The Anachronistic Code, Book Two: The Comeback Kid

By Dwayne R. James

It's 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen ... again. And he’s not alone.
Somebody has made changes to the era that Josh grew up in and he’s thinking that it’s a message that can help him stop a future cataclysm before it even happens. But first, he has to decode it, not just for himself and the girl he left behind, but for the future of humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dwayne R. James
• Release date: Nov 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781928015239

Dwayne R. James

Writer and watercolour artist Dwayne James lives outside of Lakefield, Ontario where he writes and paints as often as he can, that is when he's not spending time with his very forgiving family.Dwayne studied archaeology in University, and as a result learned how to write creatively. "The most important skill I learned in University," he says, "was the ability to pretentiously write about myself in the third person."With no formal art training, Dwayne has always preferred the self-guided, experimental approach. In fact, he taught himself how to illustrate archaeological artifacts while completing his Master's degree at Trent University. Said his thesis supervisor at the time: "There might not be much in the way of coherent theoretical content in Dwayne's thesis, but damn, it looks pretty!"After spending close to a decade as a technical communicator at IBM, Dwayne opted to look at their Jan 2009 decision to downsize him as an opportunity to become a stay-at-home Dad for his young twins, and pursue his painting and creative writing whenever they allow him to do so. It is a decision that continues to make him giggle with wild abandon to this very day.

Book preview

The

ANACHRONISTIC

CODE

The COMEBACK KID

by

DWAYNE R. JAMES

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2019 by Dwayne R. James

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A note from the author:

I’m unapologetic in the number of pop culture references that I make in this book. Please note that I give credit for each and every one and that it is not my intent to claim any of them as my own, or to incorporate aspects of their mythology into my story other than in a manner that is either referential or reverential.

Indeed, it is my goal to pay tribute to the positive impact that they’ve had on my life, and the lives of so many others.

The ANACHRONISTIC CODE Series

Available Now

DÉJÀ ME

the COMEBACK KID

MEMORIES from TOMORROW

Coming Soon

ESCAPE from TOMORROW

and a few more after that to be named later…

Synopsis

It's 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen … again. And he’s not alone.

Somebody has made changes to the era that Josh grew up in and he’s thinking that it’s a message that can help him stop a future cataclysm before it even happens. But first, he has to decode it, not just for himself and the girl he left behind, but for the future of humanity.

Table of Contents

Chapter 9: I’m Not Alone

Chapter 10: The Video Recital

Chapter 11: Blowing Bubbles

Chapter 12: A Youthful Optimism

Chapter 13: The Inevitable Orwellian Comparison

Chapter 14: The Obligatory Fart Joke

Chapter 15: Excerpt from Josh Donegal’s journal

Chapter 16: The Side-Quest

About the Author

Also by Dwayne R. James

Chapter 9

I’m Not Alone…

Well, if I had any reservations about keeping the fact that I’ve traveled through time to myself, it came via a message from Weird Al.

Yes, that Weird Al.

The Eat It guy.

It’s Thursday, April 25, 1985 today, and it’s been a full week since I arrived unwittingly in my own past, waking up in a significantly younger body and in what appeared to be my childhood bedroom. Naturally, I was a little shocked at first, especially when I discovered that what I had first thought was just a hallucinatory dream, included people—specifically loved ones that I had lost years ago. Then, once it had become incontrovertibly apparent that what I was experiencing was genuine and that I really had shifted in time, I decided to try and fit into my own past until I could figure out what was going on, and how it had happened in the first place. Acting sufficiently natural not to draw any undue attention to myself would have been difficult enough, but I also had to make sure that my high school sweetheart, Andi, wouldn’t notice that I was acting differently. Although it probably would have been wiser to keep the young woman at several arm’s length, I soon came to realize that I was becoming a little infatuated with her all over again, something the 67-year-old inside of me had had a difficult time reconciling.

