which allowed anybody with a laptop not only to pull images from the past but also to project them anywhere they wanted, and for a short period it was impossible to drive down a road without seeing some historical image on a wall or some figure from the past standing in a yard.
Finally someone discovered how to bring smells forward with the image, and that nearly put an end to the freedom of access everyone had come to enjoy, because the scientists were worried that if the smell came, perhaps viruses would come as well, and what would happen if somebody brought a plague victim forward into a city and the plague got loose?
But only the smell came, no solid bodies, and while no one could quite understand why that was, there were no bacteria, or even viruses, introduced from the past. In the end, that was that.
But no one could see into the future for the simple reason that it hadn't happened yet, and there were apparently no other split dimensions or alternate time lines to find. Nobody had invented antigravity boots or a skateboard that flew or ray guns that blasted people to bits (unless you counted the lasers the military was using) or ships that went to the stars.
At least not yet.
There was, Dorso thought, entering the gym, just this messy time line business and the normal humdrum life thathe had going for himself, with no blips on the horizon except that somebody, somewhere, had decided to make him the recipient of a string of strange techno-practical jokes.
Bodies and dead rats and frogs had started appearing in his locker about three months earlier; then it got positively weird. There would be images mixed with other images—a carp stuck halfway through a pane of glass, alive and wiggling; a Brazilian soccer player looking normal except that his bottom half was a tricycle; and a dog riding a bicycle upside down.
None of it made sense. Dorso didn't have any real enemies unless you counted the entire football team, who seemed to think he was some kind of toy and were constantly playing catch with him, throwing him up in the air or stuffing him into containers. But they did that with most of the boys who didn't play football, except for Waymon Peers, who at thirteen was six foot four, weighed two hundred and fourteen pounds with no fat, and told them he'd pinch the head off the first player who messed with him. The team didn't seem to single Dorso out. Besides, he was sure none of them were smart enough to turn a laptop on, let alone go through the complicated process of acquiring a time line, projecting it backward to access an image, and then projecting the image forward in a hologram. It wasn't that the process was very difficult, but it was beyond most of the players, who sometimes seemed to take days to learn their locker combinations.
Dorso's life had gone on in spite of the practical jokes, which weren't really much of a bother except for the smell,and he'd come to almost expect them. He was walking down the hallway carrying his laptop, which contained all of the material in the textbooks, when an image of George Armstrong Custer appeared next to him.
One of the byproducts of time projection was that everybody knew what all the important people in history looked like. Cleopatra really wasn't all that pretty, Shakespeare had bad teeth (of course so did everybody else back then, but Shakespeare had the surprising habit of picking at his with his pen and he always had ink on his lower lip), and John Wilkes Booth, who killed Lincoln, looked and acted like a drugged ferret.
Dorso knew instantly that it was Custer, who was dressed in the buckskins he wore the day he was killed in the big battle. Dorso had watched the battle several times, so seeing Custer wasn't that surprising. He was standing with his side to Dorso, looking away. He had a Colt revolver in his hand, and as Dorso watched—the image was only apparent for thirty seconds—Custer turned toward him.
That was when something happened that bothered
Finally someone discovered how to bring smells forward with the image, and that nearly put an end to the freedom of access everyone had come to enjoy, because the scientists were worried that if the smell came, perhaps viruses would come as well, and what would happen if somebody brought a plague victim forward into a city and the plague got loose?
But only the smell came, no solid bodies, and while no one could quite understand why that was, there were no bacteria, or even viruses, introduced from the past. In the end, that was that.
But no one could see into the future for the simple reason that it hadn't happened yet, and there were apparently no other split dimensions or alternate time lines to find. Nobody had invented antigravity boots or a skateboard that flew or ray guns that blasted people to bits (unless you counted the lasers the military was using) or ships that went to the stars.
At least not yet.
There was, Dorso thought, entering the gym, just this messy time line business and the normal humdrum life thathe had going for himself, with no blips on the horizon except that somebody, somewhere, had decided to make him the recipient of a string of strange techno-practical jokes.
Bodies and dead rats and frogs had started appearing in his locker about three months earlier; then it got positively weird. There would be images mixed with other images—a carp stuck halfway through a pane of glass, alive and wiggling; a Brazilian soccer player looking normal except that his bottom half was a tricycle; and a dog riding a bicycle upside down.
None of it made sense. Dorso didn't have any real enemies unless you counted the entire football team, who seemed to think he was some kind of toy and were constantly playing catch with him, throwing him up in the air or stuffing him into containers. But they did that with most of the boys who didn't play football, except for Waymon Peers, who at thirteen was six foot four, weighed two hundred and fourteen pounds with no fat, and told them he'd pinch the head off the first player who messed with him. The team didn't seem to single Dorso out. Besides, he was sure none of them were smart enough to turn a laptop on, let alone go through the complicated process of acquiring a time line, projecting it backward to access an image, and then projecting the image forward in a hologram. It wasn't that the process was very difficult, but it was beyond most of the players, who sometimes seemed to take days to learn their locker combinations.
Dorso's life had gone on in spite of the practical jokes, which weren't really much of a bother except for the smell,and he'd come to almost expect them. He was walking down the hallway carrying his laptop, which contained all of the material in the textbooks, when an image of George Armstrong Custer appeared next to him.
One of the byproducts of time projection was that everybody knew what all the important people in history looked like. Cleopatra really wasn't all that pretty, Shakespeare had bad teeth (of course so did everybody else back then, but Shakespeare had the surprising habit of picking at his with his pen and he always had ink on his lower lip), and John Wilkes Booth, who killed Lincoln, looked and acted like a drugged ferret.
Dorso knew instantly that it was Custer, who was dressed in the buckskins he wore the day he was killed in the big battle. Dorso had watched the battle several times, so seeing Custer wasn't that surprising. He was standing with his side to Dorso, looking away. He had a Colt revolver in his hand, and as Dorso watched—the image was only apparent for thirty seconds—Custer turned toward him.
That was when something happened that bothered
Similar Books
