All Our Yesterdays

By Mike Kennedy

In New America, the History Channel of the 25th Century edits 20 episodes of The Ancient Office, which still produces documents in ways Gutenberg understood. In Old America, the office of 1975 in Indianapolis has more in common with Da Vinci’s drawing of the Cannon Factory, than with any workstation in 2452.

Next year, Apple sells its first personal computer, and 30 years later, the assault on consciousness begins with the great connectivity. The Network's local producer learns what's coming; realizing that a hive of bees may have total connectivity, but what have they given up? Progress promises to pick up speed at the turn of the 21st century, accelerating toward the eventual downfall of one particular animal, a mammal: genus Homo, species Sapiens.

Within the program, All Our Yesterdays, some shows are epic: The treason trials and public executions of Old America; the paralyzing anxiety of our near miss at extinction, when our fate hung on that single capricious chromosome; and the building of the Atmospheric Decarbonizing Complex on the Columbia River. But New America has recovered (temporarily) in these last 50 years, and so, the series The Ancient Office documents life at a more gracious, walkabout scale.

Time is a relic of our Neolithic campfires, and yet our moments remain forever real. The end of days begins so innocently in 1975. The exponent works simultaneously across 500 years, playing moments like Bach at his clavier. Then comes the labyrinth's crucial turn: 2006; the I-phone; Twitter; the assault on consciousness by this nemesis who was awakened from the null zone by the growing racket of incessant human connectivity. Man’s destiny is not to have one, and even to lose his past.

This writer sees the present struggle against the New World Order as mankind’s unconscious course correction versus the approach of the technological singularity. Overtaking us, it would bring the irreversible loss of our nature as Longhunters. All Our Yesterdays is an allegory of mankind’s defeat in that struggle.

The characters in the story explore the four levels of consciousness via the retro-causation from the History Channel of the 25th Century. The back matter at the end of the book provides an expanded definition of each. This novel was the channeled experience of the military's "Project Looking Glass." Channeling is the means to discover the thing you know that you do not know you know. It is a rendezvous with the thing that has no name. The unconscious does not sleep.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Kennedy
• Release date: Jan 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005240455

Mike Kennedy

A note to Kennedy's readers: "Like many of you, in former times I thought of myself as not merely awake, but vibrantly awake. I was wrong. Beginning in 2019 and connecting the dots as consciousness is wont to do, I began my Red-Pill experience. Recently, and to my amazement, I see that the writing of three of my novels was channeled experience. 'Mali' turns out to be a story of the Deep State. It was always, from the start, a story of the illusion of free will. 'Taggart' turns out to be a story of Trans-Humanism. And 'All Our Yesterdays' turns out to have been an unconscious metaphor of the inner sanctum of the Cabal and its malign design upon mankind. I have long known that my stories find me (and not the other way around). Two attempts at designing a story have both resulted in ten-thousand-word dead ends. I quote from Aeschylus (his work 'Agamemnon'): 'Pain, which cannot forget, even in our sleep, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our despair, and against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God.' And we remember that 'grace' is an unmerited consolation. Finally, I see that my 'message to the publishing world' (final paragraph below) recognized the sad fact that agents & editors have betrayed their intrinsic debt to western civilization and consciously work in thrall to the dark side. One should keep in mind that the root word for 'inspiration' is 'spirit' and so must ever remain experience beyond the five senses. I have always written about those things that you know, but do not know you know."On a lighter note: "It is not too late to fall in love with language. You've just needed characters you wish you knew. I wish there were drawings, pictures, and maps in novels and short stories. Don't you? In the novel 'Mali,' a picture begins every chapter. So also, in these two anthologies. All in support of the magical movie in your mind. Go ahead and venture, 'It's showtime!'"Indianapolis author Mike Kennedy described by Trident Media Group, saying: "Kennedy has a way with words. Readers attracted to Hemingway and Mailer will love Season of Many Thirsts [A novel brought to E-Books under the original title: REPORT FROM MALI]." Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says of the manuscript: "This is a potentially important and significant novel on many levels, including formally." Little, Brown says of the novel: "Our admiration for its ambition and the energy and high-octane force it applies toward these engrossing geopolitical events. Chance and his team are memorable characters." Random House says: "Kennedy captures the strange, and intriguing world of Mali." Playwright Arthur Miller said of Kennedy: "Marilyn and I used to think there was something funny about Mike, and then we realized that he was simply hilarious."Kennedy's message to the publishing world, "I have read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from time to time across fifty years. During this, my most recent reading, it occurs to me that I am Kurtz and that all of you are Marlow. Kurtz lay dying in the pilot house of the river steamer. Marlow, the company agent, has found him and returns with him. Kurtz has spent years in the jungle pulling out ivory and sending it downstream. Finally, Kurtz agrees to return down river to civilization because he realizes that he has something to say, something with a value beyond his ton of treasure. Kurtz realizes that he has achieved a synthesis from out of his brutish experience. Kurtz imagines being met by representatives at each one of the string of railway stations during his return to civilization. He tells Marlow, 'You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.' And then, sounding as though he steps into our own millennium, Kurtz adds, 'Of course you must take care of the motives—right motives—always.' Now I see that Kurtz is Conrad. Kurtz is not unique. He is every writer. It is only Marlow, the agent, who is unique, unique in his fidelity, not just to the job, nor only to the company, but to the civilization that sent him."Listen to the video essays of WrongWayCorrigan on Rumble. https://rumble.com/c/WrongWayCorriganCJ

