Time Travel

            On Tuesday morning the donut shop beneath me changed its password so I had to go downstairs and buy a coffee to find out what the new one was. It turns out that they’d just changed the first letter of the old password to upper case, which they’ve done before and so I guess I could have figured that out.

            I weighed 88.6 kilos before lunch. I had a slice of ham with mustard and some yogourt for lunch.

            I had planned on riding down the street to Parkdale Community Legal Services to have them check out my new rental increase notice, but just before I would have gone it started raining so I took a siesta instead. When I got up I checked out the PCLS website to see if they were open on Wednesday and they aren’t. Thursday would have been fine for me but then I noticed that they would not have a drop-in until May 2. I called to ask if I could still see someone before May 1 and the receptionist told me I could come down and fill out a form to see if someone could see me. So I rode down there. Instead of going along Queen to take a left turn on Noble I decided it would be less difficult to go up O’Hara, across Maple Grove, down Brock, and east on Noble because Noble curves south to Queen right to where PCLS is located. I filled out the form and a woman named Ruth saw me. She told me that they are in transition now because they are training new student intake workers and they only have intake workers available for emergencies. Since my case was not an emergency they couldn’t assess my rent increase notice until May 2. I asked how that would work then if I have to pay my rent increase and then later find that it’s not legal. She said that I could just deduct the extra money from my June rent, so that sounded okay. I made an appointment for 15:00 on May 2.

            I looked at the rest of the recording of my song practice for July 20, 2017. A lot of the French songs could potentially be videos for uploading to YouTube but the Thursday morning traffic was pretty noisy and since it was a warm day I had all the windows open. Maybe some of the weekend recordings are better. A couple that I already uploaded from that time were recorded on the following Sunday.

            I worked a little more on my story “The Infidelity of the Fiddler”.

            I’ve been trying to turn the journal entries that I made during my bedbug infestation into a story.

            I worked on a long poem about a night at the now defunct Yellow Door open stage.

            I boiled a carrot and a potato, heated up the last of my steaks and some gravy and had them for dinner while watching an episode of Star Trek Discovery.

            This story was loaded big plot lines. The writers are good with those but less so with character development.

            Spoiler alert!

            It begins with Airiam’s funeral and the launching of her body into space. Somehow I suspect her cyborg body will serve as the beginnings in the future of the Borg race.

            Tilly, while analyzing data from Airiam’s memory banks, discovers that the bio-neural signature of the red angel is the same as that of Michael Burnham. They conclude that Michael is the red angel acting from the future.

            Captain Leland and Georgiou arrive from Section 31 and propose that they try to capture the red angel. Later Georgiou flirts with Stametz and says that in her universe he was pansexual and they had lots of fun together along with Dr. Culber. Stametz insists that he is gay in every universe. Burnham goes to see Leland and he reveals to her that he is responsible for the deaths of her parents because they had been doing research in time travel for Section 31 when the Klingons attacked and killed them. They’re research had been in the development of the suit that is worn by the red angel.

            Michael decides that the only way to capture her future self is to put her present life in danger because the red angel always shows up to save her since she would cease to exist if Michael were to die. Burnham is strapped to a chair in a building on a planet with a toxic atmosphere. The roof is opened to expose Michael to the poison air and she begins to die. Some of the crew try to save her but Spock pulls a phaser to stop them. Michael dies and then the Red Angel arrives, shooting a beam that restarts Michael’s heart. The Discovery crew spring their trap and capture the Red Angel in a stasis field. The red Angel emerges from her exoskeleton to reveal that she is Michael’s mother.

            It wouldn’t have made sense that Michael was the Red Angel since she would have remembered the plan to capture her and would have figured out a way to circumvent the trap.

             Michael’s mother, Dr Gabrielle Burnham is played by Sonja Sohn, who started out as a slam poet.

            This story made me curious if there have been any stories of time travel that predated The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. A lot of stories are of people either going to sleep or going someplace where time passes more slowly and then coming home to find a lot of time has passed. To me that doesn’t really count as time travel because to some extent we’ve all experienced it. I think being able to control one’s journey through time is more legitimately time travel. The earliest example of something like that seems to have been in Samuel Madden’s “Memoirs of the 20^th Century" which was written in 1733. In the story a man receives a series of letters written in 1997 and 1998 from a future in which Catholicism has taken over the world. In this case the time traveller is a guardian angel that delivers the letters from the future. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol could be seen as an example of time travel except that we don't know if Scrooge's dream really depicts the future. In the 1861 novel Paris Avant Les Hommes by Pierre Boitard a man is transported by magic to the prehistoric past of the area that became Paris and encounters dinosaurs. 

            As for time machines, the one that beats H. G. Wells by just a few years is The Anacronopete by Enrique Rimbau, published in 1887.