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.