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Jeremy's Story

START HERE.... A technology magazine editor finds himself in 1967. He hatches a plan to change the world of technology

Published onMar 22, 2022
Jeremy's Story
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Part 1: Jeremy's Opening Story

Chapter 1: Jeremy’s Story

August 19, 1967 7:10 am Pacific Daylight Time, Timberville, Washington

* * *

Young Jeremy with opossum

 

 

I have all the questions any retiree would ask, anyone who fell asleep in September of 2019 and woke up in their own teen-aged body, in their high-school home bedroom, in a quiet house on a weekend August morning in 1967. I can see the calendar on the wall. I am no stranger to this room. I’m writing this down on some three-ring, lined paper I found in a Pee-Chee on my desk. Pee-Chee, right? If this were 2019, you could Google that.

I am writing because that’s what I do. I had spent decades running The Next Wave Magazine, one of top online resources for advanced tech info in the world. Even in my delusional state, it calms me to take a Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil in hand.

Returning to bed after a quick pee and a prolonged look in the bathroom mirror, I figured that I had been drugged some time the previous evening. My current girlfriend and I had walked down Pearl Street in Boulder to that new cocktail lounge, where I tasted their Sazerac cocktail, more than once. What I thought was Absinthe was actually poison. I am now in the middle of an hallucinogenic experiment, under the influence of a KGB-level, mind-fucking drug. I’m probably tied up in the back of a white van headed for a mountain cabin. All this is a drug-induced delusion. This particular vision has been yanked from my own memory, and weaponized to make me doubt my sanity.

I sat down on my childhood single bed, used and lumpy, with that heavy, dark blue coverlet. The Next Wave had recently done a feature on Russian hacker squads behind recent malware blackmail schemes. Is this revenge?

In my delusional drug state, I had awakened with a bit of morning wood; me being fifteen, and with that haircut I can remember from the barber on Commerce Avenue. A body hardly used and not yet full grown. I could even smell the Glade Floral Scent air freshener Mom used. This drug is really evil. Or, maybe I’ve been fifteen all along, and the fifty-two years I’ve experienced are generated from a slow growing brain tumor.

Any kind of organic, subjective explanation seems more plausible than time turning itself around and jumping in the wrong direction. I anticipate that there will be a blinding light in my eyes, and a doctor’s sonorous voice: “He is finally showing signs of consciousness. Won’t be long now.”

This crazy dream. I am sitting on my bed. Outside, the robins and crows are welcoming the morning. I am as awake as any person has ever been before coffee. I don’t feel drugged. My movements are natural, my head is clear. I’ve lost, what? fifty-two odd years of time. I begin my checklist of questions, a list with no answers. A thousand questions. The first one being: how do I make it stop?

None of the movie scripts in my head fit my position here in this shit-hole small town that I had fled a half-century ago. The most excitement I ever had here was the day I caught a possum. And why me? I had no desire to revert to my high-school self: no glory days to relive, no true love inadvertently sidetracked. But, perhaps everyone else on the planet had been similarly transported, and everybody is scratching their heads in bewilderment.

Fifty-two years might be an accidental time frame, or have some actual significance. All I know right now is that I am here and I am a kid again. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll be visiting King Arthur’s court. Right now, most of me is still hoping I reside in 2019, still looking to wake up for real. Next to me in bed, my new partner is still asleep, or is she? This dream state will dissolve the instant I open my eyes. Only they are open.

I was in no way extraordinary in the 1960s. I was a teen: bored, distracted, unpleasant. I had no mission to fulfill, no quest to follow. If I walk out the door right now and get run down by the milk truck, my family would be sad for a bit, but nothing else would be affected. I just wrote the phrase “milk truck” and it didn’t sound archaic. In fact, it passed by outside just a few minutes ago, playing that stupid Disney song.

What’s so magic about 1967? I searched my memory. The Vietnam War is ramping up. The space race is big news. The Beatles are still together. I can use ‘groovy’ as an adjective again. The Summer of Love may be humping away down in San Francisco, but here in small-town Timberville it’s still just “Slumberville” to me and my buddies. Of course, this time around I could ditch high school and head for the Haight. That’s way too cliché. London would be better. Except, I have no funds at all. Shit. I remembered. I have an afternoon paper route.

Fifty-two years packs a lot of changes, if you live it. I’m not the same adolescent child I see in the mirror. How can I pull off “being fifteen” again? I guess I can do “strange kid.” Become the silent type. The neighbors will whisper, “he used to be so open and friendly, only lately, it’s like he’s folded into himself.”

In a few years, I’ll have a whole new crowd of friends at whatever college I get into. Only, I don’t see me doing the whole university scene once more. Been there. Done that. I have half a century of BTDT. It’s actually just the right time of life to suddenly be an entirely different person, which is what I’ve become. Except I’m still me, only really young, and, I noticed, still a bit stiff. Is fifteen one continuous boner?

At the breakfast table, I watch Mom preparing the food. She has said nothing to suggest she went back in time, so I stay quiet on that topic. The woman slicing a banana on my Cheerios had been dead for more than two decades. We buried her after a hospital surgery mishap. She’s also young enough to be my daughter. Today, she’s in a hurry to get through her own breakfast and be off to church for some committee meeting. Nothing is different for her, as far as I can notice. Perhaps she is hiding her own time dilemma. Dad is away on business travel today.

I make an argument for having coffee. “I’m going to high school in a few weeks.”

She told me my brother didn’t start until he was in college. She said, if I hurry, she’ll give me a quick lift up to the Country Club until early afternoon. Otherwise I can stay here and mow the lawn today instead of tomorrow. I’d forgotten about summer days at the Timberville Country Club. Golf in the morning, poolside in the afternoon. Sounded like a plan.

Woah!

It struck me so hard I almost shouted. The notion that I was actually fifteen again. Fifteen, and with my whole life in front of me, and a lifetime of knowledge already in my head.

1967: it’s still, what? Two years before Woodstock. Maybe I’ll go. The Mets. I remember; they took The World Series in 1969. Nobody saw that coming. Should be a way to make bank on that. Hello, Vegas! Maybe buy Bitcoin at two dollars. My mind began to swim in the possibilities. I made a note to start a list of potential financial windfalls to exploit.

I take my cereal bowl over to add to the dishwasher. My Mom is back in her room, fixing her face. I don’t know what to do about church. I gave that up decades ago. I’ll need to finesse it while I’m here, I suppose, if only to avoid arguments and sadness with my mother. We are Presbyterians so there is no emotional investment required. Just stay awake during the sermons. Not always so easy.

I’m feeling supremely confident as Mom drives me to the Country Club. I come from the future. I know things, a lot of things, important things. It makes sense to just pretend I’m a kid until I figure out what’s up. Better to avoid any psychiatric complications. Fly under the radar. Maybe I’ll head up to Seattle and become best high school buddies with Billy Gates. But first, there is bound to be a lot of pretty girls at the Club pool to admire from afar.

 

CODA: August 19, 1974

I just finished writing this story. I’m not here to tell you the ending. My story is just one in a billion. This one is mine. I will throw in some spicy bio moments when these illustrate the immediate zeitgeist. But mainly I want to tell you how I helped create an alternative new now as this emerges from the history I remember. I tried to keep an actual diary of those days when my own life seemed at the center of this temporal typhoon. I will lard these into the story with some restraint. The very first day was like that. Who can forget waking up fifty-two years younger?

 

 Time Drift Vocabulary

* * *

Sometimes it’s difficult to talk about the future as a memory; about your past as everyone’s former future. Authors have created new words for this peculiar circumstance.

Abouttimeance

Retribution, judgement, acknowledgement of future/past wrongs. When those actions you diddone impact your life in the new now. “Everyone knows Steve willbewho a bully. Yesterday he got his abouttimeance when nobody would hire him.” It’s comeuppance for things you haven’t done yet in the new now.

Afterkinder

Children born after August 19, 1967 in the future/past. We do not know what happened to them when the time quake hit. Timedrifter parents, and others retain the memories of these afterkinder children. Their sudden absence and unknown fate creates an emotional burden on many timedrifters.

Diddone

You wake up fifty-two years ago and remember everything. Other timedrifters who knew you in the future/past also have memories of your time together. Things you did then haven’t happened yet, but you diddone them anyhow, as long as somebody remembers them. This doesn’t mean you will do the same things again, just that you diddone them last time around. People judge other people by their actions, and themselves by their intentions. Just remember, it’s likely you’ve got some ‘splainin to do.

Future/past

The fifty-two years (approximately) that disappeared on September 2, 2019. A period of time now only preserved in the memories of the one billion plus timedrifters who woke up back in 1967.

New now

The present time, used when contrasting with the future/past

Olders

People who were older than thirty in 1967 and were not alive in September of 2019.

Pregret

Regrets emerge from your memories to hound you in the present. Pregrets emerge from memories of what you diddone in the future/past. They disappear when you do not repeat them in this future.

Realagers

Individuals born in the new now. Anyone born after Noon (UTC) August 19, 1967.

Realtimers

All the individuals alive in 1967, and who did not retain a memory of the future/past (mainly, they died before 2019). They numbered more than three billion in 1967.

Timedrifter

Any of the billion or so individuals who were alive in 2019 and older than 30 months in August of 1967, and who can remember their lives in the future/past. Apparently, the hippocampus (the brain’s memory card) cannot handle a fifty-two year memory dump until it’s around 30 months old. In 1967, timedrifters ranged in age from two-and-a-half years to nearly sixty years. Most were under twenty.

Willbewhere

Descriptions of places in the future/past

Willbewho

Descriptions of people in the future/past

Willhavebeen

Descriptions of objects in the future/past

Willhavesaid

Direct quotes from the future/past

Younglings

People who were thirty or younger in 1967, but died before September of 2019.

Young/old

See: timedrifter

 

 

* * *

August 19, 1967, 10 a.m.

 

Fab Four

Mom dropped me off at the Club’s lower parking lot. “Running late,” she said. “You understand.”

The day’s heat was just beginning to gather. I took the shortcut to the pro shop through the pool enclosure. This was not encouraged, as the metal spikes on golf shoes are rough on the asphalt walkway. The pool enclosure was an ample, smooth, concrete deck with the main pool in the middle, and a small kiddie pool on the far side. There is plenty of lounging space around the pool. On the clubhouse side, a fringe of umbrellaed tables were served by the restaurant. In front of these, a row of padded chaise lounges provided the elderly members with a purview of the whole enclosure while they sipped their daiquiris.

Glancing over at the pool, I spied a covey of girls in animated discussion while seated on the concrete. My fifteen-year-old self reminded me that these are girls who would never talk to me, and will avoid looking in my direction. I walked faster, bending forward to support my golf bag over my shoulder.

“Yo! Mister Next Wave!” a girl shouted.

I stopped, dumbfounded, and turned to look. Sarah Dobbins, of all people, was motioning at me: my junior-high’s cheer squad captain. Her blond locks fell down the back of a robin’s-egg-blue bikini. I had forgotten that she was also on the swim team. Muscled and tan, she could have been a sea creature basking on a rock, all curvy and round and slim and taut and well, female.

“Drop your clubs and come on over here,” she shouted.

Thoughts accelerated through my head. She knew about The Next Wave, so she must be a time traveler too. I’m not alone. Thank god! And then I thought, Sarah Dobbins is looking right at me. The latter thought seemed more remarkable.

“Come on over. Let’s talk,” she added. “We don’t bite… much.” They laughed as they watched me.

“Give me a minute,” I shouted to them.

I dropped my clubs near the edge of the deck and started removing my shoes and socks. For some unknown reason, my mind raced to a Calvino short story I liked. The way I remember the story is like this: a man came upon a woman sunbathing topless on a beach quite near the route he was taking across the sand. Slightly unnerved, he walked by her, deliberately turning his head away from her. Then he stopped to consider that ignoring her might seem uncivil. So, he retraced his steps. This time he glanced at her briefly, and smiled before moving on. Several times he walked by her as he experimented, seeking an optimal level of nonchalance, and not being quite satisfied with his performance. Finally he approached, turned to face her, and stared at her naked torso appreciatively, until she arose in anger, shrouded herself in her robe, and ran off, cursing him. Trust Calvino to take awkward to its limit.

The fifteen-year-old I am has no idea how to approach Sarah Dobbins and her female crowd, over there, all confident and casual in their swimwear. But there is also an old man in my head who didn’t really give a shit about any of this.

I left my clubs, walked over to them, stood there, and folded my arms. I couldn’t sit anyhow in my chinos. They had been swimming. The deck was puddled with drips and drops, wet butt prints and damp foot prints.

There were five of them, including Sarah; not all of them were in my grade. Sue Vance and Vivian Stone had both been in my homeroom last year. Dixie Thompson was entering her senior year in high school. The fifth girl was young, maybe six or seven. It looked like she’d been crying recently.

“Hi Sue,” I nodded. At least Sue and I had spoken to each other before. “Hello Vivian. Dixie. Um, Sarah. Who is this? And why is she so glum?”

Sarah leaned over and put her arm around the poor girl. “Lucy Buck. You remember, she died in that skiing accident up at Copper in Colorado in the 2010s.”

“2013,” Vivian said. “It was on Facebook. But now, that’s not going to happen this time around.” She smiled at Lucy. “You’re going to be skiing powder when you’re eighty.”

“I don’t understand,” Lucy spoke. “How did you all get so, so weird. Just yesterday….” Tears started up again.

“Jerry,” Sarah said, “It seems that only people still alive in 2019 can remember their…” She motioned for some prompt.

“Future/past?” I inserted.

“That will work.”

“It’s Jeremy,” I said. “I assume this is not a phenom localized to the Timberville Country Club.”

“Turn up your radio,” Sarah said to Dixie.

Dixie bent down and grabbed a metal box covered in black leather and chrome, about the size of a cereal box, with an antenna stretched out from its top side. She twisted a dial on its face.

“… All nations are now reporting that thousands, maybe millions of their citizens can remember not only the past we share, but, remarkably, some years into the future. Scientists are puzzled…”

“That’s Walter Cronkite,” I said. I remembered being here in the clubhouse, watching their big color TV, when the moon landing happened, or will happen soon. When was that?

“He’s been talking for a couple hours,” Dixie said. “This is planetary.”

“What do they know?” I said. I squatted across from Sue.

“The event was simultaneous across the globe,” Sue said. “I’m not…” She laid back down on her back, and covered her eyes with her arms.

I wasn’t an avid Facebook user on the local high school page, but I remembered that Sue had stayed in Timberville, married a local man, and ran the Ramada Inn over by I-5. I glanced at Sarah who had put her hand on Sue’s calf.

Sarah looked back. “Sue and Tim had five kids. Tim died in 2017. Even if they meet again, how can she know she could love him? And what happens to the children from this future/past, as you say? What about the unborn?”

“You need a philosopher, not a tech writer. Wait, what’s Uncle Walter saying now? Turn it up!”

“…Reports from the battlefields of Vietnam indicate that both sides are putting down their weapons. Some impromptu ceasefire is now in effect. I have a note here that pilots in Guam are refusing to fly their B52s. I can only surmise that there are soldiers whose memories of the future give them pause to reflect, and an opportunity to reunite with lost comrades. They will not be eager to continue their role in today’s battles…”

Vivian said, “Imagine you wake up and see a buddy you know will get killed later in the war…”

“Or a memory of killing others…” Sue sat up. “We could be seeing the first generation of soldiers who really know the cost of war.”

“They also know we walked away from the Vietnam war in 1975. We declared victory while we tossed helicopters off the decks of aircraft carriers to make room for more helicopters as we fled,” Sarah said.

“Then there’s the vacation in Hue with their family they remember,” Dixie added. “Think of the Vietnamese soldiers and all their dead. It’s 1967, the war is just starting to get bad.” We were all nodding.

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it!” Lucy shouted. “I look at you all and you are… you are you. But then you open your mouths and… and it’s like my parents talking with other grownups at one of their cocktail parties. You need to stop it right now. I miss yesterday!”

“The Beatles!” Dixie, Sarah, Sue, Vivian, and I managed to say at the same time.

“Jinx,” Vivian said.

“I’ll need to grow my hair out again,” I said.

“What you need is to get to a gym this time around,” Sarah said, “I forgot how skinny you were, I mean, are.”

“You should see me in my swim trunks,” I said.

“That might be a memory I’ve blocked all these years,” Sarah said.

“I take it you’re not sapiosexual?”

“Not at fifteen. But then I’ve changed a lot since then.”

“Since now.”

Sarah was looking into my eyes like she had never seen me before. Which was entirely accurate. Her’s had flecks of green in them.

“I’d suggest,” Dixie said, “that you two get a room somewhere, but Sarah, your mom would kill me, and anyhow you’re going steady. Remember? If Dan saw that look in your eye, he’d pound Jeremy into steak tartare.”

“Dan wouldn’t know how to spell it. Dan drove his pickup off the Columbia Gorge highway drunk, not long after high school. Today, he’s actually fifteen.”

Sue said, “Lucy has a point. It’s not her fault she wasn’t around in 2019. We all miss yesterday, only my yesterday won’t happen for another fifty-two years. I miss my grandkids already.”

 

* * *

August 19, 1967, 3 p.m.

 

Mt. St. Helens 1980

Mt. St. Helens 1980

 

 

The ride home with mom was, well, bizarre.

While I was busy chatting by the pool, mom’s church group had been interrupted when the youngest member, a newlywed named Bethany, began to explain how the rest of them individually will get unhappy and divorced, impoverished and forced to live with their ungrateful children, arrested for embezzlement, cancerous at an early age, fatally injured in a car crash, the victim of a hospital mistake, or, as Bethany was keen to point out, happily married and now, once again, twenty years old. None of the others were alive in 2019, and Bethany made sure they found out why.

“You… you know the future?” Mom refused to look at me. She spent a lot of time glancing at the rear view mirror, like we were being chased. Her emotional tone meandered from terror to anger to sadness. She was processing the sudden news of her future death.

“I know a future,” I said. “I have a feeling we will be heading in new directions. This also means that your hospital accident will certainly not happen. There’s that.”

“What about your father?”

“What about him?”

“Does he ever…” She paused, her mouth tense.

Mom wanted to know if dad was faithful to her. Nothing about him dying from a heart attack while shoveling snow. Me, I was in no position to say. Once I left for college, he could have been dallying with neighbor ladies left and right.

I needed to shut down this and future conversations about specifics from my memory. I was no Bethany. My past—their future—was out of bounds. It actually never happened. Likely never will.

“Listen to me. The future I remember is not meant for conversational anecdotes. Just because something happened before—and that before has not happened yet—doesn’t mean it will happen in our future. I also doubt that my memory is so precise. I am not just fifteen years old, so I can say some things I’ve learned that might be of use. Here’s one. If you want to know Dad’s feelings about you, tell him your feelings, and give him space to respond. Don’t let your own thoughts spoil the emotional realm you share with him.”

We drove several blocks in silence. Perhaps I had died in my sleep last night, and hell is an eternity spent in my sophomore year of high school.

I broke the silence. “Oh, Saint Helens will erupt in 1980. And Seattle gets an NFL team. I don’t mind talking about newsy stuff, just no personal futures, unless this will make life longer or easier.”

“How old are you… were you?” She looked at me, back at the road.

“Sixty-seven. You’re young enough to be my daughter.”

More blocks.

“Did you ever learn to clean your room?” A small smile broke on her face.

“I can even vacuum. Tell you what, I’ll vacuum the house every week if I can have coffee with breakfast.”

“Deal.” She looked over and managed a smile.

“…maybe a Cappuccino..”

“A what?”

 

A Billion Memories

The world woke up with a billion memories stretching across a half century. I’m not going to wax philosophical. Except now. I’ve got a thousand new shower thoughts. These are a few of them. Indulge me.

This is not a movie where a small team of wary time travelers avoid changing so much as a dandelion growing in the park, just in case this change might alter the time line catastrophically so they would return to the future to find it a smoldering nuclear ruin. Slap that mosquito and you might never have been born.

This is movie where the future is the plot, and the last thing we want is what we’ve already seen. Change is not the problem. Change is the project.

Every morning, I wake up inside a mental envelope that I am certain didn’t exist for me a couple months ago—which was also fifty-two years from now. I feel an intense emotional calmness, a profound lack of worry about today, tomorrow, and the future. I’ve begun to sort this feeling out.

Living life again is nothing like living it the first time, in terms of attitude. I’m totally free from generalized anxiety. My armor is gone. I can stand naked in front of tomorrow. If this were only me, I’d consider a paid gig as a rogue, somewhat Buddhist, guru. “How I learned to stop worrying and love the present.” However, this feeling is likely shared by most of the timedrifters. We’re all bozos on this bus.

Imagine the future as a carnival side-show fun house. By waking up tomorrow, you’ve bought a ticket to enter, and you fully expect to get scared. It’s the point of going in. You startle, and you scream and laugh. Then you are out the other side, until you wake up the next day to a different fun house. That’s what the future holds the first time around; an endless supply of different, scary fun houses. The future is scary. I mean, you just never know.

Then someone gives you another ticket to the very same fun house you visited already. This time, nothing scares you. That’s what being sixty-seven and fifteen at the same time feels like. It’s like I own the future. Nothing crushed or killed me the last time: not the reckless driving moments, not the various recreational drugs, not the occasional sprains and aches, not the serial broken-heart disappointments, not even the hyper-competitive marketplace I faced. Nothing the world tossed at me broke me. What should I fear this time?

Instead, I’ve got this crazy amount of energy. It’s like all that worry has been diverted into my creativity warp drive, and I am cruising at Warp 11. Thank you, Scotty!

I have to smile about the internet billionaires who once rode unicorn start-ups into crypto-currency fortunes, and those politicians who now remember the sheer luck that put them into places of power and influence, and bankers who will again need to mud-wrestle their way into that plum job at JP Morgan Chase or HSBC.

At the societal level, all the shady business deals that robbed towns of their taxes and then their jobs, the environmental shortcuts that poured toxins into local waters and chemicals into the skies, the worthless promises made by political candidates—all those vapid visions of “better times ahead,” to be paid for with more pain in the “short run”that ran your whole lifetime—these events are locked into the heads and hearts of the hundreds of millions who came back from the future.

Out in the workplace and inside families, we have the memories of millions of personal acts of subtle cruelty, calculated indifference, or intentional harm. These cannot go unchallenged the next time. And the next time starts today. Each sad family is sad in its own way, as Tolstoy noted. In this 1967, that sadness is a future event with a memory trail. You don’t want or need to dive back into that particular sadness if you can fix it first.

The unspoken truth is that the lies and the cruelty were buffered by many more acts of kindness and concern, measures of empathy and caring. Unfortunately, we remember the slap far better than the kiss, the stumble more than the helping hand. Without a continuous coriolis of kindness and care, most of us timedrifters would not have been above ground in 2019.

Some of us gave love and got love in return, like the Marley song. Fast friendships and families we could rely on, devoted lovers and mates for a week, or a decade, or more. We added our own love into these relationships. Half a century of loving and being loved; this too is tucked into our current personhood. Some missed out on love. Fractured families, lonely lives; we’ve been there. Now it’s up to us to make the next fifty years a time when love will find us. We all deserve love.

