Well, here I am.
We've survived (We shall survive?) this past/future year, but supplies are running low. Will run low. Douglas Adams was right when he wrote about grammar and time travel. Odd to think of Adams as a visionary. Odder and infinitely more frightening to think the survival of humanity may rest with one visiting visionary, a man often mentioned in the same breath as David Icke and rarely taken seriously.
Of course, so much seems plausible now. When the crisis hit, we thought it an act of nature, an equatorial disease. Now we've learned otherwise. Now I head to an unassuming little town in upstate New York, to a research facility few people know exist.
Time. I had to wait some out this weekend. I thought about reposting some of my past write-ups, the ones I wrote the first time around. I could get kthejoker's blessing again for my account of Scott Baio's life, a write-up prompted by his reappearance on reality tv. I'd forgotten about that until my host turned on the television. We saw Scott Baio is 45... And Single in the listing. In any case, noding would have killed time.
I'm imagining t-shirts:
I Got To Live My Life Over and I Spent an Afternoon Writing About Scott Baio
The Human Race faced Extinction and Scott Baio was Trying to Get Laid
You miss the simple luxeries, the cherry pies, Candy bars, and chocolate chip cookies.
But this is serious, if entirely mad. I will post this notice and then head to New York. It starts in New York, tomorrow night.
D-Day has arrived.
It's funny, how things are different this time around.
I can recall those early days, meeting other noders and heading to Birmingham on some apocalyptic tour, ever northwards. We got drunk one night and listened to a world die.
Peggy Sue Got Married. That was the movie's name. That's how time travel works. We imagine a stream of fast-moving effects and tricky lights and when the lens focuses ye knights of olde ride by or a diplodocus munches down the way. No, I strapped myself in Chernobrov's device, that masterpiece of scavenged technology and mad insight, and awoke in my own body, November 2007.
Time feels unstable now, as though we've awakened some insane god whose pounding fists send waves that wrinkle reality. Yesterday I logged on to find Wntrmute's message and couldn't figure out why I had no write-ups. Of course, it's because I haven't written any. At first I thought my old memory was reasserting itself, some effect of time-travel and psychology, but then I recalled all of the differences.
And then, reality blinked, the flickering of an eyelid.
This morning, one of my write-ups appeared, one I wrote from Exeter on December 29, 2007, the first time I lived it. I didn't write it this time around and so it shouldn't have been there. A moment later, it wasn't.
Blink.
Gravy's earlier voyage, which we believe ended in 2005, obviously had some effects. Dubya lives, though I've found online references to a film that grotesquely recalls the assassination that happened in a timeline I can still recall. Gravy herself is a long-fled noder in this version of things, rather than the top contributor I recall from the first time around. I wondered if the same were true of f1r3br4nd, but he had always been a fled noder, someone who logged back on to one of the few sites he could access, a piece of the past, to offer commentary on the situation in America.
I also don't recall so many 500 Server Errors last time around. Ah, well.
I have the access codes. If I'm successful, the world will not end in another week, and I'll have no proof that this nightmare occured. I shall return home and live life more fully, knowing what was and could be.
If I fail (as they shall know, not from Chernobrov's misfortunate chronovisor, but from the continued crappiness of the world), sam512 will try. And on through our few last, reluctant, scurvy-infected brave heroes.
Who knows what the world will look like in 2008? And will even this record survive, incredible testimony to an adventure that, if we succeed, will never have happened?