Terry Cakebread: Human, Part I

My name is Terry Cakebread and this is the fucking story of my life.

October 31, 2044 Earth

The clock read 7:55 AM, as I double-checked the wall of endless switches and monitors that covered the inside of my spaceship.  I could not concentrate on what I was doing despite the potentially morbid consequences of my lack of focus.  This was essentially my funeral – it was a day that I knew, and hoped, would come since I was seven years old.  I was an incredibly gifted child if I do say so myself.  I could always breeze through math problems that gave others difficulty and my ever expanding interest in all things science put its splendors easily within the reach of my mind.  When I was in second grade my teachers implored my parents to move me up to a more difficult grade or at least sign me up for advanced classes.  Let’s just say that my parents were not endowed with the same intellectual gifts that I was.  My parents were two bleeding heart burnouts, who would not allow me to be brainwashed into placing importance on the things dictated by society.  This is why I remained in the second grade.  I remember, at times, attempting to hide my intellect from them so they would not think that I was being too absorbed into “the system” that they fought so hard against.

There was only so much I could do – my mind was racing in a thousand different directions and on October 15, 2014 at the age of 7, I found my purpose.  I was browsing my parents Netflix account as they slept.  I typed science into the search bar.  My mind was so absorbed with science at the time that I had already read my entire science book cover to cover by the second month of the school year.  I was now moving on to documentaries.  I moved the curser slowly past a number of movies.  Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I didn’t make the random selection that I did.  Maybe I would have developed an interest in the subject afterward, as I like to think, but maybe my life would have been a lot god damn better if I would have skipped this movie.  The curser landed on Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.  In the next month I watched and re-watched the entire series a total of four times, but one episode piqued my interest more than any other.  I watched the episode on time travel every night that month and during the course of my lifetime I must have watched it a couple hundred more times.  I used to have dreams of traveling to far off galaxies and planets in a single lifetime, living out sci-fi fiction in real life.  When you are 7 years old anything seems possible and I was from a long line of dreamers.  I would chase that dream for the rest of my life.

My parents were sobbing, proud but distraught.  I knew that this was the last time I was ever going to see them and they knew it too.  The image was tough to get out of my mind.  I thought of my girlfriend too, a voluptuous blond by the name of Veronica Bosomchest.  I could still envision the tears streaking down her face and neck to be swallowed up by the deep ravine of her ample bust.  She was inconsolable.  I had to bite my lip hard to keep myself together and if there was any time that I ever needed to keep myself together it was now.  If time travel was like the movies these goodbyes wouldn’t have been so hard. There would be an old man running around like a lunatic screaming, “Plutonium!” and warning me not to bang my mom.  But there was no old man and no one was telling me not to bang my mom.  The reality of time travel bordered on melancholy, to say the least.  I would be accelerating my space ship for seven and a half continuous years, and at the end of that time the ship would be travelling very near the speed of light.  When a person travels near the speed of light, time slows down in the spaceship for reasons that only I and a handful of other human beings can understand.  Everything still feels the same on the ship but for each hour that passes on the space ship many more will pass on earth, so many more, in fact, that my family, friends, and even the entire human race, would all perish long before my journey would be complete.  Once that space ship took off I would have nowhere and no one to return to.  I would be alone, in space, the last of my kind.

“You ready, Terry?” I heard coming from the inside of my helmet.

“I think so.”

“Good luck Terry, we all hope this works.”

“Thanks for the fucking confidence.”

I hastily turned off the speaker in my headphones and initiated the launch sequence.  Within moments the ship was moving and I began my travel through time.

