Keely- Revised Version

KEELY THE KID AND THE KDW-2030
OR
How Keely Invented TimeTravel And Saved The World
By Doc Walton

My granddaughter can explain the whole thing in precise technical terms; how we can go back through her life and watch it from the 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 the world would be far worse off and maybe not exist at all. They named the contraption of tubes and wires and what-not that takes you back the KDW 2030. Those are my granddaughter’s initials and that’s the year she made her breakthrough. I don’t know why she picked me to go with her after all the testing and checking proved it safe - maybe because I’m older than dirt – but I was surely honored to go along. 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. Being born 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, now you get it, 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 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. At least that’s what I was told. “Don’t worry,” the robo-techies said to me, “there is no danger of changing anything back there and altering the future, so you can forget all those old movie and cine-implants that have “travelers” screwing up the Present.” Little did they know! I’ve 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. What actually happens is more like a theatre experience where all you do is sit and watch. Each bubble can only move backwards in time within its host’s life span because of links to his or her genetic codes. Travel passengers can only witness what their host experienced during their life. 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 more chunks of their lives than is minimally necessary.
On my journey of reacquaintance 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 composition 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 by the scowl on her face 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.
When Keely was just a little kid, her favorite movie was Frankenstein, the Boris Karloff version. Her dad had a collection on VHS – no Instascreen in those primitive days – of all the old black and white Universal Studio horror movies and Keely just loved Karloff’s flat headed monster. She had his lock kneed walk down pat and would try to frighten the grown-ups with snarls in her little girl voice. They would feign fear and cry “scary scary” while running away. But it wasn’t just the monster that captivated her. She would light up and pay rapt attention during the scenes in Doctor Frankenstein’s laboratory when wheels spun, sparks flew and test tubes foamed up and spilled over. To her it was all magic and I guess it is not surprising that by adolescence she was drawn to science, chemistry and labs of her own.
As I watched her recite some impossible formula while mixing ingredients in her high school chemistry lab, it was hard to believe that this kid, this pretty little teenager would grow up to change the world. But, of course, I knew it was so, and I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that under her white lab coat she was wearing her gymnastic uniform. Practice was coming up right after Lab and this was a kid who knew how to manage her “time.”
We did some sort of fast forward through Keely’s college years, stopping for five minute intervals that she deemed worthy of look-sees. There were boys in most of those, or rather young men, and Keely was rummaging through them like my generation would
go through old snap shots. There was one boy in particular that Keely fancied enough to visit a half dozen times. “This is Theo” she said. “He and I were almost engaged.” We
watched them kissing late one night in front of her dorm room until I cleared my throat loudly and Keely broke free of a small trance with “alrighty then” and moved us further up her life line. There really wasn’t that much to see in the two years Keely spent at MIT. She studied, she went to classes and she tested out early. There were the boys - I think I counted four besides Theo - but they didn’t seem to matter as Keely only stopped to look at them briefly. There were also a couple of professors she paused us to admire as they lectured and demonstrated concepts far beyond my understanding.
So there you have it, the general sense of how this going back in time works. I had the hang of it myself at that point and was just loving it; skimming through the highlights of my granddaughter’s charmed life. Of course, if that’s all there was I wouldn’t be bothering you with these details, they’d be just for the family. What happened next though, was so frightening my ancient ticker nearly jumped from my chest. No one had warned me or even hinted at Keely’s role in this chapter of history, not even Keely. And the reason was… no one knew! The world, in fact, was never to know and I can’t prove a thing, but it did happen… every bit of it.
We are somewhere in, I think, Germany or maybe Austria. We can see Keely standing alone at bridge rail looking out over a fast flowing river. She is quiet, very still and appears to be lost in her thoughts or perhaps just meditating. In the bubble we mirror her stillness. A tall, dark woman in a long coat approaches Keely and begins to speak. Her voice is soft and my ears are old, so I can’t quite hear what she is saying. Keely, though, is getting visibly upset in both the Present and the Past. She turns to me in the former and says, “This is Stella Scarnn. You probably don’t recognize her, she was so much younger then.”