Book preview

All Our Yesterdays

A Novel by

Mike Kennedy

Copyright 2021 by Mike Kennedy

Smashwords Edition

ISBN No. 9781005240455

www.GoodStorySaloon.com

www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/GOODSTORYSALOON/

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or businesses is purely coincidental.

Other books by Mike Kennedy

Taggart’s Last Rites

Late Night Radio

Lady of the Yellowstone

Report from Mali

Bare Branches

In Their Own Likeness

Leda and the Swan and Other Stories

The Prince of Staten Island and Other Stories

Jill Seymour before the Network Intervention

May 15, 1975

Fancy Gap, Virginia, Old America

From the files of the Galax Gazette, Galax Va.

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more.

[Macbeth, Act 5]

He who lives his life without fame

and burns his life to dust

leaves no more trace of himself upon the Earth

than wind-blown smoke

or foam upon the water.

[Dante’s Inferno]

Interactive Table of Contents:

Outer Novel:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Inner Novel:

Prologue

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Episode 7

Episode 8

Episode 9

Episode 10

Episode 11

Episode 12

Episode 13

Episode 14

Episode 15

Episode 16

Episode 17

Episode 18

Episode 19

Episode 20

Outer Novel:

Chapter 3

Levels of Human Consciousness

CHAPTER 1

Dyno saw Dinny Cochran for the first time as she came sailing over the roof of the space station, her sub-G vaulting pole falling free. She looked like a shooting star against the stripes of Jupiter. The surface was dusky but there was more light overhead. He had managed to get over forty shots, including one by jumping far to the side to get Dinny, the station and the planet all lined up. That camera shot would become the cover photo six-months later.

Dyno had been impatient to try out the Ganymede gravity so he had not waited for the shuttle to take him to the station. He rented a pressure suit from the space port and started hiking with his duffel and his camera bag loaded down with lenses of every focal length. One camera hung by a strap around his neck with a memory card a third full, just from the flight. It would later take the magazine weeks to go through all the photos.

This moon is half again as large as Earth’s moon, but it has ten-percent less gravity. Dyno had heard that you could jump twelve-feet straight up and broad jump over eighty. And this was not the simple view from Earth’s moon. The twilight sky on Ganymede was a corps de ballet of seventy luminous orbs, floating in seventy orbits, in a scene forever freshly composing.

Apart from an occasional squawk of space port business coming through over channel-one, the only sound was his own breathing, and that had soon become a racket.

As she floated down, with her face getting larger and larger, Dinny held up two fingers and Dyno switched to Channel Two.

"Mister, if you put a hole in that fabric, we’ll ship you home in a sponge."

