The Time Traveler's Guide to Grammar by Aliana
Thursday, September 18, 2361
The next three days were horrible. Mr. Orders remembered that only three kids had been tested on the time machine the day before. The students had been forced to stay until ten the next night. She had promised Greg that Tuesday night she would be all his. Greg had been her boyfriend since freshman year when she had been enrolled in a normal high school. He reminded her of a teddy bear with his chubby cheeks and his incredible hugs.
They grew up right around the corner from each other, and they had stuck together throughout all of middle school. But more and more, she found it a chore to come and see him. He played lacrosse, while she played with physics. His conversations centered on the Yankees, and diverged only when necessary into other major league baseball teams or his high school’s team. Her concept of stimulating conversation had a little more relevance to the future of society. He started reminding her with every date that slumped from speaking to kissing to silence of the kind of teddy bear that needed to be given away.
Instead of spending all night with him, she spent fifteen minutes talking to him out on his stoop. Then she felt her stomach growling, and tried to muster up enough enthusiasm to give him a decent good-bye. Tuesday night and all of Wednesday she spent studying, utterly demoralized that she was the only person that had not turned in anything to the computer.
Added to all of this, the class’s enthrallment with Caden only became amplified over the course of the week. By that day, she was considering telling Mr. Orders that, screw paradoxes, she was going back to normal high school. So she was not in a good mood when Mr. Linklater stood up in front of the class and announced that today was one of the most important in their careers as time travelers.
“Today, you will be assigned your partners. This is the person who is responsible for getting you safely back to your original time.” The class seemed to have mastered the skill at staring at the walls, the door, the windows, and the floor. Anything so that no one had to make eye contact with one another.
Quinn had always relied on Greg to meet new people, and she just assimilated into the circle of friends that he made. She was thin and pale and found that she fit perfectly into corners. She was the person everyone was sort of friends with, but if pressed, could name nothing deeper about her than what class they had taken with her. Her fashion sense was limited to jeans, a T-shirt, and the occasional sweatshirt. The perfect combination of clothing to never be criticized or complimented. Had anyone looked at her eyes, they would have seen that they changed with the color of her clothes, a fortunate gene passed on by her grandfather. But she mostly kept her head down and her mind in the clouds. She found though that no one ever expected the shy girl to rudely stare; this gave her the freedom to watch the world without having to fear being watched herself.
Little did she know that someone was watching her, even trying to catch her eye. He needed to make sure that those were the same eyes that he had seen years before. The color was different, but the quiet curiosity was the same.
Quinn eyed everyone in the room. There was one girl named Redia, small, tan, and skinny with a pixie haircut who seemed nice enough. There was another boy named Kyle with large glasses that seemed a little on the quiet side, but well intentioned.
Mr. Linklater held up a paper and began. “Alice! You’re with----,” his voice cut out as a voice that came out of nowhere and called “Derek!”
Mr. Linklater rolled his eyes. “Obviously, your future selves have learned the trick to speaking back into the past. Let’s see how many names are changed this year.”
He sighed and called out “Emily and---”
“Kate!” The sound came from the midst of the room. Kate, upon hearing her future self, jumped and squealed. Everyone around her giggled, but the tone was stilted and nervous. Their time to hear their future selves was coming all too soon.
On and on the list went. With each name she grew expectant, and with each name she inwardly groaned.
“Giselle and----,” a voiced called out “Salvatore!”
“Caden and Qu----,” Mr. Linklater began. “Quinn!” A voice from thin air finished.
She gave a sideways glance over to where Caden sat. Their eyes caught and he smiled. He seemed way too satisfied with this situation. She folded her arms and sat back, determined to pretend that he did not exist.
Class went on, and Quinn tried to concentrate on the problems that the teacher was reviewing. She found herself shifting restlessly in her seat, closing her notebook and opening it a half dozen times, putting her hair up only to take it down once more. She realized her actions were not because she was anxious to get out of the class, but because sometime this afternoon she was going to have to talk to Caden. Next week, the class was going to start regularly practicing on the time machine, and there were simply too many homework problems to do for them to ignore each other forever.
When Mr. Linklater dismissed the class, Quinn quickly scooped up all of her books. Keeping one eye on the door and the other eye on Caden, she sneaked through the doorway and down the stairs. Once outside, she zipped off her hoodie, letting the late afternoon sun sink into her skin.
Looking down at her watch, she saw that she was right on schedule for the Scrollwalk. It had just come out a few years ago, and worked like a conveyor belt suspended over the road. All over the country it was hailed as a revolution in transportation technology. Already the people of New York City saw it as just another shadow cutting up the skyline and cutting down their property values.
