Dead End of a Circle

By David Myhro

Dead End of a Circle is a story about time travel, but it is unlike any other. All other such stories have two things in common: first, no attempt is made at describing either the working parts of the time machine or the general theory of what is actually taking place; and secondly, the act of time travel is a mere plot device to drive the story. Dead End of a Circle does not conform to this. The working parts of the machine are described in full and it is plainly explained how the system works. Also, the act of time travel is itself a conquest instead of just being a means to place a character out of temporal context as a gimmick.

This is the story of a man that is completely indestructible. It explores his dealings with mankind as he, due to his infinite lifespan, abides with humanity from the very beginning up until the very end when all life in the universe faces inevitable extinction as the last of the stars burn out. He also contemplates himself, being unsure of who or what he is and where he came from.

This book is for those who adore the wonders of cosmology and who like to ponder about the far future of both the universe and humanity. I hope you enjoy reading it and all feedback is appreciated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Myhro
• Release date: May 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310845765

David Myhro

Working on sequels to Dead End of a Circle.

Book preview

Chapter 1

I was introduced to the time machine that we'd spent so much time developing and the only thing I could think about was that it shouldn't have been possible to exist. Of course, you could easily make a future-traveling time machine simply by traveling very fast, but to make a past-traveling time machine is a completely different challenge.

I'm sure, due to the stories of time travel that you've endured in your lifetime, that you have certain expectations of what's coming next. You are probably only concerning yourself with the many potential paradoxes that might arise from time travel.

You can break man's laws, and if God is real then you can surely break his laws, too, but you cannot ever break the laws of the universe. And so if a time machine were to be successfully constructed, then the consequences, even if they seem like a paradox, will be completely natural and within the rules of the universe. The main question that any seeker might ask should not pertain to paradoxes, but rather to the working parts of the machine.

I will give you an engineer's description of the machine later, but for now I'll start my story from a bit further back…

Chapter 2

The year was 2011 and the place was New York City. As I had been doing for all my life, so I was doing on this night—I was hunting.

I found a destitute prostitute with a nondescript face who had one stocking riding higher than the other and some reddish-brown substance clinging to the cusp of her nostril like the Nike symbol—an ugly duckling of a woman whose unnecessary sexual parts were a mockery to the testament that no man would ever have her; I was somehow able to lead her to believe that I was sexually attracted to her. I motioned to her to get into my car, and she gladly did.

I had a fairly good idea of what she was expecting me to do, and it wasn't that I would rip out her throat and inhale the scent of the cherry springs that proliferated from the oxygenated life beneath. But, as fate would have it, I was the one in for the surprise: she was a police officer—a dead one now—and I hadn't suspected it because she never tried to elicit a bid from me. The other officers who'd been in surveillance were now buzzing around me like flies; had I swatted them all down, this day would have perished in my memory after a few centuries.

With ease I disposed of the officers that charged at me since I, thanks to all the time that I've had to walk this earth, had long ago mastered the various arts of hand-to-hand combat; there was a coward, however, that had escaped while I was occupied with his companions, and this was the beginning of the end for me.

I thought nothing of this night and I continued to live my life. I was an anonymous, moderately famous magician—in addition to combat skills I'd also picked up some showman tricks and swiftness of hand over the years, but the main attraction to my shows was something that was not fake. I've been hanged, scorched, poisoned, drowned, crushed, and tortured in many other ways on stage. But that escaped police officer was the real magician, and none of these tricks could compare to what he was going to do to me.

As I would discover after my arrest, the police officer did not provide a reliable description of my face to his cohorts. What he did do was advance through the ranks and become a respectable homicide detective, and, seventeen years after that night, he recognized my face on the internet. The only thing he had to work with was a very quick encounter in the dark, nearly two decades ago—and he was in fear for his life at the moment, no less. It seemed impossible, but he saw my ageless face and his dormant memory awoke. His paygrade bestowed him credibility with the rest of his fellow officers, and that was the only reason that he was even able to scrap together a few men to spy on me. I'm sure he gained even more ranks after I was seen killing yet another prostitute on their very first day of surveillance.

The team's numbers were nowhere near what they needed to be in order to take me down, but they didn't know it. They only knew that I was caught in a violent act, and so there was no hesitation on their part to attempt to apprehend me. They threatened me with bullets and such, and so I killed them, but that slippery detective escaped once again. This time, however, he had images of my face and of my deeds, and I had no chance of an escape from New York. Within a matter of a few hours there were enough recruited hands so that they were able to capture me with their mechanisms of metal; I surrendered unconditionally, lest I be seen reflecting bullets outside of the context of being a magician.

