How Messing Around With A Camera Gave Raul A Heart Attack
Raul snapped the picture. Invisible protons from the pre-existent future gathered behind his crazy lens. They rested on the CCD, burned an image into binary code.
Raul fiddled with some of the buttons on the back of the camera and squinted at the digital display. His smile turned to a frown, the frown turned to horror. The camera fell and broke. Raul died of cardiac arrest.
I haven’t had the guts to look at the picture yet.
That was what happened in one hour. Right now though, I’m going to the place where Raul works, a laboratory. He’s a theoretical physicist, and he dabbles in manufacturing as a hobby.
Back in college, he invented something he said was a particle-entanglement networking system for computers. I’m not really sure what that means but it made my laptop purr like a cheetah, and run like one too. When a guy like Raul says he has something cool to show you, you listen.
He comes to the door baring teeth in a good way, and he’s holding a camera; a pro-sumer looking DSLR. The lens has this big honking bulge where the focus ring should be.
He says, “I should be making money off this stuff.”
His inventions, he means.
“Why don’t you?” I ask.
“It’s impractical, this thing especially. The battery dies in like five minutes.”
I laugh. “So, it sucks. What does it do?”
“Watch.”
He takes a picture of an empty spot on a table. He shows me the picture. There’s a soft focus shot, like what a pinhole camera takes, of a coffee mug sitting there.
“Okay, where did the mug come from?”
He just smiles at me and nods at one of his co-workers. She’s holding a mug and walking over to us. She sets the mug on the table, right in the same spot as the picture.
I look at Raul like, are you serious? I don’t want to say anything mean, but I think he’s messing with me.
“What, are you trying to be some kind of cheap street-magician now?”
He laughs. “No. Come with me outside.”
We go out front. Cars, with people inside, roll by on their way to fast food joints for lunch. Raul stand there messing with some buttons on the back of his camera. He takes another picture without even aiming, just in a general street-ward direction. Fast, he shows me the picture.
There’s a red ‘Stang, a blue pickup, and a white SUV passing by in the picture. I look at Raul with one eyebrow raised.
“Look,” he says and tips his head toward the street.
Sure enough, here they come, the red, the blue, and the white. The exact three cars from the picture. My other eyebrow goes up.
“What,” I say. It’s more of an expression than a question.
Raul looks pleased with himself.
“It’s a camera…” He pauses for effect, “…that takes pictures of the future.”
My mind flits around to other causes; it’s a coincidence, Raul’s playing a prank… I can’t come up with anything else.
“That’s nuts. If this was anyone other than you Raul, I’d be going ape.”
He smiles.
“So, you going to let me try or are you going to keep me wondering for the rest of my life whether this was a prank or not?” I ask.
“Sure! Try it, you of little faith.”
I chuckle. He hands me the camera. It feels like a bowling ball. Something inside of it is heavier than normal and I get the sense that it’s fragile despite its weight.
“It’s heavy.” I say.
“Yeah, it holds the future. You think it would be light?”
I roll my eyes, one of which I then hold the camera up to and snap a picture of the sky. A little lazy cloud appears in the LCD. I look around in the sky and find the little cloud, a ways off, drifting toward the spot I took a picture of.
“Whoa!” I’m getting a little excited now.
“Bo-ring.” Rauls sings. “Let me take a picture of you.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Sit on the bench. Let’s see what this bench is going to look like a year from now.”
I comply with his request. Rauls messes around with some buttons on the back of the camera.
“A year, huh?” I say. “What if you see something you don’t like?”
“What if I see something I do like, hmm? It’s not like I can do anything about it. The future is the future.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’m sure. Look, here’s how I see it. Time and space are pretty much equals. If space doesn’t exist, we can’t enter that space, right? Equally, if time didn’t exist we would constantly be stuck in the present. This little guy,” he holds up the camera, “ain’t stuck in the present, man.”
“I guess that’s why you’re the genius.” I say with sarcasm, still not quite sure I buy his theory.
“Here goes.” He aims at me and clicks the button. The camera shutters just like before, unassumingly.
You know the rest.
Now here I am at my computer, memory card waiting in the slot, recovered from the smashed camera. Do I dare look?
You Are The Reflection - Part II
A scientist sees into another world, and runs into some unwanted consequences.
Read part 1 first.
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You Are The Reflection - Part I
A scientist sees into another world, and runs into some unwanted consequences.
If you’ve already read this, read part 2.
Read More
The Thing Under The Bed
My wife made me feel like a kid, but not in a good way. I should have bought that bat.
“Gage. Gage! There’s someone under our bed,” she whispered.
Her words touched a cold can of soda to my neck. I remembered all those other times in my childhood bed, waking up in the middle of the night, realizing that I had kicked off my armor, the bed sheet and comforter that had been my only protection from whatever is was that had waked me.
I remembered my wife and daughter and my memories of childhood were overcome by manliness.
“Hello?”
No reply.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
What would I do? I would have gladly used a weapon. I didn’t have any weapons. I should have bought that bat. The best thing I figured I had in this particular situation was the heel of my foot. When whoever it is comes out I’ll bring my heel down hard on his back, right between his shoulders.
