Time Travel Omnibus, page 1136
On March 24, 2001, Titor offered his final piece of advice (“Bring a gas can with you when the car dies on the side of the road”), signed off forever, and returned home. He was never heard from again.
Today, everything posted online gets a healthy dose of skepticism. Let’s call it the Post-Snopes Era. We’ve been conditioned to suspect everything.
In 2003, Titor fan Oliver Williams—some may want to put “fan” in quotation marks, simply because of the numerous unsubstantiated theories that Williams himself is/was Titor—launched JohnTitor.com, which tracks Titor’s predictions and offers a compendium of all of his 151 posts. In 2004, members of George Mason University threw together a multimedia rock opera based on Titor. A summary of the tale at io9.com garnered over 103,000 hits in 2011. And, according to IMDB, a feature-length film about Titor is in the pipeline. What seemingly should have been dismissed as a four-month hoax, the work of some nerd killing time at his boring temp job, somehow turned into a phenomenon.
Since the beginning of the mysterious posts, Art Bell’s popular late-night radio program “Coast to Coast AM,” a nationally-syndicated show that covers pretty much everything that’d fit comfortably into an episode of The X-Files, has been the go-to place for all things Titor. George Noory, who replaced Bell in 2003, has continued carrying the torch, devoting entire episodes to the ongoing mystery, fielding inane questions from callers and somehow answering with a straight face. (Examples: “Is there any way that Titor could be a godsend, sent as an angel, to warn us?” and “Do you think there’s any possibility he was a space alien? I’ll hang up and listen.”) In 2006, a lawyer named Lawrence Haber, who claimed to represent Kay Titor, a woman alleging to be John’s mother, contacted Noory. An interview followed between Noory and Kay—with Haber acting as a phone go-between—and it ended up answering, well, pretty much nothing at all.
After that episode, the show intermittently tracked Titor’s proposed timeline, looking at current events like tea leaves, possible harbingers of a nuclear armageddon. But as the false predictions piled up—while many of Titor’s descriptions are vague enough to be considered “not yet disproved,” he did also claim there would be no Olympic Games after 2004—the search for Titor shifted from “Is this real?” to “Who deceived us?”
In 2003, The John Titor Foundation, a for-profit Limited Liability Corporation, self-published John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale, which is essentially a bound copy of the message board posts. (Used copies of this are currently going for $130 a pop on Amazon.) The Italian investigative TV show Voyager took up the case in 2008, hiring a private eye to locate the folks behind the LLC, and a search led back to the aforementioned Lawrence Haber, who was listed as the company’s CEO. An investigation by amateur sleuth John Hughston, who also goes by the name “Razimus,” uncovered a mysterious P.O. Box in Celebration, Florida, belonging to the LLC. A group of friends with some downtime between gigs at their production company checked out the P.O. Box themselves but found nothing worthwhile. At some point, JohnTitorFoundation.com was created, offering some kind of nonsensical secret code to digital passersby. And just a week ago, Hughston released another video—this one 40 minutes long—in which he names Haber’s brother, Morey, as his prime suspect by using a side-by-side analysis of phrase-usage, which, to be kind, is not exactly a slam dunk.
(Weirder side note: In 2004, a computer engineer named Marlin Pohlman filed a patent for a time travel machine that “back-engineered” concepts in the Titor posts. This started another round of speculation that Pohlman, himself, was the original Titor poster. Last March, he was arrested for drugging and sexually assaulting four women.)
The search for Titor, then, has become more convoluted than Oliver Stone taking on the 9/11 conspiracy. A new piece of information comes out, a tech-savvy kid with some time to kill sees it, decides to give the puzzle a shot, and on and on it goes, the cycle never reaching an end. The trail burns hot, the trail goes cold, but the trail never disappears. There have been countless blog posts and armchair investigations—a Google search for “John Titor solution” bounces back with 325,000 results—but nothing’s come close to finding a worthwhile solution. An itch in the back of the throat remains, unscratched.
