THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION SONG TO THE STORY
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CHAPTER I
My name is Cascrypto, and this is the story of how I became a computer moron (nerd) and a traveller of time. I was just your nondescript regular average bloke trying my best, albeit unsuccessfully to make an unusual mark on the world, until my meeting with Roberto T.M (the Mad Programmer, who makes Dr Frankenstein look like the poster boy for Sanity).
It was on a Friday night, it started off just like any other. I was out by myself to get a drink after being through a very hectic week. After my third jeneva, I suddenly had this dark feeling of boredom, so I decided to try something different from my usual weekend routine. I paid for my drinks, caught a cab to the train station, and headed to the Red District of Amsterdam. In hindsight, going to the Red District was probably a wrong move (or a very good one depending on your angle of perception), because that decision changed everything. I hung out by the bar, drinking heavily and dancing under it influence, smoking marijuana and flirting with a female attendant named Marit. It seemed a good night, and it promised to turn out even better if I could just get Marit to the dark alley behind the clubhouse. I made a mental check of my wallet to confirm that I still had some condoms. Marit is an attractive lady, but I doubt there will be anything exciting about waking up one morning to a baby in a basket on my doorstep. Marit with her huge bosom and generous waist looks like a very fertile one I’m not ready to be a father yet, so a guy has got to check up on his protection. She sauntered past me a couple of times making sure her ample bosom jiggled enough to make a priest question his faith, but it was a busy night, Marit wasn’t going to get away from the bar anytime soon, and I had to take my leave eventually.
In my drunken state, I had to run to the train station to catch the train as it was getting too late, even in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it in time to get a train ticket before the train’s departure, so I decided to do something stupid and board the train without a ticket. I was excited, yet nervous; this is the biggest adventure I had ever embarked upon although it didn’t feel right. I was travelling on the train without paying. I was scared yet it was a great feeling, there was this thrill of knowing the train inspector could catch me, my veins would freeze, I couldn’t explain it. After travelling for about a quarter of an hour, I saw the train inspector coming towards me, and the excitement and thrill turned to fear and trepidation, the next station was still way off, and I could get arrested for being a stowaway.
I prayed for the train to go faster but prayer didn’t seem enough. It was the longest 10 minutes of my life.
The inspector came into my carriage just as I was opening the carriage window, (the actual plan was to climb out onto the ledge and wait him out) so I jumped without thinking. At that moment, time stopped, and my life flashed before me, I knew at that moment even before I hit the ground that my life would change forever, and I was right. As I hit the ground, I felt a mind-numbing pain, like all the pain that anyone and everyone had ever suffered, was inflicted on me at that moment; everything went dark.
Just as my feet left the train, the inspector let out a scream and everyone around were thrown into confusion, the situation has escalated; they all thought it was a suicide attempt, next thing I could remember was lying on the bed in the hospital after my surgery thinking about it; was I suicidal?. The answer is no, but I came to the conclusion that a suicide attempt would have actually been a more sensible explanation for my action, at least then I could say it was my decision. In a dark twisted way, that may have helped in dealing with the outcome, but now I have to live with the knowledge that a foolish mistake made in the split of a second might have ruined my life completely. I allowed a bottle of gin choose the direction my life took from that moment; I became a humpback just because I refused to pay for a train ticket. I became the poster boy for bad decisions in seconds, what a lucky life I have, but the truth is, maybe I was stupid, but I was not suicidal.
I know Most would rather pay the fare than jump from a train and risk breaking a leg or an arm, or even worse breaking your back like I did but I was drunk and young and isn’t being stupid a part of the package? It is not as if I climbed to the top of a high building and simply hauled myself off. I was not committing suicide; I was just drunk! Well, not that these explanations mattered anyway. I was a humpback now, and that’s simply how I was going to remain.
After spending three months in a hospital, I knew my life was never going to remain the same. I had a hunch, I was never going to walk again the way I used to, and now I looked like someone with a baby perpetually strapped to his back, sex was now out of the question, but how can I not have sex? I love women, and I believe they are one of the best things in life, sex is amazing, and I love it, but I was going to now have to do without it. Marit’s face came to my mind, what if I had stayed back and tried to score with her? Maybe I wouldn’t be in this situation; it was series of depressing thoughts.
When I got out of the hospital, I became a loner, a computer moron. This train jump did not only make me a humpback but also made me lose my zest for living. What is the point if I can’t take a walk on a boulevard without a stick and just take a random girl home to pile drive her to oblivion, what is the point if I can’t take my friend’s Porsche for a spin and pretend it’s mine to pick up chicks? Which girl would have sex with a man looking like a dromedary, she might as well take to bestiality. What is the point of it all? Well, it could be worse, I could have two humps and look like a camel and not a dromedary, optimism as bloody as hell set in. I need to use a colourful rainbow stick before I can walk now, and since my rainbow stick only works when there is a significant amount of dopamine secreted in my brain.
I decided to do something about it; I can’t live this way, I will just waste away.
So I spent years learning to program while interacting simultaneously in forums, with my hand tucked in my sweatpants drinking tea and coffee. I tried to code a black wormhole which will help me open a hole to travel into the future so I could find a cure to my bad leg and hump or even going back in time to warn myself before jumping from the train. That was the only way I could restore my old life, and I was determined to do it.
