Till the Shimmering End of Time

 The year is 2001. Jimmy Rhodes is an IT consultant working for
Odyssey Inc, a small startup company. Jimmy is developing a new software
package that will, among other things, allow one to access those Internet
sites no one ever sees because they are hidden behind thousands of others. He
wonders about a hunch of his. 

 People rarely get past the first couple hundred ad entries, he
ponders laboriously, before they make the decision to go no further. That
seemed inherently unfair to Jimmy. Maybe he might level the playing field
though his new creation the "Reverse Search" program. Even things out a
little.

 Essentially his idea was to give his purchasers of RS the option of
alternately making the first site last and the last site first. Maybe upgrade
later to let them choose numerically any site in between. What was out there
at the far flung end of those categories anyway? The fact that accessing
those remote sites proved to be so difficult made him more than curious.
       
  Jimmy started the RS program up for its first test run. Any doubts
he had that maybe there were just too many sites for there to be some kind of
organized discrimination quickly dried up. His suspicions were confirmed. He
did smell a rat.

 Jimmy was amazed at the wealth of untapped potential he found at
these ends of the Internet. These ends of the cyber universe. No wonder these
sites were obscured this way. It only stood to reason that with a billion
people on the net an indentured, serflike subclass would emerge. A
quasi-enslaved group with bargains so supple as to drastically undermine and
undervalue corporate America as well as the corporate world. So big money HAD
squelched out the competition by putting them back here in this no man's land
of anonymity. He figured those who offered to automatically find the lowest
price on the web for anything were just another falsifying element of that
enormously greedy structure more commonly known as the suits. He might have
more trouble than he thought getting his brainchild to market. He thought he
knew now what he was up against.

 Entry 106,836 under Internet technology was labeled ARPANET1969. Do
not click open till 8:36 on January 12th, 2001 the ad warned. That was today
and right now Jimmy thought. This must be some kind of gag. Jimmy double
clicked on it. As soon as he did he noticed the cord connecting his mouse
ceasing to exist although the new sleeker device remained fully functional.
He had the urge to run out in the hall and take a look around but intuition
told him to stay put.
   
 ARPANET or the Advanced Research Projects Agencies net was the
original Internet designed by the U.S government in 1969. It was originally
used to connect universities and other government bodies. Jimmy began to
wonder how life might have been different over the last 32 years if Internet
technology had caught on from its beginning. If the government hadn't hung on
to its secrets as long as it did. If the masses had recognized how it could
shape their lives. If people could have shared their best ideas and complex
knowledge long before... Maybe the world couldn't have handled it. Maybe the
Internet showed up right on time as it was. With those formative thoughts
brewing his mouse disappeared altogether.
   
 What the hell -- Jimmy started.

 This mechanized entity does not recognize that command, said a
crystal clear human voice digitally. He looked down to see his tower and
speakers fading away into transparency too. The room was in a vaporous state
of upstart distillation. The annoying clump of tangled wires that had
previously connected the rest of his computer's appendages fluctuated into
and out of visibility finally vanishing altogether.
   
 Before Jimmy could spring up out of his chair the sound of
ventriloquism seeped out from the rooms empty corners wraith like.

 "Hello is any one there?" the voice said inquisitively.

Jimmy looked all around flabbergasted. Had someone found out about the RS
program? Was that what this was about? A face appeared on the screen in front
of him.

 Jimmy looked closely at the man and the clunky machinery in the
background. The man was wearing black horn framed glasses and sported a 60's
style crew cut. He wore an ordinary white short sleeved dress shirt with
several pens sticking out of his pocket.
   
 " Quick, what year is it there?"

 "Are you kidding? Its 2001." Jimmy replied

 "Hot damn. This is NASA we have you on our Jumbotron Apollo monitor.
Its 2 in the morning here. We have the place cleared out for you. Your right
on time. I can't believe we did it. This was such a crapshoot.
   
 "What kind of gag is this?"

 "No gag at all

 But how-- Jimmy began.

 We've been working on this a long time. Listen, I can tell you this.
We used projections from information we got from atomic clocks. Some Quantum
physics. A little relativity and a whole lot of heat and electricity. Fusion.
The mirrored light refractor is apparently working. Add in a little
innovation that we can't tell anybody about and a whole lot of luck and there
you have it. Our connection seems to be shaky at best but it just might work
for our purposes.
   
 With those words Jimmy's screen disappeared altogether and he found
himself looking at a holographic projection. He passed his hand through it
awestruck. Now he really was frightened but disbelief lingered. Like magic
the furniture itself started to change around him. The antique cherry wood
desk and chair morphed into one sleek composite unit. Jimmy reclined back,
his head cradled comfortably for viewing. Its hybrid of buttons and sprawling
luxury struck Jimmy with its stylized sense of evident ergonomic logic. Jimmy
noticed what seemed like car lights in motion passing through the blinds
outside of his window.