But why?
The Titor legend persists because no one ever claimed to be behind it. Now that we won’t be fooled, we need an answer. It’s the Zeigarnik effect; when something’s not wrapped up, it preoccupies our memory.
Last month, Brian Dunning, a writer and producer specializing on the subject of skepticism, devoted an entire episode of his aptly-named podcast Skeptoid to the John Titor phenomenon, less focused on who it might have been and more about that question: why does something without any merit still have legs as an urban legend?
“Now that the number of unsubstantiated claims on the Internet is somewhat larger than the factorial of the square of all the large numbers ever conceived separated by arrow notation,” said Dunning on his podcast, “it would be a lot harder to achieve John Titor’s celebrity.”
Today, everything posted online gets a healthy dose of skepticism. Let’s call it the Post-Snopes Era. We’ve been conditioned—from everyone having access to Photoshop, to Punk’d and Jackass, to found footage films, to big budget viral marketing campaigns, to emails from faux Nigerian princes offering a portion of their riches if we simply send them our bank account number—to suspect everything. Every video of a cat performing a spectacular feat is met with at least one commenter decrying “FAKE!” The Titor story, from a time when we were all so innocent, a time that was less than 15 years ago, came right before things started to change.
And the Titor legend persists, in part, because no one ever claimed to be behind it. Now that we won’t be fooled, we need an answer. It’s the Zeigarnik effect; when something’s not wrapped up, it preoccupies our memory. Our skepticism needs a party responsible, a grand designer that allows it to make sense. When we find out—think the wizard behind the curtain in Oz, or whoever Jacob was supposed to be in that final season of Lost—the mystery ends. No one has claimed Titor, so the story continues.
There are some obvious connections for conspiracy theorists—the fracturing of governments, underground bunkers—but, for everyone else, there’s this: time travel stories are freaking cool. “This is a superpower that everyone would love to have,” said Dunning. “We all want John Titor to actually be from the future.” Who among us didn’t spend idle moments of our youth wondering about flying cars and hoverboards, or what life was like back in the Old West. In fact, when I asked Hughston, the sleuth blogger, why he was initially drawn to Titor, he said that he’d been “a big fan of time travel since about 1985,” the year Back to the Future was released.
But there’s also a much easier explanation. “The John Titor story is popular,” Dunning said, “simply because that happens to be one of the stories that became popular.” If Titor wasn’t leading conspiracy-minded white dudes in their post-graduate years of boredom and confusion down a rabbit hole of mystery, something else would. It’s Urban Legend Darwinism. Among all of the hoaxes, Internet rumors, ghost stories, and Satanic voices you can hear if you play the vinyl backwards, some have to become popular. Might as well be Titor.
There is one other (distant, remote, nearly scientifically impossible) possibility, though.
“One of the keys to cracking the Titor question,” starts an email by someone who goes by the name Temporal Recon, “is to just allow for the possibility that time travel very well could be true.”
The great thing about time travel: the story cannot be refuted. If events don’t happen as the traveler says, that’s because the traveler changed the timeline. “Many never even get off the ground in their research due to this very limiting view,” T.R. said. “They simply don’t believe that the human race will ever conquer time. ‘Ever’ is a very long time, Rick.”
There’s a particular point-of-view that seems to evolve within every amateur Titor investigator I encountered. As the puzzle fails to be solved, when no serious candidates present themselves, the goal of locating the hoaxster morphs ever so slightly, allowing in the possibility that maybe, just maybe, time travel could be real. “Look, of course John Titor didn’t travel through time,” they’ll say, only to dramatically shift with the addendum, “but let’s say he did.”
If you squint hard enough—and forget about the last four Olympics—things will always begin to resemble what you want to see, especially when reality’s only a minor quibble.
