Chapter Twenty (of 21) -- Tempus Fudges

Welcome. My name is-er, was-Michal Rossetti Salieri, and, as you've probably guessed given that I've given the author permission to include my story amongst this series of stories, I've undergone a rather significant change. In deference to my long passed relative, I've certainly changed register, abandoned my basso profundo, moved up an octave, or any of several other rather poor analogies. I'll let Mr. Rigby explain. Certainly his skills, unlike mine, include the ability to spin a tale.

Oh, before I forget, don't expect an in depth discussion of the theories and procedures I've developed. First, Mr. Rigby is not adequately trained to understand them-of course I doubt anyone alive to day is-and because I have no intention of providing anyone else the fruits of my labors-at least not without some really impressive compensation. Anyway, enough! Here's what happened.

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"Einstein was wrong." M. R. Salieri stood behind the lectern in the Oak Room staring out into a puddle of twenty or so apparently bored attendees. The conference management had turned off his microphone to avoid echoes and feedback there were so few in attendance. He cursed the ungodly hour. Who expected a groundbreaking research discovery to be announced at eight in the morning on a Sunday, but he gamely continued.

"Einstein was wrong. The single most basic premise in his ground breaking formula, E=mc2, was that he assumed the speed of light to be a constant. It is understandable how he would arrive at this assumption, just as Newton considered gravity to be a constant. At the time, given the available data, it seemed obvious. Newton never got to see the evidence that gravity varied from planetary mass to planetary mass, while for Einstein, in the absence of lasers and cesium chambers nothing seemed able to travel at a speed faster than light. Now we have quarks, we have red-shift data with clear breaks, we have…

Salieri wiped his forehead and looked out at his audience. No one was listening; well, maybe the guy leaning on the mop off by the empty and unattended bar area.

"Is anyone here actually listening to me?"

No one answered.

"Is anyone here from the government? The corporate sector? Academics? The Press?

"None of the above? You there!" he pointed to the only person actually sitting in the back row of the vast sea of seats in the conference room. "Why are you here?"

Instead of answering, the man put up his feet and stretched out across several of the chairs in his row. Salieri could almost imagine him snoring before his head touched the plastic seat bottom. Frustrated and angry, he squinted to see the other attendees more clearly and realized that the other four men were standing about wearing coveralls and leaning on brooms or against cleaning carts.

With a curse, Salieri packed up his papers and stormed out of the hall. It seemed like a cliché, but M. R. Salieri vowed he would not be trifled with. "I will get even," he snarled as he stormed past the bored cleaner. It was slight, but still there was some slight feeling of satisfaction as he kicked the mop out from under the cleaner and saw him fall as he left.

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Always a loner, even as a child, he had been home tutored until he left for college, only to return after one semester, disgusted with the ignorance of his professors and the puerile material they presented in their lectures. Two more attempts at different universities ended similarly and his one attempt at a conference presentation was the final straw, convincing him that humanity had no redeeming value.

Salieri's mother died shortly thereafter, of a broken heart having watched her hopes and dreams for her son collapse if you believed the whisperings of some of the house staff. His father, already having difficulty dealing with the strange and reclusive man he called his son, and now devastated by the loss of his wife, threw himself into business. The result was he tripled the family's already sizable wealth in less than five years, but it was at the expense of his health and he died of complications after triple heart bypass surgery before the end of that fifth year.

Abandoned by both parents, Salieri withdrew even further into his own world. It was not long before only the committee that was responsible for handling his fortune-since he would not-and the occasional scientist with whom he would correspond on specific issues of interest to him were aware of his existence. More and more, his world revolved exclusively around the pursuit of knowledge and the application of that knowledge to new and unusual inventions. Only his strong moral standards, imbued early in life by a series of nannies and private tutors, prevented him from being what the world at large would call a mad scientist. Or did they?

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"Finish this last circuit board. Connect the power supply. What else do I need to do?" Salieri spoke out loud as was his habit after long years alone. The cluttered tabletop upon which he worked stretched for nearly thirty feet in the center of his workroom in the basement of the family mansion. Every couple of feet there was another "project" in progress, some electrical, some biological, and some representing studies into even more abstruse forms of science. Along the wall behind him was a small fortune worth of bin after bin of tools and equipment, enough to bring a smile to almost any scientist in almost any area of specialization.