Then, only three days in, just as I had begun to feel comfortable enough to be enjoying the ride, everything changed. I had been out with Andi and some of her friends when I had noticed a temporal anachronism, a detail that didn’t belong in this timeline—I mean besides myself, of course. The detail in question was a subtle difference in the song In the Air Tonight. The first time that I’d lived through 1985, the lyrics had been: "If you told me you were drowning. But now, in this iteration of 1985, for some inexplicable reason, Phil Collins was singing If you told me you were choking!"

This had been last Saturday, and after a marathon session all night and into the morning, in which I listened to every piece of music I could get my ears on, I found four more anachronisms. Four more song lyrics that were not the way I remembered them to be. As I found each one, I wrote down the details in a spreadsheet-like table on the very last page of my journal. That table looked something like this:

So, there were five songs that were different in this particular timeline, and it wasn’t lost on me that these were not major alterations. They were small ones. Specifically, words. Words, I speculated, that could be combined to form messages. This had led me to believe that maybe, just maybe, the changes represented some kind of code.

Call it wishful thinking if you will, but until you yourself have been displaced in time into the body of your teenaged self with no idea how or why it happened, you’ve no right to judge me. The truth was, I knew from experience that humanity wasn’t headed for a bright future. In 2025, billions and billions will be wiped out by a global pandemic, and the few who would be lucky enough to survive would eventually find themselves under the rule of an authoritarian corporation. If the existence of time travel sounded at all ridiculous to the rational part of my brain, that part of my brain wasn’t listening anymore. It was too busy grudgingly admitting that switching well-known song lyrics was an ideal way to get an accidental time-traveler’s attention. I knew, from personal experience being inside my head, that certain lyrics stayed with us for years, especially the ones from the songs of our youth.

So yes, call it wishful thinking that the first explanation that I reached for to explain the anachronisms was that somebody else had come back from this same distant future too, and was trying to get my attention. And, to do this, they were sending out a coded message that could only be deciphered by people who had already lived through the 80s once, because they were the only ones who would know that there’d been a change in the first place. Still, I had to wonder about how much my own longings might be influencing my perspective on the situation. Was I being overly optimistic in thinking that the message might represent some kind of a way to keep a dystopian future from happening, or was I projecting patterns onto a timeline that didn’t necessarily have to flow the same way twice?

There was only one way to know for sure: I had to find as many of the changes as I could, and then see if there was some kind of pattern to them. So, over the last four days, when I wasn’t listening intently to the radio, I had been going through every piece of music I could lay my hands on.

I started in the most obvious place: home. I had listened to all of the cassettes in the house by Monday, and had then begun to wade through our modest record collection, which consisted mostly of my parents’ albums and 45s from the 60s and early 70s. Almost immediately, I was reminded of how much work it was to listen to records! Beyond the 45s that contained just two songs (one to a side), a single side of an LP couldn’t last more than thirty minutes! Coming from a time when listening to an endless variety of music was as easy as hitting the shuffle button on a music device, it was positively laborious to have to switch things up on the record player every twenty-five minutes or so!

I used to bore my kids with stories about how music had been changed by digital downloads. They were accustomed to simply being able to copy a vast song collection to the tiniest of players, or being able to go online at any time and stream whatever song you wanted to hear at any given moment. Even on the island, we still had the Strand's version of YouTube as well as the communal database on the Pucks library that offered free streaming of anything (copyright laws and broadcasting fees had been completely dismantled after 2025 in the hopes that familiar forms of entertainment could bring at least a little comfort to the survivors).

Rewind to 1985 when this was certainly not the case. As a youth, I used to get very excited about collecting music, and I know I wasn't alone. It was a badge of honour to have friends over for a party and play music for them, so that they could get excited over the music you had access to and could play whenever you wanted (personally, one of the many reasons that I threw such terrible parties was because I just didn’t have much in the way of popular music because most of what I owned were orchestral movie soundtracks).

