Chapter 4

I woke up with a muddled head and a grumbling stomach. I had gone to bed early, but I didn’t feel very rested. The night had been full of chaotic dreams and thoughts zipping through my head of time and space and different parts of people flowing on rivers of electrical currents to different loci and the Space/Time Continuums turning into e-files that reached out and grabbed ticker tapes of future stock prices while dials twirled and lights flashed and finally bells rang, which turned out to be the alarm going off.

The first thing I thought when I gained consciousness was, “Man, am I hungry! How many eggs have I got left in the fridge?”

My second thought was, “Am I really going to waste time on this silly machine? Then I’ll feel like an idiot at the end of two or three hours because I fell for the gag and it didn’t do a damn thing. Or maybe I’ll try it and it won’t work, and I’ll worry that I must have somehow screwed it up. Then I’ll feel totally incompetent for however long it takes to prove the damn machine does or doesn’t work.”

The third thought was, “Yeah, but if it does work, I could become filthy rich without any real effort at all!” Which was a pretty enticing thought. Sort of like, “What if this is the winning lottery ticket?” And with about as much chance. No, come to think of it: infinitely less.

So my fourth thought was, “Am I going to bother going to work today? Or should I stay here and try to figure out how to work this ridiculous thing, knowing I’ve already burned all of my sick days on the times when I was just so sick of everyone and everything at the office that I couldn’t make it in without making myself ill?” And then, of course, I’d regret the fact that I’d wasted hours I could have been paid for while absolutely proving to myself I was never going to make my fortune by believing in con men or miracle machines.

But the fifth thing I thought was, “Man, I am really starving!” So off I went to the kitchen to count and cook eggs, and maybe some bacon if it wasn’t all green.

While I was sitting there eating my five overdone eggs without bacon, I revisited thought number four. There was the trade off between trying to get an advance on my sick days and the potential frustration of wasting the time and effort by not having any success. Even worse, in proving myself an ass to ever have a semblance of belief in this likable but totally unbelievable supposed descendant and his completely impossible invention. Which was all compounded by the tantalizing fantasy of the freedom I would gain through him and his wacky box if it was all actually true and I could become filthy (or was it beautifully?) rich.

So, I may be stupid, but I’m not dumb, right? I brush my teeth and head off for work, making it to the office barely on time, as usual. I could always try the box later.

Not surprisingly, I wound up sitting there the entire day just staring at my computer screen, studying various offerings on the Nasdaq. I went to my Charles Schwab member site. It cost me thirty bucks per trade, which was barely what I made on most of my investments. I wanted to read up on what the analysts said about those stocks, how they’d done over the past twelve months, what the industry projection was, and all that jazz.

All the while I was thinking to myself: “What am I doing all this research for when I’ve got almost my entire two grand investment money already tied up in stocks that are lower than what I bought at, which means they’re worth almost nothing because I never buy shares that are more than ten bucks apiece? So I’m not going to sell them anyhow until they go up, and if the stupid machine works (which I know it won’t, but just for the sake of speculation) I won’t need to do any research because all I’ll have to do is look at the screen on that box and know exactly what to invest in.”

But I did it because I couldn’t possibly concentrate on my work for more than ten minutes at a time. What’s more, it was a way of keeping the dream alive for at least the rest of the day, until I went home and had the time to sit down and see if the damn thing actually, really, truly worked. I was cursing its impact on me before I had even tried it.

Naturally, at the end of the day The Old Toddler came up to me as I was about to leave on time for a change. I resigned myself to getting reamed out for ten minutes for goofing off most of the day. So, of course, I was totally shocked when he said:

“I’m very pleased that you took my warning yesterday to heart, Smith. This is the first time I can remember when you worked diligently at your desk all day. Not once did you wander around the office, go for at least three cappuccinos or continuously stare off into space. I hope this signifies you’re turning over a new leaf and that you keep up the good work in future.”

Then I remembered that my desk faced The Old Toddler’s office so he couldn’t see what I had on my screen. I give him a quick smile. “Of course,” I said, and breezed on out the door.