She knew tomorrow she would have to talk to Caden, but she was just thankful that she could save that headache for another day. They had given the students a good eight hours of homework, but if she stayed up all night, she might be able to do enough of the problems to convince Caden that she could do the rest of the equations on her own.
“Hey! Wait up!”
She did not turn around, but merely attempted to ignore the voice coming over her shoulder.
“Hey!” the voice came again, and now she finally looked back. Caden, looking like a shadow lost in the daytime, came up and started walking next to her.
“So, it seems like we’re partners now.” Caden took out a cigarette and lit it.
She ignored his comment, instead pointing out, “You’re what, sixteen? That isn’t legal. Or healthy.”
Caden’s eyebrow rose. “Yeah, Mom. For one thing, I’m nineteen. Secondly, this isn’t a cigarette. It’s Amma-B.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What in the world is Amma-B?”
“It’s close to cigarettes, but now they’ve actually modified them so that they are healthy. I’m currently sucking in proteins and vitamins.”
“That’s impossible. They’ve modified cigarettes so there are hardly any carcinogens, but there is no way that you could call a cigarette healthy.” She was frowning, then suddenly her brows unknotted as the realization dawned.
“Yet,” she whispered. “Wait,” she continued. “So you’ve been to the future already? For a longer time than it took to complete our assignment? How? They have a lot of security around the machine….”
“Anyone could get through the security in the school. But the thing is, you only need to get through once. Then you can coast around the future for a few years, learning how to use the time machine in a future where it is programmed by language instead of math. Then, you come back and teach the system to everyone back here.”
“How in the world can a time machine be programmed by language? Then there is the slight problem that by going into the future and learning this, you will rewrite everything now, and then you will have created a paradox! That is illegal! Not to mention impossible, because we all had to go back and recommend ourselves to Mr. Orders, and that is the only paradox possible----”
Caden started laughing at this. He laughed with his whole body, his chest and his hair dancing along in merriment at her expense. “You really need to get out more. You do know why we, the chosen, the Kings and Q
“To maintain order in a world where suddenly both space and time are fluid mediums, to protect the balance between personal gain comparative to personal virtue, and to uphold ethics and a noble society.”
Caden leaned in conspiratorially, “Wrong. It’s so that we have fun breaking them.”
She looked skeptically at him. “Highly doubtful.”
“Alright, think about it. We are now citizens of time. Our country is no larger than that metal box that soon we are going to look at as home. We have no laws that can hold us other than the vague, ambiguous promise to bring a little more good into the world. All of the laws that the Time Travel Authority set up we are supposed to break so that we won’t blow our heads off from boredom or spend all of our time outrunning our death. Come on,” he took her hand. “I have a reservation at this nice French restaurant around the block, and I will answer all of your questions if you join me for a late lunch.”
“Let me guess, you have a reservation for two?”
“Yep.” He smiled brightly, “I knew you were smart enough to catch on.”
“To catch onto the fact that since you are insecure with yourself, you have used the time machine to see the future to ensure that you will always be right?”
Caden winced. This he did with his entire body, his shoulders coming up as if he meant to physically protect himself from her. “I was thinking more along the lines of catching on to the fact that I wanted to be friends with you.”
“Oh.” That shut her up until they had reached the restaurant. The inside looked like a cottage, with dark wood paneling, hand painted furniture, and reproductions of famous French paintings. Frames were set along the walls that cast holographic images of scenes from archaic French landscapes. On the window where they were seated, tiny snowflakes plastered the screen. A full moon shone down on gentle rolling hills, which glowed an unearthly white under their white blanket of digital pixels.
“If you move this dial, it changes the time of day. The other dial changes the season. Pretty cool, isn’t it?” Caden set about twirling the dial until they were looking at a sunrise. His face was lit up with orange and pink rays of light.
“Yeah, I’ve never seen one of these things” Quinn hesitantly turned one of the dials, setting stars scattering under a blaze of sunlight. They both played with the switches for a few minutes, until they finally settled on a sunset in autumn.
For a few seconds Quinn’s eyes scanned the room, which was an odd mixture of bright afternoon and star-sprinkled moonlight. Then her gaze lit upon the three forks, two spoons, and two glasses that constituted the silverware.
“Hey, Caden?” Quinn hesitated, not wanting to be rude. “You do know this place is expensive?”
Caden shrugged. “You don’t spend three years travelling into the future without glancing at what the stock market is going to look like.”
“Well, alright, you have your part of the meal covered, but I really think that I should be paying for my part of it…” Quinn’s words faded to silence.
