Hyperlink Reality

It was just after a work-lunch and I was moving icons around my iMac in a daze when my mouse cursor moved right out of the boundary of the display and came to rest floating in mid-air! I glanced at the plastic bottle on my desk that I used to add vodka to my coffees. An involuntary flick of the wrist and lo! I had clicked with the cursor on the bottle. A wikipedia page titled 'Plastic bottle containing vodka' appeared and informed me that, amongst other things, vodka means little-water in Russian, also due to blow moulding the bottle was capable of withstanding up to four atmospheres of pressure and therefore could be used for making water rockets, and that the owner of the bottle was advised to consult alcoholics anonymous.

This was all rather unnerving, so I looked around for a another object to investigate and there, sitting adjacent, was Max Gutz, a fellow so morose that it was a year before we realised he was an American. We sometimes called him MiseryGutz. When I clicked on him, the article that appeared stated that Max had been born on a motorway in Idaho, and, due to his Bohemian childhood he had developed few inhibitions with regard to the opposite sex. He had two illegitimate children, and had left several very angry women behind him in the US. One of his lovers had hated him so much that she had arranged to visit him for his 40th birthday, and at the appointed time had crashed his vintage German sesquiplane Albatross into his home. Of course, he hadn't been there, having decided to visit another woman instead. After that, he had stayed celibate for a while, and had become obsessed with collecting the cutlery of the Nazi high command, but after having met a nice Japanese woman called Suzuko, he had moved to the UK to start a new life, and had sold all of Hermann Goering's cutlery to care for their son, who had advanced leukemia. I looked at him in some awe. How could such a catalogue of extremes apply to such a flaccid gumbo?

I could see my own reflection, my mouth wide open in amazement, in a dark area of the screen and couldn't resist clicking on myself. I thought I'd be as exciting, in my own way, as Max, but my bio was such a shock that I held my breath. It said I had talent, but had been a failure because I did not have the confidence to drive for what I wanted. I was now using alcohol to dull my brain and avoid being reminded of the opportunities I'd passed up. Alcoholism was destroying what was left of my career and health: I was apparently infertile and showed the early signs of cirrhosis of the liver. There was even an Appendix with a helpful list of all the failures I'd deliberately forgotten.

Apparently, I then made a peculiar gurgling sound, and fell unconscious off my chair. When I finally came to, I was in a side office and Max was sitting with me, reading a linux manual.
"My God, Max!" I said "Tell me you weren't born on a motorway!"
A puzzled Max quietly said: "I wasn't..".
I was convulsed with relieved laughter, until he added:
"..I was born on a freeway."

A Room with a Tap

I wrote this short story in 2005, and uploaded it to the website: h2g2

A Room with a Tap

I sensed the change to fuzzy time. As I gazed at my hand it blurred and elongated towards the direction I would move it and in the direction it had come. My senses expanded from being localised to one instant to being spread out over time. At first I was horrified since I was used to processing data at one time only, and I could not tell what was before and what was after. Things in my time-window were meshed together as a colourful noisy nightmare and I descended into confusion. As I tried to bring order, patterns began to emerge. I was in a hospital where buxom nurses spooned medicine out of my mouth. As my neurons re-arranged and my skills grew I learned to filter-in only the data relating to a single time, say the present, or a time two seconds in the future. I also rediscovered the correct direction of time, and the patterns made sense again.

Eventually I was released from the hospital and I went home to my beloved wife and work. I found that I could reply to the questions of my wife and colleagues before they had asked them, which, oddly, roused the suspicions of my wife, but gave me a tremendous reputation at work. I found myself at the talking end of a lot of one sided conversations, since I tended to fire answers at approaching people who hadn't even asked their question yet. This disturbed and impressed them hugely, but it always bothered me that I could only see a few minutes into the future at most. Then I realised that the future I was seeing was constantly being negated because I was acting upon it before it happened. As I looked further and further ahead my future-sight couldn't keep up with the changes in all the possible futures which diverged like spaghetti so all I could see was a distant tangled mess of superimposed possibilities. Damn: bets on the horses were out.       

However, gambling with foresight was unnecessary, since over a couple of months my amazed colleagues propelled me to the top of my company, I started a religion and my salary increased four fold, but I became so bored with knowing what would happen two minutes before it did, that I took to staring at myself in the mirror, jiggling my head desperately trying to out-guess my future-sight. Then one day I turned on the cold water tap and, for once, looked at the water. I was amazed at the turbulent flow that erupted from it. It was like seeing a coloured flower in a black and white world, because I couldn't forsee it at all! To the dismay of my wife I spent the next few days marvelling at the arrogant freedom of turbulent water. Eventually, the nice men at the hospital gave me a room with a tap.

New Horizon

(An excerpt from my first sci-fi novel, unpublished).

The machine was ready. I connected a charged capacitor, accelerating thousands of electrons down through a superconductor. This huge collective acceleration downwards formed a Rindler horizon three astronomical units up in space, nearly as far away as Jupiter. As I’d predicted everything in a column above my machine also saw this horizon and was attracted to it, including a model spaceship sitting freely on top of the machine. It shot upwards and smashed into the ceiling, which was held in place by its solidity, and I whooped with delight as the pieces fell on me. There was a spate of mad barking from the dog in the flat above, and my neighbour shouted down.

‘What are you doing down there? That bang made my dog jump three feet into the air in shock!’

Ah, the ability of people to fit strange observations into a mundane world view!

‘Sorry, just playing ball!’

I’d overestimated the effect and hadn’t meant to launch spaceships and innocent dogs quite so well. It would be enough to equal gravity rather than beating it. I went back to my desk to do a few simple calculations, looked up at the dent in the ceiling and giggled: there’s something hugely satisfying about knowing something no one else does, especially if knowing it can land you in jail.