PETER DRAPER

TREVOR’S STORY

Entering the room, Trevor looked around to assess his situation.  He had come here voluntarily to give his side of the story and should be able to feel safe. However, his life had taken such a weird direction recently that he had learned to hone his awareness skills and evaluate all new surroundings with regards to security and safety.

The journalist came in behind him, she was known to his circle of friends, as small as that circle was, to be fair, honest, and open minded.  His story was sure to test those qualities, he shook her hand and she gestured to an armchair indicating that he should sit.

She sat in the chair opposite him, and her assistant clipped a microphone to his collar, while she adjusted her own.  She prepared her notepad, looked at Trevor and smiled, then took out a pen and pencil and placed it on her lap.

“We need to get the levels right for the audio, so let’s use this opportunity to introduce ourselves,” touching her chest she smiled again and said, “My name is Carol Tate, I am a freelance journalist currently researching a spike in the reporting of paranormal events.  In regard to that I would like to interview you and hear what you can contribute to my study.”

Trevor smiled back, “Please just call me Trevor, we can discuss how that name came to be in due course, and subject to the terms and conditions already discussed, I will be delighted to talk to you.”

Carol looked over to the young man sitting at the audio mixer and recorder and received a thumbs up.

“I guess we’re good to go Trevor, shall we get started?”

“Why not?”

Trevor shuffled a little in his seat to get comfortable and placed his hands in his lap.  He looked at Carol and smiled, then said, “Where do you want to start?”

“Normally I like to start at the beginning, but from the limited understanding that I have of your previous work and what it has allowed you to do, I understand that may not be appropriate. So, you choose.”

“Fair enough, I won’t be able to go into things that are still protected under the Secrets Acts, but I can give you an overall idea of what started this whole thing.  Now, I am going to say something that will seem implausible to you, this all started when I was a lot older.”

Carol’s head shot up from gazing at her notepad and she had a confused look on her face.

“I know, I know, but bear with me here.  As a somewhat older man named Dr. Peter Castell, I was involved in a highly sensitive research program that was investigating the plausibility of time travel.”

“And did you succeed?” Carol asked.

“Yes, and no Miss Tate. Yes and no.  Much of what I will tell you this afternoon will require you to first suspend your disbelief and secondly attempt to understand the true nature of paradox.”

Carol scribbled a few notes then said, “I’ll give it a go Trevor, but how, just how in hell did you used to be an older man?”

“Let’s try and explain that then. A little later I am going to tell you that time travel is non-existent, but also that, by most people’s understanding of the concept, we actually achieved it.”

“At the point in the story that these events took place we knew even less about the true nature of existence, and we had no real idea what consequences could occur as a result of our attempts at the manipulation of space and time.”

Tapping his chest, he continued, “Peter Castell had a troubled youth.  After a successful stint in the military, he, I mean I, was wounded in a counter-terrorist operation to the extent that my career was effectively over.  It was the only thing I had ever been really good at, and I really was good at it.”

“When I left the military, I had a nice little sum of money for those days, and I pissed it all up against the wall.  I began to spiral into a lifestyle that was leading me to an early grave.  It all looked like it was going to end with a suicide attempt in a central London Park.”

“As part of my research into the project I effectively went back in time to monitor my behaviour and witnessed my own attempted suicide.  While trying to stop it I triggered something that we later learned to call ‘The Significance Algorithm’ and knocked my younger self into a kind of limbo, a holding environment so to speak, which allowed existence to sort out any anomalies.”

“A series of events, which we interpreted incorrectly as it turned out, caused me to rescue myself from that holding environment and return both my younger and older selves to what we then thought of as the present.”

“Then thought of?” Carol asked.

“We’ll get to that Carol, yes there were two of me, separated by over 40 years, living in the same time frame, but we soon learned that such a thing was an abomination to existence and we both became very sick, in fact we both started dying.”

“Wait, let me get this straight. Existence itself dictated that you couldn’t both be in the same time frame?”

“Again, can we get to that later?”  Carol nodded.

“If we didn’t want both versions to die one of us had to go voluntarily.  My older self took that choice as his body was reacting very badly and breaking down faster than this one.  He took his own life leaving me behind but, as Peter Castell was now dead, we had to create a new identity for me, so Trevor was born, or rather created.”

“What happened next, well over a period, was that I absorbed everything that my older self-had ever learned and experienced.  I became a man in his mid-twenties with the accumulated knowledge and experiences of the same man forty years older.”

Carol looked at Trevor, not knowing exactly what to believe.  This could all be some fantasy or psychosis, but Trevor had been highly recommended to her as part of her research.  She should hear him out at least.

“How did that feel Trevor?”

“Both incredible and frightening, I had memories of things that I physically hadn’t experienced yet.  I felt both supercharged yet anxious at the same time.  Having the project to deal with, and going back to leading it, helped get my mind off of the personal issues and gradually I became more and more comfortable with it.”