Some of us also got wise. Wisdom doesn’t just show up. It’s not a door prize you win for turning old. You find it hiding in the pain of your mistakes, and the traps you fell into along the way. A billion people carry the wisdom they earned incrementally in the future/past here to 1967. I’m thinking our new future is going to be a different place and a really interesting time to live through. Guess what? Now is the next time for everything.

Chapter 2: Sally comes to talk

August 22, 1967

 

young girl on a bicycle

Sally on a bicycle

 

 

My Dad’s cousin, Ralph Miller, was calling around to all of his close relatives today, three days after the time quake. He told Dad a sweet and sad story, and I’m adding this here. It stands for a thousand others. I will embellish some of the details. Ralph isn’t the most observant guy.

Saturday morning, Ralph was out mowing the front lawn. Sally, a neighbor’s little girl, waved at him from her bike as she rode past his house. He waved back. Sally’s dad works at Sears and her mom plays bridge with Ralph’s wife, Adelle. Sally is Katlyn’s best friend. Katlyn is Ralph and Adelle’s daughter. Sally and Katlyn are the same age, nine.

The next time he looked up, Sally was riding the other way, staring in his direction. She might have said something, but the mower’s Craftsman motor was at full power. He mowed on.

“Mister Miller!” she was at his gate.

She shouted, “I need to talk with you. Is Katlyn gone to class?” Katlyn had ballet in the morning on Saturdays, Ralph explained to my Dad.

Ralph popped the stop lever on the mower. It barked twice and quit.

“What’s this about? Katlyn’s at ballet. She’ll be back in an hour.”

“She’s in class!” Sally’s face opened in a wide smile that crinkled her forehead.

Sally opened the gate and walked, almost danced, across the yard towards him. When she was near, she held out her hand. He put his out and she took this in her strong little fingers. She held on to him with some tiny urgency. What Ralph said to my Dad was, “She grabbed me like I was a balloon about to fly away.”

“I will say this thing to you, and let you think about it,” Sally said.

“Are you in trouble?”

She shook her head. “It’s about Katlyn. I remember how she… how she died.”

“You what?”

“Have you been told already?”

This was still early on that Saturday, and Ralph hadn’t turned on the news. He had slept in. Adelle had gone off with Katlyn to her class while he was still shaving. He had no idea what was going on in the world.

“Run that by me again…”

“It will be OK.” She gripped his hand even harder. “We can stop it.”

She looked up into his bewilderment and continued. “Listen to me. Come May next year there will be a storm, a really big one. They will call it Hurricane Grace. Your tree…” She looked over at the towering pine next to his house. He followed her gaze. “It will topple over and kill Katlyn up in her bed during the night.”

“Next May? You mean next year in May. In the future…”

“On May 17. That following morning was terrible for everyone.”

“I’m going to walk you home.” Ralph put his hand on her shoulder. Maybe she was sick, delirious. In a few hours, he would know the whole story, time quake and all.

She said, “I can ride my bike. I’m pretty sure you’ll get this same news again today, but I wanted to tell you how much I’m going to love having Katlyn here and safe, well, for years and years. That old tree…” She frowned at it and turned to him. “That tree will make some good firewood. We can burn it on the night of the hurricane and have a party. I’ve got to go now. You or Mrs. Miller can call my Mom. She remembers, too.”

Sally let go of his hand. “Ralph,” she had never called him by his first name. “I know how much you grieved for Katlyn. It wasn’t your fault. That stupid tree, who could guess. But, you see, I do know this. You cut that motherfucker down next week and we’ll all sleep a lot better.”

When she smiled at him, it was hard to remember she was just nine.

“Sorry about the language. I learned it in the Marines. I know how you will die too, but that’s a long time from now…”

“What’s that?” he said to her back.

“Turn on the TV,” she said over her shoulder.

Ralph watched her stride away, hop on her bike, and pedal like a windmill down the street.

He went inside and turned on the radio. When Katlyn got home, she got the biggest hug of her life, at least until Sally dropped by, again, later the same day, and gave her a hug. That one was a hug for the ages.

Ralph figured that, when you wake up young again, and see your best friend at nine, and understand why her life was cut short while yours wasn’t, you find that each day with her is a gift. When you joke, laugh, and hug, there is a new weight carried by a fresh understanding of how these moments carry meaning.

Ralph wanted everyone to know that Katlyn would be just fine. The pine tree was coming down next week.

 

* * *

September 8, 1967, Timberville, Washington

 

Academic Society Meeting  conference room filled with people

Academic Society Meeting

 

 

A few more shower thoughts for you readers. I keep having these, so I’ll spit out the best ones here. I’m lucky that Timberville is one of the rainiest places on the planet, since I’m spending a lot of time in the shower with all these thoughts, and, of course, that vision of Sarah Dobbins in her bikini.

I will include a few of these thoughts, and other asides, in my story. Every day I wake up and the whole time is filled with aside-worthy material. How often do you get a chance to meet a woman you had a one-nighter with when she was thirty-four, only now she’s seven years old and begging you to wait for her to get to seventeen, because she really thinks you had something special between you? I will be selective. I’m scribbling away here at McDonalds, where they announced the Big Mac a year early. Still forty-nine cents.

In my previous line of work, writing about the explosion of digital technology, many of the fifty-two years in that future were a feast of invention, innovation, market saturation, exploitation, and unicorn IPO fantasies. Digital technology was an E Ticket to a fabulous tomorrow. For you realtimers, a unicorn is a company worth over a billion dollars. In 1967 there was one billionaire for every one billion persons on the entire fucking planet. By 2019, one out of every twelve-thousand residents in San Francisco was a billionaire.

From 1967 until 2019, digital technology was the center of the capitalist universe, along with finance, and, as always, energy. Can’t have too much oil. Even so, we saw Web 1.0 colonized by big capital, and then Web 2.0 got captured the same way. We were just imagining Web 3.0 when the universe jerked us back into analog days. I have lost you realtimers. It’s too complicated to explain here.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were a high-tide mark for the American economy. This had been expanding rapidly since the War. What happened next is still being studied in 2019. Simple version: the people running the economy found new ways to siphon the wealth from this at the expense of everyone else. For everybody else, average people working in most enterprises and professions, from farming to factories, the next fifty-two years were something of a dogshit buffet, an incremental dystopia.

If you were not in line to get stupidly wealthy, you just got poor, sick, or dead. O.K., that’s extreme. Only a lot of people got poor, sick, or dead because of the economy. Quite a few were incarcerated. The rest binged on internet TV shows to avoid facing the sorry spectacle of their diminishing lifestyles. If you could not keep moving up the pay scale, you probably refinanced your home a couple times and prayed you would never get laid off. If you did, you’d be renting somewhere, or living on the street. With multiple kids, you likely worked more than one job. It took one job just to pay for child care. You consoled yourself with booze, or Prozac, or Xanax, or Oxycontin. There were no hover boards or flying cars, just internet porn.

This is my story, so I’m not going to go over other territories. I was a happy parasite on the dotcom bubble. Before the NASDAQ bubble burst, I even ran my own company. Then I found financial security in critiquing innovation as this accelerated across society. The Next Wave became The New Yorker for high technology. I was fucking proud of it. I miss it. Me, I did just fine in the future/past.

Here’s an aside about a cover story in the Atlantic. I was amused because I almost went to grad school in anthropology.

The American Anthropological Association, one of hundreds of learned societies in the US, holds an annual conference. This year, many of the youngest people in a conference room were sitting on half a century of future knowledge about their careers and their colleagues. After the opening introductions, five young women marched onto the stage and commandeered the opening plenary talks, to be given by a panel composed of five aging, white, male Fellows: the “grey heads” of the discipline, and board members of the Association.

The Atlantic piece goes into some detail, but the main idea was that these young/old women each had fifty-two years of science and life experience to add to the meeting, along with a list of real complaints, which they announced to the room.

They spelled out how three of the grey heads on the panel had stolen their graduate students’ work and published this as their own, how two of them had serially sexually harassed female grad students, and four of them were pursuing research of no lasting value, being derivative and already obsolescent. Only one of the professors escaped their scathing critique. This fellow, a descriptive linguistic anthropologist whose life work helped rescue endangered indigenous languages, was both important and caring throughout his career, and was mourned across the planet when he died in 1977.

The women then asked all the women in the room who were timedrifters to stand up. Nearly a hundred stood, some as young as six years old. These women were invited to the microphones in the aisles. Each of them had two minutes to tell their future/past story. Three hours later, the women on the stage demanded the resignation of the entire executive board, and used a voice vote to accomplish this. They then opened up nominations for a new board, to be elected before the meeting closed. This academic meeting was tame compared to those in social psychology, philosophy, history, business management; in fact, most academic fields.

Fifty-two years of patriarchal memories now pushed “second wave” feminism into a continental academy earthquake. “Me too” from 2019 hit the academy, and the greater society, in 1967 like a wrecking ball. Hah! And I just put an ear-worm into the text.

I am so going to enjoy what happens next, wherever I go.

 

* * *

September 29, 1967, Timberville, Washington

 

baby shoes

Parenting

 

 

My sister, Sandra, and her husband, Rick drove down from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he is finishing up his schooling in ophthalmology. Sandra is pregnant with their first child, and expecting fairly soon. I know from the future/past that this would be a girl named Chelsea, and that she would grow up, graduate from Kenyan College, and become a partner, and finally the wife of Lois. They would move to Boston, where Lois’s family was from. They would have two kids through adoption.

“Since she was a just fetus back in August, we don’t know what the time shift will do to her awareness and personality. The amount of what we know about fetal memory would fit into my little finger,” Sandra said at the dinner table.

“Reports are coming in that link the capacity for memories of the future with the development of the hippocampus in the brain.” Rick added. “We are hoping she won’t be born already burdened with adult ideas. We want her to be fully an infant. It’s a tricky time to be a new parent.”

“Parenting. The toughest job on the planet. And no experience required.” Sandra said. She put her hand on top of Mom’s and smiled over at Dad. “Some people are just naturally good parents.”

Mom and Dad have been peculiarly quiet through the meal. I’ve noticed that olders tend to be reticent around time-drifter conversations. Of course, having your kids chat about life thirty years from now is nowhere near normal dinner talk. I agree with Sandra. They raised us just fine. I have no complaints there.

I didn’t bring up Mom’s cooking. For a gal who spent a lot of hours in the kitchen, her skills never advanced. This time around, I have been vocal about the salmon loaf, which I would not feed to a starving cat, and some of the Jell-O concoctions that should have never seen a mold. Tonight’s pot roast was pure Mom: overcooked and highly salted. But certainly edible.

I was not about to mention Laura, Sandra and Rick’s second child, who was born in Juneau, Alaska, where Rick made his practice after school. Baby Laura was one of the millions of afterkinder kids, lost in the future/past; perhaps awaiting a new birth. This was a huge topic in churches and on daytime television. Are all these pre-conceived (a new meaning for this word) children waiting in some cosmic antechamber for their parents to get frisky? And do they have Nintendo?

I said, “When that firstborn appears, parents are complete rookies. I don’t care how many books they read. Timedrifters are different. Their experiences of the future/past are going to effect how these parents raise their kids. You and Rick have not only got the whole parental experience behind you, but also a preview of who Chelsea is and will become. That’s got to impact how you treat her as a kid. I remember Chelsea, too.”

“We’ve decided to move to Tucson this time around.” Rick said. “It will be a new life in a fresh place.”

“That, and not doing another five decades of Alaskan winters,” Sandra said. “Fresh surroundings, different friends, and an everyday miracle of seeing our little girl grow and blossom anew. You are all welcome to come down and visit when the rains get to you. Rick has mentioned picking up golf…” She smiled at Dad again. Then she looked at each of us in turn. Her eyes fixed on ours as she turned her head from person to person, ending with me. I knew that stare.

Aha! The real reason for the long drive down from Canada. We were being primed for the list of “Chelsea interaction no-nos” that would arrive later by mail. Sandra figured they could escape old friends in Alaska, but not the people around this table. Particularly moi. I would need to stay quiet about Chelsea’s life in the future/past. Like it never happened.

She continued. “…We have decided to name her Robin, not Chelsea. She will be her own person…”

“But Chelsea was my Mother’s name…” Mom said. She looked at Dad, who took another gulp of wine and shrugged. She sat back and crossed her arms, shaking her head. “It was all decided…”

Sandra said, “… And now, un-decided. You will be happy to know we are keeping our own names.” A faint smile.

I had just read that a some number of timedrifters are opting to change their name, to “signify their hope for a new tomorrow.” Sure, or how about to “avert getting tracked down by future/past enemies once the internet is back.”

My future/past ex-wife, the one I can now avoid ever meeting—unless the witch changes her name—moved to Flagstaff after the divorce, a months-long drama that garnished the same year my dot-com start-up was also imploding. I still figure she was trying to get out with a settlement before the stock tanked.

Eyeing the large glass of Italian Swiss burgundy in Dad’s hand—remembering Denise always sent me to the liquor cabinet—I reasoned that most of the planet’s timedrifters cannot move to Arizona. They will not avoid a long childhood surrounded by people who, with all good intentions, encourage them to “do better” this time around. The exception here being the still unborn Elon Musk. And also me. I was so unremarkable from the start that my success with The Next Wave Magazine was a huge surprise to my family and, I now know, to childhood friends, even Sarah Dobbins. Me, I was never surprised. I always had plans to become precocious… sometime next year.

 

* * *

What the hell happened?

 

Everybody wants to know what happened. At this point we are all disappointed.

What we know is that around noon UTC on September 2, 2019 the planet Earth jumped back in time to around 1 pm, UTC August 19, 1967. This time leap included the planet and also the solar system and beyond. All orbiting and exploratory human-made space vehicles, satellites, landers, space stations, even the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts disappeared. So, we do not know the full spatial extent of this event. Since time simply returned to a prior state, the only traces of this event happening are the intact memories for this time interval belonging to individuals living on September 2, 2019 and born before August 19, 1967.

There is no good science to explain this time reversal. All we have are conjectures and disputable (or non-falsifiable) theories about this. It does seem to disprove the notion that time and entropy are rigidly connected and cannot be reversed. It suggests that memories, and probably thoughts too exist as quanta.

Here are some of the current theories attempting to explain the time reversal. Please feel free to add your own.

* * *

space with comet and light beams

Time comet

The Time Comet theory

The first announcement of this theory posited that something like a “time comet” has passed through our solar system on its way to other parts of the galaxy. This event reset the time continuum back approximately fifty-two Earth years; like rewinding the tape on a time recorder.

In current, 1967 speak, it’s like the time phonograph needle got picked up and moved to an earlier song. One minute we are listening to Hiatus Kaiyote, the next, we are back to “A Winter Shade of Pale.” People call this a “time quake.”

For some unknown reason, individuals still alive at the end of this period maintain an active memory of their former lives when the reset occurred. We do not know if long-living, non-human species, such as elephants, whales, turtles, parrots, sponges, etc., have individuals who also remember the lost fifty-two year interval. I daydream about an ancient elephant matriarch returned to her youth. How would the other herd members interact with that situation?

I would venture this event means that consciousness—that hard question we never answered—exists independent of time, or subject to other times. The front edge of theory here is about “closed timeline curves,” meanders in normal time that can take quantum energies back in time.

We do not know how big this event is. Perhaps it encompasses our whole galaxy, suggesting some undiscovered time/gravity well that is both stable and, so far, undetectable until it happens; maybe time is a form of gravity, combined with a spooky temporal quantum phenomenon. Which is another way of saying we don’t know shit.

Some speculate that the time comet has rolled through our solar system before, around about five-thousand years ago. This event fostered the advent of the bronze age and also the invention of writing systems in various parts of the planet, and provided the logic for the Mayan calendar, which measures time in units of fifty-two years. Some say it started the Kali Yuga (you can look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls, because Wikipedia is decades away). Certainly, there has been no previous time comet after the advent of writing systems, or we would know all about it. Some say the last time comet is when writing systems developed. I guess people had something to write about.

Star Trek watchers are soothed by the dozens of time-regression episode plots that are supported by this theory. If Kirk can travel from the Twenty-Third Century to 1968, why can’t we all skip back a few decades? Given our lack of understanding about how the universe operates at this level, this theory is highly theoretical. Still, this is the theory supported by Occam’s razor. It’s the least-complicated explanation. You can stop reading now… or…

* * *

young woman's face: Is there a metaverse?

Is there a metaverse?

 

The Metaverse theory

There’s a corollary to the time comet concept that claims the event pushed us into a parallel metaverse that happened to lag ours by fifty-two years. Dozens of corollary theories emerged from this thread. Mainly, they appeal to those who returned to a time before they became parents, and it offers hope that their children are alive in a different metaverse. Physicists keep this theory in their back pocket; it’s too close to their multidimensional models of the cosmos, but too ambiguous to actively support. Metaverse explanations are facile, philosophically loaded, and unfalsifiable. College dorms on winter nights ring with its possibilities. This is the theory supported by Occam’s bong.

* * *

It’s all a simulation woman wearing AI goggles

It’s all a simulation

 

The AI Simulation theory

This is another unfalsifiable theory stream. Here it goes. The perfect simulation in which we are all sprites has a control program that tracks the trajectory of the simulation’s progress toward some super-duper future state. When this trajectory points to either near-term breakdown, or prolonged stasis—when the perfect simulation hits a point where its perfection is uncertain—the control program reverts to an earlier moment in the simulation, while allowing the sprites to maintain their active memory of their future state. This makes them super-actors, with an ability to either push stasis into dynamic change, or redirect the activities that led to the breakdown into another course where breakdown will not happen. This is the theory supported by Occam’s Uncle Morty.

A less exciting version of this posits that God did this for his own reasons. Don’t ask, they say, he won’t tell us. This version requires Occam’s Kazoo.

* * *

Aliens are here   mysterious mountain photo

Aliens are here

 

The godlike alien intervention theory

This is a grand “Groundhog’s Day”style theory, with an alien twist. Something you might hear in a Century City elevator on the way up to film producer’s office suite.

An alien race with enormous power and wisdom has been watching Earth, waiting for humans to get up to speed in their intellectual evolution so that humans could join the sentient, star-traveling, galactic club of kindred species. But then this alien species learns that Earth will be destroyed—solar storm, giant asteroid, whatever—some time in the next decade. They decide to put the solar system into a time loop to allow humans to grow our culture, society, and technology up to the point where humans can perfect our own star travel and leave the planet behind, just in time.

That means this current loop is just the first of many loops, each one starting on Labor Day (in the US) in 2019. Because only those who live long enough to stay in the loop will get regenerated to 1967, this first loop should concentrate on planet-wide health and fitness, and on the end of all wars and violent social conflicts. Longevity research will help olders stay alive extra decades.

This theory has generated enough popular speculation to become a force for moral behavior in the new now. If you’re going to venture into the dark side this time around, you will be punished in the next loop. In its own twisted way, this theory is helping to open up a civil society that is far more, well, civil, than it was in the future/past.

The telos of this is clear. Humanity can use hundreds of time loops to learn and build a regenerative culture and the technology that will carry us to the stars, so that we will avoid the destruction of our home world. This theory is verifiable to some extent; all you need to do is stay alive until the next Labor Day, 2019 and see if you wake up again in 1967. This is the theory supported by Occam’s agent at William Morris.

* * *

face looking spooky

My Imagination

 

Default solipsist theory

This type of theory is always available to explain anything weird. I put it here to get it off the table. This theory holds that I am the only reality and I spin up the universe as I please. All of you are vomited from my consciousness. For some reason I pleased to vault back into my teens. It’s all me, all the time.

I would hope that, were this true, I’d be having a lot more fun right now. Smartass junior high students would be TicToking this in 2019. This is the theory that kicks Occam under the bus.

Chapter 3: The Big Idea

October, 1967, Timberville, Washington

* * *

 

ad for polaroid camera

My life for a selfie

 

Now that I’m getting a full load of caffeine each morning, and access to all the same news sources as anybody else with a library card, a TV, and a radio, I’ve begun to speculate on what I might do to put a dent in the future, as Steve Jobs willhavesaid. I’m ready to rock. My old editorial staff—the ones I had hometown information on, and were able to locate—are ready to roll. The idea of leveraging the future/past to launch a whole new technological modernity claws at my attention.

I was amazed how little I missed my smartphone. After a week of checking my pocket and wondering where I left it, I gently relaxed into the soothing infovoid that is 1967.

The smartphone that willhavebeen on my bedside table in 2019 had as much computing power as the world’s best supercomputer in 1990. Fortunately, in 2019 and in 1967, the biggest, fastest computer we’ve got is still the one behind our eyes. This is not to announce that I’m always happy with my present analog hermitage.

How dearly I miss my word processor application. I will do everything I can to encourage others to get that tech up and running quickly. I would even try Word Perfect again. I’m typing this on a Sears manual typewriter, the same one I took to college the last time around.

Some of my timedrifter pals have gobbled up Polaroid Swinger instant film cameras to fulfill their selfie photography addictions. I imagine there’s a “Swinger Stick” being invented right now. I’m O.K. with a Nikon and Tri-X film, or I will be when I have enough cash to buy one. Shooting film makes you think twice before tripping the shutter.

The burden of twenty-four hour news has been lifted from our day, and we acquire celebrity gossip in small doses from magazines. There is always something to read. Even Timberville has a couple bookstores. We have more magazines than I ever remembered, hundreds of them, from international weeklies to niche enthusiast monthlies. There are magazine racks all around. My Mom gets one or two mags a week in the mail. The only ones I see her open are Reader’s Digest and TV Guide. The latest copy of Boy’s Life arrived yesterday. Mom put it on my bedside table. Golly.

The major newspapers and network TV news are status-quo loving and parochial, and well-researched and intelligent. The local newspaper shows up daily. I have handed off my paper route to a fourteen-year old youngling. Now I’m surviving on my meager allowance while I figure out my next move. I do miss free calls around the planet. I discovered that a short call to New York City would cost me more than a single-malt scotch at the Country Club, not that they would serve me, the bastards.

Music is another matter. I have a cheap record player in my room, and a modest collection of LPs and 45s. I use a transistor radio for take-along music. In a few years, Sony will invent the Walkman cassette player. Or not. I also don’t see three decades of CDs happening. Maybe we’ll go straight to MP3s. Some of my friends are frantic to get portable music into their days. After all, this is the golden era of rock and roll. Sure enough, they’re not getting no satisfaction.

I guess every age has its charms. These are visible in high relief when you show up unexpectedly from sometime else. I discovered that there are dozens of folk tales about a person who goes into nature, stumbles across some strange, small people, is given a drink, and goes to sleep for a couple decades or centuries. These are famous stories preserved in Germany, China, and Japan, and in Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Upon waking, the person is amazed; their surroundings are unrecognizable. The story then becomes a travelogue of that future.

There are moments each day when I reflect on my outstanding good fortune. I just won the time lottery. I never got so much as a five-dollar return on a lottery scratcher, but then I hit the jackpot on the time lottery. So did a billion others, and that’s fine with me.

I woke up that Saturday with almost twenty-eight million more minutes in my life. I know these minutes are not guaranteed, but I’ll pretend they are, and use each one with some new joy. It’s like time un-paved paradise and un-put-up a parking lot. I get to live again in the paradise of my youth. I totally missed doing this right the last time around. I was too busy being young.

