Once upon a time a particle physicist married a primal therapist and they conceived a child. Nine months later she gave birth to Stephen, a beautiful baby boy. Together, the proud parents intended to construct a time machine that in forty five years time would return their son twenty five years back into his past. More specifically, their objective was to reposition the seat of his consciousness so that to all intents and purposes, his present moment in time would become twenty five years earlier, and he would once again be a young man of twenty.

 

They had forty five years to plan and prepare. The first phase of the experiment would take place in his twentieth year, the second in his forty fifth.

 

Twenty years from now they planned to subject their son’s mind to a special kind of psychic force while his emotions were simultaneously immersed in a particular kind of intense feeling. In so doing they hoped to momentarily create an environment in which it would be possible to capture time messages that had been transmitted from his future self.

 

The second phase of the experiment would take place twenty five years later and would be the source and origin of the controlled modification designed to make its impact during his twentieth year.

 

They identified and isolated two essential components of their grand experiment. One was the actual shifting of the seat of his consciousness, its spatial and temporal coordinates being what makes the present moment in time. The second component would be the mechanics and the means for transferring information stored in his forty five years old brain and back into his younger twenty years old brain, but executed in such a fashion as to render him cognisant to what had happened.

 

Failure to achieve the second objective would modify the consciousness of his younger self in such a way as to deny him knowledge of what had happened, the effect of which could be extremely unpredictable and bizarre. At the least he might awaken as if from a bad dream.

 

But if it worked they would have produced a unique human being, a young man of twenty but with a mind containing all the knowledge and experience that he as a forty five years old man would have acquired.

 

There is a beginning and an end. As we make our way through the tunnel of life, so a route is plotted through the six dimensional space-time continuum contained within the tunnel, and each fixed moment in space-time is flagged with a marker or node. Quite how such a marker might manifest itself is unclear, but suffice to say that it can be assigned a six dimensional coordinate – three spatial and three temporal coordinates.

 

Consciousness knows the route from beginning to end that each of us takes throughout our lives, but onwards from the present moment in time, a global or cosmic uncertainty principle ensures that the coordinates of the future cannot be fixed absolutely, although the variation is finite and inside certain predefined, and very narrow limits.

 

Messing with the future is therefore a hazardous affair; indeed it is probably impossible since there is nothing to hang your hopes on.

 

Consciousness knows the route its occupant has taken from the moment when it was first switched on in our brains and the foetus became a real live human being, to the present moment in time.

 

Our couple knew this and so they set about developing a theory of time travel. Markers are points that are fixed in six-dimensional space-time. By injecting a stream of psychic negative energy particles into their son’s mind during his forty fifth year, they hoped to convey information from marker to marker through his tunnel of life, and ultimately to have that information impinge on his consciousness that was the present moment in time for him sometime during his twentieth year, when sufficient preparation would already have been made for his consciousness to be primed to absorb the energy stream, and more importantly to prevent the energy stream from hurtling back to the beginning of his life and so render him a baby once again.

 

We see ourselves sitting on a chair. We see our hands in front of us, we see our legs. We can even make out the rims of our spectacles. A millionth of a second ago we saw virtually the same thing, but we had moved on in space-time. In one second, the orbiting of the earth around the sun propels us nineteen miles from where we were the second before, and if nature were somehow able to freeze and slice up the images into a million separate frames, and were we able also to ‘step back’ and see for ourselves, we could label each frame with six coordinates denoting a six dimensional frame of reference. We would also see the fragment of our tunnel of life.

 

And were we to study the picture thoroughly enough, we would deduce that the seemingly one dimensional arrow of time taken by our tunnel of life can only be possible inside a three dimensional volume of time.

 

When Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, he determined the speed of light c to be the ultimate velocity, making impossible the transmission of energy from point to point in space-time at speeds greater than c. This is because the mass of a particle becomes infinitely large as its velocity approaches c.

 

Although the mathematical equations prohibit the acceleration of particles travelling at less-than light speeds to or beyond c, they don’t preclude the existence of particles that move at velocities already greater than or equal to c.

 

After all, photons travel with a velocity equal to c without ever having been accelerated from a slower speed, so why could there not exist particles that forever travel at velocities greater than c?

