The Second Day at School
Or not, as it turned out…
So here I was, lying in bed apparently aged five years old in England in 1958 with the mind of seventy three year old man from 2026 and no idea whether this was a super realistic lucid dream or… something else entirely. I listened to my parents, or close facsimiles, talking as they started to get up and get dressed for the day. The previous day is when I had arrived, being my first day at school and it had not gone terribly well. I had started off assuming it was a dream but very rapidly found I could not wake up.
The light was streaming in through the window, with its multiple panes of single glazing. No double glazing or central heating here, but there were a couple of gas fires in the two rooms downstairs. It was cold as I looked out past the peeling paint. Probably lead paint as I thought about it. The house was old even now — built in the Victorian period. And for good measure I also remembered it had lead water pipes. And asbestos in the roofing. Dental fillings contained mercury. The people here really liked their poisons. Probably knocked ten points off my IQ growing up in this place. And lets not forget lead in petrol if the contaminated water or the dentist didn’t get you. Time to do some serious reality testing. I had to know how real this place was, and there was only one exceedingly unpleasant test I could think of, and I was not looking forward to it.
After dressing in my school uniform I made my way to the bathroom and carried out the normal routine, including brushing my teeth. The dentistry in this era was a nightmare, as I recalled only too well from my original visits to the so-called school dental butcher. I also rolled up my sleeves and washed my hands and forearms as well as face. Yes — you guessed it — no showers. Only a bath once a week on Sunday night.
As I entered the kitchen my mother asked me if I was feeling alright today: “You mean am I Charles, the deluded five year old who has experienced an inexplicable brainstorm and become a precocious genius who suffers delusions of being a time traveler, or Little Charlie? Sadly for both of us, the former” I replied. I picked out a steak knife from the drawer, and a clean tea towel and went to the table and sat down. My father was already seated and had been listening in silence while he waited for my mother to join us. As I expected, there was a pot of hot tea sitting in middle of the table. I opened the lid and popped the blade of the knife inside. As my father was about to speak, presumably to ask why I did it, I cut him off.
“When I was talking to mum yesterday we had a long chat about what you assume is my fictional family — your grandchildren and great grandchildren through me. However, something rather important slipped my mind at the time, because I was focused on what was happening in 2026. Anyway, I have a sister named Jane. She is born next April.” I looked at my mother: “Maybe you should do the arithmetic and have a chat with dad. By the way, do her a favor and do not call her Jane — she always hated the name. Got called Plain Jane all through school. She always wanted to be called Amanda for some reason.”
I could not decide whether the look of shock on their faces was due to the impending arrival, or the fact that a five year old was discussing their sex life at the breakfast table.
So, the time had arrived and unfortunately this had to be done. I pulled the steak knife out of the teapot, flipped it over to an icepick grip, and with no hesitation stabbed it into the outside of my left forearm. And, of course, quickly pulled it out again. With an exclamation along the lines of “Aah! Jesus Fucking Christ that hurts!” Blood welled from the wound. I guessed it was about one centimeter long and probably about as deep. Hence the tea towel. That was going to leave a scar, but more important it really HURT. Not so much the cut, but the blunt-ish trauma to the muscle. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer as the saying goes.
The strange thing about pain in dreams, even lucid dreams, is that it is more a memory of what pain should feel like. What I experienced in eye watering quality, was the real deal. My heart sank. It meant the pain centers in my brain were being stimulated for real. It meant that this place was real to the extent that things I did here could seriously injure me. It also meant that either someone was delivering this to my brain up in 2026 in a VR sim far beyond any tech I had ever heard of, or this was really real. And that kind of tech was just… not possible. My musings were cut short by panic at the breakfast table.
My father grabbed my arm and looked at it, stating that it was going to need a stitch. I thought about disagreeing with him, but the muscle was going to swell from the bruise and probably hold the cut open. Anyway, in this I deferred to his expertise. One of the things a lot of men of this period knew about from first hand experience was injury. And death. This was just thirteen years after the bloodiest war in Human history, and he like millions of others had been a soldier. I just pointed out that I had sterilized the blade and arm so there was little chance of infection. He just glared at me as my mother asked the obvious — why did you do that? After blobbing on some iodine, part antiseptic part punishment, we left the house to go to the hospital.