But as she speaks, Scarnn turns and stares right at us as if she can see us there in the Future and I know her immediately. The curiously mismatched sides of her face are evident even in her youth. One side is placid, blue eyed and almost without expression while the other is somehow twisted into a fixed smile that appears as a gruesome leer. This disparity will grow worse as she ages and become an icon of evil the equal of any in history; or it would have, if not for Keely.
There is suddenly then, a flurry of activity on the bridge and I feel my fragile old body flush with adrenaline. Scarnn has moved towards Keely who stands still as stone. She extends an arm and taps Keely tentatively with one finger in the center of her chest. She smiles at the contact and both she and Keely realize they are substance, they are mass. Scarnn, a taller, thicker woman than Keely, reaches out abruptly and grabs her by the shoulders. She begins to drag her toward the bridge rail. It’s clear she want s to throw her over the edge. Keely is resisting, fighting back. Inside the bubble I am helpless, unable to move. I’m shouting No! No! when I become aware that Keely is at my ear. She’s saying, “It’s okay Grandpa, it’s okay.” At the bridge she quite suddenly disappears. Scarnn stands there, bewildered, holding nothing.
Keely messes with a few gadgets and then does something mental and we are returned to the Present. I am still visibly upset, but Keely has calmed and seems thoughtful. “C’mon Grandpa” she says, “I’ll buy you lunch.”
We sat quietly for awhile over our fifty-five dollar plankton burgers. I was trying to absorb and make sense of what had happened when Keely took a long sip of her Pura-agua and said, “what’s really disturbing, Grandpa, is that when I was at the bridge the first time, the “time” we were visiting, Stella Scarnn wasn’t there. In fact I stopped at the bridge because that was the moment when I first realized that although I loved playing music, science was where I could be the most useful. When Scarnn showed up, I was as you saw, quite startled both there and in the Present. Her appearance at the bridge means she has learned how to move through the Past not only in her own life stream, but mine as well. Now I have to…now I must…learn to do the same…slide from one stream to another. Scarnn has to be stopped before she can find a way to alter the Past. As you know, she wants to do away with all of us and, well, everything. Eliminating me would be a good start to that end. As the only other time traveler I’m the single person who can catch her; if, that is, I can get into her life stream. And one other thing Grandpa, just before I moved back from the bridge to the bubble, I felt her strength waning, fading. This tells me that the physicality she had achieved was a temporary condition, something, for now, she can’t sustain.”
You seem to know a lot about Scarnn,” I said, “do you know her from somewhere?”
“Yes. She and I were at MIT together, freshman year. She was a brilliant but unstable student. She suffered from depression and when she was in one of her black moods, she hated everybody including herself. We had similar curriculum, so we were in several classes together and I rarely saw her as anything other than an angry, hateful person. She was argumentative and seemed to ooze violence. Most of the kids were afraid of her and avoided contact with her. She would sit in class with nobody closer than three desks away and just glower. You could almost see the hate rising off her. When she attacked our Physics professor near the end of the year, she was expelled and would have been arrested if she hadn’t just vanished. That was the last time I saw her until now. Of course, like everyone, I’ve heard about her End World cult and all the terror and havoc they take credit for. I’ve even read her manifesto “Oblivion.” I can’t imagine a worse mixture than hers of brilliance, hate and insanity. And something else you should know Grandpa, at the Institute we are working on a project beyond Time Travel that I can’t talk about just yet. With Scarnn having access to my Past, especially my recent Past, it’s not unlikely that she will uncover this project. If that happens then not just this world, but all worlds will be in danger.”
Keely and I make a date to return to the Time Bubble two weeks hence. I’m calling it a Time Bubble because it gives you something to visualize even if what you are imagining is not very accurate. In reality it’s a matter of tubes and chemicals and a sort of hypnotic state. Keely runs the whole show and as I’ve said earlier, we never actually leave the room. At least, I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell. Ask Keely.
