This is a story about a gentleman who I have known for a long time. I work in the technology field and many of my friends do as well. I know his wife well and she also works in the field. He is a brilliant scientist and engineer. The story he told me, although somewhat fantastical, I urge you to keep an open mind and read to the end where it all begins to make more sense. I tell the story in his voice.

When you get older, it’s not uncommon to see an obituary for someone you once knew. Usually, it’s someone older than you, maybe a parent, an uncle, or an old friend. But when it was someone who was younger than you, that starts to hit home. Especially if it was someone who you knew well, someone you had a relationship with a long time ago, someone you shared a bed with, lived with, a long time ago.

That happened to me, just the other day, Pamela Sue Perkins. That was her name, cute sure. I was 32 and she was 27 the last time we saw each other. She was a knockout, people back then said she looked a lot like Michelle Pfeiffer (who, back then was incredible) but honestly, no shade here to Ms. Pfeiffer, but I bet she wished she looked as good as Pam. Pam could have easily been a model, or actress. And a body that did not quit, perfect proportions, goldilocks breasts, not too big, prefect. And an ass, my god, that ass.

But now, I’m 65, married, with two grown kids, retired, very well off, nice house. And my wife now, well, I could not be more in love, and she is every bit as beautiful as Pam.

But back then, with Pam, we were wild. Fucking crazy wild, insane. I was working as a hot shot engineer for a startup tech company, an up-and-coming young buck with the world by the tail and so much money rolling in I couldn’t spend it fast enough. Her, well, she was the hot marketing manager, both of us making more money than was healthy for our maturity level.

We partied, all the time. Everything, weed, coke, booze, cigarettes, Adderall, we hit it all. Had a huge house on the lake, big boat, pulling down seven figures combined but still in hawk up to our asses. Shit, what did we care, it was rolling in so fast, profit sharing, some other company bought our company we get a big stock option payout all that crap.

Then, one day, something happened to me, something fucking indescribable, that changed the trajectory of my life. No, I did not find God, or have some breakthrough in therapy or hit rock bottom or any of that shit. No, fuck all that. No, this shit, if I told you; you would walk away laughing your head off. But it happened.

It happened one afternoon; I didn’t even wait for the next day, I told Pam that night. I told her, “I am going straight, 100%, no more booze, no more drugs, not even weed, no nothing 100% clean from now on. Are you with me?” She threw her head back and laughed at me. Saying, yeah right. I’ve heard shit like that before from people, two days later they wake up with a powder covered dollar bill hanging out of their nose.

She was right of course, that’s usually how it goes, no question about it, except this was different, because of what happened to me, something that was life changing. I tried to explain it to her, but she laughed and told me I was high. I was not. I was not high when it happened, and I was not when I told her, and I have not been since. In fact, not one thing other than an occasional glass of wine with dinner with my wife now. I work out every day, eat vegetarian almost exclusively, on special occasions, with my wife, we will splurge and have a steak. But, nope, since then, clean living, Clean As Hell.

Over the years, I would hear about Pam now and again. Someone I know, who I used to work with would email me or on the phone would say, hey Pam Perkins is working here now, didn’t you and her used to go out or didn’t you and her used to live together or something. I would say oh yeah, how is she doing? They would say, Oh OK, but the tone of their voice seemed to reveal a suppressed commentary they did not want to delve into.

But I see it in her LinkedIn page, hopping from job to job every two years, then no more entries after 2014, just something about looking for work. On her Facebook page, pictures of her grew more and more sorry, as the years of drugs, alcohol and cigarettes took its toll on her.

Eventually, she took her Facebook page down in 2014. I found out through the grapevine that she had terminal cancer and was moving home to be close to her parents. She was adopted at a young age from a drug addicted couple and her adopted parents were young at the time they took her in.  She passed away in 2021, someone sent me the link to the obituary, an online one.

I admit that over the years, at least until I met my wife, I thought about trying to somehow rescue Pam. But I knew, that’s impossible, even if I did convince her somehow, it would be a matter of time before I would come home and find her with booze bottles and coke strewn about with some dude’s dick up her ass or something. No, it just doesn’t work like that. You have to want to clean up, someone can’t do it for you.

But now that brings us back to what happened to me to set me straight. Well, here it is, all suspensefully built up for you. Except, there are two versions of the story, the short quick one where you walk away laughing and calling me a kook and the long version, where I explain it out in long for gory detail. That version, there is a chance you will believe me and understand.

