The Man Who Folded Himself

by David Gerrold

  I am destined to rule the universe.

  I am God.

  But I must never let them find out, or they will try to kill me.

  I think I will kill them first.

  If I ever get out of this room, I will kill them all!

  I made a point of cautioning my younger self, “I don’t know if he can be cured. But I am sure we can never trust him with a timebelt again. I think we’ll have to be very careful to see that he doesn’t get out. A paranoid schizophrenic running amok through time could be disastrous—not only for the rest of the world, but for us as well.”

  Danny was thoughtful as he peered through the one-way glass. “It’s lucky that we caught him in time.” His voice caught on the last word, I think—I know—he was a little shaken at seeing the drooling maniac he might have become. I hadn’t gotten used to the sight either.

  I said, “I think he wanted to be caught. We got him at a point where he was still conscious of what was happening to himself.”

  “If he ever does get his hands on another timebelt,” Danny asked, “He could come back and rescue himself, couldn’t he?”

  I nodded. “That’s partly why it was so hard to trap him. We had to get him into a timeline where he had no foreknowledge of where he was going, otherwise he would have jumped ahead to help himself against us. We wouldn’t even have known about him if he hadn’t kept coming farther and farther back into the past; one of us must have eventually recognized what was happening and gone for treatment, then come after this one who was still rampaging around. That’s when I was called in to help. We had to deny him any chance to look into his own future until we could get the belt off him. The fact that he hasn’t been rescued yet is a pretty good sign that this is the end of the line for this variant.”

  Danny grinned. “Well, just the fact that we’re standing here talking about it proves that.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m from a line where they caught it in me before it got this far. I never went through that.” I pointed at the glass. “You, you’re a variant too. You’re from even earlier. Neither of us is in there. He could be incurable—and if that’s the case, then he has to stay in there. Forever. He—and I mean all of us—has to be either completely safe, or the timebelt must be held beyond his reach. The consequences—” I didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  Danny bit his lip. “You’re right, of course. It’s just that I don’t like seeing him there.”

  “It’s for his own good,” I said. “More important, it’s for our good. If time travel is the ultimate personal freedom, then it’s also the ultimate personal responsibility.”

  “I guess so,” he said, and turned away from the glass.

  I didn’t add anything to that and we left the hospital for the last time.

  Today I destroyed the career of an archaeologist. Accidentally. I didn’t mean to do it. A fellow named John Shannonhouse. A chair at Columbia. He reported some very perplexing recent discoveries. And half-jokingly referred to them as “very convincing evidence of a practical joker with a time machine.” It was the half that wasn’t joking that concerned me.

  The “recent discoveries” he referred to were some rather unfortunate anachronisms. Things I should have paid more attention to. Things I left in the past. Things that someone left in the past.

  I thought I’d been more careful, but apparently I wasn’t. Or one of me wasn’t. One of the Pompeiian artifacts in the British Museum has definitely been identified as a fossilized Coca-Cola bottle from the Atlanta, Georgia, bottling plant.

  It’s possible I did it. I was there for three days prior to the eruption of Vesuvius. I don’t remember leaving the Coke bottle, but if it’s there, then I must have. Unless some other version of me has been there since and left it there—

  That is possible. The more I bounce around time, the more versions of me there are; many of us seem to be overlapping, but I have observed Dans and Dons doing things that I never have or never will—at least I don’t intend to—so if they exist in this timeline, they must be other versions, just “passing through.”

  Either they’re around to react to me, or I’m supposed to react to them. Or both. Certain fluxes must keep occurring, I guess—I assume there are mathematical formulae for expressing them, but I’m no mathematician—which necessitate two or more versions of myself coming into contact: such as the Don who came back through time to warn me against winning three million dollars at the race track on May 20.

  That one was a situation where three versions of me had to exist simultaneously in one world: Dan, Don, and ultra-Don (who was excising himself). Other situations have been more complex; the more complex I become, the more me’s there are in this world.

  The whole process is evolutionary. Every time Daniel Eakins eliminates a timeline, he’s removing a nonviable one and replacing it with one that suits him better. The world changes and develops, always working itself toward some unknown utopia of his own personal design.

  My needs and desires keep changing, so does the world. (I must be about thirty now. I look about that age.) I have lived in worlds dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure—sexual fantasies come true. I have lived in other worlds too, harsher ones, for the sense of adventure. World War II was my private party.

  But always, whenever I create a specialized world, I make a point of doing it very, very carefully with one or two easily reversed changes.

  I do not want to get too far from home—meaning my own timeline. I do not want to get lost among alternate worlds with no way to get back and no way to find out what changes I made to create that alternate world.

