Blast from the Past # 6: The Golden Age

The Golden Age

Jesse Martin was unquestionably a product of the latter twentieth century. His mother had given birth to him two months prematurely due to being traumatized by the feared meltdown at Three Mile Island. She died six years later when a bottle of Tylenol that she'd bought at the corner drugstore turned out to be laced with rat poison. Jesse's father was shot dead two years later because he made the unforgiveable mistake of walking into the only 7-11 in his neighbourhood that hadn't been held up yet that year. Jesse had refused to open the apartment door when the police came by, hours later. His late father had already impressed upon him just how evil the world could be, and now he was going to provide another object lesson.

When the authorities attempted to locate relatives for Jesse to be placed with, they discovered that one pair of grandparents had not been among the lucky seventeen survivors of doomed Flight 819 from Denver to Las Vegas; another grandfather had suffered from Alzheimer's disease since shortly before his wife had been killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver; one uncle had served in Viet Nam from 1968 to 1970 and had succumbed to aftereffects of Agent Orange in 1977; and the only other relative, an uncle, was a Thalidamide child with one arm and no legs whatsoever.

Thus it was that Jesse found himself deposited into Archer's Orphanage at age eight. Mister Archer was a former priest who'd been defrocked when it'd come out that he was stealing money from his church's coffers. Fearing public embarrassment for the church, the Arch-Bishop had pulled strings to have the whole affair hushed up. He even managed to quiet the rampant rumours that the ex-Father Michael had been involved with several young boys from his flock.

Jesse, at age fourteen, had never been molested by Mister Archer, but knew at least three boys who had. Knowing that his superior was an obvious bigot, Jesse restricted his evening prayers to a single note of gratitude for his own dark skin. Anything that made him unattractive to the lecherous Mister Archer could not help but be a blessing from On High. Still, his years spent in the orphanage had done nothing to improve the depressing view of the world that had been his parents' sole legacy to him. He'd seen a fourteen month old baby attacked by rats, a twelve year old girl wither away and die from AIDS, and countless other tragedies that had reinforced the idea in Jesse's mind that the world was headed to Hell in a handbasket.

The breaking point, for Jesse, had come in the form of a discarded newspaper that had blown by him as he returned from school one warm Tuesday afternoon. All that Jesse had glimpsed of the paper was its front page headline, but that had been enough. In big red letters, the words had burned themselves into Jesse's teenaged brain: PEACE TALKS END IN ANGRY WORDS. Jesse had heard scattered murmurings at school about the US-Soviet meeting that had been called in an attempt to avert what everyone seemed to consider inevitable: the Third World War. His classmates were inexplicably unconcerned about this event, but Jesse knew better. He'd been witness to too many instances of madness to doubt that Man was teetering on the edge. He didn't always understand what he saw and heard - he still felt a twinge of shame when he remembered that for years he'd thought that a "cancer-causing agent" was a man in dark suit and sunglasses who injected people with a substance that gave them cancer - but he could always grasp the gist of it all.


Without a second thought, Jesse changed his course and headed for the city limits. He had no intention of returning to the orphanage and waiting quietly for the moment when he'd hear the rockets overhead and then see the light as the sky turned orange and everything melted. That particular nightmare had visited him on too many occasions for him to react any differently than he did. He made a beeline for the country.

Before nightfall, Jesse had exited the city of his birth and was several miles into a stretch of uncorrupted woodlands. Knowing that he couldn't walk all night, Jesse reluctantly climbed up into a tree and curled up in the V formed by two of its branches.

Several hours later, Jesse heard voices. At least, it sounded like voices at first. Then, as he became more awake, he realized that is was only one voice. But the words were completely unrecognizable, and seemed to shift pitch every few seconds. Unable to see much of anything in the darkness, Jesse decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and stayed very still.

The voice continued its strange monologue through the remaining hours until daybreak. As the first rays of the sun poked horizontally through the trees, Jesse was finally able to spot the source of the sounds that he'd listened to all night. It was a small metallic object roughly the size and shape of a Walkman, floating about three feet above the ground, with no visible means of support. Jesse judged that it was at least twenty feet away from him, and so he quietly climbed down from his perch. He stood beside the tree that had provided him with sanctuary during the night, and decided that he was far enough away from the object that he could take flight before it could do him any harm. So he took a chance.


"Hello," he said, "can you understand me?"

"Hello? Hello! There's someone there?" The words started out sounding very machine-like, but became more modulated with each word.

"Yes, I'm here. My name is Jesse. Who're you, and how did you get that thing to float like that?"

"My name is," and then the sound became a crackle for a moment, "although I doubt that translated to you much better than your name did to me."

"Translated? But you're speaking English... mostly, anyway!" The excitement of the moment was starting to overcome Jesse's natural suspicion and fear.

"Well, actually no. I'm speaking," crackle crackle, "but the Universal Translater is converting my words into concepts that are recognizable to you in your own language. With the number of new languages that are popular in my time, I didn't think the odds were very high that we'd speak the same language, so I made sure the time line was equipped with a Universal Translater."

"Time line? Are you trying to tell me that you're talking to me from... what, the future?"

"Precisely! You've grasped the situation perfectly! I'm speaking to you, via the time line that you see in front of you, from a time period approximately two hundred years in your future! In fact, I'm the inventor of this device, and this is my initial trial run! And a more successful first attempt I couldn't have hoped for! My, but this is exciting!"

"But, if you're from the future," Jesse said, as his sharp mind started to draw some conclusions, "then that means that the Atomic War isn't going to wipe us out the way everyone says it will!"

"Oh, no, we learned the folly of Atomic Power years ago, and switched over to the clean energy contained in the," crackle crackle crackle crackle, "though I don't suppose that will translate either, as their discovery is likely still years away for you. It was that particular breakthrough that allowed us to enter the Golden Age that we've been enjoying for almost a century now!"

"But this is amazing! You're telling me that we somehow found a way to live peacefully among ourselves!"

"Well, of course!"

"And we didn't destroy the environment with pollution and deadly chemicals?"

"No, certainly not!"

"Then, there is hope after all!"

"Well, naturally! I must say, you seem more than a little bit paranoid about your current conditions. It can't really seem that bad to you, can it?"

"Not anymore! You've just told me that it's all going to work out in the end! The Earth is saved!"

"The Earth? What kind of a sick sense of humour do you have?? ... Just my luck, I make contact with the past on my first try, and I hook up with a real sicko!"

Jesse felt his heart turning cold in his chest. He managed to ask, "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, give it a rest, already! Don't play the fool! Even in your day we knew that the Earth blew itself up in a civil war of some sort. Say..... I wonder if that could've screwed up my calculations at all?"