Chapter Fourteen
Meanwhile, somewhere in the far distant future, a young woman was reading up on the life of Peter Durant.
The young woman’s name was Linda, or is Linda, or will be Linda. Fuck, I don’t know; the whole time thing kind of fucks with the tense, right?
Anyhow, Linda was not only a student of the fine arts matriculating within the future super global network of unprecedented universities, but a very wealthy young woman who happened to have inherited one of Peter Durant’s famous and altogether priceless early paintings.
Didn’t see that coming, did ya?
The painting in her possession was a depiction of an alarm clock, one of only a dozen or so examples of Peter’s work to have survived the great conflagration that eventually engulfed his modest home.
That and about six thousand years of time.
One of many things the young lady Linda had learned through her extensive investigation into the artist’s life, and this was for an extra-credit project since she’d missed some school that semester, was that during the year 2015, Peter had a very strange encounter with an unnamed woman, and something that young woman handed him turned out to change his life.
Odder still, was the fact that the thing the young woman handed him turned out to be a letter.
Even more stranger still, was the fact that when Linda read a digital copy of the letter in her mind zone, she noticed that it was undeniably written in her own handwriting!
This was a fact that could not be argued.
Later that day she sat down and wrote the exact same words that she had read in that art history book, a book she’d uploaded into her mind zone, and when she compared the two, she was incapable of denying the fact that she must have been the individual to not only have written the letter he’d received nearly six thousand years before her birth, but it was quite possible that she was the one to have handed it to him.
Without any consideration for her schedule, she checked the date the history book had recorded as the date Peter had received the letter, then checked the location and time and any other details about the event that were preserved for posterity, and promptly downloaded all of that information into her cerebral cortex.
Later that evening she called the time travel agency with her brain and purchased a trip to the year 2015, to arrive during springtime, and after receiving detailed instruction on how she was in no way to make contact with the subject of her temporal observations, she solidified her plan to hand the letter to Peter.
She was so excited she could hardly contain herself and quickly agreed to the company’s terms and conditions of time travel by clicking the little box in the lower left hand corner of her mind, with a finger she held out in the air.
Done.