Altered Notes to My Future Self

Hi everyone, It’s been some time since I posted the first chapter to this work-in-progress, titled Altered Notes to My Future Self, and now there is a second chapter. So, I’m posting them together. Thanks for reading, supporting, and recommending my Substack. Onward, Russell

Welcome to the Wired World / 2015 / Russell C. Smith / Collage

1.

Stagecoach to San Francisco

I heard a loud knocking on the stagecoach door, sounding distinctly like the barrel of a gun.

The man doing the knocking shouted, “Git out!”

Since I was the only passenger inside the coach, I was the one who was expected to be “gitting” out. Dressed in dark gray suit jacket, (well worn) black jeans from the future, and a charcoal gray fedora, I kept my finger firmly placed on the button of the Capture Instrument I held in my left hand.

Slowly pushing the door open, I lowered myself down to the running board. I stepped onto the trail, equal parts sand and rock.

In front of me were two men, one tall and one short. Scruffy bandits of the Old West. The real thing, not the facsimile version acted out in Westerns made in the mid-Twentieth seen on a wall-sized VidScreen in a climate-controlled room, far in the future, 122 floors above Central Park Lake. Each of them pointed pistols and sour expressions at me. Wearing crumpled black hats, sweaty neckerchiefs, week-old beards. Clothes that no doubt hadn’t been washed in months. The dusty breeze blowing away their pungent odor was a welcome addition to the California mountain pass landscape.

The taller of the two stepped forward, pointing his Colt 44 at either my stomach or my thigh. I wasn’t sure which.

He said, “Hands up!”

Staring into his eyes, I did nothing, except grip the instrument tighter.

Predictably, he shot me.

He grazed me in the left, outer thigh. I gritted my teeth, then thanked my luck or his bad aim. But mostly I thanked my leg covering made of the same material as my bulletproof vest, doing what I’d designed it to do.

Pointing his gun more directly at my chest, he said, “You look like a smart one, maybe from back East. Even wearing a pair of those fancy spectacles on your nose. Don’t you know you’re supposed to hold your hands sky high in the air, while you’re being robbed?”

“I was about to…” I said, when he shot me a second time.

The bullet proof vest hadn’t yet been invented, so he had no idea as to why I’d fallen, shouted out in pain, yet no blood streamed from my chest.

I stood up and aimed the Capture Instrument at the two of them. Before they could even think about moving away, they were looped into a burst of sprayed plasticine expandable mesh, and a round-ish-edged square container began forming around their limbs and torsos. Practically invisible under the bright desert sun, the clear plasticine enmeshed itself to their squirming bodies, as if they were one two-headed and eight-limbed living organism stuck inside a compact portable jail cell. The mesh had been coated with a mixture of Pharma Grade liquid Codeine, and OpiumDer 49 – formulated for speedy absorption. Within minutes, their squealing turned to whimpering as a disabling grogginess settled in. The plasticine cell gripped their bodies, until they looked like nothing so much as a square box of strangely glued together human parts.

Our stagecoach driver glanced over his shoulder in a state of shock at the scene playing out beside his coach. I looked up at him and said, “Jasper, remember how much I’m paying you, and what for?”

“You betcha, Mr. Alexander,” he said, while pointing down the road. “I ain’t seeing nothing but the road up ahead, taking us to the passes we’ve got to make it through before sundown.”

“Thanks again for your discretion,” I said.

Right on time, a new turbulence was created – making the dry desert air next to the coach shimmer for several seconds, while the time continuum opened up into a compact whirling tornado. To an outside viewer, Anna would’ve appeared from out of nowhere. Only I knew she’d transported herself from Alexander Enterprises, the laboratory ten floors below our living space. Anna knew everything about what I’d begun and was well aware of the timeline shifting implications, we were working with. As if sliding off an invisible conveyer belt, a large steamer trunk emerged from the same time-stream she’d just come through, and landed exactly two feet behind her. She smiled and waved up at Jasper, who I thought might faint from an overload of novelty, but although visibly perplexed, he gripped onto the horses reins and held steady. I briefly wondered if he’d transported other time travelers, then filed the thought away in the back of my mind.

I pulled off my shirt and undid the bulletproof vest, glanced at the large bruise forming on my chest near my right shoulder. Touched it with a medium amount of pressure. It would sting for several minutes, then become a bruise that would eventually fade. After pulling off my boots, I removed my jeans to see how badly I’d been grazed. A small bloodstain was forming. The bullet had grazed but hadn’t come close to entering my leg.

