Dust

“This is all my fault.” I said to myself, horror in my voice. The destruction that stretched out before me was undeniable. In the short time that I had been back from my journey, I had learned that this had been the norm for generations (not that anyone was keeping track).

It is the wasteland of nightmares. It could have been the wasteland envisioned by Hollywood, but in this world, there is no such thing as Hollywood. My God, how I regretted what I had done. The world I left is not the same one that I now came back to.

Life in this world is a free for all, the concept of morality is all but lost and civilization is stuck where I had left it. Progress is a term that none are familiar with for survival is the only language that is spoken now and it is a harsh one. Friends turn against each other, families abandon each other, and enemies don’t exist anymore, why have a term to define everyone?

I was warned by theorists, by moralists and futurists. I was warned by scientists, the religious, and the common man. I heeded no such warnings. I tinkered with the past and this is the result. I had told myself it was purely academic, that no harm could come from intellectual pursuits.

The contraption that I had created to warp space-time was an ugly thing, but it had worked. I could send myself into the past and see and meet all the people that I had always desired to. It only took one trip to bring it all crashing down.

386 BC. Athens, Greece. I found myself talking to one of the greatest minds the world has ever seen. He spoke quietly but with vigor. “What is a just man? Now that is a question worthy of answering.” Plato said.

“Will you be the one to answer it?” I asked.

He sighed deeply. “I should like to. My mentor, Socrates, he could have found the solution.”

I wanted so eagerly to help him, to point him on the right track, to be part of the formation of what would become a basis for western philosophy. “Well, I couldn’t imagine trying to dissect what it means to be just for one man. Maybe in the terms of a whole community, a republic so to speak, you could break it down into manageable pieces.”

Plato pulled at his beard, obviously deep in thought. “Maybe, maybe.” he murmured to himself. We talked for a while longer, but like Cinderella, once the bell strikes midnight, the magic begins to fade. My machine pulled me back to the present, but when I arrived, it was a different world. I was outside on a dusty landscape with my machine in pieces all around me as if it had imploded and then exploded. Smoke rose from every horizon and hasn’t stopped yet.

I have been exploring the past two days and found naught but pain and suffering. The world I knew is gone. Technology has not progressed since I left Plato and humankind has regressed into little more than beasts. It wasn’t until a few minutes ago that I remembered the book I carried with me through the time machine as inspiration. Republic, by Plato.

It is tattered and hardly recognizable. I had flipped through it and quickly realized it felt smaller. I began to read the print and noticed something terrible. This was not the same text I had in my world. It was the work of some poor mind, not the work of genius.

At that moment, the image of a butterfly came into my mind. It was in its cocoon and as I watched, a hand, my hand, pulled it open so the butterfly wouldn’t have to struggle free. I felt the grip of terror at the realization of what I had done. I had stunted Plato’s intellectual struggle. He never did find the answer to what a just man is. He never passed on that knowledge. The Academy never came into fruition. Plato never taught Aristotle, Aristotle never taught Alexander the Great, humanity never learned morality. We had reverted to scavengers.

The books old and brittle pages turned to dust in my hands and floats away in the wind. This brings another thought into my mind, another reminder of something that will never be. The song by Kansas echoes in my mind:

I close my eyes

only for a moment

and the moments gone.