"You must be Dinny." She sounded squawky and far away and there was that odd time lag that made you think that she had not heard you.

Mister, as long as you’re breathing my air, it’s Commander Cochran.

Most reporters won’t go this far for a story, but Dyno had talked his editor at Free Will Magazine into letting him hitch a ride on an ore freighter dead-heading back out to the Jupiter colonies. His pitch was that the public is curious about daily life so far from Earth at the Iridium Mineworks on Ganymede. And he had already seen a story that mentioned Dinny Cochran and so he had a lead. Stories of the Quantum Resistance Movement had started selling a lot of newspapers, but a magazine has space and full color pictures.

This was back in 2448. That interview and an eight-page spread in the magazine was how she made her big splash. The story gave a boost to subscriptions and so the magazine had Dyno keep an eye on her.

Afterward, the subject of Dinny Cochran took The History Channel out to Ganymede to film a segment of their continuing series on the history of explorers, soldiers, convicts, and colonists of space. And so, Dinny hit the big time as network ratings went into orbit. The network lured her out of the military with an offer they called once in a lifetime.

Except, that particular expression has since become a touchy subject, since no one today can be totally sure if they are living in their original lifetime. The technology has become tightly regulated, but the damage has already been done, assuming that there was any damage, which, of course, can never be known.

The Time Gang is still on the loose with that stolen intervention machine, which they have not energized directly off the grid since the week it was stolen. The power consumption would instantly give away its position, and so police think they use a generator. But that must mean that they are not very mobile.

Just who the Time Gang is and who controls them remains a mystery. The network has been investigated, but, so far, it does not seem like an inside job. The police do not even know what the Time Gang is after.

There has been a lot of hard feelings. Folks today blame the History Channel if they are not doing well. Folks say they have been cheated out of title to their past.

Officials vow that the Time Gang will be pursued if it takes forever, which it might, since officials fear that they are being protected by their future selves.

Dyno stowed his duffel on a top berth in a compartment for six. There was a desk at one end next to a window with a view of Jupiter and several moons hanging in orbit.

He had arrived just in time for dinner. He went down to the mess hall. He clattered out a tray onto the cafeteria slide and grabbed some silverware. He helped himself to the buffet.

Each of the men took a sporting turn at Dyno. He recorded the audio. Commander Cochran always dines in her quarters, alone.

Hey, Mister, stow that cutlery. I don’t want a floating fork in the eye, okay?

"Don’t dish that stew out too fast or it’ll wind up on my plate instead of yours."

It looked like actual beef and Dyno could recognize the potatoes. The other vegetables were distinctly shaped, but he had never seen them before except in old photographs. There was one with a remarkably subtle flavor and he thought it was celery. He used the ladle to corral a few before they floated to the deck. Dyno had heard that they ate pretty good out there.

The men were dressed in identical black spandex resistance suits with hoods, designed to prevent muscle atrophy during long exposure to low-g.

Where you out of, Mister?

New Boston, He said.

How’s the lobster?

All the fisheries are back, He said. "But the one thing we don’t have is beef."

"Beef is all we do have. They ship it into the Space Center from Argentina."

What’s it like working for Dinny? Dyno asked.

It suddenly became very quiet. A few shook their heads.

Look, Mister. Just watch your step. Do not get that lady on the warpath.

"Yeah, you’ll be gone in two days, but we’re stuck out here with her for two more years."

I haven’t seen her with her suit off, Dyno said. But I hear she’s pretty nice.

Word of advice. If she ever asks if you want to go to the gym with her, don’t.

What’s wrong with working out? He asked.

Mister, it would be a workout you’d never forget. Have you ever heard of Randori?

Judo! Dyno said. He did not mention that he was a practitioner.

Out here in point fourteen-g, Judo is particularly wicked. All kinds of submission holds! Look mister, you might have had a lot of luck with the ladies back on Earth, but the Commander is a warrior nun. You ever read about those warrior monks in the Knights Templars a thousand years ago? Well, we got one out here and it’s her air we’re breathing.

That’s what she told me outside, Dyno said.

