Bernard enters the Wish Machine and finds a world we never made.
I thought of the locomotive model change and I felt a cold chill down my back. I was fooling with dynamite. A change in an adjacent reality might affect our world. Make no mistake, those other realities, Frigby’s, Collyburn’s, Hamm’s, Hanzmueller’s and mine, were genuine. They were not imaginary. People lived and died, suffered pain and experienced joy in those other worlds. They were as real as our own. I was beginning to worry. Perhaps the wall between our reality and other realities were not as solid and substantial as I thought.
The evidence I was gathering from each of the Wish Machine trips was helping me understand more about the laws of reality. I had proof there were many alternate realities next door to our world. Maybe the number was infinite. I also had good reason to believe all realities do not move at the same speed. Some drag along as slowly as molasses in January. Look at my reports of the several I recorded so far. That’s what I did when I went to the Thurman Butts episode; I moved to a slower alternate world where Sam Candella was still a 9-year-old child.
The best analogy I can think of for episodes like the Thurman Butts experiment is like looking out the window of your train compartment in R-Prime and seeing another train on a parallel track behind your train. When I went into my alternate past to a time when I was 9 years old, it was the same as though I had flown from my seat in R-Prime and plopped down in the same seat … but in a second slug-a-bed slower train. That second train was behind me. That’s where a 9-year-old Samson Candella was 60 years behind R-Prime. I get dizzy trying to sort it all out.
I don’t have the answer to why my imagination took me to the Thurman Butts past. It seemed the same. Maybe the Wish Machine created a new alternate reality to fit my wishes. I just don’t know yet. Maybe I will never know. The entire concept is too strange.
I don’t fault anyone who gets lost in my theory. The whole idea of alternate worlds gives me a headache. My theories are tough concepts to get around for my mind. To anyone who reads this report I say, don’t try. It is enough that you are willing to accept the possibility of my theory. Read my entire report. When you have perhaps then you may understand what I am trying to say.
Maybe the wall between realities was thinner than I supposed. If my mind could pierce the wall to a next door past reality (the way I did with Thurman Butts when I was 9 years old) maybe I could also go to a world moving ahead so swiftly that it might seem to bear no relation to my past; a world of the future.
Some alternate realities must zip along at greased lightning speed. Using the same simple analogy of trains on parallel track, a future reality would be like looking out of the window to the caboose of my R-Prime train and seeing another train far, far ahead of mine. If I could go there I would arrive in a world that was yet to be (at least from the perspective of our present reality). Such a world would be a future reality. Could I go to a world of a future where a cognate of Sam Candella lived in the future?
In a mega universe, where anything was possible, why shouldn’t a cognate of Samson Candella find such a future utopian world? I wanted to find a reality where disease, poverty and corruption was no more. I wanted to visit a world where people lived noble lives free to achieve the impossible.
Summoning my courage, that same afternoon, I sat in the chair within the hyperspace field of the Neutron Star. I have learned to focus my mind and I used auto hypnosis to imagine the utopia I wanted. With every fiber of my being and every bit of mental power I had I saw that perfect world where the great problems in physics had been solved and all men were brothers.
I translated … and found myself in room I had never seen before.
Next episode: Sam finds himself in the future. It was wonderful but it was nothing like the world he supposed.
Gene Paleno is an author and illustrator living in Witter Springs.
