Back to Roots 2

I'd had many reasons for wanting to come back. Not to this particular 'now', of course. And yet... where DID the extra energy come from? I had meticulously plotted the path of my reversion, I should have arrived the fourth of August, 1996. Every ounce of mass aboard the station was accounted for. Every bolt, every chip of paint, every-

Ah, hell. Everything except my OWN bodymass. What a staggeringly stupid oversight.

After all those years, thinking I had considered all the angles, such an obvious oversight in hindsight. I was so busy being right that I hadn't given much consideration to the idea that I could also be wrong. It isn't as though there's precedent for it, after all. To the best of my knowledge, this has never been done before-- and if it was, well, nobody was talking.

I take a moment to ponder an omnisolipsism wherein every conscious mind from their own perspective took on a variation of my journey of expanded life, living to accomplish their goal of rewinding everything. I find myself wondering if I currently am nearer to the beginning, the middle, or the end. If all beings from their own perspective live the same life, then only one life is ever lived, with all external persons observed merely the backdrop, yes? But like all ponderance of solopsism, it feels overly convoluted, with the facts molded to fit the theory rather than the theory shaped by the facts. Masturbatory, even. I shove the mental non sequiteur from my mind as I consider myself being led by the hand to my grandfather's car.

Being here, now, presents me with a quandary. My original plan had been to return at to the age of nineteen. Freshly on my own, my family all but left behind, ready to make myself a brand new life in a brand new city. I could power my way through physics and math degrees, earn my doctorates again, and take the time to have a family while earning tenure at a major college. I could rerelease all my own contributions to my fields, at a fraction of the effort that it took me to develop them the first time around. Yes, as puerile and bland as it sounds, I was genuinely lonely. Not to mention that, under my own auspices I could bloom and get all my degrees the first time around, confront my father while he was still alive, help my sisters. Yes, I have issues. Lots of them.

But I'm not nineteen. Depending on the date, that's possibly a decade away, and until then my personal independence would be limited at best. As much as it irks me, I think my best option is to pretend to be my physical age for now, until I have more information and more autonomy. However long that takes. Seven to ten years is a while to wait, but you don't get to be my age without learning patience.

Which is why I'm carrying a small beach bag, of course. Knowing as I do the way that years weigh on the body, I find myself in awe of my grandparents. My grandmother taught dance into her mid seventies, and my grandfather was both father figure to me and a salesman of mortuary plots, when he wasn't painting, tending the yard and the fruit trees and banana plants, or taking photographs, until he retired two years before his death at seventy two. But all these are vague memories of a future not yet come, and I'm here in the now. Seeing and hearing and feeling. I put my bag into the back seat and get in, and something scrapes lightly against the bare skin of my thigh past my swim trunks as I sit down. I look to see what I've sat on, and there are a cluster of almost parallel cuts in the vinyl seat. White fibers of the padding peek out through the rent in the material, and it takes me a moment to sift through hazy memory.

I did this. A hundred sixty plus years ago. Or, maybe only a few days, judging by the still bright white of the exposed padding. I was always engaging in reckless behavior like that; breaking or cutting or dismantling things. I was... well, now that I consider it, I was a very destructive child. Hardly a surprise, of course. I was barely reared until I came to my grandparents to live. An intelligent child left to their own devices with no rules or guidance is a recipe for disaster, and after only a trio of years with structure I was still somewhat unruly. In many ways, despite my improvements between second and fifth grades I was still hardly more than an animal.

It's a strange thing, then, that I would one day become the wealthiest human alive. If I cast aside pointlessly self effacing humility, the most influential of my time. And in many ways, it was this very influence that saw me go down a path similar to Isaac Newton. Not, of course, that I equate the construction of calculus from scratch to my own contributions. Mostly I was just plugging in numbers and deducing the implications; I didn't CREATE the foundation of modern physics and higher mathematics. But my drive and ambition and determination left me with no time to pursue interpersonal relationships. By the time I was 'desirable' I was too caught up in my own cleverness, and by the time I learned to get over myself, I didn't trust any of the endlessly toadying suck ups, sycophants, and sleazeballs who tried to get close to me. It's almost ironic that, due to the number of people who tried to seduce me after a few decades rising to the public conscious through my contributions, that I remained a virgin. But then, trust never came easy to me.

My fingers touch the torn vinyl with something like reverence. I'm here again. I'm in this place, in this time. I'm in the back seat of my grandfather's Camaro. And, I realize belatedly, as my grandparents look over their shoulders at me with concern, that I still haven't put on my seatbelt. I fumble with the seatbelt and click it into place after a couple of abortive attempts.

"Nicky boy, are you feeling okay?" my grandfather asks me, and the concern of a man nearly a hundred years my junior still warms my heart.

I nod silently, not trusting myself to answer verbally.

