1983

The year is 1983, and I am going to turn thirteen in November. It's the third of June. I have already seen Return of the Jedi five times. I am proud of this fact, at this critical time in my life, as it is currently three more times than my best friend, Kale. His name is actually Justin, but like me, his folks are Portuguese, and it seems like every meal is kale this, kale that. So, I just call him Kale, “Kale of the Kale Family, The family who eats kale.” He doesn’t seem to mind being called “Kale,” and I let him call me “Flinch,” somehow that describes my nervous, distracted nature better than “John.” Life is simple. School and friends and movies and video games. Speaking of games, Kale and I are supposed to be going to see War Games tonight.

I should also mention that this is when I died for the first time.

Is it murder if you kill yourself? I mean, not suicide, but actually find and kill yourself, as a separate entity. I always wondered if that was why suicide was illegal, just in case someone was able to clone themselves, or time travel, or some other way you might find yourself confronted by yourself. I apologize for this being all out of order. It's a side effect, I suppose of the life I have been living. Let me start at the end, and work back to this, this...beginning.

I should also mention that this is when we all died for the first time.

***

I’ve always had a fascination with the idea of the multiverse and paradoxes. Specifically within the realm of time travel. I’ve seen all the movies and read all the (good) books. I know all the theories, from multiverse to pandimensional to a singular timeline. But not really knowing what to believe always bugged me. So I made it my life’s work to find out the truth.

It all started when I was fourteen, after discovering a Doctor Who marathon playing during a PBS fundraising telethon. Kale and I both stayed up for hours watching what felt like an endless stream of time-travelley goodness. Kale is a good friend, the kind that stays up and watches Doctor Who with you, even though he doesn’t get it.

That was a turning point for me, me and Kale, and The Doctor. I knew I would never be fully satisfied until I had an answer of scientific basis and not pure speculation. I also knew that the day would soon come when Kale and I found less and less in common. In my eyes, the sci-fi writers had just as much claim to describing the truth as the physicists did, sort of like how the atheists had as much right to claim there was no God as those of faith did to believe there was.

I admit I kept to myself a lot in high school. I wouldn’t say I was a nerd; I still had friends. Kale was one of them. He took to sports naturally, and that uncommon interest did drive us further apart. Kale entered ROTC early in high school, and I somehow always knew he was the type to become a weapon for someone else. Always looking for something to fight for or believe in. I don’t mean that to sound as if he wasn’t his own man or that he was easily controlled. No, but he and I were different. I wanted to make my own way, find my own path, and Kale... Well, he was more of a follower. I’m just glad it wasn’t of me.

“You always got your nose in a book, neh? Why don’t you stop reading and start living?” Kale would say to me. For a good while in high school, I felt there might be something wrong with me. This obsession I developed with time travel and, more so, with paradoxes. Wanting to solve that unsolvable question. It ate at me. Most nights, I lay in bed and try to figure a way to beat a paradox. I would create scenarios in my head, put myself in a sticky situation and just try to have a breakthrough. I longed for a chance to make sense of it; to travel and not screw it all up like every movie I ever watched. I knew the risks. It didn’t stop me from wanting it, though.

I wanted to go back and tell myself the answer. Go back and erase all these years of wonder that drove me to the brink of insanity.

Of course, at that point, the question was moot. Simply a nagging query I couldn’t answer. What I lacked in athletics I made up for in academics. By my senior year, I had already completed two concurrent bachelor’s programs in prerequisite math and physics classes at Crenshaw Community College. Sure, not the most prestigious educational establishment, but it was what my family could afford, and honestly, the books taught me what I needed. I was used to knowing more than my instructors. I’d been sent to the principal’s office more than once for debating outdated information with my teachers. Remember, this was 1988, and there were no cell phones in every kid’s pocket, no Google-Box, no inter-webs. Just whatever the teacher felt like teaching, and honestly, most of it was crap.

By this time, Kale had already enlisted in the Army and would leave for boot camp immediately after graduation. We made it all the way through high school and became such different adults than we were kids, but our friendship endured. I was proud of that. He kept me tethered to the real world. His sense of honor, his duty to his country. I only pulled my head out of the clouds long enough to talk to Kale, and he only had his head in the clouds long enough to talk back.