I lived in near isolation devoting over 11 years of my life to this research; developing a program to help find the location of the nearest black wormhole, but it just didn’t work, until one day I went to a chat room on the dark net and started talking with a certain Roberto Transpotime21bus master. Roberto told me about his Time Bus Machine, and that he was also trying to code a black wormhole to teleport his bus to the future in the right space in time, I saw this as an instant opportunity presenting itself to me. Roberto may be a crazy genius, but he was God sent. Our meeting could not have been a coincidence; we were both trying to change the world, and we were both trying to change our lives by altering time using different methods but without success. It is my firm believe that nothing happens by accident, and my meeting with Roberto was definitely not one, from our discussions we both discovered that the interaction of both codes combined could open a black wormhole; we have definitely taken a step closer to our trip to the future. That moment was the best time of my life, seemingly; the moment for which I’ve lived for. We have a dream, and we are not going to end our battle with time, not now that we’ve gotten this close. We started making plans to fuse both codes together, Roberto’s Brilliant Impossible Brain and my Intellectual Computer Moron Brain; the perfect combination.
It was common knowledge in the black wormhole coding community that there are some invisible inactive black wormholes in Europe, and they exist in a couple of places in Amsterdam; the challenge was locating them with one of our wormhole scanners and activate them, and our search was about to be over. The fusion of both codes was supposed to work like an invisible black light that will search out the location of the nearest black wormhole.
Roberto had been preparing for this moment since his teenage years, unlike me, that was thrown into the research due to circumstances. Roberto had also built a Time Bus Machine made of radiation resistant materials to protect everyone on their passage through the black wormhole. The bus was made with the same nanotechnology used to make radiation suits but was adapted to integrate into steel and aluminium materials, he had been ready for a long time, and my code was the missing part of the jigsaw, this made me feel really special.
It was a crisp Wednesday noon when we decided to do the first trial, we gathered in the Zuidoost observatory run by Metaphilibert, a long-term friend of Roberto’s family and started trying to fuse both codes in one of the wormhole scanners. We already had a theoretical idea of how the codes were supposed to interact, but it was the first time we were actually doing it in practical, “check the frequency regulation meter!” Roberto kept yelling at Sigwo, he was tense, and it was understandable, he has spent the better part of his life on this, and he is finally at the apex of it all, and if everything went well; this could be the final stage.
We kept trying and retrying but the codes refused to interact, I could see the tears and frustration in Roberto’s eyes, and I felt sorry for him, even more than I felt for myself, he had spent all his life on this, and he was about to be disappointed at the most crucial stage. We kept at it till far late in the night till I dozed off.
“Cascrypto wake up; I did it!” it sounded like a call from somewhere far deep in the dream realm, “Cascrypto!” I could hear Roberto’s voice clearly now, and I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the computer screen and a running matrix, what is happening here? I wasn’t fully awake yet, then I looked up to see Roberto’s teary eyes brimming with the widest smile I had ever seen, the codes finally fused and it was a beautiful moment. Then started the wait, we had to wait for the program to spread its dragnet as far as it could and locate the nearest black wormhole locations, we waited for half a day, then the most bizarre thing happened, the program got a hit! I will be going to the future with my new friends, and we will change history.
Roberto and I eventually achieved our aim of coding and locating the black wormhole; it was an arduous journey, but we finally realised what we wanted, and now all our efforts have paid off. Now arose another problem. Initially, the question came up about how we would prevent our journeys to the past from having any adverse effects on eventual outcomes in the future but we ignored it, the outcome is called a Paradox. A paradox is a ripple effect of a change in past occurrences in the future due to time travel. Paradox can have grave consequences if not properly managed. In truth, time travelling is groundbreaking, fun and fantastic but it it also has its own disadvantages in that any negative change in past occurrences caused by time traveling could have far-reaching dangerous consequences on the future (the present), so we needed to be careful. Now that we had located the black wormhole we wanted, we had to revisit the issue of the paradox, and the task fell to me, according to Roberto, my computer moron brain will be better suited to this endeavour, and he had an excellent idea on how I should go about it. Roberto believed that if we could just code and locate another black wormhole that would help us travel back in time while the other wormhole remains inactive throughout the process, then we might just find a way to prevent a paradox whenever we travel. It was imperative that I started this task immediately because it was the only thing stopping us from completing our Transpotime21bus crew. The Transpotime21bus has spaces for twenty-one occupants; we already had eighteen: fourteen humans (myself included), three robots and a cyborg. We would fill the remaining three seats only with people who have had some terrible experiences in the past they would need fixing. To do that we needed to travel back in time, and then to go back in time, we had to solve the paradox conundrum.
To create the Paradox prevention portal, I had to create several codes that would help discover a secondary door to the past. It took me several days to get the systems needed to achieve this goal, but I finally did, and then we had to test it.
Several thoughts started running through my head, what if it doesn't work? What if all my efforts were all in vain? What if I am embarrassed by my own creation, I was losing my mind. Then suddenly I pushed all the thoughts out of my head, I’m not going to do this to myself; I did everything right, and it will definitely work.
We started the Paradox prevention portal device and waited, I can't put the joy I felt into words when the green light came on almost immediately. I did it; it was time for us to make our first journey into the past and we would be doing this with the definite assurance that we won't be risking a paradox.