I stepped out of the harness and let the glider fall to the sand. The wings collapsed and it looked like nothing more than a stick with palm fronds tied to it. I felt like I had flown it, had made the perfect landing, a stall but really had I? My hands had fit perfectly into the wings and I had been one with this thing.
But even as I had landed my attention was riveted on Hollywood Beach. Somehow I knew that this re-build was 12 feet higher than the original or else it would be under water and that it would settle back as the Atlantic fell over the next century or so. The boardwalk was different. It was wood as it had been in 1966 when I was selling Paradomes in Florida but I would not have known that since I never visited it then. I didn't even know then that this was the murder scene where Candy had had her very rich husband beaten senseless, or more precisely dead, with that vintage coke bottle. The boardwalk was now, 2011, a clean ribbon of paver stones. The boardwalk was finished, rebuilt in wood, circa 2166 where I was with the glider, it was the rest of Hollywood Beach that was under construction.
I was fixated on the robots and the noise they made. There were many sizes but they all seemed to have six wiry legs attached to a black central pod and with similar smaller pods on the end of each leg. These leg ended pods made a soft click every time they touched anything including other pods, walls, materials. It made for a cacophony of noise you can't imagine. They were rebuilding every element of Hollywood Beach as it had been in 1966 and not so different than it was in 2011 other than that wood boardwalk.
Margaret and Frances were there, 2166, no Patrick. And for the life of me I cannot understand why they took such childish delight in my landing. Laughing and giggling like six year olds didn't seem appropriate for a couple of centenarians plus. They sensed my awe of the robots and answered as the question was forming in my brain. Yes there are a lot of them, trillions would be suggestive but orders of magnitude wrong. They didn't know in fact since robots were being created at an astounding rate at any moment and they ranged in size from the nano to the thousand foot tall varieties. None of which were on display here. Think of how many nano robots it takes to recreate a living reef in Indonesia. Get the picture?
I was back on the beach in 2011. A little girl, black as you can possibly be, was staring at me her red shovel held straight out seeming to be holding up the parasail that was drifting slowly along the horizon. Maybe I had been storing, maybe it had all been a dream but I don't think so because I could also see Margaret and Frances walking away deep in conversation. A conversation I could not have heard anyway because their lips were not moving. She was what was once called a pickaninny, the four year old black girl that is, all eyes, all energy, always just a second from a squeal of delight, she was gorgeous. She stared down at this ugly old honky that had just been making that conversational sleepy racket.
I had known for a while that I was not part of most of their discourse. They spoke to me so that I could understand. But I was receiving information, more now than earlier, another way. They were connected directly to my brain. They just put things there like how to fly a glider. It was not what you may think. It was not paranormal. Much more prosaic, it was Wi-Fi. We were wireless. They had computers in them and so did I. Probably one of those robots or a group of nanobots had put it there and they probably were still there, in my bloodstream maybe awaiting further instructions.
Margaret and Frances knew anything they wanted to know about me but I knew only what they wanted me to know about them. This was a one way street. As they would explain to me later, "You could not handle it, the noise would drive you mad."
Anyway I lay there on the sand of Hollywood Beach 2011 knowing somehow that tomorrow we would be going to Patagonia 2300, or there abouts, to inspect the tethers for the bubbles that would be arriving soon. Margaret was determined that this was going to happen. Most of the coastlines were repaired, all of the themes were in place, the seas had subsided and there was no more time anyway, in 2300 that is. There was a wall there where they lived in 2300. They could not go into the future, their future that is, but they somehow could visit, work in and manipulate the past. I was part of that past. They could do anything with me and I didn't care. Had they made me that way or choose me because that was who I was?
Before they showed up I didn't care much about anything accept staying alive and that thread was growing quite thin. OK I did like Waffle House and I did like thinking about how to survive but despite the crying I was really sort of flat, zoned out. Maybe it was the meds, obviously it was, or was it them, did they even exist. I had to pin something down, something concrete. Maybe Jason could help.
Patrick told Margaret that there were things happening in the bubbles that he did not understand. Jason, all of twenty and very precocious, was all but out of control. He had gone missing for more than a month. Into a dark place. One of many that they as students had been mapping as an exercise. Find and measure the matter there and map any black holes and their activity. There was only one black spot that was off limits. The artificial one that our friends used to mask the Earth and its environs. Patrick was worried that Jason was thinking of breaking the rules. Jason was thinking too much for himself Patrick thought.
What Patrick didn't know is that Jason could move things. Jason had moved a black hole, OK a little one, and Judy knew it because she was a tracker and checked in on all data points in that black sector and it had gone missing for a week. She knew Jason had moved it because when it returned to its exact former position its spin was reversed. That is what Jason would do. Jason scared Judy and that was a new sensation. Judy had never been scared before. Judy was 12 years old, one of the youngest, Jason was her big brother and twenty. Jason was different. " How do you change the spin of a black hole" Judy wanted to ask Jason, " do you have to take it all the way around?"
I remember being twenty. A number of times it seemed that my mind went into overdrive, that it was for brief periods in hyper-drive, that my mind was experimenting with a new more intelligent state. This seemed to happen after I had had an especially good T-bone steak. That did not happen anymore, it stopped before I was twenty two. Still like salty T-bones though, well done.
The little black girl was still there, when I again opened one eye in 2011, but she was now talking over her shoulder to someone about me in another language and waving that shovel menacingly. I said "boo" and she, startled at first, laughed and then hit me over the head with that shovel, sand was in my eye. I wondered what she would have thought of the robots that would ply this beach later especially the ones I would sic on her chasing her back to her sand battlements all clicking and clattering. I sure couldn't chase her.
They knew I had a problem and they were not going to do anything about it. And I was not going to ask. That was understood.
My mind was putty in their hands but when I was with them I felt fine, could do things, could think, could wonder. And in Patagonia I would experience something from the past, a sense of excitement tinged with a bit of fear. The first from Margaret and the other from Patrick.
I was Wi-Fried and well done. I felt part of the team with nothing to do, at least for the moment.
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