is.
     Because you can believe everything you find on the internet.
     If you know anything about the world, you know that sometimes false stories are published to make the true stories look false and only those that are truly “in the know” know the difference.
     Sometimes they manage to make it off of the compounds and onto some conspiracy podcast but it’s tough to believe what you hear unless you’ve had some time to ease your way into it.
     Maybe you watch a show on the History Channel about ancient aliens and you see a clip of Michael Tsarion or David Icke and decide to do a little more research the next time you’re bored and have internet access.
     Most of what they say is interesting in the way that a lot of conspiracy theories are interesting.
The world is run by shape-shifting blood-drinking alien lizards?
     Sure.  Why not?
     As long as they don’t try to take off with all of our water and they keep the trains running on time then it’s fine by me.
     But if you listen to enough stories, some of it starts to makes sense and you heed their constant urgings to “Do your own research!”.  And you do.  And you discover other sources like Texe Marrs and Jordan Maxwell and William Cooper that have done their homework and provide you with their sources if you have the time and effort to research them.  And less of what these people have to say seems like the ravings of a schizophrenic that went off of their meds and wandered away from their keeper.
     Certain phrases and project names recur.
     Project names like Rex 84 and Project Paperclip and Mk Ultra. 
     Maybe you hear about a shadowy organization that rules the world and you do research, or at least what passes for research in the age of the internet about The Freemasons and the Skull and Bones and The Illuminati and the New World Order, the Council On Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group which meets in secret and supposedly selects the next world leaders and plots the future history of the world before it happens.
     Maybe you even try to tell your friends about this amazing revelation that you’ve discovered about how the game is actually rigged and only fools play by the rules and there isn’t anything behind our currency and hasn’t been for years.  That the money that everyone spends most of their life pursuing is just worthless paper.  That maybe, just maybe, we never put a man on the moon.
     The further down the rabbit hole you go, the more superficial the smiles of your friends become.
     When someone that doesn’t know you well mentions something in casual conversation in mixed company, maybe a look was shot, quick and intended to be subtle.  A half a smirk or a roll of the eyes.
When anyone mentions politics, you say that the president was selected, not elected and that the popular vote and democracy itself is a sham and do they know anything about the electoral college?  The topic of conversation is awkwardly forcibly changed to sports, weather, or the latest events that happened to fictional characters on a popular television show.  Just like changing the channel.
That’s when you realize that the knowledge that you worked so hard to find is now yours to bear alone.
Even if we never put a man on the moon, you still have to wake up in the morning and empty your bladder and brush your teeth unless you want your teeth to rot away.
     Never mind the fluoride in the water supply.  The chemtrails criss-crossed across the twilight sky.
     Forget about MK ULTRA and Ewen Cameron.
     That’s not going to make sitting through your scheduled shift at your job any easier.
Having that information at the ready isn’t going to make small talk over appetizers on a blind date any easier.
     The last thing your friends want to be lectured on is why the days of the week are named after Norse Gods.  That Jesus was a solar deity and comes from a long line of magic sun gods that people worship, because it’s easier than having to accept that the universe is really so vast and meaningless that the existence of any single organism is so brief and inconsequential in comparison to all of time and space as we know it that it might as well have never happened and that one day maybe tomorrow and maybe a million years from now the sun will either implode or explode or burnt out and collapse in on itself and every record, tape, CD, MP3 and whatever the next incarnation of music technology is, it won’t matter if you bought another copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall that you can upload directly into your brain’s audio center, because unless you’re listening to it in a colony in another solar system everything will just be circling around whatever the sun decides to turn into on either a cold dead iceball or a burned out ball of charcoal but that won’t matter because by then everyone they know and love will probably be long dead, gone and forgotten and nothing really matters no matter how hard you try.
     No.
     It’s not that kind of thing that everyone’s wired to handle.
     So you dial it back.
     You realize after you spend a summer not so secretly not being invited to anyone’s cook-outs that maybe a lot of the stuff that you’re carrying around in your head isn’t really ready for prime time.
Your put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else and try to live for today.

     The time machine has always existed.
     The time machine will always exist.
     At first the goal was teleportation.
     To move things from one place to another.
     It sounds easy when you phrase it simply.
     First a thing is here.  And now it is elsewhere.
     A thousand years ago if you had said that humans would fly across the sky in metal machines that weighed as much as a thousand men they would put you wherever they put the people too mad to mingle with other people.
     Who was it that said “Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.”?
     Even in our time, advances in technology have brought us wonders that only years ago we thought we wouldn’t see in our lifetimes and we take it all for granted.
In your pocket you have an affordable device that contains the computational power that would have required entire buildings of machines to produce and you use it to send each other pictures of your genitals.
     Sometimes the use of the machine is determined by the user.

