Rant

child? And back in Biblical times, wasn’t she, like, thirteen years old?
    Shot Dunyun: Sixty years ago, this other Rant Casey got bumped back in time and had to wait his way back to the present, along the way making a few changes. Stoking.
    Neddy Nelson: Besides, what about the creepy Old Testament stuff about Lot’s two daughters getting their dad drunk and then…“preserving his seed”?
    Chester Casey: Close as I can figure, that wild story is how come Buddy drove his car off that bridge. All that crazy coot’s dreams, my boy was supposed to fulfill them. But I’d wager that’s not exactly what my Buddy done.
    34–What If
    Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): I want to ask, you ever wonder why the dominant culture says certain stuff? I mean, really hammers on you that some stuff is absolutely, deadly impossible? For instance, what science calls the “Grandfather Paradox”? How it works out that you should never, ever even consider time travel, because you might go back in time and kill your own grandfather by accident, let’s say, and then—kah-poof—you’d not exist? I mean, if you trusted in the government experts, wouldn’t you be careful and never go back in time?
    Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): I was so little, but I remember the I-SEE-U Act shutting down the rubberneck studies—those government engineers, like my mother, crashing into each other to study the effect on traffic. I remember my mother saying who was missing from her office, and I thought she meant fired or laid off. A few more engineers each week. I asked if she’d be leaving, and she told me no. Never, she said, not without her little Echo, meaning me, and my father. She said she’d never leave us behind.
    Neddy Nelson: What if this? If somebody went back and reworked the past, how would the rest of us know? Don’t we only know the present reality that we know? What if reality gets reshuffled—in little, tiny ways—all the time? Or what if the people in power have already shuffled the past to get on top, and now they’re telling the rest of us not to monkey around with history or we’ll go back and kill our ancient ancestors and every generation after that, and then we’ll never get born?
    I mean, could the people who control all the money and politics ever invent a scarier warning? Didn’t these same science experts used to say the earth was flat? Wasn’t it really important we should stay at home and be peasants and slaves or we’d fall off the edge?
    Echo Lawrence: As a little kid, I remember going to a fucking lot of funerals, mostly for people who worked with my mother. Sitting in church, my father would elbow her, saying, “This is where they really go…”
    And my mother, behind her black veil, would tell him, “Not all ofthem… ”
    Behind their bedroom door, they’d argue about moving, leaving, taking off. My mother called it Reverse Pioneering, to some place where the air was clean and we’d have empty land all around us. It was a nice dream, but even to a little kid she sounded crazy. At this point in history, there was no place in the polluted, crowded world left like that.
    Neddy Nelson: I want to ask you, instead of a “Granddad Paradox,” I mean, what if there’s a “Grandma Paradox”? I’m not saying anybody’s done this, but what if somebody’s gone back and screwed with their own past? Not major changes, but just stacked the deck so their present is—better? I mean, what if you found yourself a long time ago—by accident—and you met your own great-greatgrandmother before it was wrong to date her? And what if she was a babe? And let’s say you two hooked up? And how about she has a baby who’d be both your daughter and your great-grandmother? In the wrong, sick-minded guy, could you see where this plan might be headed? A hybrid you with superpowers? Couldn’t you keep living, maybe hooking up with your next ancestor babes—your grandmother and your mom—stoking your own genetics so the future you—even the present you—was more strong, smart, crazy…some extra something?
    Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): No shit. I remember the big media push for everybody to get ported so we could all boost peaks. First off, stores stopped selling and renting videos and books. You couldn’t get audiotapes or disks. Overnight, the entertainment industry switched to producing nothing except ports and out-corded transcripts. The real push was targeted at young adults, ranging from fourteen to