I subscribed to many scientific journals and even contributed a few anonymous articles between 12th grade and when college started. Once my knowledge overshadowed what I was learning, I decided to keep my discoveries to myself. I didn’t want anyone to find out what I was planning to build. I had a life mission, you know? I couldn’t rely on anyone else to get me where I needed to be, nor did I want to risk having it taken away from me. I think all that effort got me noticed, and my hard work paid off, landing me a full scholarship to M.I.T. That was thanks, in no small way, to a letter of recommendation by Dr. Harlan Fredericks, who later became a mentor to me. He seemed to have the same sort of drive and determination as I did, but I never did find out what his focus was.

I was still an undergrad, if you discount the degrees from Crenshaw, when I had my a-ha moment. It's not the kind of thing you could ever forget. Every aspect and detail of that day is etched into my memory. It was October 31st, 1991, and I had just been dumped. Dumped on Halloween. My girlfriend, Julie, met me at a frat party near Boston College. We agreed to surprise each other with our costumes. I may have been the only one surprised to see Julie dressed as ‘Slutty Nurse.’ The nurse part I got since she was a nursing student, but the slutty part, well, that just attracted the wrong sort of attention. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no prude, no bible-thumping-opinionated-misogynist. Still, Julie was already unapproachably hot, with curves in all the right places, and this outfit was obviously triggering porn-star fantasies in the boys at this party. Julie seemed to enjoy the attention of the jocks a bit too much. I’m not one for confrontation, and if I’m being honest, I didn’t do a great job of giving Julie the attention she sought. I suppose I took it for granted. Somehow, a woman that sexy had decided I was her type. It never really made sense to me, but I certainly wasn’t going to question it at the time. She was entirely too much fun in the sack.

The more she drank, the more attention she got, and the less my Tom Baker-era Doctor Who costume seemed to warrant her attention. My mind wandered to calculations and power conversion algorithms, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see her having fun flirting with men twice my size, with half my brain.

Eventually, when I caught her making out with one of the guys she had been flirting with, she just stared me dead in the eye, that way a drunk will do, and said coldly, “Why don’t you jump in your RE-TARDIS and go find yourself a new companion.”

Touché, Julie, for using my love of Doctor Who in such a puerile yet clever way. It was fine. She really was more of a distraction than anything useful in my life. But, damn, she did have a great ass. To comfort my mildly bruised ego, I imagined her putting it to good use that night, getting herself knocked up by one of those jocks, and having to drop out of school, so, yeah... Enjoy that life, Julie.

I left the party that night and returned to the little house off campus my folks had bought for me. They figured that since I had earned a full scholarship and saved them thousands, the least they could do was give me a private place to study. It wasn’t the nicest house in town, but it belonged to my father’s brother and wife. When Aunt Rose decided to move in with her sister after Uncle Alfred died, my folks bought it from her at a family discount. I think it was more a case of Aunt Rose wanting to keep the house in the family, and perhaps my having more of a future than her own kids made it easier to choose me. Ironic, that. She thought about my future while I thought about my past.

They were good people, my folks, not terribly well educated, but they had big, kind hearts. They tried to know me, and they did, to an extent. Them giving me that house during college was exactly what I needed to accomplish my goals. The solitude and anonymity. It meant all the more to me when they passed away in 1990, victims of an icy road and stubborn disregard for seat belts. They were good people, and I still miss them, but without the life insurance payout, I could never have afforded half the equipment I needed.

With the distraction of Julie and her mostly-exposed-breasts and latex-suppressed-nipples fading into the periphery of my mind, I could finally think about one remaining obstacle with my machine. Oh, I’m sorry - I haven’t mentioned the machine yet, have I? Talk about burying the lead, sheesh.

I built a functional time machine. Well, at this point, I wouldn’t say it was a time machine...technically. It did have a clock on it, so, yeah: Time Machine.

The breakthrough, early on, was realizing the one thing that none of the sci-fi writers ever addressed when they talked about time travel; stellar drift. Even if I can target a point in time, I have to be able to create a wormhole through space and time that connects to where my target was or will be in space relative to now. The universe is speeding up as it expands, traveling, and with it, the galaxy, this solar system, and this planet. That means in 1984, my intended target, the Earth wasn’t anywhere near where it is right now. If I just calculated for time, I’d step out into outer space, where the Earth won’t even physically be for seven more years. That would be very bad, indeed. It was this insanely complex calculation that had plagued me these last few years.