     At first the goal was teleportation.
     To move things from one place to another.
     It sounds easy when you phrase it simply.
     First a thing is here.  And now it is elsewhere.
     If a thing can be moved from one place to another then how far can anything be moved to?
     The first the things were small.
     Ball bearings and marbles.
     Forks and spoons.
     When the things were made to disappear, they disappeared, but no one knew to where.
     Making things disappear was the easy part.
     Making them reappear where they were expected to was the difficult part.
     The scientists sworn to secrecy under penalty of death or worse were thrilled to be on the cutting edge of this new technology.
     One night after many drinks had been drunk while idly drawing on a dry-erase board with colored markers someone figured out that the problem wasn’t only space but time.
      “Around, around the sun we go, the moon goes 'round the earth, we do not die of death - we die of vertigo.”
     If you make a thing disappear with the intention of making it reappear in the same location the problem is not that the object will not reappear in the same place, but that the place is no longer where it was for the object to return to.
     The planet turns on its axis as it orbits around the sun and the entire solar system is spinning on a plane with the rest of the known universe.
     The problem was determined to be one of not only space, but of time.
     Experiments began with increments of time so brief that they would hardly seem like time at all to anyone or thing but the instruments keeping track and the items reappeared as predicted, but a little less predictable as the amount of time an item was allowed to be disappeared was lengthened.
     Things began to get weird and adjustments were made.
     Objects were successfully transported, first across a tabletop, then from one room to another and the experiments were repeated and repeated again just to be sure that what was thought to be happening was actually what was happening.
     One day a scientist decided to try to transport their watch from one room to the next.
     Just for a laugh.  Just to lighten the mood.
     The scientist even tried to think up a punchline for when the timepiece reappeared in the next room.
Something along the lines of “Time flies!”.
     When the watch reappeared the time had to be reset.
     That’s when things got interesting.
     No one had really stopped to wonder where things went when they went from here to there or where they were when they disappeared.
     Least of all did anyone wonder when they went.
     Supposedly that’s all we ever learned about the possibility of teleportation and that the project was abandoned as being too dangerous and unpredictable for any practical use.
     There are many scientists that know more than they would ever say about the project that few would even believe were they to risk their life to tell anyone the things they know.
     But there is something that I know.
     You can’t expect any good scientist to open up Pandora’s box only to peek under the lid and then shut it and forget what they saw inside.
     Although the funding for the project was discontinued and the scientists were reassigned to other projects, maybe some of the scientists were not reassigned.
     Maybe in exchange for their rights to be a private citizen some scientists traded their identities to be able to delve further into this new mystery until they had mastered it.
     Maybe some agents sworn to secrecy were assigned to infiltrate the message boards of sci-fi fandom and put forth the question of what consequences there would be for humankind if a time machine were to actually exist.
     Maybe the government through covert funding sources financed the existence of some of the science fiction magazines and awards were rewarded for the best conjectural fiction of what might happen if time travel were a reality.
     There’s a theory in conspiracy circles that the technology that the public at large is allowed to be aware of is ten years behind what science is actually capable of.
     What if I told you it was twenty years?
     What if I told you that I knew when and why the pyramids were built and why the library of Alexandria was burned and that some of the prophecies of Nostradamus were true.
     What if I told you that I knew who killed Kennedy and why, and I knew someone that heard Marilyn Monroe’s last words as they slipped from her beautiful lips?
     Would you believe me if I told you?
     Would anyone?
     It doesn’t matter anymore.
     It never did.
     It never will.
     I won’t tell you who I am.
     Who I am doesn’t matter anymore.
     What matters is what I know.
     I have seen the time machine.
     I have heard it humming and I have seen it make things disappear elsewhere, elsewhen.
     Sometimes these things reappear where and when you expect them to and sometimes they don’t.
     Sometimes smaller things and other times things not so small.
     Sometimes small objects.
     Sometimes other things.
     I can’t be sure that I can tell you for certain who or when but we have a way of knowing our own.
     You’d never make the trip unless you thought it through.
     To disappear from here and now and reappear elsewhere, elsewhen is more than most people could ever to hope to wrap their mind around.
     For some it is a dream, for others, a nightmare.

     The time machine has always existed.
     The time machine will always exist.
     I know where it is.
     I can take you there if you want to go.
     But you have to ask yourself… are you sure you want to go?

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