"Are you feeling sick?" he continues.

This time I shake my head.

"What's wrong, Nicky?" Grandma asks, and I laugh a little.

What do I say? "I'm... I'm fine." That was the word. Fine. It's fallen out of use in the last hundred years, but it still comes to me quickly enough. "Syscheck OK." They both look at one another in concern, and I could smack myself. English has changed a bit in the last century and a half.

"Should we call Doctor Pearlman?" Grandma asks. "He's slurring his words..."

Grandpa looks back at me, before he reaches backwards, and puts the back of his hand against my forehead. What on earth? "Hm. A little warm, but that's probably the sunburn," he says. "No fever I can feel."

"Grandpa, I'm fine." I say more emphatically, while desperately wracking my brains to remember how pervasive the internet was back then. Now. Hm, I'll need to construct a framework of language tenses to account for my new circumstances; weirdly enough as we became more and more a society living in what was once science fiction, we speculated less. And I'm browsing cat videos, now. Focus, Nicolas! "Just a m- a little headache." And I almost said migraine. Nicolas, you old fool. Although now that I consider it, I AM feeling a bit of a headache.

The expressions on their faces seem almost relieved. "I have some Tylenol," Grandma answers, fishing around in her purse, a tan-beige bag with a cracked and worn seam next to a buckled shoulder strap. Grandpa, meanwhile, nods, and starts the car. I look out the window briefly, when Grandma says, "Here. Do you have any water left?" I look to see her hand held back over the passenger side, and I cup my hand, letting her drop the white tablet into my palm.

I spend a few seconds trying to parse where I would have water. But we just came off the beach, so a sealed water bottle of some kind is almost a certainty. I rummage through the beach bag I set down on the seat a minute ago, until I find a half liter water bottle, about a third full. "Yeah." I take the pill, unscrewing the top and washing it down as the Camaro jostles from the rough sand and grass into cracked pavement, then from there onto an old highway. Kamehameha Highway, a half forgotten memory tells me. Next to no cars on the road and of those there are, at least half have surfboards strapped to the top. A light drive, but still a bumpy one, as we rattle across the highway, before passing a tiny, official looking building next to a minimart with a 'SE7EN ELEVEN' proudly displayed on its placard. We pass these, and the road we take directly afterwards is a right turn onto a barely paved road that would have to smooth out to compare to cobble. A handful more streets on the steady incline and we take another right onto a road that no longer even pretends surfacing, becoming a dirt road. Not fifteen minutes back here and I'm already craving civilized transportation infrastructure.

What strikes me most, though, is the greenery. There are widely spaced houses lining the dirt road, and they're all large houses on enormous lots. I remember the property being nice, but it startles me to see how spacious it is. Condo housing groundside is enormously expensive, and independant houses exponentially so. Will have once been? Whatever the proper verb tenses of time travel. And at a sizeable property, even for this time, we stop, my grandfather gets out of the car to unlock a padlock on a chain link fence gate.

The parcel of land is bounded by a truly staggering quantity of greenery, including bushes, trees, and vines bedecorated with five pointed, brilliantly white flowers. The latter is intertwined so heavily into the chain link fence surrounding the property it almost seems to form a wall of leafy green. A large, wide boughed tree towers over the left side of the gate and shelters the gravel drive in, with globe shaped, tan-brown aggregate fruits that I belatedly recognize from my fondest childhood memories as breadfruit, something I haven't had the opportunity to eat in fifteen decades. My stomach growls suddenly at the thought of it, and I realize with a bit of a start that I'm rather hungry. And it's while I'm distracted by this thought that Grandpa gets back in the car and pulls forward.

The path goes another thirty feet on the gentle downward slope of the gravel drive, until it levels off behind a building that I can only describe as an apartment on stilts. Further down the slope on the property, I can see a wide, single story house, spread out most of the width of the foremost third of the land. My centenarian's eye does a quick estimate of the area of the property, assuming square corners and four straight line sides based on what I've already seen, and returns about a half an acre. But then, there's only a few billion humans in this time frame, aren't there? The available planetary land and orbital habitat isn't being parceled out between a quarter of a trillion people, now. Only one planet in the solar system... but less than seven billion people to live on it. It's almost bafflingly uncrowded.

"Nicky?" Grandma asks me, and I realize I've managed to be distracted yet again. "What's wrong? Are you sure you're not feeling sick?" She sounds concerned, very much so, and I feel a tremor of shame and guilt for it.

"No, Grandma," I reply, and again my high, child's voice sounds strange to my ears, "I'm okay. I was just thinking."

"Well, get your bag and let's go in the house," she says after a second.

