First Person Singular

In Probability Avenue, there was an old dream waiting to be fulfilled. It traveled back in time.

A young, slender, handsome man sat silently in the far side corner of a café. He has an ageless gesture marked with an expression of waiting. But he was not bored. He was a man always in purpose. He did not try to urge time to move forward. He waited patiently. As if time was something eternal to him. Something that was sacred and sublime. Time did not bother him. He lived with all his life without time—or without the essence of time—so a little late of his old acquaintance was not an issue. He can wait. He can spend all his life waiting for her in eternity if this was the only way to see her. It didn’t disturb him. He sipped occasionally on his hot cappuccino, placed the cup on the table with care. He craved for a stick of Lucky Strike, smiled at his self when he realized he gave up smoking long time ago. He reached the iPod Voice kept on his pocket. With a voice command, its menu appeared before his eyes. A retro-portrait of Bob Dylan graced the screen as wallpaper. The playlist appeared in holo screen, amazed of the songs that now were considered Classic. The man felt a moment of silence before he uttered the title of the song:

Man on the Moon by R.E.M.

The song played like a hymn from a distant planet. He wanted to cry. He felt his dream elsewhere. No, not inside in this café. But out there, sighing in silent with the constellation of stars.

Let me stop here for a moment. Leave the man on his moment of contemplation. Instead, let us look closely the interior of the café where this novel in-progress of your humble writer takes place.

We are inside of a Dome City, the Hyper-Manila as most people outside the wall of the city preferred of calling it. It stood just outside the Independent Muslim State (old name was Baclaran) near Manila Bay. It was the only city in the Philippines not run by Religious Sect Government. Years before the 2015 Filipino Civil War, Hyper-Manila was where Mall of Asia, Nayong Filipino, and some Call Center Companies stood before. By the year 2030 almost of the land area of Luzon was bought by the Royal Society of World Government and turned them into underground facility and laboratory for Advance Theoretical Physics, Cybernetics, and Reverse Engineering. In fact, unknown to the Filipino People, a Large Hadron Collider prototype was built at the bottom of Manila Bay.

Inside, the Dome City was called “Palace for the Elite Filipinos”. Founded by the first Ilustrado—the Mistress—its citizens were all Filipinos who were intellectuals, technocrats, scientists, writers, poets, musicians, and people whose genes were technologically enhanced or reset. As the citizens inside Hyper-Manila were concerned, life outside those walls does not exist. For them, outside Hyper-Manila was a mass of dead bodies of communists, Muslims, guerillas, and pigs.

time dilation

We found our man still sitting comfortably in his chair, enjoying his music and solitude. Now, he’s reading an Anthology of Poetry by 20^th century Filipino poet. The Estrelya Café breathed life along the Probability Avenue, overlooking the Manila Bay. The café has cutting edge interior design, high ceiling, and solar panel lighting. Some citizens called it the “Star Café”, but costumers, most of them Filipino astronauts, were fond of calling it as café built for stars. Every night, the high ceiling was turned into a holoscreen. It looked like a large cloth spread wide where you can see the heaven painted in hologram, stars across was shimmering and galaxies were rotating in their own sole beauty.

It was built for his immortality, Mitchel Schrödinger.

Near the entrance of the café, there was a large IMAX screen hung. The screen showed an advertisement for purified water from Venus acidic atmosphere, synthesized with nanomolecules. Then shots were changed to a shampoo commercial, showing a cloned Marian Rivera. Then cut to a concert of a phenomenal female pop icon featuring her popular tchhotchkes, happening in one of the Off-World colonies. Not long it showed a Filipino Space Shuttle floating like a sponge in space. Then cut showing the different snap shots of globular clusters of Milky Way, taken from Bagwis Telescope.