I spend the next two weeks in a state of eager, but also frightened anticipation. I try to keep up my usual routine of journal writing in the ether zone and tele-reading in Spanish. (I love that I can hologram any book ever written) but my mind keeps racing to the idea of going back in time. Even the Denver Broncos’ second consecutive undefeated season can’t hold my attention. I’m nervous as a teenager about to get his first aerocar license. When Keely finally calls and tells me to go to the Pick-up Port, I set a sprint record for ninety somethings in getting there.
We take our places at The Institute, hook up all the folderol ourselves – Keely is afraid one of the robo-techs might be compromised by Scarnn, and as I’ve said before and hopefully will again, away we go.
This time we stop first at one of Keely and Jackson’s early concerts. K and J are on stage doing their fusion thing and their music is, well, timeless. I can see Keely’s brother Carson in a backstage booth turning knobs and pushing buttons on a console to record the performance. He’s on leave from the Avalanche to rehab a torn ACL he received against the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup finals. The Avs weren’t the same without their “enforcer” and lost 4 games to 2. Carson still has that big brother attitude towards Keely and when he’s not with his team, he travels with her as a personal body guard. He can be, as you might expect from a hockey player, quite intimidating.
We drop in on a number of concerts as Keely’s career develops. The venues get larger and the audiences more enthusiastic as she and Jackson build on their series of number one hits. We stay at each “time” spot just long enough to see their closing, bring-the-house-down numbers and then we move along. We are in London in some sort of amphitheater when Scarnn reappears. She is suddenly just there, on the stage, a few short feet from the performers. As she materializes into full reality, Keely, in the bubble, says to me, “don’t worry Grandpa, I’m going to try something.” And then, like snap your fingers, she disappears. That is, one moment she is gone and in the next she reappears standing beside Scarnn who is clearly startled. She says something to Keely and then reaches for her, but Keely steps quickly away. Before Scarnn can try again, Keely vanishes for a second time and then, not quite instantaneously but close, she reappears behind her keyboards playing as before.
The audience in the theater thinks it is all part of the show and erupts in a spontaneous and noisy ovation. This is a special effect they had never seen before. Their applause drowns out whatever Scarnn says next, but her menacingly pointing finger directed at Keely speaks loudly enough and then she too disappears.
“Let me explain.” Keely says in the bubble, looking at my completely puzzled expression. “For the past two weeks I’ve been trying to discover how Scarnn got into my life stream and I finally figured it out. It’s not that hard to do actually, just a matter of applying some old DNA technology to what we have already been working with. Once I uncovered the method, I tweaked it a bit and now I can move through Scarnn’s Past just as she does through mine. The difference is, I can do it faster. Now, whenever she appears, I can slide out of my moment like I just did and then slip into hers. I can also stay longer than she can. Since she can only alter my life while in my life stream, I can avoid her by jumping to hers. She has to flee back to the Present, because wherever she goes in her Past, I can follow. In other words, I have to stay one “jump” ahead.
“Okay,” I say. “So you are not in danger for the moment, but you know Scarnn has to be working at catching up or worse…something worse.”
“Yes, I do, Grandpa. And that’s why I have formulated a plan. But to make it work I’m going to need a lot of help. I’ll need Dad, maybe Mom if her back’s not bothering her, both my brothers and Uncle Todd. These are my closest genetic relatives. I’d use you and Grandpa Fox, but, well, no offense, you are both too old. How fast can you round them up?”
“Me?” I ask, startled. “Why me? Can’t you do it?”
“I have to stay here traveling. If I can get Scarnn to chase me in the Past, her stream or mine, I’ll know she’s in a bubble and not working her lab in the Present. I’ll stall for time while you get the family ready. Can you do it?
“But Keely they don’t know about any of this. They’ll think I’ve gone bonkers. How am I going to explain it?”
“I don’t know for sure, Grandpa, but I know you’ll find a way.”
It wasn’t as hard as I had imagined. Keely’s dad, Don, called Ace by his friends for having 4 holes-in-one in his lifetime – two in one round – was adjusting to new knees and just hanging around the house blowing blues on his harmonica.
