The Girl Who Sat in the Corner

Chapter 12 - Time

                   

As soon as Preetha left, he went back to the table and unscrewed the cover of his computer, a tower he had built himself, and pulled out the network card he had been experimenting with. Carefully, he pried out the two original programmable chips and inserted the ones that Preetha had brought. It only took a moment to put the machine back together.

From a hiding space in the back of the kitchen cabinet, he extracted two round white dishes of circuit boards and wires, actually the bottom halves of two very old Apple AirPorts that he had radically modified to his purposes. He then positioned them several feet apart on each side of the table and connected them to the new card with network cables.

Wesley had gone a lot further than he told Preetha. It would have forced him into revealing why he'd spent nearly half his life on this insane quest. Nobody would ever understand that afternoon on the bus and it would have been too painful to explain.

A month earlier, he had connected to the old vid.io site and slowly managed to navigate to her page. The videos would never work, but he could read her posts and after a long wait, her small profile picture appeared, building line by line. A feeling of sadness and longing, a feeling more powerful than he could remember ever having, overcame him. As much as it hurt, he grabbed an image of the screen and saved it.

Over the next few nights he kept testing and had learned that once he connected to a certain date, he couldn't go back to it. It was like a gateway, but once opened, a span of several days surrounding it were sealed off, possibly forever. His calculations and predicted something like this and, while testing and exploring, he was very careful to avoid the day he was most interested in. With his original setup, he couldn't send data well enough to create an account and log in, but he had anticipated that as well and had spent months working up the specs for a set of replacement chips that would let him. That's what he gave Preetha to work on.

As the computer booted up, he found himself holding his breath. Writing the software that would work with the modified board had been hard and he wasn't totally sure it was bug-free.

The familiar Windows desktop appeared and a message in the corner told him that it was loading the new drivers. Then, a message telling him it worked. Another victory! Next, he launched his program, named it t-hack, and found an unused date about six weeks earlier than his target. Once it was running and connected to his time-shifting network, he could launch his modified web browser and called up vid.io. This time, he clicked the "Register" button and the page opened. Wesley clicked in the first field, said a simple prayer of "Please..." and began typing.

It worked!

But it was slow. Painfully slow. He filled in the registration form and created an account with a screen name of time-jumper78 That would have at least intrigued his fourteen-year-old self. Wesley followed the plan he had been working out in his mind for weeks. Logging in, he navigated to the chat area and tested the connection in one of the public rooms, jumping into different conversations until he could get a response. He felt a chill. He was interacting with a world nearly twelve years earlier.

The next step was a small one. He logged out and browsed to a news site to make sure the connection to vid.io was really broken. He couldn't help pausing a moment to read the headlines. It was like finding a decade-old newpaper. He then went back to vid.io and logged in again. It wasn't a fluke. time-jumper78 was now a real user.

He logged out again and broke the link with the date he just visited. Wesley was both elated and scared. The next part was the real thing. He knew what he had to do, but had no idea how it would go. It was too hard to ponder the results, whether he failed or succeeded.

He carefully entered the date and time, checking his typing carefully and hit the aptly-named "Go" button. The browser launched and he got to the vid.io login page and checked the date and time. It was over twenty minutes later than he wanted. A flash of panic swept through him. "Oh God, Wesley, please stay put!" he willed is younger self.

The chat page seemed to take forever to load. The connection was slowing down and the cooling fan in his computer started whirring softly. It hadn't done that before.

He entered string-nut77 in the search box. A very long minute later, the name popped up with a green dot beside it. He was still online!

Wesley took a couple of deep breaths to steady his hands, which had begun to shake. He opened the chat window with his earlier self and began...

"Hey!" the universal greeting of the time.

"Hey yourself. Who are you?" was the answer moments later.

He had thought about the answer for a long time and had decided to play to his underfed high-school ego.

"Your ideas about time and the multiverse were right."

"What?"

"It took us almost 12 years, but we proved it"

"We???"

"Yes!!!" he decided just to dive in. "I'm you. I'm 27 now.

"Bullshit! How did you know what I've been doing?. You hacked me!"

"No Wes. This is for real!!" he felt strange addressing himself by his own name.

"Yeah, I've been hacked. I never use that name online."

"I know." Wes, the elder, thought back quickly and remembered his favorite online fake name, "Clem Klondike, right?"

"Hacked!! I'm outta here!"

"Wait!" Something jumped into Wesley's mind. An old memory, something he would have never told anyone. "You hate Esmeralda's chili-cheese meatloaf." That should convince someone as skeptical as hhimself.

There was a pause long enough to make Wesley think that his younger self had gone or he had dropped the connection. The fan noise was quickly getting louder. His computer was definitely starting to heat up, probably under the strain of his modified network card. He got a brief whiff of the acrid smell of hot circuit cards.

Then an answer.

"Holy shit!"

Bingo! It was time. "Listen. This is REALLY important. Tomorrow on the bus SAVE KAI'S TABLET!!! NO MATTER WHAT!!!!" If there was ever a need for ALL CAPS, this was it.

"Wha..."

Wesley's screen went blue for a moment and then black. The cooling fan quickly spun down and the computer fell silent.

He cursed at himself and pounded the table. With all the fancy electronic work he had done, it didn't occur to him to beef up the computer's power supply. Simple and cheap. But now was too late. "You stupid, stupid..." he cursed himself mercilessly. It was over. All over.

Wesley suddenly felt totally exhausted and totally drained, like he'd just finished running a marathon in his head. He turned off and unplugged his dead computer and stuffed the network pods back in his kitchen cabinet, carelessly this time, and headed for bed.

He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror for a while, seeing that a lot of the high school freshman was still staring back at him. His eyes were still tired, his hair still carelessly combed, but now he was a day or two overdue for a shave. He tried to tell himself that he did what he could, but the pain, regret and shame he had carried with him all those years were still there. He went to bed exhausted, but it was still hours before he could fall asleep and then he dreamt the dreams that he hated.