My Trip in Time

Journal Entry: 01/22/2011

  Hello. My name is James Peter Matthews. As you might guess from my name, my parents are pretty religious. Trust me – you don’t know the half of it.

  My parents are proud members of the First Baptist Church of Hillsboro (oh and for the record, there are no second or third Baptist churches in Hillsboro). Mom and Dad are rabid church goers. They go every Sunday (even when on vacation), they go to Bible study, they teach Sunday school, volunteer at the soup kitchen, participate in prayer chains, and the whole bit.

  My parents dragged me and my three brothers and two sisters to church every Sunday for as long as I can remember. I had the whole God nonsense drilled into me from the time I could talk. Oh don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad. The cookies and Kool-Aid that they served at Bible School were actually pretty good. And I also had fun creating some cool crafts out of kernels of corn, but beyond that, it all blew chunks.

  When I finally went off to college, my beloved Tech University, I said sayonara to all that God garbage. I was finally free.

  OK to be honest. When I started college, I still had the God-wool pulled over my eyes. It was my college roommate, Stan, who showed me the light, so to speak. Stan was as rabid an atheist, as my parents were Christian. I started off defending everything I was taught in church. Like God made the world in seven days. Adam was made from clay and Eve from Adam’s rib, and etc. But Stan just picked it apart, citing modern geological findings and evolutionary science.

  Well, as you can imagine, I didn’t have a leg to stand on. It wasn’t too long before I realized the truth. I was fed a load of garbage from a bunch of simple minded people who couldn’t accept the fact that God’s a myth, and that we are all on our own.

  Of course, it wasn’t until my senior year of college that I finally confessed to my parents that I was an atheist. My Mom cried for a month, and my name was splattered all over the church prayer lists – Please pray for James Peter Matthews, who has been led astray at college. Even my siblings were on my case about it. All in all, it really ticked me off, so I vowed that I would prove to my family that God was a myth.

  How did I attempt to do this? Through science of course!

  Unfortunately, after a couple months of trying I was still at ground zero. Not that I didn’t come up with some excellent evidence to prove that God was a myth, like carbon dating the age of the earth and etc. It’s just my family refused to accept the evidence. They would say something like, how do we know that carbon dating is really accurate? Or maybe dinosaurs and man really lived at the same time. Or maybe God planted evidence to make you think that the earth is a lot older than it really is, just to throw the non-faithful off. I was about to give up and simply write off my family as hopeless when I had a stroke of genius – time travel.

  I was at my fraternity’s annual pre-spring break party (January, we actually have three pre-spring break parties), and thus I was pretty drunk when the idea came to me. Modern science was quickly proving that the Bible was a bunch of bull, but it would still probably be decades before the job was done. I didn’t want to wait that long. So what could I do?

  The answer was simple. Travel forward in time and bring back the evidence. Of course, the problem with that is time travel hasn’t been invented yet. In fact, you can make a strong case that time travel isn’t even possible. However my girlfriend, Beth, gave me an idea (Beth was also a little drunk).

  “Why don’t you just send your future self an email,” she laughed, just before throwing up on my shoes and passing out.

  Ok, yes Beth had just watched “Back the Future 2,” you know Doc Brown sends Marty a message via Western Union from 1885 to 1955. Anyway, as I was cleaning up the mess the idea really sank in. If time travel was really possible, then sometime in the next few hundred years someone is going to discover how to do it. I just needed to figure out how to get a message to someone in the future with instructions to journey back in time with sufficient evidence to prove that God’s a myth. In the end, the solution was amazingly simple, which is why most people don’t think of it.