 

In this case the speed of light remains an inviolable barrier but that does not preclude the existence of particles on its other side. The physicist Feinberg dubbed such particles tachyons meaning swift, and the experimental search for these strange and mysterious particles was on.

 

And indeed, if tachyons do exist, they are exotic. Apart from other oddities, tachyons would accelerate as the lose energy. Conversely, whenever energy was imparted to a tachyon, it would decelerate. This leads to a most peculiar characteristic of tachyons; their prima facia possession of negative energy. More peculiar still, such particles will seem to travel backwards in time, or at the very least operate in a temporal frame of reference that is alien to our own experience.

 

Our couple were faced with the following conundrum. If they were somehow able to release a stream of tachyons into their son’s consciousness, how could they do it, and in what direction would the tachyon beam move, back into his past or forward into an unknown future?

 

But what is negative energy? According to the theory, if a tachyon stream is supplied with positive energy, it will slow down and then, after unloading its excess energy will career off back into its own past at an ever increasing rate.

 

The method must involve a primal shock to the nervous system, a shock so intense, so all embracing, as to disrupt totally and utterly the primal defence system – that which separates us from the animals, the insects, the reptiles, the fishes, for all living creatures have something in common with each other, and deep in our brains lie the remnants of the fishes and reptiles from which we all evolved. The late development of the Man’s frontal neo cortex is not the be-all and end-all of human consciousness.

 

The primal defence mechanism is in place at birth. In forty five years time they planned to prise open their son’s primal defence system and unleash the power locked deep in his gut. It would send shock waves to his brain in the form of an intense beam of negative tachyon energy, and in the ensuing primal turmoil, he would momentarily saturate his consciousness with this literal bombardment of negative energy containing all the thoughts, memories and feelings from his present moment in time.

 

Well, perhaps not the entire lot, at least not to begin with.

 

To begin with, why not a specific message containing just one piece of clear and unambiguous meaning?

 

Just one piece of information! 

 

At a predetermined moment in time, hit his twenty year old brain with a message containing a specific piece of unambiguous information that would force him to reconsider something.

 

Now there’s a thought.

 

The negative energy would wind its way through his tunnel of life, skipping from marker to marker, hurling itself ever faster and faster to the destination of its origin.

 

But they wouldn’t want it to go that far. Indeed, they planned to effect a perturbation to their son’s consciousness during his twentieth year and so halt and capture the energy movement in one prophetic swoop. But what kind of emotional state would be powerful enough to achieve such a thing, and how to define our destination? After all, sending a time message back in time is one thing, but sending it back to a specific moment in our past would appear to be quite another thing.

 

‘Orgasm!’

 

’Sexual orgasm,’ proclaims the man to his wife in what is most definitely a Eureka moment one night after a particularly passionate bout of love making. ‘Sometime during his twentieth year, our son must spend the night with a woman,’ he explains to her. ‘Not only that, the episode must be so memorable as to facilitate total recall of all the essential details, every feeling, every thought and every emotion, especially the climax itself, all  must be indelibly imprinted into his memory.’

 

‘And nearer the time we will explain our reasoning, that he must be prepared for something extraordinary,’ continued his wife, as if her husband’s pronouncement merely reinforced what she already knew.

 

‘The sexual orgasm is quite possibly the most intense and all embracing feeling that humans are capable of experiencing,’ returned the particle physicist, ‘yet in terms of its role and significance in procreating the species, is somewhat redundant. Sexual intercourse could in theory and in practice achieve its goal without any accompanying feeling whatsoever. This would suggest that the orgasm has a much more profound purpose, and we think this is it.’

 

The technique they planned to employ in his forty fifth year would be primal regression under controlled circumstances. In a specially modified Room using video, music, smells and noises, they planned to simulate exit from the womb as if he were once again a baby about to be born.

 

They had a dilemma. Should they force their child to regress back in time to his birth, or should they begin from a time when he is already in the womb, and then move forward in time to his birth?

 

They had forty five years to decide. And there was another problem. How were they going to ensure that their son was ready and able to receive the tachyon beam in his twentieth year? They assumed perhaps that he might have a steady girlfriend by then.

 

Years passed, forty five to be precise. Then one day, sometime in his forty fifth year, the physicist and his therapist wife ushered their son into the room, the Primal Room.