“Hey Dad, what’s up?” he asked when I picto called. I explained as clearly as I could what Keely was into and after the expected “Dad, are you taking your meds?” he listened as I elaborated and then agreed to meet at the Institute.
“How come she didn’t call me?” and “None of the kids call enough,” were his last words before clicking off. I laughed at that, said “tell me about it” and turned off the picto.
Heather was baby sitting the twins, but she wanted in on the action, so she took them back to Cody’s third wife, Alicia. Alicia, citing nerves, took them to an All Care facility.
This freed up Cody as well. He turned over the day to day routine at his Boeing Nissan Aerocar dealership to Abigail, his first wife and business partner who still carried a torch for him and wanted him back, unlike his second wife Amanda, who wanted him eviscerated, but those are stories for another day. He grabbed a demo and flew to the Institute the morning after I called him.
“Hey, Hockey Puck how’s it going?” I said to Carson when I got him on the Picto. “It’s Hockey Star Grandpa, Hockey Star.” We’ve been doing this routine since he was a player in the juvie leagues. I quickly explained Keely’s dilemma and he was damn near at the Institute before I signed off.
Todd was the problem. He and his wife Ziza were sailing off the coast of Indonesia on their ancient Catamaran. Todd hated modern boats that could sail unmanned and whose sailors were really just passengers, so he kept his vintage 2002 Cat repaired and sailed the old fashioned way, hands on. Well, one hand anyway. The other usually held a beer. “Hey,” he’d announce to anyone complaining, “I’m retired.” I think he got that from me.
“It will take me three days to get to land Dad, and that’s with good winds” he said after I had explained why he was needed.
“No time for that” I said, we need you now. I’ll have the Institute helojet you out in the morning. Can Ziza handle the boat alone or should I send crew?”
“She’ll be fine. The sea is quiet and the weather reports are good for the foreseeable future. I’ll be ready at daylight.
Two days later they were all assembled in the Travel Room at the institute and after they had quit gawking, gaping and having their minds blown by everything around them, they each had the same question, what do we do now?
“We wait for Keely to return” I told them even though there she was, reclined in a chair, tubes and wires and what-not attached, less than ten feet from us. When her eyes suddenly opened a short while later, we restrained ourselves while she recovered her bearings and then engulfed her in a pile of hugs.
“I’m sure Grandpa has filled you in on what has occurred,” Keely said to us when we had all quieted. “Stella Scarnn is the worst terrorist this planet has ever known. She has only one agenda and that is the complete annihilation of mankind. She must be stopped and only we can do it. It would take months to program the DNA of others into the system and by then it would probably be too late. Scarnn, if left alone, will eventually find her way here to the Institute through my life stream. This cannot be allowed to happen. We have been working on a second project here at the Institute that will enable me to move through vast distances in a manner similar to how I now move through time. I’m talking interplanetary travel. If Scarnn should learn our methods we will never find her and she will wreak havoc wherever she goes.” Keely paused a moment looking at all our horrified expressions and then added “Now I will tell you what we are going to do to stop her.”
When she had finished explaining her plan, we were all suited up in some sort of silvery material that made us look like characters from one of her dad’s old UFO flicks. I was not exempted from this costuming even though I wouldn’t be “traveling.” The suit had some special characteristics that Keely had devised for our safety but to the serious detriment of anyone else who came too close. It was an intricate part of her plan.
As soon as Keely’s mom, dad, brothers and uncle were ready – each had gotten a pep talk – they were tubed and wired and tranced and who knows what else on their way to the Past. I watched them all, one by one, drift into what seemed a deep sleep. Keely went first. She was to lead the others through Scarnn’s life stream and post them at sites
throughout her history. There were not too many places in her adult life that she could slide to where she would be far enough away from Keely’s clan that she couldn’t be reached by one or the other very quickly. To paraphrase an ancient fighter from my day, she could run but she could not hide.