Outside stood dad’s pride and joy. The car — a Humber Snipe. He was the only person in the street to own a car. I had distant memories of it and seen through a child’s eyes it was certainly impressive. Seen through mine, it was an ugly monstrosity designed by the mentally retarded. To give you an idea, for left and right indicators it had little illuminated flags that popped out from the upper chassis. As he opened the side door and asked whether I wanted to sit in front I just stared at him: “Are you serious? No seat belts, no child seat, no airbags, no crumple zones and a non-laminated windscreen that will slice you to pieces if you go through it? If you carried a child in this death trap in 2026 they would lock you up and throw away the key.” My observations did not go down well, and I ended up sitting in the back. After a few minutes he broke the silence: “So, do you drive a car in the future?” I explained it was a Japanese electric with a two hundred kilowatt hour battery, fast-charge, and did zero to sixty in six seconds, with a neural network self drive option and integral satnav. And that it also talked a lot, which I didn’t like. He seemed impressed even though he clearly did not know some of those terms. I was hoping that this was seeming as real to them as it was to me. Otherwise, it was going to be an utter pain in the arse if I ended up being stuck here for any length of time. I would much rather them consider me to be a time traveler than a child with weird brain damage. Fifteen minutes later we arrived at the hospital.
After a short wait we were shown into a side room with a nurse who took a look at the arm. I asked mum and dad to go away. I really don’t like an audience when I’m ill. Strangely, they complied without a word.
“So, how did you do this?” the nurse asked. I explained that I stuck a knife in my arm to see whether it would hurt. And having discovered the answer, would not be doing so again voluntarily. I leaned over to look at the bowl she was carrying. It contained various items, one of which was something that looked like a fishing hook, and a pair of forceps. Having been though this routine before, when I was older, I knew what was going to happen. I also knew that giving me a local anesthetic first was not going to happen. Fucking barbarians. “This is going to sting a little — are you going to be a brave soldier?”. They always tell little kids shit like that when what they really mean is: “This is going to be horribly painful and you will probably scream a lot”.
“I don’t have much of a choice, do I? Just get on with it please so I can get out of here.” Then the intense burning sensation as the forceps pushed the fishing hook through the skin on either side of the cut. I was grateful it was only the one. I didn’t flinch or make a sound. The nurse left me sitting there with my newly bandaged arm as she went to fetch my parents. Parents. That was how I was beginning to think of them. Not some alien imposters, dream characters or figments of a deranged brain. At least I didn’t cry this time around. Time to take things at face value, at least for now. Play the game, whatever that was.
After about twenty minutes I had started to wonder where everyone was when the door opened and in walked my parents accompanied by another man, fairly young and judging by his attire, a doctor. He introduced himself as Dr Parker and said that my parents had asked him to have a word with me. I had a bad feeling about this and asked him what his area of specialization, to which he replied “Psychiatry”. Oh shit. I just looked at my parents and said: “What the fuck have you idiots done now?”
We walked to the doctor’s office in silence and when we got there I stated that I did not want my parents to be there for the interview, to which he agreed. My parents did not get a say in it. Besides, he was a doctor, someone Who Must Be Obeyed. The reverence my parents generation held for medical doctors always amazed me.
When we were alone I bluntly asked him what my parents had told him, and he gave me the time traveling delusional self-harmer story.
“So, what school of quackery do you follow?” I inquired. “Freud, Jung or are you a bit more up to date with Transactional or something?”. He was rather taken aback by this, so I asked him to humor me and pretend I really was from 2026, since it would save us quite a bit of time. He agreed with a rather curious look on his face. “So, what do you want to know that will get you off my case? I have enough problems without you adding to them.”
