It Began with the Men on the Moon
It began with the men on the moon.
You may perceive this as an arbitrary event. A sentence in a random scrap of digitalia forwarded to you from some seedy, social website. I perceive it as the very last moment of foreplay before this particular timeline exploded across ‘outer space’ into the computer age. In that order.
It’s a part of what makes this Earth so dangerous.
Probably shouldn’t tell you that. Or maybe I already did. Sorry, bits of me keep shifting in and out of time without letting me know where they are headed. And I keep landing in this timeline backwards, for some reason that I can’t remember because that bit shifted away. Still other bits of me are in denial that here I sit, in the waning, silicon-encrusted days of the Primordial, manipulating a plastic A-Open keyboard with the fingers of a temporal human shell born 40 days before the Apollo landing — my thoughts, filtered, through a brain adolesced in the flickering phosphors of the earliest digital cradles of the late 20th Century, AD.
Unbelievable. Half my mind is reeling, just not the half that’s writing this. And I’ve fallen short of the Big Sleep by at least… 5 days! Late, by your reckoning. Thirteen posts were made between now and then (obscure fact — you could say I’m a history buff), and so must thirteen posts be made between then and now. And I’ll need to make them personally (!!), and in reverse order. Not ideal, but March 26th is the day. And it’s no use attempting to disguise the fact that things are different. I’m not that good. It’s a lost cause. And they will laugh at my token attempts.
But, there’s nothing for it. This is a special universe, with special vulnerabilities, but also special qualities. We need to stop the spread of the apocalypses here, or we are lost. And I am well aware my plan amounts to little more than an insanely speculative retcon (which is on most Earths, against the rules), but I’ve decided to break into this timeline. Break it up. Dispense with taboo, and affect it. All of it. Affect you, and be affected. I’m willing to break the future, if I have to, in order to fix it. You have to be willing. Because it’s already broken.
This is the turn of thought we call, ‘The Dawning’, and on my world, it’s the founding ethical principle of what you might call, chrononautics.
Yes, confess it. I am a chrononaut. I slouch through slow eddies of near-forgotten time, tracing a path toward the Bethlehem of the Big Sleep. Beyond which lies hope for my kind, and probably yours as well. But there is always a cost for this, exacted like a pound of flesh from the population of one’s mind. To maximise one’s effect on a timeline with the minimum application of force, one must choose the right moment, to free the right body of its local gravity. And for a sentient body, gravity is memory.
What I’m trying to tell you is that you’re going to be different than you were ‘supposed’ to be, before the Big Sleep. And so will this blog, and so will I. Even if we only meet in cross-time, and even if we can’t reminisce.
So, I need to scrabble together whatever brain I can from here to locate the real rivulet from which this lifestream sprang. And I need to post thirteen tests of Tumblr on the way. The first is this right here, uploaded both to Tumblr (via the iPhone app) and to Blogger (via email), and then imported from Blogger via RSS. If all goes well, you’ll see it in Tumblr, twice.