 

Its walls were painted black. Shaped like a half sphere with a flat floor, it reminded Stephen of a building like the London Planetarium that could show moving images on a hemispherical screen that totally surrounded him. As per his mother’s verbal instructions that radiated through loudspeakers that had been positioned in strategic parts of the room, he lay down on a bed that was positioned in the centre of the room, at which point the lights slowly dimmed until he was engulfed in total darkness.

 

To begin with, all he could hear was his mother’s voice, soft and ephemeral.

 

‘Welcome to the Healing Centre. You have been chosen to explore the healing qualities of Mind, which are truly awesome and miraculous. Fit, capable, innovative and healthy in mind, body and spirit is our objective; available to all who desire the truth, or who seek relief.

 

‘But we go beyond mere understanding. Our techniques uncover the knowledge and facts that enable you to properly assess, and thereafter manage with never before realised insights and clarity, your new found identity and place in the world; a life in which you are finally free of pain, anxiety and bewilderment.

 

‘Every thought – whether it be conscious, unconscious, fleeting or prolonged - every feeling – whether it be felt, unfelt, suppressed or held back with all accompanying emotion - ideas, images, sounds, touch, taste, smell, ailments, illnesses, neuroses, psychoses – in fact the total summation of your life – all these are fed back to us instantaneously in a continuous digitally represented stream sixty four times a second without disruption or interruption.

 

‘From this information, we have been able to construct a second-by-second, minute-by-minute exact facsimile of your life. Our grasp of technology and techniques is so precise and fool proof that we are now able to present in our laboratories, via holographic image and artificial sensors, a total mirror image of your life.

 

‘Thus, we are able to extrapolate and predict with uncanny accuracy the future you have yet to live.

 

‘The Healing Centre deconstructs your life, and then provides you with the psychological and physiological tools to reconstruct it based on new information and knowledge. Our greatest triumph is to be able to capture that moment in early childhood when the child suffers bewildering psychic, emotional or physical Pain, but which nevertheless, is recorded as a fleeting thought, one that the child is forced to forget, with the accompanying suppression of emotion and feeling.

 

‘We take you back to those times. Our cue is your earliest conscious memory, and we take it from there. We transmit to you a continuous video of the before and after that is projected onto a 3-dimensioanl screen that exists inside your head – all with sound and feeling. You are to all intents and purposes back there once again, only this time you are reliving it with an adult brain, and hence the capacity to reflect, realise, understand and resolve.

 

‘From your earliest conscious memory, we proceed to regress back, stopping each time we hit upon a fleeting thought. By now, you are tuned in to the procedure.

 

‘Thus, early childhood dilemmas can be resolved in a way that currently is not possible.

 

‘At the moment of your conception, the entire history of your parents was passed to you. We therefore have direct access to your ancestry, because it is already stored in your deep subconscious. At your birth, a Pain barrier – known as the Primal Gate – comes into play that separates your history from your new life in order that you can make sense of it, and not be distracted and overwhelmed by random thoughts leading to chaos.

 

‘At this point, we are ready to begin.

 

‘Ah! Never noticed that before,’ exclaimed Stephen as unsettling images, faint and unclear, gradually punctured the darkness; pictures of newborn babies covered in blood, and oh Lord, is that a baby stuck in its mother’s vagina.

 

But the images were gone before he could register too much detail. ‘Wow! That was quick,’ he muttered to himself.

 

Total darkness once again; eerie silence.

 

‘How are you feeling?’ asked his mother..

 

‘Very small, very tiny,’ replied Stephen. A new image had appeared, that of his mother’s eyes which slowly and purposefully filled the entire field of vision, the magnification getting bigger and bigger until only her left eye was visible, and which Stephen now found himself staring into; and beyond, into the seemingly impenetrable blackness of its pupil.

 

In his mind, Stephen drew an imaginary line between his mind and her mind, and ever so slowly, the image in his mind moved along the line until it touched the surface of her retina. In due course, he sensed he was lying somewhere in what was now the vast expanse of her iris, and which for this moment in time was his whole universe, and is what his mind had come to rest on.

 

Completely surrounding Stephen was this image of a hugely magnified eye that had appeared and grown, and which took him right back to the time when he was a baby, and where he was now totally immersed in the spiritual and psychic entangling and entwining of the fusion and union of two souls – hers and his.