The only person that even knew I was building this thing was Kale. Kale, who did not, as you know, go to M.I.T. We would speak on the phone a couple of times a month and catch up. He would tell me about Germany or France and how amazing it was to drive an M1 Abrams Tank through the targeting range, or better still, through town. I’m sure he thought me daft with all my technobabble and physics talk.

I tried several times to explain how the damn thing was supposed to work, but all he would say was, “Flinch, you know you’ll never have the balls to use it even if you make it work.”

Every time he said it, I believed it a little more, and somehow it became alright that I hadn’t finished. It was all I ever worked towards, but the prospect of actually using it... Well, that’s some scary shit, I tell you what.

But that night, that Halloween night, it was different. Getting dumped opened my eyes, and my brain. I had my priorities again, and ‘knowing’ was at the top of the list. I had my breakthrough, and that a-ha moment came. That final calculation helped me get the machine set up precisely the way I needed for it to target the correct space and time. Every parameter, every combination of heavy metals and homemade superconductors, every line of code in that ancient XT 8086 was exactly as I had been building, in my head then my basement, since I was a fourteen-year-old watching a Timelord avoid EXTERMINATION by plunger-wielding rubbish bins called Daleks.

I powered up the machine and slowly turned the dial...100...200...300. All the way to 1000, and as the event horizon appeared before me, all those crazy sci-fi theories flooded my head once again. All those late-night paradox riddles. Every time travel movie, book, debate, and heated argument I ever saw, read, or had was about to be put to rest.

I would be the first man in history to travel through time.

The thoughts of all the hard work came to me at that moment. Self-doubt washed over me, and then I had an odd moment of clarity.

Why hadn’t I ever heard of ME before? If I was about to successfully step through a portal to 1984, then why wouldn’t I already have known I had done so?

Again, just another reason to go. Another paradox I need to solve.

I had to know.

I left it running for a good ten minutes while I tried to muster the courage to step through. I decided to call Kale one last time. If this was one of those stories where I cease to exist, then I suppose it wouldn’t much matter, at least to Kale, but for me...I needed to say goodbye. And, I suppose to rub it in his face that I do have those ‘balls’ he was so concerned with. Stepping into the machine, I mean. I don’t mean I want to rub my balls in his face.

Gross.

Kale and I talked for a bit, but I still don’t think he believed I had actually done it. I even held the Uniden cordless phone up to the doorway to the basement so he could hear it humming and crackling with all sorts of energy that would probably give me and half the neighborhood testicular cancer. The male half, anyway. He just said, “Good Luck, bro. I hope you find what you’re after.” He informed me that he would be gone for a while, shipping out to something he referred to as Desert Storm. He sounded excited to finally see some action, which again put life in perspective for me.

I hung up the phone, took a deep breath, and walked straight down to the basement. I looked at the machine, with its six-foot-tall circular arrangement of neodymium magnets rotating in opposite directions, the coils of miles of wire wrapped around the rare earth elements, and the CRT screen displaying millions of lines of assembler code. My baby was working overtime to make micro-adjustments to keep the field viable.

I swallowed hard and simply took a step. One step through the portal, and that was that. I was standing in an empty parking lot. I knew I had been transported in space but saw no evidence that I had traveled in time.

The building seemed familiar, but I’ll be honest, I don’t make a habit of memorizing the backs of commercial buildings. The wind changed direction, and I caught a whiff of a familiar scent; buttery popcorn? I walked toward the front of the structure, and as I rounded the corner, I could see the marquee of the movie theater:

WAR GAMES - MATTHEW BRODERICK - ALLY SHEEDY

And beneath it;

RETURN OF THE JEDI - HARRISON FORD - MARK HAMILL - CARRIE FISHER

Hmmm, not 1984.

Well... If that didn’t place me squarely in 1983, the pegged pants, Members Only jackets, acid washed jeans and hair teased so high I could smell the Final Net over the popcorn surely did.