* * *

hands cradling a lit light bulb

Yureka

The Big Idea

In early October, I finally hit on my first really big idea. I wasn’t in the shower, I was mowing the lawn, which is a bit like walking a labyrinth. Back and forth, I went, forth and back… and then it struck me, mid-forth.

By far, the biggest ongoing and pervasive clusterfuck I can recall from the tech economy future/past was the rapidly accumulating thickets of patents that, 1) made everything insanely complex and expensive, especially for new, small ventures; and 2) made a very few people an obscene amount of money; and 2a) gifted an orc-horde of lawyers a reliable river of income. I needed to find some way to unfuck the intellectual property regime that transforms someone’s inspiration and creativity into someone else’s exclusive property.

In the future/past, I spent seven long years CEOing a dot-com company, only to see this fiasco start-up face-plant when the NASDAQ tanked. I then spent three decades editing a high-tech industry investigative journal. This gave me a picture-window purview over the whole Silicon Valley scene.

You might think that I should leverage some really hot, best-practice solutions—sparkling jewels of start-up savvy—that I gleaned from interviewing high-power C-suite consultants at Davos and Aspen. I do have a bevy of these best-practice advice tidbits tucked away in my hippocampus somewhere, maybe next to the memories of all those inspirational posters.

However, the finest management advice I ever got was to “focus on the fuck-ups.” That way you can teach your own crew how to do better next time. The top consultants even had games where your employees imagine the worst practices for the workplace, and then play-act the evil supervisors who supported these practices, just to see if any of this dark logic was lurking in the current work environment.

I didn’t need to imagine the worst business practices for the next fifty-two years. I remembered them well. The worst of the worst were patent trolls. But the real problem were patents themselves. It really didn’t take that much of Mom’s percolated (sigh) Hills Brothers coffee over the next month or so to realize that I knew exactly what I needed to do.

First I had to locate a patron with enough pre-dot-com cash to bankroll the concept. Unfortunately, all my future/past billionaire buddies were still in grade school and as poor as me. Except one. I spent real money to call up an old friend in New York City. Ma Bell was still charging by the minute. Our house had a pink princess phone in the living room and a wall phone in the kitchen. I called from the living room.

Nathaniel Greene had been in his late eighties in 2019, so he was mid-thirties now. I know he used to work at the Sloan Foundation in the ‘60s, before he jumped to Aspen to run his own startup accelerator slash think tank. He didn’t need to do either.

Nate’s family was old oil, like Pennsylvania old, and with cross holdings in pharma and uptown Manhattan real estate. Penicillin, penthouses, and petroleum formed a bonanza portfolio long before the dot-com age. I hoped that money might not be an issue.

I had practiced an elevator talk that was quicker than the lift ride to Nate’s Rockefeller Center office.

Here it is:

“Nate, the twelve million patents filed in the US between 1967 and 2019 cost a hundred billion US dollars or so just to prepare and file. The three million patents of US origin that were then accepted would cost a couple billion more dollars each year to maintain, except that only two percent of the patents ever make enough money to cover maintenance, so almost all of these are abandoned. Sixty-thousand active patents carry the bulk of the intellectual property load for this entire period, with about a quarter of these being really worth their money. I’m talking about all patented inventions, not just tech: pharma, communication, transportation, manufacturing, energy: the lot.

By reproducing these patents now, we can release the mother-load of future/past intellectual property for the benefit of the planet, while we prevent a new phalanx of private companies from grabbing these ideas to sell back to us. I figure it shouldn’t cost more than, maybe, twelve-million dollars a year for three years.”

 

You see, in early 2019, (half a year ago in my memory) The Next Wave diddone published a very long read that Sophie, one of our editors, wrote on the negative impacts that patents had made on the ability of Global South nations to innovate on basic research and compete in the market. It turned out that the patented technology property regime is as abusive to the same precincts of the planet today as was colonialism during previous centuries. In my editorial capacity, I diddone read the background technical white paper on this topic from researchers at the University of Washington. That’s how I could recall real figures for the future of patents.

A week after we published the article, Nate Greene sent me an email from Aspen asking if there was some way to fix this situation. I wrote back saying we were too late. It would take decades for these convoluted patent thickets to expire.

Then came Labor Day.

Fortunately, back here in 1967, only a tiny number of the major early tech patents are already active, mostly coming out of military hardware programs and Intel. To my surprise and delight, Nate went into full Monkey Wrench Gang mode.

“Don’t talk to anybody else about this,” he said. “Just one question: why patents? Why not just document the ideas and give them to the public domain?”

“We’ve created a planet that runs on private property laws.” I said. “It’s a wicked problem, since our ideas and laws about property are pretty simplistic and totalizing. The outcome is that once you have established ownership over property you can do a whole lot with it, including giving it away. Until then, someone else can claim this as their property. And if we tried to pass sneaky legislation to get around property laws, the lawyers would just find exceptions and snatch a bigger share of the pie for themselves. Eventually we will create new property regimes that match what we need to keep things open and useful. Until then, all we need to do is to apply for as many of these fifteen-thousand core patents as we can wrangle, and as soon as we can, and then let them lapse.”

Nate said, “Let them lapse?”

I said, “Lapsed patents belong to the public domain. Their contents cannot be re-patented.”

Nate said, “It’s super important that we don’t disclose our plans to not protect these patents. Everyone needs to think we are in this for the big score.”

“Why is that?”

Nate said, “Capitalists understand greed, they respect avarice. We can signal that we want to play their game. I’ll even do back-channel investor conversations.”

I said, “The more mercenary we appear, the more innocent we become?”

Nate said, “Exactly. The game is still ‘monopoly.’ Oh, they will piss and moan in the press about this, but actual competition doesn’t scare them, so they won’t see the real threat we bring.”

“You think this is a real threat?”

Nate said, “They all have visions of unicorn IPOs, of mansions in Montecito, and offshore accounts. When we are done, they’d be lucky to own a tract house in Pacoima.

“You understand, this endeavor is purely aspirational. Its chances of long-term success are dismal, simply on that account. And don’t tell me about Wikipedia and Linux. I am not saying we should stop before we start. Your idea is delightfully sneaky. If we do win this one, the entire world looks different.”

He paused to carefully phrase what he said next. “I’ll tell you up front. You are not the right person to captain this endeavor, even though you thought it up.”

I took the phone receiver from my ear and looked out the picture window of my parent’s house. After a minute, I spoke. “Nate. Go out and find your honcho. Build your team. You’ve got a lot of timedrifters to pick from. I freely give you this idea to run with any way you can. I’d love to have a part to play in this, a role that works for both of us, but if that’s not to be, I’m good with that too.”

“Then we are in alignment. Great idea, fantastic timing. I woke up this morning in fighting mood.”

“I’m just a guy telling you how to spend your money. I’m happy you even listened to me.”

He laughed. “There’s a lot more money coming in. The sixties were, and still are a flush time for my family’s portfolio. Don’t worry about that. You are talking tens of millions in 1960s dollars….”

“To leverage tens of billions of current IP value, in 1960s dollars, probably two to three trillion in 2019.”

Nate said, “Give me a couple days to get some ducks in a row here. What’s your number?”

When I set down the receiver on the princess phone, I had this delightful sensation, like I’d just rolled a small snowball from the top of a large hill. I imagined this gaining speed and weight as it careened toward some unknown ski chalet, which probably would have been bought up by Jeff Bezos sometime in 2014. Only now, it was a pile of rubble. I like how my sixty-seven year memory dances with my fifteen-year-old’s imagination.

 

 

* * *

October 22, 1967, Timberville, Washington

 

advert for airlines

Welcome to the friendly skies

 

 

I might have left you with an impression that Sarah Dobbins and I would get together this summer, but she never came back to the Country Club, and I didn’t see her at school or around town until a couple months later, on a Sunday morning, when I ran into her pushing a grocery cart to her car in the Safeway parking lot.

I had begged off the whole church-going with the family charade. I let my mom know that I have certain knowledge that, at least for the next half century, the big guy won’t be returning. She still has hopes for me.

“Sarah!” I called, and she turned. Sarah was wearing Levi’s jeans and a light blue REI rain parka with the hood down, over a red flannel shirt.

“Next Wave,” she smiled. “What’s new with you?”

I walked over to her. My plans with Nate were still a secret.

 

You might consider I was giving away something really valuable when I shared my idea with Nate. It was mine, after all, and now Nate is off and running with it. I beg to disagree. All great ideas—I counted this one among these—deserve to find the soil that will nourish them to flower. I wanted to live in a world where important digital technologies, pharmaceuticals, and key mechanical inventions were priced at the cost of their manufacture, and not inflated to fill the bloated quarterly dividend yield of a fucking unicorn corporation.

Also, I figured that now, here in 1967, we were far enough away from the actual “adjacent possible” for most of these patents to find markets as stand-alone products. Even if someone paid all the maintenance costs, the active patents would expire years before many of them can be used individually. Collectively, they contain nuggets of creativity to seed the next blooms in a global technology garden.

Let me unpack that last thought. All innovation—from biological evolution to the design of your princess phone—borrows its intrinsic viability from its surroundings. The space and the time when an innovation will thrive is not determined by its own design, but rather by the landscape of ideas, products, and resources into which it is introduced. A smartphone in 1967 is just a slab of weird technology. A working flying car was invented in 1949. We were still waiting for our city skies to be festooned with flying autos in 2019.

Even if Nate ran off with my idea and patented all this tech in three years on his own, the trillions of dollars these patents were worth in the future/past mean little in the 1970s. Why? Innovation is a ticket that gets you into the station. Until your adjacent-possible train shows up, you’re stuck there. Individually, most of these patents are worthless until their time arrives.

On the other side, you release all this technology as a batch into the public domain, and you grow a new adjacent possible right now. It becomes an enormous garden anyone can dig into and plant their own ideas, from anywhere on the planet.

 

“Top secret,” I said. “I could tell you….”

“…but you’d have to, what?” said Sarah.

“…trust you.”

“And you know so little about me.”

“That goes both ways. What’s new with you?”

“I’m having a ‘sad Sunday’,” she said. I could see that her eyes looked like a recent cry. “It’s the afterkinder. I woke up realizing that almost all my younger colleagues, most of the women at my yoga class, so many of those I was close to: they don’t exist anymore. They’re not born yet, and probably won’t be in this new now. Not as the same people. I’ll never see them again. Ever.”

Sad Sundays are common among timedrifters. I’ve had twinges of this when I remember afterkinder colleagues. Mostly I’m too busy being fifteen again. I’m sure I will have more sad Sundays at some point. Many of the best, brightest, kindest nerds I knew were in their thirties and forties in 2019.

“You’ll make all new friends,” I said. “It’s not like nobody’s having kids. At least you’re not a mom, or…” I wasn’t sure I hadn’t just triggered her pain.

“No, no.” She shook her head. “I am considering doing a whole new life, somewhere else, anywhere nobody knows me.”

“Is this a goal, or are you just escaping?”

“As of today…” She looked up at the sky. “I want to get home before we get dumped on.” I followed her glance. You could see a massive rain squall rolling up from the south on a steady breeze.

“And tomorrow?”

“O.K., the short version. I was a family physician in Eugene, Oregon last time around.”

“Doctor Dobbins!”

“That was me. Started out all enthusiastic, which lasted about a decade before the whole insane-clown-car, US health-care-insurance market crashed my practice. I limped through the next three decades barely keeping the office open, while working twelve-hour days.”

“It doesn’t have to be the same this time around.”

“You gonna fix it?”

“Well…” I said.

“I’ve been looking into a short-term gig at an international airlines.”

“Become a stewardess?”

“You bet. See the world, the whole enchilada.”

“I’d say you diddone watched too many TV shows, forty years from now.”

Sarah said, “I know Italian, I fit the guidelines, I just need to stay trim until I’m eighteen. Then it’s the friendly skies for me.”

“After that?”

“I figure when I’m in my late twenties, the time quake damage will have shaken up the world enough to see where the new future might lead. I’ll make my plans then.”

“How do you know Italian?”

“I did a year abroad in Firenze, and then hung out for another year. Italy in the ‘70s. You should try it this time around. What’s in your future?”

“I’m hoping to stir up some trouble,” I said.

“Good trouble?”

I caught the reference. “Really good. Focused on how we open up our intellectual property to the world.”

“I get it; the next wave will be a tech tsunami.”

“Something like that.”

She said, “Maybe I’ll see you on a flight to Tokyo or Paris.”

“Who knows? If I have a heart attack on the flight and the call goes out for a doctor, you’ll be right there.”

She nodded, looking over to her car.

I couldn’t not ask. “How long are you in town for?”

I knew Sarah was not in school. “Back to school” in September of 1967 was nowhere near normal. Two-thirds of American youth from age three to twenty remembered their own personal future/past. More than a hundred and fifty thousand of them had been the top executives in businesses, schools, cities, or states. Five hundred or so had been billionaires, and more than a million had spent time in jail or prison. A similar number to the latter had taught at the college level. A full third of the public-school teachers and staff were also timedrifters. An ex-CEO, twice-divorced nine-year-old is not going to sit still for long in Miss Jenkins’ third-grade classroom.

The State of Washington was letting timedrifters quit school when they turned fourteen. Classrooms were soon split between realtimer kids and those timedrifters who still attended. I went to school because it gave my days substance, kept me in touch with kids my biological age, and I could use the gym.

Timberville offers thirty-one churches, seventeen taverns, five fraternal organization halls with full bars, two bowling alleys with full bars, and one country club with its own bar. Zero gyms. Half the adult population smoked. I had decided to add a daily workout to my life this time around, at least until it showed. High school was my only gymnasium option.

Sarah caught the implications of my question and looked me straight in the eye, not unlike a doctor delivering bad news.

“I’m not on the hunt for romance at the moment. Dan didn’t take my rejection well. That’s putting it mildly. I had no idea how hurt he’d get, and how thin his excuses would be for why we absolutely could not break up. Apparently, I’d made him a solemn promise in sixth grade. Good lord, real teens are emotional volcanoes. On the other hand, dating a geezer in a teen body is just freaky. I should know, that’s me…” She paused and tilted her head.

What she was saying was, “that’s you.” I swallowed a sigh.

“I may never have sex again,” she said.

“I think that would be a first for a Pan Am stewardess.”

She laughed. “Right. How many TV movies did you watch? There is a third way. I could find a nice, mature lad in his late thirties, and teach him how we rolled in the ’80s. As soon as I’m legal, of course. We’d better get going…” The first splattering drops and that ozone scent signaled the arrival of the squall. She pulled up her hood.

I didn’t know what to say. “Live long…” I paused.

“…and prosper.” She laughed as she turned away and scurried to open her car door.

I pulled up the hood on my own parka and walked toward the supermarket, cursing the total lack of any internet and social media connections that would make it possible to stay in touch with the globetrotting Doctor Dobbins. Forget yesterday, I miss tomorrow.

 

* * *

man in surf looking toward the sunset

So many ideas…

 

I just have to share these thoughts

 

Jeremy here. Since I’ve been wrestling with the logic of pre-knowing a future that won’t happen, I’m going to let you in on some insights. Give me ten minutes to sort out this temporal clusterfuck for you. Then I’ll continue my own story.

New and better… or

For decades, maybe centuries, politicians have been blathering about building a “new tomorrow.” Tomorrow has always been “new,” in the sense of open and unknowable. But it wasn’t until we shared fifty-two years of an old-tomorrow that we could give this “new tomorrow” vision real colors and solid form.

The actual world we inhabit is flatly recalcitrant to most attempts at wholesale “new and better” endeavors to change it. It’s a hideously complex, emergent social landscape, filled with its own internal contradictions and ambiguities. But this world hasn’t faced a billion people desperate for change. Until now. Something needs to give, and we are a one-billion-person strange attractor that can push this planet into a new social equilibrium.

Fifty-two years of experience in your pocket supplies an appreciation for just how much intuitive spaghetti we will need to throw against the walls of our social ecology before anything sticks. For me, this awareness highlights the need for broadly distributed experimentation and iteration. It show me that our seriously wicked problems will demand collective intelligence and careful probing before we begin to think we have a plan. In fact, we need to flush the idea of “a plan” to solve our problems. Any really new tomorrow will only emerge from millions of small attempts at novel ways to escape what just happened in the future/past. We are the right people at the right time to get this done.

Start with a sad fact: that old tomorrow was, frankly, a fucking disappointment on all levels for most people. Elon Musk excepted. The future/past turned out to be like that straight-A, high-school, senior-class president who, you discover ten years later, became a meth addict, moved to Florida, and got busted running a pedo ring. Nobody wanted a new tomorrow more than a billion folks who remembered the old one, and all the people in it, and everything they diddone.

Famous future felons and friends

Everything you diddone is a legacy you face today. If you diddone it, people think you’d likely do it again. Although you haven’t done it yet in this time, you have a demonstrated a personal capability to do what you diddone before. You also have the culpability for your future/past actions, at least in the minds of others who were affected. Like I’ve said, we remember the wounds and forget the caresses. This is one reason why a lot of timedrifters change their name and leave town.

I would guess that, when Bernie Madoff woke up in his New York home in 1967, he did a dance, kissed his bank book, changed his name, cashed out his accounts and disappeared. Mostly, this was self-preservation. Dozens of future/past investor/suckers would have gladly crowd-sourced his assassination. He’s out there somewhere figuring the odds for the next grift.

Famous future-felons who are still in primary- and secondary public schools can’t just show up to class the next day with a new name. They can run away, and many did when their classmates revealed their future/past crimes to them. The milk-carton “missing child” photos took on an ominous tone: “Have you seen Jeff Dahmer, seven years old? If you do see him, do not approach. Call the police immediately.” Of course, the real people to watch out for are those timedrifters who diddone it before and never got caught. Now they’re young once more, extra-savvy, and ready for greater carnage.

The problems of olders

The largest population cohort on the planet in September 1967 is the “olders.” Together with younglings, these realtimers comprise three-quarters of the population. Olders were simply too old in 1967 to make it alive to 2019. Apart from a few thousand with extreme longevity, folks of a certain age in ’67 were dead by 2019. In 1967, most of them were still too young—between thirty and sixty—to be called “elders.”

The olders, being older, are running things in 1967. They’re the leaders of industry, finance, and governments. They have climbed the crowded ranks of institutional bureaucracies and are in charge of just about everything. They head families, raise children, prepare for retirement, or they’ve achieved advanced age already, lucky them.

Nothing in their long years prepares them for the conversations they now have with their own children, and those of friends, and even random youngsters here in 1967. From that Saturday in August, being older was not what it had been before then in the written history of humanity.

For example, you’d be sitting around out on the front yard, enjoying the afternoon on a national holiday, wife and kids off somewhere. You’re quaffing a few lagers, admiring the clouds, when a snot-nosed, six-year-old neighbor boy comes by, introduces himself, and starts congratulating or commiserating with you about events and decisions you diddone in your future.

You tell him that you’ve already heard it all before, but he’s got his own take on the meaning of the rest of your life. He will not remain quiet or have the courtesy to act his biological age. He is in full oracle mode. His memory of your future must be told.

He starts with the now-common caveat; of course, he says, your future/past life is not actually the future. It’s just one future. We are building a new one. And yet, knowing about that old future changes everything in the present, so listen up, and listen good. He is eyeing the beer in your cooler with more than curiosity.

Now, you are waiting for it, that inevitable moment when he pulls a Seneca on you. All these youngsters think they’ve got a right to wax philosophical any time they open their gob. And there it is.

He says, “Everything you diddone, all the stuff that will happen in your life, good and bad, is just what fortune has in store for you. It’s all just luck, out of your control. I bet you sold Apple at twenty-five.” Actually, you were recently reminded by your son that you sold Apple in 2002 at a thousandth of its price in 2019, including stock splits. The neighbor boy is still talking as you retrieve another can from the cooler and pretend to listen.

You know better than to ask him a question. That kid standing there in a hand-me-down Howdy Doody t-shirt is not what he appears to be. The little shit probably never his sold Apple shares. He might have read Plato, Socrates, Aquinas, fucking Voltaire. Hell, he might have a PhD in classical philosophy, and authored books about the post-Aristotelians. You keep silent as he finally finishes.

“You see what I mean?” he asks. He glances at the cooler again.

“Absolutely,” you say. You offer him a beer if he will just go away.

“Deal,” he says. You watch him walk up the sidewalk, yank the pull tab off, toss this in the neighbor’s yard, and take a slug from the can. You fear for the future of humankind.

Olders around the planet all face the same kind of profound, immensely useful, and yet unwelcome tales about their future lives. It’s a universal situation. You might be a mid-life hunter-gatherer out in the Kalahari, and young Jacob comes to your fire to remind you of that hunt three years from now where a lion diddone kills your brother. Then he asks for some of your porridge.

Olders in business

Olders today find themselves at an epistemological disadvantage. Their years are all in the past. How can they compete with someone who has a half-century of living in a future, any future? Remember that timedrifters, each and all of us, were fifty-two years older not so very long ago. We were all at the age of these olders today. There is a well of empathy that can be tapped during conversations about the vagary and fuckery of the modern-day workplace. We know this all too well, and all the physical ailments of aging. You threw your back out? That sucks. We’ve been there. We made chiropractors rich in the future/past.

For example, tomorrow, your older will be back at their job, pretending that they’re running things. That’s a laugh. In the future/past, their company, their job, everything they will work for across decades, diddone got “disrupted” when it failed to “pivot” to some new tech in 1986. Nobody will ever buy their company’s really excellent slide-rules, widgets, or whatnot. Even though 1986 is many years into the future, being forewarned puts all the plans they are making today into question. Compounding this situation, timedrifter former executives are spilling the beans to the press.

The business weeklies and the business sections of daily newspaper syndicates are bursting with tell-all stories. There’s not a whole lot of moral high ground on which to stand when it comes to environmental destruction, workplace safety failures, insider trading, and potential fraud. Future/past executives, now in their teens, are racing to get this information out before their former/future colleagues do so. Better to name than be named.

A federal appeals court in DC ruled unanimously that companies cannot enforce non-disclosure agreements on individuals who had not yet signed these, even if they diddone signed them in the future/past. The Warren Court dismissed an urgent final appeal by a consortium of top Fortune 500 companies. Court clerks let it out that prolonged outright laughter was heard in chambers.

The same legal limbo was true for future/past corporate felonies and civil liabilities. The company could not be held responsible for their future doings. This applied to any future, until this future becomes the present. That protection didn’t help much, since the corporations had, in the future/past, spent large capital sums on the most effective strategies to hide their wrongs. Now the wrongs have surfaced, and these secret future strategies are public, worthless, and horrific PR to boot. All of the big corporate players are, as Warren Buffet willhavesaid, “swimming naked.” And nobody’s cold, wet, shrunken genitals are more exposed than those of the olders in charge right now.

Death

Even death has changed for olders. I’ve mentioned this before, but it needs some emphasis. Nearly every single one of the three billion humans who were alive on the planet Earth in 1967, and who had died before 2019, could depend on someone close to them pulling them aside to tell them the time and circumstances of their death in the future/past. Whether this meant pancreatic cancer in 1969, an improvised explosive device in Fallujah in 2004, or an overdose of fentanyl in 2018, they were put on notice that the ink on the last chapter of their book of life had already dried.

