He woke up as if from a nightmare he could not recall. He closed his eyes again, tried to recapture even the faintest image of a clue that might bring back into mind the story or picture that pulled him from the deep and dark of sleep. But nothing. He knew it was there, could feel it hiding insidiously somewhere inside him. But all he had was the unmistakable recollection of fear itself. Pure emotion unclothed of its narrative.
The cold sweat bothered him. But not as much as the act of forgetting itself. It was not the first time he ever felt this. As from time to time, when his mind would not remember a particular word he knew. The harder he tried to remember the more the word seemed to escape him. Until, the slight stirrings of anger welled inside him. Which anger he tries immediately to arrest knowing full well it would only make it worse. And so he laughs to himself: Stop trying too hard and it will come to you.
But there’s no telling when. It could take a few seconds or the better part of the day, or never at all. And then all these would lapse into forgetfulness. And then he would go on with life as if it never happened at all. Forgetfulness being, also bliss.
But it might have been a dream about time travel. The last television episode he watched was all about how it might be possible one day for humans to go forwards or backwards in time. Many physicists have come to believe that both time and space are not as inflexible as Euclid once saw it even as he postulated the most fundamental rules for its fixed geometry.
And then the thought entered his head that if indeed humans could travel back and forth through time then it would have to be true that humans of the future must already be here watching us, affecting perhaps some slight alteration in our daily lives.
But if they are here, what’s to stop them from moving even farther back into ancient times just to tweak in some unseemly way the present such as we are experiencing now. And if this is true, how tenuous would our present lives be? Could we simply disappear into thin space if they messed up in any way or went too far at playing God with our pasts?
We presume too much, he finally tells himself. By now, he is sufficiently awake enough to make coffee and drink it halfway. We presume too much that the present is inexorably attached to our past and future. The alternative possibility might equally be just as true: Past and future exist only in the realm of thought when seen in conjunction with the physical reality of the present. It is only the present, which is measurable by way of the reality of time, space and mass.
What future humans will know or see of us can be nothing more real than what we see now in our television sets and computer monitors. Beyond that, nothing more. But we cannot, of course, be entirely sure. Once, it was thought that nothing travelled faster than the speed of light. Now, we are not too certain. Are there limits to what is possible in the universe such as it is?
There must be. We know there are rules to the physical universe. If the rules were not there, then the study of them would prove ludicrous and pointless. The universe itself is changing over millennial time. But it must be stable at least long enough for humans to postulate rules for the way it behaves. The universe is real. It is only our view of it which is as yet incomplete.
Do future humans have the more complete view than us? It must be. But equally as possible is that future humans have reverted back into an ape-like state. Is this difficult to imagine? Humans eventually succeed in destroying the planet through unbridled greed, pollution and tribal wars; all these, exacerbating a process of evolution in reverse. Only the most hardy and animal-like humans survive. Civilization was only a failed experiment. There are no future humans.
This thought carried with it the smell of death. Not personal death but the death of something so much bigger. He felt himself disappearing ever so slowly. In his mind he saw the drawing of a hand obliterating itself with an eraser until all that was left was the eraser itself staying still on the pristine white slate. Staying there, still into eternity. He wished only for this to be a dream from which he must awake hopefully quite soon. And then he feels it. A small microscopic fear exploding ever so slowly inside him, leaving not even the slightest memory in its wake.