 

To begin with, everything moved along swimmingly.

 

Your mother’s love. Warm, soothing, peaceful, gentle, serene, quiet.

 

Infinite.

 

All embracing.

 

All encompassing.

 

In her arms total bliss. Remember how you would gaze into her big beautiful eyes, and tell me, what could be more enchanting, more mesmerising, more reassuring than their message, which you so delicately, delightfully, and unashamedly absorbed, all those years ago.

 

All those aeons.

 

All those epochs ago.

 

No questions! No doubts! Not a care in the world!

 

And why should you? You had her, she had you.

 

What could be more perfect?

 

This is the epitome of love in all its profound and mysterious glory. And even though you are just a baby, is this really the first, the one and only time that you ever felt it, ever knew it when, until moments ago before you emerged into this world, you, really and literally, were one with the universe?

 

Is this all-consuming experience of total love, a one and only happenstance, never to be repeated one-off?

 

Why is perfection so fleeting, so transitory?

 

So easily forgotten!

 

For who amongst us can remember even our first few months of life, let alone those first few precious unique moments of discovery and revelation, when we knew, and basked in, the infinite power of total love?

 

You look into your mother’s eyes. And for some peculiar reason, no other pair of eyes has quite the same impact, as if there existed a secret pair of eyes that only the two of you possessed access to; for of all the pairs of eyes that might have gazed into yours during these crucial of crucial times, no others held their gaze, or their majestic and mystical appeal, quite like hers.

 

And you are now concentrating on her left eye, on her pupil and beyond into the seemingly impenetrable blackness of her inner eye, for you are soon to be beholden unto a secret that lies on its other side, and which is surely just the twinkling of an eyelid away.

 

In your mind, you draw an imaginary line between your mind and her mind. And ever so slowly, your mind moves along the line until it touches the surface of her retina.

 

You discover that you are searching for something, a door perhaps; a door that lies somewhere in what is now the vast expanse of her iris and which, for this moment in time, is your universe, and what your mind has come to rest on.

 

You are looking for a door, an imaginary door, but a door nevertheless, and one which you might one day feel driven to return to, and open.

 

But not now.

 

For now, you have a lifetime to live.

 

The door to your mother’s mind and everlasting life; but only if you have the courage to open it. This thought is now firmly fixed in your mind. You didn’t know it at the time, but when you gazed into your mother’s eyes when you were a baby, this is what you were searching for.

 

The awe and mystery that is existence.

 

We discover to our great consternation that love is multi-faceted, multi-dimensional. It is not quite so infinite and all-embracing as we first thought.

 

Love is multi-layered.

 

A hundred years ago, or was it just a moment ago, physics discovered that existence is two-pronged. Existence quite literally has an imaginary component that is conceptualised by the value √(-1) and which is embedded in the mathematics of the famous Schrödinger wave equation, the interpretation of which forms the basis of quantum mechanics.

 

Thus we have a real matter Universe and an imaginary Universe, but one that, while ephemeral, is just as real.

 

Quantum mechanics contends that the act of observation causes a wave-like possibility to transform into a particle-like actuality. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle ensures a degree of flexibility, or freedom, of the outcome.

 

Thus, built into the fabric of the universe are the combined characteristics of possibility and actuality.

 

To discover truth, we have to go back in time and return to the moment when we were first able to focus on our mother’s eyes, and then we must ponder why we spent so much time gazing into them.

 

How to distinguish, separate and identify the vivid images of symbology and make believe, the images of dreams, the images of real memories, and the images of new never-before-actualised-until-now memories?

 

Cautiously, Stephen opened the door and peered round, warily at first, but there was nothing to be afraid of; before him, a vast expanse of darkness and nothingness. He shifted his gaze to the left and saw a beautiful female apparition dressed in a shimmering white evening gown picking up a little boy and talking gently to him. She was saying: ‘do you want to come on a journey with me? It will be ok, I promise you.’

 

She appeared to be hovering in empty space and floating above row upon row, column upon column, of what looked like pipes; myriad entrances into the world of his mother’s unconscious? His first thought – her consciousness was also now free to come to him, if it so desired.

