“It’s time to revolutionize invention!” Nadia shouted before her audience.

The students in Mrs. Wilder’s fourth-grade class wore startled and bewildered expressions. None of them knew what was going on. Many of them didn’t even know what the word ‘revolutionize’ meant. Still, it was Nadia’s turn at show-and-tell and she had the floor. Besides which, everyone, including Mrs. Wilder herself, was infinitely curious about the covered contents of the cart Nadia had wheeled in at the start of class.

“The grown-ups have always been in charge of coming up with new inventions, but the problem with grown-ups is that they have no imagination. They can invent things that are faster, smaller, and more powerful but they’re still really the same old thing. Also, maybe most importantly, they’re rarely fun to use. There are only a few things out right now that I think really get it right and many of them are considered toys and aren’t even taken seriously.

I think that it’s time that toys stop being the only things that are fun to use, that make you say ‘wow!’ everytime you use it, and I think that it’s up to us kids to invent what the grown-ups can’t. Yes, Jonah?”

“What’s under the blanket, Nadia?” A pudgy youth, slumped deep in his chair with a chubby trembling finger indicating the covered cart, asked.

“Why, I’m glad you asked that, Jonah,” Nadia answered and a much relieved Jonah sat up a little taller in his chair. “This is my show-and-tell as well as my business proposal to all my fellow classmates. Everyone, I introduce to you, Childworks!”

With a flourish Nadia lifted the sheet into the air giving just a hint of the wonders below, and then snapped it with practiced wrist action eliciting just as much excitement over her show as well as the cart’s contents.

On top of this fairly innocuous two foot by four foot metal wheeled cart were the most incredibly inviting devices. Brightly colored objects with buttons to be pushed, sliders to slide, dials to turn, screens to watch, secrets to unlock. Some objects looked familiar, like one that looked much like a flashlight, one that resembled a clock radio, and another that seemed like a toaster of sorts, but then there were those objects that defied imagination and begged exploration.

Nadia smiled broadly as she surveyed the room. All eyes were glimmering with unmistakable captivation, excitement, and imagination. Creating these devices had occupied every spare moment of Nadia’s time since the summer before the second grade and her feverish pace had paid off in spades. Her inventions were bound to be huge successes, but they were only the tip of the iceberg. With a classroom full of vibrant young imaginations the inventions to come would prove the wonders on display today to be mere trinkets.

“Jonah, would you mind coming up here and being my assistant?” Nadia asked, catching her subject by surprise. His frazzled brain attempted to remember how to nod his head but it was no good and so instead he jumped up from his desk, sending his chair crashing to the ground, and marched awkwardly, almost robotically, to the front of the class.

“Okay Jonah, now what do you suppose this is?” Nadia asked, her hand on the toaster-like device.

“A, um, a toaster, Nadia?” Jonah asked back, his right foot grinding nervously on the tiled floor.

“It is a toaster, but so much more too.” Nadia replied. “You see these little displays on the side of the toaster? Well, let’s plug this in and pop in some toast, and I’ll show you just what you can do with *this* toaster.”

Nadia pulled out the retractable cord, plugged it in to the nearby socket, and the displays as well as a couple indicator lights lit up. From the lower shelf of the cart she took a couple slices of white bread and popped it into the toaster and pushed one of the lit buttons which changed from green to red as the bread slid down into the toaster.

“Now Jonah, think about your favorite animal. Got it?” Nadia asked and Jonah nodded. “Great. Now draw it on the first display with your finger.”

A determined look in his eyes, Jonah hunched over and sketched in some rough approximation of something vaguely mammalian before standing back up. Nadia indicated for him to then write his name on the other display and after he had finished she pressed the remaining button which also went from green to red.

The classroom went dead silent as all watched with such intensity they could almost see through the toaster at the bread itself being toasted. A few moments later the toast popped up and Nadia asked Jonah to remove them.

Much to Jonah and everybody else’s amazement, the toast was perfectly toasted golden brown except for the areas which showed the drawing Jonah had made and the blocky lettering of his name.

“Thank you, Jonah,” Nadia said. “You can keep those if you like.”