Bail was set at no bail—if that makes any sense—and so I was not afforded the opportunity to flee. Some suspicions were raised when I was so eager to sign a plea bargain under the sole condition that the number of years was fixed and definite. I was very wary of being given life without parole, or—worse—a death sentence. If I was handed down a death sentence, then the authorities would inevitably discover my invincibility when they try to do me in; if that was discovered, if they knew that the magic was real, then the day of my freedom would be further away than ever. (I did not know it at the time, but the death penalty had been recently abolished in the current state.) And I really didn't want life without parole, or even life at all, because if I got that then there may be some kind of lobbying against me when the time came for the term to be up… some proclamation by the people that I ought to be incarcerated until death by natural (or otherwise) causes. What I wanted was a set amount of years, even if it was longer than a life sentence.

Thus the prosecution, in the end, agreed to give me a ninety-nine-year, eight-month sentence (or some other weird amount like that). They didn't want to give me the full one hundred years because they thought I wanted all these years for bragging power with the other inmates. I would be eligible for parole in about eighty-six years.

Chapter 3

As things unfolded, it became increasingly clear that killing the undercover prostitute was one of the worst mistakes I'd ever made. I was simply unable to fulfill my plans of peaceful observation while being locked up with these savage scavengers. They provoked me. Daily they provoked. They provoked me like it was all they wanted out of this life. I should have been a hero because I was a cop killer, but instead I was targeted by everyone because I refused to join a race-based gang.

The intensity of the battles became very fierce. I was attacked with weight-lifting equipment and razors and dung-covered shanks and locks in socks and any other sharp or blunt instrument that these subhumans could grasp. I would usually manage to severely injure all of my attackers; occasionally, however, I would be overpowered and held down, and they would repeatedly stab me in vain. When these limb bearers escaped me, knowing full well that the magic was real, I had to hunt them down individually and murder them in secret.

I became morbidly indifferent to the violence, and my numbed mind failed to realize that the large amount of serious inmate injuries attracted the media… which attracted the government. And so there was an investigation, and many mouths spoke of me. I was taken away and examined by the world's greatest scientists to determine how or why I was what I was.

Like a wild animal I was as uncooperative as I possibly could have been. I could not be chemically subdued, so whenever I was partially unrestrained I attacked with the intent to kill. Looking back, I think that was the wrong choice. I sometimes wonder, were I cooperative, if I would have been eventually given a chance to escape or even openly go free—at the very least, a friendlier version of myself could've perhaps gleaned insight into the properties of my invincibility from a member of the staff. All I did was infuriate them and hinder their once-in-a-lifetime chance to study a creature as intriguing as myself. And so, when they determined that they had learned as much as was feasible, they locked me up and threw away the key.

They took me to the vault. Yes, not any vault… this was the vault. It would become my world, my entirety of reality, and the end of my reality. I knew that there was nothing for me after this, and I had always known my whole life that I would end up in permanent darkness one day.

The vault was deep underground and a system of mazes had to be mastered before it could be found. It was originally owned by a mega tycoon who'd had the whole thing set up because of his lack of trust of banks or even of the dollar itself. He eventually fell on tougher times and forfeited, among other things, his prized vault to the government that he could never trust. This, at least, was the story I was told by the driver while I was being transported there.

The vault was very much what you would have expected, considering that the owner designed it with the frame of mind that money was no object and that total security was the only thing that mattered. It was a cube in shape, and all five of the non-door sides were protected by several feet of steel. There was no way for any kind of wiring to come into the vault from the outside world—the vault was nothing but plain, stupid, brute force with no electronic trickery, and there was no way in hell that I could ever MacGyver my way out of this one.

The door was clearly the only way into this vault unless you had an oil drill with a diamond auger the size of a Nixon-era nuclear warhead. The door was a sliding one, rather than a swinging door, since it was just so insanely thick, and a machine was required to open and close the door because it was simply so heavy. Banks do not use doors like this for their vaults—in fact, nobody does—because it is impractical to be used on daily basis; the door had to be specially commissioned. The locking mechanism on the door was a set of several steel, cylindrical rods that receded into the door when unlocked and protruded out when locked. The receptacles for these locking rods above and below the door were nothing but holes in which the rods could hibernate.

The vault was waterproof, tornado proof, fireproof, bombproof, soundproof, and vampire proof, and that door was as shut as the speak-no-evil monkey's mouth—with me inside. The manual lock was destroyed so that no one could ever open it from the outside.

It must have been the military that ordered this—no one else could have been