  So I make my changes one at a time and double-check each one before introducing another. If I decide I do not like a world, I will know exactly how to excise it. (I thought I had done right when I kidnapped the baby Hitler and left him twenty years away from his point of origin, but that had serious repercussions on the world of 2005, so I had to put the baby back. Instead, I let Hitler be assassinated by his own generals in 1939. Much neater all around.)

  For a while I was on an anti-assassination kick. I have had the unique pleasure of tapping Lee Harvey Oswald on the shoulder (Yes, I know there were people who had doubts about who did it—but I was there; I know it was Oswald) just before he would have pulled the trigger. Then I blew his head off. (John Wilkes Booth, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan were similarly startled. In two cases, though, I had to go back and excise my removal of the assassins. I didn’t like the resultant worlds. Some of our heroes serve us better dead than alive.)

  Once I created a world where Jesus Christ never existed. Yeshua ben Yusef went out into the desert to fast and he never came back. Never went to Jerusalem. Never got crucified. Never had followers.

  The twentieth century I returned to was—different.

  Alien.

  The languages were different, the clothing styles, the maps, everything. The cities were smaller; the buildings were shorter and the streets were narrower. There were fewer cars and they seemed ugly and inefficient. There were slave traders in the city that would have been New York. There were temples to Gods I didn’t recognize. Everything was wrong.

  I could have been on another planet. The culture was incomprehensible.

  I went back and talked myself out of eliminating Jesus Christ.

  Look. I confess no great love for organized religion. The idea of Christianity (with a capital C) leaves me cold. Jesus was only an ordinary human being, I know that for a fact, and everything that’s been done in his name has been a sham. It has been other people using his name for their own purposes.

  But I don’t dare excise that part of my world.

  I might be able to make a good case for Christianity if I wanted. After all, the birth of the Christian idea and its resultant spread throughout the Western Hemisphere was a significant step upward in human consciousness—the placing of a cause, a higher goal, above the goals of oneself, to cause the kingdom of heaven to be created
on Earth. And so on.

  But I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it’s been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it’s voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big—and takes on that damned capital C—they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.)

  Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths.

  So why am I so determined to preserve the Church?

  Because, more than any other force in history, it has created the culture of which I am a product. If I eliminate the Church, then I eliminate the only culture in which I am a native. I become, literally, a man without a world.

  Presumably there are worlds that are better than this one, but if I create them, it must be carefully, because I have to live in them too. I will be a part of whatever world I create, so I cannot be haphazard with them.

  Just as a time-traveling Daniel Eakins keeps evolving toward a more and more inevitable version of himself, then so does the world he creates. It’s a pretty stable world, especially in the years between 1950 and 2020. Every so often it needs a “dusting and cleaning” to keep it that way, but it’s a pretty good world.

  Just as I keep excising those of me which tend to extremes, so am I excising those worlds which do not suit me. I experiment, but I always come back.

  I guess I’m basically a very conservative person.

  Once in a while I wonder about the origins of the timebelt. Where did it come from?

  Who built it—and why?

  I have a theory about it, but there’s no way to check for sure. Just as I am unable to return to the timeline of my origin, so is the timebelt unable to return to its. All I can do is hypothesize….

  But figure it this way: at some point in some timeline, somebody invents a time machine. Somebody. Anybody. Makes no difference, just as long as it gets invented.

  Well, that’s a pretty powerful weapon. The ultimate weapon. Sooner or later some power-hungry individual is going to realize that. Possession and use of the timebelt is a way for a man to realize his every dream. He can be king of the world. He can be king of any world—every world!

  Naturally, as soon as he can, he’s going to try to implement his ideas.

  The first thing he’ll do is excise the world in which the timebelt was invented, so no one else will have a belt and be able to come after him. Then he’ll start playing around in time. He’ll start rewriting his own life. He’ll start creating new versions of himself; he’ll start evolving himself across a variety of timelines.

  Am I the trans-lineal beneficiary of that person?

  Or maybe the timebelt began another way—

  It looks like a manufactured product, but very rugged. Could it have been built for military uses? Could some no longer existent nation have planned to rule throughout history by some vast timebelt-supported dictatorship? Am I the descendant of a fugitive who found a way to excise that tyranny?

  Or—and this is the most insane of all—is it that somewhere there’s a company that’s manufacturing and selling timebelts like portable music players? And anyone who wants one just goes to his nearby department store, plunks $69.95 down on the counter and gets all his dreams fulfilled?

  Crazy, isn’t it?

  But possible.

  As far as the home timeline is concerned, all those people using timebelts have simply disappeared. As far as each subjective traveler knows, he’s rewriting all of time. It makes no difference either way; the number of alternate universes is infinite.

  The more I think about it, the more likely that latter possibility seems.