I mean, couldn’t the political differences that continue to separate America into red states and blue states be precursors to the Second Civil War? U.S.—Russian relations have been kind of strange lately, haven’t they? The history of 2015, when Russia and the U.S. nuke each other into oblivion, is still yet to be written!
Then T.R. writes a sentence that haunts me, one that will no doubt tip me over the edge on a course to try to solve the mystery, to locate the poster, or maybe a precocious kid now armed with a learner’s permit who once met his future self. Graphs and charts will mass, blanketing my small studio apartment, where I’ll only need a bare mattress in the corner, a pizza on the way, and a computer with browser tabs parked on obscure pages of note, set to auto-refresh. Friendships and relationships and family will drift into the ether; there are only so many hours in the day. Hands will blister, fingers will ink-stain, eyes will learn to scan for men in black suits, or white coats, or some combination thereof.
He writes: “And there are others.”
And down I’ll go, into the abyss.
IN THE CRACKS OF TIME
David Grace
They called him Mark for want of a better name, though a name was of only moderate usefulness as he rarely interacted with anyone. Most of the time it was just “me” or “I”. The half-spin disparity was responsible for some, but not all, of his isolation. Even after a jump it took a while for the field to equalize and pop him back into congruence with whatever reality he had landed in. Until then he floated through the worlds like a ghost, seeing but not being seen, until he pulled the pin.
It didn’t hurt, really, not very much, the spin-up and the spin-down. Mostly it felt like pointy-legged spiders running up and down his body, their pads slowly becoming duller and blunter until their touch was barely more than a vague sensation like cobwebs brushing against bare skin.
In the beginning he tried to blend in, settle down, sometimes staying years, decades, in one place, in one reality, until the pain became too great and he cursed fate for giving him a heart to go with his brain. Then he would again push the button and drift off through the five dimensional universe and everyone and everything he had come to love became as insubstantial as a soap bubble and slipped away. He still remembered them, one of the detriments of his perfect memory. Especially Linda, his first wife, who had aged and withered and grown old in what seemed like only a heartbeat of his own time.
Now during his pop-ins he avoided people as much as possible and he usually limited his grounded time to no more than a year and a day, the minimum his systems needed to repair and recharge before he could resume his tangled journey. Subjectively, three-hundred and six years had passed. Six-hundred ninety four to go. Insubstantial and isolated, he could live in the cracks of time as long as he wanted but none of that counted toward his thousand year mission. Only time spent on the ground, among the living, advanced his internal clock and until that clock had counted off a thousand cold and lonely years, he could not go home.
Like everything else, with perfect clarity he remembered the day they had sent him away.
The lab was far underground, almost perfectly shielded against the Ants’ probes. Almost.
“Do you have any questions, Mark?” Maria Salazar asked with a forced smile. She knew he didn’t but it was the polite thing to do. Behind her were the optical control cables and the rings of the hyper-magnets, all focused on the meter and a half thick aluminum sphere in the center of the apparatus.
Mark gave his head a tiny shake. His brain felt as empty as an old bucket.
“You understand that you’ll have to wait the entire thousand years? We can’t count on the Ants being completely gone sooner than that.” She was babbling, she knew. They had gone over this a hundred times, but nervously flicking her gaze between Mark and the silver sphere, she couldn’t restrain herself from one last lecture.
“They’ll overrun us in five years at the most, probably only three. The genetic drift we’ve programmed into them will take a minimum of a hundred years to fully take hold in the crucial genes. We don’t dare program it to work any faster. If they discover what we’ve done before it fully infects them a million years won’t be long enough.”
“I understand,” Mark said in a flat voice, his eyes never leaving the Sphere.
“Then they’ll have to carry it back to their hives. Who knows how many generations that will take.” Glassy-eyed, Maria was rambling as if standing in front of her mirror, rehearsing her original briefing to the Joint Chiefs. “We’ve allotted five hundred years for the genetic drift to be fully encoded in all the Ants, in all their breeding chambers. Then we added another hundred years, just to be sure. Then we figured another hundred years for half of them to die. Then another hundred years for their scientists to discover the cause of the problem and slow the effects. Then another hundred years for the last of them to die. Then another hundred years, just to be sure. So, a thousand years from now is the soonest you can come back.