Today, you have a detailed list of all the ways you will sabotage your own health over the next decades: all the booze, the pills, the calories, and the stress that will undo your existence one July day. Your “friends” tell you these details precisely. They put the ball in your court. You’re the one who will be screaming for more Demerol as your liver explodes in the hospital ER. If this knowledge fails to motivate you, then you deserve everything that happens to you.

Sure, the medical profession and the life insurance industry had long published statistical estimates of population mortality, but here was your seven-year-old great nephew, Ernie, whispering in your ear that they buried you in 1991 when the flu you caught that February turned into pneumonia. Because your death has not yet happened, you contemplate this tragic news dispassionately at first, but there is nothing more real than death, and it strikes you hard. You go through the whole grieving process—denial through acceptance—except, when you get to acceptance, you find it’s been kicked to the curb, and cold panic is sitting there instead.

And finally, your early departure from the above-ground crowd has deprived you of being one of those timedrifter kids who have a long memory of the future/past, and a solid leg-up on any new venture today. You will never catch up with your timedrifter buddies, who can cluster together for hours and talk about movies and songs that nobody has yet to produce, and about future stock and manufacturing opportunities to exploit. Do not get a group timedrifters drunk, you’ve learned. Someone will start singing “Uptown Funk,” and they won’t stop until it funks you up.

Realtimers and afterkinders

On the happier side, realtimers, including olders, have no melancholy sentimental connection to afterkinders. The only kids they know are those, like themselves, born in the new now. Of course, younglings have their own predicaments. Let’s say you are eight years old and have a twin. On that Saturday, in the bed next to yours, in the room you’ve shared with laughter and tears, your twin sister wakes up fifty years older in her mind. You are now alone in a way you could have never imagined. You’re still reading Green Eggs and Ham. She is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, yet again.

An avalanche of conversations

Even though we are in our own skin, every one of us who came back from 2019 is profoundly out of place. Lives left unfinished, loves lost forever, former children: now ghosts of the future/past, haunt our dreams. Timedrifters will always mourn their lost kith and kin from a future that is no more. A billion life dramas lack their third act. Misfortunes vanished, but so too did fortunes. The former-rich arrived back at the poverty of their youth. Pope Francis woke up a theology student in Buenos Aires.

Over these first months, we have produced an avalanche of conversations. Lacking online social media, timedrifters flocked in person to drug-store soda counters, newly opened fast-food joints, and bowling alleys. Some clustered in churches, and adults also found neighborhood taverns. The youngest ones gathered in the sand boxes of their neighborhood parks. I can imagine the sidewalk cafes of Paris and Rome already packed with timedrifters.

These conversations nourished a new sociability. It’s like everyone had just watched the same, really, really long movie and found themselves outside the theater on the street, eager to remember moments and themes. Questioning everything. Interrogating the present, a “now” we could never again take in as though it just exists. Spinning ideas about new modernities.

We might just get through this. We timedrifters are not against the realtimers. We are, all together, against complacency itself. We do not fit in here. We do not belong. Our presence de-centers the lives of the realtimers. Everyone is off balance, akimbo. The tales we once told ourselves have become unfamiliar. The scars and the tattoos we once wore have vanished, which might make some of us really happy.

This happiness is dampened by the weight of our memories of a future unlived in the new now. Our stories and our schemes are all buttresses against this weight. We are piling up joy and hope in defense of our youth. We are back, we know, in order to fix the fucking world this time around.

Chapter 4: Wellspring Enterprises

February 21, 1969, La Jolla, California

 

the la jolla pier at sunset

Ah, South California

 

 

The system Nate and his crew developed to gather patentable ideas and designs from the future/past was a thing of genius on its own. He formed a corporation called “Wellspring Enterprises.” He did not ask for investors. All of the funding for Wellspring came from his own pocket. There were three phases to this work.

Phase One created a stealth think-tank operation, secretly hiring timedrifter engineers, programmers, researchers, and future/past patent officials to establish master lists of the most valuable intellectual property (IP) from the future/past half century. From these lists, the most valuable IP was selected to be tackled first.

In Phase Two we turned these lists in to patents. The central office was in Manhattan. We spun up a number of small branch offices, one each for different sectors of the economy. All the offices were connected with telephones and Xerox’s new Magnafax Telecopiers. That’s right, first generation fax machines. I played my part here as the VP of recruiting for one of these offices. Nate was overpaying me, so I called him to clear the air, and he reminded me this whole venture was my idea, and I should just cash the checks.

Wellspring leased an office space for us in La Jolla, California, next to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I took Amtrak down the coast with my few belongings. Mom was sad they would not see me graduate from high school. On my seventeenth birthday, I gave Dad the cash to send them on a two-week Caribbean cruise to help her transition to the empty nest. They were free to come visit me in California any time. Mom gave me a mail-subscription to the Timberville News, with a note that I could stay in touch with local events.

Before it was done, Wellspring Enterprises employed more researchers than Bell Labs and Xerox PARC combined. In my regular call with Nate, I asked about the budget.

“Nate, this is well beyond the numbers I was predicting.” I said, a bit sheepish.

“It is approaching the amount my cousin spent last year on that Hollywood ‘blockbuster.’”

“Which one?”

Fearful Lightning.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Exactly.”

“We can scale back if you need,” I offered.

“Jeremy,” Nate said, “In a year or so we will want to let out some of the IP on short-term, performance-based licenses. That alone will balance the current cash outflow. This is one blockbuster that will pay for itself.”

“Have you recovered?” I said.

“Almost.” I heard the pain in his voice. This time around, Nate’s beloved Jets did not upset the mighty Colts in Super Bowl III. “I’m still optimistic about the Mets.”

Most of the researchers were hired on contract to work from their homes and deliver patents they had certain knowledge about from the future/past. All were under strict non-disclosure agreements. Some of these inventors were still enrolled in grade school, but their income during their contract was usually greater than that of their parents. One day, a van would pull up and deliver a Magnafax to their house. We put these to good use.

Our single-story office building was designed in the style of Ray and Charles Eames. It had a towering flat metal roof, west and north factory window walls, and exposed interior plywood on the other walls. The exterior was chroma-colored corrugated aluminum. It took six months to equip and staff the place. La Jolla was scenic and quiet. We were housed in nearby rental apartments. The young university campus was still mostly a construction zone. Our job was to ferret out all the future/past innovators we could locate and get them into contracts to file patents for Wellspring

My office covered software and hardware patents in networking, communication, and personal computing: those arenas that The Next Wave Magazine reported on for decades. Chip design was handled by another office covering manufacturing patents for the wafer foundries and peripheral devices.

Remember, in five decades we diddone went from a disk drive the size of a washing machine that held three megabytes to a disk drive the size of a deck of cards that held five terabytes. In the new now, we were only two years into Moore’s Law, and already it was out of date.

My office kept a minimal staff in house, mainly for recruiting and coordination. We supervised several dozen researchers remotely, with six patent experts and four technical artists on call. I’d give my first child for an iMac and a laser printer. I hired a couple of the senior editors, now teens, from the old magazine. They were invaluable in hunting down key innovators from the future/past. The central office staff investigators connected the names we found to their current childhood locations.

I found Sophie, the editor who did the original article on patents and hired her. Unfortunately, she could not join us in person, as she still needed to show up in her fifth grade class in Houston. She kept an hour free in the afternoon for phone calls. She had an amazing memory, and a long history of being both clever and kind. Calls from her was all it took to recruit several top inventors. She mailed me a photo of her on her bicycle. She was doing her Angela Davis raised fist salute. With her afro, Sophie could be Angela’s younger sister.

Nate established a blanket company rate with AT&T, probably in exchange for a lease on property in Manhattan. So, I spent a lot of time on the phone, just like in 2019. Only now, my phone was on my desk, and hardwired into the wall. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday with an office party, and a quiet dinner alone.

Many of the original inventors from the future/past were afterkinder. By 2010, a clear majority of new technology ideas grew out of the imaginations these afterkinder innovators. Their work exists today in the recollections of timedrifters. Hundreds of amazing innovator afterkinders were not at all famous outside of their own circles, but their obscurity should not obliterate the value of their work in the future/past. I had a few sad Sundays recollecting my connections with these creatives.

I prompted Nate to include personal history audio sessions as a feature of the inventor interviews. I hoped these provenance tapes will help technology historians keep the record straight. I also wanted the realtimer relatives of afterkinder inventors to know how important their creativity was, and will be, in building the future.

At this point, nobody but Nate and I knew that Wellspring planned to let the patents lapse. Phase Two would last only two years. By its end, the science and technology stringers in the big media syndicates were sure something was going on. What they didn’t know, they would soon find out, just a bit too late.

 

* * *

August 15, 1970, La Jolla, California

 

little girl reading the headline of the Apollo Moon landing

One small step

 

 

Permit me a diversion into larger topics. I was not blind to these events; I just don’t want to get lost in them here. Today is mid-August of 1970, three years after that Saturday, and already the present day is nothing like its future/past version. I mean, the former timeline, if there was one, has already been erased. Like it never happened.

In your average time-travel movie, time travelers from the future would now be trapped in some kind of parallax conundrum. The future time they left will no longer exist, and so they can’t return. In their former future, sentient house cats have taken political control of the planet, and are at war with poodle oligarchs; shit like that. Charlton Heston is there too, somehow.

However, that’s not what happened. Since the whole planet just shifted backwards, like some kind of half-century “turn your clock back” move, the future/past was already destroyed, except in the memories of the timedrifters. These recollections were becoming more dreamlike as we re-walk our history in the present.

Back when paper was actually lambskin, writers would scrape off old words to make way for new ones. The technical term for the result is unfortunately “palimpsest” (which sounds to me a bit like a sexual perversion involving the future/former governor of Alaska). That’s what our memories are now, palimpsests of new now memories written over our future/past recollections.

Take Woodstock; it was cancelled, but I remember the film and the album. Most of the bands from the first time failed to regroup this time around. New bands with old name performers were having a great summer touring the world. Anyhow, Yasgur’s neighbors had lawyered up in advance of the event’s permit process. I guess we will need to wait for Coachella.

On the good news side, folks in California shut down the oil platform that diddone blow out last time around. People everywhere are compiling lists of natural disaster big events: environmental accidents, major storms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes. Anything that might be avoided this time around gets on the calendar of coming tragedies to avoid. Celebrity suicides and accidental overdoses are being intercepted by fans and friends. Janis and Jimmy and all the rest are in residential programs somewhere getting therapy.

Anyone who diddone really horrible things in the future/past were now caught in some pre-guilty state. The guy who murdered his neighbor in a dispute in 2011 might be four years old today. I talk about this elsewhere. Here, I just wanted to note that political tyrants in the future/past, these hundreds of walking, talking future political disasters—the Idi Amins, Pol Pots, Vladamir Putins, and their like—got special attention in the new now.

The dictators who grabbed power and acted badly: they are having their political careers pre-examined in moot courts and journalistic exposés. Some have been rounded up and imprisoned or murdered by current tyrants. The lack of due process that these same autocrats used to subvert governance in their time of power, now promotes their own incarceration. They can protest their innocence, but they cannot escape the horror stories of their future/past misrule.

Despite the fact that the Apollo 11 Lunar Module had less computing capacity than an Apple Watch did in 2019, NASA pulled off the moon landing last year. It was gloriously retro for those of us who remember the event. The bets were that Neil Armstrong would say something different this time; maybe, “That’s fifty billion dollars we’ll never see again.” He stuck with the “small step, giant leap,” statement, and they all made it home to Earth. NASA cancelled the remainder of the Apollo program while it evaluated new technology inputs from the future/past.

I’m not going to relate the news from other parts of the planet. There’s a whole lot of news, a news bonanza; the international desks of the news services are super busy these days. There’s even news from Canada. Other timedrifters are far closer to these stories than I am.

I’m awfully busy, too, so my twenty-thousand-foot perspective of foreign news is tenuous. A couple notes: the cold war got stale in a hurry when a young Mikhail Gorbachev came back from 2019 and disrupted the Politbureau. The USSR got glasnost and perestroika right now. Why wait? Yugoslavia looked at its future: an ugly civil war with a hundred and fifty thousand dead. It took a couple years, but they established the same political boundaries that were active in 2019, and set up a court of “recollection and restoration.” Political changes happened all over the globe. These new geopolitical directions need to be unpacked by folks who were and are, actually, there.

Some changes in the US will impact my own story, so I’ll outline these briefly. Of course, Robert Kennedy got elected president in 1968. Senator McCarthy backed out (really, who wants to run against someone who diddone got assassinated?). Hubert Humphrey’s message was tarnished by the rapid close of the Vietnam War, and the collapse of Johnson’s excuses for escalating US military action. Nixon was still a crook. His campaign was as dead as his cocker spaniel Checkers.

This time, Robert Kennedy avoided getting shot. In a stroke of genius, Bobby picked Jimmy Carter out of the Georgia state house to be his VP running mate. Everybody likes Jimmy, even good-old-boys way down south; and Jimmy knows a whole lot about everything. He’s the perfect Vice President. Martin Luther King, Jr. also avoided getting shot. Jessie Jackson got him on a plane to Paris, where he wrote the book, Justice Cannot Wait, that will likely define his legacy in the new now.

With a Democratic Party majority Congress, and a new perspective on foreign and domestic agenda priorities, Kennedy’s administration was able to push through significant social welfare programs, including universal preschool and community college availability, and national health care coverage. That’s right. Even though medicare was just a couple years old, we actually got “medicare for all” when forty million young/olds, who had been on medicare or about to hop on to it in 2019, put their informed ideas into the political mix in 1969. At least, I’d like that to be true.

The truth is that we got universal public health insurance after the US Senate held a week of extraordinary hearings where pubescent future/past C-Suite executives from the top five private health insurance companies, freed from their future positions of power, their seven-figure salaries, and their non-disclosure agreements—but not, apparently from the vestigial crumbs of their consciences—played “hold my beer” to outdo one another in describing the massive profit-seeking strategies their companies diddone used to restrict health care options for desperately ill patients, and guarantee a hefty return to their stockholders. That, and they told about the mountain of money they funneled into future US Senate races, and the obsequious toadying of these Senators—some of them were already in the room—eager for their campaign funding.

Remember, within about a week of the 1967 time comet event, most of the three billion realtimers across the planet were told the date and cause of their future deaths. This hit the world like an infoplague. It was as if the Buddha dropped his noble truth about “everything is impermanent” like a weighted blanket over the global psyche, redefining the phrase “shit just got real.” I’ve mentioned this elsewhere.

In a couple decades, psychologists will be studying what this collective knowledge-trauma does to the human psyche. I mean, we all know, and knew, and will know we are here on Earth for just a while; that death comes for us all. But now, more than three billion people have a confirmed reservation for the big sleep.

Most timedrifters were careful not to burden little younglings with too many details up front about their death; just enough information to nurture some hope that, this time around, their fate could be steered into a better conclusion. But still, imagine being told how you will die when you are five years old.

In the future/past, most US realtimers diddone succumbed to one of the several deadly illnesses or other medical conditions that eventually kill us. Relatively few died from accidents or suicide. What realtimers didn’t know at first was that medical bills will become the number one reason for personal bankruptcy; or that lawmakers will use the horrific reality of health care in the US against “right to die” laws, since any rational patient’s decision to commit suicide will be colored by the prospect of familial financial ruin, should their medical condition continue at length.

Then, in the Fall of 1969, when the nightly news featured insurance executive whistleblowers, timedrifters in the US could not help but open up to their parents and kids, their colleagues and neighbors, about their future experience in the US hospital-health-insurance-complex. Mostly this experience included unnecessary and heartbreaking financial hassles that compounded the realtimers’ battle with whatever eventually killed them, emptying their family savings, their retirement accounts, and their home equity in the process. Senators showed up in the Senate chamber carrying mailbags stuffed with testimonial letters from desperate, enraged constituents. Something had to give.

Cowered by the truth, the national health bill sailed through Congress, as did a prohibition on for-profit hospitals and medical groups, an expansion of the NIH, and funding for state-level public pharmaceutical laboratories. Who knows, maybe Sarah Dobbins will come back to medicine this time around after all.

In other news, the eighteen trillion dollars that the US spent on on its military in the future/past fifty-two years got quite a haircut: almost eighty-percent. Soon after the Vietnam “engagement” ended with a quick treaty between the US and Hanoi, the US signed a multilateral international agreement to limit military spending to one-percent of GDP. All of the Congressional “hawks” were in hiding at the time.

The Department of Defense had its day—actually more like a month—in the brilliant spotlight of televised congressional hearings. Future/past contractors and general officers, some of them sitting on cushions to reach the microphone, painted a dim picture of the military procurement process. Historians recounted all the wars the US had joined in the next half century, including the outcomes, none of which could be described as “victorious.” Timedrifters had compiled a partial list of the names of hundreds of US soldiers, most of them afterkinder, who diddone got killed to keep the oil flowing.

The planet was also in a pandemic outbreak of peace. Every corner of the world faced local political and military issues from the future/past, as they digested the collective memories of hundreds of diddone coups, coup attempts, assassinations, and civil wars. With so much accumulated blame on the table, most governments were hip-deep in recrimination and/or self reflection, their guns were pointed inward. This was no time to start a new war.

I do not suggest here that you count out the Pentagon. Fifty years of future innovation in weaponry was on the table. The Pentagon could skip four or five generations of now-outdated, future/past weapon systems, and go straight to smart bombs and pilotless supersonic attack platforms. The military industrial complex is nothing but nimble. All that oil still needs to be protected.

And speaking of oil, the emergency oil reserves were filled up a decade early. OPEC lost its ability to apply energy blackmail to other nations, at least to the US. Energy security and carbon impacts got the scrutiny they deserved. Conversations about alternative energy sources are already happening in the press, the academy, and agencies. I doubt that they will build Three Mile Island. I foresee a lot of wind farms around the Great Lakes. Wellspring already has several really useful patents in that area.

Shrinking the Pentagon’s annual multi-hundred billion dollar piggybank freed up a budget resource to resolve the biggest economic headache of the new now: high unemployment of younglings. Grabbing an idea from 2018—I’m thinking Bernie had something to do with this, he had hopped into the House of Representatives earlier than last time—President Kennedy backed a guaranteed income for all residents, with payments of eight-hundred dollars a month for adults and four-hundred dollars for children. That’s a goodly sum in 1970 dollars. Having a stable financial floor of a check every month allowed younglings to avoid the worst of the grossly unfair advantage that was their lot.

How do you compete for an entry level job when the kid next to you has thirty years of future experience in that same company? It will likely take twenty-five years before the entry-level employment situation settles out. But nobody needs to starve or go homeless in the meanwhile. Olders also suffered in competition with time/drifter professionals.

Here’s an example. The World Trade Center in New York City isn’t built yet. Nobody wants the same “twin towers,” way too much future/past history in that design. The original architects had to deal with timedrifter competition that brought a half-century of future design and engineering prowess to the mix. Happily, in my view, Ram Koolhess, the wunderkind who diddone wrote the book Hysterical New York, won the competition, despite being only twenty-something. Lower Manhattan will be a totally different space now.

In an attempt to pull some timedrifters out of the youth labor pool, a new Civilian Volunteer Corps law was passed in 1969. This law required all young/old residents under the age of twenty to be prepared to spend two years of service within municipal and state governments, selected non-profit service agencies, and hospitals. The Corps would draft a half-million volunteers each year. Volunteers would spend two years of service, with a salary paid by the federal government. Ten thousand places were reserved for future/past MDs. After this service, they could take state medical exams to get re-certified.

The Peace Corps also got a boost in funding, and a new emphasis on technology transfer. Thousands of volunteers spread across the globe sparking new local ventures. This is where the Wellspring Phase Three comes in. I’ll get to that soon.

 

* * *

October 10, 1970, La Jolla, California

 

photo of the towering library

UCSD library… meetup city

 

 

Yes, I am finally legal. Up on the hill, UC San Diego opened its new Central Library, and I found this the perfect place for us eighteen-year olds to meet each other. The library’s magazine room became a kind of “Tinder by the sea.” Coolness signaling was easy. Grab a Village Voice or a Rolling Stone from the rack and walk slowly across the room. Or spy someone else reading say, the Paris Review or The Nation, whatever worked. Ask a question as you pass by.

“What’s the latest?” Make eye contact.

My favorite contact line was a mention of Burning Man. I had been a Burner for a couple decades. It was a perfect spot to bond with tech creatives. Burner timedrifters are a tight group and eager to reminisce. Non-Burner timedrifters who are curious about the event might be open to a fun evening.

“Say,” I’d start, “Didn’t we meet at Center Camp in 2000 after the heavy rain? I seem to remember your costume was body paint and an electric blue merkin,” or, “I really enjoyed your naked fire-spinning.”

I was hoping she’d say, “I can’t place you. Maybe if you took off your clothes and covered your body with glitter.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I would venture.

Any curious response would result in a suggestion of moving over to the nearby coffee corner.

“We can’t talk here,” I would say. “It’s a library.”

I found ways to get booze and a bit of what passed for weed, with seeds, stems and all. Older timedrifters took pity on me and became couriers for my vices. I could not legally drink at a bar, but I had my rented two-bedroom apartment with a patio and a balcony looking out to the wide Pacific. And a queen-sized bed.

I stuck with dating timedrifters like me, although I might change my mind in a couple decades. I was not alone in this decision. In late 1967, us timedrifters were a majority of the global population from ages three to twenty-two, but our numbers were fixed by that one event. Come 1987, a whole new population of kids born after 1967 would have no memories of the future/past, and a solid footing in the new now.

Today we have two cohorts of young people, the cohort of younglings, realtimers who are experiencing time the good old fashioned, one-way time arrow into the future, and a new cohort of timedrifters for whom time was upended. Our past is in our future and our future in our past. This difference is like adding yet another gender to society.

In the US, for many folks, the concept of sex between timedrifters and younglings brought out new meaning for the word “pervert.” If your mental and emotional state is half a century older than that of the person beside, or on top, of you in bed, does it really matter that your bodies are the same age? You are still a perv in your heart.

The other side of this argument has its own logic. If your biological age is almost identical to your partner, does it matter that last year you were married to someone your own age who could be their grandparent? Perhaps it was natural for a timedrifter man to want a youngling woman and unnatural to desire anything different. Or the reverse; cougars want young love too. Of course, nobody claimed that jumping around the time continuum would be easy. We just want to avoid doing a Jeffrey Epstein.

By the time everyone turns forty again, the younglings will have enough living in their own past (and enough listening to timedrifters drone on and on about the “real ‘80s”) to decide for themselves who they can love without regret. Until then, I’m sticking with timedrifter dates.

The girls from campus who accepted my invitation to my apartment for weekend hookups agreed in advance that we were both too young to get serious about a relationship, too old to forget about safe sex, and way too eager about getting naked, nubile, and nimble with each other.

To maintain a convivial atmosphere, I suggested some guidelines for the evening’s conversation.

I wrote them down.

“The conversations we can pursue about the future/past are these:

—literature we have both actually read,

—movies we have both actually seen,

—TV shows we both admire,

—concerts we both remember attending,

—foreign countries we have both visited, and,

—restaurants either of us really hopes they can afford this time around.

