The coin hung in the air over Greg's head, and time seemed to stand still for a moment, then he seemed to be falling backwards. His backside met a hard surface that was slightly convex, as though he had just driven over a bump and blinked at the same time, but now everything was white.
His vision cleared, a woman's face came into view. She was gazing down upon him from the head of the coin. Then a lovely female voice spoke from out of nowhere.
"You have activated this travel device. Please state where in time or space you would like to go."
"What happened to my truck?" Greg asked, his body quaking.
"Is this an official query?" The female voice inquired.
Greg eyes were locked upon the only other tangible thing in his tiny universe. The limit of his vision ended at pearl and white swirling light. The voice was coming from the coin- from the woman on the head's side.
"Who are you?" Greg asked in a whisper.
"I am the vocal interface of this time device. Please state where in time or space you would like to go," the voice in the coin repeated.
"I want to go back to my truck!" Greg blurted, panicked by the sudden developments. Was he even still driving home? Had he fallen asleep at the wheel? He reminded himself that he was able to direct his dreams sometimes, yet this was very different.
"Returning you to your origin in five seconds. Please be aware of your current body position, and remember the Hopper rules for device activation," the voice from the coin said.
The instructions flew through his brain too fast for him to digest. "What are you talking about?" He muttered. The message may as well have been in Greek.
He wrinkled his brow, then in a flash, his truck was all around him. Pain shot through his shins and to his brain. Greg Thompson punched back into his seat, legs dropping back to a bent position over the pedals.
Greg’s' hands shot forward to control the wheel as the coin fell to the floorboard.
The truck jerked violently. The sudden shift in his body's position, and the mental interruption, made a smooth transition impossible. He shot a stare at the speedometer, it read 55.
Greg punched hard on the breaks, harder than a more seasoned driver would have. The truck leapt to towards the white line, then slid off the right shoulder of the road. The downward embankment was not a suitable turn out for any type of vehicle, even under ideal conditions. Dirt flew as the truck came to a stop, sitting at a precarious angle.
Greg tried to catch his breath as he gripped the wheel. His hands were paper white. His lips felt slightly numb as he fought to bring his body back under control. Greg set the parking break and his eyes were drawn back to the tarnished coin peeking back at him from across the cab, where is had slid in the near crash.
Peter!
Greg got out of the cab carefully, making sure his truck was not going to roll over. Grinding gravel caught his attention as a big blue late model suburban pulled off the road nearby. He looked up the hill as a man and woman got out and waved down to him.
"Are you okay?" The large woman shouted.
"Yeah, I'm fine," Greg said climbing up toward them.
"What happened?" The skinny man with a ponytail asked.
"Oh, a bee got in and stung me... Guess it caused me to swerve off the road," Greg lied. He was slightly proud of himself for coming up with that gem on such short notice. Strangely, he felt completely back to normal after the shot of adrenaline worked its wonders on his body.
"Well, thank God you didn't go the other way! We might have been fishing your body out of the lake right now!" The woman said, a hand on her chest.
Greg nodded sheepishly.
"Well, we have a winch with us. I could pull you up to the blacktop," the man said, surveying the state of affairs. "But, I think you could drive it out, if you are real careful."
"Yeah, I guess I could probably do it," Greg said with little confidence.
"If you want, I could get it up on the road for you. If you aren’t totally sure about it... "
"Oh yeah, Eric, do that for him," the woman chimed in. "I would feel so much better if you would let him do it," she said to Greg. "Eric has lots of experience with little trucks."
It took five minutes to recover the truck. With a departing wave to the good Samaritans in the Suburban, Greg was back on the road and heading home. For a kid whose normal day precluded anything out of the ordinary, Greg was feeling drained. His burning eyes reflected all he had been through since the sun rose. The passing of cabins hidden in the tall pines became hypnotic as he worked his way around the lake. The landscape seemed to fly around the teenager in the tan truck.
The coin?
A time device?
Peter, is this why you abandoned us?
"He must have turned it on at the gas station after I left that day," Greg reasoned.
Four years was a lifetime ago to Greg. Thinking back on the events leading him to the treasure map and the disappearance of his older brother were unexamined in his mind, at best. It had become nothing more than a fact that at the age of twelve, he had been given a map that lead to an unbelievable stash of treasure. It allowed him to avoid a crummy job at a gas station or burger joint. The treasure gave him his beloved truck and slothful summers spent at the river with friends.
Greg felt mentally short of breath with the gravity of the day’s events. He was out of shape, but something inside him relished the stress he had just been put through, and it wanted more.
