Catch 2222

Kandra Jardeaux sat at the breakfast table and skimmed over the morning’s headlines. Same old
stuff, although he had to admit, actually seeing “The World Ends Today” in black and mauve was a
bit unsettling. He reached over and switched the monitor off with an irritated flick of the wrist.

They’d known about it for weeks now, and after fifty-seven days of twenty-four hour hysteria he didn’t think there was much the NewsVid could add to the story. You really couldn’t blame them, though. It wasn’t every day that the Earth was struck head-on by a ninety-four mile wide asteroid, and as stories went, this was probably the mother of them all. Every video rag and newszine in the United Hemisphere had been saturating the airwaves with asteroid minutiae ever since a wayward comet had blasted into the orbiting chunk of rock between Mars and Jupiter and sent it falling toward the Sun, on a collision course with destiny. Hot off the press! The end of civilization! Get your asteroid souvenirs!

He wondered if the dinosaurs had cashed in on their cataclysm the way the world’s latest dominant species had.

But profiteers aside, the truly amazing thing to Kandra was the way most people were reacting. Life was generally proceeding on schedule, and instead of the mass panic you might expect in the face of such a disaster, his nutrient bus continued to arrive right on time. The monorails were still humming smoothly along, power was uninterrupted and the brain-twists were still begging for credits outside his building.

So, on this last day of existence, he took it in stride when the telewall began chiming.

Kandra crossed the room and passed his hand over the “accept” sensor. The windows darkened as the living room shimmered briefly, and faded into a three dimensional image featuring a rather frazzled looking attorney seated behind a large plexiglass desk.

“Good day Mr. Jardeaux,” he intoned nasally, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have been going through the company files - setting things in order, don’t you know - and I came across a letter addressed to your attention buried in our records. I thought you might like to have it.”

“Of course, just drop it in my e-mail.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the lawyer replied. “you see, this is an actual letter. Written on realpaper, sealed in an envelope, the whole schmear. It’s the first one I’ve ever actually seen, except in museums and the holoflicks, of course. Very valuable, I’d guess, or at least it would be if the world wasn’t ending today. Pity.” The man removed a portion of his skull and flicked absent-mindedly at a few switches.

“Jeez, I hate it when they do that,” Kandra thought, grimacing.

“It was supposed to have been delivered to you months ago, but as you can imagine, things have been rather a-jumble around here lately. Apparently it was mis-filed by a temp last March. My apologies.
I’ll teleport it over to you in a few minutes, if you’ll be so kind as to give my secretary your credit authorization for billing purposes. Money makes the world go ’round, at least for a few more hours.”

“Right,” Kandra replied and placed his thumb on the scanner.
A letter! A mystery. Surely, a voice from the distant past,” Kandra mused. Realpaper hadn’t been
available for over a century! “Well, I guess history can be put off for a few more minutes.”

He crossed the room, and sat down next to the teleportal, calmly waiting for his package to materialize. The world might be running out of time, but he still had his whole life in front of him. He chuckled
quietly, as he regarded the odd-looking tangle of cyber-relays, fusion ramps, Doery flags and optical switches that protruded from his chair.

In a few days he would be hailed as the savior of the world, and he was rather looking forward to it.

It seemed like it was only yesterday that he had made the discovery. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” he thought, and smiled at the pun. He had been watching the electrocution of a shoplifter on his favorite game show, Hang ’em High, when the figurative door in his mind had been blown open as
God dropped the secret to time travel into his lap. He had leapt to his feet, Super-Coke spouting out
of his nose, and dashed to the computer to record his insight while it was still fresh. The logic was inescapable. Time wasn’t linear, it was all twisted, chock full of tunnels winding through the fabric of space like some kind of cosmic Swiss cheese. All you had to do was to enter the cheese at point A, and if you picked the right time-tunnel, you would emerge at point B in the past, the future, or if you chose a circular route, right back where you had started. But getting to point A in the first place was the trick.

Well, the key to the cheese was the chair in which he sat.

For a while, he hadn’t thought he could get it built before the asteroid hit, but he’d made it. Barely.

And today would be the Great Escape. Hours before impact, he would exit, stage left, leaving this time and space behind as the Earth was torn apart. He’d travel back far enough to warn humanity about its coming demise, (ten years should be about right) and then reap the benefits of a grateful World Council. When 2222 rolled around again and the comet returned, all it would encounter would be empty space.

Power and fame. Money and love. The adoration of billions of people would be his.

Kandra Jardeaux. King of the World.

And in the midst of his reverie the machine beside him began to hum, and the envelope appeared.

“And now, for one small mystery before I venture into the larger.” he said, gingerly slitting the container and removing the paper within.

It was written in his own hand, and said...

Kandra! Greetings from the stone age. 1937. My god, they barely have electricity here. Before I go any further, I believe a celebration is in order. Congratulations to us. As this letter evidences, the time machine worked (although a little too well). We were right about the nature of time, but the McGregor effect was considerably stronger than anticipated, making it nearly impossible to choose the correct time-tunnel. The ride was rough, and the landing was rougher, causing irreparable damage to the time machine. Luckily, I escaped with little more than scratches and a bruised ego. Since then I have been scrabbling about the twentieth century trying to figure out a way to communicate with you.

After a few days, I hit upon our law firm. The world may pass away, but lawyers go on and on. In exchange for Grandfather’s gold ring, they have undertaken to deliver this letter to you (me) in 2222. The timing, of course, was crucial. It had to be after we tumbled onto the Cheese Theory, (I didn’t want to take any chance of disrupting the creative process) but in time to make corrections (if possible) to the flight calculations. Whether this letter will survive the centuries will depend on the reputation of their firm and a lot of luck.

That was the good news.

The bad news is that there is a larger problem than merely being able to control the tunnel selection process. It would seem that traveling through time has affected my body’s functions on a microscopic level. As near as I can determine using the primitive instruments available here, the osmatic action of my cellular membranes is becoming increasingly distorted. My body cells are taking in water faster than they can get rid of it. I figure I have another thirty hours left before I literally swell up and explode. Not a death I particularly relish. Let’s hope you/I are successful and this timeline ends before it comes to that.

So, there it is. I know that given time, you can overcome these problems. You have to, there’s no other way out. Good luck to us, we’ll need it.

Yours truly,

Yours Truly.

Kandra exhaled slowly, allowing the letter to fall to the floor at his side.

Although he had the means to travel through the ages, for the world and for him, time had run out. In the end, humanity’s destruction would be chalked up to a misplaced letter. And wasn’t that the way it had always been? The more invincible the foe seemed, the less force that was needed to bring it down.

Two choices. A slow, painful death in an unfamiliar time or a fiery denouement by asteroid.

“Some choice,” he whispered to himself.

He walked into his kitchen and called up a large pitcher of margaritas from the food replicator, dragged his chair out onto the balcony, and plopped down with his feet up on the railing.

“A toast,” he said, raising his glass to the world below. “Close, but no cigar.”

And then he sat back and waited for the sky to fall.