Alan Samuel Cole's Questionnaire

"Town" is a bit of a stretch. I live in Cabell County, WV near Huntington.  Not quite on the land that would have been my Grandfather's house, but near enough to swing by and see this version of it if I get homesick. I know what they mean when they say you can't go home again (More than most).  

My house is a small ranch style house with a detached garage off Seven Mile Road.  The interior of the house is decorated in textures with rugs and worn-but-comfortable furniture. There is a wood stove which is my primary source of heat, and a small window AC in the house and in the garage and a small bookshelf with various books on mysticism and time (none of much real supernatural value).  I have paid to get a decent internet connection in place for streaming and my laptop. 

Well, I'm certainly not on a university's payroll anymore.  Ever since the incident everyone I tell my story to looks at me like I've grown a second head, from medical doctors to colleagues to my publishers at first. 

Yes, I said publishers.  I tried to sell my story, just to keep on my feet and had mixed success in that people seem to be loving it, but as a speculative fiction.  A sci-fi novel.  Because losing everyone and everything I ever knew is entertainment for you fucking cretins... 

It seems my predecessor also didn't suffer the Stockalypse of 2021.  You people think a bad cold was something to panic the world about but couldn't even get the populace to listen to virologists. You don't want to know a real global crisis. Trust me. 

So that's it, living on book residuals and investments while I try to put my life back together and find a way to learn what's left and how to save it. When that gives out I'll figure something out. 

I want to save my world. I want the power to go back and stop the breakdown of everyone and everything I ever held dear.  And let us be clear, if it's my world or yours, I'll choose mine, every time. I don't want to be the bad guy in anyone's story.  I'm not a soldier, not some grizzled killer.  I was mostly behind the safe zones when the rioting started.  And I think it might destroy me to take a life, person to person. I don't know. but at a certain point it just becomes numbers. My timeline isn't just numbers.  It's my sister.  My friends.  *My* colleagues.  If i have to trade one world for another I'll do it.  If i have to kill, hell I'll do it.  If I have to die... look I'm a coward, so I'll probably let someone else do that if I can.  If.

For me - For anyone from my home - it was the first quantum storm.  The fall of the London Spire.  That was when the public became aware of what was in store for us over the next few years, and when the first people really started to panic. Some whistleblowers tried to speak up before, but they were always shouted down by the official voices. It wasn't possible to ignore when a nation's capital was wiped mostly off the map and the rest of the surrounding area left devastated and powerless.  That was the beginning of the end, even if we didn't know it yet, and every person in the developed world can tell you exactly what they were doing when news of the storm hit.  

Of course the storms in Melbourne and Topeka soon after confirmed that this wasn't an isolated case and as more areas were ravaged, resource scarcity and death tolls rose tremendously.  Some turned to religion, some to hedonism or banditry.  I joined one of several teams studying the phenomenon, desperate to find a way to save what was left of humanity.

Losing Stockholm was the huge setback, as much of their findings hadn't been disseminated yet, and when we finally discovered what they had found about the breakpoint, after which the cascade couldn't be stopped, it had already passed. Then only the truly desperate kept working, or perhaps those of us doing it by rote, because we had nothing else to do.  That's when the desperate, or the mad, decided to take what we had learned and try to create an inversion on time itself.  to send someone, or at least the critical information, back far enough to prevent things from collapsing in the first place.  I'll let you guess how that turned out...

I don't know why you people are asking me all of this, but the first thing you should understand is that even if you find people that match these names, they won't be the people I know. 

You can't actually meet my sister, Dana, though the local version will swear to you she is.  She hasn't accepted that her brother is either somewhere on my earth, or most likely dead.  My Dana was an FBI investigator living in Chicago, in an apartment building that apparently never existed here. It's an empty lot.  She was sharp as a tack, and tough as nails but for her family, blood and found, she would do anything.  The lawyer that lives here?  Barely gave me the time of day when folks decided I was nuts. I was an embarrassment to her. 

My ex wife Diane?  She's never heard of me here.  I kinda envy the other guy for that. We were both married to our jobs, and got married out of convenience, and when it became inconvenient we blamed each other.  

I guess the person I'm closest to here is Kevyn Anderson.  He's almost a carbon copy of my Kevyn, an engineer I met in school who has a long story of his own.  He works as a tech consultant for a private security company out of New York, and is the only person who has treated me with real dignity about this mess even if he clearly doesn't believe.  At least he doesn't pity me. 

I had a fairly normal childhood I guess.  Grew up in a smallish town here in West Virginia. Steve and Laura Cole were active participants in my life and encouraged me to find my way, without trying to put pressure on me.  I was (still am) kind of a nerd though so I guess they never felt a need to.  Got high marks through school but not exactly a social success.  My friend group was small but tight, like most picked-on kids.  It is what it is.  High school was over a long time ago and the real world knocked a lot of popular jocks on their asses at some point. But some not. I did like to spend summers with my grandpa as a kid though.  Even us nerds liked to get out and climb a tree when we were little, and now that I'm out here in the woods it feels more like home than anything else since the world went to hell .