Keely’s family would have their journey to the Past, but first I must tell you what happened here…in the Present.
The Trip Room at the Institute is a rectangle about half the size of a basketball court. There are glass room dividers separating several sections from the main floor. Behind those dividers are banks of three dimensional compuscreens, levers, switches, buttons, lights, and enough beeping and blipping noises to appease Star Trek fans the world over; all six versions of it. None of them, I thought while watching the light show, had humankind planet hopping without a spacecraft. I grabbed an Orthochair, adjusted it to fit my ancient frame and dialed up Steven King’s 74th and latest creepy thriller. The old guy still had it. He was back to vampires in this one, a familiar theme, but now they were cosmic time travelers looking for exotic blood sources on distant planets. I wondered, with all I now knew, if he was being prescient, as he had so often been in the latter stages of his career.
I was on chapter four, perhaps an hour later, when I sensed something different about the room. I switched off my Holobook, looked around, and there she was, all six foot of her ugliness, standing at the far side of the room. She was looking directly at me and smiling, if you could call that hideous arrangement of features a smile. I mean she displayed a lot of teeth, but there was a serious lack of joy in the effort. I rose from the Ortho and slid a little to my right. I did this kind of casually, making old man groans and grunts as if it was causing me pain to make these small movements. In truth I didn’t feel a thing but excitement. I moved a little further right niftily putting myself between Scarnn and the only unbolted exit door from the Trip Room. She could run back to the Past if she chose, but she would have to go through me in the Present to find the Future.
Scarnn thought I was trying to get away. She laughed. “Go for it old man” she said as she began to cross the room towards me. “Let’ see what you got.” This from a woman who could time travel, I thought? Let’s see what you got? I was less than impressed.
I wanted to take a fighter’s stance, get on the balls of my feet, put my hands up, maybe bob and weave a little, but I knew those days were long gone. Instead, I just crossed my arms and stared at this, the most dangerous person in the world. I was completely confident that Keely had me properly prepared.
I also wanted to say something clever, something erudite and memorable, a verbal one up or in your face or skomp as we called it when I was a kid. Let her know I might be old, but I was still all there. Story of my life, nothing came to mind. I went with the predictably macho and just said, “No Freakface, show me what YOU got.”
She walked right up to me and stopped a pace away. We did a stare down thing for awhile that was going nowhere until she finally graced me with another of her charming smiles. She was going to say out of my way as she grinned, but all she managed was “out of” before she got the shock of her life. Literally. She had reached out to shove me and touched the silver suit. I’m not real conversant about watts and volts and currents and such, but whatever that suit was geared to deliver was more than enough. Scarnn was writhing on the ground in a split second, smoke and a nasty smell emanating from her twitchy self. I looked around for something to bind her with and found a roll of duct tape on a nearby counter. Stuff was still the same fix-all in the twenty-first century that it had been in the twentieth. I got her hands wrapped and was working on her feet when, damn, she disappeared. “Shit,” I said aloud, “shit.” I was still not able to think of something clever.
I moved my Orthochair directly in front of the exit door and resumed my vigil. I was too hyped to continue reading, so I just sat and thought about the events that had occurred so far and what might be going on in the Past at this very moment. I was eager for this to be over and my family members safely back. There was a second when they all stirred briefly in their chairs, but they returned quickly to stillness. They were gone for several hours more. When at last they did come back or come to or whatever it is that happens, I was completely unprepared for what I was told.
“That was awesome” was essentially what everyone had to say. They had been through Keely’s life hitting all the high points and were babbling about it like they had just seen a great holoflick. Keely’s mom, Heather, said it was like Keely’s whole life had been filmed and now she could watch whatever part she wanted to. Keely’s dad, looked in shock. He was shaking his head and babbling “amazing, amazing” over and over. Todd was just laughing, making jokes, teasing Keely about different parts of her life and the two brothers were swapping jibes in a did you see when I did this and that kind of way.
I stood there and watched them somewhat dumbfounded. Were they putting me on? Finally I just had to ask. “What about Scarnn” I said, “Doesn’t Stella Scarnn ring a bell?