* * *

No personal histories, no tragic stories, no hidden regrets about something that hasn’t happened yet. No future/past political polemics.

We are a boy and a girl in the flesh, and will do our best to please one another. And we are fully a woman and man in our emotional capacities. Active mutual consent is assumed at all times, and either of us can object at any time.”

At the end of this, I would say, “If this does not sound like fun, we should have one more quick round of drinks, and I will take you wherever you need to go, if you need a ride, or say ‘adios’ here with no hard feelings.”

Those who stayed enjoyed some convivial conversation as the first round of foreplay. Exploring mutual experiences of places and cultures can be sexy. You can test this. Sit really, really close to someone you are attracted to and chat about that beach in Southern Thailand you both visited. Before you can say Koh Phi Phi, fingers are touching and roving. Then it is time to abandon the vertical, unless they prefer it standing up, or want another Manhattan first.

This also made the after-sex conversation more relaxed. The very last experience I want any weekend is a rollicking reverse cowgirl romp followed by two hours consoling a naked, sobbing, eighteen-year-old ex-grandmother who can not stop remembering how cute her afterkinder grandkids willbewhere.

The truth is, we never do porn-style sex, me and my dates. We do holding and comfort sex. We do caressing and giggling sex. We take turns and take our time. We do it like we’ve been doing it for decades, which we have, only now with newer equipment and a young partner. It is perfect and I wouldn’t change it. And I’m not going to write about it any more. I just didn’t want you to think I was home alone fapping to memories of Sarah.

* * *

* * *

November 20, 1970, La Jolla, California

 

a fiber-optic cable with light

high technology

 

 

In Phase Three we went public. First, we let slip to the press that Wellspring was open to pay really well today for certain future/past patents. We started inserting flashy adverts in the magazines researchers and engineers were reading, and press releases to the news syndicates. Wellspring’s pay scale was in line with entering engineering jobs in major companies, and you could still work from home. Nate’s PR department compiled lists of the patents we filed, and explanations of where they fit into the emergent technology landscape. There were daily press releases.

As we waited for the first wave of Wellspring patents to be approved, Wellspring offered short-term, non-exclusive, performance based licenses to some of its patent-pending IP. We all wanted the Internet now. The sooner that the global physical cabling and large-scale wireless networks were available, the quicker we could get beyond fucking fax machines. Why wait for 1992?

TimBL is already a teenager, and timedrifter. I assume he was working on the Web from day one.

Within a month, stories emerged of Fortune 500 companies hunting down their future/past researchers to offer them hiring bonuses. Here’s the ironic part. In order for these companies to hang on to their future/past intellectual property, they need to patent it now, before Wellspring could get to it.

You can rehire the person who did the patent for you last time, but until this is filed with the patent office, you have no property. And a hundred other researchers who did not work for you are familiar with the content of this patent, because they either diddone licensed it for their tech, or they tried to get around it with their own patents. Wellspring might hire any of these other researchers to reverse engineer patents your company held in the future/past. The meant that, by the end of year three of our plan, all the big tech firms were spinning out patents as fast as possible.

What’s ironic in this? Timing. Like I said: the adjacent possible is everything. A patent can achieve a real return on investment only when its timing is right. Nearly all of these patents were twenty to forty years too early to support a significant market advantage. All of these company patents will have expired before that. Their contents will then enter the public domain. We are front-loading a global knowledge explosion.

I mean, if you somehow brought an iPhone back with you to 1967, most of the manufacturing processes, some of the materials, all of the software, and, of course, the entire wireless network and the internet, would be nonexistent. You could manufacture a working copy of it in, maybe, ten years. Phase Three is a stealth attack on the entire idea of monopoly capital enclosing globally valuable technological innovation. We were stuck with 1967 patent laws, so we totally pwned these.

I’m sure you are not on the edge of your chair waiting for me to spin a story of how each patent gets described, illustrated, and filed. I’m really sure I don’t want to write this either. The work of my office was important, urgent, meticulous, and absolutely mundane. The real excitement came from the stories of the future/past inventors. I got to revisit their imaginations in hundreds of conversations, which I recorded on my little Olympus real-to-real recorder.

 

January 07, 1971, La Jolla, California

 

man in a suit and tie

Nate meets Stevie

 

 

“Mister Stapleton, It’s Mister Greene on line two.” We had a receptionist to handle outside calls. I was frequently reminded of all the occupations that had disappeared by 2019. Emma’s work day was filled with tasks that would later either be handled through a computer or a smart phone, or get assigned to unpaid interns.

“Thanks, Emma.” I lifted the receiver, and punched the button on my desk phone.

“Nate,” I said. “I hope you’re happy. Phase Three is rocking the business news syndicates.”

“Jeremy,” Nate said. “I’m calling because I just had lunch with Steve Fredricks. He wants in.”

Steven Fredricks. There’s a name I could go all day without hearing.

“What do you mean, ‘in’?”

“He says he’s open to joining us at the executive vice president level to leverage his expertise and move us to the next plateau of our vision.”

“He actually said that?”

“I toned it down a bit.”

In the future/past, Steve Fredricks ran a start-up accelerator out of Mountain View. He had jumped in as an angel investor for a couple of fat unicorn companies in the 1990s that were acquired before the dot-com bubble burst. He treated his good luck with these—I’m sure he had stakes in dozens of failed ventures—like a unique talent. His accelerator was famous for its internal competitions. They made the Shark Tank look like a tot’s goldfish bowl.

“I’m trying to guess if this is a joke,” I said. I expected Nate to show Stevie the door.

“Why would you say that?”

I had diddone interviewed Steve three times: once in his gargantuan office in the Valley, once in his Montecito mansion, and once at Davos. Each time, I came away knowing I had met someone who would push you in front of a moving subway train to see how you’d react.

You expect that a person who knows in advance the precise time of a volcanic eruption might avoid hiking that mountain the same day. I suggest you use the same strategy avoid that sociopath from your future/past. Finger the scar they left on your psyche and walk the other way.

Know also that kindness leaves a mark, a kiss on the cheek of yesterday. Gravitate toward those who have smoothed the pathway for others: teachers who gave the most and cared more than they needed, friends on the edge of your group you didn’t get to know until too late, when stories of their courage and wisdom found you. Stay close to them and follow their lead. Nate was such a person, even with all his money. A genuinely sweet guy. He just had to be joking.

“Steve behaved himself at lunch?” I said.

Nate laughed. “He insisted on meeting at le Pavillon. Then he sent his steak au poivre back to the kitchen. Said it was overcooked.”

“You had me worried there.”

Nate said, “Since he’s only nine, his massive self importance was comical. He’s also quite short for his age, and his voice is still high. I avoided asking him if he wanted a booster chair. It also looks like he’s running scared. I’m the last person he would diddone talk to before, so how did he figure I’d listen to him now?”

I’m guessing that Steve woke up in 1967 so very young and hungry, but nearly all of his former cumulative advantages have yet to accumulate. He was devious and cruel before. Today, the colleagues he fucked over the last time can see him coming.

When you demolish someone else’s life, just to get what you want, you expect them to stay lost in the ruins of their own existence. You don’t figure they will show up at Camp Dakota in the summer of 1968, ready and oh, so happy, to beat the holy bejeezus out of you. I predict that Steve Fredricks’ teen years are going to be rocky ones.

I said, “Steve needs to realize that that fifty-years we gained and lost is a public dress rehearsal for the new now.”

Nate said, “And an undress rehearsal, since a lot of what was private is now visible.”

I said, “Which means it’s a redress rehearsal too. Some people, like Steve here, have a lot of ‘splainin to do. We can keep these folks at arms length. Let’s go for an asshole-free operation, Nate. As a company rule.”

“That’s my rule number one,” he said. “Say, when we get to the middle this phase, I’d like you to become a public spokesperson for Wellspring. Can you travel? Do you have your passport? I see a bunch of airline miles in your immediate future.”

“I’ll apply for the passport this week. Can I pick an associate to go along? It’s good to have back-up talent on long trips. In case of illness or whatever. I’m also not the multilingual type.”

“Good idea. Go ahead. On another topic, last week we discussed taking Wellspring Medical Technologies public as a non-profit. I think we should go forward.”

“That would be a great counter to some of the anti-monopoly talk I’m hearing. Ever since that Wall Street Journal piece on the ‘52ers,’ we’ve been labeled as the giant, evil company stealing all the gold from the peasants, a group which, somehow, includes Fortune 500 companies.”

“The same folks are quietly asking if we need any Series B funding,” said Nate.

Two months ago, a Journal headline article on Wellspring, together with a long-read feature piece on the patent rush, invented the term “52ers” to describe timedrifters who were cashing in on their future/past insider information and hoarding all the intellectual property that should be “out in the marketplace.” Wellspring was labeled as the next monopoly threat to the economy. If we truly were what they claimed us to be: a ruthless, opportunist, capitalist venture bent on cornering the future/past technology trove to extort outrageous licensing fees, I might also be worried.

Editorials across the major newspapers, and particularly op-eds by “industry leaders” have demanded that Wellspring be split into several companies. Wellspring’s medical wing now owns a long list of really important pharmaceuticals and devices. It is potentially the biggest “big pharma” on the block.

Divesting Wellspring Medical Technologies as a non-profit would signal that we have enough IP in other areas to go public without it. Nate had made a show of retaining a top white shoe international law firm to be ready in defense of Wellspring patents. The Street was expecting an outline of our initial offering to be announced in weeks. Cleaving off the medical division would take months to complete and give us more time.

“I think it’s brilliant,” I said.

“Ciao, Nate.”

“Sayonara, Jeremy.”

Chapter 5: Democracy David

June 17, 1971, La Jolla, California

 

protesters and MPs face off in the '70s. Girl offers an MP a flower.

A decade of protests

 

 

I’m on the phone with Nate.

Nate said, “Do you remember David? We called him “Democracy David.”

“From the WTO protests in Seattle?”

“And the best-selling books…”

David was a roaming intellectual force for three decades. He went to Reed, did a PhD in anthropology at Cornell, got a job at Penn, then got fired from Penn for being too outspoken around fundamental issues in the academy. Spent a couple decades in Europe, where he wrote three best-selling books combining ethnography and economics. He landed at UCLA, where his class lectures became YouTube blockbusters. David worked on the economic side of anthropology, and was part of that discipline’s “historical turn.” He wrote deep histories about cultures of sharing and cooperation.

Nate said, “…He’s a timedrifter now, living here in New York. We just had breakfast at Zabars. His parents are socialists. They have an apartment in Chelsea. David’s biologically eleven years old, and his parents have agreed to let him fly to La Jolla for the summer. Can you put him up at your place? Your shop has the best writers, and access to a university library. We need David to help figure out how to build and govern a distributed autonomous organization without computers and the internet.”

“Step back there. You want me to host this eleven-year-old kid for the summer?”

“He is eleven going on sixty.”

“…And, you want to set up a distributed autonomous organization today? Wouldn’t it be better to wait for the web infrastructure to mature?”

“David says it’s a DAO, but a lot more. He claims we can do this now with a combination of telephones, fax machines, ditto copiers and local mail. He reminded me that in the Seventeenth Century, the original ‘invisible college’ at Oxford was started the same time that the English king established the Royal Mail. The mail system kickstarted the whole Enlightenment. It’s probably good enough for us.

“Oh, and he’s been corresponding with your future/past employee, Sophie, who talked her parents into letting her come to La Jolla for the summer. Apparently, Sophie and David diddone met at the Occupy Movement in DC. I think they were together for a while after that.”

“Nate, I’m not going to chaperone a tween summer hook-up.”

“Sophie told David she has a room with Emma, your receptionist. I am hoping they will behave themselves, at least in public.”

“Sure,” I said. Like that was going to happen.

The pre-teen timedrifter scene was getting a bit hinky lately. After a few years of playing at being “children” again—a role that wasn’t much fun the first time, and was a total drag the second time—a fair number of pre-teen timedrifters had slipped into a simulation of adult life. They dressed as adults, went out on dates, and smoked up a storm, even though they really did know better. Downtown America has gone Bugsy Malone. For you realtimers, that’s a movie where kids play grownup gangsters and entertainers.

Today, eight-year-old timedrifters in wide bell-bottom jeans and hot pants are flash-dancing at pop-up discos. And, yes, The Bee Gees are back. So are the punks. A thirteen-year-old Johnny Rotten is doing a national concert tour with the Sex Pistols that is attracting a visibly underage crowd. All this will pass as soon as timedrifters get older. Right now this scene is hilarious to us, and highly disturbing to many realtimers.

“It sounds like everything is already in motion,” I said. Nate always went warp speed when he could. “I’ll get a guest bed for my den tomorrow. David can camp out here.”

I diddone interviewed Democracy David about his third book in 2016, a broadside against biogenetic cultural theories. David’s view is that culture grew from the social need to keep narcissists in line. Culture works in the interest of the group, and against the interests of assholes who want to use the group for their own devices.

David’s got this super high emotional tone that commands your attention when he enters the room, but he is no asshole. He’s as caring and kind as anyone in the academy. Even at eleven, I imagine, David could charm the skin off a snake. He was a world-famous intellectual. Most of the sapiosexual timedrifter girls I manage to attract at the library will be thrilled to meet him. Actually thrilled. It looks like I’ll need to find a nice motel for my weekend frolics.

Nate said, “Sorry for the rush. We need to get the DAO set up ASAP as the beneficiary group for the Wellspring Medical Technologies intellectual property civic trust.”

“Civic trust?” I said. Was that even a thing?

“David will fill you in. His flight is next Monday. I’ll have him call you at the office on Friday with details. Ciao.”

I hung up.

Mostly, I was looking forward to a summer of scintillating conversations. And a lot of looking the other way as David and Sophie picked up their old relationship.

June 21, 1971, San Diego County, California

* * *

old ford steering wheel

Galaxie 500

 

 

Democracy David’s flight from Newark arrived late Monday afternoon. He had checked one small suitcase and carried on his typewriter in its travel case. On the drive to La Jolla, he said he would pick up some new clothes and whatnots here in California. Nate had him on a fat salary for six months, so money wasn’t an issue. By September, he’d be back in Manhattan.

David was animated as he talked, seated on the broad front bench seat of my 1965 Ford Galaxie 500. He strained against the seat belt as he gestured. He was under five-feet tall, and already had a slight paunch.

“I’ve reached the ugly stage of my childhood,” he said. “I’m past the cherubic phase, with the big-toothed grin and the shining eyes. And I’m a couple years from that boy cuteness that early teens pull off. Then again, I was always a dork in school. I first got laid at Reed. But then, everybody got laid at Reed.”

David sported a light-brown mop of hair, which was itself between phases: too long for a Beatle cut and too tidy for hippy freak-flag.

“I do want to be at least marginally attractive to Sophie.” He looked over at me. “I can tell that attracting women is not a problem for you. You’ve got an earnest, young Jimmy Stewart face, and more muscles than I would have imagined.”

I’m glad the days in the gym were paying off. I was not going to engage David about tween romance. I felt lucky I came back at fifteen, and so happy to be legal today.

David continued, “Girls mature faster than we do. She’s probably sprouting tits, while I can’t grow even one dark-and-curly yet.”

“I don’t remember Sophie mentioning you,” I said.

“Well she raved about you. You were the… what did she say? ‘The perfect office gentleman,’ with all your employees. This put the behavior of ninety-nine percent of managing editors into a critical light. She also said you were a definite catch, only you weren’t pitching.”

Another topic I was not going to entertain. “How did you meet?”

“Sophie, bless her heart, opened her tent, and her double REI sleeping bag, for me in Occupied McPherson Square, on a bitter cold DC January night. We bonded like mating otters for the next two weeks. You do know she diddone got a degree at the London School of Economics, and spent a year at ENS in Paris.”

I just remembered that David had been the guiding intellectual of the Occupy movement. At the time, I had taken this as a perk of his underemployment, but I’ve come to see that the entire Occupy manifesto is pretty much a blueprint for the shitstorm that was the future/past.

Sophie’s academic background was obvious from her work. She specialized in long reads about the impact of technology on the economy. She’s the one who diddone wrote the piece about patents that Nate found so compelling. I reminded myself to ask her if she remembered the names of the authors of that white paper I used. Even though they weren’t born yet, I wanted to give them credit.

David said, “Here’s the skinny. Sophie and me, we hope to reconnect, but not in that way. At least not for a few years. Right now we are stuck at first base. Don’t think you need to manage us. OK?”

“Fine by me.”

David hooked his thumbs behind the front of his pants belt and pulled this forward. He looked down the gap at his crotch.

“And you, sir, are a grave disappointment.”

He looked at me and smiled a grin that still had a load of cherub in it. His brown eyes darted across the freeway to the live-oak covered hillsides.

“It is great to be out here on the left coast,” he shouted and fist-bumped the dashboard. “But I can’t legally drive even a fucking Vespa for another five years.”

“You’ll have people around who can take you to events. La Jolla’s a small town, totally bikeable. We can pick up a couple bicycles.”

“Maybe I’ll try surfing,” he said. We had crested the last hill and were overlooking the Pacific on the road into town.

“It’s a new now,” I said. “Worth exploring.”

“I hope you’ve stocked up on tequila,” he said. I glanced over at him.

“Just fooling!” He punched my shoulder.

* * *

June 23, 1971, La Jolla, California

 

scene from a protest with crowd sitting down

Mic Check!

 

 

Sophie arrived from Houston on Wednesday. Emma took the afternoon off to meet her at the airport and get her settled in. At the office, we created a temporary working room in the back for Sophie and David, with three chalkboards and a couple large easels with craft paper pads. The room had a window wall on the North, so there was great lighting, and their own coffee maker, a vintage Silex vacuum device that David had picked up at a flea market. He was thrilled; his favorite Santa Monica coffee house diddone used these devices for their high-end cups. The harder problem was getting better beans. His first shipment from Alfred Peet in Berkeley won’t get here until next week.

After taking Sophie to get her UCSD library card, Emma drove her to the office mid-morning on Thursday. As soon as they entered, someone yelled, “Mic check!” This was the Occupy “human megaphone” prompt. It allowed one speaker’s regular voice to be heard by hundreds.

The other office staff stood up. “Mic check!” they echoed.

David came out from the back room, grinning widely.

“We want…,” he said loudly.

“We want…” the others repeated.

“To welcome you…,” he said.

“To welcome you…” the chorus.

“To the center of…”

“To the center of…”

“The next fifty years of,”

“The next fifty years of,”

“Open technology. Over.”

“Open technology. Over.”

David walked rapidly to the front and gave Sophie a quick hug. Others edged around in a circle. She turned to the crowd.

“It’s so great to be here!” she said.

“It’s so great…”

“Stop that!” she laughed. The room broke into applause.

Sophie spied me standing at my office door, groking the scene, and came over to gave me a hug. Eleven-year-olds are gangly, with spindly arms and big feet. She looked up at me. Her brown eyes were old, knowing. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the promise and the potential in those eyes.

She said, “Thanks, boss. I’m so excited to work on this.”

I patted her back and we separated. “You certainly diddone earned it,” I said.

I introduced her to those who hadn’t diddone worked with her before, and guided her to their project room. David stood next to the door, on which someone had tacked a hand-written sign, “Magic Theatre: For Madmen Only.”

He said, “Come along, Sophie girl, we’ve got two weeks to reimagine the global economy.”

“Or they’ll lock us in?” she said.

“Brick up the door and forget we ever existed.”

“Until then, you’ll get donuts in the morning break…” I said.

“…they haven’t invented avocado toast yet, my dear,” David added.

“…Sandies or pizza for lunch, and Oreos and sodas in the afternoon. Coffee, all day.”

“When does happy hour start?” she said.

“When you turn twenty-one,” I said.

“I diddone that forty-odd years ago,” she said.

 

David insisted on getting to work by Seven AM. La Jolla was in full summer splendor, and he and Sophie wanted to spend the late afternoons on the beach, or riding their Sears five-speed Spyder bicycles around town, boogie boards bungie-corded to their banana seats. Boogie boards were a new invention, and a beginner’s ticket into surf culture.

Local pre-teen younglings learned not to pick on Sophie, usually the only black girl on the beach. Sophie was sharp with her wits and quick with a verbal counter attack. She could also code switch into Les Halles market French invectives that David was sure she didn’t learn at the Sorbonne. Call her “Gidget,” and you’d get a mouthful in return. Act aggressive, and she will put you in your place.

David was pretty certain that Sophie integrated the soda fountain counter at the local Rexall Drug store. He came home with the news. The man behind the counter would not serve them, and kept looking around for the manager, who finally took his signal and quick-walked over.

“Where are your parents?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. Where are your manners?” Sophie said. “My buddy and I are thirsty, and you are open for business. I’m friends with about a dozen Black Panthers up in Oakland, I can get them on Amtrak tomorrow. Maybe spend a week here, work on their tan. Try out your hamburgers.” She smiled at the manager and looked over to the soda jerk.

“I’ll have Coke float,” she said. “David?”

“Same.”

The manager must have nodded, because the guy got busy on their orders.

 

David and Sophie were as serious about their play as they were playful about their work. By the end of the fortnight, the back room’s window wall had been plastered with note-covered craft-paper sheets. The place smelled of stale coffee grounds.

David’s package from Peets had arrived. David found a hand-cranked coffee mill at a hardware store. The other workers in the office each got one cup each to satisfy their curiosity. I was instructed that the entire office would need a regular supply going forward. No more Hills Brothers.

 

* * *

July 12, 1971, La Jolla, California

 

Ronald Macdonald

McCoop

 

 

A couple weeks into their work, after a call with Nate, I stopped in. David was scribbling on his note pad. Sophie was finishing a diagram on the blackboard.

“Great timing,” David said. “We just got this nailed down for you. At least, the parts we can work on here.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Nate is eager for me to go out on the road. We need to get in front of the speculation over the Wellspring Medical Technologies spin-off.”

Sophie looked around at me, “Do you want to become an expert on open, collaborative networked cooperatives and copyfair licensing?”

“I just need to know enough to talk about our work in meetings across the planet. If you can do up a slide deck with a lot of notes, that would be super. I will read any background material you give me, and I will struggle with the content until I don’t have questions of my own in terms of how this works. The why it does, and what it will do is still open, I guess.”

“Slide deck? PowerPoint? You mean, ‘have artists do up a stack of overhead projector transparencies’,” Sophie said.

“It’s still 1971.” David said. “Analog days.

“Where do we go from now?” Sophie said. “Take a seat. We’ll give you the three minute drill. David, you want to start?”

I pulled up a folding chair and sat in it backwards.

David stood and leaned back against the room’s central table.

“The vision is a planet where a core of health care technology is controlled and nourished within local and regional cooperatives. The intellectual property becomes a pooled resource, and the coop members are the commoners who will use this resource for the benefit of the wider societies where they live.”

As he spoke, he gestured with his hands, and I could imagine him at a lectern on the stage of a university auditorium. He continued.

“The main problems here are communication, coordination, and resource sharing constraints. We need to enable the coops to build their own economy by federating across regions and nations. They will want to build back-bone customer relationships with local doctors and hospitals.”