The problem was that teenagers in the 80s just didn’t have very extensive music collections, even the ones that thought they did. It was expensive to buy music, and it was relatively hard (at least by the standards of the future with which I was familiar) to listen to it once you had it. Sure, we had portable cassette players at the time, but the cassettes that fed them could never hold more than a couple dozen songs at any one time, and you had to listen to them in the order in which they had been recorded on the tape. Radio was by far the best way to hear a wider range of music than that which you owned, but even it was limited in that they only ever played what was current. ‘Oldies’ radio played mostly 60s music, meaning that there was a whole decade that hardly got any airtime at all. Sure, you could buy the multi-cassette compilations of 70s music that they were always advertising on TV, but, like I said at the beginning of this paragraph, that cost money that most teenagers (present company included) just didn’t have.

This was the culture into which the mixed tape was born, with those tapes becoming a kind of currency in the schools of the time. If you could scrabble together a decent variety of popular songs and record them onto a cassette tape in a sequence of your own design, you could become a celebrity with your friends. You could trade copies of that tape for other things of value (usually a bag of Doritos or a couple of those cookies from our cafeteria that melted in your mouth before you could even swallow them), or lend the original out to friends so that they could make their own copies of it. And then, inevitably, that friend would lend it out to even more people until the copies that were being made were of such poor quality as to be virtually unlistenable. That was another problem of the era when it came to music. Few of us owned a stereo tape deck of sufficient grade to record copies off vinyl that came anywhere near the quality of the original.

Still, it was the further evolution of an era when kids stopped trying to use their own words to communicate with others, choosing instead to claim that, this artist says it much better than I ever could in this song. It was a time when teenaged girls would hand their boyfriends a mixed tape with a special selection of music that she had specifically designed to tell him exactly how she felt, only to have him think that it was little more than romantic music to be played in the background while they made out.

Plus ça change, I suppose.

And then, there was the difference in sound! As I listened to these old LPs, I was reminded just how much I missed the subtle pop and hiss of the needle and the vinyl moving against each other physically. It just made it seem, I dunno, so much more real. Tangible. Palpable. It was like you were feeling the sounds as much as hearing them. I can remember hearing stories when the first CD players started showing up in cars in Northern Ontario, that the main reason the drivers could play that music so extraordinarily loud was because it was so clear that it didn’t damage your hearing in the same way that analog music did.

Anyhow, I hadn’t identified more than about ten anachronisms when I found one in Gino Vannelli’s song Black Cars, and it occurred to me that a preponderance of the altered lyrics were showing up in Canadian songs. Beyond Vannelli’s song, I had found a couple from Bryan Adams, as well one in Tears are Not Enough (now titled Tears Just Aren’t Enough in this timeline), the Canadian answer to the Ethiopian fund-raising relief started by the United Kingdom’s Do They Know it’s Christmas, and followed soon after by the Americans with We Are The World. As I wondered why so many of the altered songs were Canadian, and if they had gotten much in the way of airplay outside of this country back in the day, it began to make a certain morbid kind of sense. If this was a message constructed by somebody who had experienced the future and was trying to contact others like me who had shifted in time, then that person would want to target Canadian songs, since we made up such a large percentage of the survivors of the events of 2025, thanks to our isolation on Prince Edward Island.

In any event, by the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I’d finally worked my way through my family’s entire assortment of vinyl (I had been staying up well after everyone else had gone to sleep and was using a set of headphones that was tethering me to the stereo cabinet in the recroom in a manner that I had become unaccustomed to since the advent of Bluetooth). Although I had found a handful of differences in more modern recordings, I discovered that the effort to go through my parent’s collection had been pretty much a complete waste of time. Every piece of popular music from that 60s (Dad loved classic rock and had most of a complete discography of the Beatles and the Stones, and Mom had had a bit of a Motown fetish in her youth) had been just exactly as I had remembered it all to be, and it had almost been the same for the stuff from the early 70s as well, with one huge exception. In the Tony Orlando