When I got home, I immediately opened the instruction manual and read it from cover to cover, even though I felt pretty comfortable with the instructions Solomon had given me. Maybe a delaying tactic, or my conservative nature. I don’t know. Anyhow, I finally got down to it. I turned the box on. All the proper lights lit up, which didn’t prove a thing. I took a deep breath and pushed the “Acquire” button. Nothing happened, but then, nothing was supposed to happen. Not for a while, at least.

I decided to start with something simple, like looking at tomorrow’s closing stock prices. Solomon had supposedly set the coordinates to show me at my computer screen. I adjusted the date and time setting for the next evening at six o’clock, when I knew I would be home and looking at it. As simple as Sol had made it sound, both in person and in the manual, it took me over three hours of fiddling around before I finally had all of the adjustments set. And that was just for one day in advance!

Well, okay, everything takes a lot longer when you’re just learning. Yeah, learning how to act like a complete fool.

Anyhow, after sweating and cursing and calling myself every synonym in the book for ‘fool,’ there finally came the time to switch on the screen and see my ‘ghost’ scan. I only hesitated for maybe thirty seconds, and then I flipped the switch.

I waited. And waited. And then I tried to figure out how I could literally kick myself in the ass. And then it happened.

To my utter amazement, this ghost image actually started to form on the screen! It was appearing very slowly and fuzzily. But, when it focused, it was definitely me with my back to the ‘camera’ and the computer screen gradually becoming clearly visible. I looked over my shoulder to see where the camera was. Then I remembered that the screen was showing me in front of my computer while I was actually sitting here at the kitchen table in front of the box as I watched myself slowly scroll down a list of the ten stocks I was monitoring. As I watched my ‘future’ self do that, I carefully wrote down the closing prices.

To conserve power, as Solomon had suggested, I had only set the ‘prescan’ to last two minutes. The image suddenly blinked out of existence. That startled me, considering how long the image had taken to form. I slumped down in my chair. I trembled with exhaustion from the intense concentration of the past few hours, as well as the exhilaration of the promise that stared me in the face like a bucket of water in front of a man who had crawled across the Gobi for the past three days.

It was too incredible to be true, and yet there could be no doubt of what I had seen. I rushed to my computer. I could barely contain my impatience as I turned it on, got onto the internet, and logged on to the Schwab site. Reviewing my actual portfolio list, plus some I was tracking, I was startled by the relative similarity in the numbers. It seemed that, while my time machine showed numbers close to reality, there were definite differences that could be the results of a day’s trading. I noted that six of the stocks were down, one was unchanged, two were up marginally, and one was up nearly four points. The last was a fairly expensive stock, trading at over fifty dollars a share, so of course it was a stock I had never bought. At that moment, I had just enough money in my bank account to buy eight shares, which my meager ‘margin’ on my Schwab account would cover. That’s sort of like a credit amount against current holdings, so you’re in deep doodoo if you lose a trade on the margin. So, naturally, I decided to blow the whole wad.

With slightly shaky fingers I went through the ‘buy’ sequence, punching the “Confirm Trade” icon with undue violence. It’s not that it was such a huge trade monetarily, although with my limited funds everything was a big deal. It was more the fact I had now committed myself financially and emotionally to this science fiction story. True, that little picture in the screen of the box was very powerful evidence that this might be more than a fantasy, but I had no actual proof as yet. It could still be some elaborate hoax, although there was obviously no sane reason in the world why anyone would go to so much trouble. Unless I was being used as a Guinea pig!

Ah, ha! Maybe that was it. They were just testing this gadget out, whatever it might be. It was probably some kind of tiny TV that could receive their cleverly edited special effects video with me and my computer starring in the “Dumb and Dumber” roles, before they tried it out on the Big Fish. They wanted to make sure it was believable enough before wasting their target mark. They had cracked my passwords into the net and on Schwab, discovered which stocks I played, and then dummied some numbers in to make it look real. So that meant they would have to contact me – or maybe not me, but the real mark – before the next day of trading closed, trying to extort their money in some way before the mark had a chance to see the real closing prices. I was sure I had it figured out.