Maybe?  I mean I got married, sure but I don't know if I could honestly say we ever really loved each other.  We were just kind of there.  Human beings pair off instinctively, and we liked each other well enough. I even think we loved each other in our own way, but deep down, I really doubt that Diane and I had ever given enough of ourselves to really be IN love, so much as we took comfort in each other for a while until things got hard.  If there had been more than that, I don't think it would have been so easy to blame each other for everything and let things fall apart quite so easily. 

I'm afraid of actually being what they say I am. A Kook.  A Madman. The product of traumatic brain injuries that have destroyed the memory of an otherwise brilliant man and reduced him to spouting nonsense about quantum temporal bridges and collapsing universes. A man whose memory of his life is so garble that he can't remember the name of the school that gave him his PHD or how his parents died or any detail of his life or the world around him.  I CANNOT be that man.  I do not exist merely as a collection of falsehoods and cerebral scar tissue GODDAMNIT!

Except I am also afraid that it was real, and that it's gone. Make no mistake I'm not here because i was just going about my day and got plucked up, we were working with terrifying forces in an effort to anchor reality itself from collapse. maybe me being here means we failed and i just fell though the cracks.  Maybe there's nothing left to go back to. Maybe I'm all that's left of everything that I knew before, and this is all there is now. 

So there are the thoughts that wake me in a cold sweat at night.  Take them as you will. 

Is it a non-answer to say I don't have any?  I woke up from my coma without even the clothes on my back.  Everything I have and can have is of a world I am foreign to, and one I would as soon leave behind. The only things i have of any personal value are myself and my memories.  I suppose the items I collected on my jobs prove that part of my life, but I don't know that they are precious  to me on a personal level apart form being proof that I did the things I remember doing.  Not that I plan on sharing those things with anyone anytime soon.  Maybe I'll write another book when I have enough stories. Give me something more to go on as the money runs out?  Who knows. It'd probably just run off the people who think i write good science fiction, with all the magic whatsis and creepy horror movie bullshit. 

Let's see. 

For all I know everyone and everything I know is dead and gone.  Destroyed maybe down beyond the atomic level. 

Even if they are still around, I'm so cut off from them that they might as well be dead. 

Worse yet I live in a petri dish of bad cosplayers that pretend to be the people i knew, respected, loved, and cared about, or rather that I am the one they did. 

My very existence may have killed a man, since there has been no sign of my doppelganger since I arrived.  Even if I haven't killed him, He'll have to live with the fact that I've ruined his goddamn life if i ever can get us back. 

As a lifelong man of science I'm now having to start depending on madness magic to give me any hope of seeing what I know as home ever again. 

In the meantime I've lost all the respect either of my selves ever earned, and I'm just some old kook in a cabin now. The only way I have to progress in getting any of it back is to risk my life doing insane things for what seem to be mad gods doing their best talent agent impression. Fun!

So you tell me?

I don't.  Fuck 'em. 

Yeah, as much as I'd like to leave it at that, I want to keep answering questions so I'm going to break the fourth wall here a little bit. Alan's days are mostly spent doing online research or reading over books he's amazon ordered on mysticism and the arcane as it relates to time. Now that he's getting going with this stuff, he's trying to learn as much as he can as fast as he can.  usually this means ignoring things like morning routines unless he is to be among people.  he keeps basic hygiene going but it gives the word basic a workout and frequently reruns clothes until they are offensive rather than keep up laundry and new outfits.  he perpetually has scruff and hair is unkempt unless he's going somewhere. This state may taper off but for right now he's in research mode and little else matters, least of all the proprieties of a society that is emotionally ephemeral to him. 

Heh, I can't think of the last time that I had anywhere that special to go.  

I'd definitely need a shave and a haircut, since most days I'm not really "kept up" and I've kind of let what's left up there go wild.  I don't have the body to pull off a fully shaved head, but I'm not gonna try to make a rug happen or go for the sad combover look.  

For clothes, it depends on where I'm going.  I've done those alumni fundraiser dinners when I was in Academia, so if it's needed I'll wear the full monkey suit: Tux, cummerbund, cufflinks, etc.  It's been awhile but I remember how to rub elbows with money (I think).  I prefer something a little less overdone, though, just a nice formal shirt and jacket, dark pants affair. That's fancy enough for most anything personal.  Not that I have anything personal going on. 

[This line of discussion seems to prompt Alan to evaluate himself in the reflection on his phone's screen.  He seems dissatisfied with what he finds.]

Jesus, I hadn't even thought about this weekend. 

Maybe talk to Kevyn about doing something?  If I don't think about it too hard, he feels like my best friend still. I'm sure he'd be down for a visit and to do something out if I wanted to, but I don't know if it's worth pretending to be someone I'm not. I definitely don't want to see Dana - this Dana. Mercifully, though, I doubt she'll call. 

