We finished the Second Episode of our weekly Halloween Podcast serie. The Podcast features a science fiction Story of the Timetraveler written by John Eric Jordan. It’s an ongoing story which will be continued and come to its final end in the 3rd and last episode we ll release next week, a few days before our final TAMTAMTAM Halloween party on the 31st at Kindl Brewery Neukölln.

Click on the comic strip above to see it large.

ahoi J-J-J

TRACKLIST:

bbc radiophonic workshop – exploring the lab (doctor who)
tonto’s expanding head band – judgementor
mahavishnu orchestra – one word
bbc radiophonic workshop – take a closer look
arsenal – folk epic tale
ryuichi sakamoto – tell ‘em to me

STORY (included in the Podcast):

The Time Traveler’s History of the Future

PART II

One such anomaly occurred when I was taking a trip far into the past. The number on my year-counter grew as I went deeper into prehistory. I was somewhen in the vicinity of the Cambrian Explosion, when the machine suffered a sudden jolt, nearly throwing me to the ceiling. Checking the instruments, I noticed that the year counter no longer displayed the year. It didn’t even display numbers. An esoteric pattern of cryptic symbols rolled across the screen. About the same time, I noticed the cabin of the vessel becoming unbearably hot. I was worried that some of the unknowably complex machinery was overheating. I had no choice but to stop.
I knew not the time or place where I brought the machine to rest. Most of the sensors were going haywire, but I was able to discern that the air was breathable and the temperature bearable. With the utmost precaution, I exited the vehicle and inspected the hull. There was no damage that I could see. Maybe letting it cool down would be enough. I decided to give it some time in standby mode and made brief forays into my surroundings, always keeping the machine in sight.
The area was flat, with small bluffs dotting the landscape. The atmosphere was thick and wet, suggesting a coming storm, but there were no clouds. The flora was unusual. No flowers bloomed. Dry twisted branches reached out from short trees that I would have called shrubs if it weren’t for their very thick trunks. I realized what was so strange: I was taller than everything in the landscape. After scouting the machine’s perimeter, I headed south for a half kilometer before hearing noises. Voices? The wind? Cautiously, I crept toward the source of the murmuring.
From a dense tangle of the dwarf-trees on top of a low bluff, I looked down over an open area cleared of brush with a huge bonfire at the center. Between me and the fire, about 50 meters away, I spied what seemed to be animals huddled together. Undeniably so, but something about them was terrifyingly odd. At first sight of them I was struck with a chill up my back. Hairy, scaled, feathered; I couldn’t recognize any one animal, but they possessed the features of all kinds of different fauna. Then I realized what was so strange. Despite their different kinds of hides and heads, they were all shaped like anthropoids. These were creatures from nightmares or myths. I could only describe them as monsters.
My scientific curiosity got the better of my fear and I managed to stay put, using all my willpower not to flee immediately to the ship. The animal people were gathered in some kind of ritual, chanting rhythmically and surrounding the only green thing I had seen in the entire landscape: a frail sapling. Creatures came from the edge of the circle with armloads of kindling to add to the already enormous fire. The higher the flames leaped, the louder and faster the chanting became. It was as hypnotizing at it was terrifying. I was startled out of my trance with the crack of breaking branches. A squat hairy beast was practically on top of me, gathering firewood from the tree under which I hid. I watched, paralyzed with fear, as it’s hideous claw reach for my arm, obviously mistaking it for a branch. The creature’s touch made me instantly recoil, sending the startled beast tumbling back. As I stood to run, it gave the most awful soul-piercing cry my ears have ever heard. The chanting stopped and the entire horde looked up at me. Before I could turn, they were upon me: running on all fours, running upright, slithering. A few of the brush-gatherers must have flanked me, because a small phalanx of creatures blocked my path back to the machine. I doubled back the way I had fled, but cut around the side of the bluff to avoid the brunt of the onslaught. I found myself in the clearing. Maybe I could get a torch from the bonfire and hold them at bay. I could hear their wild braying. It seemed only an arm’s length behind me. I made a b-line for the fire, directly through the site of the ritual. I felt it, and heard the wild exclamation from the horde, before I realized what had happened. In my wild haste, I had trampled the sapling under foot. The cry that rung in my ears was one of mourning, anguish and hatred. I didn’t stop. I didn’t think. I ran for the bonfire and grabbed a firebrand from the edge of the leaping flames.