 

Taking a running jump, Stephen threw himself at his Guardian Angel who caught him, and together, they slid down one of the pipes. The ‘camera,’ for want of a better word, was already positioned at its far end, and so captured them falling through the ceiling and into a room that he was sure he lived in, once. Stephen looked around and recognised the furniture, the colour of the walls and the general ambience of the room.

 

Before him, the big round face of his grandfather who, with his big smile, wide eyes and raised eyebrows, jibber jabbered: Whereyourdaddy?, whereyourdaddy? – as a grandparent might.

 

Can the future influence past events?  How to prise open the Primal Gate? His mother was now about to dig into the meat and scrape the bone.

 

‘Ok Stephen, now, I want you to remember the night you spent with Rashmi in the summer of 1966 in your twentieth year, you know, the one we talked about.’

 

‘Yes mother,’ he replied after a pause.

 

‘Now don’t be embarrassed because I’m your mother,’ small pause, deep breath ‘but I want you to fix your mind firmly on the moment you climaxed.’

 

Silence.

 

‘I’m assuming you had sex that night?’ she asked, with more than a little authority in her voice.

 

‘Yes, yes we did,’ answered her son instantly, but with some remorse in his voice, as if he was remembering a very painful episode.

 

‘You know she died not long afterwards,’ said Stephen after he’d calmed down a bit, and tears begun welling up in his eyes. ‘I’ve never been quite able to get over it. She was such a wonderful person. We met at university in my fresher year, but I never really got to know her until about a year later. She was a little older than me; and she had grace and charm, and a beauty that was extraordinary.’

 

‘And she’d known death.’

 

‘I remember,’ said his mother. ‘She was born in Mumbai in India, but spent most of her childhood in the Sudan in a place called El Obeid before coming here to study.’

 

‘That’s right,’ replied Stephen.

 

‘I wish I’d met her,’ said his mother after a short pause.

 

‘Occasionally I’d see her in the university common room, sitting alone reading a book,’ he continued. ‘As the weeks rolled by, I began to notice that she’d look in my direction whenever I walked into the room. ‘

 

A slight pause as Stephen collected his thoughts.

 

‘I desperately wanted to talk to her, but I was so shy, and I doubt if we would ever have spoken were it not for the time when she walked into the room just as I was leaving. We literally collided in the doorway causing the coffee she was holding; well it kinda found its way over my jeans.’

 

He paused while he savoured that defining moment in his life.

 

‘Providence. I think fate stepped in and gave me a helping hand.’

 

‘You know,’ continued Stephen after another pause, ‘Rashmi refused to have sex. I mean she was wonderfully sexy and romantic, but she only permitted petting.’

 

‘Except the day her exam results were published,’ he suddenly remembered, after a pause. ‘I’d never seen her so happy and excited as the day the letter arrived telling her that all the hard work, study and research that she put in over the three years had not been in vain, and that day, she asked me to go to the chemist and get some you-know-what.’

 

‘Contraceptives you mean?’

 

‘Yes mother, that’s what I mean.’

 

‘So, you had sexual intercourse. Which ended in orgasm, in a climax, am I right?’

 

‘Yes mother you’re right, I lost my virginity that night. But there’s more to it than that,’ returned Stephen with more than a little confusion in his voice. ‘I felt so bloody weird afterwards. Can you believe, my mind was suddenly filled with gobbledygook, as if a voice was speaking backwards, I kid you not? It’s difficult to explain, how can I put it, but intercourse surely can’t be that different to petting. I can’t put my finger on how it was different, and when I think back. I wished we’d done it properly more often.’

 

‘That’s it!’ his father suddenly exclaimed in a flurry of excitement, and momentarily putting Stephen off his stride. ‘I know exactly why the noise you heard was meaningless.’ He turned to his wife: ‘how could we have missed the bleedin’ obvious? Of course he would have heard gibberish.’

 

‘Hang on to that thought darling, and tell us when we’re ready to send the message.’

 

‘Carry on with what you’re saying Stephen,’ said his mother.

 

After a pause, Stephen continued. ‘Anyway, Rashmi was going to stay on another year and do her Masters once she’d received confirmation from the Mumbai authorities that the funding was in place, but before this all got underway, she received tragic news of an epidemic sweeping the village of Khawr Teggit that lies a few miles west of El Obeid, and so she flew back.’