Jonah nodded and returned to his seat.

“I’ll demonstrate the rest of these devices with more assistants but now I have to ask, who among you would be interested in joining Childworks and helping me invent more things like this?” Nadia asked animatedly.

However, not a single hand was raised.

Then, one went up. And another. And a few more. And soon there wasn’t a single hand that wasn’t up. Even Mrs. Wilder’s hand was enthusiastically waving in the air.

“Thank you, everyone. I promise you you’re all going to be part of something extraordinary,” Nadia said, positively beaming. “Now, let’s check out the rest of these gadgets.”

“Let’s see, Daniel Bolls… Yes, it says here he died in his sleep last night. Tender old age of ninety-four. Not bad, not bad at all. Ah, here he comes now.”

I stepped back to take in the full effect of the glorious device. McAfee, the sixty-two year old proprietor of the machine, smiled and stepped back as well.

“You know Mr. Kensington, despite my having been proprietor of this node of the soul machine for thirty years now, I’m still awed by the show it puts on,” McAfee said.

I nodded, only half paying attention to him, my attention momentarily fixed on the brilliant orbs beginning their journey in the machine. The sound of my photographer’s camera clicking behind me snapped me back to my original purpose there.

“So then, as you explained earlier Mr. McAfee, this device is connected to a soul collector which basically plucks disembodied souls from the air, processes them for experiences and memories, and then wipes them clean for a fresh start in their new life,” I said, partially reading from my notes.

“Yes, that’s right,” McAfee replied, his eyes tracing the orbs of light passing through the machine’s spaghetti network of crystalline tubes.

“And one of those orbs of light we’re witnessing right now is the late Dan Bolls of 1516 Hawks Lane, correct?” I asked.

“Right. According to my schedule it should be the topmost ‘orb’, as you put it.” McAfee replied.

“Explain to me again how you know which soul belongs to who?”

“Whom,” McAfee replied. I quietly added the ‘m’ to my notes as he continued. “The soul collectors are limited in range, which is why we have so many collection nodes around the world. When a person dies their soul gives off a very unique resonance, identifying that individual much like a fingerprint. We essentially tag that frequency, look up who died at that time, and pair the two pieces of information in our database.”

“What happens with the information in the database?” I asked.

“Ah, you see, when we process the souls we collect we extract all sorts of information from them. Experiences that the person had been through, things they had seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted, and even things that they had liked or disliked in their prior existence. This information is of tremendous interest to numerous groups, most of whom subscribe to the anonymous version of the database.”

“Any examples of the subscribing groups?”

“Oh, government agencies, brain trusts, advertising groups, nothing unexpected.”

“Can you give me any specific names of any of these groups?” I asked, knowing McAfee’s coming response.

“No, I’m afraid not. We have to protect our client’s identities. Company policy. You understand, right?”

“Sure,” I replied. “Doesn’t hurt to ask though.”

“Certainly. You wouldn’t be a very effective member of the press without asking those sorts of questions.”

“Do the unique resonance signatures tied into individual records means that you could track a soul through its different lives?” I asked.

“Yes, indeed it does,” McAfee replied. “The means to do that isn’t very intact yet, however. Our reliance on death records to tie soul resonance information in to the soul’s previous owner rather limits our tracking abilities. Plus, we also pick up the resonances from animals and we have no way of knowing who or what exactly they were.”

“Are they the same? The human and animal souls. That is, can a soul be a human or an animal at different points?”

“Again, I’m afraid we don’t have very good data to make any official statements on that, but from what little data we do have on the matter it does seem likely.”

The sound of increased camera clicking drew my attention back to the soul machine and I saw the orbs were just starting to exit. It seemed reminiscent of a dandelion giving off its seeds which would then drift lazily off in search of a new beginning. That’s what these souls were like, dandelion seeds searching for a new place to root themselves, drifting off into the ether to start all over again.

“Where do the souls go, once they’ve been through the soul machine?” I asked, trying to keep track of which orb had been Daniel Bolls.

“Ho ho, that remains yet one of the great unknowns, Mr. Kensington. Where the souls go after our brief layover is nobody’s business but their own.”