His next followup was entirely predictable: “Tell me about the future”. I thought for a while, giving weight to my new situation with regard to the fact that all this was possibly real, or at the very least, could hurt me, and then spoke: “For most of my life I lived in the shadow of possible nuclear war, with tens of thousands of nukes all ready to go and incinerate the planet within the hour. It never happened, but we came horribly close on a number of occasions, saved only by good luck. If people believe what I am saying, chances are we get a new roll of the dice. I doubt we would be so lucky second time around. So I am not going to discuss matters political, military, technological or anything that could change history in a meaningful manner. But that still leaves art, music, fashion in general, and the social situation not to mention personal stuff.”
He nodded, and then asked about what I did in 2026. I told him about my career as a scientist and engineer specializing in deep space laser comms, and how I was working on testing a high bandwidth system by bouncing it off a Chinese retro-reflector on the surface of the moon. “So there are men on the moon? And what is a laser?” To which I replied: “Not at present, and its a device that will not be invented for another two or three years — unless I do it first. Lasers are piss easy to make”.
Even as I said it, a cartoon style light bulb went on in my head. I really could build a laser. In fact, my head was crammed full of science and technology that had not yet been invented, including a number of rather simple discoveries that got a Nobel Prize — for example, Buckyballs and high temperature superconductors. In fact, school science classes sometimes made those. I could knock out half a dozen Nobels before I was ten! And the beauty of them is that they are generally technologically worthless to the people of this era.
And so it went for another half hour. He was hooked, whether he knew it or not. So it was time to make my move: “OK doc — I have a proposition for you. It doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not, but you have to admit I am not your typical five year old kid. I’m going to throw you a bone, or possibly two. The first one, which is probably running through your head right now is about getting your name on a paper in a prestigious journal documenting my case. Or maybe even a popular book. And the second bone is that I know, in general outline, the trends in psychology and psychiatry over the next few decades. Especially the popular money making ones. So, here’s the deal. My parents do not have the contacts that you do. I want to use those contacts to meet some people, and I want an introduction from you. Cash on delivery. What do you say?” The games people play eh?
In the back of my mind I was glad that my parents were not religious, and that the whole slew of classic demonic possession horror films were still a decade or two in the future, or maybe I would have been facing some crazed exorcist.
By the time we got back home I had explained what had happened, and they seemed rather despondent. Perhaps they were disappointed Parker had been subverted so easily. Or maybe that they were being taken out the loop, or perhaps something even more mundane, that they had ratted me out to a shrink who was busy reinforcing my delusions. Hard to tell.
And then it struck me forcibly why they were behaving like this, so I simply said to them: “You believe me, don’t you…”. My father was the first to nod and agree. My mother added her observations, that it was not my description of the future, but the way I spoke with an Americanized accent, and the slang they had never come across as well as the adult mannerisms and the description of my future relationships. She particularly objected to my crudity of expression and the especially dismissive way I used the word “whatever”. I suppose I was lucky I had not introduced either of them to the concept of “talk to the hand”, but that would likely earn you a slap even up in 2026. Here it would be almost a death sentence trying on with an adult. Then a few other things fell into place, and I spoke carefully: “I’m sorry I called you idiots. You are not, and you did a really good job raising me and Jane. It’s just that my parents were always thirty-something years older than me, not the same age as my own children — you look so young. And that’s how I have unconsciously been treating you. I suppose from your point of view you have lost a child and gained a grumpy old man. Think of it a bit like the apocryphal speech the father of the bride gives at the wedding, about less like losing a daughter and more like gaining a son. But weirdly different.” They actually smiled. “Most parents don’t get to see what their kids are like as old people”, I added.
Later that afternoon, having missed school, I pondered my future plans in the event I was trapped in the past. I was beginning to see ways I could profit from all of this in a spectacular manner. The smartest person ever to grace Planet Earth. A zillionaire. Maybe a cult leader or something. And… the most talented, innovative and versatile popular music composer of all time, although I might give Punk and Gangsta Rap a miss. But if I was going to rip off various artists over the next few decades I had to be careful it was not by pirating the works that made them famous in the first place. The absence of… well, lets just call them the Famous Four, would put quite a kink in the timeline. That butterfly effect thing again. I definitely did not want to risk that, any more than I wanted to tell people what happened politically around 1990. One of the parties might get terminally pissed off if they found out, and start world war three.