 

‘We wrote regularly and I always looked forward to her letters.’

 

‘She was having such a tough time mother. In one letter, she told me she wouldn’t be returning to England. I still had another year to go before graduating, so I promised her that as soon as I did, I would fly out and join her.’

 

‘Then one day, without warning, her letters stopped. Virtually a whole year went by until that fateful day when I received the letter stating that she had died in rather unfortunate circumstances. A friend had apparently come across unopened letters which she opened, and seeing that Rashmi and I were close friends, felt obliged to convey her deepest sympathies and condolences.’

 

‘That’s when I started smoking; I was quite in love with her,’ said Stephen after a meaningful silence, as if her death had subsequently robbed his life of its own meaning.

 

‘And that’s what we want to do something about Stephen,’ replied his mother instantly. ‘These past twenty years or so, you’ve looked so drawn, so pale, and so underweight. You have cancer of the lung, and the doctor tells us you’re probably not going to live beyond fifty; and that’s now only five years away.’

 

‘So we are going to try a little experiment. We have already explained its purpose, that we are going to try and send a message back in time to that summer when you were with Rashmi, and you have to tell yourself not to start smoking, otherwise you’ll die before you reach the age of fifty.’

 

His father now continued. ‘To begin with I need to explain something about the nature of time. It is helpful though, to think of time as something other than a phenomenon that is divided into past, present and future. For our purposes, we should think of time as an indivisible whole where the future, the present and the past all merge into one.’

 

 ‘Time like space, is three dimensional. This is not a concept that most people can get their heads around, so we hope to understand it better by using our view of space as an analogy.’

 

‘In actuality, space does not have dimensions; it simply exists. It is mathematicians who have assigned three dimensions of length: breadth, depth, and height, because this is sufficient for identifying, or mapping, locations, as well as giving school children exercises in trigonometry.’

 

‘In actuality, space only exists as a volume; a one dimensional line and a two dimensional surface are mathematical concepts that cannot exist in isolation, or in reality.’

 

‘In actuality, a one dimensional line can only exist within a two dimensional plane that can be flat, or has been drawn on the surface of a sphere. In the latter case, the line itself will exist inside a volume of space; therefore, in order to accurately describe the line, we should define points on the line using three space dimensions x, y, z.

 

‘The line, however, will always regard itself as one dimensional. ’

 

‘Two points on a plane can be joined via any number of alternative paths. We may walk in only one dimension, but it is always inside a two dimensional plane. The two dimensional plane, whether it be flat or curved can only ever exist inside the three dimensional volume of space.’

 

‘Thus, perception and actuality are different. We may think we tread the same space over and over again every twenty four hours, but in actuality, we are hurtling through space at a phenomenal rate. Our surroundings may appear to be unchanged, but our absolute position in space is not; it is always changing, and we never touch any point in space more than the once.

 

‘In order to acknowledge the three dimensional nature of time, we must first of all reveal what two dimensional time looks up.

 

‘Think back to what you did yesterday between eight am in the morning and eight pm in the evening. The clue is to realise that you could have done something different. For example, instead of driving to the shops, you could have walked to the park. Thus, at eight am yesterday, a finite number of alternative futures were available to you. The one dimensional arrow of time would only ever move in one direction of course, but the direction in which it does move is nevertheless variable, and open to a finite number of possibilities. This necessitates a two dimensional plane of time that would allow alternative futures to be played out.

 

What about the third dimension of time?

 

‘Now, we each live the same life over and over again, all between the same start and end points in time - our conception and our death - but each life is separated by a movement along the third dimension of time that occurs at our moment of birth when a psychic gate comes into play that slams shut to prevent all memories of the past from interfering with the baby’s new life. This is why none of us has any memory or recollection that we might have done all this before. It has to be this way, otherwise we as babies would have our lives thrown into chaos, and we would not be able to survive.’

 

‘We aim to prise open your psychic gate. At the same time, you will transmit a specific message to a specific moment in time that is identified by the memory that you have of it. The memory is thus the door, or in more scientific terms, an indirect reference pointer, to the actual event.’

 

 ‘Except, and this is the crux of the matter and why the message you did receive was garbled.’

