Chapter One
With no answers apparently forthcoming, Seb found himself dazedly going through the motions of the day while trying to mentally parse what had happened.
Was I dreaming? Am I dreaming now?
He didn’t know. His memories were almost scrambled, or at least pureed. His death and the moments leading to it were as clear to him as the dinner he’d had the night before with his mother. One of those two sure as hell didn’t belong, but he couldn’t tell which was which.
Logically, it had all been a dream. Certainly a bit of a rough one there at the end, but there had been good times too.
The problem with that, however, was that the memories of it weren’t fading like a dream tended to. He had two sets of memories, and neither seemed to have a problem with the fact that they didn’t exactly mesh properly.
So he just sat in the awkward bench seat on the bus, leaning against the window as they did the rounds, picking up kids for the last day of school in his tenth year of life.
Ten! I’m Ten!?
It all felt so… wrong.
Surreptitiously he did the lucid dreaming trick he’d practiced so much in his early twenties when he’d been on a meditation and ‘release your inner power’ schtick. About the only thing that came from that of any value was the understanding of how to determine if he were dreaming.
Pushing his fingers into the window of the bus with ever increasing pressure he stared, waiting for them to penetrate through the glass as they always would in a dream, but all he got was a couple sore fingers for the attempt.
Not a dream, not as best I can tell.
No one bothered him on the ride in, but he’d always been more of a loner than anything else, and rarely in his life had he had more than one or two friends he could actually count as more than friendly acquaintances.
At this point in time, that number was actually one and said friend didn’t go to the same school.
So the other kids…
God, I really just thought the other kids like I’m one of them. Am I one of them?
Seb realized that he really needed to get a handle on this, because the confusion was driving him to a whole new set of insecurities and he had enough of those to begin with.
What is happening to me?
*****
Thankfully the last day of school before summer break was really just a day to hangout and get the official records for the past year, because if he’d actually had to study anything, Seb doubted that he’d have been able to focus.
Probably wouldn’t have mattered, not with tenth grade material he thought, but there was also the probability that he was losing his mind so… yeah, there was that too. Writing out answers to questions that contained the ravings of a schizophrenic breakdown might not be the best of things to do.
He just picked up a book and stuck his nose in it and that was largely enough for everyone to leave him be.
If he’d really gone back in time, as it appeared, then that meant… well, honestly, Seb didn’t know what the hell that meant.
Not knowing what it meant, however, didn’t mean that he didn’t have a plan.
He’d had a plan for what to do if he went back in time within his own lifetime since he was in his thirties, actually, and regularly updated it as a mental exercise.
Until they showed up, said plans had mostly just been various ways of making enough money to tell the world where it could stick its opinions, along with various paths to debauchery the likes of which would qualify him for legendary status among the ancient Greek pantheon.
Not entirely off the table, I suppose, Seb thought with an amused, if slightly hysterical, undertone. There are other priorities to ensure first though.
Among other things he definitely had to age up to a point where his personal morals, liberated though they might be, didn’t clash with the ages of people around him to the point where he would have to seriously consider tossing himself in a woodchipper.
Ugh. Time travel age gaps are going to suck for any relationships.
Lord knows the half plus seven rule is toast unless I want to be a monk or something.
Whole new meaning of lemon party… Seb thought, all but giggling hysterically as he tried to keep himself from slipping down a spiraling suction of nope.
With some effort he pulled his mind back from that brink and thought about the future he remembered, and the aliens that destroyed it.
What he knew of the early invasion ran across his mind, along with all the speculation his fellows had tossed into the fire early on as largely pointless in the moment. Preparing the world for what was coming wouldn’t be easy, honestly he didn’t know how he could do it honestly.
But he had to try.
Little in the way of intelligence had been gathered from the invaders…
they didn’t really have a name that anyone knew, and so had been classified under various terms in the records.
The common names for them weren’t for mixed company, particularly not children, not unless said company had grown up fighting the bastards at least.
