Halloween in 2065
A Scary Story
It was on Halloween in 2031 that Thomas finally completed his time travel machine. At least, that’s what he thought it was. He couldn’t be sure until he tested it.
The morning of Halloween he tightened the final bolt and stood back to admire his handiwork. It looked pretty good, all things considering. At least, that was what he thought. He briefly wondered whether he should wait a day to try it. Perhaps Halloween was a bad day for time travel. He thought about this and couldn’t come up with a reason why. Besides, he didn’t have any plans for Halloween. It wasn’t like he needed to be around for trick-or-treating or a costume party.
Then Thomas reminded himself that if his machine worked, he could travel a thousand years into the future and come right back to this very minute. He needn’t worry about missing Halloween that evening, because he would be back by then. He began to wonder what would happen if he returned to a time a minute or two before he left. Would he step out of the machine and meet himself? He wondered whether it was possible to travel backwards in time to before the machine existed? If he could do that, could he go back in time to before the machine existed and then build it, so that it would already exist before he invented it?
He decided the worst paradoxes could wait. For now, a basic test of functionality should suffice. With one final look around the basement he’d spent the past seven years working inside, he stepped inside the time travel machine. He closed his eyes and spun the dial.
He opened them. The dial pointed ten thousand years into the future. Bad idea. The human race could have died out by then. He turned it back the other way and settled on a point a little over a hundred and thirty years in the future. It was quite possible that the Earth would have been irradiated by nuclear war before then, but if that was the case, it would likely happen within his lifetime anyway. Better to know in advance.
As he pushed the large red button, he realized he had only spun the dial corresponding to the year, meaning that he would arrive in the same month and on the same day of the month. Oh well, he thought, if human beings still celebrated a silly holiday like Halloween in the future, his out-of-date clothing would surely count for a Halloween costume.
Thomas materialized in the middle of a suburban street. He was somewhat disappointed to find that it didn’t look that different from the suburban streets of the twenty-first century. The automobiles parked by the sidewalks looked very odd, but none of them were flying around. There were oak trees in the yards of each of the houses, which were made from standard materials common to the twenty-first century.
He nervously touched the bracelet on his wrist, which would call the machine whenever it was time for him to go back to the present. Or the past, as the case might be.
The houses were built in new styles, and some of them were pyramids. Most were larger than twenty-first-century homes, which surprised Thomas, for he had imagined everyone would be living in tiny, environmentally-friendly cubes.
It was surprisingly cold, and he wished he had brought a jacket. In his day, Raleigh in October was quite warm, and he had imagined that by the mid-twenty-second-century it would be very hot. Then he remembered that he might not necessarily have traveled to Raleigh. For all he knew, he was in Northern Europe.
But there was something about the street which reminded him of home, as unfamiliar as it was to him. Thomas had always thought that by the twenty-second century, the nation state would be gone, most especially the anachronistic United States of America, but looking around the street he was starting to doubt that proposition. Only in America would people build homes this large and decorate them with such gauche and silly inflatables.
For the street was decorated for Halloween. That much was obvious. There were holograms of witches and ghouls, orange and purple and black lights strung on the trees, and old-fashioned inflatable ghosts which in Thomas’s day could be purchased in bulk at Wal-Mart and Lowes.
As he stood there staring at one display of a group of skeletons wielding electric guitars, he saw a group of figures appear around the corner. They weren’t flying on hoverboards or floating along above the ground. They were walking on two legs. Most of these figures were three-feet tall and clad in garish costumes, and they were accompanied in front and back by several six-foot tall figures wearing what Thomas assumed were normal clothes, but which might have been Star Wars costumes.
As they drew closer, Thomas was disappointed to see that they were carrying small plastic lightsabers. The robes were Jedi costumes. One man was wearing denim and a flannel shirt, and Thomas realized that this might not be an ironic historical costume in the style of the twenty-first century, but the man’s everyday clothes. He knew in his own day that many fathers didn’t wear costumes on Halloween, even when they accompanied their children trick-or-treating. The man was holding the hand of a little girl dressed up as Snow White.
Thomas waved at them and they waved back. He wasn’t sure what to say at first, especially since he was so disappointed how little change there had been in a hundred and thirty years. Perhaps this was a provincial township which clung to tradition and superstition. There had to be such places. Perhaps the floating sky-cities and the robotic waiters existed elsewhere.
The crowd of children stopped short of Thomas. Some of them pointed at him, and a few made small noises, but none of them said anything. They stared at him. Unsure of what to say, he mumbled, “Happy Halloween.”
They smiled. He stuck out his hand to one of the adults who had her hair up like Carrie Fisher in The Return of the Jedi, and she shook it, but she didn’t reply when he said, “My name is Thomas and I’m from the twenty-first century.”
He waved at the children. “What is your costume?” he asked one girl, but she just smiled at him.
Perhaps English was no longer spoken in this place, or perhaps the language had evolved so much that nobody understood what he was saying. But none of them made any sounds of their own, and they didn’t open their mouths except to smile. Nor did they speak amongst themselves. He could tell that they were communicating in some way, because they would look at each other, and occasionally wave their hands or point their fingers. The children were excited. But they didn’t say anything. Clearly, they could hear him, because when he spoke they looked at his mouth. But none of them said so much as a single word.
Thomas had been prepared for the possibility that his words wouldn’t be understood, and he’d brought with him a notebook and a pencil. He retrieved these now and began writing down the words, “My name is Thomas and I come from the twenty-first century.” The woman who had shaken his hand stepped up to watch over his shoulder, but she made no sign of recognition even when he wrote, “What is your name?”
He showed the words to the crowd of assembled trick-or-treaters, but they all stared blankly at the lined paper.
“I HAVE TRAVELED THROUGH TIME,” he wrote in large capital letters, but to no avail.
Perhaps their written language no longer resembled English, he thought. Feverishly, he began drawing pictograms, stick-figure men, and numerals to indicate the twenty-first century. He showed these to the crowd. But though they passed around the notebook and widened their eyes, they appeared to have no understanding, even of the number twenty-one written in Arabic and Roman numerals. Thomas tried tally marks, but this, too, engendered a blank reaction.
At that moment, the woman who had come to look over his shoulder gasped. She pointed to his head and then waved over the others. They all crowded around and began pointing at a spot above his right ear. Thomas wasn’t sure what they were doing at first.
But then he saw it. Each of them – man, woman, and child – had a crystalline lobe poking through the hair above their right ears. This gave off a faint light which ebbed and flowed. Occasionally it blinked.
Thomas felt the ground fall away beneath him as he realized what these lobes were doing. Even the youngest child had one. Perhaps it was surgically implanted at birth.
He brushed away their hands and backed into the street. He felt sick. A device which could send and receive signals from brainwaves, which could connect every individual’s mind directly with every other mind, would obviate any need for speech or writing or even mathematics. In a society without any need for speech, babies might not learn how to speak, because they wouldn’t hear their parents speaking.
His mouth opened, but no words came out. His words were useless. These people couldn’t understand the sounds his mouth was making, because they had never learned how to talk. Perhaps they didn’t even know what he was doing.
He sunk to his knees and began to cry. Immediately, the children swarmed around him and began to hug him, but this was little solace. He wished desperately that he could tell them that he would be alright when he returned to the twenty-first century, where he could communicate with his own kind, but he knew they wouldn’t understand him. And he knew too that he wouldn’t be alright, for he would never be able to forget Halloween in 2165.