Keely

This too, will require your patience and perserverence as I yank a story from my subconscious. Again, first draft, don't be too critical.


My granddaughter can explain the whole thing in precise technical terms. How we can go back through her life and watch it from beginning to now. Time travel was what we called it back in my day, but of course in my day it was just science fiction. And it makes sense that we would visit her life first considering that without it none of this would be possible. After all, they didn’t name the thing the KDW 2030 for nothing. Those are her initials and that’s the year she made the breakthrough. Me? I was just honored she thought to take me with her. Truth is, I’d mostly missed her life the first “time” around.
We started at her birth, naturally, and I had been there for that. It was every bit the miracle then as it is today; maybe even more so, since Painaway hadn’t even been thought of at that point and birthing mom’s suffered a good deal more than they do now. Keely Dawn Walton, that’s right, I’m talking about that KDW, popped out right on time all rosy pink and perfect. I got a kick out of watching all the relatives, including myself, grinning and glowing with pride. Turned out that we’d be doing that pride thing throughout Keely’s life, but we couldn’t know that then and I’m getting ahead of the story.
First, I suppose, I ought to explain a few things. This bubble of nothing that Keely invented or maybe I should say discovered, because in a way it was there all the “time,” is something that can be seen through, but not escaped. It gives “travelers” a kind of fly-on-the-wall perspective. They can see and move through the past, but not interact with it. There is no danger of changing anything there and thus altering the future, so you can forget all those old movie and Cineimplants that have “travelers” screwing things up in the present. I put the word travelers in quotations, because that’s what the public has decided to call us, but really there is no sense of movement. It’s more like a theatre experience where all you do is sit and watch. Since each vehicle can only move backwards in time within its occupant’s life span because of its links to the their genetic codes, travelers can only witness what they and their fellow passengers experienced during their own lives. When a “traveler” goes back in “time” he also goes forward. By this I mean that if he is gone to the Past for a day, a day forward will have occurred in the Present. Should the “traveler” upon his return decide to go back to the Past, he would then be able to see himself entering the “time” bubble and disappearing. Trips of longer than a day are seldom undertaken, because there is no way to transport sustenance. Keely will have to explain what really occurs as it’s beyond my ken, but the little I do know is that our physical selves stay seated while some odd chemical rearrangement occurs and then, as a great comedian from my day used to say, away we go.
There is a kind of fast-forward a “traveler” needs to employ to watch the highlights of a person’s life. Viewing in real “time” expends that amount of time from the traveler’s own life and even the most ardent of our historians are not willing to give up what is more than minimally necessary. On my journey of re-acquaintence with Keely, we jumped from her birth to a cold Halloween evening when she, her dad and I Trick-or-Treated around their Denver neighborhood. I had asked to visit that moment because it was the last I would have with Keely for many years. I was impressed both “times” by her stubborn refusal to give in to the cold and go home. Her dad and I were freezing. This toughness would serve her well in the Future.

We next jumped? Skid? Slid? I don’t really know, to a fourth grade piano recital. Keely had resisted the teacher’s urging to play any of the more traditional pieces and opted instead for a composition of her own. From our bubble, we recognized the tune as one that would be a feature in the repertoire of Keely and her cousin Jacksons’s band some years down the road. We could tell that the teacher’s ear was not attuned to the blues/jazz fusion that Keely was putting down, but we could also tell that Keely didn’t care. She knew she was good and mom and pop were there to support her. From the bubble I waved to them as well, but of course, they couldn’t see me. The grown Keely, in the bubble with me, was laughing hysterically at her little self bowing and leaving the stage. “I never realized I was so confident as a kid” she said. “I must have got that from my Grandpop.” I laughed with her then. “Right,” I said. “Your other Grandpop.” Then hop, skip, jump? We were in a chemistry lab, Keely with test tubes in hand.