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they’re here to stay. I definitely believe in yesterday.
Over tea (or dinner as most people call it in 2026) I outlined my plans to mum and dad. They seemed a bit out of it and just listened. Then my mum asked me to sing a song from the future. I explained that songs really had not changed much in terms of lyrics, with some exceptions. And that in order to make it sound like something I could not have heard on the radio or TV it would be a song I used to listen to post-2000 called Schwartze Sonne by E Nomine. I don’t mind naming them so explicitly here, first because the members of the band are not yet born, and because I do not have much of a problem fucking things up from 2000 onwards. They sing in German and Latin, or will do, and that it is a genre loosely called techno-trance-occult.
I watched dads face as I went through the words. I knew he could speak German, but not sure of the Latin. Then another turn of the millennium band, Of The Wand And The Moon with My Black faith. I also sang bits of songs from the 70s, 80s and 90s but omitted their titles and the name of the singers. Then we discussed social changes, from the change in sexual attitudes, legalization of homosexuality and same sex marriage to womens fashions and skirt length to the sad fact that men were still wearing ties. And how TV had expanded from the single channel we now watched, the BBC, to the thousands we later enjoyed 24/7. They were not too thrilled about reality shows like the one where a contestant chose a date from assorted naked contestants, slowly revealed from the feet up. Nor shows like Spartacus with violence to an insane degree — think someones face being cut off and their brain falling out. Yes, I know — physiologically implausible. Groundhog Day all over again, a joke which you won’t get if you are reading this any time prior to the 1990s
We ended with them asking questions about what I considered a safe topic — cosmology. They were both interested in what the other planets were like so I described the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus, the frozen lakes of a barren Mars, the sulfur volcanoes of IO, the subsurface ocean of Europa and the hydrocarbon seas of Titan. Then the thousands of planets we have discovered around other stars. I also mentioned that we only had eight planets in the solar system whereas here they have nine. But that it was not as exciting as it might at first appear! Also included was the age of the universe, Black Holes, Quasars, Magnetars, Neutron Stars and other exotica. But no life anywhere as far as we could tell.
Eight o’clock in the evening, and past my bedtime. I actually felt tired, like I was really a child and besides, all parents want a bit of me-time without the kids hanging around so I dutifully retired. As I was getting changed into my pajamas I noticed a tennis ball lying just under the bed. I picked it up and threw it casually against the wall, catching it in the other hand on the rebound. And stopped dead in my tracks. Perfect proprioception. If I really was an adult mind transplanted into a child’s body it meant my motor functions had been edited in a major fashion. No way should I have been able to function physically without astounding clumsiness from day zero. At that age I could not have thrown and caught a ball so easily. I had assumed Charlie’s motor cortex had been left intact and I was somehow overlaid on the pre-frontal, but it was definitely a lot more complex than it seemed initially. What kind of technology could take my brain states, edit them, send them back in time to selectively overwrite the synaptic connections of a child sixty eight years in the past? The answer was none — the amount of computing power to do that did not exist even in 2026. Maybe this was not the past at all, but if so what is it? A test? A punishment? An opportunity? And who or what was doing this, and could I find a way to contact them? Or it?
Or, just perhaps, I was really Little Charlie who had suddenly been zapped with a weird kind of implausible brain damage that had turned him into a super genius and triggered a series of fantasies about the future. As stupid as being bitten by a radioactive spider and becoming a superhero. I needed a test as to whether all my future memories were truth or delusion. I needed to check one of the bits of knowledge that I possessed that nobody else did in the year 1958. The only historical events I recalled happened early next year and featured Buddy Holly and the Manchester United football team. However, if they did not occur, I would put that down to me inadvertently changing the timeline. I need a bit of science that was unknown, but easy to check. Perhaps my first step to fame and fortune. I could own this planet by the time I was 50 if I got it right.
As I drifted off to sleep I realized I also had to learn to play the guitar.