Anna, stepping over to me, hiked up her corseted powder blue dress, and leaned down on one knee next to my leg. She slipped a blade from the hidden sheath sewn into the bulletproof corset. Adjusting her black hair pinned to the time-period black hat which could be found at any upscale haberdashery in San Francisco, she positioned her knife with casual precision. Anna scraped the wound to clear away any leftover shrapnel. It wouldn’t be the last time I was somewhere on a scale of glad to delighted she was a woman who loved reading medical textbooks – published anytime between the fifteenth to the twenty-second century. Reaching inside her undergarment again, she pulled out a small metal medicinal ointment container, dabbed a bit onto her finger and into the wound.

She stood up, her left hand placed on her hip and with arched her eyebrow, and said, “Try not to get shot again.”

Anna’s costume would fit into any gathering place in San Francisco – from upscale mansion to backstreet bordello. Her grin was pure 2144, and her senses were buzzing due to her second time jump of the day. She bunched up the front of her skirt, gave Jasper a glance and a grin, then hopped up and slid inside the coach. I sometimes think she enjoyed the dress-up part of time travel as much, if not more than traveling through time.

Jasper saw an opening, and reminded me, again, “Got to get going. We don’t want to be out on this road come nightfall.”

“As soon as I take care of our prisoners,” I said over my shoulder.

Our would-be bandits, drugged asleep, would have no idea how they reached an abandoned warehouse, near the Barbary Coast. I affixed the transport disc into the slot on the fully formed two-person cell, and did the same for the trunks Anna had just transported with her. I set the coordinates for the dockside warehouse I’d recently purchased on the Wharf, just a few blocks downhill from what would become North Beach, the Twentieth Century haven for the heyday of mid-century counterculture, formed by Beat Writers, poets reading in coffee shops, and musicians playing folk music and blues in small clubs.

After watching our prisoners disappear, I hopped into the back seat of the coach and it took off. Anna had already fallen asleep. Her head leaning against the inside window curtain of the coach, with her right hand nestled inside the front folds of her skirt. Loosely gripping the pearl handle of her six-shooter. Anna’s weapon was an identical match for a period piece Colt-45, except for one key element. It was designed to hold 14 shots and created with a precision unknown in these here parts, as they say, back in 1875.

2.

Altering the Past

Two days later, just past 10:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, our stagecoach rolled into San Francisco. Pacific Standard Time doesn’t yet exist, but will be adopted in a few short years, along with Eastern, Central, and Mountain Time Zones, on November 18, 1883. Why you ask? So the railroads could run trains from coast to coast, in the United States and Canada under one unified time system. That’s how powerful the men who built and own the railroad industry are. They can alter time and space.

Anna and I stepped onto Market Street. I stretched and called out to Jasper, who’d just hopped down from the coach. He was patting one of the horses and feeding him sugar cubes.

I walked up, shook Jasper’s hand and placed an envelope containing $2,000.00 U.S. Bond currency into his inner coat pocket. It was our agreed upon sum. He didn’t ask for it or even agree to it. I had insisted. It was worth over $58,000.00 in 1875 currency, and far more than any Wells Fargo coach driver would be making in their lifetime. Since land in or near San Francisco was priced at around $5.00 an acre in 1875, Jasper could retire and live well, if it suited him.

Jasper opened the envelope and peeked inside. “Truly hard to believe, Mr. Alexander.”

“Believe it, and be safe with it,” I said. “I strongly advise depositing it in a bank immediately.”

Anna came over and smiled joyfully at our driver, while saying, “Oh, thank you Mr. Jenkins for getting us here safely. It feels so good to be standing on my feet.” She spun in a circle. “And what a lovely morning to be in San Francisco.”

“Yes, Miss Anna,” Jasper said. “What do you reckon you will be needing first?”

“Look at how thoughtful you are.” She glanced in my direction. “I believe what we most require is the closest quality hotel, for a bath and a fortifying meal. Suggestions for a local transport?”

He scratched the back of his head, underneath his sweaty hat band. “I’ve heard tell of a big, fancy new hotel,” Jasper said.

“The Palace,” Anna said with a smile. “That’ll do quite nicely.”

The newly opened and taking up several city blocks monument of a hotel, was the largest one in California. It would be damaged beyond repair in the 1906 earthquake and consumed by fire. But those events were several years in this timeline’s future, and in 1875, we knew we’d be safe and sleeping well. We also knew we’d be treated to the best amenities available in San Francisco at that historical moment.

