The Extraordinary eTab of Julian Newcomber

by Michael Seese

  “I made a few modifications,” the man said.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Julian asked.

  “Yes, I can see you’re having trouble believing—what the smart folks call ‘finding credibility in’—what I’m saying.”

  That proved it in Julian’s eyes.

  “OK. Fine. I believe you. You’re me. I’m you. Whatever. Why are you here?”

  “I need you to help me do something.”

  “What?”

  “I kind of caused a problem. In the past.”

  “But you said you’re from the future.”

  “I did. And I am.”

  “Then how did you cause a problem in the past?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “So what do need me for?”

  “I need your help changing history.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “I must have hit my head. That’s it. It’s the only answer that makes any sense. I was sitting in the chair, and it fell over, and I bumped…” Julian stopped when he saw the chair standing upright. “Fine. No knock on the noggin. Then I’m dreaming. Yes, dreaming. I fell asleep while studying. And this is all a weird, though strangely lucid, dream. I know. I’ll pinch myself and wake up. On the count of three. One...two…”

  The stranger reached over and pinched his arm.

  “Ow!” Julian yelped. “What did you do that for!”

  “To save you the trouble.”

  “I didn’t need your help.”

  “Don’t get all riled up. What the smart folks call—”

  “I KNOW WHAT RILED UP MEANS!”

  “You don’t have to yell. By the way, you’ll outgrow that temper thing around fourteen, give or take. Anyway, let me restate my previous statement. I don’t want to change history. I want to un-change history.”

  “Do I also outgrow talking in riddles?”

  “I’m not getting you.”

  “Never mind.” Even though it was still the afternoon, Julian suddenly felt ready to go to bed. “Go on.”

  “Have you figured out the clock thing yet? When he gave us the eTab, Dad told us what it’s supposed to do. But have you found out what really happens?” Grown-up Julian asked.

  Young Julian saw no sense in lying to himself.

  “Well, it did some weird time...change...thing. On the way home yesterday. And I might have, sort of, just maybe, done a little bit of experimenting. Changing the clock, and all. But I have no idea how it works. Or why.”

  “Nobody does. Even Dad couldn’t figure it out when I finally told him about it. But he and I both have tried our hands at tinkering with it. Upgrading it. Changing it,” Grown-up Julian said, his voice losing volume and confidence with each word.

  “Changing it how?”

  “I thought that by adding some more numbers, and a second, inner circle with the numbers going backward, I could use it to...”

  “What?”

  “Travel forward and backward in time, as far as I want, in either direction. Well, that’s not entirely true. The numbers go up to 199. So, 199 years, in either direction, is the most I can go.”

  “199 YEARS!”

  “Yeah. Neat, huh?” Grown-up Julian said, clearly missing Young Julian’s rising concern. “Let me tell you, Dad thinks it’s really cool. So cool, in fact, that he put something like ten thousand numbers on his. He and Mom are vacationing in Pompeii right now and...Oh boy! I sure hope he remembers they’re six hours ahead of us. Otherwise, it could be bad. Very bad. At least I think it could be bad. After all, I did miss a few of the classes, and was late for my final, and—”

  “Classes? What classes?”

  “Don’t interrupt. It’s very a rude habit. Unfortunately, you won’t outgrow that one as successfully. Nor will you outgrow your freckles. But don’t worry. You’ll decide you like them the first time a girl tells you she likes them. Anyway, I’m no temporal scientist. Far from it. But I’m pretty sure it would have a negative impact on our very existence if Mom and Dad were to get buried under a mountain of lava two thousand years—”

  “Since, apparently, I will never outgrow my rude habit of interrupting, I’m going to right now.” Julian jumped in. “Let’s not worry about Mom and Dad. They know how to take care of themselves. Well, Mom knows how to take care of herself and Dad. But you...me...us...No, you tinkered with the Dad Five-Minute Warning app. The app that somehow, for no apparent reason, throws people into the future? You tinkered with—”

  “You’re repeating yourself.”