I pick up the bag as asked, and take off the seat belt, before shimmying out of the back seat. Despite the added inconvenience of everything being so big compared to me, it's overshadowed by the complete lack of age's aches, pains, or discomforts that even twenty second century medicine couldn't entirely eradicate. As much of it was the accumulation of scars both great and almost imperceptible, that regeneration and telomerase treatments can't fully repair. My hand flies to my left shoulder, and I realize that the tattoo I got a hundred twenty odd years ago- or rather, twenty odd years from now?- is gone.

This was certainly not very well thought out, for all that I'd spent longer than a natural human lifetime planning it. It's just like Alexis once said to me about fifty years ago: the smartest people can still make the dumbest mistakes through tunnel vision.

Grandma closes the car door behind me, and Grandpa joins us, leading the way. I follow along; my memories of this property are pretty murky. At the end of the gravel parking there's a concrete path bordering the apartment on stilts, which leads to the larger house. It's something of a squared off C shape, with a wide concrete patio nestled in the crook of the C, and a small, wide stone stairway up to the main, double door. Grandma unlocks the door, and opens it, a loud tinny jingling of several decent sized bells accompanying it. I follow inside almost meekly, taking in the wide living room before us, a hallway at the right exit from the room, and a dining area stretching into a kitchen on the left. The living room has both relatively normal seeming couches and a few chairs made of what looks like rattan or stiff, woven reeds bound with cords, their seats cushioned. It takes me a moment to recognize the large, boxy thing with the stiff wires atop it as an old cathode ray television set. With antenae.

LED sheeting won't be invented until 2031. Flat screen TV's won't hit the mainstream market til... 2010 or so?

The real tremors hit me as I mentally digest the fact that it's going to be another decade before the internet enters American cultural awareness. Isn't it still Darpanet right now? I'm not sure about that; internet history wasn't my field of study. I feel woozy. I need an excuse to get out of sight-- and, I realize, my child bladder is giving me the perfect excuse. I carry myself on into the bathroom, bag still on my shoulder.

An oblong, fuzzy blue throw rug rests in front of a sink that comes up to my chest, with a plastic, two step stool between the rug and the door. The sink is on the right, a bathtub with a pink plastic shower curtain in front of me, and a make up counter with a tall mirror on the left behind the open bathroom door. The toilet is between the tub and the sink; I shut the door behind me and take care of business while attempting to not think about the fact that I'm somewhere between the age of eight and eleven.

It's at this point that, looking around the bathroom, I notice a calendar hanging by the makeup table. May 1989. I'm eleven years old. The knowledge chills me to my core. Grandma was always meticulous about calendars. The school year is almost over. Meaning that I'll be heading back to the mainland for the summer, with my parents. For the last time. After this year, I don't come back.

Living with my parents nearly killed me the first time around. No. No, I can't do that.

I find myself needing to use the stool for the sink; it's an annoyance, mildly humiliating. I use it anyway, because it's either that or I ignore one of the most basic tenets of sanitation. The soap has a scent that triggers early, early memories, flashes of balmy nights with the windows open and the distant sound of surf as moonlight cast speckled shadows on my bedroom wall. Memories more than a century and some decades deep, memories that line up with my current circumstances and environment with an eerie precision.

My room is the next door to the right of the bathroom. A wide, surprisingly neat room for an eleven year old boy, with a toy chest that I know will contain a number of plastic dinosaurs, a mesh bag of marbles, a duffle bag full of Lego blocks, rubber bands, plastic sword cocktail skewers, a pair of blue and yellow plastic yo-yos, and other various preteen treasures.

I briefly consider looking further at these things but the grittiness in places unmentionable is starting to filter through to my consciousness, and I have utterly no desire to test the limits of how much beach abrasion it takes to overcome the dermal resilience of a child. Especially not when the child in question is me. I search through the dresser next to the bed that feels utterly enormous, finding an array of clothes that looks patently ridiculous to twenty second century eyes: brief underwear, shorts with garish colors, a pink tank top with a palm tree on it. Kitschy, tourist debris. I wrestle with the impulse to search my closet for a good suit, preferably something made by Redding and Meyers. The biggest problem with which-- aside from such a suit being worth four or five figures American, even by the standards of current inflation values-- is the company is first incorporated in 2061 or so, a long established and dignified company whose foundation is more than seventy years away.

What a mess this is. How am I going to fit in here?

I decide to shoulder the indignity of looking like an underdeveloped vacationer, and proceed to the bathroom again. It takes me far longer than I like to admit to remember the procedure of operating an analogue, non AI assisted shower, and I get a face full of icy cold water before I recall that hot water took time to warm up prior to the introduction of thermally regulated plumbing pipes. I manage not to let a yelp out, but it's a close thing. Archaic bar soap and an environmentally disastrous plastic bottle of liquid, viscous shampoo are my chemical assistants in my ablution, and I use them clumsily.