Jasper, picking up on our cues, stepped into the center of Market Street and whistled at the closest carriage driver. The driver was quick to pull up behind us and hop down from his carriage. He hefted our bulky luggage on his broad shoulders and transferred it from stagecoach to carriage as efficiently as a young man had to do in such a bustling city. I held up a dollar bill and placed it in his palm.

The blonde-haired, blue-eyed young man glanced down at this good fortune and said, “Where to, Sir?’

“It’s around the corner, and four blocks from here to the Palace Hotel,” I said.

Anna held out her hand, and he helped her up into the open-air carriage. While I pulled myself up on the opposite side.

Our youthful driver, with a smattering of a blonde beard, most likely in his early twenties, climbed up to the driver’s seat and tugged at the reins. Urging his horse onward before he was fully seated.

Ah, the feeling of being at the exact point in time with future knowledge rushing through me. I was ready to settle in for another productive season. Adding to our wealth, during one of the highest growth periods in California’s history. Of course, it helped immensely knowing what would be unfolding, month by month, and day by day. We weren’t living half a year in the past only to observe it. We were there to change history.

Every book, movie, and TV show was clear about one thing. If you alter one, or more events in the past, you’ll be altering the time-space continuum enough to alter the future. So, the advice was to avoid doing so at all costs. Me, I’m counting on this supposition on time travel to be true.

A person, especially someone connected with a network of powerful wealthy individuals, especially if they fell into the category of visionary, can begin connecting what I think of as “time-altering experiments” that’ll begin showing up in future events, and, in fact alter the future. First in subtle ways, affecting one’s family history, or a single town, and then altering the history of an entire region of a country. Eventually, the world.

Why would I want to do such a thing? Beginning in the 1970s, and continuing the same course for decades, several generations of politicians and billionaire owners of monopolies in the energy sector kept lying to citizens of the United States and doing nothing to take any meaningful measures against the impending climate crisis. By the first few decades of the twenty-first century, the global climate crisis worsened, wildfires grew larger and burned entire forests and cities, and notable land masses were taken back by oceans. On a global scale.

All of this aligned with how much mankind had treated the earth more and more unkindly. Ignoring the consequences. Those at the tippity top of the food chain were changing the world by inaction, and by a sheer unwillingness to give up the tiniest bit of their fortunes for the greater good. I always thought mankind was a misnomer. Mankind was most unkind to its primordial, and symbolic mother, Mother Earth.

By the year 2090, floods and fires had taken back, reclaimed, ravaged every continent on planet earth – letting humanity know it was past time to rebuild, readapt, and make entirely new plans for every place people had inhabited for the past 25,000 years. The wakeup calls had been blaring for some time, and those who were shocked when major costal cities had been swallowed up by the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and every other ocean and sea on our planet had been living with blinders on for so long it was horrifically absurd.

In North America, in 2085, Key West, Miami, Charlotte, and New Orleans were the first major cities to be completely submerged. Several years later, inside the contiguous United States were Tampa/St. Petersburg and Seattle. In other parts of our planet, Venice, Amsterdam, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Mumbai were submerged in 2087.

Where Anna and I lived, in Manhattan, a cabal of multi-billionaires, including us, had been working behind the scenes, out of reach of waning governmental control, and putting our financial and personal resources into not ignoring the most scientifically proven methods for saving and elevating culturally significant structures, and constructing a seawall large enough to hold back the mighty Atlantic for another eighty years, give or take a decade. If we were lucky.

We city dwellers were the ones with the most to lose as well as the most to profit, financially and emotionally. Understanding the value and risks of such an enterprise. I always asked at top-level meetings, “What was worth saving for ourselves, and future generations – on Manhattan, (or the New York island, as Woody Guthrie so poetically put it in song), and what would we have to let go of, and completely transform?

I’d love to tell you that raising every significant art and cultural edifice, starting with major museums and concert halls, was my idea. But it wasn’t. Men were living in tech, finance, and survival brains. Women understood saving the world was just as much about preserving culture as it was about saving ourselves. Anna spoke up, as one of half a dozen women at a planning meeting where this key topic was delved into. She’d said, “While looking around this sturdy teakwood table, high up on the 88^th floor, in a building built on top of what will be the newest megatower next door to Lincoln Center, as we soon raise it 48 stories above where it now stands, next to Broadway River, I see many men and women who’ve put effort and funds into our project. We’re only blocks away from the recently elevated MoMA, which has been raised to 44 floors higher from its former level.”

