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?