So, here is, hang on to your panties….

You see, even in the midst of all the partying and everything else, I was, well, I like to think still am, one hell of a good engineer. That’s why the money was rolling in and what made me successful in life, and it could be what saved my life. Or saved me from the same fate as Pam.

Back then, I was working on video streaming hardware, a chip that makes that possible, a type of technology that we all take for granted today and is built into everything people use to stream TV shows, but back then it was new technology, and I was a big part of developing it, a pile of patents and all that.

I took some of the gear home and had a lab set up in my basement with a lot of other electronics and computer stuff. A bunch of stuff I liked to tinker around with, when not partying with Pam.

But my real dream, what I was working on in secret was a type of quantum communications. If you are not familiar with the concept, the idea is to entangle two particles separated by distance where, if you change some characteristic of one of the particles, say the spin of an electron, the paired particle will reflect that change instantly, from a distance, in theory, faster than the speed of light. Einstein made fun of this idea calling it “spooky action at a distance”, even though work he did that won him the Nobel prize predicts this exact phenomenon. Yes, BTW, Einstein did not win a Nobel for relativity which he is so famous for, he won it for his work in quantum mechanics.

The idea that I had was that if that was true and could work, then if you were to transmit information that way, based on the theory of relativity, speaking of that, then essentially you are transmitting information back in time.

You cannot send a material object back in time, that cannot work, you run into all kinds of strangle infinite mass and other crazy results, but information is massless. And, if you can send information back in time, then you can build an incredibly fast quantum computer because basically it can compute something and give you the answer back in time, appearing as though it occurred almost instantly. Crazy right? But the math works out. The problem is the engineering, how to build something that can do that.

I was using terahertz beams, everyone else was experimenting with lasers, but I had an idea, terahertz beams are basically radio signals with incredibly high frequencies. Radio waves and light are all really the same thing, electromagnetic waves, just light is orders of magnitude higher frequency. But terahertz beams lay between radio and light. The reason I was so interested in terahertz beams is they have particular properties when interacting with certain types of materials, specifically 2-dimensional materials, very thin sheets of various semi-organic materials. Basically, a material with a uniform structure like a crystal but very thin. Like graphene for example.

What I had discovered was that if I placed multiple sheets in a large circle about 2 meters in diameter with each one spaced at just the correct spacing and shot the terahertz beam into it, the beam would make the full circle and come back and if I put some simple information on the beam, say modulate it with some 1’s and 0’s, that information would come back to the beginning earlier in time that it was being sent. I know, amazing right? But it worked, you could see it on the scope, the pattern on the top trace of a scope and the same pattern on the bottom trace on the scope, except the bottom one was shift to the left by a few milliseconds.

Now, you are probably thinking, so what good is a few milliseconds? Well, for a computer, that is an eternity. If you could find a way to use that, then perhaps you could run a program on it and it would send the answer back to you before it finished running. Then it would seem like the computer is solving the problem almost instantaneously.

But I was not the first one to demonstrate the phenomenon, it was a fairly well known phenomenon, just that no one had found a way to make use of it. Always, the signal would degrade and not be useful.

But then I got the idea, what if I had the signal go around and around the circle of crystal sheets over and over again, putting a signal booster in the head end of the circle, like a cyclotron. I called my invention a cyclo-beam. It worked too, but the information would degrade after a few cycles. Then I got the idea of my video chip, part of what it does is error correction. Very, very fast error correction, I inserted my chip into the cyclo-beam and it worked!  It worked perfectly. I could send a message to myself back in time. At first just a few seconds. But I thought, in stock trading, you could become very rich. But I soon found out, it was not that easy.

It didn’t work for anything useful, it seemed like, if the information you sent back changed anything material, the law of causality would simply not allow it, the universe does not allow you to change the past perhaps?

I wasn’t sure, I experimented around with it a lot trying to figure it out. I had a lot of theories but really, it was just a hobby thing and I told no one what I was doing lest they think I am a nut.

More spooky shit for good ole Einstein!  For fun, I put a video feed into it, since I was using my video chip anyway, and that worked, I could stand in front of a camera and wave my hand, and it would show me waiving it but as I increased the number of cycles around the cyclo-beam, it degraded into white noise.

One day I cut out of work early to fiddle around with my cyclo-beam in my basement lab.

