My name is Chakrin Schole and I am a time traveler. Normally, labeling myself something so defining would unnerve me, but given the information I am about to present, I feel a label is necessary. I am writing to you from the year 2010, what you would consider “present day.” Present day: what an ironic phrase for me. I see so many ages that past, present, and future hold no more value to me than a single grain of sand would to a beach.
However, there was once a Present Day for me – before the days of journeying through time. If I remember correctly, the Present Day of my past occurred in the early years of the 2700’s (my mind has witnessed so many dates throughout history that exact dates often elude me). I was a small boy then, and grew up with an eccentric mother named Rhea who was fascinated with the idea of time and travelling across space. My mother was a brilliant woman, but her ideas were not often heard because of her deformity. She was born without a mouth (which, as you can imagine, meant that she had to ingest all food through absorption), and her peers were so unnerved by this and the fact that she couldn’t speak that they paid little attention to what she had to say through words.
I frequently felt that I was her only companion, despite the many house nurses we had to tend to her. Because of this, when the world ended, I was the only one who had a way to escape. My mother successfully made a time machine, and she offered me the maiden voyage, insisting that I was as much as entitled to it as she. I must have been no older than 10 at the time, but because I spent so much time in her laboratory with her, operating the machine was not difficult. At the time, the Era of Information intrigued me (the 2000’s), so I decided to travel there. My journey was short, because I was so thrilled that my mother’s invention worked that I decided to return to my Present Day and tell her.
The one flaw of the machine, however, was that it could never return to the same moment in history twice – it had to always be a moment later, and moments in which your present self had already participated in could not be visited (my mother foresaw this as being highly problematic, so she erased any possibility of it from her blueprints). Perhaps, however, she did this for a different reason – to save my life. When I returned to my Present Day three minutes after the time that I had left, my world was ruined. The planet that had been filled with life: humans, animals, plants, buildings, water, trees, and light, was gone. All that remained was an empty void of mute grey.
I had always imagined the end of the world to be filled with fire and blackness. Something that is easy to blame and be angry at. I never expected The Grey. Every direction in which I looked was the same shade of grey. There was no horizon, no sun or stars, no floor, everything was merely blindingly grey. And quiet. No noise existed in The Grey, and in the deafening silence, the mixing sound of my rapidly beating heart and my breath on the dead air was equivalent to an explosion.
Instinctively I knew through this grey that my world was no more. I suspect that my mother, the genius that she was, knew this was coming, and saved my life by putting me in the machine. She saved my life, and for that I am eternally grateful, but ever since then I have been a wanderer of time – not having an era to call my own. All my friends are gone, and I cannot make any for fear of disrupting the continuum. However, I am writing this blog for the audience of the 21st century so that they may know my story. You’ll never meet me or know what I look like, for I am the wind in human form – always going as I arrive, but for my own sanity I need to feel that people can see me (albeit it is just the internet), so this is my projection to the world. Past. Present. Future.
