The Horse Doesn't Eat Cucumber Salad

Tales from the Ancient Future

The Horse Doesn't Eat Cucumber Salad

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"This is the password if you get in any trouble:

'The Horse Doesn't Eat Cucumber Salad.'

Otherwise just keep your head down, and don't come to me unless its an absolute disastrous emergency, get it?"

"Yes sir."

With that the telephone man left the building, and I went back to my lunch.

I have visits like that almost every day now. A uniformed goon shows up at the door with about 500 feet of cable coiled up over his shoulder, asks me for directions very politely, and leaves without ever giving the impression that the weight of a hundred years is pushing down upon him. If you think jet lag is bad, then you would never be able to handle the awkwardness of time travel.

Its funny that Bell Labs would be the ones overseeing their operations. Alexander Graham Bell holds the patent for the invention of the telephone, but he wasn't the first one to invent telephone like technology. The earliest existence of telephone technology is really important to these folks. You see, they need to know WHEN the earliest appearance of any of this technology is so that they can preempt it by at least a couple of days, if not much more. I'm talking years and years here if possible. That's how I got into this mess in the first place. Now, I seem to have become the temporal tour guide for any sucker they can talk into coming back here to run a little more wire. Its all crazy to me, but I have to give it to them. It actually seems to be working.
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"Humphries, get your ass over here! You do want this promotion, don't you?"

"Yes sir, don't get me wrong I was just trying to give Franklin there an idea of what he was getting himself into. I don't think these new recruits quite understand the seriousness of what they are getting themselves into."

"Look, Jim, I understand your concern, but these kids are well compensated for the risks they are taking. Its nothing new, and more importantly its not your responsibility anymore. You're moving up, and someone else is going to take over your position. You need to focus on your new responsibilities. You're going to be in charge of a lot of territory here. More than any other Regional Manager has taken on before...."

"Now wait a second, no one told me that I was going to be taking on more than any other Regional here. I mean, Jeff is already over seeing 1860 to 1888. I mean how can I possibly handle more than 28 years?"

"Jim, this is great news. Do you realize what this mean? You are going to live to be over 150 years old! No one in the company has a record like that."

"So the cartographers got me charted out after all, huh?"

"You say it like you're upset. This is fantastic, Jim! I mean you're the envy of everyone in the whole company."

"Yeah, and what do I get for it? Sounds like at least 30 years in the 19th century."

Silence. That wasn't a good sign...
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The funny thing about becoming a Telephone Man for Bell Labs in the 21st century was that there was a really good chance you would live out a large portion of your life in the wrong time period. For me that was increasingly becoming the case.

Another funny thing is that the more responsibility you have in the operations, the greater the amount of your life that would be transplanted into another time period. For me, that meant being born twice.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't actually born more than one time, but if you check historical records, you'll find my real birthday as June 22, 1984. You'll also find a birth certificate for me on March 28th, 1832. I'm sure at this point your asking yourself the real question here, "Why?"

When I took my position as Regional Manager for the 19th Century, it mean that I would actually have to transplant my time line, my life that is, back to the time period where they needed me to work. Being that I was 28 when I was promoted, that meant that "baby me" had to be kidnapped from 1984 and transplanted to a family in 1832. This way I was still 28 by the time 1860 came around. I know that this probably doesn't make a lot of sense to someone who doesn't see things from the Ancient Future, but this transplant didn't actually mean that my life in the 20th century didn't happen. In fact it means that there is an alternate time line for my years from birth to age 28. I have the knowledge of 56 years of life, half of them in the 20th and 21st century, the other newly acquired half from the 19th century.
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Pete was a bright kid, at least he appeared so on the surface of things. You had to be at least mildly intelligent to get into a gig like this. But Pete didn't get into this job because of his IQ, he got into this because he, like many of us, had a love for time travel.

Now time travel is nothing like you are probably thinking it is, in fact, time traveling is a lot like regular traveling. One of the biggest repercussions of this is that you can't really just go "back" in time like so many popular movies would have us believe. Because if you were to just go straight "back" in time you would probably smash into travelers who are riding your ass, per se. Think of it like this: If you are hauling ass down the freeway and you miss your exit, you can't just slam it into reverse or else you would cause a massive pile up. And don't let this metaphor fool you, although it would be possible to slam your car into reverse on the freeway regardless of the consequences, this is not the case while time traveling. If you want to go back in time, you must make that temporal U-turn, if you will, and start heading back the down other side of the freeway until you reach your exit.