“And here you are now?”

“Oh, a lot happened between then and now, that was just the start, the preamble if you like.”

“So, where do we go next?”

Well, the project continued and grew, I’m afraid I can’t go into specifics, but we did some very good humanitarian work, but as with everything there were elements that wanted to use it as a weapon.  To be fair we had always expected a tactical aspect to the project but hoped that it would be used wisely and justly.”

“More importantly though, our understanding of the nature of existence grew exponentially.  While it’s fair to say that we still don’t know much, we, in fact, know a whole lot more than when we started the project and the research.”

“Such as?”

“Now, if you thought that what I told you just now was unbelievable, you’re going to have a lot of trouble with these concepts.  So, I ask you to bear with me and reserve judgement until later.  We arrived at a phrase that encapsulated our understanding of space and time, and that is ‘Everything is always already happening’.”

“Time really is a construct that those of us trapped in existence use to make sense of things, but in fact, there is no past, no future, just a whole lot of now.”

“And.. you lost me,” Carol said.

“I’m not surprised, I got lost a lot trying to understand all of this.  First of all, try to grasp the idea that everything we know is made of frequencies Waves are everything and everywhere and the infinitely possible combinations and interference patterns of those frequencies create what we think of as reality.  Now, before you get too bogged down try and understand that they all exist now, they just exist, not then, not soon, but now.  You don’t have to travel backwards or forwards in time, you just have to kind of slide into a new set of already existing frequencies and experience that ‘now’.”

“What we discovered is that everything is made up of primary and secondary datasets of frequencies and that sub-sets of those frequencies identify the concept of when and where something appears to be.  By altering those subsets, you can appear to move something in, what we consider to be, space and time.  It’s all relative to our understanding because in fact everything already is.”

“So, Trevor, are you telling me that you actually achieved this, can you summarize what you actually managed to do?”

“Very simply, Carol, we worked out what the desired subset frequencies would be and bombarded a subject with those frequencies and they tripped to the new instance of reality.”

Carol held up her hand to stop him talking, “And that’s supposed to be putting it simply?”

“Let me try again, and I’m not judging here Carol, this is beyond cutting edge stuff.  Have you heard of something called entrainment?”

“I have not, Trevor.”

You know how if you’re trying to relax, say during a massage or in meditation, they play soothing music set at a very low beats per minute rate?”

“Yes, and I hate pan pipes because of that.”  Trevor laughed at her quip.

“Well, it doesn’t have to be pan pipes, famously Baroque music is usually performed at 60 bpm and listening to it, in a quiet atmosphere, will slow down your heart rate and calm your mind.  Similarly, if you are at a hard rock concert your adrenaline will flow and your heart rate will spike accordingly.  This is called entrainment. So, we bombarded the subject with the desired data sets of frequencies, entrainment took over and the subject would move to the desired instance, thereby appearing to travel through either space and/or time.”

Carol looked up sharply, “Woah, so you’re saying that you did this, you moved objects like that?”

“Not just objects, people too.”

“Through time?”

“Well, I hate to flog a dead horse here but factually not through time just to an instance that appeared that way.”

Carol was doing her best not to appear flustered, “Can you just humour me and my newness at all this and let me think of it as through time?”

“And through space, sure we can do that.”

“Great, I might make some headway here now.  So how would this cause an increase in paranormal events being reported.”

“I can’t say for certain that it has Carol, I don’t know if there’s enough data to say that but there is always that possibility.  To let you wrap your mind around this concept a little better I will ask you to imagine something.  Try to think of reality as a whole lot of stacked, micro thin slices, of reality and that they are all made of variations of frequency interaction.  Now imagine that we change one of those frequencies significantly, and that the ripples spread out and ‘nudge’ the other instances.  Do you see where I’m going here?”

“Are you saying that moving something from one instance to another might cause interference to both?”

“As long as you leave the word ‘might’ in there I’ll go along with that.”

Carol scribbled a couple of notes and nodded.

“As I said, I can’t go into details, but we moved some huge amounts of stuff and if that is a possible cause we could definitely have made some ripples that may even have allowed instances to overlap, and that ‘could’ have caused some events to occur that might be considered paranormal.  But there’s more Carol, quite a lot more.”

Carol looked up, “Do you need to take a break?”

“No, if you’re good, so am I”

“So, what more is there?”

“There were three of us that made a lot of trips.  We called them trips to avoid falling into the past and future language trap.  We had several agents that we used to make trips depending on the actual nature of the mission.  However, three of us made more than any of the others.  We had a male and a female operative, both with military and intelligence backgrounds, which made an enormous number of trips and, of course, myself.”

Carol looked up again, “So do you also have a military background Trevor?”

“As I said earlier, I do, I was a counter terror agent for the Royal Air Force Regiment for a few years until an injury forced my retirement.  I made a very large number of trips and over time something happened to me, causing me to become something more than I was at the start of the project.”