Is it nuts that I'm thinking of trying to get ahold of Zoe or Tomlin? I don't know them well, but at least *I* know them.  They probably would think it's weird though.
Maybe just set up a movie marathon and get caught up on a bunch of pop culture stuff?  

Getting lit on fire comes to mind. I definitely wish i hadn't done that.  

But that isn't what you mean, is it? I guess that's kind of hard to quantify.  Obviously some things went very wrong or i wouldn't be here, in this place, doing this thing.  But going back over it, I don't know what I could do different. I feel guilty, of course, that I'm here and alive and relatively safe, but i don't know how I could have prevented it.  And if I could have, what then?  I die with everyone else and whatever little hope i represent doesn't exist, so i can't really say i regret that either.  

I think the greatest "regret" may be accepting the fact that sometimes shit happens that's just beyond our scope, and all we can do is try to pick up the pieces. I don't know if I'm ready to face that, which is why I do what I do now.  Maybe I'll make a difference.  Maybe I'll have something to regret. or maybe i won't have time to regret.  We'll have to see. 

But for now: Yeah, the fire. 

What is time?  I don't mean the sequence of events e experience from within it, but the essence of the fourth dimension as seen from the outside of it.  I've been given flashes of insight into the higher science, the art, the very nature of time itself, and the more of these contracts I do, the more of its mysteries I glimpse. I don't want to sound Lovecraftian, but what people don't get is that just seeing something that vast isn't what breaks you.  having that brief moment of COMPREHENSION is.  having something so much bigger than your mind actually squeeze in there for a fraction of a second, which can be its own eternity when you're looking at time from the outside, and then to be reduced to being a mortal mind again.  It's the stuff that drives people mad. time lives in me now and when something sets me off i am frozen into those instants of terror.  They stretch out into little eternities. 

That's the price I pay for power. And if I succeed, who knows if what's left of me will even be able to live in the place I save? We'll see if what's left is still a man. 

I guess I have to admit there is something out there greater than us.  I've just seen too many things not to.  If you're asking if I worship anything: no, not really.  Given my past, if there is some omnipotent controller of everything I'm more likely to have a bone to pick than I am to bow and scrape.  

I think, though, that it's more likely there are a lot of forces out there that people would call gods.  I'm not making the call on whether they are or not though.  Maybe a lot of them are just folks like us who kept going and growing.  Maybe one day I'll be the god of time? But then that begs the question of what started all this.  All these trials by fire that turn normal people into something else? 

Somewhere down that chain there has to be a being that is just fundamentally on a level above humanity, and if you need to put that in a "god" box, so be it. 

I mean, I had seen some freaky shit before I started this gig, but yeah, I was a man of science, and at first I resisted the idea of magic, but it was hard to ignore stone cold evidence.  When a kid's playroom is turned into a hellish Olympiad, there isn't enough "higher level of science" to explain that away, but I clung to that notion, even tried to do magic with the math of high level physics.  

I was naive.  I was in denial.  I'm a lot more open to it now.  Past a certain point, I think you just have to say "if I've seen the things I have already seen, what's really going to surprise me?". You know? That's where I'm at now, but who knows?  Maybe something comes along next week and throws everything off again.  I think the thing is, I have too much riding on me to let any of it frighten me away.  

There aren't many that I have seen more than once.  

Zoe seems sweet, in a bookish sort of way.  Very introspective and insightful very personable.  Lots of things that I am not. Clever, too.

Tomlin is more tough and practical. Get-the-job-done type.  I've drifted more that way, lately and i can see it as something of a defense mechanism.  something is off about him, but I've never seen proof of what it is. 

River...  wow.  This is fresh, it's hard to talk about and it's kind of fucked...

River was a moonbeam flower child if I ever met one. Seemed totally fearless without being even the slightest bit grim.  Found the good in a murderous restless soul and I fully believe she intended to redeem and befriend her.  She took a buckshot blast to the stomach on our last gig, though.  Didn't even think to try to get out of its way.  I did what I could to patch her up, but the cold...  

River was gone.  We were alive. The wolves....

I'm sorry.

The perfect room is my den, warm and cozy, with a soft chair and a light just bright enough to read by over my shoulder. It feels safe and quiet and peaceful.

The perfect room is my grandparents' den with all the cousins and aunts and uncles in sweaters and pajamas on Christmas morning. It feels warm and loved and lived in.

The perfect room is my sister Dana's kitchen with a Chicago deep dish pizza in an open delivery box as we catch up on one another's lives.  it smells faintly of smoke from where she committed attempted first-degree dinner. 

The perfect room is the bar that Kevyn and I used to hang out at back in college, with classic rock playing and that cute waitress I could never work up the nerve to ask out. 

We never appreciate how many perfect rooms there are in a lifetime, until they aren't the perfect room anymore.