My Sad and Desperate Tale of Woe
The scene is that part of town in which you do not like to go. The colors of the world are faded into a cold and grimy gray which touches every surface and seeps into the heart.
Nobody could live long here it seems, because the life lived here would cease to be life and become only desperate survival, the domain of the cockroach and the rat, but not an environment fit for mankind.
Nonetheless down these streets a man is walking. His face is innately kind, but with the kindness of a remote personality, distant from the actual feelings of humanity. He seems a kind man out for a stroll, but walks these streets with a too studied aimlessness, too intently uninterested in where he is going not to have an exact destination in mind.
A kind man with a precise destination among the dead and dying, the desolate and forlorn, among the damned and hellbound.
Nobody walks here for just the pleasure of walking; even the shadows between the streetlights and the streetlights themselves know that there is something wrong in the air. Who is this man trying to fool with his late night wandering.
He walks by the encampments and nods as though acquainted with the inhabitants, his long sleek cashmere coat darker than the night, asserted by a simple pin at the throat with the sigil of a tower upon a rock with a lightning bolt issuing from the base of the tower — the sigil is slightly bent and damaged in the lower right hand side.
Although he evidently has no apparent destination he starts to slow and finally to stop in a loitering manner by a little alley in which some men are lying, sickly among the garbage and detritus of this area.
A voice comes from the darkness, weakened, a desperate voice and it says “Mr, for a dollar I’ll tell you my sad and desperate tale of woe”
The man smiles slightly and says softly “I will make it five dollars, tell on”
“I wasn’t always like this. I had a job and a life, not a great life mind you. But a respectable life always on the edge of losing respectability, a life that was not great that seemed to lose a little bit of quality each year, but never seemed to actually slide so far down that you could say it was a bad life.
It was a life that was just getting further and further from anything worth living each year.
I never had any luck”
The rich man waits solicitously for the poor man to continue.
“Until one day I was downtown in the business district, I was heading home from another late night at the office, setting up a Kubernetes cluster when nothing went right, and then I saw across the street a very unusual sight. It was a chrome bathtub with a weird steering wheel set on a small metal column in the middle and a gauge of some sort on the side.
This bathtub sort of flickered into existence, like strips of video interlaced from different movies and then layered over reality, that solidified until it seemed part of everyday.
There was a young guy in the bathtub, pretty good looking, he immediately got out of the bathtub and without hesitating started climbing up the rain gutters of the building. He was in pretty good shape.
I ran over to the baththub, I had. a pretty good idea what it was because I mean, a steampunk bathtub flickers into existence what can it possibly be right? Anyway when I got to it my suspicions were confirmed because laying in the bottom of the bathtub were three different colored keys — a blue key, a red key, and a long black iron key that gave off a feeling of evil — and a single page with the title ‘How to Run This Chronocraft’ which chrono I knew had something to do with time so this confirmed my suspicions — It was a time machine!”
Again a pause, the poor man reaches into his pockets and pull our a dirty unwrapped cough drop and pops it in his mouth, moving it about like one moves a particularly haunting obsession in the mind.
“Of course I stole the time machine, who wouldn’t, given my life, my conditions, the dwindling away into insignificance and unachieved potential?
But I left a note to the owner. The young man who even then was hanging up top of the building like it was the most normal thing in the world. I considered for a second — was he a vampire? Time machines exist, why not vampires? He had certainly clattered up the side of the building in a way more like an old time horror movie monster than a human. But I didn’t have time to consider this — I was writing the note.
I wrote —
This is Just to say
I’ve taken your time machine
This is definitely where you left it
and its gone now.
I’m sorry but this is really my one
my only shot
at improving my life —
The temptation was just too great.”
The man who had wandered into the dark and dangerous place without care seemed now nonplussed
“You Wrote a Williams Carlos Williams parody to apologize for stealing a time machine?”
“Who?”