“I know.”
Maria fidgeted and took a step back. By that unspoken signal Mark stood and approached the Sphere.
“Your battery’s only good for an initial three seconds,” Maria warned him unnecessarily.
“I know. I can do it.”
Maria gave him a weak smile and extended her hand.
“We’ll detonate an hour after you leave. None of us who know . . .” Maria waved her hand describing not just the lab but the entire research complex that extended for half a mile in every direction, “can be allowed to be captured by the Ants.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s a hundred megaton H-bomb. We won’t feel a thing,” she said and trembled.
Mark stared blankly then gave her a little nod and reached for the GO button.
“We’re counting on you!” Maria shouted just before he disappeared and slid through the aluminum-alloy shell as if it were no more than a gust of warn air. Once inside the Sphere he pulled the pin and solidified in the hunched control chair. The center of the small panel in front of him held only a red light and a single button. Mark took a last, long breath and pressed the button to the stop.
Outside the magnets charged-up and went through their calibration cycle. At odd moments the Sphere vibrated to random harmonics then settled into an almost indiscernible hum. The light flashed orange. Forty-six seconds later it turned a steady green. The button began to pulse a vivid red. Mark took one deep breath, then slammed the control with the heel of his palm.
The air seemed to coalesce into a thick, sub-sonic scream and then the Sphere and the lab and the entire outside world all faded into cellophane-colored smoke and Mark drifted down into the cracks in time.
“Time isn’t what people think it is,” Maria had told him the first time they met. “Events don’t happen, one after the other. All of our temporal history is there, all at once, in five dimensional space.”
The confusion on Mark’s face was obvious and she took a breath and started again.
“Time itself is a series of energy ripples like waves down a long trough filled with glass plates. Each plate contains the entire three dimensional universe one incredibly tiny fraction of a second thick. One after another each time wave crosses a plate, activates that three-d universe as now, then moves on. Our wave, our time, washes down the trough activating each of our nows one after another. Our time wave is the fourth dimension that sequentially activates all that is us and now one fragment of existence at a time.”
“And the fifth dimension?”
“That’s the length of the trough, the depth of existence from the beginning of time to the end. Actually, it’s not a trough but a mobius strip, it continues without any end and the waves of time go round and round forever.”
“So we travel through time . . .” Mark began hesitantly.
“We can’t travel through time, at least not our time. Our time is our wave and we can’t make it move faster or slower and we certainly can’t make it go backward.”
“But, I thought—”
“You thought that we were going to send you through time?” Maria frowned then gave him a patronizing smile. “Pretend you’re in a rowboat balanced on the crest of a wave. Okay, you take a flat stone and you skip it across the waves toward the shore or out to sea. Each wave it touches is somebody else’s time. You’re going to be that stone. You’re going to skip yourself from wave to wave, back and forth through other people’s time until your wave, our wave, has moved a thousand years into our future. Then, wherever you are, you’re going to skip forward and rejoin your own time, our universe.”
“And I can’t kill my own grandfather and never be born because . . .”
“Because whoever you kill won’t be your grandfather. He’ll will be someone else’s grandfather.”
“But that someone will be a person who looks like me and thinks like me. Who is me.”
Maria exhaled loudly as if unsuccessfully trying to explain the square root of 7 to a backward third grader.
“Your time is always fixed in your own little wave. Your time is your own wave going down the trough. For you there isn’t any past or future to go to. All you’ve got is your own wave as it moves forward through the universe. Your time is where you are on your wave in the trough, past to future, your past, your future. There’s no time travel in your own wave because it’s always only where it is. But we can send you back to someone else’s wave.”
