T - Time Travel - #AtoZChallenge

I had never been a good test taker.

I didn't have a learning disability or anything, but it never failed. No matter how well I knew the material or how prepared I was, my anxiety would get the best of me and I would screw everything up. I knew today would be no different.

I arrived early to allow myself to get seated and try to soothe my nerves before class. It always seemed to work better than just walking in and starting. When I stepped into the classroom, I saw three of my classmates huddled in the corner of the room. My best friend Brian waved and called me over.

I said, "Sorry, no. I have to prepare."

Mr. Grayson snapped at Brian. "Turn around. Face the wall."

I guessed Brian was in trouble. Not really surprising. I looked forward to hearing the story later. I sat at my desk, closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

As I concentrated on being calm, students filled the room and took their seats. I ignored the chatter and stayed in my quiet mental state.

I was so relaxed, I thought I might drift off to sleep, but I was jolted back to reality when I heard a desk topple over and a couple of people screamed. I spun around to see what happened and Sara was sprawled across her desk scrambling to get up. Mr. Grayson shouted at her above the commotion of the laughing students, "Miss Nussbaum, join the others in the corner."

Sara was obviously embarrassed and quietly crossed the room to the corner. She placed a tennis ball on Mr. Grayson's desk as she passed. My buddy Brian tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, "I guess Sara and I didn't do so good."

I spun around to look at him. He had a big smile on his face, but lifted his hands with shrugged shoulders. Brian never cared much about his GPA. I looked over in the corner again and Brian was still there. If he was in both places, then he was right. He didn't do so well. 

Just then, Sara walked in to class. A few people pointed her out to herself over in the corner. Her shoulders slumped and she shuffled to her still overturned desk and started cleaning up.

Mr. Grayson quieted the class. "Alright, let's begin. You have all worked hard this semester and should be well-versed on time-travel dynamics. Now it's time to see how well you can apply those principles to practical use. Today's task is pretty simple."

I could already feel my heartbeat accelerating. The teacher saying it was simple preemptively made me feel stupid for when I inevitably failed.

Mr. Grayson continued, "Last week during the school assembly, I was in this room implementing the test you are about to take. I had 16 tennis balls. One for each of you in this class. Every five minutes, I placed a ball on this desk. If the previous ball was still there I removed it and placed the next numbered ball.

In a few minutes, each of you will come forward and draw a number from the box. The number you draw is listed on the chart I have on the board. That chart will tell you what time your ball was on my desk last week. Remember, each ball was only on the desk for five minutes. The ball is your target.

After you draw your number and check the chart for your target time, return to your seat. Do not jump until you are instructed. Everyone will jump together once the entire class has their assigned ball number. For full marks on this test, you will jump back to last week landing in this classroom during your assigned five-minute window. You will pick up the ball from my desk with your designated number and you will jump back seated at your desk precisely one minute after you left. Any questions?"

John raised his hand, "How do we know which ball to grab?"

Mr. Grayson answered, "What number did you draw?"

"Seven," John showed his slip of paper.

Mr. Grayson took the chart off the wall. "There was only one ball on my desk at a time. John, number seven was on my desk from precisely 2:15 to 2:20 last Friday afternoon. If you arrived at the correct time, that ball was there. If there is a different numbered ball on the desk, then you arrived at the wrong time and I will not permit you to take it. I was seated at my desk throughout the entire test, so expect to see me there."

Another student spoke up, "So, you already know who jumped correctly. Right?"

Mr Grayson smiled, "I know the first part. Jumping to last week. But I don't know who jumped back to today correctly. This test involves two jumps and it is the jump back where the most mistakes are made."

Suddenly John appeared in front of Mr. Grayson's desk holding a tennis ball with a large number 7 on it.

Mr. Grayson took the ball and thanked John. "Now, go stand in the corner with the others." He then looked at the John who was still seated. "Well, we know you got the first half correct, don't we?"

My buddy Brian from the corner shouted to John, "You did better than me. I didn't even land in the right day."

Mr. Grayson followed up Brian's statement. "I'm surprised you even found your way back."

The class laughed. Mr. Grayson could be fun at times.

"Alright, class. Set your chronometers. For your coordinates, I want you to jump to the same chair you are sitting in now. You are going back to last Friday afternoon at your assigned time. After your jump, step to my desk, retrieve the ball if it has the correct number. Then, return to your desk and jump back to today. Jump to exactly one minute after you left. Every seat in this classroom should be empty for one minute. You will be graded on this. For your return jump, remember what you have learned. You have to account for temporal displacement, how long you have been gone, and the Coriolis effect. All of these have to be considered for your calculations to be correct. Are we ready?"

THREE…TWO…ONE…JUMP!!!

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All this month, I am participating in the A to Z Challenge. A new post will go up every day (except Sundays) using a letter of the alphabet as the starting off point. My theme for the month is literary genres. I am writing in a different genre of flash fiction each day. Today's letter is T for Time Travel.

Fortune Cookie #15 - Diversity

I dove into my collection of fortune cookies this morning and came out with this gem.

