as you call it, sometimes sucks. I don’t want to go back to ancient Egypt. I just want to see what it would be like to be alive, um, say, twenty years ago.”
His brow furrowed as if some small excavating machine had just carved a canyon across his forehead. “Why twenty years ago?”
I didn’t really have an answer. I just had this fascination with everything from the turn of the century. The millennium, as they called it — the year 2000 and the ten years leading up to it. “I think everything was simpler then. Things made sense.”
“Trust me. Things made about as much sense then as they do now. Some people thought the world would end at midnight on December 31, 1999.”
“Maybe it did. Maybe this is all an illusion.” I had bought into Robyn’s theory at least in part. She was now my mentor.
“You’re going to tell me that all matter is made up of 99.9 percent empty space, right?” My father sounded slightly sarcastic but not insulting.
“I was thinking along those lines.”
“That we’re all just bundles of energy, and there really is no such thing as matter?”
“That too.”
“Dylan, I think you should study quantum physics. You’d like it.”
My father often said that he wanted me to go to university and study physics or biochemistry. I wanted to be an entomologist, however. It was an ongoing debate. “If I study quantum physics, could I figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light?”
“You could give it a shot.”
“Then I’ll consider it. What sort of equipment would I need for FTL travel?”
“You’d need a lot of energy would be my guess. If you could get yourself into space and build a spacecraft that was strong enough, then detonate a contained one-hundred-megaton nuclear explosion that could push you out of the solar system, you might, and I say might, approach the speed of light, but I don’t think you could make it work.”
“But if I could, it would alter time, right?”
“Somewhat. But the blast would probably kill you.”
“That’s the downside, eh?”
“Real down.”
“Can’t I just create some kind of force field with my mind and travel back in time?”
“And what kind of force field would that be?” My father could be a bucket of cold water at times.
“I’m not sure. But I’d like to go back to that night of December 31, 1999, or maybe sometime in 1995.”
“Why do you want to go back to the year 1995? That was before you were born.”
“I don’t know. I just think I’d be more at home there.”
“Do you realize how slow computers were then? How primitive the WorldCom was?”
“It was called the Internet back then, remember? The World Wide Web.”
“It was like a tortoise. And everything was two dimensional — video screens, comp monitors, cinascreens. You’d be bored out of your gourd.”
“I am bored out of my gourd — sometimes, anyway.”
“You’re sixteen, Dylan. It’s a tough age. You’ll get through it. Your mother and I love you and we’ll see you through. You’ll go to university. You’ll have the best holoprofs in the country. You’ll meet chicks.”
“Chicks?”
“It was a joke. Chicks was a term they used when I was growing up, although girls hated it.”
“Why would you call them chicks? Like chickens?”
“I don’t know. Language isn’t always logical.”
“Language puts everything into little boxes,” I said. “I don’t trust it. I’d prefer to be telepathic.”
“Oh, that would be swell. Everyone walking around listening in on everyone else’s thoughts.” He was sounding sarcastic again.
“At least then everyone would have to be honest.”
“Is honesty important to you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. It’s one of the old-fashioned virtues and I approve of it and so does your mother. There’s not enough honesty in our world — especially in my job. Even though I work with brilliant men and women, they are always playing games. I can’t tell when anyone is telling me the truth. Makes me want to buy one of those Veriscans.”
“They say the Veriscan is only about 85 percent accurate in telling if anyone is lying.”
“If you buy the upgrade I think it might be closer to 90 percent, but really all it does is register pupil dilation and changes in skin temp, heart rate, and sweat.”
“Miles Vanderhague got caught wearing one in school. Some of the teachers were really pissed off.”
“No one wants to be caught fibbing.”
“Can I have one for my birthday?”
“No. Absolutely not. Why would you want one?”
I thought for a minute. I really did want one. I wanted to know when people were bullshitting me. My parents in particular. It’s sometimes tough on a kid being raised by a couple of eggheads. Even though I knew they loved me, I often had this feeling they had read too many psychology textbooks. And I sometimes thought they were holding too much back.
“I want a Veriscan,” I said, “so I can use it to meet girls — chicks.”
“That’s not ethical. You want to know if they are telling you the truth? It would almost be like reading their minds, invading their thoughts.”
“Precisely. I could ask them directly what they thought about me and I’d know if they were telling the truth. It would cut through a lot of bullshit.”
“Dylan, you are one weird kid. Sometimes I don’t know where you came from.” He was smiling now, at least, and that was a major breakthrough with my father. “But I’m still not buying you a Veriscan for your birthday.”
“Not even a cheap one?”
“No way.”
In my dream, I was at the bottom of Loch Ness. Either I was with the Loch Ness monster or I was the Loch Ness monster. It was unclear to me but it was one of my underwater dreams and I was looking at the surface of the loch and the Scottish sky above. I think I could see the dark underside of boats on the water. There in the depths I was feeling very lonely in an underwater monster sort of way. I was thinking I was the only one of my kind on the planet. I knew that if I surfaced and the truth about me was known, many people would find