Taking the completed circuit board with him, Salieri strode purposefully to the Rube Goldberg device filling the remaining half of the huge room. Opening a panel he shoved the board into the last remaining empty slot.

"Yes! Done at last," he sighed and rubbed his tired eyes as he slumped tiredly to the floor. The last seventy-two hours had been a nonstop effort to finish the project that would finally prove, once and for all, his genius to an unknowing and uncaring world.

Like most truly great discoveries, it was both striking in its simplicity and remarkable in its complexity. It built on the complex concepts behind string theory with its multiple dimensions and found a simple mechanism for moving beyond theory and actually manipulate and least some of those dimensions.

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Sorry to interrupt, but before you ask, let me ask you a question. If you had just developed a usable application of a device that permitted both time and inter-dimensional travel, would you stop and take a nap, or would you want to try it out immediately?

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I couldn't wait. All thoughts of sleep fled before the excitement of finally being done, finally being ready to demonstrate that I truly was a genius magnitudes beyond Einstein, DaVinci and those other pikers. But then I realized my problem. I had spent so much time in conceptualization and development that I had never really thought what I would do if-I mean when-I finally finished. I knew I had to do something significant, something that the whole world would see and recognize my greatness. And that was the rub.

It's always the simple things that seem to be overlooked. With all my planning I neglected to consider how I others would realize what I was doing. If I went back in time and changed history, there would just be a new history waiting for me when I returned. No one would know what I had changed. The only way I would be able to prove it would be to take someone else back with me, but then there would only be the two of us, not the adoring world I so wanted.

The bottom line was, I went to sleep after all. This was going to need some thought and I did my best thinking in bed, when the mind can float free and make associations that might otherwise never occur.

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I would not have thought it possible if I had not done it, but I slept around the clock-a full twenty-four hours. The good news is, the time spent sleeping had been well spent. When I woke up I realized that I was looking at the problem the wrong way. I wanted validation, proof the other's acknowledged me as the genius I was, but I didn't need to change the world and then came back to show off what I had done. Instead of having people impressed when I returned from some when or where after doing something amazing, I could just go somewhen and be someone amazing.

I know this narrative has been long on talk, and short on action, but if I don't give you this background information, Dr. Salieri has threatened to rewrite history to insure that I include it. Like most laws of nature there are limits or constants. Newton thought it was the speed of gravity, 32 feet per second. Einstein thought it was the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. For course, both were wrong. The only constant is that what is, must be. Matter cannot be created from nothing and history, at least in one dimension, cannot be changed. My plan was to search the nearly limitless multiverse until I found a situation were I was world famous. The problem is, that I would have to accept all of the other variables and conditions present in that dimension. In other words, I might need to be a different person in a different dimension, but that would not be bad. My life as Michal Rossetti Salieri was not perfect; otherwise I would not wish so badly to be what I was not.

It took me only a month to decide.

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"And…cut! That was perfect, as usual. Your best yet. No question, this is going to be another blockbuster. What will this be, your thrity-fifth?" the Director gushed excitedly while the crew cheered and applauded. The man and the woman in the huge, silk covered, oval shaped bed basked in the adulation being heaped upon them for several seconds before the man slipped out of the bed and added his applause to that of the others.

With complete disregard for the sheet slowly sliding down to settle on her lap, Michal Rossetti Salieri, shrugged her perfect alabaster shoulders and allowed her breasts to jiggle slightly. It was enough to silence the entire crew. Several shifted positions to ease growing pressures below the belt.

"Gentlemen, I thank you for your thoughts, but I would be nothing without you to make me look so good." With that she strolled regally off to her dressing suite. She never bothered to correct the director and tell him it was actually her thirty-eighth mega-hit. It was great to be adored and admired at last.

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Interlude Twenty

Damn! I actually fainted. Maybe it was the shrimp I grabbed out of the refrigerator. They did taste a bit funny.

Oh, hell. Who am I kidding? It wasn't bad shrimp. It was my heart. I'm obese. I'm more than obese; I'm a freaking blimp. This isn't a matter of just loosing a bit of weight. I need to make some drastic changes. Janice and mom were right all along. I need to see that doctor, and soon. I'm going to call Janice and get an appointment ASAP. I'm too young to be with Jenna yet.

CONCLUDED IN CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Code Pink