I filled in the rest of my notes and glanced up at the orbs again just in time to see them phase out of view.

Am I finally back?

I’ve spent the last couple weeks lost in the Internet. No, that’s not a typo — I was lost *in* the Internet. Wild stuff, seriously. Oh, and it’s totally not a series of tubes. More like a fourth-dimensional hyper-spiderweb streaming vast quantities of fast-moving electrons traveling with awe-inspiring accuracy and efficiency. Serious quantum physics-grade stuff there.

Getting into the Internet was surprisingly easy. You build a matter fabrication unit that not only assembles matter at the molecular level but takes it apart too. Then you write the software to store the molecular pattern that is you, re-encode the analog data to binary bits, and then upload the code into an artificial intelligence framework.

A good AI framework will grant you the tools to get to wherever you need to be, accounting for all available protocols including html, ftp, and a lot of P2P networks, port scanners to get past all but the best firewalls, and the means for your sentient half to social engineer your way past even those blockades by sending out an e-mail to the tech support staff pretending to be some management weenie who needs to get on the corporate intranet from his or her home. Even good techies give up the goods when it comes to requests from management because after a few weeks on the job they learn to surrender their attempts to reason with the pointy-haired bosses on matters of security and how it applies to them too.

Military networks are a little trickier. You can’t really send an angry arm-waving e-mail to the techies claiming to be some four-star general and expect they’ll just jump. You have to have authorization codes and multiple OK’s down the chain of command. But, where there’s a will, there’s always a way.

And let me tell you, I have seen some seriously hardcore data on my travels. From next-generation technology prototypes and development notes, to compromising intel on everybody from the bottom to the top, and on to major black-ops hush-hush doesn’t-exist-even-if-you’re-looking-straight-at-it kind of stuff, I have collected quite the goodie bag. Of course, the really juicy stuff would probably get me disappeared so I’m not at any urgency to show those cards, but the leaves plenty of stuff that Oprah or Maury would sell their thrice-mortgaged souls for.

The data didn’t come without any catches though. I definitely raised some red flags out there. Almost got stuck in a few networks when the sysadmins started blocking nodes and running security sweeps. I know I showed up in a few HijackThis logs though I managed to delete myself from them. Can’t say I erased all records of my trespasses, however. I have to admit I’d like to see the faces of techs trying to figure out what they were looking at in their logs. Can’t imagine they see too many sentient collections of software trying to escape their network security measures.

Worst near-miss for me though was when I accidentally corrupted some Unix daemon on a corporate network in Moscow that started a perpetual cold-boot sequence across the whole server cluster. I fled from machine to machine as they each entered their shutdown sequence. Eventually I wound up on the last system in the chain and got stuck in cold storage on the hard drive until the system came back on a few minutes later. I went through this around twenty-two times before I finally figured out how to hold off the reboot for a few seconds by creating a huge temp file for the system to delete before shutting down.

I got the feeling that something happened when the power was going out each time, too. It got me to wondering what it feels like to be written to backup, because it did feel an awful lot like I was being painstakingly read from head to toe. And then following my escape from the network it felt like someone was shadowing all of my moves. Tch, probably just paranoia. Probably was just some curious virus or worm looking for an open port to infect me through.

Still, if I was written to backup every time the system rebooted I might also have been restored every time it came back up and then that means there could be infinite digital copies of me roaming the Internet looking for a way out. Would they all be looking for my system to enter through the designated port and be rebuilt by the matter fabricator? If they found it they’d be denied reassembly because the molecular fridge is empty, so where would they go next?

Wait, I did run across some interesting matter fabrication experiments taking place at a few labs around the world, including a couple in the US. If my copies know about them too, and there’s no reason why they wouldn’t — I learned about those experiments before I was backed up, and if the fab labs had all the right molecular components, then my copies could instantiate themselves in the real world too.

I’m not entirely certain how I feel about the prospect of endless me’s coming out of Internet. I guess it wouldn’t be the worst thing to come off the Internet, but I’ve kind of gotten used to being the only me. I still think I’m probably just being paranoid, but maybe I should come up with a contingency plan just the same. You know, in case I come home to find me and don’t like the fact that the reason I couldn’t reassemble here was because I beat them to it. Or something like that.