  “Maybe now would be a good time for you to work on the interrupting thing.”

  “Point taken. Do you mind if I sit down? My legs are kind of tired. I did a lot of running today.”

  Young Julian pointed to the desk chair. Instead, his future self sat down on the floor, cross-legged. Young Julian joined him.

  “The point is, don’t you think changing the app was—”

  “Stupid? What the smart folks call ‘idiotic’?” Grown-up Julian said. “Probably. But I just had to.”

  “Actually, I was going to say ‘unnecessary.’ Why didn’t you just change the calendar?”

  “Why would I want to do that? The calendar worked just fine. Other than the event reminder sounding like a foghorn.”

  Though he was in the presence of a grown-up, Young Julian felt, somehow, as if he were the more mature one. It was like talking to Dad, version 2.0.

  “No. I mean you...I...we...figured out that by setting the clock ahead 10 minutes, we could jump 16 minutes into the future.”

  “Yes. Yes, we did.”

  “Then I figured out you could open the calendar app, change the date, and use that as the jumping off point.”

  “Really? That works?”

  “Yes, it…No, wait. I thought it might. But it was only a theory. I meant to test it out. But I didn’t get to because I was—”

  “Interrupted,” they said in unison.

  “Interesting,” Grown-up Julian said, clearly contemplating the circularity of the whole thing. “In hindsight—or would that be foresight—I really wish I hadn’t interrupted me today. Because if I hadn’t, then I might have gotten around to trying out our idea of changing the calendar, potentially saving me from having to re-jigger the Dad Five-Minute Warning app. Now I get what Professor Brown was talking about in that class I took last semester, Time-Interference Paradox 101.”

  “Speaking of which, what did you...we do? To mess up history?” Young Julian asked, glad he never actually took Step 5. With his luck, he probably would have wound up in a dinosaur’s mouth.

  “Well, we might not have.”

  “You’re starting to make my head hurt.”

  “It’s pretty simple, actually. I decided to go back to the Civil War. After all, we really love the Civil War, and—Do we love the Civil War yet?”

  “We’re just starting to study it in school.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It seems kind of boring, especially when compared to some other wars. The ones with real weapons.”

  “Real weapons?”

  “You know, like tanks and bombers and submarines.”

  “I do recall thinking that, yes. No worries. Just wait. Your...our opinion will change. And trust me. Cannons and guns are real weapons. I know, because I went back to Gettysburg. The battle, after all, right? And while I was back there, in 1863, watching it all, I might have dropped my cell phone somewhere.”

  “Excuse me? You did what?”

  “OK. I dropped my...our cell phone. Boy, this me-you-us thing is getting confusing. Tell you what. From now on, I’ll say ‘me,’ when referring to me,” he said, index finger pointed at his chest, “and you say ‘you.’ Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Now, where was I?”

  “In Gettysburg. About to be stupid.”

  “You don’t have to be snippy about it, Young Me. I was at Gettysburg, being curious. And inquisitive. And I just happened to drop my phone. In a field. Somewhere.
In 1863.”

  “Who were you calling?”

  “What? No one. Why?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out why you decided you needed to place a call, like, ten years before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.”

  “News flash. Cell phones do more than just make phone calls, Caveboy.”

  “Now you can stop being snippy.”

  “Fine. I promise.”

  “I guess we don’t outgrow that,” Young Julian groused.

  Grown-up Julian answered only with a guilty-as-charged shrug.

  “So you lost your cell phone. Big deal. Dad used to do it, like, three times a day. At least before he invented the Shirt Phone,” Young Julian said, unconcerned, owing to the fact that he had not yet taken Time-Interference Paradox 101.

  “Oh! I wish I’d remembered about the Shirt Phone. It would have saved me the trouble of...all this.” Grown-up Julian waved his hands around in a vaguely situation-encompassing manner. “No offense.”