"Well then! Now you know."

Dyno tried changing the subject. What do you guys think about free will?

Mister, I ain’t going to have free will again until I get these stripes off my sleeves.

Is she the only woman here? He asked.

Except for the Chinese penal colony. There’s hundreds of them out there.

There sure are a lot of convicts in space, Dyno smelled a story.

That’s because of these empty ore freighters. Stuff ships outbound for free and people ship outbound for next to free. The only major expense is getting stuff and people up to Shackleton.

So, what’s a penal colony in space like? Dyno asked.

For a tank of liquid oxygen, you can have yourself a pretty good time. You gotta bring back an empty though. The Commander’s strict about that.

Does she go there? Dyno asked without thinking.

Twenty men now tried very hard to bottle up determined belly laughs.

What about Quantum? Does anybody believe in it? he asked.

Mister, philosophers never make it out this far.

"What do we call you anyway?"

"Dyno. So, what does bring everybody out this far?" He asked.

The view.

The faint-hearted smirks told Dyno that might have been half right. They still looked. You can’t not look. But actually, it was the pay. Each man could go back to Earth and live well for fifteen years on what they made out there in just three. Of course, back on Earth, there is still not a lot to spend your money on, not as of yet, except for land.

Red-carpet chat-amok soirees at awards shows will televise, from time to time, The History Channel executives holding court with a flouncy coterie of social influencers, pixel queens, beaming babblers, and the talking-head elites. The interviews breezily dismiss the populist insurgency arguing against Quantum’s description of a universe in which everything has already happened and free will and time are merely illusions.

Of course, as Professor Babylonia Bismarck will point out, the Quantum protest is not new. It began, subconsciously, 500 years ago with Ernest Hemingway, the patron saint of free will. He wrote about the things you know, that you don’t know you know.

Hemingway’s characters thought that reflex and inspiration could change everything. Or else, winner take nothing. That’s when your struggle gains you only the satisfaction of knowing that those who beat you had to work for it—and maybe need stitches.

The Quantum Insurgency worries about the Time Gang and the safety of Saint Hemingway even though he has been placed, by popular demand, on the National Register of Historical Characters—with summary execution for violators in the Deep Fryer at Sing-Sing: Old Crispy. But, if Hemingway’s life does change, how will we ever know?

Plucky Dinny Cochran tries to have it both ways. She has always been the hero of her own life, although the Network allows the use of only the term celebrity.

Day-to-day, the folks at the Network, those with too much time on their hands, will always gossip that pretty Dinny Cochran could work in front of the cameras instead of behind them. That is, if she wanted to host the shows. That is, if she would only give in and say the word. That is, if she was not so stubborn. That is, if she would just wear a little makeup and show some leg, and quit wearing that Celtic Cross like a Purple Heart.

They say that one of the executives took a hard landing on Dinny’s first day at work. A woman is at her most beautiful when she is at her most aloof.

Just where would a girl like Dinny Cochran begin to explain? That is, if she ever felt she wanted to.

Perhaps you might know, if you had been the magazine reporter that made the trip to Ganymede, and if you had found yourself tagging along as Dinny hiked out to an oxygen separator located a mile from the station.

You might have taken risks just to get the pictures. You would know that you have to return to Earth with something to show your editor.

And so, here you are, gulping compressed oxygen and argon, out in 200 below, and 470 million miles from home. Jupiter is hanging two fingers above the horizon, as large as your gloved fist. You’re on the sun side and so Jupiter is completely lit. You’re counting the stripes. The scene overhead is dusky while the surface at your feet is dark. You have a light but Dinny is directing her beam ahead of you and watching where you walk. She knows that visitors are never looking down.

Remember not to tear your pressure suit.

The mare on which the space port and the station were built quickly gives way to jagged badlands. A rough trail winds through them.

The famous eye of Jupiter’s red storm is slowly swirling in front of you. It had shrunk to half the size of Earth, but today it is back, larger than ever. Jovian geologists think it is on a thousand-year fluid-dynamics cycle. They also think it might take about that long to solve for the strange attractor of Lorenz equations in Chaos theory.