“We’ve adapted Ostrom’s commons design patterns, and the standard rules of cooperatives, into a new framework that treats not just the members of the coop, but the health of the whole surrounding community as the mission. We have a full list of top-level values and virtues for these coops. They can add their own local values, too.”

Sophie came over and stood beside David.

She said, “The Wellspring Medical Technologies patents could support a multinational corporation with annual revenue in the tens of billions of dollars US today, and into hundreds of billions by the time the patents expire. Wellspring is the equivalent of combining Johnson & Johnson, Hoffman-la Roche, Pfizer, and Bayer into one megapharma. But we can’t just pour out this tech at the feet of researchers across the global South. We need durable economic and social vehicles to support turning these patents into products through testing, manufacturing, and distribution…”

“…and we need to protect these products from the current big-pharma firms,” David added. “So, we are turning to open-patent, copyfair licenses.”

“You’ve mentioned these before. What are they?”

David continued. “These licenses fall between an open-source license, which lets others use the tech as long as they continue the license in their products, and an open-non-commercial license, which prohibits commercial use. Copyfair licenses are open-source within the coop federation, and non-exclusive for commercial use, with negotiated payments, including performance guarantees. That’s why we need to spin off a Wellspring Medical non-profit as a home for the commercial transactions. The actual patents will be given over to a civic trust.”

“What’s that?” I said.

Sophie said, “You know what a land trust is. When the Nature Conservancy, for example, is given title to some land, this land is protected from development forever. Civic trusts are the same, only for intellectual property. The beneficiaries select trustees to operate this trust on their behalf, and in support of a well described mission. In this case, it’s the same mission as the coops: improving the health and wellbeing of their local communities.”

I said, “I know we are in a new now, but we are not on a new planet. We’ve seen how the marketplace will appropriate and repurpose technologies originally designed for public benefit. They will just open up their own coops, post large signs in their corporate lobbies to signal their values and virtues, and channel profits back into their corporate pockets.”

David and Sophie glanced at each other. The room fell silent.

Sophie shook her head and spoke up. “I guess we need a new drug. We’ve gone as far as caffeine can carry us here. David and I have been wrestling with this exact issue for three days now. And we are stumped.”

“Doing better is hard,” I said. “‘Is this a ‘Cheap, fast, or good: choose two’ moment?”

“We must have all three,” David said. “In the future/past, dozens of coop models and projects were tried and tested. That’s where we pulled our ideas from. But each of them was a one-off, and took years to develop. We need a rapid launch, some form of global movement, and starting tomorrow.”

I said, “Do you have a management plan for these new coops?”

Sophie pointed to the notes on the window. “We have a governance design pattern language that can be localized anywhere on the planet. But we don’t even have the internet to let the planet know about this. We could teach this to a thousand leaders a week if we had the bandwidth. Instead, we have first-gen FAX machines, telex, and mimeographs. At least, we can distribute our patents on microfiche.”

I said, “Nate was telling me. The entire load of patents that we own can be packed into three bank boxes filled with microfiches.”

David said, “The whole package would fit onto the back seat of a VW Beetle. The office in Raleigh is finishing up the index now. We will have five-hundred of these sets ready in six months.”

Sophie said, “Wellspring is donating these sets to academic and public libraries world-wide.”

I said, “You’ve got a hell of an incentive for researchers to join up.”

David said, “That’s not nearly enough. If we try to do this project by project, it might take two or three decades to spin up enough coops to make much of a difference. The patents will have lapsed by then.”

Sophie said, “During the whole future/past, the US was the higher-education and career magnet that attracted bright young engineers and scientists to its universities and tech companies. For decades, societies in ex-colonies diddone complained about this ‘brain-drain.’ Much of the talent of Silicon Valley was born in Madras or Lahore, on the Serengeti or along the Mekong. Now we have a couple million engineers and scientists across the planet who are back in their home towns and their local schools.”

I said, “How do we nourish this intellectual capacity, when it’s so broadly distributed?”

David said, “Distributed is the whole point. We can’t do a distributed autonomous organization today; we can’t build the digital blockchain. So, DAOs are out. The mission is still to fully distribute the knowhow and the power to turn this knowledge into goods…”

“…Besides, DAOs are so 2015,” Sophie said, “Too far in the future today, but not quite 2019. By 2019 we diddone the next, best thing. We called them ‘open, collaborative networked cooperatives.’ OCNCs start with the logic of traditional coops, but extend this to cover multiple stakeholders. This means families and neighbors, customers and suppliers: everyone in the mix gets a voice, even though it’s the actual coop members who get the final say. OCNCs include care-work and share-work as an equal contribution to their economy. And OCNCs collaborate globally, just like platform coops. Of course, we don’t have the internet to support online platforms. At this point, we will use mimeod newsletters and telex machines to network between nodes. We’ve got a couple decades at least before any meme can go viral across the planet.”

I said, “The only things going viral now are, you know, viruses.” I looked down at my left arm, where my childhood smallpox inoculation site was still apparent. It would be another five years before humans eradicated this deadly virus.

“Everything today seems designed to slow us down.” David picked up his coffee mug. “At least, we’ve got Peets.” He took a large gulp. The room fell silent.

 

What happened next is my favorite part of this whole story. At least, up to now. My story, after all, and I get to savor what I want.

In the silent room, I let my eyes flow over the notes plastered on the windows. A good number of these were rules, formal requirements for participation in this future global federation of coops. I walked over and touched the paper as I read. It was all there: the patterns to follow.

David was right. Everything in the new now takes longer to do. In 2019, a YouTube video could reach millions of viewers planet-wide in one day. Here in 1971 it might take a huge hit movie three weeks to get to number one at the box office. The infoworld is much more local now. International news gets about seven minutes a day on the nightly broadcast. Society seems so much smaller when your local paper only has one page for “national news.”

‘At least, we’ve got Peets.’ But that’s only because David is getting shipments direct from Berkeley. In a few decades we’ll be able to walk into…. I stopped and closed my eyes.

David says I grinned like a monkey and was laughing for a full five minutes. I remember letting out a chuckle before I could speak. I returned to my seat and looked at each of them in turn.

“What?” Sophie said, finally.

“Franchise it,” I said. “Let’s go full Ronald McDonald on this fucker.”

The two of them looked momentarily confused, concerned, and finally, delighted. They stared at one another, nodding their agreement. They were catching on.

I continued, “Each local coop is its own organization with its local culture. What we franchise is the governance system that they must use to build their own practices. As long as they use this governance system, and follow its rules, then they can access Wellspring technology for free.”

“What about…?” David started. I raised my hand. I wasn’t done.

I said, “Who diddone conquered the world, last time around? McDonalds and Starbucks, that’s who. How did they do it? Standards and training. Adding value and keeping costs down. Expanding as fast as possible to capture market share. That’s why we had thirty thousand freaking McDonalds across the whole planet.”

I was on a roll.

“We steal the best idea the neoliberal marketplace ever had, and weaponize it against them. Instead of burgers and lattes, we offer free technology on-ramps. We can bring Wellspring coop governance franchises to every town on the planet, train locals to be coop community managers, and do regular quality-in-quality-out reviews. And we can do this in a single year.”

David hopped on, “We should attach a credit union to each franchise region, so the coop assets stay inside our economic system…”

Sophie said, “And we train the Wellspring governance leaders to capture any new technologies from their coops, and share these across the whole federation. Jeremy. Boss. I could kiss you!”

She stepped forward, her intent clear. David followed. They both found one of my cheeks in a friendly European-style smacker fest. They then started dancing around while singing.

“You deserve a break today, so get up and get away, to McCoop!”

This advertising melody had been blasting over the radio and TV for months.

 

That weekend, I joined Sophie and David in their work room for all-day franchise governance idea-farming, and then they joined me in the evenings. They needed me to be the “adult” to get them into showings of A Clockwork Orange, and The French Connection, both rated “R.” We were ready for a Monday morning call to Nate.

“Jeremy,” Nate answered when I reached him. “I got your telexed one-pager. Tell David and Sophie that the franchise concept is outstanding. Just what we need to define the beneficiary pool for the trust.”

Sophie spoke up, “Hi Nate. We are all here on the speaker phone. And the franchise idea was Jeremy’s.”

David added, “Jeremy was so pleased with his idea, his grin almost broke his face.”

“Well, it’s brilliant. But your one-pager sucks…” Nate said.

We looked at each other in silence.

“…Not unexpectedly,” he continued. “I’ll have our staff here headhunt a timedrifter with major international franchise executive savvy and management skills. And I’ve asked our lawyers to identify a partner or two with legal work in this arena.”

David said, “Great, Nate. I’m a vagabond academic, and Sophie’s a journalist. We don’t pretend to control the business side of this. Jeremy’s a…”

“…wizard and a savant.” Nate said. “But you’re right. I’m not expecting you to grow practical acumen over the weekend. We’ll find someone, maybe a team, that can handle that end of things. So, keep working on the governance and culture side, and on education and training. And Jeremy…?”

“I’m here,” I said.

“I’ve made a decision about the trust….” Nate stopped talking.

After ten seconds I said, “Nate, are you there?”

“Just making sure you are paying attention. I think we should call this the ‘Stapleton Trust’.”

Sophie did her power salute and shouted “Yes!”

David nodded vigorously. “Say something,” he said, and poked me in the arm.

“I’m honored, Nate. You sure you don’t want it to be the ‘Greene Trust’?”

“Positive. And one other thing. Once we get Wellspring Medical Technologies running as an NGO, I want to do the same thing for our patents in housing, food production, energy, transportation, and communication. We’ll throw all the key intellectual property into the Stapleton Trust and franchise each of these divisions as independent outlets or in a bundle. I still want to get you out on the road with this. Have you located a partner to go along?”

David stepped close to the speaker. “He got two partners right here.”

I raised my eyes to the ceiling and shook my head. I knew he was right. I just wished they were a decade older.

Nate said, “That OK with you, Jeremy?”

Sophie had grabbed my left hand in hers and was doing a little dance. David gave me a thumbs up.

“Jeremy?” Nate said.

“That’s fine,” I said, “if their parents approve in writing. Your lawyers have overseas offices, right?”

“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Nate said.

“It better not,” I said. “They are both pretty cute. If they cause me trouble, I’ll sell them to pirates.”

David said, “We’ll join the lost boys.”

“Spanking was still around in the Seventies, I believe,” I said. “I remember getting paddled in school.”

“It was a preferred tactic of child rearing,” Nate said. “Even out in public.”

“‘Uncle Jeremy’ needs to remember,” Sophie said, “that I have a black belt in aikido.”

“It’s true,” David said, “I saw her take down a bully on the beach. It was beautiful. She makes Steven Seagal look like Pee Wee Herman.”

“I would guess his arm will recover over the summer,” Sophie said.

Nate controlled his laughter to speak, “Get them their passports. My staff can work on your itinerary and make all the travel arrangements.”

“It’s onward the Phase Three then,” I said.

Nate said, “As soon as the lawyers get the trust set up, I’d like you three to be initial trustees. I’ll pick two more for their IP rights know-how. If we hope to go worldwide, we’ll need advertising. I’ll ask my team to get together with DBB on a surprise campaign. They’ll want your input. Plan on a Manhattan visit early in September.”

 

* * *

September 07, 1971, New York, New York

 

plaza infront of Rockefeller Center

Nate’s office

 

 

 

“Stapleton!” It was a child’s voice, made even higher by its emotional urgency. Like a baby bird calling for its meal.

It came from behind me. I was in midtown Manhattan, walking up Fifth Avenue, approaching Rockefeller Center. I had finished lunch alone. Sophie and David ran off this morning to visit the American Museum of Natural History. We would gather at Nate’s office.

I turned my head. The fist that was probably aiming for my chin glanced off my shoulder. The other fist was slow. I raised my hand defensively and grabbed it. I was being attacked by a kid in a three-piece business suit. He had an adult haircut and a manner and appearance I recognized.

“Fredricks,” I said. “What the fuck?” I let go of his hand. “Are you following me?”

“Following you?” Steve Fredricks stood back and crossed his arms. “No way. I just saw you and had to come over.”

“And punch me.”

“You are ruining my life.”

“And you are what? Ten? You’ve got plenty of time to fuck up your own life.”

“You guys stole my tech from me, and I’m going to sue you for a hundred million dollars.”

I had an occasional desire in the future/past to slap the grin from Steven Fredrick’s puss. But here and now, I just wanted him to go somewhere far away.

“You do that, Steve,” I said. “I didn’t know you invented anything.”

“Don’t think I won’t! I did better than invent something. I supplied their funds. I made them rich.”

“If I were you, the first thing I’d do is zip up my fly.” I pointed.

He looked down, horrified. His hands searched for his zipper.

“Fooled you! Anyhow, there will be plenty of new tech to bet on. I just wouldn’t count on working with the same people this time around.” I turned back toward my destination.

“Greene won’t take my calls,” he wailed, “Nobody will talk to me”

“Not if they see you coming,” I said, and walked away.

 

 

September 19, 1971, New York, New York

 

in the dark, a hand holds up a cellphone shining brightly

Their Future is calling you

 

 

The DBB advertising presentation was, as expected, sparkling. These people could sell condoms to eunuchs. The trick of doing the same advertising campaign in a couple dozen different languages is to minimize the talking, maximize the montage, and emphasize the message. They had picked “Their future is calling you” as the message. The plan is to enlist timedrifter inventors and creatives as early adopters. They will be the first wave of Wellspring Coop members and leaders. Then we can reach out to realtimers.

 

The spot started with a telephone ringing. A twenty-something woman in business attire answers with “Hello” in whatever language she speaks. Her eyes widen and she holds the receiver away from her ear. From this receiver, a stream of images flows: sleek electric cars, ultra-fast trains, landscapes dotted with giant wind farms, an upscale rural village with solar rooftops and laughing kids riding electric bicycles. The camera passes through the window of a coffee shop, where the clientele are talking animatedly on their cell phones or working on laptops or tablets. A fade to an operating room where middle-aged man is having a robotic surgery. Jump cut to the surgeon seated at her control station. Move in to the video screen. We see what she sees: the inside of a beating heart. Dissolve to an image of a group of young adults, all smiles as they wave you to come with them and then to a jumble of oh-so-cute pre-schoolers laughing and singing. Text appears: Join the Wellspring Coop near you today.

 

At this time, all of the images were hand-drawn with ink and colored pencil on velum, and mounted on boards that were displayed one-at-a-time. In the final renderings, the new technologies will be realistic animated models and mock-ups. Timedrifters will find these scenes relentlessly nostalgic. The magazine and newspaper ads will use the same images and message.

Sophie tried to wheedle them out of one of their photorealistic, masonite iPhone models, just to take it to the Upper East Side and talk into it while walking. Cause a stir.

It would be a whole lot easier if we could post a link to our “homepage.” Instead we have a global call center network collecting information from the curious. Our reply; “Stay Tuned World, we are coming soon to a library near you.” We had chosen local libraries as sites for our visits.

 

After a week of meetings and presentation preparation, we are booked on a direct flight from JFK to London. From there we go to Paris and then Bologna, where the Wellspring Coop franchise central community architect training center will be located. Then we will be visiting selected, early adopter, in-country training sites, first in Tunisia and Botswana in Africa, then over to Madras and Calcutta, Bangkok and Singapore, Sidney and Auckland, Taipei and Tokyo, and finally back to California. Our next trip will cover Latin America.

The La Jolla office will be shut down. The Stapleton Trust headquarters and International Wellspring Coop main office is being outfitted in the San Francisco. Nate wanted this on the West Coast to be closer to East Asia. He figured that China would become a key player in the near future.

Nate insisted on sending us off in style, so we have first class tickets on one of the new Pan American Airlines 747 Clipper Ships. After London, we will be back in the economy section. Our journey will last almost two months, so packing was a bitch. None of our luggage has wheels. I think Wellspring has the patent on these. We’ll need to seed this out as soon as we can.

Sophie chose a colorful tunic and matching bell-bottom pants for travel. She wore three-inch platform shoes. David found a tweed jacket and insisted on wearing this over a black t-shirt and jeans. He said he would do some clothes shopping in London, “Where they actually know fashion.” I went with a Brooks Brothers blue blazer, tan slacks, and a striped tie. Without a laptop, we needed to carry all our presentation materials as transparencies, and our reading material on paper. We shared one travel typewriter.

The first wave of timedrifter literature was now available. At the Pan Am Terminal’s book store, I selected a couple reads from a new series by Charlie Hiaasen. Over Fed is a drug crime story about a small crew of timedrifter future/past FBI agents undoing the wrongs of a gang of realtimer jewelry thieves. Slipped Disc is a comedy adventure about timedrifters upending the rock-and-roll music industry in the South.

The first-class seats were as expansive as they were expensive, with two on the left side of the very front section of the 747 and two on the right. Sophie and David were together, and I was across the aisle with an vacant window seat beside me. Behind us, the spiral staircase led to the upper cabin lounge we could visit whenever the seat-belt light was off. The stewardesses were all slim and attractive in their tailored jackets, colorful scarves over white shirts, modestly short skirts, and bowler hats.

Our cabin was nearly empty. An attendant came by with heated towels, bottles of sparkling water and bowls of cashews. She handed out the day’s menu on large cards.

David was telling Sophie comic horror stories of flying on Eastern European airlines before the Soviet Union collapsed. A stewardess walked to the front of the cabin to give the safely speech. She turned to face us, and became Sarah Dobbins. I stared, slack jawed. Sarah had somehow managed to get even prettier than she was at sixteen. Her face was made up into a vision of ’70s womanhood. Her hair was pulled back into a thick ponytail.

I shushed David and he glowered at me. Then he caught sight of Sarah and smiled. After her pro-forma talk, during which I pretended to be studying the menu, Sarah came over and stood by my seat.

“Hello Next Wave,” she said. We grinned at each other, and she touched my shoulder.

“Doctor Dobbins, I presume.”

“No heart attacks allowed on this flight, Jeremy.” She wagged her finger at me.

“I’ll try to contain my excitement,” I said. “Your outfit isn’t helping.”

“Takeoff is super busy,” she said. “I’ll come back later to talk.”

David spoke up, “Miss, I’d like a Manhattan before takeoff.”

Sarah turned to them. “Once we are in international air space, I can serve Jeremy a martini,” she said. “But you two are restricted to soft drinks.”

“Then, I’ll have a Sprite,” David said, and smiled.

Something in that smile, I thought.

“Coke, please,” Sophie said.

Sarah nodded, “More cashews?”

“That would be marvelous,” David said. His eyes were soaking in Sarah’s form in a very grownup manner. She walked back to the galley. David watched her go.

Sophie leaned across David, “How do you know a Pan Am stew? Do you have a secret life you haven’t told us about?”

“We both escaped the same small town,” I said.

Sarah returned with their refreshments on a tray. “I’ll be back after brunch is done, we can catch up,” she said to me.

She took a few orders from the other passengers before returning to the galley. Again, David watched her. As he did, his hand slipped into his jacket pocket and withdrew two liquor singles. He passed a Bacardi to Sophie, and cracked open a Stoli for himself, emptying this into his glass of Sprite.

 

After takeoff and a brunch that would last me all day, a stewardess cleared away the china, and the cabin settled in for the remainder of the Atlantic crossing, with dinner scheduled just before landing. Sophie and David decamped for the upper lounge, where they could play backgammon on a table.

I was too excited to read a book, so I pretended to browse the New York Times. I glanced about in anticipation. The coincidence seemed more like a plan. How did Nate know that Sarah was on this flight? I did mention to him that I was hoping to contact Pan Am while in Manhattan, to see if I could leave a message for my friend Sarah, one of their stewardesses. I said I was hopeful she would be free for dinner some time while I’m in town. Sarah’s photo had been on the front page of the Timberville News in February. She looked swell in her Pan Am uniform.

 

* * *

David and Sophie finished the first of their backgammon games, with Sophie winning from behind on two consecutive double sixes. She grabbed the ten-spot bet from the table and tucked it into her purse. Then she sat back and looked around her.

To the rear, the lounge sported a full bar, and at the front, the cockpit door. The stewardess had come by earlier to ask them if they wanted to visit the cockpit. Like they were kids, or something. David told her he was a member of the American Airlines million-mile club. She sighed and went back to the bar.

Sophie said, “You realize, we are sitting in the first class lounge of an enormous jetliner, on a trip funded by petroleum, pharmaceuticals, and real estate, chatting about the end of capitalism.”

“Maybe we’re occupying this space?” David said.

“Mic Check!” he said loudly. The other loungers looked over in alarm. The stewardess rushed up, and asked if they needed anything.

They ordered another round of soft drinks, which David spiked after she left.

After a long slug from his drink, David said, “We could do a counter montage for the coop advertisement. Let me see. ‘Fade into nuns taking selfies in the Vatican’….” He put his hands out like he was framing a film scene.

“Jump-cut to coeds on the beach with dueling selfie-sticks, holding bikini poses…” Sophie said.

They went back and forth with ideas:

·          “a thanksgiving dinner where everybody at the table is glued to their cell phones;

·          a cop on the street using a choke hold on an unarmed black man;

·          A capsized refugee boat in the Mediterranean, with corpses in the water;

·          and videoed from some billionaire’s megayacht;

·          speeding cars running over protesters;

·          the US president tossing rolls of paper towels at hurricane survivors;

·          oil derricks on fire in the gulf;

·          mechanized massive indoor poultry farms;

·          the Kardashians;

·          and the Cardassians;

·          Jar Jar Binks;

·          the Macarena…”

“Enough!” Sophie said.

David slumped in his chair and leaned his head back, eyes closed. Sophie took a large gulp of her rum and Coke and, leaning forward, focused on him.

“You don’t think we’ll make any difference, do you?” she said.

David caught her stare.

“It’s worse,” He said. “I’m pretty sure that if we don’t succeed, then all hope is gone. This is the best conceived, best designed, best funded, and best run global effort I’ve ever seen. We have adapted the best intentional culture practices from dozens of working cooperatives and established commons. Earth has a billion humans who already know what a shit-show capitalism will become over the next decades.”

“You can’t franchise kindness,” Sophie said. “The commons will never simply out-compete the marketplace.”

“You remember how the big social media platforms captured viewers with rage and fear?” David said.

“That’s the easy way. There’s an algorithm for that.” Sophie said. “However, actual kindness and care requires real intention and determination.”

David said, “All we can do is construct an envelope of social practices that valorize authentic interaction. Then we center our culture inside this envelope. You can’t change people by simply ‘changing their minds,’ but you can push them to try new practices and experiences that teach them how to live with more kindness and generosity. You can spotlight normative actions and attitudes. If any cohort in the history of humanity is primed for regrooving, its a billion timedrifters.”

Sophie said, “You know, we’re just cheerleaders. We’ll need millions of others to join the team. What do we actually bring to the table?”

David said, “We bring the table.”

 

It seemed a waste to finally run into Sarah, only to leave her again, or have her leave me again. To be clear, we were never together. In La Jolla, I managed to keep my occasional hookups in the one-night-stand mode. In future/past, I rarely did hookups. I had a string of serious girl friends across a couple decades. Each of them might have become a long-term relationship, but then, one day, we fell apart, until Denise. I told you about Denise.