Hey, if any of you work at one of these matter fabrication labs and you notice your matter printers are assembling something rather, well, human-like, drop me a line, won’t you?

April 23, 2019 – 5:03:57 AM

“And in future news tonight, the following six people will win the 12.4 million dollar lottery jackpot next week – Gerald…”

I’ve read a lot of science fiction, and I don’t think anyone ever predicted that time travel would be invented by the press. Still, I’m not actually surprised that it was.

October 19, 2013 – the New York Times slips in a mention of a traffic accident yet to happen on the second to last page of the main section. Several people call them on it and the Times passes it off as a misprint. One week later a package delivery man on his way to an illicit rendezvous runs into a stalled ice-cream truck, resulting in the grisly ice-cream related demise of one frozen treat vendor — exactly as the Times had printed it.

At that moment the cat was out of the bag. By the very next issue the New York Times began the ‘Upcoming News’ section of their paper and began running stories up to a week before they would take place. This put to test the theory that the future was linear and unchangeable as some unfortunate people would read about their own fates and try to alter the outcomes. Sometimes they could, in which case the Times would print a retraction, but other events proved themselves more stubborn to change.

To be more clear, the device used by the Times wasn’t exactly time travel. That is to say, nobody actually traveled anywhere. It was more of a time window as events of the future could be observed, anywhere at anytime up to a week in the future. But experiments to transfer objects to those future locations always resulted in those objects seemingly ceasing to exist. Therefore, the Times’ time machine would remain only for the purpose of peering into the future and knowing where to send their reporters to be on scene for breaking news.

Unsurprisingly, it turned out that other news outfits had also been working on their own time travel devices. The Times had filed a patent on their device soon after its existence was revealed and similar technologies had to be altered sufficiently so as not infringe on the patent. Within the next half decade, every major newspaper, broadcast news program, and Internet news site, had their own version of the future news running.

The ’scoop’ was redefined once the New York Times had their time machine placing their reporters just where every story was about to take place. Now the race was on to stretch time travel farther and farther out in a bid to take the lead on the future news scoops. The Times had the lead but the Wall Street Journal finished strongest with their “In Three Months” columns, which could actually go so far as three months, five days, and two hours in to the future.

Of course, it would come as no surprise that world leaders had strong interests in time travel. Mostly, politicians wanted to ensure the outcomes of their endeavors whether they be elections, bills, or even wars. Ultimately, however, their knowledge of the future proved one of those things that defied most change. Winners would win, losers would lose, and that held true throughout the spectrum of things that held political interest.

So it remained to reporting the news that time travel remained useful.

As strange as it seemed in the beginning, when news was being delivered fresh days before it would happen, it has become part of our daily existence now. Like a new townhouse complex where once there was a scrap yard, it simply became one of those things we quickly grew to accept as normal. The adaptiveness of humans is one of those uncanny things, that we can take something that shortly before didn’t exist and then turn around to think it had always been there.

How many of us can honestly say we don’t pick up the morning paper, flip on the TV news, or load up a news blog, and take for granted the events taking place in the next three months. Who among us is at all surprised anymore when we read that next week a car crash will claim the life of some celebrity, or that political unrest will shake up a whole nation two months from now.

Not me, that’s for sure.

Well, that’s it for me this week.

Signed,

Time Skipper

Just another random voice on the Internets.

p.s. Remember to look both ways when you’re crossing streets twelve days from now. Who knows — it may make a difference.

The dragonfly flitted within mere inches of my face, it’s translucent wings catching the sunlight in a neon display of violet, green, and pink. Its flight path took it to a nearby tree branch where it hovered a moment before gently alighting upon the branch, folding its wings back and settling in.

I let go of the spray head on the garden hose and lowered it gently down. It was a hot summer and yard work was a good choice for summer vacation work. Nobody wanted to be outside in this heat, much less working in their yard, but at the same time nobody wanted to have anything less than a green lawn in this little slice of suburbia. I didn’t particularly care for the work either, but it was earning me good money and I needed a car for senior year and college after.

