The Rainbow

I wrote this as my submission for the final heavy weight assignment of the humanities course "ENG436- Writers vision of the future" during my last year at IITK. I will not here dwell into all those philosophical connotations of the 'future' (far beyond the concept of time) we were taught in the course, rather keep myself busy with the work I am loaded with these days and simply put the original text of the story uncensored, unquoted and unplugged - So here it goes ......

The Rainbow

"Future is catastrophic!!” I said, with indignation.

“But I’ve been waitin for this momen..,so wat if am never goin to come bak. Les play this game..Come on...”.

I knew that it was going to happen from the very day, he started to scribble on Magna Doodle, the one his father gifted him on his 10th birthday. The first thing he wrote on it was ‘am comin future!’ The other time he got a Dancing Monster on his b'day, he had flushed it right down the toilet, very next day. And now when he is 18, his instinct to venture into future has leaped off more than his age.

As a pre-matured birth he had always been running ahead of time, be it the homework submissions in school, or the ontogenesis of the moustaches above his lips. I get this feeling every time I see him, that there is definitely something extra or misssing in his genes,

“wat-er u thinkin?" he squalled in my ears.
“Oh...nothing, but we shouldn't do this, it’s...”.

As a mark of self-respect he spoke again before I could finish. His habit of interrupting has never let me say my words completely: 'Interruption' was his make, as if he was destined to interrupt.

" I can’t wait, nemore... am leavin without u, if ur not in here wi'thin a min", he said in anger and desperation.

Nothing but to loose against him in the arguments was the trend and so I decided not to uphold his craving for 'future' anymore. I have known him precisely from the point in timeline, when he was outcaste by his classmates. Ever since then we have been friends, or to say more convincingly 'brothers'. I cannot even dream of living without him. Therefore the next instant when I was sitting beside him in the doughnut-shaped chamber of the Segway Human Transporter, amidst the biggest uncertainty of my life, a rough feeling of content drew over me.

As a research lover, I was privileged to know many things, especially those which were more of a fiction than reality for others. Incidentally, on one occasion I had somehow laid my hands on a research paper titled:'The speed of time' by an Irish Physicist. It was more of a philosophical embarkment rather than a rigorous mathematical proof of something which I still have not been able to mentally digest, forget about assimilating it. The crux of the paper was -‘Time moves, both in forward and backward direction’.

The premise on which the paper was written argued that if time can move forward, then what stops it from moving backward. How outlandish and insane, this concept might seem at first impression to anyone, it had the most severe and disastrous outcome, that could ever be imagined. For it led to a catastrophic collision between the two timelines, traveling in opposite directions, quite similar to two trains moving in opposite directions on the same track, yet so different in physical aspects of a collision. The collision would turn the whole universe around us to a mere singularity. In a way it had also put a limitation on the extent and quantity of time.The paper termed the moment of collision on timeline as a ‘Dent’ and expected its duration to be less than a nano-second.

From that very day, I had this uncanny feeling that if there is someone who will run across this 'Dent', then its going to be no one else, but him. But how I wish I could dump all this knowledge into his 8 pounds of brain, without having to speak a word!

His father was the head of an outlawed company named Segway that did R&D on time machines. The theoretical feasibilities and practical viabilities of making a Time Machine had been worked out already two decades back. It was then that the International Confederation of Metaphysical Researchers popularly known in short as INCoMER, based on an anonymous litigation filed against the advances being made in this field passed a law which proscribed any further researches on these machines, and declared the production of time machines illegal.

The rage and protest of the scientific community which stood against the decision, was easily suppressed The litigation had through a careful risk assessment brought in front of the whole world the implied threat on human life, and the associated vulnerabilities, if these kinds of machines were put for assembly line production. After that even the few prototypes of these machines being experimented upon in the labs were completely destroyed and the relevant literature burnt down to ashes.

And thus it came over the shoulders of those bad guys who await the formation of new laws and regulations, so that they can breach them. His father was the first one to get around this new law, by leading a group of rebel scientists who managed to setup their own laboratories and other infrastructure for a self sustained R&D centre of time machines, which later on became famous by the name 'Segway Transporters’.

This new untested version, in the series of Programmable Human Transporters manufactured by Segway, in which I was sitting with him closely, resembled the picture of ‘Tokamak’ from our Science book. My default habit of reading the manuals, unfolded the capabilities of this new model to me. It was designed to specifically pin point and target any desirable time in future, with an accuracy of a nano-second.

"les goto 29th febuary of twenty-nigh twenty-nigh..", he said in an extremely euphoric voice.
As a freehearted guy, I jolted upon him "There is no 29th of February in twenty...”.
I immediately guessed that he had realized the mistake in his words while punching the keys on the florescent lit board under the dark light of the chamber, because once again he spoke before I could finish.

" ok,..leave that, les try a random time!!".
"Boy! Has he gone mad", I said to myself, but then I could not expect anything more sensible than this from him.

And Before I could realize what he was up to, we were already screaming out of the intense pressure and an unbearable acceleration which made the entire blood gush up to my brain. I could feel the perturbed and periodical motion of the machine, often accompanied by a dissonance. A silence prevailed after this initial hassle and state of commotion. I felt completely drained, with only a last quantum of energy left in me to dream with open eyes. I don’t know if it was in my dream or it was a hallucination but I could see those seven faint colors of an astoundingly bright rainbow.

The symmetrical reflection from a shining surface below projected the semi-circular shape of the rainbow as a complete full circle. However, this ecstasy ended abruptly, because we literally crashed, like an untrained motorbike driver, forgetting how to apply brakes. By this I knew we have reached somewhere in the future, without even a vague idea of ‘where’.

Murphy had said it right , 'If at all anything can go wrong, It will', and even if Murphy had not said this, I would be more than sure, of going wrong if there is someone like him around me. Not to my utter surprise, but with a fearful heart, a line of cold sweat running down my armpits and knowing the nano-second accuracy of our machine, I could feel from the air around, that we had ‘successfully’ struck the ‘Dent’. I needed no more words to prove that Interruption was in his blood; in fact in his genes. That he did not spare even ‘Time’.

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PS: Comments and Criticisms are most welcome !!