  The next day I began researching law firms to serve as my vehicle of communication to the future. The firm had to be big enough that I could be reasonably sure that it would be around in 75 years (unlike my Father’s attorney who was 55, had no partners, and already had two heart attacks). In the end, I selected the law firm of Lucas, Orson and Scott. So for $300 (my poker winnings from the pre-spring break poker game), an attorney drew-up this simple message that would be delivered to my heirs after my death:

  To my Children and/or Heirs:

  I, James Peter Matthews, hereby charge you with the following request. While this request may sound odd to you, please do your best to fulfill it, for it is of the upmost importance to me. And if the request is successful, then its outcome would have already affected my life and if you refuse, you could be jeopardizing your own existence.

  At some point in the future, perhaps hundreds of years from the time I write this request, 01/27/2011, time travel will be possible. If at the time you read this letter, time travel is possible, then I charge you to travel back and meet with me on Thursday, 02/10/2011, at 1:00 p.m. EST in front of the Tech University library. I will be wearing black sunglasses and my red Cardinal’s baseball cap – enclosed are the exact geographical coordinates.

  Now the purpose of this meeting is not for you to provide me with who won the super bowl for the next fifteen years or what stocks to invest in. I simply want to discuss with you the existence of God, myth or real, based on the scientific knowledge of your day.

  If time travel is not possible in your lifetime, then I charge you to pass along this message to your heirs. Eventually, time travel will be possible and my request will be fulfilled. I know this request sounds odd, but if you have any love for me, then please do your best to carry it out.

  Thank you and love,

  James Peter Matthews

  And that was it. I am sure the attorney who assisted me with the letter thought I was nuts. But who cares, it was done. Now, I simply had to wait the two weeks to see if any of my descendants would honor my requests. While waiting, I vowed to myself to be especially nice to my kids and grandkids, not to mention that I planned to have a lot of them.

  All in all, I felt pretty good about my plan. I figured the chances were pretty decent that at least a couple of my children would honor my request, and hopefully one of theirs would as well and etc. So as long as time travel was possible, and the earth didn’t get destroyed first, someone with the means to honor my request would eventually receive my message. The only question was – would they care enough to come visit me?

  Journal Entry: 02/10/2011

  I left my apartment at approximately 12:40 p.m. to head to the Tech U. library, wearing my sunglasses and Cardinal’s baseball cap. I chose the Cardinals because: A. I am diehard St. Louis Cardinal’s fan; and B. Tech U. was in Boston, therefore I was probably the only Cardinal fan on campus. After all, I wanted to standout for any visitors from the future.

  It was a brutally cold day, with a high temperature of only seven degrees, but I didn’t mind that much. After all, with it being so cold there would probably be no one standing in front of the library, which would make it easier for any future visitors to spot me. So you can imagine that I was stunned when I arrived and found not one, but two young men standing in front of the library, both wearing sunglasses and Cardinal baseball caps.

  OK, I admit that in my shock at seeing not one, but two guys, wearing Cardinal baseball caps, that I didn’t put two and two together to get the obvious four. Instead I was like, what the hell! What are the chances that there would be freaking two other Cardinal fans standing in
front of the library?

  If my brain had been working right, I would have realized who they must be by their sunglasses and baseball caps alone. But there were more subtle hints that I missed as well; like even though it was only seven degrees outside, they were dressed in shorts and t-shirts. Sure at Tech U., a student standing outside in inappropriate attire was nothing new – but these guys weren’t shivering at all. They were calmly standing there, looking around, like it was a balmy 80 degrees. I was about halfway to them, when they noticed me and grinned. It was at this point that my mind realized the obvious and I froze in mid-step.

  You would have thought that I would have been a little more mentally prepared, but I wasn’t, I was stunned. I couldn’t move. I just stood there looking at them. The guys were basketball player tall, with blond, almost crew cut length hair visible underneath their ball caps. They both wore nearly identical St. Louis Cardinal t-shirts, the only difference is one shirt read Galactic Baseball Series Champions 4011 and the other read Galactic Baseball Series Champions 4012.

  “James Peter Matthews?” the shorter of the two asked, stepping up to me; he was maybe a few years younger than me. I nodded and he