foolish_m0rtal | Brown College Question 4B

b. Dear Applicant: It seems my doppleganger appeared in a series of erotic daguerrotypes from the late 1800’s. Please advise.

I almost had her today at noon outside of the pizzeria I remember liking so much. Funny how I didn’t think of her as myself now. There was only the me before I built the Hopper and got lost in time and the me who’s travelled for years trying to fix this mess and get back the life I used to have.

I’d forgotten a lot running around through history. I didn’t remember the name of the little girl who gave me shelter one night when I had to hide the Hopper from the Confederates or the face of the scrawny cop that pressed his spare gun into my hand when we heard the familiar rat-a-tat chatter of shots coming from the speakeasy around the corner. I still had that gun even now.

Funny then, how I could remember this day down to the letter from what I ate for breakfast that morning to the time I fed my cat before leaving for the lab again in the evening.

She was eating a slice of pizza and sitting close to the window with the daguerreotypes I’d slipped in her mailbox spread across the table. The ones from 1894 when I’d desperately needed money to buy parts for the Hopper. Apparently she hadn’t understood the glaring clue, and had some kind of family tree spreadsheet up on her laptop. I guess she was wondering if it was some distant embarrassing relative that the rest of the family had never talked about and if this was the start of some strange silver halide blackmail.

It struck me that I could just wait till she left in the Hopper and then pop back into her old life like she’d never left. It was dangerously tempting. I wondered if her co-workers would notice the difference, see how old my eyes were in the rest of my face. I wondered what she would think to finally come home and find me sleeping in her bed and wearing her clothes. That sent a chill through me. Who knows if there was another me already there on the couch flipping through the TV channels? Who knows if there were a myriad of us here poised and ready to spring and claim what was ours. A smallish flat. A temperamental old tabby called Lion-O. A day in day out job at the laboratories working on applications of theoretical physics. Such small things that were worth so much to us now.

I looked inside again, angry that she could take all this for granted and leave so readily. What would she have said if she’d seen me? The only thing I could have ever told her was that science without ethics was horror. A horror that I’d been living for the past fifteen years. Maybe fifteen. It was difficult to judge time when history was past, future, and present all smashed together.

I didn’t know what else to do. Last resort, I could kill her. Or at least incapacitate her long enough to put the project on hold for a little longer so I could figure out what to do. I didn’t want to resort to violence.

The person inside wearing my face finally snapped into place, and I realized she was me, and surely when I had been sitting in Joe’s Pizzeria looking over those strange daguerreotypes , there had been another me watching from outside, debating whether murder was really the answer. But I’d lived and built the time machine. That only meant one thing.

I’d failed.

I hadn’t been able to stop myself from building the Hopper or had the guts to shoot the gun. So here I was now, already pre-destined to fail.

No. I wouldn’t accept that. Why else did humans dream of time machines than to have a second chance? A do-over? This was mine, and I would take it as the gift I’d clumsily intended it to be fifteen years ago.

I touched the gun in my pocket. I could do this. I knew exactly how the Byzantines had made Greek fire and where Montezuma’s treasure was hidden and why no one would ever find it. I’d evacuated those poor people from Roanoke Colony. I’d called the Washington Post and spoken to Bob Woodward about what was going on in Washington.

Sometimes you just had to make your own future.

There! I'm finally finished with the Brown Application. *falls over* I was most concerned about this one, and put it off till the last minute. (an hour ago) The application is due this Friday, and I wanted to send it in early. I realized this meant I would have to send it in on Wednesday. Which was tomorrow. This gave me the impetus I needed! Comments are appreciated, but note that I have to send the application in tomorrow, so no matter how wonderful I think your suggestions are (and I do not doubt that they will be wonderful) I will not be able to include them. Mostly, they will probably just make me say, "Oh dammit, I should have written that!" and make me sad.

But I still look forward to what you have to say!