I swung around, waving the torch in front of me. I expected the mob to run at me like a torrent, but they were huddled around the sapling. Despondent moans and cries emanated from the field around me. The green sapling. In this dry and wretched expanse, it had been something important. I destroyed something these beasts cherished, possibly a key to the future of this world.
The animal men seemed to no longer notice me. My retreat to the machine was unhindered. It waited for me, dormant. It responded to my commands and I was able to return to the continuity with which I was familiar. The year counter showed that I was back in the Cambrian and I continued on my intended voyage. I never found out where or when that strange world had been, or the consequences of my actions.
– - -
Travel in time long enough and you are bound to find other cross-temporal adventurers. Some even became pioneers of a culture based on time travel. I hoped that following these threads could unlock the mystery of my own machine and when it came from.
Early breakthroughs in time travel technology culminated in an era I dubbed the Messenger Age. At that point, no matter – let alone passengers – could travel at rates faster than the present or in a direction other than the future, but a brilliant pioneer did manage to send information back in time. His first messages were aimed roughly toward the Middle Ages. The experimenter was hoping to share helpful knowledge with the era in order to hasten scientific progress and bring The Enlightenment centuries sooner. Although the messages were received, he failed in his intent. Most of the middle-agers who received his transmissions and tried to share the knowledge with the masses were burned at the stake as heretics and witches. A lucky few were just ignored.
The technology improved and messages were sent to more reliable sources in the future. The benefits of this relationship between the Messenger Age and the future age with which they communicated cannot be overstated. The Messengers gained priceless knowledge and the means for improved technology. The future was able to fill many holes in their own anthropological record and strengthen their evolutionary theories with direct access to a prime source. Not just communication, but also commerce became very strong between the different times. It became the first Cross-Temporal Age and offered whole new levels of enlightenment to humankind. Not surprisingly, one area of research to benefit immensely was time travel. The barrier to matter traveling in time was overcome and the two cultures were finally able to meet, emigrate to each others’ times and even interbreed. By the time the early Messenger Age reached the late Messenger Age via normal chronology, the version of the future that the messengers first contacted was a thing of the past. Both ages had coalesced into a homogenized culture that was greater than the sum of their original parts.
It was during this period that I chose to send a message home. I had been gone for millions of years and felt nostalgic. Not only that, but I wanted to arrange a meeting upon my return. I sent a cross-temporal transmission back to 2009 with an invitation for my friends and select luminaries of the era to meet me on the night of October 31, 2009. I could take as long as I wanted to continue to travel so long as I scheduled my return accurately.
– - -
As I mentioned before, even with all the incredible things I witnessed, I still found myself becoming nostalgic for the early Twenty-First Century. For a long time, I lost my desire to travel. I became indolent, spending days at a time in my penthouse overlooking eon-spanning Megatropolis. All I could think about was the barrier that I could never cross, not even in my incredible machine or with the advances of contemporary humanity. Providence may have bestowed upon me an amazing vessel for navigating outside the temporal trap, but I was still only skipping stones on the surface of an impossibly deep ocean. Traveling in time does not conquer it, or free us from the entropy of the universe. It merely remixes continuity.
After my vast cross-temporal journey, I came to realize that I am far from understanding time, let alone escaping from it. No matter how much I traveled – no matter how deep in time I journeyed, no matter the elaborate and elegant new connections I drew across disparate chronologies – I was still limited by another kind of time – my own mortality.
TIME TIME TIME. The Tyranny of Time. In the end, we are still temporal animals, fated to live for a mere 30,000 days. No matter where in history those days occur, entropy catches up with us and we, as individuals, must always come to an end.