Opening night of War Games. I was at this theater tonight, with Kale, at the 9 pm show. I stopped an unkempt man exiting the theater and asked him the time. 8:30 pm was the reply. I became understandably excited. I was going to see my mom again. She’ll be dropping Kale and me off later tonight. I would also get to see my younger self. That will be weird. I just stood there by the steps that lead up to the ticket window, thinking about what sort of paradox I could cause if I tried to speak to my mother.

Just then, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to address the tapper. It was me. I had tapped myself on my own shoulder. Another me.

But not me. Not exactly me.

We were not dressed alike, but he was me. We looked at each other for a moment, knowing that something was wrong, and it was one of the scenarios we each had feared. The idea that the me that lives in 1983 is now a separate version of me because I came here.

I fractured the timeline.

This me I see now is him. The other me, as an adult. A different me, who also came back, tonight.

“John, I need you to come with me. I have to show you something,” the other me said, gesturing with a nod that I should follow him back behind the theater.

I didn’t say a word, just followed him. The lot behind the movies was empty. It seemed only employees parked back there, despite all the broken beer bottles and other trash. As we rounded the corner, I saw a flash of light, then another about five feet from it, and another ten feet further. I let my eyes adjust after the last flash, and as the sun had finally set in the late summer hour, the mercury vapor lamps in the back lot came to life. Popping and pinging as the blueish light ramped up and started to flood the area.

The lot was filled with people. With men. With me.

What the hell?

I reached out for the other me, and pulled him back, “Where are they coming from?” Before he could answer, two more popped in.

“Every time one of us arrives it fractures the prime timeline yet again. Another version of us is created in another parallel universe,” I said to myself, so it appeared.

I replied to the seemingly smarter version of myself, “But that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!”

“John,” he continued, “you assumed there was one answer, right? Either there’s one universe and one timeline or an infinite multiverse and infinite timelines?”

I nodded, waiting to hear more, distracted by the flashes of more versions of myself arriving in the dark, warm summer night.

“I think you missed a step in your calculations, John. Your version of the machine is tuned to this universe, and every version of you created by a fracture of this timeline arrives in this universe. No matter where they started. Hell, you might not even be from this universe. I know I’m not.” He shrugged at the absurdity of the rapidly filling lot.

“How can you know that?” I asked my other self.

His reply made perfect sense, “Because when I was a kid, Revenge of the Jedi came out last Christmas, and War Games never got released because Ally Sheedy OD'd and died while filming.”

The lot continued to fill up, and new versions of me, Flinch, were starting to pop in and knock over other Flinches. The self-control and scientific curiosity was starting to wear thin. As I looked around, I could see groups of ‘me’ having this same conversation. We came together in the middle of the lot, away from where most of the travelers were arriving.

The other me that had come to get me raised his hand, and the others stopped talking so he could address them.

“Do any of us have a way to stop this?” The crowd began to murmur again as we all tried to think of a way to put an end to this ridiculous paradox we created. No one had any answers. None of us from any universe had ever thought of this exact scenario.

There was a shuffle in the back, and the crowd spread, and that’s when I saw him. From the darkness into the center of the circle walked the only anomaly none of us Flinches had expected.

Kale.

He walked towards me as if he knew me, but how could he? He probably didn’t know any of us.

“Kale,” I shouted as he approached. He seemed older, perhaps thirty? Dressed in what looked like digital camo, with a fully stocked utility belt like some sort of time-traveling military Batman.

“Flinch,” he said with a nod. “I’m going to fix this, for all of us. You don’t don’t know what the hell you did, bro.”

I replied, “Kale, what did I do?”

“You finally grow a pair and you kill us all? This shitstorm you started, here in 1983, by 1999, millions of copies of you are here. You’ve single-handedly overpopulated the country. There’s no food, no housing, no way to keep up with all these new versions of you, and every attempt to stop it just creates more of you.” His face was a mix of frustration and sympathy. I would soon discover why.

“So, how did you get here? Why are you here?” I asked Kale.

“They chose me because they knew any version of you would listen to me and let me do my duty. The other versions of you helped us build another machine in 1998. Your original one was never found, they think it ceased to exist in our timeline once you fractured the shit out of the multiverse. They built one that could send me back to stop you from coming here, to begin with,” he replied.

