Читать книгу Deconstructing Dylan - Lesley Choyce - Страница 10

I liked Robyn’s suggestion that it was all an illusion and I liked Robyn a lot. It was really fortunate that I connected with her as soon as she arrived at school. My hair was growing back already, creating a kind of fuzzy stubble. I’d given up on wearing black and wondered what would be next for me. I was like an insect going from the larval phase into something else, I figured. No, not a butterfly, that was for sure. But a metamorphosis nonetheless.

One of my childhood dreams was that someday I would figure out how to travel through time. I understood that all you had to do was travel faster than the speed of light and you could alter time, but no one was offering me a clue about FTL travel. Except my father, that is, who took my question to heart in his clinical, scientific way.

“You want to travel back in time? Not satisfied with the here and now?”

“The here and now, as you call it, sometimes sucks. I don’t want to go back to ancient Egypt. I just want to see what it would be like to be alive, um, say, twenty years ago.”

His brow furrowed as if some small excavating machine had just carved a canyon across his forehead. “Why twenty years ago?”

I didn’t really have an answer. I just had this fascination with everything from the turn of the century. The millennium, as they called it — the year 2000 and the ten years leading up to it. “I think everything was simpler then. Things made sense.”

“Trust me. Things made about as much sense then as they do now. Some people thought the world would end at midnight on December 31, 1999.”

“Maybe it did. Maybe this is all an illusion.” I had bought into Robyn’s theory at least in part. She was now my mentor.

“You’re going to tell me that all matter is made up of 99.9 percent empty space, right?” My father sounded slightly sarcastic but not insulting.

“I was thinking along those lines.”

“That we’re all just bundles of energy, and there really is no such thing as matter?”

“That too.”

“Dylan, I think you should study quantum physics. You’d like it.”

My father often said that he wanted me to go to university and study physics or biochemistry. I wanted to be an entomologist, however. It was an ongoing debate. “If I study quantum physics, could I figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light?”

“You could give it a shot.”

“Then I’ll consider it. What sort of equipment would I need for FTL travel?”

“You’d need a lot of energy would be my guess. If you could get yourself into space and build a spacecraft that was strong enough, then detonate a contained one-hundred-megaton nuclear explosion that could push you out of the solar system, you might, and I say might, approach the speed of light, but I don’t think you could make it work.”

“But if I could, it would alter time, right?”

“Somewhat. But the blast would probably kill you.”

“That’s the downside, eh?”

“Real down.”

“Can’t I just create some kind of force field with my mind and travel back in time?”

“And what kind of force field would that be?” My father could be a bucket of cold water at times.

“I’m not sure. But I’d like to go back to that night of December 31, 1999, or maybe sometime in 1995.”

“Why do you want to go back to the year 1995? That was before you were born.”

“I don’t know. I just think I’d be more at home there.”

“Do you realize how slow computers were then? How primitive the WorldCom was?”

“It was called the Internet back then, remember? The World Wide Web.”

“It was like a tortoise. And everything was two dimensional — video screens, comp monitors, cinascreens. You’d be bored out of your gourd.”

“I am bored out of my gourd — sometimes, anyway.”

“You’re sixteen, Dylan. It’s a tough age. You’ll get through it. Your mother and I love you and we’ll see you through. You’ll go to university. You’ll have the best holoprofs in the country. You’ll meet chicks.”

“Chicks?”

“It was a joke. Chicks was a term they used when I was growing up, although girls hated it.”

“Why would you call them chicks? Like chickens?”

“I don’t know. Language isn’t always logical.”

“Language puts everything into little boxes,” I said. “I don’t trust it. I’d prefer to be telepathic.”

“Oh, that would be swell. Everyone walking around listening in on everyone else’s thoughts.” He was sounding sarcastic again.

“At least then everyone would have to be honest.”

“Is honesty important to you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. It’s one of the old-fashioned virtues and I approve of it and so does your mother. There’s not enough honesty in our world — especially in my job. Even though I work with brilliant men and women, they are always playing games. I can’t tell when anyone is telling me the truth. Makes me want to buy one of those Veriscans.”

“They say the Veriscan is only about 85 percent accurate in telling if anyone is lying.”