This body of mine, so scrawny and small, feels alien to me. A long lost, bad memory. A mental blueprint of self that provoked a frenzy of exercise in my teens, bordering on obsession, and the study of martial arts long after that. Yet for decades, that mental image of myself as small remained unshakeable, such that I never appreciated how large I'd become because in my heart I never stopped feeling small. Even my drive and determination, my achievements in mathematics and temporal physics, could probably be laid at the feet of that particular self image. Not imposter syndrome, per se, but something similar, a nagging sense of not a lack of ability, but a lack of deserving the ability I had.

Maudlin thoughts for a man my age. A lifetime of achievement, of accumulation, of wealth and influence and respect and power, in the grubbing hands of a posturing child in an old man's body, reflected now in the mind of an old man stuck in the body of the scrawny child he was and now, is again.

I finish my shower, no detail of which falling to remind me of how small I am from the position of the shower head above my reach, to the size of the bottles of archaic shampoo in my hands, to the high step over the side of the tub. I haven't the foggiest idea which towel is mine, but grab the nearest and dry myself off quickly. The damp sea air doesn't help matters, of course, and I sorely miss the climate controls of my station, but that's gone now, its accumulation of mass and energy expenses in a fool's errand to return my to my younger days, to play the game all over again instead of standing in bored victory after the fact.

Perhaps it's better this way, though. My thoughts carry a clarity, here. A rapidity and ease. My mind feels, for the lack of a better word, more agile. Despite all the advances of modern medical science and antigerone therapies, neuroplasticity is still in part a function of biological youth and I feel more mentally capable than ever before.

I'm as dry as a towel will get me in the humidity of the islands, a stark contrast to the many years I spent living in the Mojave desert and the many more aboard habitation orbital cylinders where a fast rub down with a towel will start the job that the dry air finishes. It takes me a moment to register that I've forgotten to bring the clothes in with me; I rectify this oversight by scurrying from the bathroom to my room while clad only in my towel, my swim wear left to hang in the bathtub.

Without the needs of sanitation more pressing, I quickly dress myself and look over the duffle of legos, a toy I haven't laid eyes on in over a century. The toy fell out of fashion as the mass economy took over, as mass recycling made counterfeit legos trivially easy and 3D printing licenses were always easy to work around. As such, the vintage pieces scattered so haphazardly in the bag give me a thrill of excitement as I pick out a short one by three pip piece and look at it in my palm.

Nostalgia flickers in me, and I feel a wild impulse to sit on the floor and just... tinker with the toys. I would keep this duffle of Lego blocks until I turned fifteen, when I gave them to a neighbor whose parents couldn't afford to buy any for him. It was an action I only regretted for having moved away and therefore being unable to occasionally play with them when we hung out together.

Ancient history as yet unwritten. Tied to memories of much worse, as my mind draws back to dread as I remember once again that leaving this summer, I never come back. That my grandparents move to Boulder City in a few more years, that my grandfather dies there. But first, my parents separate, my mother marries Charlie, abandons my sisters with my grandparents and runs away with him. The chain reaction of terrible events in my family, the move to Lancaster to care for my sisters and the disaster that entailed.

On one hand, the desire to reinvent myself got me through college. On the other hand, that was a long, miserable process interspersed by years spent on my grandmother's largesse, battling past a GED and auditing classes, a full time and a part time job, scraping together funds from an ever tighter tighter budget during the twilight of the years when enough of my parents' and grandparents' generation still believed it economically viable for a person to bootstrap themselves into a college degree.

More than nineteen years of coming struggle and suffering, all because an eleven year old boy wanted to look out for his little sisters, a task that was well beyond not only my abilities to manage in the coming conditions but worsened their struggles too, in that it prevented them from getting into foster care when it would have done them the most good. I failed so very utterly that when they and I were grown, I just let myself drift away. I don't know what happened to them; Allison only ever called me twice in our adult lives and last I spoke to Star she was living on a ranch in Northern California with her husband.

Despite the passage of more than a century and a half, I remember that span of time vividly enough that I can't bring myself to go through a repeat of the events of my teenage years. I'd chosen nineteen as my target age of return for a reason.

I look up at the analog clock next to my childhood bed, not really seeing the time. Ironic, that.

"Nicky!" I hear from the other room my grandmother calling me. "Wash up for dinner!"

How long was I wool gathering? Far too long. I climb easily to my feet, a thing that I'd all but forgotten the feel of less than... two subjective hours ago? For years I've been mentally preparing myself for the app explosion of the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands, but I'm nearly a decade early. Plans to develop digital assistant programs to get an easy influx of money are out the window.

Then my grandmother's words catch up to me, and I find myself slightly annoyed. I've only just gotten out of the shower, and I'm supposed to wash up for dinner? Then again, I've never sanitized those Lego blocks, and bacteria have no respect. Grudgingly, I acquiesce and wash my hands, then walk across the house to the dining room.