 

‘The forward one-dimensional arrow of time won’t be compromised. The message will actually be transmitted into the future and not back into the past,’ proclaimed the man triumphantly.

 

‘What?’ cried out his wife, ‘what do you mean the message is transmitted into the future?’

 

‘That’s right,’ replied her husband. Turning to his son, he continued. ‘The end of the message will be a future event compared to its start. Since the message will have been received from the future, the message itself will be travelling backwards in time; therefore the end of the message must hit before the beginning. Therefore, to make sense, it must be spoken backwards.’

 

‘The message is: Avoid death at fifty, resist smoking,’

 

‘Spoken backwards, this sounds like g’nikOhmz tsisEE rEEtfif ta hted dyova

 

‘Now, fix your mind firmly on that moment back in the summer of 1966, the night you hit orgasm with Rashmi. Allow its memory to totally saturate your consciousness. When you feel you’re back in the bedroom with her, and you’re reliving the actual moment, start repeating the message over and over again.’

 

Taking a deep breath, Stephen began to chant: g’nikOhmz tsisEE rEEtfif ta hted dyova g’nikOhmz tsisEE rEEtfif ta hted dyova ……

 

‘Now listen to me very carefully,’ commanded his mother, her words overlaying the message Stephen was chanting. ‘Conventional primal therapy used to approach the moment of birth from this end, that is to say, we would regress the child back in time from a young adult to a teenager, to a child, to a toddler and finally to a baby. But there are certain drawbacks to this approach. Since then there have been major advances in treatment and method. Nowadays the strategy is to start from a point inside the womb and move forwards in time towards the birth.’

 

‘The body’s defence system is there for a purpose. In a very real way it separates the life inside the womb from that outside, and there are many reasons why it has to be this way. Any psychotherapist will say as much. However, while the psychotherapist will seek your understanding of why this is so, we on the other hand confront it.’

 

‘Except we don’t actually confront it.’

 

Pause!

 

‘More like we creep around it.’

 

In his mind’s eye, Stephen saw his psyche cunningly creeping around a huge black mass of mystery and danger, just like a group of soldiers might negotiate an obstacle in order to get to its other side without detection or without raising the suspicion of its occupants. And in that instant, his body began trembling as a wave of terror seemingly dislodged, and then separated itself, from the pit of his stomach, and began making its way upwards.

 

‘What’s happening? Something’s happening and I don’t know what’, cried out the boy.

 

‘Keep repeating the message, keep saying the message, louder, harder’ said his parents.

 

 g’nikOhmz tsisEE rEEtfif ta hted dyova g’nikOhmz tsisEE rEEtfif ta hted dyova ……

 

Deep in his solar plexus, the distant rumblings of long forgotten feelings were slowly becoming conscious, emerging from a deep sleep, and opening their eyes for the first time in a long time, as if an extinct volcano that had been dormant for years was coming back to life; to erupt in the most ferocious and unstoppable torrent of fire, wrath, rage and torment.

 

 ‘You’re not going to get away with it that easily. Huh! You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for you two-faced shitty piece of cretinous garbage. You think you can casually stroll into the mess you call your pathetic little life, you blundering fool of an excuse for a human being. Who on earth do you think you are to play with such profound revelation as to even suggest for a moment that you can come anywhere close to what I’ve got in store for you? You think you can barge your way into my world, my universe with your silly little theories, your humdrum smells; your feeble attempts at duplicating the non-duplicable, as if you can wish yourself into a kind of simulated baby babble that somehow gets you a free ticket to the past.

 

You know, the universe was not built this way just for your sordid amusement. There’s a purpose to everything and I’m not about to consign the present to the garbage can just to please your morbid curiosity. I can see you have a point. You’ve brought together in this fascinating little book of yours a stream of rather curious and unsettling coincidences, for they are no more than that. And you’ve put one and one together and come up with three.

 

Cos you’re forgetting one tiny thing, what will you do with this new found knowledge? Where do you think it will lead? Think hard my friend, think fast. Know where you wish to land.