Her friend, who went by Madam Esmerelda, stood up to her well over six feet height, with a black and silver wig adding another half a foot, and continued Anna’s train of thought. “We aren’t saving the museums, music, poetry, and the bookstores and libraries of New York City for our own purposes and no others. If so, I fail to see the point of doing this at all. Whatever comes next, and wherever we all wind up in our time travels, humans will require the arts to help guide them. We’ve taken upon the task of saving this city, doing our part. If we can. Making the best of this Hinge of History.”

I was wealthy before the climate crisis reached the tipping point. Starting, buying and selling, investing in and accumulating technology businesses beginning in the 1980s. And then, my little side project of perfecting time travel made me wealthy beyond belief. The dream had become a reality, as they say. With a limited number of people being able to purchase the tech and commit fully to our mission of going back in time to alter America, and world history. First, we’d do our best to keep our home turf, before it became submerged. Washed away by the tides of history. Best workaround for our resources was using container ships and putting up massive hydraulic systems designed to make our imaginings a reality. We were doing what skyscraper builders did in centuries past, only we were doing it under incredibly inclement circumstances. This is how edifices and arts organizations – from The Metropolitan Museum, to Lincoln Center, to the Guggenheim, and the New York Public Library, and on and on and on… were given the full water protective insulation and elevating treatment.

The East River Wall, the height of a 120-story skyscraper, was built on a foundation of ancient Precambrian crystalline basement rock, flown in from the Adirondack Mountains. Dumped by the metric ton into the East River, to form a solid underpinning to the structure that would become a template for how to make it happen, for every close-to-being submerged coastal city on the planet. Fabricated by material made to withstand hurricane force waves, superstorms, typhoons, and tornados, as well as future climactic events forecasters hadn’t yet predicted. Some things had to be sacrificed to make the East River Wall a reality. Half of Central Park had become a saltwater lake, to relieve some of the pressure of the ocean tides pushing against the wall.

All of this is to say, on a fine sunny day, in the far future from the spring day we were experiencing in 1875, Anna and I could travel on our yacht docked below Alexander Tower, on Central Park South. And within twenty minutes, dock underneath The Metropolitan Museum of Art, step into a climate-controlled elevator, go up 74 floors, and step into the same Great Hall entrance to The Met visitors used to walk into after a short flight of stone steps on Fifth Avenue. We’d walk up the grand staircase leading us to European Paintings, where we’d spend hours with Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh – and maybe on the way out, visit with an Egyptian Mummy. If the storm-tossed seas splashing against our seawall will be strong enough for either building its replacement, or history is altered enough to make sure none of this ever happens. Either way, we’re still in the process of changing our world for the better. Centuries and centuries of art and artifacts, books and maps, are safe for a time from the final ravages of the climate crisis in one world, which is a world none of the creators of these masterpieces could ever have imagined.

Our young driver pulled up in front of the Palace Hotel, quickly carried our luggage into the lobby, glittering with red draperies and golden chandeliers. He waved down a bellman to help us get checked in.

Before our carriage driver left, I handed him a two-dollar bill, and said, “My name is Mr. Alexander. We’ll be staying at The Palace for several months. If you can drop by again tomorrow morning around this same time, with all of the morning newspapers, I’d like to look at some nearby properties.”

“Thank you, Mr. Alexander,” he said. “I’m Caleb, Caleb Morrissey. I’ll be here right at the time you said.”

“Most excellent,” I said, and shook Caleb’s strong hand.

In 1875 currency, I’d already paid young Caleb $87.00. I’d be offering him much more if he knew how to be discrete and wasn’t afraid to venture into the seedier parts of the city.

Anna and I checked in, paying six months in advance for their penthouse suite.

A bellman carried our luggage up to our room and received a two-dollar tip for his services.

Anna settled into our bedroom, then took out towels, soap, and shampoo from her traveling bag. She went into the bathroom and ran water for her bath. From our bedroom window, I looked down at Market Street, watching the city come awake.

From the open doorway to our spacious bathroom, I watched as Anna stepped into the clawfoot bathtub, which she’d filled nearly to the top with hot water. She let her hair down and made murmuring sounds.

I walked over, sat on the side of the bathtub, and said, “I think I’ll go check on our would-be bandits, and afterwards order us room service for lunch. How’s that sound?”

She smiled and flicked some water at me. “As long as you kiss me first, I agree.”

So, I did.