Caden looked seriously at her. It might have merely been the warm lighting, but his eyes genuinely seemed to glow with concern. “You really don’t get it yet, what you’ve signed up for. In a month, when we have free use of the time machine, you can put a hundred dollars in a bank account, and then go and collect the interest on it a thousand years in the future. There you go, five minutes of your life and you will have made more money than your parents could ever dream of making throughout their entire careers. Besides,” Caden smiled, “I was nervous, so I went into the future and already paid for the check. Don’t worry, I didn’t look at what you ate. I figured you would appreciate having the feeling of free choice.”
“Oh, thanks, bunches,” she rolled her eyes. “Now, tell me more about how to use a time machine with language instead of math.”
“Alright.” Caden leaned his elbows on the table. “I was a sophomore in high school, and like you, I was one of the smartest kids in my grade. It was a week after my best friend had gotten the invitation to a private school, an offshoot of Solomon and Schechter, yep, called the Midgar Academy. He came back and let me in on the fact that Midgar was where the secret time traveler’s school was. You know how it was in middle school, everyone wanted to get in here. Between the time when you realized that there were larger things in the world than the Gamenet and the Telepark and the time when you could get your license, becoming a Time Traveler was the only hope you could hold onto. So knowing that I actually had a shot at getting in, and then finding out where the school was…well, I just felt as if I could somehow ‘convince’ the school administration that they had gotten something wrong. So I laid out an intricate plan to break into the school.”
He half smiled, “I was silly to think that an outsider, a Minute Man, up against a school of time travelers could ever really do something they did not like. But, blissfully unaware, I spent far too long researching how to disassemble electric fences and hanging out around this place. Long story short, my plan worked perfectly. I searched through all of the rooms, and finally came to the time machine. I wrote out the proof, and submitted it into the computer.
“The computer immediately rejected the answer. Getting really angry, I just wrote, ‘Fuck you’ and submitted that. The computer responded with ‘Improper position.’ So, half as a joke, I wrote ‘Bring me a hundred years into the future.’ This time, it worked! I not only landed a hundred years in the future, but I landed in a time machine that had been placed in a museum exhibit. Here is where it gets weird. It was a museum exhibit to the history of time travel. I was a part of this exhibit, as the founder of the style of time travel through language. Not only relieved, but also completely exhilarated, I spent three years traveling through time studying grammar. Then I came back here, just in time to get my letter to Midgar, and here I am.”
Quinn frowned, puzzled. “Why haven’t you told the professor then? You could immediately travel around the country, teaching all of the other time travelers how to use your new technique. You would definitely be the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize.”
Caden cocked his head slightly to the side, looking at her with an odd expression most people reserve for ancient specimens in museums. “You really don’t get it. Time means nothing to people like us. If I wanted to, I could have gone all the way back to the time I was five and shown off my new trick there, and be famous for the rest of my life. But I realized that, for one thing, I was happy as I was. And, well, I got to see a summary of how my whole life played out.” Caden shrugged, “I was more than content with how it would go.” He stared at her then, and she felt his gray eyes to be incredibly unnerving.
Shifting her attention to the intricately tied napkin on her plate, she said, “so, um, tell me more about how using language works out. I feel like it would never be able to get you to the right place unless you wrote out an entire book detailing where your position was in relation to where you wanted to go.”
“Language works as a faster mode for time travel because it is an arbitrary system that we can understand quickly on our end, and at the same time is a closed structural system consisting of rules that relate specific symbols and orders to specific meanings. So, if you say ‘I will go one hundred years into the future’ the computer will understand what to do. You are giving it a subject, or a grouping of particles that it is moving into the future. You are giving the computer a verb, or a direction to go in. You are also giving it a direct object that identifies whom or what is receiving the action. In this sentence, the future is what is receiving the action.”
“So, pretty much, you spent three years figuring out how to write a sentence?”
“Essentially, but it’s a lot more than that. Language uses a finite number of symbols to express an infinite number of ideas. Tell me you aren’t curious how learning a little bit of grammar can allow you to manipulate space and time.”
She was unable to comprehend all of what
They both ordered. As the waiter left, Caden cocked his head towards the door.
“See there?”
She looked, and almost fell back in her seat.
Caden started laughing at this point.
“You’ve got to be joking!” she whispered, her eyes glued to the spot Caden had indicated.
Walking away from their table was a very familiar patch of chestnut hair bobbing on top of a stick straight piece of moving shadow. As the figure was about to open the door and step outside of the room, he turned around and waved at the pair. The figure was none other than Caden. Or at least, he was the Caden of a few hours ago.
Caden leaned back in his chair, sipping on a glass of wine that he had easily gotten with his real ID that he was not supposed to possess for another two years.
“Wait until you see what putting a sentence in passive voice does.”