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The Incredible Dr. Jones
I swear I was trying to get the hell out of there as fast as I could, because this guy was obviously pretty damn crazy.
“I’m telling you, Neil Gaiman stole my novel!” His voice tilted a little further over the cliff.
Dr. Jones, what a man! Deranged by years of failure, he had eventually fixated on two intertwined ideas. The first: that Neil Gaiman, long deceased, had stolen the idea Jones had had for a novel long before the man was born; and the other, that he, Jones I mean, was going to somehow warp back in time so that Gaiman could inadvertently steal his idea in the first place, somehow. I looked around the hangar at all the esoteric do-dads, the lengths of wire, the slanted writing scrawled over various FilmDislpay© screens. In the middle of the floor sat a small, barely-one-man spacecraft, which Jones busied himself about, rambling. Each time I tried to surreptitiously sidle for the door his eyes seemed to turn on me accusingly, hurt, and adhere me to the floor via heat vision.
“Look!” he cried, slapping a FilmDisplay©. “It’s math! The answer is forty-two! String theory quantifies all of existence! And here!” He leapt to another screen. “Quantum physics posits that time is infinite and has as many dimensions to it as space!
“We are poorly limited creatures. We move through space in three dimensions, out of a possibility of many, many more, but we can only perceive time as a single constant dimension, ever marching on!” He belted out a few bars of the old Russian national anthem with strict authoritative rhythm, a strangely enthusiastic militaristic rendition. “But time is not a line! It is a sphere!”
“Okay,” I said, resigned to this bullshit fate. I had just wanted a restroom, and I ended up here? I hardly thought it was fair.
“Time started as space started at the Big Bang, and expands ever outward towards the end. But! Just as space moves in many directions, so too does time! So, as this chronospherical object expands, it also is simultaneously collapsing! Ergo, there are people in other dimensions who move backward from our time, which they probably perceive as forward, and would consider us backward! Ha!” Jones jumped to another screen.
“And of course there’s no reason not to think that there are creatures out there, who move freely through time, XYZ, while space remains a constant dimension for them, and are layered over many possible realities. Is that so hard to believe? Quantum creatures? Is God so limited as to only have made us? Or is the universe a house of mirrors, each one slightly distorted, so that all created in his image appear so different across multiple realities?”
“I guess that’s possible?”
“Possible? What else could it be defined as if not possible? Of course to them we are only an equally inconceivable possibility as well! Such is the mind of God! to be so faceted, that His creation can never be fully realized from a single vantage point!”
I pointed to a different screen. “So this…”
“Bah! That’s my budget!” I stared dubiously at the pi symbols and mathemagical jargon. “Hardly of consequence now, is it? I’m about to fly this chicken coop and become infinite!”
The Hardly Believable Dr. Jones whipped a final, crudely drawn diagram around. I almost laughed at the display, it was so close to children’s art. A little, almost recognizable craft was flying toward a circle in the middle of the display labeled as “The Epicenter of the Universe.”
Jones glowed with triumph. “I will fly this craft, carefully modified for warp-drive, into the center of Creation itself! There, the white hole that spews forth more space-time resides, pulsing onward, allowing existence, infinity! As time also moves toward the beginning of the universe, so too must we, to find the end of space!”
He gesticulated to the craft in question. “I, Harper Jones, Quantum Mechanic, will fly this to the center of Everything, and as I collide with the center of the white hole that fuels existence, God-rays will permeate my consciousness and I will transcend the fabric of my own reality! My will, my memories, will billow out through every possible eventuality, along every pipeline of time and space, and fill the universe, and with this, a whisper of my consciousness will collide with that of the late Neil Gaiman’s, giving him the glimmer of ingenuity he will have needed to write American Gods!”
“Is that the correct tense you would use for that?”
“Tense will have been… or will be… or is… irrelevant!” the mad scientist concluded with a flourish. “I will exist in all times simultaneously. I will be… godlike!” His eyes gleamed madly as he beamed at this proclamation.
“Yeah, I’m… way too sober for this.”...
Zac Jones is a writer living in Jackson, MI, who spends most of his time trying not to look his age. Right now is as old as he's ever been. I turned around and walked out.