Now, all this is further complicated by the fact that practically everything in the universe is constantly spinning. Meaning that the position that you were in at 6:12 could be miles away from the place you inhabit at 6:13. This is simply a consequence of the Earth spinning at 1,038 miles per hour if you are standing at the equator. Plus the Earth orbiting the sun, the solar system orbiting the galactic center, etc. It all becomes terribly complicated if you are trying to visualize it from a linear point of view. But in the Ancient Future, we have found ways to navigate. Not to make it sound easy, but at least with the right frame of mind and a good calculator you have a chance.

This is what made Pete a good time traveler. Traveling in the opposite temporal direction took a lot of gumption and a lot of good instincts. It was actually a lot like being an explorer. Along with exploring came charts and maps and other important record taking, but it also took a lot of just plain old survival skills. That was because as you may find yourself now 5 years earlier than you were expecting to be, you better be able to make the best of what you had at hand.

Pete was my first subordinate after I took my position as Regional Manager for the 19th Century. I had hardly settled into my new digs in 1855 when he came knocking on my door. I was sitting down to a lunch of cucumber sandwiches with a pen and pad nearby to start on my company-mandated memoirs when I was shocked to find Pete waiting at my doorstep with a coil of  telephone cable over his shoulder and nothing else in his possession except his goofy-looking, Ghostbusters-esque Bell Labs jump suit.

This was all a shock to me, you see, because it was still 5 years until I was supposed to carry out the initial hook-up to the earliest known telephone device so that reverse installations would be possible. And further more, once that had happened, we would still only be able to extend the current networks back a few days at a time. Long story short, Pete was way off his mark, 5 years to be exact.
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Its quite challengingly to try to explain life in the Ancient Future to someone who still perceives time in a linear fashion, but as one of the top managers for Bell Labs, it is one of my new responsibilities to record my memoirs in the 19th century as a educational piece for my contemporaries. So let me cap off this more literal part of my interpretation of events with a brief explanation of Bell Labs' vested interest in the coming of the Ancient Future.

The Ancient Future came about as a direct result of technological advances. Not just any technology mind you, but more specifically telecommunications technology was responsible for the change in the way that the human civilization perceived time. For centuries humans had always perceived and believed in time as a straight line, going one way into the future and leaving everything in the past directly behind us. As communication technology slowly gave way to the internet and cellular devices, humans began to become more keenly aware of nearly anything that could or did happen at a given moment. In fact, the technology became so efficient that we started to become aware of things that happened before and after a given moment without realizing it. I hope at this point you understand that I am saying that humans were beginning to perceive the time that existed around the moment that they existed in, or to put it another way, the size of our "moments" was increasing. Once this phenomenon started to become evident in our everyday experience it was practically the beginning of the end and the end of the end before we could even perceive it. Our perception of time literally opened up so that time itself was now more perceivable as a plane, a wide open space, that we could traverse in multiple directions, far more than just forward and back. And this is how my dual lives in the 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s, is possible. I never really traveled back in time, I simply side stepped it. And this you see is the nature of the Ancient Future. With a forth dimension becoming open to all of us that were able to perceive it, it was like the Wild West again. It was a whole new frontier that no one ever anticipated. And for Bell Labs, it was an amazing opportunity to capitalize on assets that they never knew would be so valuable.

As you already know, the internet is based on cable and cellular towers and satellites all beaming signals here and there and everywhere. And some of the first people that began laying the most serious networks of telephone cables was Bell Labs. In the Ancient Future, the temporal plane that opened up to us is not infinite. In fact, it is limited by the technology that was in place at the time. So for people of the Ancient Future, the temporal plane looks like it just goes off a cliff before the 1800s. But with some of the first telephone devices making their debut in the 1850s and 60s, this is the connecting point for the people of the Ancient Future to the rest of time. What Bell Labs is trying to do now is to connect their already existing phone networks further into the past. And they have to do this one day at a time. But for them to efficiently guide their workers through the past, they need a guide. Someone who is actually familiar with the times, and the places of the time. That's where I come in and why I have lived over 50 years of my 21st century life in the 19th century.
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"Cucumber sandwiches, again? What's with you man? You eat those like everyday."

Pete didn't like cucumbers. Also he didn't understand the irony of cucumbers either. For me, cucumber sandwiches were a becoming kind of a fetish because of the paradox that they represented for me personally.

"So, any luck out there today?"

Pete had been spending his days seeking stalking Johann Philipp Reis, or Phil as we had started to call him. Phil was going to be responsible for one of the earliest forms of the telephone, and although it would be deemed unworthy of transmitting a good enough signal for vocal communication, it was capable of sending digital information. This was all that was required to extend our networks, but the problem was waiting out a time when we could actually get a hold of some of his technology without disrupting parts of our networks that already relied on his inventions.

"Nope, sorry, boss. The guy just isn't getting anywhere. He has the right idea, but i just can't get a hold of what he is working with yet. Its still just a waiting game."