 

‘Shut the fuck up!’ I’ve spent my entire life listening to your inane drivel, and now I am utterly sick and fed up with it. Why can’t you just shut the fuck up? Little voice inside my head, you’re driving me the wrong side of dead. I want so much to be with you, writhing in that shit and poo, not knowing what I want to do. I’m reaching out please touch my hand, tell me that you understand, the reasons why I must go there, and stop tugging at my hair. I really now do have to go, and meet my dreams to tell them so. I’m climbing on that huge big bed, on which she and I will shortly wed, and get that lusty female bitch, to sit astride me suck my cock, so I can  groan and cuss and grunt, as I climb into her juicy cunt and rock. You’ll play that Mahler, for all it’s meant, and when it’s over I’ll be spent, back in me, becoming twee, when I was just a year or more, crawling round that dusty floor, looking for a crayon and pad, to draw my mummy and my dad, by God he used to make me mad, sometimes I’d feel so Goddamned sad, but don’t you see the wisdom here, the genius behind the seer, the sage who left one thing undone, the moon was there, but where the sun? That moment back in ’66, at the window, you left me in a fix, you only sent me half a message, saddled me with morbid presage. That was not how it was meant to be, so what now the future, what’s in it for me?’

 

‘Say it! Say it!’ shouts his mother.

 

Avoid death at fifty, resist smoking.

 

‘….. g’nikOhmz tsisEE rEEtfif ta hted dyova…… ….. g’nikOhmz tsisEE rEEtfif ta hted dyova….. ….. g’nikOhmz tsisEE rEEtfif ta hted dyova….. ..

g’nikOhmz    tsisEE r  EEtfif     ta  hted dyova’ ‘Aaaaagh,’ screamed the boy.

 

And then silence.

 

If their theory was correct, this set of weird messages had hurtled at breakneck speed into Stephen’s future to his moment of death, through the primal gate, up one notch in the third dimension of time (to avoid clashing with his present life), to the moment of birth of his next life, and on to that moment in his life determined by the specific memory.

 

The specific memory to which we refer would have been the memory of that moment in this twentieth year when he was making love to Rashmi. At the climax, his consciousness would have been saturated with the psychic negative energy that would have manifest as a perturbation, a singularity, one that would have combined with the feeling of the orgasm, and which would have been deciphered and unravelled by his consciousness, and actualised into the audible message Avoid death at fifty, resist smoking, with each packet of feeling increasing in volume and intensity, in accordance with how each was generated and transmitted.

 

The particle physicist, with a look of fear almost, turned to his primal therapist wife:  ‘Did we get it right?’ as they hurried into the room to where their son was lying motionless on the floor, after he’d fallen while writhing on the bed, in apparent agony. Then a flicker of movement as Stephen opened his eyes and looked up at his parents. For a moment there was silence. Then his mother spoke.

 

‘How are you Stephen?’ she asked

 

‘Ok, a little weird I guess,’ he replied with a nonchalant wave of his hand as he stood up, stretched his arms, took a deep breath and said: ‘Anyway, who’s up for a run, plus I’m starving. I feel like I’ve not eaten in a month.’

 

‘I’ll join you,’ said his father, ‘but first, would you like a cigarette?’

 

‘No!’ replied Stephen, with some irritation in his voice, ‘why should I start now?’

 

With a mixture of triumph and incredulity, the man turned to his wife and said: ‘By God we did it. Our son was able to send a message to his former self, from the future, from his future; telling himself to avoid smoking. You know what this means.’

 

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘All Stephen needs to do now is to think of times in his life when change would have been worthwhile, and then all we need to do is dream up the right messages.’

 

‘That’s right,’ continued her husband, ‘we have opened his primal gate. He is therefore fully conscious, so he won’t have any trouble fixing on specific memories and transmitting new messages to them.

 

However,’ said the man after a pause, ‘he could conceivably encounter problems receiving the messages before his twentieth birthday, before he lost his virginity.’

 

There was a silence, but then, with a burst of

renewed enthusiasm, his wife replied: ‘possibly,

but if during his adolescence, he masturbated?’

 

A slight pause, and then: ‘Hey, son,’ called his father,

‘did you by any chance keep a daily diary when

you were a teenager?’

 

‘Yes I did,’ replied Stephen.

 

‘A detailed daily diary?’

 

‘Er, sure! All school kids had symbols for stuff they did,

but didn’t want to admit to.’

 

The particle physicist beamed at his primal

therapist wife. ‘Then we’re in with a chance.’