A diversity of friends is a
credit to your flexible nature.

My immediate thought was that this is one of those rare fortunes that is actually accurate. I DO have a very diverse group of friends. But on further reflection, I realized that this diversity was actually forced on me.

I haven't lived in America for 4 years. In fact, my Facebook Memories this morning had a video of me showing off our empty apartment in Indianapolis hours before leaving it for the first time. We left our home four years ago today.

Since then, we have lived in China for 20 months and have now been in Vietnam for over two years. And we have a wide diversity of friends.

Countries our friends are from:

Australia

Thailand

South Africa

Jamaica

Peru

England

Taiwan

Vietnam

Mexico

New Zealand

France

Romania

Ireland

Russia

China 

South Korea

Canada

Malaysia

Singapore

I am sure there are a few I haven't thought of, but these are the people we associate with. And with so many different cultures over the years, a level of flexibility is necessary. However, I have to acknowledge that it wasn't our flexibility that gave us such a diverse friend group. It was our circumstances.

When you live the expat life, you meet a lot of other people doing the same. Yes, we get to know many of the locals, but we also meet up with and get to know the people who are "foreigners" here. Wherever they may be from.

When I lived in Indianapolis, I guess I had a diversity of friends. I met a lot of people through my job at Amazon and had friends from all walks of life. People of various colors, creeds, religions, and countries. There I had friends from six different African nations. Immigrants from Tanzania, Kenya, Senegal, Namibia, Egypt, and Ghana. However, once again, I met these people because of my job. I guess it does require some flexibility in order for us to form friendships, but work gets the credit for putting us together.

I grew up in an all-white, Polish Catholic community. A very small town.

I don't write this to make it sound like it was a racist place. Many small towns across America are the result of settlers from a couple hundred years ago settling there. The town I lived in and a few of the surrounding towns were heavily comprised of people with Polish ancestry. In fact, a few of the old-timers still spoke Polish. A few towns over was a town of heavy German ancestry. That's where you could go to buy the best sausages. You still can. There was another town that was heavily French. These cultural distinctions are still evident today despite it being many generations since the towns were founded by people emigrating from those countries.

However, being all European settlements meant basically all white residents. Growing up, this was my group of friends.

Can you say DRUNKEN REDNECKS?

There are a few of my old crowd missing from that picture, but you can trust me when I say they would just be more of the same. The only diversity among our group was when we decided to spring for Stag beer instead of our usual cheap Milwaukee's Best.

I am not saying anything bad about these guys. They were (and still are) some of the best friends I ever had. And as for the lack of diversity, it wasn't because of a deficiency of flexibility or racism. It was because of proximity and geography. Most of us had no real interactions with Asians, Latinos, or African-Americans until we turned sixteen and had to get jobs in the bigger city where there was work.

Other cultures just weren't around. There were Polish people and the few of us who weren't. Even if we had a black friend from the city, it's not like they would have wanted to come hang out in our redneck haven anyway. And I can't say I would blame them.

I am not trying to claim there was no racism in my small town. There was, but I have to admit that I was probably blind to most of it since it didn't affect me and, other than the occasional after-school special, I'd never been challenged to even think about it.

I remember going off to college when I was about 30 and loving the fact that I had a neighbor family from Myanmar. Across the hall were three roommates from three African nations. All men who had left their families behind to get an American education and would then return home. I have never had this kind of proximity with the outer-world before.

So, thank you to the cookie for having so much faith in my flexible nature, but location must be given its credit also. I am sure that if I had never left Scheller, IL, I still wouldn't really have international friends or friends of different colors other than people I might meet at work.

 I am so grateful for the intercultural experiences I am having now and wouldn't trade them for anything.

Call Me...Maybe?

I received the following writing prompt in my inbox this morning and knew exactly what I would be writing about.

A phone ringing in the middle of the night is symbolic of something terrible has happened. Everyone knows this. A phone call this late is reserved for emergencies. Unless you had idiot friends when you were a teenager who had no concept of manners time. I always hated having to go to my school to yell at some idiot who was inconsiderate enough to call my house in the middle of the night. In the '80s, we didn't all have cell phones. You called the house phone which woke everyone up and my dad would answer. I would then get in trouble for having stupid friends.

So, if you don't have idiot friends, then a late-night call meant something terrible has happened. The pulse jumps before the first ring has even finished as you imagine all the terrible news that is awaiting you on the other side of that receiver.

However, a middle-of-the-night call doesn't have the same meaning for me any longer. I have lived in Southeast Asia for the last two years. This means 98% of the people I know are on the exact opposite side of the world than I am. My hometown is 12 hours behind me in Vietnam. This means that midnight for me is noon where my parents and kids live.

A phone call in the middle of the night means someone forgot about the time difference. Plus, I don't have to worry about this because my kids never call me anyway.