Greg again spied the bronze coin on the floorboards as he drove in silence. The memory of the original coin from the first treasure stash came to mind. His older brother had picked it out of the bag with no protests, fair trade for advice on what to do with the plunder. The tarnished coin had meant nothing to him then.
Had flipping it really pulled Greg somewhere outside his truck? In his gut he knew it had; this was no false experience. The strange coin was a time device that had been hidden in that first treasure crate, four years before. Was this one with him now the same one he had given his brother?
He pictured Peter discovering the properties of the coin he had taken from his little brother, and it was all over. Easy time travel was way better than working for minimum wage at a job, your last summer before you finish high school. But why hadn't he returned?
He found something better, some place better. There was only one snag with that scenario. Greg could not believe his big brother would never return, never at least send word he was doing fine. They had always been close...
A week before Greg was given the little book containing a treasure map that would change his life, he and Peter had gone fishing together. Greg brought along the button caster he had gotten for his birthday in the spring, while Peter had his full sized pole. It was Peter who had taken him to the fairgrounds, showing him the way to toss his pole over the fence. The two had climbed a tree next to the chain link and dropped into the grounds. It was Peter who had taken his kid brother under his wing. He bought a big Styrofoam cup full of earthworms to use, because while Powerbait was science, nothing would ever beat using regular old worms. Greg couldn't remember any thing in particular that they may have spoken about that day, but the actions were poetry to the impressionable mind of a twelve year-old boy.
Greg hoped something had happened to Peter. Well, he didn't hope, but he preferred the case where something had kept him from coming back. Somehow the possibility that his brother had forgotten about his family was worse than being lost.
Miles sped past and Greg's wandering train of thought continued into the unplanned frontier. His brother was a time traveler. Where had he gone? A mountain coalesced ahead beside the tracks. Time travel was possible!
The concept was not outside the realm of possibility, in Greg's opinion. Who was to say that in the future, the secret to traveling through time would never be unlocked. It could happen in a distant future, opening up the capability to everyone throughout the past. It didn't seam so far fetched. But what were coins that
allowed you to travel through time doing in his present, in 2015, when such a compact and clean-cut ability to time travel had not yet been invented? Or had it?
The conflicting logic of it all was getting too big for Greg's head. He found himself unable to hold on to all the ideas at once, concepts falling from his arms like an overloaded shopping basket. But a looming question remained, one that had occurred to him earlier: who was the man who gave him the treasure map and presumably buried all the loot? Was he from the future? Did he use a coin to steal all this wealth? But if he was that rich, why was he living on the streets? There was no faking the fact that the man was homeless. Greg had gotten a good whiff of him. Every time he smelled that kind of filth on a person, he thought of white cars screeching to a halt and the man being thrown through the air. The guy was not faking his poverty. He was a bum.
Greg abruptly took the next exit. He had to know for sure. Had his brother found out what the coin was? Was that truly why he had disappeared? If it was the case, it was the first link on a much larger chain.
Where have you gone, Peter?
It was past noon, but still hours from sunset. Greg stopped his truck in the shade of looming evergreens, on a side street, not far from the sounds of the roaring interstate. He bent over and retrieved the coin. He got out of his truck, wary to avoid another interruption while driving, and made sure no one was around. On the way out of the cab, he happened to glance at the clock on his dash: 1:13 P.M. Only squirrels chattering after fallen pinecones watched as he took a deep breath and pumped his forearm into the coin flip. Greg closed his eyes upon release, not really believing anything would really happen at all. He held out his palm.
"You have activated this travel device. Please state where in time or space you would like to go."
Greg again found himself inside the sphere of white. This time he was on his feet and his heart was pounding hard. "Can you tell me here my brother went?" He asked the coin, unsure if he was ready for the answer. He was disappointed.
"This device does not have specific knowledge on the personal histories of individuals. Furthermore, your request was not specific enough to search for a particular individual."
"Never mind," Greg said. "Can you take me back to the day he disappeared? It was August 16th, 2011."
"Please specify location and exact time of insertion."
"Hmmm," Greg said to himself. He felt outside his body, watching from some other place. But he went on. "His boss said that when the other employee showed up at 4 o'clock to take over at the end of Peters shift, there was no one there... And we had to have gone to see him a couple hours before that. So, let's try two thirty."
"Two thirty P.M. local time," the voice confirmed. "Location?"
"How about the alley next to the bookstore on Bank Street, downtown Grass Valley?"
"You have requested the alley to the west of the bookstore, Grass Valley, California. United States, North America. August 16th 2011, two-thirty P.M. Local Time. You will be placed in five seconds. Please remember the Hopper rules for device activation."