Sarah and I met on the day, on that day, the Saturday. It feels like… destiny. As far as I know, she wouldn’t even stop over in London, and I’ll never see her again. She might have already found a steady partner. I’m sure she gets a lot of proposals. She’ll be living in New York, and I’ll be out in San Francisco. It’s been years. She might even be engaged or married. I ordered another martini from a stewardess, wondering where Sarah had gone. My inner voice told me I was an idiot. I fully agreed.

 

Sophie said, “Back in 2019, it was clear that any pathway to a better future was a near impossibility. Most people interested in radical change were betting on a violent breakdown of the global economy to trigger a new one.”

David nodded, “Too much capital was locked up in private equity, or in offshore accounts of the one-percenters. Powerful social media platforms had completely colonized the online experience, and the planet was already headed for massive climate disruption. We had just elected a reality show president.”

Sophie said, “Then, in a blink, we are here, today. The new now is about as perfect a culture-change launch pad as we could wish for. Still, we have another problem…”

“Like we need more problems…” David said.

“…the better we succeed, the more that economists will say we failed,” Sophie said.

“What? No unicorn company market bubbles to enchant them?” David said. “No dramatic leap in the gross domestic product?”

Sophie said, “Success for us, well, and the damn planet, will never show up as economic growth. If we really do this right, the global GDP will drop every year.”

“The planetary conviviality index will soar,” David said. “When you want a lot less, you can always get what you need. Sorry, Mick.”

Sophie said, “For the first time, our economy will count everybody’s work, including care work and share work. The hours you spend on child care, or gifting your talent to someone who can’t pay: these are counted and treasured. At least half of what it takes, and what it means, to be a full member of a Wellspring coop happens in this larger, general economy.”

“That was also true in 2019,” David said. “We just didn’t notice.”

“Do you think Jeremy and that gorgeous stewardess are an item?” Sophie asked, lowering her voice.

“I sensed some eagerness on both sides,” David said. “At least, they’ve got the equipment for it.” He rummaged through his coat pockets. He frowned. No more singles. “I hear there are lot’s of great adult things to do in San Francisco, with the emphasis on adult, which I am not. Maybe there’s a neighborhood park with a swing set I can use. Oh, crap.” He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly.

“There is something we need to discuss,” Sophie said, louder than she had planned.

She came around the table and sat down in the padded chair next to David’s. She put her arm over his shoulder. He looked away and then back at her. His eyes connected with hers, his head tilted a bit. He raised an eyebrow. It was a gesture she remembered from the future/past David. He was signaling his full attention. He knew how to listen. Second-wave feminists had taught him well.

She said, “Jeremy mentioned that it might be good for one of us to spend, well, some time in Bologna, to stay in step with how they are training the franchise community architects.”

The jet rattled over some choppy air and was quiet again.

“He’s got a point,” David said. “But I’m already booked into coordinating with the franchise honchos in San Francisco.”

“I know. I meant me.”

He nodded. His mouth grew tight.

She continued, “Maybe it’s better that we’re not together for a while. You can use this time to figure out that being really young, and kind of old, at the same time is a situation very few humans get to grok. Sure, there are a whole bunch of us at this moment, but we are the only ones in the last five thousand years. Just think of what we’re able to accomplish with the gift of another half-century of living!”

She stroked David’s hair. He took her other hand in his.

She said, “You have a lot of joy in you, Davey. Let it out. Treat the next few years like a happiness sabbatical. Or get fierce. Act as though you are in the last months of your dissertation, when no woman with any sense should get within ten feet of you until you finish it, or it finishes you.

“Either way, just give growing up it’s own time. Understand that you will wake up some day soon, and you will be the randy, teenage image of your adult celebrity academic self, an icon of pubescent virility and sexy intellect. They’ll need the jaws of life to pry the hoard of hopeful, horny post-Marxist sociology- and lit-crit coeds away from your naked prone form in the bookstore. And I’ll be in there at the bottom of the pile.”

“How did I get naked?”

“We tore your clothes off.”

She kissed him lightly on the forehead. “Honestly. I’m not at all ready for sex, myself. And I get to look forward to years and years of monthly menstrual periods. I pray to God I don’t get my first period on this trip. Here’s a future warning. Way, way later, when I’m in menopause, you be wise to keep your distance, at least on some days. Some days, I will go full Foxy Brown on your ass, and not in a good way.”

“Sounds like you’re already planning our retirement.”

“You keep an eye out for our dream house when we hit Costa Rica on the next trip. But now, I’ve got to be in Bologna by December.”

“You’ll be surrounded by cute Italian boys.”

“They can sniff my bicycle seat for all I care. I’m there to work hard and have fun. Old lady/teen girl fun. Bike rides in the country side and art museums in town. Gelato and cinema. De Sica films. And Fellini. And Visconti. And…”

“I pity any man who tries to pinch your butt.” David said.

Still smiling, Sophie moved her arm slightly. The hand David had used to hold onto hers was now in her grasp. She lifted her arm, locking his wrist into a position where any movement he could make caused instant, excruciating pain. Immobilized, he had no choice but to laugh as she bent her head forward. She kissed him full and long on the lips.

 

Sarah appeared at my seat, and stood facing me. I dropped the newspaper on the seat beside me and said, “Hey there!”

“You’re looking good, Jeremy,” she said.

“Not as good as you,” I said. “High fashion suits you.”

“It’s all a front,” she said. “I’m a hard-working girl in a gilded cage.” Her smile, the one she kept on for her job, fell into a pensive frown.

“Perhaps you’re ready to move on?” I said.

She nodded. “Tell me about your work. Give me something to really smile about.”

I gave her the one-minute intro to franchised Wellspring coops and the Stapleton Trust.

“Stapleton?”

“I had a small part in getting this project up and rolling.”

“I’ve had a lot of customers up here in first class who were angry and scared about Wellspring.”

“It has been fun,” I admitted, “Pretending to be evil.”

She said, “Your friend, David. I diddone read a couple of his books. Amazing intellect. And Sophie looks really sharp.”

“Sophie diddone wrote the original article that exposed the problem we hope to help solve. I say ‘help’ because no single group or plan can accomplish anything at this scale. We are only planting seeds. All of the work will be done by millions of others. Or it won’t.”

“I’ll bet on you, Next Wave,” Sarah said, “Any day.”

“With a bit of luck, we might nudge the global economy into trying something different.”

“Different, as in ‘better’?”

“That’s the rub. When you push the system over the edge of its known horizon, you don’t control the new direction it will take. I’ll stick with ‘different’ for now. Tell me, where would you rather be today?”

Sarah glanced around. In a low voice she said, “I’ve got a friend working at a hospital in Berkeley, California. She says she can get me into a program there to restore my medical certification.”

“Doctor Dobbins redux?”

She nodded, “It’s a vocation, not a job.”

“So, go for it.”

“I’m signed on here for another two years. I have friends that rely on me. I’ve got a lease on a flat in the West Village. And I still enjoy waking up in a different city. Speaking of which, I have a two-day layover in London.”

Her new smile was the real one. Full of invitation. She leaned forward and touched my hand on the seat arm. “They book us into the Edwardian in Soho,” she said.

It was now clear that Nate was up to no good, or, in my case so very, very good. “That’s my hotel,” I said.

She laughed. “Suspiciously convenient,” she said.

“I had nothing to do with the arrangements. But I agree. Perhaps we should be careful. Dark forces could be at play.”

“We will outwit them by meeting tonight in the lobby bar at, say, 11 p.m.?” she said.

“Great. But that’s too late for dinner, even in London.”

Her hand enveloped my wrist, she raised my arm, and, with practiced form, pretended to take my pulse. She grinned and winked at me.

“Hmmm… A hundred and thirty. You are excited. Tonight, we’ll just go to your room after a drink. I’m thinking we could, you know, play doctor.”

Chapter 6: Stapleton Trust

March 14, 1972, San Francisco, California

 

street shot of Embarcadero Plaza office building

Stapleton Trust SF

 

 

At the Trust, I got a package from Bologna, Italy today: a hundred-page report from Sophie, which also included details of the first graduating class at the Coop University.

In Bologna, Coop U. trains the trainers. These trainers will teach coop community architects at twenty-five regional Coop University campuses on five continents. Each of the hundreds of community architects will work inside a coop and train dozens of small-team leaders. The community architects report back to the Wellspring non-profit headquarters in San Francisco. Once we get our internet up, they will also share laterally across the planet.

A cassette tape in the box was addressed to me. I popped this into my brand new Walkman and pushed “play.”

Sophie’s voice;

“Hi Boss! Greetings from Italy. Please circulate this report as you see fit. The ideas in here are so 2019 they make me ache for Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X.

In La Jolla, David and I thought we’d captured the whole schema of open cooperatives. It turns out we were just dancing around the edges. Fortunately, we’ve got a dozen really sharp late-career willbewho cooperative theorists—now in their teens—who bring lifetimes of experience inside city commons and worker coops. This cadre has replaced our clever ideas with actual working designs. We had to chuck out a couple career academics who had never seen the inside of a factory, but who were bent on leading the show. We are also making friends in good places.

There’s a whole cohort of post-capitalist practitioners in Barcelona who are happy to coordinate with us. We have feelers out to regenerative farming groups in Ireland and New Zealand, and open housing operations in Oregon and Kenya. David connected us up with the socialist economist alliance, now based in Chile, where Allende is still in power. We are looking for connections with alternative energy activists.

Nimali Rasanayagam is our spark plug. She runs the faculty team like a champion. The curriculum they built for coop community architect trainers takes five weeks to complete. To graduate, they must do well enough in this course to go back and teach it to others. They have another eight weeks of intensive team-leader, organizational culture-building workshops. Nimali calls this her ‘community architect boot camp.’ The first class of seventy-eight trainers graduated and returned to their home schools last week. The next class starts after a short Spring break. I’ll hang here through the next cohort. Then I’ll head back your way.”

I read Nimali Rasanayagam’s autobiographical statement in the report, reconciling this with Sophie’s descriptions. Born in Kandy, Sri Lanka, Nimali went to Singapore University and then Oxford University for a masters. She got hired by the United Nations to work at the OECD. When the civil war started in Sri Lanka, she tried to get her family out, but her father, a high-level officer in the Ceylon Administrative Service, was killed in a bombing incident.

Nimali spent a decade working on city-level resilience planning. Then she got involved in the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain. Finally, she moved to Bologna, where the City was opening up to commons-based community wealth-building efforts. When the time quake hit, Nimali was back in Kandy, thirteen years old, and ready to pick up where she left off. Sophie described her as fierce, quick, and funny.

The report included a group faculty photograph. They were standing in a stone courtyard surrounded by a classical brick Italianate facade of arches and ornaments. Several olders, being generally taller, took up the back row. In front were timedrifters, mostly teens, standing as confident as a parliamentary committee, or a West Side Story gang, or both.

Nimali was front and center, next to Sophie. Nimali was wearing a bright Ceylonese batik top and white bell-bottom pants. Her copper skin contrasted with her blue eyes. Her abundant raven hair was caught up in a braid. Something about her demeanor made me really happy she was on our side.

I pushed play again.

“I know you might never get around to reading this report, Boss, so I’ll summarize it for you. The franchise rules for the open, collaborative, networked cooperatives (OCNC) are built from the best ideas from a couple hundred years of cooperative societies, from Nobel Prize winning design principles for commoning, from 2019 feminist economics, from platform cooperative principles, and from open-source community governance practices. These rules are mostly self-evident, only as complex as they need to be, and really easy to audit. We can tell right away went a franchise goes off the rails. The trainer training includes several expected failure conditions and their solutions. We will be capturing new failure modes as we experiment and iterate. Some rules are governing constraints. Most of them are enabling constraints.

You can dive into that distinction in the report. All systems use both types. It’s like English. The grammar governs acceptable use, and the semantics enables poetry.

The rules we use govern and enable what Nimali calls a ‘thick culture,’ a culture with many demands and frequent rewards, mostly felt as a deep form of belonging, an open invitation to intimate conversations, and generalized gratitude for others. The OCNC culture is anti-hierarchical, powered by reciprocity, and forgiving whenever mistakes are owned.

You are not required to succeed to belong. You are required to own the actions you take and their effects on others. Here’s something I learned. A lot of the work of governing the OCNC is handed off to the culture. Members learn to govern themselves. It’s not a management plan, in the “best practices” mode. All we do, and can do, is promote learning the rules, acting on these, and turning action into poetry.

Think of this culture as a dance, a great social dance you get to join. But you must learn the steps. You are expected to get better at it, and you must understand that this dance is not about you. You need to surrender to the dance before the dance of culture can bring you what it offers.

‘What does it offer?’ I asked Nimali.

She said, ‘Everyday fun and laughter, even when things are tough. Occasional joy, which you share with others. Depending how generous you are, a lasting sort of happiness you can rely upon. And the comfort of knowing you are always cared for. A portfolio of intangibles that you cannot come by on the open market, and free from perverse incentives.’

‘Wow. I do not understand how this can possibly fail’ I said to her.

Nimali laughed at that. ‘This kind of thick culture was planet-wide just a thousand years ago, after being dominant within human society for maybe a hundred-thousand years. This is the culture our genes evolved to thrive within. Then our brains got ahead of our hearts.

Spin forward a thousand years. In the mid-1970s, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher willhavesaid, “There is no such thing as society.” And people will nod and agree. Yes, thick cultures do fail. Thatcher also said there’s no alternative to the marketplace. I’m looking forward to proving her wrong.’

I told Nimali that I read how the UK Conservatives have abandoned Maggie in the new now. They’re looking for the right timedrifter to run against Callagan. Of course, Labor should also find a timedrifter to run. Tony Blair is hot to go again. My money is on Richard Branson.

Nimali said that for the first five-to-seven years, we will be working on the organizational culture side while we bootstrap production within our coop network. We have a lot of barriers to overcome, in terms of production. I mean, we need to build the foundries that produce the machines we will use to produce the goods we require. The only way to do this is to enlist the help of the state.

Without partnerships between us and city and national governments, we will fail. We can’t finance a whole start-up economy from the inside, and we won’t pursue private equity investors. Even the smallest silicon chip foundry is a big investment. Public finance for local production capacity pays-off in the near future. The governments get their investment back, and the community gets the production capacity to make essential goods.

We need to out-compete the corporate lobbyists without access to their deep pockets. We are recruiting as many timedrifters as we can who diddone worked inside their nation’s government agencies. Our coop members will also need to be active in the political process. That’s an advantage we have. Nobody’s marching in the streets to defend Pepsi.

Nimali predicts that half of all OCNCs will face failure in the first three years. Finance will be tight, and some will not achieve a stable internal economy. Others will fail because of skewed expectations, poisonous personality mixes, and skilled incompetence.

Skilled incompetence is a real thing, Boss. It’s when we have self-appointed leaders who have spent years learning the wrong way how to lead. They get really skillful at manipulating people, instead of engaging people. They offer solutions that can’t be questioned. They call this ‘expertise,’ but it’s a lot more like ‘excrement.’ And they are everywhere in business. David says the academy is infested too.

‘Half!’ I said to Nimali. ‘So many?’

She said, ‘Do not worry, Sophie. We hope to fail forward. Our members will keep learning. They become better at being coop members and leaders over time. Right now we are all new at this, even the trainers we’ve graduated. Getting a few years of experience will make a huge difference in the failure rate. Experience in a thick culture makes it easier to interact. The norms become second-nature, the opportunities for sharing become more apparent. The celebrations become more fun.

You know, we include regular celebration events in our timelines and budgets. These events are self-organized. Celebrations perform culture. They display the social work of culture. They are also diagnostic for our coop managers, who track these very closely. How many people are included? What’s the level of engagement? How much fun was it?

“I take it the ‘culture as a dance’ has some actual uses?” I said.

“You bet. On the dance floor, everything is out in plain sight. When cultures go sour, celebrations are the canary. What we look for is a year-to-year increase in celebration participation and enthusiasm, as members get better at doing these. Unlike the neoliberal market’s thin culture, ours is a shared learning environment. You cannot be an “expert” consumer, just an over-consumer, which is a kind of addiction. We help individuals become expert at being human.’

I said, “We need many more of these.”

O.K., Boss. One other thing. That advertising campaign the Nate paid for; it’s getting huge play across dozens of nations. The trainers we sent out last week are already reporting a groundswell of local interest. The energy here at Coop U. is incredible. You should visit.

I know, you’re super busy with the Trust and all. But… you and Sarah need a real honeymoon, not a week in Carmel, and Tuscany is just the place. We are causing so much good trouble here that I can’t complain. Get David drunk this weekend; he needs some ‘adult time.’ I’ll be in touch. Ciao.”

I clicked “stop” on my Walkman.

My office window looked East, toward the Embarcadero and the bay, where they were busy knocking down the five-year-old, elevated freeway, not waiting for the 1989 earthquake.

The Trust was handling transactions licensing its patents for short-term, non-exclusive commercial use. It favored small start-ups over large, established firms. Some of this income will pay for Coop University’s activities. The Trust hands off budget considerations to the non-profit, but the trustees will enjoy reading Sophie’s report.

 

* * *

August 19, 1974 7:10 a.m., Berkeley, California

 

The Hills of Berkeley

 

 

This is the end of my story.

At least, for now. I decided against chronicling the many struggles that Wellspring Coops endured in these months. I’m not writing a novel here. Besides, much of this recent history will become clear and public during the next phase of my life. There will be new stories down the road.

When we hit September 2, 2019 again, assuming we are not tossed back to 1967 once more, there will be an accounting. I’ll get to ask myself if I’ve made any kind of difference to the planet. I’ve got a whole lot of living to do before that.

The future is still open for grabs. All we’ve attempted is a corrective to what William Gibson willhavesaid: “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Wellspring took a half-century of a digital innovation future and spread this as evenly as possible around the planet.

Nate objects, although with a smile, when I tell him he will go down in history as the Twenty-first Century’s global Andrew Carnegie. In the end of the Nineteenth Century and the start of the Twentieth, Carnegie funded more than two-thousand public library buildings, mostly in the US, but also in a dozen other countries. Nate has now filled these and other facilities around the world with free-to-use, high-tech inventions, and a cooperative network to share them. The cooperative governance patterns Wellspring uses are called the Greene Principles.

In January of 1972, the calendar day “August 19” was recognized as a national holiday in the US. “Time Day” celebrates the arrival of tens of millions of timedrifters. President Kennedy signed the holiday bill, and spoke about the impact that timedrifters had made in just a few years. Well, he aint seen nothin’ yet.

Time Day is here again. No wake-up alarms went off in the morning. No rush-hour traffic noise drifted up from Interstate 80. Every timedrifter remembers the moment they arrived in 1967. This day has a very personal history for a billion people on Earth. For me, this was the day I connected with Sarah Dobbins.

I woke shortly before seven this morning and rolled onto my back. I stretched my hand out. I was alone in bed. Then I heard kitchen noises. Sarah was in her second trimester, and not sleeping that great. She’s usually up before the alarm. I will go help with breakfast, dear reader. First, I will catch you up with some details.

Sarah and I did play doctor in London. Several times. It’s good to be nineteen. The whole night and day was exceptional, mostly because we wanted it so much. I’m old enough to know when intention and affection are in sync.

She flew back to New York, and I flew on to Paris with Sophie and David, and, from there to our other Wellspring junket destinations. In Bangkok, I reconnected with a gem seller not far from the Oriental Hotel. I diddone visited his store in 2001. The ruby he sold me then was appraised for more than what I paid. This time, I chose a sizable cabochon-cut blue star sapphire, at a low, 1971 price. Perfect for an engagement ring.

I sent Sarah a love letter, actually an aerogram, from Sidney. I figured a love telegram would send the wrong message. My desire is consuming and urgent, but not desperate. I opened my heart and confessed my sincere affection for Sarah, and moaned about how hard it was to be away from her. I told her that I would come to see her in New York as a soon as I was back in the States. If my plan was a horrible mistake, I said, she can send me a short telegram at the Wellspring Coop office in San Francisco. Just tell me I’m a fool, I wrote, and I will never contact you again.

Our reunion in New York was as dazzling as the day in London. It’s still too new and personal for me to share with you. Also, I was in a love fog most of the time and cannot be a reliable witness. We were married a week later at City Hall in lower Manhattan. Then I found out that getting married meant the Sarah could no longer be a stewardess, another great excuse to move away and start a new life. My own job was opening up in San Francisco.

We traveled West, first to Timberville for the obligatory wedding reception at the Country Club, and then down to Berkeley. We stumbled onto this Julia-Morgan-designed house on Spring Street, not far from Peets Coffee and the recently opened Chez Panisse. The down-payment emptied my savings.

Sarah’s friend came through with the internship that lead to Sarah’s re-certified medical license. Sarah is now a licensed MD. I have almost finished up my term as a trustee of the Stapleton Trust. And, yes, I did swagger a bit at our wedding reception. Sarah never looked more beautiful. Mom was overjoyed; Dad was buoyant; Sis and her husband came up from Tucson with little Robin.

Nate wanted to manufacture a career job for me at Wellspring, but I had other plans. Nate and his office will continue to guide Wellspring into the Twenty-First Century. He admitted that his family’s fortune will suffer, with so many pharmaceuticals going into generic production and real-estate prices likely to stay in line with the rest of the economy. Which is just fine with him.

Nate says, “Any economy that creates billionaires faster than day-care centers needs to be rebooted.” He started a list of future/past billionaires who will never achieve this dubious title in the new now. His name is first on the list. He calls it the MisFORTUNE 500. I see a website in its future.

A few years ago, in 1968 in the new now, I trademarked “The Next Wave” as a title for a publication. In late 1972, the Washington Post decided to go ahead with its OMNI publication. Soon after that, I discovered that the Chandler-run Los Angeles Times was looking to finance a tech-centric popular science outlet, focused on start-ups and new now innovations. I approached them with a proposal to bankroll The Next Wave Magazine.

Our meeting at Musso’s went very well, and they had a proposal to me before I left LA. The Next Wave’s new office is South of Market in San Francisco. Proximity to Silicon Valley is still a factor. Our first issue will be out this October. I’ve got better funding than before, and access to global connections through the Times’ international news syndicate.

I’m rehiring a gaggle of reporters from the old magazine. I yanked William Gibson down from Canada and grabbed young Bruce Sterling. Our writing will be spectacular. We’ll be a print monthly for now, and online as soon as broadband capacity gets built out. Of course, the first year or two will be filled with tech news coming out of Wellspring cooperatives.

Sophie has signed up to be a senior editor. She flew in from Tokyo midweek. The Asian branches of Wellspring Coop network are blossoming everywhere but China.

Sophie and David share an apartment in the Haight. They are “fifteen going on sixty-seven.” California Supreme Court had ruled that timedrifters were simultaneously biological teens and adults. They had some of the rights of adults. One of the arguments was that, should the time comet have moved us forward instead of backward, fifteen-year-old time drifters from 1967 would still be under-age in their mental capacity, but physically they would be senior citizens, and so, legal. Why should the opposite mode be illegal?

David was just offered a three-year visiting professorship at Berkeley in a newly-funded program that brought in notable timedrifter anthropologists and sociologists, including Appadurai, Sahlins, Wallerstein, Habermas, and Giddens. Foucault, a realtimer, but still Foucault, is scheduled in for a full semester next year. David will be the young Turk of the group. They have been challenged to “refactor the social sciences for a new now world.” David said he’d rather refactor the new now world directly. At least, he says, the conversations will be lively.