The hubbub quickly quieted and they all looked at me quizzically, like I was doing something old man weird that they couldn’t quite follow. They were sporting expressions that ranged from I’m sorry did I hear you right to what the hell are you talking about as with one voice they jointly chorused, “who?”
“Stella Scarnn” I repeated, and they all looked even stranger.
Fortunately, that’s when Keely jumped in. “Don’t worry Gramps” she said. “I can explain everything.”
When everyone one had calmed and promises of further trips were extracted from Keely, we gathered for dinner at an Instadine where it was possible to order any food you had ever heard of. Of course it was all pseudo, but it tasted like the real thing. Being both old and old fashioned, I had the fried chicken from Nelvis Café in Boquete, Panama where I live. Following the meal, everyone went their separate way with Keely promising to see me safely to my home. On the way there, in the Institute’s private Whisper jet, she told me what had happened.
“I put them all into Scarnn’s life stream,” she began, “just like we planned. I waited in my own, knowing that at some point Scarnn would have to go there. I guessed that when she entered the Past and encountered our people poking about, she would want to return to the Present to figure it out, but wouldn’t go through her lifeline because
she could then be followed and we would learn the whereabouts of her laboratory.
She did what I expected and slipped into my life stream. Instead of going to the Past to find me, she returned to the Present and encountered you and your silver suit. Nice work there Grandpa. If she returned to her own Past she knew that everyone waiting was similarly suited and I doubt if she wanted to go through that agony again. She slid back into my stream and I could feel her presence immediately. Might have had something to do with the added charge her body was carrying around. I wasn’t sure if what I was about to do would work, but I had to try. I showed myself, briefly, in the near Past, just enough that she could see I wasn’t silver wrapped, and then I fled. I ran further and further back into my Past pausing here and there to be sure she was still on my track. I returned eventually to MIT. I was there the day Scarnn attacked Doctor Winters our Physics professor. In fact, my boyfriend Theo and I had heard the professor’s shouts for help and were headed to the lab when Scarnn came bolting down the hallway and ran right by us. You will remember Grandpa, that at the bridge there was no one there to help when Scarnn grabbed me and I had to use my own wits to escape. This time I stopped next to Theo and waited. Scarnn was now moving backwards in time when she got to me and not forward through it as she had been after attacking Doctor Winter. She didn’t realize that at the exact moment in her own life stream she would be running by me.
In her anger she appeared next to me and grabbed me for a second time. Theo, bless his heart, went ape and as you saw earlier, Grandpa, Theo is a big boy. Scarnn could not escape from her Past self, that is, the self that existed before she learned time travel. I started screaming and pretty soon campus security guards were dragging her away. What happened next baffled me for awhile until I picked up the thread of her life stream that ended the day after that encounter. Scarnn, depressed and now facing prison, hung herself in jail. Stella Scarnn the terrorist and the atrocities she committed never happened. She and they were gone for good. How this will affect us in the Future I can’t really say. There are a lot of people alive who wouldn’t be, that’s for certain, but whether they will change the world for good or bad remains to be seen. So far, you would have to say… so good.
“What about your Mom and Dad and brothers and Todd?” I asked. “I don’t understand what happened with them.”
“The moment Scarnn died they were gone from her life stream and returned back to the Time Room in the Present. Before they could awake I put them into my life
stream and gave them the tour. To them and to everyone else, Scarnn, if remembered at all, was only an annoying child. It was you and I Grandpa, you and I. We saved the world.”
We flew along in silence for a little while after that until I remembered where this had all started. “Keely” I said. “You haven’t finished showing me your life. I want to see it all, every bit.”
“I’ll clear my schedule and in a few weeks you can come back for another ‘trip’” she said. “We can start in the second grade when I won the high jump at field day. Right now though, I’m going to enjoy the Present. How’s that artificial liver of yours holding up.?”
“Just like the real thing.”
“Alrighty then,” said Keely, “let’s break out the scotch.”