17254 Bentley Avenue
Twin Oaks, MI 48026
November 19, 2010
Dear Jenny,
How’re you doing, friend? It’s been a while. Sorry I haven’t sent you any letters, life’s been pretty busy for me lately. Finals are coming up soon, and I’m studying as much as I can so that I can at least try and get good grades by the end of this semester. I’m probably boring you with all this stuff, but let me tell you something really sweet that happened to me this past weekend. You’re most likely not going to believe it, but get this--I traveled through time. Yeah, yeah, you’re probably thinking, “Pshh, this guy’s insane” or something, but let me explain how it all went. Here’s what happened…
On Saturday, I was with my friend Devin in the park, just hanging out and walking around the field and talking and stuff, when suddenly the sky above us lit up like lightning for a split second, accompanied by a loud crack of thunder. Devin and I fell to the ground in surprise, and the next thing we know there’s this small patch of grass in front of us that had just been scorched. We went up to it slowly, and saw that there was something in the middle of the burnt grass. It looked like some kind of high-tech, futuristic wristwatch. I walked up to it, carefully picked it up and saw a label on it that read: “Vortex Controller”. It had a keypad on it, with digits numbered 0 through 9 on the left side, and what seemed like a small speaker and a small microphone on the right, and a small monitor on the top. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, so we decided that we would look it up on the internet, to see if it was some new toy or something.
We walked back to his house and went up to his room, and looked it up on his desktop. There weren’t any photos or any pieces of info on the watch. Nothing at all! We didn’t know what it was, nor did we know what it could/would do. I decided to toy around with it, and, you know, try to figure out what the weird thing was. I slipped it on my wrist, and it immediately turned on, with the monitor glowing a weird light-blue color. A clear robotic voice spoke from the speaker, saying: “Hello, and welcome to the Vortex Controller! Would you like to begin? Say yes to continue, or no to cancel.” I asked Devin what I should do, and he told me to say yes. I did so, and the device replied, “Please type in the month, day, and year that you wish to travel to.” I was kind of skeptical of the device. I was starting to think more and more that it was just a toy of some kind.
I decided to just type in the day before that Saturday’s date, which was the 11th, and it appeared on the tiny blue monitor. “Is this date correct?” asked the Controller. “Yes.” I replied. “Okay, the date has been set,” said the machine, “Countdown initiated. Prepare for time leap.” Then, the machine started to get warm and shake a bit. I started to get a bit scared, and then the machine spoke again: “5, 4, 3, 2,...”. Just as the countdown hit one, we were sucked into (and were falling through) some sort of warp tunnel with blue and shimmering gold colors, bolts of lightning, and stars. Jen, let me tell you, it was really crazy. We were falling down through this tunnel so fast it felt like we were riding on the Top-Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point. It was so awesome, but I had never felt so scared in my life. I felt the adrenaline race through my body, and my heart was beating so fast I could actually almost hear it! Suddenly, everything around us began to stretch out, and we started going faster and faster. There was a bright white light at the bottom, which we were quickly approaching. When hit the light, everything became blindingly bright, and we passed out. The last thing I remember is hearing a loud crack of thunder, similar to the one from before.
When I woke up, I was lying next to Devin on the floor of his bedroom. I felt pretty dizzy, so I stayed there for a few minutes before sitting up. Then I shook Devin awake. We looked around to see if anything seemed different, but nothing did. It was still a sunny, cloudless day. I told Devin to look at his phone, and he did so. The time on his phone was the same as the time we had left: 2:56 p.m. The REALLY eerie thing, though, was that the date wasn’t the same. It no longer said November 12, 2010; instead it said the date that I had punched in, which November 11, 2010. At first, I had a really hard time believing that we had possibly just traveled back in time. We went outside and looked around his house see if any change had occurred. We didn’t find anything for a bit, but then we saw something that weirded us both out: we saw ourselves, riding on our longboards down the road, toward downtown Birmingham, just as we had done yesterday. (Or today. I don’t know. You get what I mean.) We both did a double-take, and looked closely, to make sure that it actually WAS us. We both started freaking out, and then we both started freaking out excitedly, because, you know, we were the first time travelers in history. FRIKIN’ AWESOME, RIGHT?
After a while, however, we got pretty bored because we saw pretty much the same thing as we did on the 11th. So we went back to our present date, the 12th, and started getting really pumped. We thought about all of the possibilities. We could change history, visit certain dates in both our lives, significant or not, or visit any important event that ever happened or will happen in the world. Then I remembered everything that I had ever read about or seen in sci fi novels, TV shows, and movies. If we tampered with time, we could possibly either mess something up completely, or do something that could be good for the entire world. I’m sure you know about that stuff, too. I told Devin, and although he was really psyched about being able to see what was to come in his own future, he thought that it’d be better if we destroyed it. I agreed, knowing that it would be a huge loss. However, we couldn’t risk messing something up or letting the Vortex Controller fall into the wrong hands. So we took it, broke it to pieces with a sledgehammer, and burned the rest of it in his fireplace.
I actually do think that what we did with the watch was right. I mean, it would’ve been fun to explore history and see my future and all, and to be able to give my younger self some advice about some situations that I had been in and how to avoid or get over them, but I think I’m already okay as I am, and I think that leaping into the future would ruin surprises for me. Plus, I think meeting my younger or older self probably would’ve caused some issues with the space-time continuum or something. So, um, yeah. . Hope you enjoyed my lil’ story, Jenny, hahahaha! Can’t wait for you to write back. Tell the family I said hey!
Sincerely,
Remy Combs
P.S.: Don’t tell anyone about this, okay? I trust that you won’t. I mean I don’t want Devin and I to have to deal with reporters and stuff like that. Thanks, girl. :D
I enjoyed the epistolary approach here. Great use of telling detail! Hard to work dialogue in: 28/30
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