Then the news flash rolled. A gorgeous android lady flashed on the screen. Everything with her was determined with algorithmic pattern, lifeless. She spoke, with cold and pure speech, about the Filipino Astronaut who was part of an expedition spearheaded by The Royal Society of World Government one hundred years ago. Their mission was to travel to the center of Milky Way. They were to build a wormhole generator to be used as sub-station for Time Travelling, the news said. Three days ago the crew of Spaceship Mariposa came back on earth. Their mission was a success.

The man watching on the IMAX screen, his eyes fixed to the Filipino astronaut, the youngest crew of Spaceship Mariposa.

He laughed.

He didn’t recognize his self on the screen. It was like seeing a stranger in the street. Everything on him on the screen was new, unrecognizable. Something on him was erased from the moment he realized who he was. Time was so tricky, he thought. He reminded himself with a film noir they used to watch with his dearest, before he took part in the expedition. The end was built from the beginning of the film.

How old was he now? He didn’t care to know. He left the Earth before reaching the age of twenty nine. Now, as if nothing happened, as if his life stopped decades ago, his age was still the same as before. He felt like a boy celebrating his birthday in a carousel. The cake never spoils.

A roving humanoid waitress with a vague human expression marked on her face asked the man if there was something he needed. The man observed her. She was petite with a long brown hair. She wore a mini-skirt, the luscious hips greeting him. A homosexual humanoid, the man thought. He smiled to her and made a gesture for nothing.

He turned his attention outside the café. It started raining. Artificial rain, he thought. A computer manipulated weather programmed from the central mainframe inside this dome city. Like traffic lights he used to see in the old days, only it was engineered by a sentient AI. As clever as the human mind.

The artificial rain embraced him like a forgotten thought. It resided straight to his heart. He smiled. What was his life before? He tried to remember.  The old days, it was so sweet of her. In the old days, he was also here in Blue Wave, Macapagal Ave. Waiting for her, reading some books with hot cappuccino on his hand. The old days, their old life, their old habits, was still there, blinking in the dark.

Time, he believed, was still waiting for them.

They were both came from a family of Ilocano aristocrats, somewhere in Ilocos Norte. He was her kababata, a puppy love. Their destinies were written in the stars, as teased of her grandfather. The truth was, their families made a truce long before they were born. They were destined as esposo and esposa, her father’s palabra de honor to the family of his, as it was a great help of her father’s electoral candidacy. The truce was never a problem, however. Fond to each other, they relished the same kind of foods, listened with the same kind of music, read the same type of books. While other children were busy playing patintero or bahay-bahayan, you can found them in the library of his father, looking some pictures or listening to his grandfather reciting a poem. When they entered College in Manila, he became some sort a machinist to her, skilled of solving her petty problems.  She always looked for him. Calling him in mobile phone, sometimes demanding him to fetch her in school, and inviting him to sleep over in her dormitory. In her dorm, he will tease her. She will tease her. He will cook for their supper. She will do the dishwashing. They would talk about the book he was reading, the upcoming movie they’re planning to watch, or their own anecdotes of the day. After dinner, they will read some magazines or listened to their favorite bands in compact disk.

As the outside world thrust itself in shadows, they found their selves in bed as two stars circling each other’s orbit, their bodies radiating of heat and perspiration.

My life, the man told his self, was run like a silent film. In black and white, in sepia tone with dust and scratches as the only proof of a love I never had. He looked up; the ceiling of the café was now filled with beautiful grains of sand, shimmering. The big deeper smiled at him without effort. Beyond that star was a constellation of fulfilled dreams. He felt a tinge of religious feeling with the stars that once he had known only as pipedream. I never gave up my love in purpose, he said. The stars, my life.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the exact moment, the feeling of a brief promise he had made to a girl one hundred years ago.

He heard an old voce called his name. Their eyes met, like two stars waiting to become one. The old woman was smiling at him. A finite smile of immortality. It was his childhood sweetheart.

“You’re late.” Estrelya said.

He uttered love out of dream.

[image: physics at syracuse]