  “None taken. So, get another one.”

  “It’s not that simple. Well, yes, it is, as far as getting another phone is concerned. But that’s not the problem. The problem is, if someone finds it, it could completely change history as we know it.”

  “Change history? How?”

  “No one can say. We won’t know until it happens. It might make ‘today’ better. Or not.”

  “This is unbelievable. How could you drop your phone?”

  “Well, I was off to one side. Hiding behind a tree, much like any rational but unarmed person would do on a historic battlefield. Then Pickett’s Charge started. The turning point of the battle and, ultimately, the war. How cool is that? I’m standing there, watching Pickett’s Charge. History was unfolding before my eyes,” Grown-up Julian said, his eyes finding that faraway place Young Julian often witnessed his dad viewing wistfully. “I just had to take a picture. But then bullets started flying. I tucked the phone in my pocket and ran. At least, I thought I tucked it in my pocket. I know I ran. But when I checked, it was—”

  “No. I mean, how could you be so clumsy?”

  “Trust me, we are.”

  Great, Young Julian thought. Another thing I have to look forward to.

  “Well, what do you think you should...” said Young Julian. He stopped and looked around. “Hold on. Everything today is normal.”

  Grown-up Julian looked around, too. “If you insist.”

  “The point is, history hasn’t been changed. So, they didn’t find it.”

  “No. They just didn’t find it yet.”

  “What do you mean? It’s in the past. More than a hundred years ago.”

  “More than a hundred years ago? Nothing like a little ballpark figure.”

  “I told you, we just started studying it. The point is, it happened. Or, it didn’t happen.”

  “No. It’s hard to explain. To be honest, I don’t understand all the details—what the smart folks call ‘intricacies’—of time travel. Like I said, before you interrupted, I did take a course on it. At the community college. But I missed a few classes. Time is kind of a continuous looping thing. So, as we speak, some guy with those big bushy sideburns that meet up with his mustache might be picking it up, and saying ‘WTF,’ or whatever they said back then. Or, maybe history has changed. But you don’t realize it, because everything else over the past 150-plus years—everything leading up to this moment—has changed. But if everything has changed, it wasn’t supposed to. And that could have unintended consequences.”

  “Unintended consequences? Like what?”

  “Worst case, the universe could end prematurely.”

  “WHAT!?”

  “Chill out. Like I said, it’s a worst-case scenario. More likely, any premature demise would be limited to the Earth. The solar system, tops.”

  “I feel so much better. Now here’s a wacky idea. Go back and get it. Problem solved.”

  “I don’t have enough charge.”

  “You what?”

  “My eTab is almost out of juice.”

  “So why did you come here? Now?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you come here, instead of going back to your own time, charging it up, then going back to the Civil War?”

  The question made perfect sense to Young Julian, even though nothing else about the last fifteen minutes did.

  “I didn’t have enough charge to go all the way there, either. Back to my time. I only had enough to get here. Time travel requires a lot of power. Traveling farther takes more power.”

  “If you insist. So once you realized you’d dropped it, why not just go back to a few minutes before?”

  “See that? We’re smart. Always thinking. Your idea does look good on paper. But there are two little flaws in your budding logic.”

  “Only two?”

  “For now. One. The bullets were flying. My only thought was Get me the heck out of the Civil War. Not Hey, why don’t I go farther back into it. Two. If I had jumped back twenty minutes, it would have used up even more of the charge, potentially stranding me there forever. Or at least until a future me decided to go back to find me and... Well, I’m sure you see where this is heading.”

  “Wow. This is hard. We’re really going to understand all this?”

  “Define ‘understand.’ The point is, when I did the calculations—we’ll be very good at math, by the way—I realized I had enough charge to get to now, but not ten years from now.”

  “Eight years.”

  “Right. Eight years. And, I thought, who better to help me than me!”