“I hate to burst your bubble, Kale, but look around you. You’re a little late!” I said to him. The shock of it all started to sink in; what my genius and ignorance had caused.

“No, Flinch, I’m not late,” he said looking at his watch, “I’m right on time.” He looked me in the eyes, and I could see the determination on his face. He nodded again, then shook his head, muttering to himself as he turned away, “The balls on this one, neh.”

He departed the still growing crowd and headed towards the front of the movie theater. I called out to him, but he didn’t turn back. He just kept on marching. His mission suddenly became clear to me, as my mother pulled up to drop Kale and me off to see War Games.

We got out of the car, my mother making me kiss her cheek as I took the five-dollar bill from her hand. As she drove away I held my gaze on the little Pinto Wagon until the taillights disappeared into the inky blackness of Route Six.

Then I heard the screams. A woman calling for help as she stood over the bodies of two young boys in the front lot.

Kale was gone. I turned back to ask the other versions of me what they saw, but they were gone as well. All of them.

Gone.

***

“So the two boys were laying there, deceased, and suddenly you were alone?” asked the man in the dark grey suit.

“Yes,” I replied, agitated at having told this story four times already, “apparently Kale’s mission was a success.”

“Why did every one of the other copies of you disappear, except this version of you?” He fiddled with a gold pen he had been taking notes with earlier. Craning his neck and adjusting his tie, he sat back in a sturdy metal chair. The sound of condescension in his tone and the look of disbelief on his face told me he just wasn’t buying my story.

“Listen, agent,” I answered, leaning in to remove the space he had just created between us, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

“Try me,” he retorted with a smug look.

I sat back in my own metal chair and looked up at the harsh fluorescent lights of the interrogation room I now occupied. I nodded and said, “Ok, here we go...again... Try and follow along. When I set my target for 1984—”

“Next year. You were trying to go into the future?” He interrupted.

“No.” I made an attempt to remain calm. “I was in 1991, as I told you. 1984 was the past, my past. Well, fine, it’s your future if you need to think at it that way.”

“Go on.” The agent prompted as he made another note with the gold pen on the yellow legal pad he had securely affixed to a leather binder.

I continued. “My calculations were off, not just in terms of the date, but I didn’t have any empirical evidence to support multiple universe timelines, so I built the machine with a singular resonance frequency. That means it was tied to a specific universe. My own. When engaged, the machine would create a stable wormhole through space-time and allow the observer, the traveler, to enter one end on the machine side and exit where the wormhole’s event horizon opened in the destination time and place.

In every other parallel universe where another version of me built a time machine, their machines would also have been built with that core resonance frequency. Do you follow? No matter where they were from, when they walked through, they ended up here.”

The agent furrowed his brow and I could see the wheels turning as he processed my simple explanation. He leaned in again and said, “Ok, that’s your theory on how all these other John Souzas appeared, but where did they, and this older Kale, er, Justin Machado, go?”

I looked him dead in the eye and said, “You’re really going to hate this part, but when older Kale killed the younger versions of ourselves, well, I never grew up in this timeline, so I never built the time machine that started all this.”

He huffed and scratched his balding head. “Then why do you suppose Kale killed his younger self also? I mean, if you are to blame for all this, why kill himself?”

As I tapped emphatically on the table, the sound of the handcuffs hitting the steel top made my point seem much more dramatic than I intended. “Because he needed to close the loop. When I entered this universe, the me that lived here in 1983 ceased to be the me I am now, the one from 1991. The same thing happened to Kale when he arrived from 1999. That caused a separate fracture, a separate paradox that he couldn’t leave unattended to.”

“I’ll ask again, John, if any of this bullshit is true, why are you still here?” He asked as if that one question would dispel all my lies and catch me cold.

“Because,” I answered, “I started this, and when I did, I was the first one here. That put me outside of the fracture to this universe and this timeline. I am the prime observer. The Flinch that died in that parking lot wasn’t me the second I got here. He was the one who would have grown up to create a time machine that brought all of them here, and when he died, they never could have come. But I saw them. I met them. I spoke with many of them. They existed, and now they don’t. Time doesn’t reset or unfracture for everyone. Just for those created by the fracture.”