Like his brother before him, Greg furrowed his brow and started to ask about the last piece of information that was spit out at him. Instead, his bright surroundings were gone- replaced with a beige brick wall. Greg's reflexes took over and he caught the falling coin before it got away. The sudden return of gravity to the device was unexpected.
Greg turned around and surveyed his hometown. Had he really just traveled through time? Nothing seemed to have changed. It was still a hot summer day. At the least, he had traveled forty miles down the hill...
Greg walked out of the alley and stood on the edge of the street. A few deep breaths made him feel better. If he was really back in time, he figured he should probably be careful. If someone happened to see him walking around four years older than he should be, there might be obvious questions, especially if he ran into his younger self. But then again, he didn't remember seeing anything like that. Greg was unsure the exact mechanics that might govern these sorts of things, so he decided to play it safe.
He walked up the street with his head down and found refuge in the less visible places that were not on the main streets. As he walked, Greg concluded that he needed a good vantage point to see what he had come back for. In the shadows, across the street and up from the service station, Greg searched for a better vantage point. As he poked around an idea came to him. He flipped the coin and cut off the standard greeting.
"Can you move me to the roof of the building I am standing next to?"
"You are currently not standing next to any building, but I can place you on the rooftop of the closest building to where this device was last activated."
"That works," Greg said rolling his eyes.
"You will be placed in five seconds," the coin informed him. "Please remember the Hopper rules for device activation."
"Wait!" Greg remembered. "What are the Hopper rules?!"
"The Hopper rules are rules tourists must follow regarding interaction with the past," The coin said. "Would you like me to read the entire text of the rules?"
"Um, no," Greg said. "Can I guess it basically means not to be seen using the time machine..."
"Crudely put, that is the general spirit of the rules which you were given instruction prior to being given control of this device. Any specifics can be asked of your assigned Supervisor."
Greg was lost and far too excited at the prospect of finally getting the answer to the four year-old question he had etched on his soul. He disregarded all the follow-up questions that sprung to mind and went back to his main task. "I'm ready for you to put me on the roof of the building now," Greg said.
"Proceeding with the previous interrupted request. You will be placed in five seconds."
The sudden shock of sunlight startled Greg like being suddenly awoken from a dream. He was standing in the middle the roof. He walked across the tar and gravel roof to the brick edge and found himself looking down over the old town area of Grass Valley. Greg felt like king of the town; a superhero looking out on the city he kept safe. The people down on the street didn’t notice him; it was like watching an interrogation room through one-way glass. He located his brothers’ old work and leaned against the building's edge to get a better view.
His brother was still there, sitting motionless behind the counter, next to the big picture window. He was watching TV. Peter was just the way he remembered: tall, unkempt light brown hair, patchy dusting of thin facial hair, black jeans and a gas station shirt. It was like studying at one of his brother's old school photos, but the figure down in that convenience store moved! So real in fact, he picked his nose.
Greg wondered how long it would be until his younger self arrived. After a few minutes of watching his brother, who was right now only a year older than him (rather than the normal five), Greg broke away from his spot and walked the street side of the rooftop. I can't remember which way we came to the station after getting the first stash, the time traveler considered, so he kept a look out.
A half an hour later, quite baked by the summer sun, Greg noticed the three youths coming down the street with wagon in tow. It was like watching a home video, years after the filming. Was I ever that small? Greg thought. From across the street and so high up, he could barely hear the squeaky voices of the youths chattering away as fast as the words would spill from their mouths. He felt the strongest wave of déjà vu crash over him as the three kids walked into the gas station and spoke with Peter.
"This whole time, the day I found the treasure, I was watching myself and never knew it..." Greg whispered to himself. "If only I had looked up." But he knew he would not see his own older figure that day, or he would have remembered it. Because that was the way it worked, right? It was the same way he knew he was not going to run down to the street and stop the younger version of himself and tell him to go back and take the coin from his brother. If he did that now, he would remember it, and since he didn't have that experience four
years ago, it never happened. Was that the way time worked? He and his friends were leaving the station.
Greg snapped out of his circular thinking. This was the important part. His younger self glanced back at his brother, who flipped the coin into the air. Something happened, but it was too fast for the eye to catch; it could have been a blink. Young Greg turned away and continued up the hill to his house. Across the way, on the roof, Greg's eyes were glued open, burning from not wanting to miss a second. Peter stood still, coin in hand. He looked around himself, and then down at the coin. He flipped it again.
Like a trick of stop motion photography, Peter was there - and then just not. There was no smoke or dematerializing, no flash of light or wormhole effects like in the movies. Peter was, and then was not.
Greg's shoulders slumped. He waited another five minutes, but he knew it was useless. Peter had discovered what the coin could do and didn't look back. Greg heart ached, wishing his brother had never noticed that coin.