  “If that’s all you need, I’ll just—Hmmm. I never did ask Dad how to charge it. But, it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll just ask him for the charger, bring it up here, plug it in, and then you’ll be fine.”

  “Ummm...”

  Even at the age of twelve, Julian knew that “Ummm” rarely was followed by something positive, like “Great idea!”

  “Ummm what?” Young Julian sighed.

  “We don’t plug things in, in the future. We just put in power cells.”

  “What are power cells?”

  “They’re like batteries.”

  “Fine. We have batteries.”

  “Not like these. They’re the size of...quarters...Yes,” he said, thinking for a moment, “quarters do still exist. Now, today, at least.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Money is a lot different in the future. But that’s beside the point. The point is, they’re not like regular batteries. You plug them in...here,” Grown-up Julian said as he pointed to a place on the front. They last for like a year, and then you replace them.”

  “What’s inside of them?”

  “Cucumium, I think. Or was it Bubumium? No, Bubumium’s the stuff I invented in eleventh grade to mimic the symptoms of bubonic plague. Really effective for getting out of class. I could have made a mint on that, selling it to the other kids at school, especially the day before Senior Cut Day. If Dad hadn’t confiscated it. Nope, it must be Cucumium.”

  “Cucumium? What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s some kind of chemical. Or mineral. I don’t think it’s an animal or a vegetable. You really need to pay better attention in Mr. Beaker’s eleventh grade chemistry class, instead of concocting your own devious samples of elementary matter.”

  “Fine. Mental note: no devious samples of elementary matter in Mr. Somebody’s eleventh grade chemistry class. Back to our problem. How do we get this Cu—”

  “Cucumium. The same way we get everything. We just tell the replicator ‘I need a new power cell.’ And there it is.”

  “Really?” Young Julian asked, amazed—what the smart folks call “agog.”

  “No, not really. That’s Star Trek.”

  Young Julian frowned. “So, where do you get it, or them?”

  “The same place we get everything. GoogMart.”

  “GoogMart? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Because it doesn’t
exist yet.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Dad’s an inventor. So we just need to figure out how to get him to invent it. Soon. Really soon. Really, really soon.”

  “Why soon?”

  “Well, I think there might be a teeny, tiny, eensie, weensie microscopic possibility that if the power cell totally dies, it could erase the eTab’s memory, including the upgraded clock app.”

  “What!?”

  “I said, it might...might... totally erase the eTab’s memory, including the Dad Five-Minute Warning app.”

  “Which would?”

  “Strand me here permanently.”

  “Permanently?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “But wait. You could change the calendar. That works.”

  “Or not. It’s really too bad you didn’t get to actually try out the theory.”

  “Yeah. Pity,” Young Julian said, flexing his still nascent sarcasm muscles. “Any other news you want to share?”

  “No. That’s about it.”

  “Fine. Look, since my eTab is at ninety-five percent,” Young Julian said, more than a hint of techno-smugness in his voice, “maybe we can somehow use it to help you get back to your time. Let’s think about it after—”

  “Dinner time!” his mom called up.

  “Ooh! I’m hungry. Really hungry,” Grown-up Julian said. “I didn’t eat before I left. And I smell broccoli. I love broccoli! Do you think you could get me a plate?”

  “That it? Anything else?”

  “Yeah. If Mom or Dad bring up Pompeii, change the subject.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “I’m so glad you all decided to attend,” Mr. Newcomber said, launching dinner with his official (and officially worn out) joke.

  The Newcomber family had two firm rules with regard to dinner. (Aside from the obvious ones, like no throwing food and no sitting in the wrong chairs.)

  Rule #1. Dinner was required—what the smart folks call “mandatory,” and the really wise ones call “you darned better well be there.”

  Rule #2. Everybody had to talk about his or her day.

  There was one more rule, courtesy of Mrs. Newcomber—whom Mr. Newcomber smartly called “The Boss.” None of Mr. Newcomber’s inventions were permitted at the table.