“If you buy the upgrade I think it might be closer to 90 percent, but really all it does is register pupil dilation and changes in skin temp, heart rate, and sweat.”

“Miles Vanderhague got caught wearing one in school. Some of the teachers were really pissed off.”

“No one wants to be caught fibbing.”

“Can I have one for my birthday?”

“No. Absolutely not. Why would you want one?”

I thought for a minute. I really did want one. I wanted to know when people were bullshitting me. My parents in particular. It’s sometimes tough on a kid being raised by a couple of eggheads. Even though I knew they loved me, I often had this feeling they had read too many psychology textbooks. And I sometimes thought they were holding too much back.

“I want a Veriscan,” I said, “so I can use it to meet girls — chicks.”

“That’s not ethical. You want to know if they are telling you the truth? It would almost be like reading their minds, invading their thoughts.”

“Precisely. I could ask them directly what they thought about me and I’d know if they were telling the truth. It would cut through a lot of bullshit.”

“Dylan, you are one weird kid. Sometimes I don’t know where you came from.” He was smiling now, at least, and that was a major breakthrough with my father. “But I’m still not buying you a Veriscan for your birthday.”

“Not even a cheap one?”

“No way.”

In my dream, I was at the bottom of Loch Ness. Either I was with the Loch Ness monster or I was the Loch Ness monster. It was unclear to me but it was one of my underwater dreams and I was looking at the surface of the loch and the Scottish sky above. I think I could see the dark underside of boats on the water. There in the depths I was feeling very lonely in an underwater monster sort of way. I was thinking I was the only one of my kind on the planet. I knew that if I surfaced and the truth about me was known, many people would find me fascinating but I would not be able to communicate with them and I would be considered a freak of nature. I did not want that so I stayed at the bottom of the loch and waited for the end of time.

Although I may or may not have actually been the LNM in my dream, I had access to the creature’s memory and that memory was very good. He/she/I remembered a time when there were others like us — great, gentle beasts roaming the seas, well before humans appeared on the scene. It was a time of peace and harmony, which sounds dull when I say it out loud but it was good back then, quite good. And I’m pretty sure we were telepathic. In the dream, it really was like being there.

When I woke up, I was surprised to discover I was still in my bed. I was slightly shocked to see I had two arms and two legs and that I had been returned to 2014. I looked in the mirror and saw that my hair was continuing to grow back on my head but stubble was also starting to appear on my chin. Pretty soon I would actually need to shave. I saw a look in my eyes that said I was disappointed with what I was seeing. But then I remembered Robyn and I cheered up. I remembered that I had promised to go to Tibet with her someday and that cheered me up even more.

It was a Saturday and that meant no school but I had no real plans. I wrote down my dream on my comp — about being the Loch Ness monster. (Now I was convinced I had somehow merged my identity while asleep with the great beast.) I half convinced myself that I had travelled back in time with/as the LNM. Maybe I would not need the hundred-megaton nuke to power my time travel after all.

Sitting before my home comp, I fed in a profile of the LNM and asked the searcher how long ago it would have been that such creatures roamed freely. Sixty-five million years ago was the answer.

“Why did they disappear?” I asked the searcher.

The sweet, feminine voice (the one I had programmed) came back immediately to say, “Probably a meteorite, Dylan. An extremely massive chunk of rock from space. First the collision, next the crater, and then a huge column of debris catapulted into the atmosphere and then drifted all over the earth, cutting off the sun. It meant the extinction of many earth creatures.” She sounded so sad and sweet when she said this, and I felt a pang of regret too when she sobbed. I knew it was only programmed emotion (the upgrade I had installed last month, the one my father found foolish), but my own sadness was real.

“Dinosaurs and other creatures, like your friend the Loch Ness monster, had been around for 100 million years. It was their planet.”

“They didn’t know what hit them,” I said. “And then they were gone. All of them gone. All but one.”

“It has not been absolutely proven that the creature exists,” she countered.

“I know,” I said. “But it hasn’t been proven that it doesn’t exist, right?” I asked.

“Correct.”

“But sixty-five million years is a long time. Nothing could live that long.”

“No single organism. But life regenerates.”

“Remind me how long humans have been around.”

“Less than four million years.”

“That’s not very long, is it?”

“Depends on your point of reference.”

“Compared to dinosaurs.”