Sophie and David are joining us for dinner tonight. Dr. Sarah Dobbins is working all day at the Berkeley Free Clinic on Durant, so I’m in charge of the meal. I’ve also got to get up and help with breakfast. Like, now.

 

The sun is now low enough in the West to brighten up our wood-paneled dining room. I’ve set the table, an oak craftsman affair, also designed by Julia Morgan. Mid day, I made a run to the Berkeley Marina Fish Market, where I found Dungeness crab and local king salmon in season. I grabbed the rest of the menu items from the Berkeley Food Coop supermarket. I expect Sarah around six. She normally goes straight to the shower after a day at the clinic.

Sophie and David arrived from the City at five-thirty. They both flopped onto the living room sofa.

David said, “We would have picked up a bottle of Pinot for the meal, but, you know…”

“We’ve got plenty,” I said. While David and Sophie could legally have sex and get married, all the other State childhood-protection laws remained in effect. The State’s argument is that, in a couple decades there will be no underage timedrifters, so changing all the laws now would just create the need to change them back later. I said, “Sarah will be home soon. How was your holiday?”

Sophie said, “Yesterday we went to the ‘Time Heals’ concert at the Oakland Coliseum. It was amazing. They’re all still kicking it. It’s like Woodstock in the afterlife.”

Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Duane Allman, Gram Parsons, and Jim Morrison, backed up by The Band, and with a host of famous music guests, were on a major nationwide summer tour, celebrating their new-now “Not Dead Yet” status. T-shirts with this logo and their faces on them were everywhere this summer. Since they had also not fully abandoned the lifestyle choices that cut short their existence in the future/past, most timedrifters expected their rock idols to show up dead at some point. But for now, they were all alive and singing. Timedrifters paid a premium to catch their act.

Realtimers had no memories of how these rockstars diddone died, but are enthused by stories of diddone tragedies averted in the new now. It gave them hope. Most of them were eager to extend their own life spans in the coming decades.

David said, “Owsley was good to us.” He winked at me.

It’s still 1974. The Bay Area is awash with LSD, and also shrooms, and some peyote. We are pregnant at the moment. Sarah also sees a lot of careless overindulgence of recreational street drugs at the clinic. Pinot in moderation is our current vice. We’re still not drinking any fucking Merlot.

David continued, “Jerry and Linda came on stage, and so did the governor. It looks like the election season is hotting up.”

Sophie said, “Governor Kayes gave Wellspring a shout out. He said he would be adding Wellspring maker labs to all state high schools. The California Civilian Volunteer Corps has a battalion of tech nerds it will point in that direction. Kayes said the only way to predict the future is to invent it. Quite a change from the future/past Reagan days.”

On February 3, 1968 in the new now, California Governor Ronald Reagan died during an afternoon nap at his 45th Street Sacramento house, where he and Nancy lived, instead of in the governor’s mansion. The autopsy revealed a surprise. He died from a massive heroin overdose. Martina, the eight-year-old daughter of the groundskeeper, confessed.

She said, “When this bastard diddone closed down the mental hospitals, my sister was left homeless on the streets of San Diego. She was raped and murdered there.” Attempts to try little Martina as an adult were denied by the California Supreme Court.

Lieutenant governor Robert Finch took over as governor. Finch narrowly lost the 1970 election to Alan Kayes, a timedrifter computer scientist, innovator, and future/past CEO, who was drafted by the Democratic Party when timedrifters overtook the party convention. Kayes’ election was the new typical. He had demonstrated competence, intelligence, a concern for his employees, and vision for the future. He was thirty years young.

The case for electing timedrifters to public office was clear: they’d bring an extra fifty years of future experiences to the job, and they are young enough to be passionate about change, and to be concerned about the impacts of their decisions.

A future/past career as a politician was not an asset. If you were a lifetime politician, then you’ve diddone your time, and should do something else in the new now. Jerry Brown is the exception to this rule. I guess if you also practice Zen, have diddone served as the mayor of Oakland, and are dating a rock star, you get to run for the Senate.

I had interviewed Alan Kayes several times in the future/past. He was talented enough to be a one-person start-up. He could code, and also created a new coding language. He could imagine and invent a new product and design its manufacture. He could, and did, build convivial workplaces where his employees brought all of themselves into the job. He willhavesaid a dozen of the most famous quotes around Silicon Valley. This last winter, I wrote a feature piece about Alan for The Atlantic, based on our interactions in the future/past. I like to think I’ve contributed to his reëlection.

While we waited for Sarah, I grabbed us some bottles of Anchor Steam beer, which is as close to a craft brew as we get in the mid ’70s. I asked Sophie about her recent trip.

Sophie said, “Tokyo was great, but not as fantastic as it was in the old 1990s. You know how I love that city…”

I said, “Save the juicy travel talk for dinner, will you. Sarah likes that stuff. I think she misses her globe-hopping days. What about Wellspring? What’s new in the open coop world?”

Sophie nodded and began, “The world in 1974 is a mess, although not nearly as much so as 2019. Today, each nation we operate in has its own relationship to new technology. Some of the ex-colonies retain administrative systems that were originally created to stop them from producing new tech. They were supposed to trade basic goods to the colonizers in exchange for technology products. The same bureaucrats who were charged with denying licenses for new tech are now tasked to promote and sometimes require new technologies they, themselves, don’t understand.”

“The locals we train as cultural architects in our franchise college in Bologna go back to their countries and leverage the technology acumen of local innovator timedrifters to motivate the realtimers to experiment and play with all this technology they now can get for free. It’s a productive learning situation. They are bootstrapping new production capabilities as fast as their resources allow. The new Peace Corps tech squads are helping to translate the patent know-how into appropriate solutions on the ground. And now the European Community is also sending out technology crews…”

David said, “Nerds without Borders is back, too…”

I said, “Domestically, we’ve got more than two-thousand geek-level Civilian Volunteers Corps members in place this year inside our coops. They are leading a coordinated effort to design new convivial machines to manufacture coop-ready devices to be used to produce a wide range of goods.”

Sophie said, “We are committed to cosmolocal solutions, with design and learning across the planet, and widely distributed manufacturing of anything heavier than a bicycle. No megafactories in China filling containers with goods for Africa.”

I said, “I’ve got some news for you. The American Wellspring Coop network, in partnership with the Nerduino Confederacy, has just created their own proto-Internet service provider network, with internally-manufactured, smart dial-up modems, routers, and switches. They’ve got an open-source hardware motherboard design for a computer with USB port for a keyboard and VGA out to an antenna adapter, so people can just use their current TVs for monitors. Ideally, we’ll soon be manufacturing these components in a couple dozen regional coop manufacturing centers around the globe.

In a couple years, we’ll be able to communicate by internet like we diddone in the early 1990s. We even have a first generation web browser. This tech will be shared globally in the coming months. The Stapleton Trust is licensing it for commercial use. We’ll distribute the income from these licenses across the global Coop networks to subsidize the global production and distribution of modems. At that point, Coop communities will form the largest, best connected global society in the new now.

David said, “Show him.” He nodded toward Sophie’s backpack on the floor.

Sophie bend down and withdrew a translucent grey plastic keyboard with a small display screen from this. She handed it to me.

She said, “This keyboard from our Coop network in Korea has a USB connector, but also its own text display screen. It can store and output an ASCII file to print or save. In Japan, a couple companies are ramping up production of personal-use dot-matrix printers.”

“Companies?” I said. “No Coops?”

David said, “Prior patents. Anyhow, we can’t produce everything ourselves. For one thing, the production capabilities available through existing corporations are too plentiful to ignore. They already make everything. Our job is to cover all the basic technology requirements for a productive flourishing society, so that we aren’t held hostage to the marketplace. We also do this without fucking over the environment locally or externalizing costs to somewhere else. Then we build cultural practices that honor how we make and use our technology.”

Sophie said, “Having coops with governance that fully includes women and younglings is sometimes the hardest cultural challenge. There’s a whole lot of patriarchy around.”

David said, “Remember, 1967 was closer to the end of World War I than it was to 2019. Commercial jets had only been around a decade. The US Civil Rights Act was three years old. Most of the African colonial states had recently become independent. In many nations, the young adult timedrifters from 2019 might as well have been aliens from another world.

“A world with six-billion smart phones,” I said.

David said, “Well, it’s seven years later. A lot of that initial weirdness is gone. Most timedrifters have grown up into adulthood. Some will be the same stubborn jackasses they were in 2019, but the majority will have reflected on their years and are fully primed for the next best thing. That’s what we are offering them. I just hope that the dystopia that willhavebeen 2019 is not coloring their expectations. Too bad there isn’t an optimism pill.”

Sophie nodded, glumly. “Building a new culture is hard work. Technology will not ‘save the day.’ New technology will not solve anything all by itself. The main culture change that any new technology produces is to optimize user habits and attitudes for the use of that technology. In other words, left alone, technology remakes its users for its own purposes…”

David said, “You don’t use Facebook, Facebook uses you.”

I said, “Sophie, you visited several coops. Any first impressions?”

Sophie brightened up. “I would totally live in any one of our Coops in Okinawa. They’re reviving traditional textile methods, and pottery, and metal and bamboo work. They’re gardening everywhere, and cultivating rice. They pooled their resources and bought two compact rapier looms and a circular knitter. These use Stapleton patents. They can make clothes for their community. They make their own bicycles and cookware. They even have some first-generation solar panels up and running, with many more on order. Their umeshu plum wine is excellent.

Mizushima Terako came by a couple months ago and set them up with regional time-banking endeavor. Their community architects have reported on this to the Wellspring HQ. I think it will spread across all our coops. I was there during the Obon festival. The Coops contributed many of the dance groups for their town celebrations. It was rowdy and bawdy and wonderful. Little kids and olders all dressed in their festival kimonos.”

“What about the failed Coops?” I said. “Not to be a downer. But…”

Sophie said, “I get it, Boss. A full report. I asked to meet with a community architect who was winding up a failed Coop. This was in a business district of a town on the edge of a large US Marine Corps air station. The short story is this: too many of the young folks here were connected into jobs supporting the air station. Family members were split between the Coop and these other jobs, which paid better, and didn’t require any volunteer or care work. The Coop failed to take off, and we shut it down.

Sarah arrived home just then, and waved at us as she headed upstairs. “See you in twenty,” she called.

“I’ve got to go get the fish in the oven,” I said, “But first, do we have any sense that what we’ve started here will fly on its own at some point?”

Sophie paused and then spoke. “In the forty-seven nations where we are active, our goal is to maintain a ten-percent annual growth rate. We want to double and redouble our social economic footprint by the time our patents expire in fourteen years. And we need to seed more nations, particularly China.

If we don’t grow our win-win economy fast enough in this first phase, we will get swallowed up by zero-sum market forces. Capitalism’s been around for centuries. It owns the planet right now. We are going to be mega-fragile until we hit the tipping point.”

“Which is…?”

David said, “Coops have been ten-percent of the general economy for decades without making inroads into the center of manufacturing and consumption. Right now, our best guess is that we need to have thirty percent of global primary production to provision our coops inside their own commons. Once we can do that, it’s all a matter of changing our cultural practices to escape the perverse incentives the market can use against us. For that, we need allies we don’t know about today. Ours is one little project in a big world. If we had a dozen more at this scale, we could work together and weave a new culture of caring and sharing.”

Sophie said, “Nimali once said to me, ‘Capitalism is just the nightmare you wake up to every morning. All we need to build is a better dream.’”

Nimali visited Sophie and David earlier in the summer, before she voyaged home to Sri Lanka, where they are having their own national reconciliation program to resolve the atrocities of the future/past. I’m pretty sure Sophie and Nimali are also coupling, at least some of the time. I don’t know where David is in this triad. Not about to inquire.

David continued, “We probably need China. However, China is intensely problematic. In the new now, the rapid collapse of the Cultural Revolution has destabilized the central authority structure to a far greater extent than in the future/past. The Gang of Four were captured in the departure lounge of the Hong Kong airport in September of 1967. The last seven years have been chaotic at the top.”

Sophie said, “China has more than a hundred million young timedrifters who are challenging the olders who run the show. This is totally radical for China. No other culture on the planet carries more respect for elders than China.”

David said, “A lot of them spent decades in the future/past working long hours for shit wages assembling technology owned by foreign corporations. Local communists have a hard time arguing against a local ‘technology commons.’ Hell, we’re more socialist than the Chinese willbewhere in 2019.”

Sophie said, “Right now, the bigger problem is from our side. The US has a thicket of cold-war regulations against sharing technology with China. We need to make the argument that leaving China out of the technology mix will have long-term negative consequences. I’d say this will take another five years to sort out. We probably should have incorporated the civic trust in Canada.”

I said, “At least, we have a sympathetic administration. President Carter is astute and has a capable cabinet. I hear that Vice President Sanders is ready to travel to Beijing any time. Excuse me, I’ve got to get dinner going.

Help yourselves to more beer. It’s in the fridge.”

 

At dinner, which I served and acted as waiter, keeping glasses full and dishes moving, Sophie and David caught up with Sarah. I could tell that Sarah was almost ready to crawl into bed, but she was also really enjoying the company.

Sophie said, “How does it feel being pregnant so young?”

Sarah said, “The last time, I would never have considered getting pregnant at twenty-one. Of course, I was in my first year of medical school, and could not imagine even getting a goldfish. But this time, it seems that life is upside down. I’d rather be a mom at twenty-two, drive the family station wagon through my thirties, and be ready for anything when I hit forty. Never having kids before, it’s a joy doing this right now. Except when it’s not.” She put her hand on her belly.

I said, “We know it’s a girl. We’ve narrowed down the names to Rebecca or Tracy. The calculus here is complicated. We want names that fit into the current youngling population—nothing bizarre from 2019, no Luna or Bodhi—and, we want to avoid the names of other family member afterkinder, for all the usual reasons.”

Afterkinder child names have become emblematic of the memories of children not yet born in the new now, but who were well loved, and sorely missed, from the future/past. Only parents, and, on certain occasions, relatives and friends, will speak these names in conversation. To do so can bring up a lifetime of memories, and sometimes a sad Sunday. Expectant parents make a list of the afterkinder child names of their family and friends and make sure they don’t name their child any of these.

David said, “What’s it like doing medicine fifty years ago? I mean, today.”

Sarah, “Stepping back fifty odd years in medicine is kind of like visiting a remote country and making due with what’s available. Actually, the most important medical advances are changes in understanding, not chemistry or devices.

Still, we have gene splicing tech in the 1970s, and some therapies against HIV, thanks to Wellspring Medical. We’ll be implementing advanced imaging and other interventions much sooner than in the future/past. Now that we have national insurance, we might even keep more doctors around. Private practice is going to be a lot different. Sophie, how was Tokyo?”

Sophie went into a description of the difference between current 1970s Tokyo and old-time 1990s Tokyo.

Then she concluded, “Now that the CIA’s long-term financing of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in the future/past is public knowledge, the Socialist Party has taken power. There’s a chance for some national politics less connected to the construction industry and less obsessed about rapid industrialization. Still, the keiretsu corporation conglomerates are the real power, and Tokyo is their home.

They say eighty-percent of all political and business decisions in Japan are made within twenty miles of the Tokyo Imperial Palace. That’s why we’re focusing on third-tier towns for our coops. Our Japanese franchise coordinators plan to promote new technology jobs in all the prefectures. I spent twice as much time in Okinawa as I did in Tokyo. But I do enjoy that town! A funny thing happened… ”

She took a sip of her wine and set the glass down.

“On Saturday, my Tokyo contact, Eriko-san, took me around the city. We did the sights in the morning and then went shopping in Shibuya and Harajuku in the afternoon. We were going dancing in Roppongi that evening, so I went back to my hotel in Ginza, near the main train station. I put on my evening wear and we headed out.”

“Eriko thought it might be interesting for me to visit one of the grand old public baths before we nightclubbed, since they would be closed later in the evening. She was right. It was really fun to mix in a crowd of local women bathing in several different tubs, some hot, some cold, and one of them with an electric current, which I didn’t try. A couple of the old gals were, let me just say, curious about my afro. I let them touch it and they giggled like school kids. Only…”

Sophie smiled, remembering. “After the bath, when I got back to my clothes basket in the front dressing room. I looked in basket…”

She glanced around the table.

Sarah said, “Basket…”

“My panties were gone.” Sophie put on her shocked look. Eyes wide, mouth open.

I said, “Someone swiped your panties? What about your purse?”

“I’d put my purse in a small locker by the door. Eriko was angry and embarrassed. She explained to me that there’s this illicit black market on gaijin women’s panties. Thieves grab foreign women’s undies off of outdoor clotheslines or from laundromats. In my case, someone snuck them from my sento basket, to sell, or as a surprise gift for her boyfriend. Eriko said that panties from a black girl are rare in Japan.”

Sarah said, “Who buys these? Why not just get them at a store?”

“It’s a kinky fetish thing. And the buyers pay more for panties that have been worn, preferably for several days. Worn and…”

She crinkled her nose. “…skanky.”

Once the laughter died down, she said, “I was in a bind. Remember, we were dressed for dancing. I was wearing my knee-high, white gogo boots, which I’d carried across Asia for just this purpose. And…” She quelled a grin.

“Go on,” I said.

“…my candy-apple red, woolen miniskirt dress. This one is full-on Twiggy. It barely hits the top of my thighs. I can’t move at all without flashing my panties. They’re like part of the outfit. I bought this on Carnaby Street, where it was just the fashion. It was a hit in Paris, too. But I didn’t dare wear it in Bologna. I’d be whistled deaf on the street. Anyhow, Nimali wouldn’t let me out the door. And, no way could I walk around Tokyo commando like that. I’d get arrested.”

Sarah said, “You’re trapped in a public bath. How did you get out?”

“There was this old woman who had been in the bath with us. Could be eighty. She had tinted her hair some shade of purple. I’m almost crying, wondering how to get to my hotel, and she walks up all naked and everything, bows, and puts a folded pair of clean, pink, granny-panties in Eriko’s hands. Erico looks at me and smiles, and bows to the woman. Eriko handed them to me.

“These briefs are huge, high-rise, could be mens’ boxers. I guess you could fit a Depends inside them. I mentioned paying her, but Eriko signaled no. Eriko explained that the old lady came to bathe with the clothes she wore, and an extra set of clean clothes to wear home. I thanked the lady a whole bunch in my best Japanese.”

Sarah said, “You wore those things to the hotel?”

“Damn straight. And I kept them too. Best travel souvenir ever. A kindness from a stranger.”

David said. “Hold on! We can quit the coop business and jump on this blue-ocean market opportunity. Imagine what Pan Am stewardess panties would sell for in Shinjuku. We need a name.” He thought for a minute. “I know. ‘Funky-Uns’”

Sophie and Sarah stared at him in silence for a long minute. “Never mind,” he said and slumped back in his chair.

I took this lull in the conversation to fill in Sarah on some of the things we discussed before she got home.

‘It all sounds so encouraging,” Sarah said. “Tell me, is there anything you’re missing?”

She looked from me to Sophie, and to David, who nodded and began. “Me, I want to see patents and copyrights replaced with laws that enable open collaboration and rapid sharing. Perhaps governments could offer prizes for innovations, instead of patents. I know the timedrifters in the Electronic Frontier Foundation are working on new laws. Rumor is, the Cluetrain folks are gathering in Boulder. Right now, we’re stuck with property laws linked back to the Roman Empire. Sophie?”

Sophie thought for a minute. “We haven’t touched the built environment. A lot of the barriers to collaboration are built into the cityscapes we occupy. If you have to commute four hours a day to get to the coop, that’s a lifestyle killer. I think all of our coops would work better if we could reimagine the spaces where we live and work. Jeremy?”

I said, “‘Missing’ suggests that we have a plan against which to measure success. A map where “X” marks the spot. Fortunately, we don’t have a plan. None of us has a guiding vision of what everything needs to be like for the planet to ‘win.’ What I see us doing is turning the boat. The future/past was sending us down the stream that ended in a deadly waterfall. We’re steering the present into a new direction. Is it enough to send us down new stream? Will that stream be any less harmful? That’s our hope. I’ll end this metaphor now. What do you think, Sarah?”

Sarah said, “I think you have all underestimated the amount the good you’ve done for the whole planet, and not just humans. You’ve leveraged an abundance of technical knowledge on a fulcrum of positive culture change. The technology is useful and shiny, but the real gift is the new social technology you’ve harnessed. You’ve stealth-loaded kindness and care into a new social model. You jumpstarted conviviality as a requirement for the economy. Kids who grow up in this environment are the ones who will change the planet.”

I said, “The first thing Nate said when I gave him this idea was that it was way too aspirational to succeed.”

Sophie said, “It’s obvious he doesn’t believe that.”

David said, “In my head, I’m sixty-seven years old. Everything I do from now is aspirational. Why should we just accept the world as it is?”

Sarah said, “Jeremy and I are totally snuggled into this house, engaged in our work, and excited about the baby. What’s next in your lives?

Sophie said, “After David’s done with the Berkeley gig, we’d like to spend a decade or so inside a coop somewhere, not in the US, in Botswana or maybe Sri Lanka. Nimali keeps saying how beautiful it is there.”

“You want to make things?” I turned to David, “And you’re planning to steal away with my senior editor?”

David said, “Throw pottery instead of flapping my lips all day? You bet. Better yet, design something new and make it real. I’m thinking I’ll focus on transportation or energy. Figure out how to manufacture a useful appliance for my regional community. Share it with other regions. Experiment and iterate until it’s a good as it needs to be. Make enough of them so they’re cheap.”

Sarah said, “What about you, Sophie. What will you make?”

“I might follow you on the baby train. Then I’d like to try teaching, maybe middle school. I want to expand my writing into biographies. So many great stories out there, right now.”

I said, “You can come back and work at The Next Wave, any time.”

“Thanks, Boss.”

“And bring this loser with you.” I smiled at David.

David said, “I’ll try not to piss them off too badly over at the University. I don’t want to abuse my welcome this time around. Speaking of which. Sarah, you look beat. We should really go.”

I escorted them to the front door. Outside, the setting sun was low over the Golden Gate Bridge. Coming back, I chased Sarah away from the dishes, insisting that she go upstairs and have a nice, hot bath. I’d be up soon. There was a new episode of the Rockford Files on tonight.

 

This is the end of my story.

You might imagine this is a story of the Wellspring Coops and the Stapleton Trust. That story is just beginning. We planted a lot of seeds. If I’m still above ground in twenty years, I’ll write that story. This is a love story.

I was wrong when I woke up in 1967. I thought everybody came back because of some yet unknown law of physics. Far from it. Aphrodite sent me back on that day to find Sarah. In the old now, our love was inadvertently sidetracked by stubborn adolescence. I’ve seen this movie. The Goddess put Sarah in that bikini on the cement deck, posed as lovely as Venus on her shell. Aphrodite sent a billion others back to distract me, but it didn’t work.

Sarah and me, we found one another. End of story. Beginning of life. I’ll catch up with you’all in a couple decades.

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