As he’d been thinking, though, no one really knew much about them prior to the actual invasion, but he and his fellows had long speculated that they must have been scoping the planet out for a time before they mounted the actual assault.
That was just how you did things, militarily, and besides…
it did appear that their earliest attacks were too well targeted to be random.
If we’re ready when they show up to scout us out, we might be able to at least delay the invasion.
The first target was a United Nations meeting in 2078 attended by world leaders, no one walked out of that one alive.
The United States and Western Powers were shaken, but China, Russia, and India nearly collapsed from the mixture of political infighting and the sudden attacks by the invaders.
Seb stopped, looking down at the old star trek novel he was pretending to read, and laughed suddenly. That got him some attention, but he just shook his head and hefted the book.
“Sorry, just a funny line.”
Everyone went back to their own entertainment as he settled back down.
Here I am, a ten year old kid, planning how to save the world from an alien invasion. Talk about a nineties plotline, I’m a decade too early for this bullshit.
Realistically he wasn’t sure what he’d be able to do, however.
Sure, making some money would be easy. He had the discipline of an age of writing, and the skill to match… or, he thought he did anyway. The veracity of his memories still had to be tested, but assuming they were true, Seb expected that he should be able to crank out a novel or two over the summer.
After that, keep working, keep sending them out to publishers, and sooner or later he’d get his break again.
Dump the royalties in specific markets, buy up small but significant shares in key stocks… Easy millionaire in no time.
Making money was really just a matter of being ready to grab and leverage your lucky breaks as they came. The real trick was seeing them, grabbing them, and squeezing them for everything they were worth.
Every person of success he’d ever met had gotten lucky.
The amount of luck, though, that varied in proportion to the skill, intelligence, and education they had.
The more you were ready to take advantage, the less luck you tended to need.
No one got anywhere without luck, but luck alone rarely did you much good either.
I wish I had Al, though, he…
Seb trailed off, thinking for a moment, then he looked around carefully as a thought broke clear through his muddled thoughts.
Could it… I mean… maybe?
No one was looking anywhere even remotely in his position. He shifted to shield one side of himself from anyone’s view, then made a quick gesture and mentally prodded the alien technology he had taken great pains to acquire for himself in the future.
His heart skipped a beat as the shimmering split in spacetime appeared, and he could feel the mental weight of the contents of the dimensional storage settle into his mind.
Damn. Definitely not a dream, not unless this is.
He had his dimensional pocket, along with everything he’d put in it for the trip to the evacuation colony.
This just went from impossible, but I’m going to make it work anyway, to ‘I may have an actual shot at pulling it off’.
*****
Getting through the rest of the day was an exercise in patience that he’d honestly not really believed that he had.
He couldn’t exactly pull out an advanced VI in a classroom in nineteen eighty six, so he forced himself to keep reading and just keep his head down as much as he could while his mind was actually awhirl with the possibilities he was dealing with.
It’s nineteen eighty six. Honestly I don’t know much about what’s going to happen politically or such for at least a couple decades… well, a decade and a half. Oh damn. Two thousand and one.
Just the thought of that day in September was enough to increase his heart rate, and he wasn’t even American.
Seb knew that he didn’t know nearly enough to even hope to stop the event, but Al would. Al would know everything that was made public, and possibly quite a bit that wasn’t given that he’d been trained on government databases that had largely been unlocked after everything went to hell.
He buried his head in his book, groaning slightly, and inadvertently attracted the teacher’s attention.
“Mr Parker, are you quite alright?”
“Yes Ma’am,” He mumbled. “Just fine.”
Only dealing with existential dread and the time traveler’s paradox is all. No big deal.
Seb took a few breaths, clearing his head.
Ok, don’t buy trouble until you have to. While I think I can safely throw out any concerns about Paradox, since there’s approximately zero percent chance that I will be able to repeat my life perfectly. That means that if a paradox is possible, I’m screwed no matter what.