 "What the--" he had never seen that happen before. He was on the
72nd floor. 
   
 I'm Arthur C. Clarke, the man said. You have apparently found the
Time Capsule codewriting script. So what ever did become of ARPANET? The
potential even from now--1969 is... After 32 years I can't imagine. We have
many hopes for the Internet. The information we are collecting from your
binary broadcast is going to help us keep Kennedy's promise just in time --
just before 1970. We believe this is the event for us that will get the first
man on the moon.

 Our computers are the fastest of our time, Clark went on.

The computer I have in front of me has more computing power than that whole
room of scrap metal and vacuum tubes behind you Jimmy said with an air of
superiority seemingly convinced now. Clarke turned and looked across the
room's at the enormous fortress of steel, reel to reel tapes and blinking
lights. 
   
 The single holograph where the old computer had been began to
stretch out and break apart fission like. The image slowly evolved and split
into separate 3x3 foot windows that covered the walls and ceiling. The
world's new paths were leaving documented footprints behind. Developing
events some apocalyptic, came to fore in them.

 One window broadcast on the current manned mission to Jupiter's moon
Europa. Another porthole highlighted the explosion of a shuttle high in the
earth's atmosphere. Tragically it had been returning home from its mission of
drilling for oil on the moon. Another reported Iran had dropped its third
nuclear bomb on neighboring Iraq in three years.

 Canada had just become the 56th state of America behind the other
new additions Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba and England. McDonald's
had finally bought out Burger King. A new age Karaoke machine was being
advertised on still another screen. With it people could rehearse and record
scenes out of what they used to call movies. Later they would insert their
clips over the original actor into the very scenes of those originals --
seamlessly. A monolith tumbled domino like through space in still another
frame. The line of gray area between reality and possible futures widened.
Commercial banners of advertisement popped up and disappeared throughout the
montage collage. Some things never changed, Jimmy thought
   
 What's going on there Clarke asked from 1969? Were getting more
static on our end.

 What the hell did you do, Jimmy pleaded. All the change was to much
for him. Strange stirrings began inside of him.
   
 We simply speeded up the natural progress of our time, Clark
replied. By our getting the salient information from that computing dynamo in
front of you we hope to move ahead dramatically. Our hopes are that by 1972
we'll be technologically where you were at in 2001. If it works we can do it
again and again. Only better, faster and with more information transferred
each time. There had to be an electronic link to get the whole process
started. To connect the dots that were already there. That link was ARPANET

 We've even figured at that geometric rate that by the time were done
with this connection we'll have shaped the flow of time suitably enough to...
His voice trails off knowingly.

 In 2001 you'll actually be living somewhere around 2400 by way of
comparison to man's normal progression. Give or take a hundred years. We can
tack on large increments of progress without actually wasting the physical
days of our lives in that pursuit. It works exponentially. In this way we've
hypothesized one might live forever.     
 
 Jimmy became more alarmed at what he saw next. His own body was
starting to change. Images in his subconciousness overlapped his field of
vision. An evolutionary disposition took shape. Jimmy noticed his arms and
legs had atrophied -- shortened. His feet felt bound somehow and removed his
shoes to find webbing between his toes. His eyes had moved further apart and
out to the end of tentacle like feelers. With them he could see both sides of
his globe at once. His hair was falling out in clumps as it had steadily
since the time of Australopithicus.

 Its happening to fast, Jimmy cried. The process is cycling over and
over like its on autopilot. Metallic plaque like fittings began to grow from
Jimmy's arms and legs. A transparent skull cap domed over the area where his
enlarged cranium pulsed. A mystic fluid washed back and forth over his brain
inside. A motorized propeller folded out of his back. The faces on the screen
from 1969 disappeared altogether. The links to the past had grown too distant
to be retrieved. That part of his humanity was gone.
Human disconnection was complete.  
   
 Jimmy watched the building erode quickly around him. Patina built up
on the now visibly decaying patchwork of roof tops around him. The streets
were silent with littered wreckage of unfamiliar machinery. The clouds took
on the rusty burnished color of old half lives. A zephyr in the sky stirred to
life like it had since that first day. People's old shadows of varying size
and shape were scorched into the walls on the ground below conjuring memories
of speckled footage from the Hiroshima blasts. The image of terawatt
supercolliders flashed atomic negatives through his mind. A shower of large
meteors fell steadily from above the likes that don't come along often.

 Hovering now Jimmy watched the sun grow larger and turn red than
blue as if the undulations of time could not make up its mind about immutable
laws in distinct regions of this void. Finally it went supernova. The
universe sucked inward on itself like a brilliant color movie run backwards.
He found himself floating in a new primordial soup. He remembered his
mother's last words--its like trying to fit the ocean into a thimble. The
beginning is the end he thought only briefly. Time consumed him. Jimmy was a
one-celled amoebae once again.