“Uhm, William Carlos Williams — he wrote a very famous poem called This is just to say about stealing plums”
“Yeah I don’t know who that is or what stealing plums has to do with anything. Anyway I stole the time machine. It was simple to read the instructions and go a month in the future. I went to the public library and wrote down some results of the Football games — it was just like Back to The Future 2“
“I’ve never actually seen it”
“Well, in it a guy who looks like Donald Trump uses a time machine and a book of a sports results for the last 50 years to become the richest man in the world. So I figured this was a pretty foolproof plan and started off the same. But there were complications”
“Go on”
“I’m not going to bore you with the scores and the breakdowns of the games and all that — I mean that stuff bores me because I don’t really care for football I just bet on the games because it seemed like a sure thing. I took basically my full savings $14350 and bet them on 5 games, going by the scores from the future. It didn’t work, only one of those games went the way the future said they would. I lost 13000 but made 3 to 1 on the last game so I still had 4050 dollars. You explain that to me?”
“Well assuming a simple reality maintaining feedback it could be that..”
“Obviously the games are all rigged.”
“Sure, that’s also a reasonable supposition”
“Right. Well I had a little over 4000 bucks left, but I wasn’t broken, hell I wasn’t even depressed much because I still had the time machine. Of course I went forward a month again and checked the scores and they had all changed like when I bet on them, I just figured I wanted to check I wasn’t ending up in some alternate future”
“Good thinking”
“Yeah. Assured of that I decided the next thing I would do was to invest in stocks. 4000 wasn’t that big an amount, but I had a time machine — how could I lose? So I did what anyone would do in my desperate situation, I put my house under a double mortgage that I knew, in a month, I would pay off totally”
“That didn’t work out either?” said with the utmost gentleness.
“Nope.”
“What happened?”
“I had invested all my money in a startup that was going public, it was supposed to be a unicorn according to the news, it debuted with the highest ever stock price when going public. It was some sort of dream learning technology.
The person dreaming wore an intelligent sleep mask — The ZZZs Mask which helped people sleep less while sleeping deeper — it helped you sleep effectively. I would have been a millionaire. I took that money went back to the beginning of the year and invested and then — nothing happened the way it was supposed to. Explain me that!”
“So — assuming a simple reality maintaining function any results in the time stream that change results extremely may end up..”
“It was all owned by some shadowy limited liability construct out of the Bahamas, Illuminati Ganga Incorporated. But when I came back after investing there wasn’t that any more, I went to their offices in L.A, the building was no longer solid, it was like a movie scene, and the sign they had outside said Illuminati Ganga Incorporeal — That’s the Spirit!
I did some more research there’s some sort of Illuminati Ganga artist’s collective. Is it a piece of performance art, did they do a piece of performance art to just ruin my life?!?”
“Well normally I’d say that assuming a simple reality maintaining function all of this could be explained, but I think you are definitely onto something there my friend. I think this Illuminati Ganga — whoever they are — are the one’s responsible for what happened to your life.”
“Someone ought to make those guys pay”
“From your mouth to God’s ear my friend, from your mouth to God’s ear”
The poor man, thinking of his losses in life, pulls out a flask of whiskey of takes a shot.
“So, what happened to the time machine if youd don’t mind me asking”
“Well I had taken it back to the week before I first found it, and was drinking in a bar close by where I had originally acquired the time machine. I was drinking and just thinking about how messed up my life was and then a large flatbed truck went by, with three guys on the back who looked like they’d stepped out of that movie with DiCaprio and Bill the Butcher — New York Gangs.
A short guy with tufts of red hair poking out from beneath an Andy Capp style hat, and two bigger guys who looked like muscle from 100 years ago. One of them was cutting an apple with a giant clasp knife and eating the slices.
And then strapped on the end of that flat bed was the time machine. And that’s the last I saw of it. So here I was, stuck in a past I never made, without money or anything to live on and I came here to dwell.”
The man at this held out his hand.
The other drew out a couple twenties from his deep pockets and said simply “Thank you, I hope things get better for you soon”
Their transaction over the rich man left the poor area of town to put the information he had gleaned to productive use, the poor man went back to thinking over the hurts he had suffered, albeit with one new overwhelming thought in his mind — whatever had happened to him was all Illuminati Ganga’s fault.
This was taken from an old archive of Illuminati Ganga, stored in the caves below Tintagil Castle for the past 500 years and written on an unknown material that seemed a form of metal, flowing like water in a pool but when pored unto a platter solidifying into a paper-thin, super strong polymer.
Illuminati Ganga scientists are currently studying the material, which gives some evidence of having been extracted from dream time.
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