Additionally, neither my wife nor I keep our cell phones in the bedroom. So, it becomes even less of an issue. If someone does call us in the middle of the night, we won't even know about it until morning. Plus, what good does it do to call us in an emergency anyway?  We are freakin' 12 time zones away! What can we do about it? A couple of extra hours before we get the "bad news" wouldn't make any difference.

All the Time in the World

I consider myself a bit of a movie buff. I love movies and love watching them with someone who doesn't mind picking them apart and discussing the intricacies of the story line. The possibility of a great debate is probably most present in time travel movies.

I love watching time travel movies and trying to catch continuity mistakes. However, one has to be careful to follow the time travel rules being established by that particular movie. The rules are not universal. In some movies, the 'grandfather paradox' is in play, meaning that if you were to travel back in time and kill your grandfather, then you would cease to exist. This happens in Back to the Future. When Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox), accidentally interferes in the first meeting of his parents, he starts to fade unless he can get them to fall in love.

In other movies, going back and killing off an ancestor would have no effect on you. You would have altered the future from that moment, but since you already exist, you would continue to do so. This would not change even if you traveled back to the future again.

In some movies, a change in the past will effect the previous future. In others, what has happened has already happened and cannot be changed. In yet other movies, making a change in the past, creates a parallel timeline with the newly instituted changes.

So, when looking for these movie mistakes, one must be careful to only look at the time travel rules that have been established by that particular movie. For instance, in the recent movie Looper, there is a man from the future who is now in the present who must be caught and killed. The gangsters have caught the younger version of this man.

According to the rules of the movie, if they killed the younger version, then the older version would cease to exist. However, they cannot do that because it would cause a problem with time continuity. The future actions of the younger man still need to happen. They need to capture the older man and then kill him.

This all makes sense until they start using their method to draw the older man back to them. First, they carve an address into the body of the younger man knowing that it will leave scars. The older man, seeing them on his own body, knows where they want him to go. Then they start cutting off parts of the younger man's body. The older version of him, suddenly missing a few fingers, knows they will continue to do this if he doesn't go to the address. As he is racing across town to get there, other parts begin to disappear off his body.

This is where the mistake comes in. Obviously, they're going to kill him when he reaches the address. However, the radical amputations that the younger version has suffered would drastically alter the future actions he would take, which is specifically why they said they couldn't kill him. Someone didn't think this through.

It does seem that in most time travel movies, the idea of messing up the space-time continuum is something to be concerned about. If time travel ever does become possible, I wonder if that would actually be something that we'd have to be concerned with.

Let's assume that time travel has become possible and we could do it safely. Let's also assume that it hasn't been government regulated as always seems to be the case in the movies. If this were the case, I see all sorts of commercial possibilities.

Let's forget about the ideas of going back in time to do things like buy stock in Apple, secure thousands of acres where Manhattan or Los Angeles will one day be, stop Nickelback from forming,  buy Mickey Mantle baseball cards, or warn your younger self to take care of those Star Wars figurines. I am more interested in the implications for the average working man.

Travel agencies with access to time travel technology would make a fortune. Someone wanting to book a tropical getaway is always taking a gamble on what the weather will be like. We all know someone who paid thousands to go to an exotic beach somewhere and it rained through their entire vacation. However, a travel agency that could send you to any point in time could send you to your destination on a week guaranteed to have excellent weather based on past weather records. They could also make money sending people to experience first hand historical events of their choosing.

How many baseball fanatics would give up their life savings to be in the stands of Wrigley Field on October 1, 1932 when Babe Ruth pointed to center field calling his home run on the next pitch? What would someone pay to be present at the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or the first Wright brothers flight or Michael Jackson catching himself on fire. Many would pay just to go back to re-experience a previous point in their lives. The possibilities are endless.

Pizza places would never have late deliveries again. A person calling in would give all the usual information they give now, but would also be asked when they would like their pizza delivered. The time would be stamped on the ticket and as soon as it was done, the driver would zap himself to the moment in time it was requested and would knock on the door of the customer. Customers could even make a call and ask for it to be delivered right now. As soon as they hung up, they would get a knock on their door. In the event of a mistake on the pizza, the company would fix it and then send the delivery out to arrive seconds before the first one. This would stop the bad one from ever being delivered and the customer would never even know there had been a problem.

This could even be used by families to salvage a bad night. Let's say one of the kids runs through the kitchen as dinner is being placed on the table causing it to be spilled all over the floor. Dinner is now ruined. They could call the time travel pizza delivery to have pizza delivered at the beginning of the night and avoid the entire scene.

Construction contractors who get behind on a job could send their employees back a few days or weeks to double up on manpower and get themselves back on schedule. Stores would never be out of stock again because when the product finally shows up, they can go far enough back in time to stock the shelves before they lost any sales. The cable company would not give you those huge windows of time when they might show up anymore. They could tell you exactly when they would be there and regardless of how busy their day was, they would be there.

Fathers would never have to miss the birth of their children. No one would ever miss their flights and packages would always be delivered in time for the holidays.

A world with time travel would be awesome. As soon as it becomes possible, I'm opening a pizza place. I'll make a fortune.