Gotta flush him out.
“I’m getting my gun!” I yelled, maybe a little too excited. I moved toward the side of the bed closest to the door. He was sure to crawl out that way.
I waited for something black to creep out. I imagined this guy wearing a trench coat, maybe nothing else underneath.
The room fell silent. I held still, kneeling on the corner of the bed with my right foot ready to move fast and push hard into a spine.
I heard movement, rustling. It came from beside me.
My wife was sitting up. She put her hand on my back.
“Gage. I was joking.”
The Sun Kills Itself
I wrote this one for a 78 word story contest in Esquire Magazine.
The sun kills itself like no one expects it to. First it gets real hot, like 95 degrees in winter, but the people are okay.
They build these huge power plants that shoot lots of light-waste into space. They suck up as much sun as they can. The sun, pissed, burns up the ocean.
Then it starts getting tinier. Lots of clouds come back. The bouncing light-waste powers the eyes of the people and they see for now.
The Blackener
Stone-faced, I stared out of the porthole at the small star cluster where I was born. It was gone; it had been gone for almost a year already, but the light of it’s death was just beginning to reach me.
I blinked. When I opened my eyes, Celo 2 had disappeared, the entire system was left in the cold.
Celo 1 nova-ed from the sudden change in gravity and incinerated what was left of it and it’s neighbor’s system.
The Blackener’s ships then fired at the Rena system’s star and doused it like a cosmic fire engine.
“Forgive me,” I whispered to Rena, my old home.
“Do you regret?” The Blackener said.
“No,” I said. I still watched the blinking out of the lights of my home. “Well, possibly. What if there was still some good?”
“All the more terrible a future then. For, that good would surely have fallen to corruption, in eventuality.”
“Yes, yes. You’re right.”
“You are no murderer. Your actions are justified.”
I thought about that for a moment. My face remained in a hard frown.
“I’m no hero either. I cowered off into hyper-space before the attack.”
There was silence from then on as we watched, The Blackener through my eyes, as the last star simply died.
2 Single Paragraph Stories
1.
I get a lot of other people’s mail. Yes, it’s all addressed to my house, but I have no idea who the names above the addresses belong to. It’s like I have a history of all the people who have ever lived in this house. Only, the pages are out of order. I have no clue whether the chapter on “Mark’s Playboy Re-Subscription Notices” comes before or after “Mary Applegate’s Letters From Mr. Alvarez”. There’s just not enough information to tell. Maybe I’ll just sent Mr. Alvarez’s letter back and let him know that Mary is clearly hiding from him since she didn’t give him her new address.
2.
When I was a kid we had this truck with the big letters M-A-Z-D-A on the tailgate. I freaking hated that truck. I could use all kinds of metaphors to describe how it smelled but it’s more effective to just say that I got a migraine every time I had to ride in it. I think the most disturbing thing about it was the fleas. This one time I swear I had fleas in my mouth on the way to the dump. The bed was full of trash, I already had a headache and I had to hock a loogie. The window on my side wouldn’t roll down so I started to open the door. Well, my dad noticed this and yelled at me. It was hard with a mouthful of fleas but I managed to tell him that I had to spit because I had fleas in my mouth. He eventually let me spit out the door, thank God. Then there was this other time that a lizard in the Mazda’s bed bit my three year old brother’s pinky. It bit him so hard he bled which I had never seen a lizard do to someone before. Man, I hated that Mazda.
I get so distracted.
I am prone to distraction. I feel like I can never get anything done because I can never concentrate on one thing for more than 5 unbroken minutes. I blame the culture that I live in for me being this way. Every day I come home from work with a new ambition; some new creative dream. I want to be a great programmer. I want to make lots of money programming. I want to have written a great novel. I want to be a great musician, or a great performer. I want to be a director or a video editor. I want to start a popular website that people flock to and enjoy greatly.
At the same time I also feel like I need to take care of the family that I love. To follow my passions would be to forsake my wife and my daughter, and I can’t do that. Are my ambitions a distraction from my responsibilities or are my duties as a husband and a father distractions from my long-shot dreams?
Maybe that question doesn’t even matter. My wife finds time to be a mother and a wife AND runs a very popular coupon blog for our city (she also finds time to write a column for a local magazine). Maybe I can have both a family that I love and who know I love them AND have hobbies.
So, I’m back to my own deficit of attention; which is something that I do not know what to do about. That was a pointless, bummer of a post…
Lisp My Number
So, I bought a fun little book.
Land of Lisp by Conrad Barsky M.D
Below is my first Lisp program. It’s a guess the number game.
(defparameter *small* 1)
(defparameter *big* 100)
(defun guess-my-number ()
(ash (+ *small* *big*) -1))
(defun smaller ()
(setf *big* (1- (guess-my-number)))
(guess-my-number))
(defun bigger ()
(setf *small* (1+ (guess-my-number)))
(guess-my-number))
(defun start-over ()
(defparameter *small* 1)
(defparameter *big* 100)
(guess-my-number))