The biggest downfall of the work though, aside from the scorching heat, was the incredible boredom of it all. Even the most remotely interesting distraction, well, distracted me. Right at this moment it was a slender, long-winged, little dragon.

Fixing my eyes on its current position I cautiously stepped closer to the resting insect. I walked forward softly and wondered if doing so made much of a difference. It may have though, as I got to within a foot of it, and again saw those colors reflected in its wings.

Satisfied that it wasn’t going to take off on me, I said, “Hey little dragonfly, tell me, where did all the dragons go?”

“What do you mean where did all the dragons go? You’re looking at one right now,” it responded right back.

Well, that was unexpected.

I blinked a few times and looked again at the dragonfly, only to realize it was, in fact, looking directly back at me. I blinked several more times in response.

“Hey, you got something in your eyes, maybe?” it said. Or rather, he said, as it was a male voice, however squeaky.

“I uh, I uh, I uh,” I answered.

Great, here I was with the greatest scientific find since, well, okay, so science clearly isn’t my strong suite, but what would it matter if I had a talking dragonfly…

Wait a minute, what did it say?

Wait, did I say that out loud?

No, it’s not answering.

“What did you say?” I asked my meal ticket.

“What are you, dense?” it said. “I said, you’re looking at a dragon right now.”

“But you’re tiny. And a bug.” I wielded my reply like a crushing sledgehammer of logic.

“Yeah, and you’re big and an idiot,” came its reply.

“Okay, sorry, wrong foot,” I started over. “It’s just that you’re nothing like the dragons I know about. The huge kind that breathe fire, terrorize villages, and kidnap princesses so knights can come kill you and be a big hero afterwards.”

“You’re right about that much, I’m definitely not one of those.” it answered. “The kind of dragon you described would’ve been more like my great-great-great-grandfather’s time.”

“So what happened?” I asked and the dragonfly flitted its wings, possibly in annoyance, and I regretted the little laugh I had as I asked my question.

“Pfft, magic is what happened. You know Merlin?” the dragonfly asked and I nodded. “Well, that guy was a load. He couldn’t do squat, just impressed the king and knights with a little hocus bogus. That’s all he could do, or so we thought.”

“Oh?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

“Yeah, the king and his people weren’t exactly taken with us dragons and so he ordered Merlin to get rid of us,” it replied.

“And Merlin cast a spell which turned dragons into bugs?” I exclaimed.

The dragonfly flitted its wings again and walked a few steps before stopping.

“That’s the story I’ve been told,” it said. “Not exactly the height of our existences, you know?”

“No, I guess not,” I answered. “And you don’t know any way to change yourselves back?”

“Well, there is one thing that might work,” it started. “But I’d need a human to help me.”

“Hey, I’m a human!” I shouted my revelation and I thought I saw the dragonfly shake its head.

“Okay, here’s what you’ve gotta do. Take a couple steps back, say ‘Aye Mah Bud Hed’ three times, and run as hard as you can at me. You have to do it just right or the magic won’t transfer over to me,” it said. “Alright?”

“Alright,” I said, taking a couple steps back. “Let’s hope this works.”

“Aye Mah Bud Hed, Aye Mah Bud Hed, Aye Mah Bud Hed.”

I repeated the magic words and added a battle cry as I charged the little dragon. At the last moment as I neared it the dragonfly took off and I collided hard with the tree it had just been on, falling back on my butt.

A roar of laughter erupted from the tree and I thought for a moment that I had screwed up and cast my spell on the tree, bringing it to life. That theory died soon after though, as the laughter died down to choking gasps and snorts and turned to words from the same voice as the dragonfly.

It said, “Oh, I can’t believe you fell for that. I left that transmitter in the tree hoping to scare the mailman or some pedestrian but I got you so good.”

I turned around on a hunch and saw a boy about ten or eleven in the window of the house I was just working at. He waved at me and held up a walkie talkie. He pressed a button and the voice came back again.

“By the way, you really are a butt head,” he said.

I shook my head and rubbed my tender forehead. This was going to be one long summer.