Pam was still at the office doing whatever it is marketing people do. And that is when it happened. Somehow, the video feed came on. And it was me. Me a lot older. Me when I was 62 and I said to me, “Listen, I know you are freaked because I am you 30 years from your timeline, I am sending you this message, don’t try to figure it out now, but you, I, will later, just listen up.” Then the future me read that obituary for Pam to me. Then the future me said, “Look, you gotta stop, you have GOT TO STOP, right now, or you will end up like her, maybe even sooner with the pace you two are on. Please listen, we do not have much time, this phenomenon, is a once in a lifetime alignment, you will understand later. But this is real. Pease listen. STOP. Got it?” Then the message ended.

I did not have time to react and turn on a recording device. I was not high, I was 100% straight when it happened. OK, so you are going to ask about this magical super alignment the future me, well, the now me found.

Yes, I found that my device worked but, that pesky law of the universe that prevents things from actually changing made my device basically worthless, or useless for anything other than a parlor trick or something fun to tinker with.

Over the next 30 years I would play around with it, improve the tech, better chips and materials and so on. But essentially, you can’t get a signal from the future that is useful for anything. That meant my dream of the super quantum computer was dashed but I learned so much from tinkering with the tech it benefited me later with many other related inventions.

But it continued to fascinate me. Then I realized the alignment I was talking about was an exact phenomenon that occurs only when there are a large number of tachyons from a solar flare occurring in both instances in time.

There was one on that day and time, a big solar flare. And there was a big one, just a couple of days ago. I found myself inexplicably drawn to my lab in my now house in my now basement with my current wife upstairs busy cooking, which she enjoys doing, watching some cooking show and replicating what they do.

While she was busy doing that, I had the exact time figured out when the two solar flares were at maximum tachyon emissions. I had pre-recorded my message to myself already, from memory, a memory that was etched in my brain. I wondered what would happen if I do not send this message into my old cyclo-beam that I had so carefully packed away and kept in my basement all those years.

What if I just said forget about it. Would I disappear? Or suddenly die or what?  I realized also, that, maybe I had been hallucinating that day, maybe a flashback, or maybe a case of pareidolia.

I had no idea, but I really did not want to find out. I mean, I have everything to lose, I love my wife so much and my kids. No, why take any chances. So, at the exact moment, I played my pre-recorded message into my cyclo-beam just as the universe wanted me to. I wonder, does this mean we do not have free will? I think we do, it’s just that if you find out about what you freely decided upon before you decided, well, the universe simply does not allow you to change your mind.

Deep down, I think I am being silly, but whatever I saw, it changed the trajectory of my life, and, I just felt like I needed to do it. Sending a message back to myself in time. Maybe it was really just symbolic.

But none of what I did, the whole cyclo-beam idea, it’s been out there for a long time and others have found the same thing I have, it’s useless. The fact that this tachyon thing happened. If I could prove it, I could write it up and get a Nobel.  But I don’t know how you could, I’ve never been able to repeat the phenomenon other than that one time.

I told my wife about it, she believes me, or she says she does. I have never told anyone else about it, other than Pam, and she’s gone now.

My wife said, “perhaps you were always going to go straight after the cyclo-beam worked simply because you thought it was that big breakthrough invention of a lifetime and that would have made you go straight anyway so that is why the universe allowed the message, it didn’t really change anything, you were going to anyhow.”

That is why I married her, she’s pretty dang smart, and maybe humors me a bit as well with my kooky invention ideas.

If you have not figured it out by now, this gentleman found his Joshua Tree, his higher power, in a technological gizmo he was tinkering with.

He mentions that it may have been pareidolia, I will save you a trip to google, “Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.” That seems to be his recognition that he was looking for something meaningful and needed something to believe in and saw something in the white noise on the computer screen. But he seemed to feel he saw it, so who knows.

We all accept when someone says they believe in astrology, or magic, or angels or God, but, if you had never heard of God before and someone explained it to you “you see, there is a super being out there someone we cannot see, and you can communicate with this being telepathically…”  referring to prayer, it would also sound pretty fantastical.

I talked with his wife later about it privately and she said that she thinks he, being a scientist and engineer, needed something to believe in, perhaps that he felt fit into his scientific mind, that he could rationalize in a way.  It was his technological Joshua Tree is how she put it.

I thought that was brilliant and I also think that he is really lucky to have found his higher power and he is even more lucky to have found such an amazing life partner.  It is sad his former girlfriend did not. Unfortunately, many never do.