8:00 AM October 15, 2047 Earth Time (ET)

I had been traveling on my long tube of a spaceship for three years.  The spaceship was similar in size to a fairly large ranch style house but the design was heavily influenced by the principles of aerodynamics for obvious reasons.  The ship was equipped with a very advanced gravitational simulator so that I would not float from one end to the other for the rest of my life.  The only thing that separated this from a regular house was an enormous pantry at the rear, built to hold 70 years worth of food riddled unrecognizable with preservatives, and the front of the ship that contained an elaborate control panel and a window betraying the fact that I was actually hurtling through space.  There was also an exercise room to help me stay in shape but I figured that if I was going to be eating food that was supposed to last for the next 70 years, that the exercise room was not really going to help me all that much. I would spend most of my days back then trying to figure out difficult equations that might help me determine more about the universe, reading, or having video meetings with my mission directors in my living room. I also had the pleasure of having regular video contact with Ms. Bosomchest two times per week, where she would provocatively pretend that she hadn’t forgotten about me yet.  I played along with her rouse, and I was well aware of it being a rouse, after all I am the super genius flying through fucking outer space.  This day was the day, however, I calculated that my speed would not allow my communications to function properly.  I attempted to tune in to my standing appointment with Ms. Bosomchest and my pants were already shortening by about a ½-inch at this point if you know what I mean.  I was not surprised when I did not get the pleasure of seeing the bountiful Ms. Bosomchest on the screen as I assumed that I wouldn’t.  What did hit me was unexpected.

I had prepared for this moment for many years.  Even before I ventured onto the spaceship, I knew that this moment of “singularity” as I liked to call it, would come.  My chest started to tighten up, it felt like I had a cinderblock on my chest.  I could not breath, I sucked desperately at the air and even wondered if the spaceship had been breached.  I never had such extreme feelings of anxiety before.  I was able to slow my breathing after about ten minutes or so before the panic attack finally subsided.  I felt totally drained. I sat there in a living room that looked no different than any other living room on earth, condemned to a life of solitude.  I was too distraught to finish my calculations for the day or do any reading, so I did what I always did when depression set in.  I watched professional wrestling.  Due to amazing advances in computer storage capacity I was able to have the entirety of the internet at my fingertips even though my communications with the earth were terminated. I would not, unfortunately, be able to receive any new information placed on the internet since my communication with earth ceased.  The touch screen wall of the room changed as I heard my voice shout out reflexively “Play the Undertaker match from Hell in a Cell 1998.” I found myself suddenly immersed in a  screaming crowd, where a seven-foot giant of a man was about to toss his seemingly lifeless opponent twenty feet to his demise. The wretched opponent fell to the earth demoralized as the crowd erupted.  I felt normal again.

I started using WWE to self-medicate my depression in college.  I started college at Penn State University for aerospace engineering.  I was going to change the world.  Depression started to set in for me over my coursework.  My classes seemed so easy and trivial at the time.  I was not making the advancements I wanted to make and was going nowhere near the goals that I set for myself.  To combat this I started to spend most of my time in the library by myself, learning on my own.  I spent most of my nights that first semester trying to figure out a way to create a power source that would sustain the acceleration of a spaceship for years on end, because I felt that this would be the limiting factor for deep space travel.  I thought I was on to something when I imagined a wireless power source at a distance from the ship, very similar to the way the wireless charger worked for my cell phone at the time.  But I still had to find a way to create the astounding amount of energy necessary.

My classes were only getting in the way. It was bullshit.  I was doing all the work, learning on my own and I had to pay them to get in my way.  Just so I could get a piece of paper that said I didn’t fuck up a lot.  I was smart, smarter than any of those has-been’s who were my teachers.  The thoughts of the injustice of it all often clouded my mind and I began to see what my parents thought of this whole “society” thing.  I started to watch some WWE in my apartment to clear my mind.  There was/is something about those spandex tights, poor story lines, and terrible acting that captivated me.  The melodrama of it all called to me like the pied piper called to his rats.  I found that after a small WWE binge I could solve problems that had been plaguing me easily, and my creativity was through the roof.  With the help of professional wrestling I began to progress my theories in leaps and bounds, and had almost no time for my school work.  I had to drop out, and I did drop out after just a year and a half.  There I sat many years later twelve hours deep into a WWE binge with no intentions of stopping, traveling into the future.

To be continued . . .