With that, the agent got up, collected his things from the cold steel table and left the room. I could see him shaking his head as he talked in hurried phrases. He seemed very agitated as he spoke to the other agents in the hall. He looked over at me through the security-glass window, threw his hands up, and stormed off down the hall.

His body language made it apparent that he didn’t believe a word I had said. I didn’t blame him. I was unprepared for this. For trying to tell the truth. For ever wanting to come back here. I finally have a perfect paradox and its solution, and I’ll never get to execute it.

It's my own fault for getting arrested. What possessed me to walk to the front of the theater, I’ll never know. Why I ran away and drew attention to myself, I’ll never know.

I sat in the cold white room for nearly an hour before something happened. They just left me there, cuffed to the table as if I were an animal. The fluorescents in the room flickered, and there was a flash of light, and there he stood.

Kale.

Sharply dressed in a black suit with a black tie, he walked across the room, quickly uncuffed me, grabbed my wrists, and pulled me to my feet.

“Time to go, Flinch,” said this man in his mid-forties, this older-yet version of my best friend Kale.

“What the hell? How? Where are we going?” I asked, as if I cared. Any place was better than locked up for double homicide of two small boys or locked away as a nutcase.

“Home, Flinch, we’re going home,” Kale replied.

Another flash appeared, and the event horizon was stable in the room; that same six-foot circular shape. I could hear the humming and crackling of the machine, my machine on the other side.

Kale put his arm around me and we walked through and in an instant, we were in a nearly empty warehouse. The portal closed up and ceased to be. The machine powered down and became silent.

It wasn’t my machine. Not quite.

“We’ve made some changes, Flinch, but we need you to help us with a few things.” Kale explained as we walked towards a set of chairs.

“Where are we, Kale,” I asked, “when are we?”

“New Mexico. It's 2023. I’ve been looking for you for a long time, bro.” Kale sat. “When you disappeared Halloween night in 1991, I thought you had offed yourself. I thought that all this time travel bullshit you had been obsessed with finally got to you. I came home on leave before Desert Storm and found Julie. She told me she hadn’t seen you since that night, that she broke up with you and, get this, went and got herself knocked up by some d-bag she met at that Halloween party.

“Anyway, I busted into your house expecting to find you sitting in the cast iron tub with a blood-soaked note pinned to your chest, but instead, I found your machine in the basement,” Kale motioned towards this other version of my machine I see now sitting on the floor a few feet away.

Kale continued, “From what I heard, a Dr. Harlan Fredericks from M.I.T. knew what you were up to, what you were building, and got the Army involved. I called in some favors and managed to get assigned to the task force that was sent to investigate your disappearance. Being your best friend sort of made me invaluable, I guess. We had the machine functional by 1995, but without any notes, numbskull, we couldn’t really set a destination. By 2002 we figured that out but still didn’t know where in space-time you were.”

“How did you find me?” I asked Kale as he poured me a hot coffee from a plaid thermos.

“That room you were in, just now, that whole interrogation was buried, apparently, because the suspect ‘escaped custody.’ It wasn’t until 2019 that the file was turned over to us when that agent, Harris, was killed on the job. He was secret service at the time, and his personal belongings were examined for sensitive data before they were released to next of kin. Once we had that report, we knew where and when to find you. They sent me to get you, so you would have a familiar face to welcome you home.”

I was in shock. I think I was, I really do. What Kale had told me made me realize that I had never lost my best friend, and he never gave up trying to find me. I asked him about that, “Why would you spend so many years of your life looking for me?”

Kale smiled and answered, “My entire unit was killed on their second week in Iraq, Flinch. Your disappearance saved my life. Finding you and saving yours was the least I could do.”

“I don’t know what to say, Kale. Thank you. Thank you for believing me and never giving up on me.” I felt a tear about to escape, and I wiped it away.

“C’mon, bro, let’s get out of here. I live just a few miles away. We’ll get you a warm meal and we can catch up. A lot has changed in the last thirty-two years,” said Kale.

“I bet,” I said, “I can’t wait to see how technology has advanced.”

“Dude, you have no idea. Just wait until we get to the house. I have Revenge of the Jedi on HD-DVD.”