Three Millennia in a Balloon - N. Barry Carver (parable of the sower read online .txt) 📗

The plans are all over the interweb.

I simply loaded them ein and touched it all together in the parking attic. Anyone in France could have done it.

It’s called a Dirigible–Z my friend, and I’m tapping you out this note from my palmtop notery, as I rise above the rooftops of the Notre Dame, in the hopes that you will simply eat your heart out–in jealousy.

Let me monologue a bit:

When Misters Bell and Edison perfected the atom-conglomerator –providing us all with the limitless energies we now enjoy (what was that, a full decade ago... about 1878?)– it didn’t take the jilted Mr. Tesla long to put those energies to good use by opening the first dimension doorway into the past.

Since then common folks with any interest in seeing just how unbreakable history is, have been snipping back and forth through time. They add a bit here (like slipping DaVinci the sewing machine plans) and nip off a bit there (like making that little Corsican “Emperor of the French” – what a laugh that was!) just as they pleased.

But while it did mean some alterations in the business of today, very little really changed. But I....


Oops, sorry. I had to break off there for a minute. Seems I got to reminiscing and didn’t equalize the pre-mix on the Helium3 outputs. That could have been bad, no? Nothing like vaporizing your neighborhood to ruin your dinner plans, eh?

Now, where was I... Oh yes, well, all the diddling aside, I’ve decided (and you are the first one I’m messagetexting about it) to change everything! That’s right. The kit and sync!

My super dirigible, with its flexi-tanium shell, is (as soon as I reach height for the trajectonomy) going to appear above the Caral Supe people of Peru. These folks were making pyramids about the same time as the Egyptians and two-thousand years before the first Mayas were showing the big baby-faces to the old Olmec gods!

Of course considering the amount of time I’m traveling through (more than anyone yet ever has) I will only have seconds to bring those ancients my tidings from the future, but it will be more than enough time to bump us centuries ahead of where we are now.

While we had to wait around for Alfred Nobel to patent his Gelignite before entrepreneurs could move us to the advances of today, the Caral Supe will not. That’s right, I’m passing on the product and the formula for the best pre-atomic-age explosive to the most ancient civilization of the Americas!

Henceforth it will not be we silly Europeans, bored with their own extravagances, that discover the “new world” but the civilized Americans (Central Americans to be precise) who conquer the tribal natives of the Visigoths and Arani.


Sorry there. Had to break off again, eletroexpansion of the wormhole matrix does take a bit of your attention or you never know where you’ll come to ground, no?

So, in just a few moments, I shall drop my little parcels at the feet of these noble knowledge seekers. The first bundle is the largest and, since the city I’ve chosen is coastal, it will be dropped over the water with a vertitude-switch set for just five rods above the waves. The report will be tremendous and announce my arrival in grand fashion.


Ahem. Excuse me. Minor adjustment there.

The second charge is much smaller and designed to give off more light and heat than noise. This is simply to show them the versatility of the substance they’re receiving.

Then the final package, dropped just seconds later, will give them (translated into the best present-day guess at their communal writing) samples and instructions on how to create as much more as they like.

I daresay there will be some horrible accidents and a costly learning curve, but once this idea falls from heaven upon them and my dimensional dirigible (I’ll patent that phrase too!) winks out of sight, there’ll be no stopping the spread of this idea. The genie will be out of the bottle several centuries before the Greeks put on their first play!

Isn’t it all just too, too brilliant.

Oh, but I am exiting the time channel now.

How strange it always is that when traveling out, no matter how hard you try, everything is just a blur and you cannot make out a thing. Then, on the return leg, you can see yourself heading out–staring so hard, perhaps right at your own face–as plain as a truffle.


Zut alors! I’ve hit a bit of a tweak and come out facing the wrong way round. Don’t these little setbacks always crab-up your style? Nothing for it but to ease it right by dead reckoning. I can see the city on the shore quite clearly. Far more developed than I’d thought – and the boat styles are tremendous!

Well, I’ve dropped the first package and am trimming in the ion-colander to make for the main building (which looks like a university from the old world!) for the second pack.

Now whoosh! That was a bang!

I think I may even have caught a bit of wind from that first charge pushing me on. I’m going to drop the second and third packets off opposite sides just a second apart as my chronoglide guider tells me I’m shorter on time than I supposed.

Now they’re away.

I see people running and shouting. Confusion is always the first step in learning, say no?

And, finally, the time-shifting alignment gears are bouncing electromites everywhere and it’s goodbye to the ancient, ancient... Americ... hold on a sec.

As I entered the forced dilation of the wormhole. I’ve seen... what looked like the boot of Italy fly past. But that just simply couldn’t be.

Arriving above my apartments near Montmartre, I am a bit confounded by the sight. I knew there would be changes... but this seems to be coming in ripples and headed in a direction I was not expecting.

The city is far smaller than when I left and my home is simply an unkept field. I had supposed the development would be affected but not diminished. Perhaps though, with enlightened ways, our new society has simply set aside more green spaces and my home is but a small price to pay for such heightened awareness of one’s responsibility to nature.

Another wave is passing now as I descend below the tree level. The air over Paris has turned a dirty brown and, if I’m not mistaken, the old chimneys have reappeared. I can’t make too much of it because they were only recently made obsolete but what is disturbing is that they all seem to be belching a black smoke–darker than any wood smoke I’ve seen before.

While securing my rig, the giant flexi-tanium shell just dissolved into thin air and I watched as the pressurized hydrogen it contained made a quick shimmer and was assimilated into the atmosphere.

I guess I’d better send this off, for posterity’s sake, before anything else can go amiss.


I am despondent.

I am reduced to writing on paper with watered ink. I transcribed the above before my palmtop shimmered away.

I am not only fifteen years prior to the date of my departure but the world has been ruined.

The wood stoves of old all now burn filthy coal and the air is made terrible with it. Poverty is everywhere and the greatest piece of mechanical engineering I can find is an aluminum monoplane. Some fool named Felix tossed his plane, with himself inside, down a hill and managed to get off the ground for a minute up in Normandy. No one seems to believe it possible.

This is the height of technology! And, this monstrosity is powered... by steam! What idiocy!

And I am to blame.

From what little I can piece together it seems my writing you, my gloating, lured me away from my controls too long. I never reached the now unknown people of ancient Peru but instead went twice as far in distance and half as far in time.

The great dirtiness and ignorance before me is a tar of my own creation. What they now call, “The Dark Ages” are a direct result of my meddling – and the reason there may never be another try. It is an abomination that history, the history I knew, never held before.

I did not awaken knowledge seekers–I condemned them.

My message from the future burned the library at Alexandria and they, we, have never recovered from that blow. Science is only now beginning to look seriously into disease and engineering questions that were, previously, answered long before my birth.

Of course, I am in the only one who will ever know what we have lost but that does not make my burden less or reduce the severity of my sin in any way.

This secret I shall take to the grave along with the paradise world I was so keen to “improve”.

And when I write, as I must tell what I know somehow (and hope it infects at least a few with inspirations) they will see it only as a sort of science blended with fiction. Or they will simply think me mad.

Even mad enough to write to a friend who may never be born now, and leave these notes for his sensibility that will never reach my own.

How should I be anything but miserable, no?

Signed, in Paris, 1874

Asking your forgiveness...

Your friend,

Jules

Text: © 2012 Barry Carver
Publication Date: 04-03-2012

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