Smaller moons suspend in the space between Ganymede and Jupiter, making the scene look very three-dimensional.

Where does the oxygen come from, Commander?

"The surface of Ganymede is mostly ocean, Dyno. In places, it’s 500 miles deep with double layers of ice: one layer on top, and liquid water on either side of a second ice layer in the middle.

Dyno, if you will look right, you’ll see the solar farm. That’s where we get the energy to separate Oxygen from Hydrogen. With 3 percent of Earth’s sunlight, it takes acres of panels. That’s why the smelter has to be located back at Shackleton Crater on Earth’s moon, because the sunlight there on the crater rim is ten times stronger than Earth’s.

Dinny’s voice comes through the speaker next to Dyno’s right ear. She is at his elbow but sounds farther away.

The actual separator is down about a mile. It’s below the ice in the liquid water of the first layer of ocean. The controls and the power feed are in a small station on the surface. That’s where we’re headed.

How do you get the oxygen back to the station and the space port, Commander?

"We pipe it a mile to the station and to the port, and two miles into the mine. Oxygen doesn’t freeze until 360 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but it boils at 290 below. With essentially no atmosphere to displace heat, the surface temperature at this latitude stays pretty stable at 200 below. So far, none of the pipes have cracked. They’re heated when it drops to 250 below, when we’re on the dark side, but even way out here that’s still warmer than Shackleton is down in the perpetual darkness of the crater floor, and they are a heck of a lot closer to the sun than we are.

Dyno, I haven’t been back to Earth orbit for some years. How big is Shackleton getting to be?

They’ve got suburbs springing up out past the rim.

"Man! I would NOT want to live out there! Way too sunny! I would have a headache all the time."

The reason is because so much of the crater floor is taken up with the ice mines and the smelter and now, they’ve started refining Helium-3. They expect the first load to ship to Earth next year. About ten tons of it.

That’s about three-fourths of what we need to power New America for a year! Does that mean they’ve given up on the idea of expanding the Lunar Solar Farm?

No, and they are building more rectifying antennae’s on Earth and so the guess is that maybe they’ll add more acres of solar panels in the future, probably up on the higher slopes of Epsilon Peak and Malapert Mountain.

Probably for redundancy in case of a meteorite strike. Do they still have plenty of water ice in the crater?

None of the comet ice mines have reached the end of any vein. The view from inside the crater is pretty spectacular.

The glare outside the crater hides a lot. I’d like to visit the dark side someday. They used to have a resort there.

How did you get used to the dangers of space, Commander?

Where to begin! Dinny exclaims. She runs through a quick list of harrowing terms, while reminding you that Earth has its share of dangers too.

Okay. Dinny relents. "Since you have come a long way to get a story, I’ll give you a description of one up close and personal.

"So, maybe let’s start with a girl choosing to keep her eyes glued to her pressure gage when she’s caught out in the middle of a meteorite shower. This is instead of looking up—how most Earthers would react—as the big ones come slamming in at twelve-thousand miles per hour, shooting ejecta off in all directions.

"This is because—as long as you can keep your wits about you—the little gage face, strapped to the arm of your pressure suit, is actually where the action is, not overhead. The big ones are too fast for a girl to dodge. Or, to use that word that your readers hate: The big ones are ‘inevitable.’

"So, you play it cool. You watch for that tiny one—the one that you can do something about. The one a girl will never notice. The one that makes some silent but deadly pinhole in her pressure suit. The one that will finish sucking her brains out through her ears just about the time she is on her last turn of the hand-wheel back at the air-lock—only a few p.s.i., or a few steps, too late.

"That is the kind of meteorite you can patch with a piece of foil-faced tape, if you can find the pinhole, if you can reach it. Call it ‘free will,’ a term that your readers love."

How often do these accidents happen? He asked.

Dinny never actually answered the question. Instead, she gave Dyno the science.