  Consider it’s the far future. You’ve almost got utopia—the only thing that keeps every man from realizing all of his dreams are all those other people with all their different dreams. So you start selling timebelts—you give them away—pretty soon every man is a king. All the malcontents go off time-jaunting. If you’re one of the malcontents, the only responsibility you need to worry about is policing yourself, not letting schizoid versions run around your timelines. (Oh, you could, I suppose, but could you sleep nights knowing there was a madman running loose who wanted to kill you?) The reason is obvious—you want to keep your own timelines stable, don’t you?

  Is that where it started?

  Is that where Uncle Jim came from? Did he buy himself a timebelt and excise out the world that created it?

  I don’t know.

  I suspect, though, that a timebelt never gets too far from the base timeline, and that the user-generated differences in the timelines are generally within predictable limits.

  Because the instructions are in English.

  Wherever it was manufactured, it was an English-speaking world. With all that implies. History. Morals. Culture. Religion. (Perhaps it was my home timeline where the belt began, perhaps just a few years in my future.)

  Obviously the belt was intended for people who could read and understand its instructions. Otherwise, you could kill yourself. Or worse. You could send yourself on a one-way trip to eternity. (Read the special cautions.)

  If the average user is like me, he’s too lazy to learn a new language (especially one that might disappear forever with his very next jump), so anyone with a timebelt is likely to keep himself generally within the confines of his own culture. His changes will be minimal: he’ll alter the results of a presidential election, but he won’t change the country that holds that election. At least not too much. So the timebelts remain centered around the English-speaking nexus.

  Those users who do go gallivanting off to Jesus-less universes will find themselves in worlds where English never developed. If they elect to stay, making it their new homeline, they can continue to spin off any number of themselves. But when the last version dies, that’s where the belt stops. There’s no one in that timeline who can read the directions.

  A timebelt either stays close to home, or it stops being used. Should anyone attempt to use the belt, they’ll probably eliminate themselves. You can’t learn time-tracking by trial and error. It’s crude, but effective. It’s an automatic way of eliminating extreme variations of the homeline.

  Just what the homeline is, though, I’ll never know.

  I’ve come so far in the ten or more years I’ve been using the belt that I’m not sure I even remember where I started.

  I wish I could talk to Uncle Jim about it, but I can’t.

  He’s not in this timeline.

  Too late I went looking for him, but he wasn’t there. I don’t know what it was, I’ve made so many changes, but something I did must have excised him. I don’t know what to undo to find him. And even if I did, maybe it isn’t undoable.

  I’ve removed myself from my last real contact with—with what? Reality?

  I’ve never been so lonely in my life.

  Maybe I’m lost in time.

  It’s a fact, I don’t know where I am.

  I went looking for Uncle Jim and couldn’t find him. When I realized that I must have accidentally excised him (probably by one of my “revisions” in this world), I went looking for myself. If I caught myself on May 19, 2005, when I was given the timebelt, perhaps I could keep myself from editing out my uncle.

  But I wasn’t there either.

  I do not exist in this timeline.

  There is no Daniel Eakins here, nor any evidence to indicate that he ever existed.

  In this world I have no more past than I did in the Jesus-less world. I have no origins.

  And no future either.

  If I cannot find younger versions of myself, perhaps there are older versions—but if there are, where are they? I have met no one in this timeline, at least no one who I have not become within a few days.

  Where is my future?

  The house has nev
er seemed so empty.

  The poker game is deserted, the pool table is empty, the bedroom lies unused. The stereo is silent, the swimming pool is still, and I feel like a ghost walking through a dead city. The crowds of me have vanished.

  My past has been excised, and I have no future.

  Am I soon to die in this timeline?

  Or do I just desert it?

  Is that why I’m no longer here?

  (Am I hiding from myself—why doesn’t a Don come back to help me?)

  If this timeline is a dead end, then where am I going?

  I wish I had my Uncle Jim.

  I wish I had my Don.

  Or even my Dan. Sweet Dan. . . .

  I’ve never been so scared.

  Don, if you read this, please help me.

  I must be logical about this.

  One of two things has happened—is about to happen.

  The me I am about to become has obviously found a new timeline. Either he doesn’t want to come back to this one, or he is unable to. Perhaps he has made some change that he can’t undo. Perhaps he doesn’t even know what that change is.

  Is it a change in the world timeline? Has he created a universe where Aristotle never existed? Or did he accidentally kill Pope Sixtus the Fifth? Maybe it was something subtle, like stepping on a spider . . . or fathering a child who shouldn’t have been. Whatever it was, has the Daniel Eakins I am about to be lost himself in some strange and alien timeline?

  I keep remembering the timeline where Jesus never lived—am I to be lost in a world like that?

  Or is the change something else? Is it in me instead?

  Am I about to make some drastic alteration in my personality? Something I can’t excise? Something I won’t want to excise?

  Something I am unable to excise?

  What if I turn myself into a paraplegic? Or a freaked-out vegetable, incapable of understanding?