Narrative experience
I
Like I said, my name isn’t Jake Ruckley. Jake is the name of the guy I’m about to drag you through this story with. He’s the protagonist, the fall guy, the patsy, the smoking gun. I am the narrator, the grassy knoll, the black umbrella. Besides, what does a name even tell you about someone? The legacy of their fathers hoped for? The wealth or misfortune they were born into? What heritage their ancestors abandoned at the shores of opportunity to assimilate in a new world? Maybe, but it doesn’t tell you what kind of thoughts a person has when they’re alone. It doesn’t tell you their deepest fear.
It definitely doesn’t tell you what they’ll do when the universe stares back at them through the face of it.
Their stories tell you that.
So here’s what I can tell you about me. I hate science fiction. I know how that sounds considering what I just told you about unraveling the fabric of reality and traveling between universes but when you become a permanent resident in your escape from reality it's no longer vacation. I’m sure wherever you found this story it was listed as sci-fi and anyone with the misfortune of being within ear shot of the author when the subject is mentioned knows HE loves it. But I hate it.
Now.
That wasn’t always the case.
When I was a kid, sci-fi was church. Like most nerds born after 1977, I was radicalized by Star Wars. The Special Edition came out when I was in 4th grade, and I got to experience it for the first time in the movie theater. I think my bottom lip is still stuck to the liquid butter on that movie theater floor.
From then on, it was Star Wars everything. Shadows of the Empire was the first book I actually read during SSR that didn’t have Waldo in it.
In 5th grade, Mrs. Yosemsky read us The Giver out loud. I didn’t realize it was sci-fi until I was well into my 20s, but in 5th grade it was just nostalgia. Proof I could love a book without spaceships and lightsabers.
As I aged out of the Star Wars universe and flunked out of the Space and Engineering Academy, I had to branch out to other galaxies. Star Trek. Dune. The Matrix. Alien. Terminator. Doctor Who. Stargate. Battlestar Galactica. Firefly. The Expanse. Ender’s Game. Foundation. Philip K. Dick stuff that made me feel like my brain needed a shower.
Even as an adult, I always dreamed up living in worlds crafted by my favorite authors and screenwriters.
I wish I could say I grew out of it. The truth is, in the universe I was born in, I guess dreams do come true.
Though it’s nothing like I envisioned it. Sure, there are spaceships, but nowhere worth going. Lightsabers are cool, but super impractical, except for fun. And in that case, it’s not worth the risk of slicing your buddy in half, so we still use the pretend ones.
And now I lost the one thing I really loved.
Enjoying sci-fi.
Sometimes I can suspend disbelief, and some writers are creative enough to craft a world I haven’t seen, something that can’t exist. And yes, there are a few things that can’t exist
Time travel is NOT one of them.
That’s the one everyone gets wrong. Time travel exists, and always has, but there are limitations.
No, you can’t go back and bag your grandmother or whatever paradox. Physical matter can’t travel through time. A space ship can’t travel through time. Light can’t travel through time.
But information can.
Congratulations. Throw away your textbooks. Burn all your bibles, kids! You only need one rule for this whole multiverse thing.
One constant.
I’ll wait…
You got it.
How would light travel through a medium it never experiences?
No Big Bang. No “before the Big Bang.” No “let there be light.”
Sorry, Yahweh, but it goes like this:
Light.
Yada yada yada. Jesus and such. Amen.
So now you want to be a time traveler. You got some information, you got big ideas, you’re ready to roll the dice. Fine.
But there are limitations. Not rules, exactly. More like… physics with a bad attitude.
Rules that can be broken eventually will be.
You need a device to carry information even that is bound by the lifecycle of whatever device you’re using, and what kind of information it can actually carry. You’re going to need a receiver on the other end. You’re going to need some kind of consciousness to interpret the information.
You’re also bound by the first creation of that device, to the last one that remains functional.
And if the last one goes out of commission before whatever civilization invented it goes multiplanetary, you’re stuck on the timeline of that planet, with a few exceptions.
In my original universe, I discovered this on accident when I tried using an old fax machine in Berkeley. Yeah, a fax machine.
Who would use a fax machine in 2026? The United States government, of course.
More on that later. Did you know the first fax was sent in the 1800s? Neither did I, until I was deep in my travels through time.
I also know that fax machines never made it off Earth. Humans do get there, eventually, they just didn’t take the fax machines because why?
The last fax machine was destroyed along with the Earth, in one of those billionaire bunkers underground, along with the planet and everything on it.
Don’t worry. There was enough time for some… I guess you could call them humans… to escape with most of the information. The systems that maintained them made it off using different technology to travel through space and time. But I decided to stay here in 2026, to live and die a somewhat normal existence before things get too science fiction, even for me.
So yeah, where was I?
Oh yeah,
Friday January 2nd, 2026
The day I found out there was a time machine hiding in plain sight in Berkeley, California.