"Jupiter’s gravity draws these rocks in, but, lucky us, the moon on the next orbit out takes most of the hits. That’s Callisto. If you turn around, you can see it behind you. From here, it looks about pea sized, although it’s the third largest moon in the solar system. We’re the biggest, and Titan, out at Saturn, is number two. We orbit in 7 days and Callisto orbits in 17 days, so Callisto is on the other side much of the time. I did a paper in college on the Newtonian physics of why poor Callisto takes such a beating.

"Jupiter formed early and its mass was the reason why Earth did not take more hits during the formation of the solar system. As it was, Earth did take one gigantic hit when a rock the size of Mars gave it a glancing blow. That’s how Earth got such a large moon relative to its size. In fact, we’re not altogether sure that it was not Mars that actually did it!

But in the last hundred million years, things have sorted themselves out very elegantly, and if you look at the math, it really is quite a beautiful piece of choreography, especially out here in the Jupiter system.

That, briefly, is what eighteen years in space does to today’s busy, modern woman of 2452. That is why this particular modern woman is the way she is—now that she is finally back down in good old single-g.

Dinny Cochran is today safe and sound and living under the protective gaze of Professor Babylonia Bismarck, Dinny’s literature professor in the college where she studied Galactic Geography and Newtonian Navigation, and everything that Hemingway ever wrote. Even though years out of school, Dinny remains charmed by the colorful professor, who salts her vocabulary with ancient turns of phrase picked up during a lifetime of reading the old bindings.

But the television program! Oh my god, the program, Dinny will exclaim! If there is a single thing in the universe that is more interesting than the Oort Cloud, it must be All Our Yesterdays, with each month-long series of shows broadcast in two episodes each week on The History Channel.

Within the series, All Our Yesterdays, some shows are epic in scale: The Treason Trials and public executions of Old America; the paralyzing anxiety of our near miss at extinction, when our fate hung on that single capricious chromosome; and the building of the Atmospheric Decarbonizing Complex on the Columbia River. But most shows in the series are about the people. They document life at walkabout scale.

The Ancient Office is one of these, except it might run longer. The network feels that the lives of the ancient workstation, sentimentally known as an office, will engender sympathy for a bygone era balanced touchingly on the verge of mind-bending change,

The office in Old America had more in common with Da Vinci’s drawing of the Cannon Factory, than with any workstation in 2452.

It was inside the network truck, where, with capacitor banks fully charged, that the Jill Seymour intervention was first beamed out, for a distance of only thirty feet, yet across five centuries. Then, six-hours later, it was inside the network truck, after a drive to Marietta, Ohio, that the raw footage, the actual work product, shot centuries earlier, was readied for preliminary screening.

This footage has been fetched overland by Dinny and her crew from out of the vault where it laid in waiting, shimmering across the centuries with motives silent and with intent as yet unborn. This is a sort of gestation, with a kind of prenatal care by the periodic copying onto fresh memory chips. The original, ancient packaging is carefully replaced each time. The label of this show reading then as it still reads today: Property of The History Channel 2452 (The Ancient Office, 1975).

This package, and others like it, has slept across the centuries within the clanking steel vault located in the limestone block offices of Farley, Windhoven, and Boyce. Theirs is the only law firm with an unbroken history, and with an unbroken address, going all the way back to the First World War. And that was a lot of wars ago.

There, in the vault, the raw footage of various History Channel shows each sit quietly, each series incubating its future date. Each package resting unmolested with the exception of a rare unwrapping for periodic upload into newer devices, copying with fresh code. This is done at least once each generation across the centuries. In this way, code-rot has been forestalled, and, among the most ancient shows, the worry over embrittlement of actual reel-to-reel film was prevented by the conversion to digital format so very, very long ago.

The faithful caretakers at Farley, Windhoven, and Boyce have done their jobs well, but, of course, they have been well paid down through the years. The network has established many funds in accounts scattered across the centuries to cover their production costs.

This is how the network extends its writ across the primordial format once quaintly known as time.

Dinny says this is like hooking a fish. You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it in the boat.

This particular network truck had arrived at Dinny’s house six days ago, and then left, only minutes later, with Dinny looking all-legs, striking in military blue coveralls and jump boots. She had previously told Professor Bismarck that the intervention would reach out to a new local producer and was to be done on the Blue Ridge Parkway, south of Mabry Mill, Virginia.

And now, the truck was back. And now, Dinny was back home. And now, Dinny knew if the network had a new series, or not.

Professor Bismarck would wait until the network truck had left, and then another fifteen minutes after that for Dinny to get settled in. Then, the professor would cross the street with a pot of fresh coffee. It was before eight o’clock in the morning.

Surely, Dinny would let her in, wouldn’t she? The professor simply had to know all about it. She had been waiting to know all week long!

Professor Bismarck thought, while she waited, that she would look up Mabry Mill in an atlas of ancient roads and towns. These interventions were always in out of the way places. They had to be. You did not want to intervene into a crowd and hook the wrong person, or worse yet, have the event reported in the local newspaper.

The professor had learned that, generally, the network searched the data bases for records of persons of good character and high intelligence driving alone on a lonely road and soon to be in a fatal accident. One-car accidents are preferred. Accidents became more common in the late 20th Century after the introduction of mobile personal communications devices. With the population in those days so much higher, the network has always managed to find a candidate.

This time, the History Network had in mind the year 1975 and a program that they called The Ancient Office. Reference works indicate that the office of that early time was on the brink of the personal computer. But brink or not, in that year the office produced its documents in a way that the father of printing, Johannes Gutenberg, would have understood.

The method was called moveable type. The only improvement since Gutenberg invented moveable type was how the type was moved. In 1975, each alpha was connected to an electric motor that slammed it against an ink ribbon held above a sheet of paper. A recent advancement had been the IBM Selectric which gathered all the alphas onto a single, metal ball which rotated its face and inclination before slamming into the ink ribbon. Only the addition of electricity would have mystified Gutenberg.

Mistakes in printing, and there were many, were painted over or rubbed out, making for documents that Gutenberg would have rejected. Copies were made by placing tissues, darkened with carbon, between two sheets of paper so that the force of the motorized type struck its image through the first sheet and onto the second sheet, producing the same alpha in the same place on each paper. Sometimes an office would have a machine to make copies, called a Xerox. But often, an office kept no record at all of what it had sent, or, if they did, files were often misplaced.

The documents in those days were called mail. They were addressed to people in faraway offices, then physically carried in vehicles across a network of roads, and finally by a mailman trudging along the sidewalks with a leather bag, through weather of all kinds. Days later, after the information had grown stale, the document was received by a company and then was distributed by hand to the intended recipient. Of course, they did have the telephone, but it left no record beyond what you remembered or chose to.

The spoken word was a tangled web, and the written word was always late.

CHAPTER 2

Professor Babylonia Bismarck, in her kitchen, lovingly admired the hourglass shape of her ancient Silex percolator. She added the coffee grounds to the upper dome when the water in both was roiling with bubbles. She turned off the stove when the vacuum in the lower dome began to siphon the coffee down and through the glass filter in the neck, leaving the grounds behind. She removed the upper dome and carefully placed it in its pedestal to cool. She grabbed the curving Bakelite Art Deco handle and stepped outdoors with eight cups of freshly brewed coffee.

She loved her Silex, no cords, no lights, so very quirky and retro. And as the ancient advertisements of 1932 once so proudly proclaimed: Absolutely Sanitary.

Dinny smiled to see the professor on the front walk. My goodness, Dinny marveled, the smell of fresh coffee carries all the way indoors. Take a whiff of that!

Buy you a cup of coffee! The professor hailed Dinny at the window.

"I was hoping! Come in!" Dinny sang out.

Professor Bismarck was holding the coffee pot in the wrong hand, forcing a pirouette through the doorway. Dinny was setting the table and bringing cream, croissants, butter and jam. The bakery bag announced that Dinny had stopped in Nyack on the way home.

"Croissants! Oh Dinny, my grandmother used to say that they had these all the time."

"Fortunately, the baker happens to be a fan of the show. And guess what? He even sold me a chocolate éclair."

No!

He keeps them in the back. We’ll split it before you go.

She must be