“Care to explain?”

“Sure, during everybody’s life they constantly evolve to different degrees.  Consider, we start off learning to walk, we have to watch where we place every footstep, but gradually we don’t look down anymore, we learn the skill to see where everything is around us and walk easily.  This is a form of personal evolution, an acquisition of new skills common to everyone.  Similarly, when we first trip we need the aid of being bombarded with frequencies, but gradually, over time and with experience, we have been able to learn to trip without that.  A few of us developed the ability to ‘tap into’ or recognize the frequencies in which we exist and slowly began to develop the ability to change them and trip unassisted.”

“Why didn’t this happen to every agent?” Carol asked.

“I think it may have to do with our military training and experience.  We have been trained to become acutely aware of our surroundings, to identify hazards and prepare for them and I think this may have boosted our ability to incorporate the frequency information defining our surroundings and with experience learn how to change them.”

“Trevor, you’re going to need to explain what all that means to me in a language I can understand.”

“Would a demonstration be better?”

“If that’s possible, sure.”

Trevor took a sip from the glass of water and placed it back on the table.  “Carol, can you move that glass closer to yourself please?”

She picked up the glass and placed it just a few inches from her notepad, “Okay?”

“That’s fine, now watch it closely Carol.”

She focussed her attention onto the glass, but it instantly vanished.  “What the fuck??” and when she looked over to Trevor she saw that it was in his hand as he took a sip.

He placed the glass back onto the table and asked her, “Is that okay for now?”

“That’s creepy is what that is Trevor, how did you do that?”

“I don’t really know Carol; the descriptive process is beyond me.  Just as I don’t know how I change the focus of my sight when I look from near to far, I just know how to move things like that.”

“Do all three of you have the same abilities?”

“No, it differed with each of us, all revolving around the same skill set and all using the same techniques but just to different levels.”

“I’m staggered Trevor, I don’t know what to say.”

“So, we’re done?”

“No!!!  I have more questions and I need to know if there’s any connection between what I just witnessed and the increase in paranormal incidents.”

“Well, you just saw one more incident right there, although to be fair, it’s paranormal to you but now completely normal to me.  It is entirely possible that people have seen either my colleagues, or myself, appear to move things or sometimes seem to disappear or appear.  Although we do try to take care not to freak people out.”

“Are you now telling me that you can move like that too?

Suddenly she was looking at an empty chair.

“Better that I show you again,” his voice came to her from behind and she turned to see him standing there.

“Holy shit, that’s not a good way not to freak people out, I’m freaking out big time right now.”

“Are you ready for one more freak out?”

“I guess…”

“Do you know everything that was in your bag when you came out this morning?”

“Mostly, yes.”

“So, you’d recognize something that was not there when you left your home?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Then please check your bag.”

Carol took her bag from the back of her chair and opened it cautiously.  There, right on top of the other contents was a small keyring with the words ‘Project Wave’ engraved on the metal disc.  She held it up and examined it carefully and asked when he had put it there.

Trevor walked around the desk and sat back down, as Carol followed his movements she felt a small movement at her back.

“Was that.. you..”

Trevor grinned and said “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“I am totally confused,” Carol said.

“Don’t try and understand everything, simply accept that there are things that can happen that you won’t be able to understand.”

Carol took a drink of water and agreed, “That’s probably a good idea.”

“Trevor, there were a lot of conditions placed on this interview, secrecy and privacy being one of the primary ones, could you elaborate on why that was?”

“Well, I’m a wanted man, we can cover why later, but the irony is that I keep letting them catch me, but they can never hold me because of what you just saw. Sometimes I even let them cuff me and just trip out when I feel like it.”

Carol laughed a little, “I can see why that would be frustrating for the captors.”

Looking at the interviewer Trevor made a snap decision to tell her a lot more.  “Let me explain something that may be even harder to understand.”

“Harder than what we’ve already covered?”

“Well, that will be up to you.  I have become something that has rarely existed and that is completely self-aware.  I mean that in the sense that I don’t just think that I am a set of frequencies interacting, I know it.  I understand it and as such can identify with all other frequencies around me.  Watch this please.”

Carol watched as Trevor raised his hand, formed his fingers into a point and slid them into the very structure of the table.  His hand melted through the hard wooden surface and was, quite simply half inside the table and half out.

“Whoa.” Carol’s eyes widened and she almost forgot to breathe. “That’s an illusion, right?”

“Everything’s an illusion Carol, everything.  Here’s the deal though, I can walk through walls, reach inside a building, and move to anywhere or any ‘time’ that I want to.  I previously held top secret clearances and spearheaded a Government Committee that organized highly classified operations.”

Trevor took a deep breath and continued, “As my self-awareness grew I held back the nature of my abilities from my colleagues, but when I found out that a few other members of my previous team could also do extra ordinary things I confided in a few people.”

“Gradually though, some people found out, or suspected various things, and I became perceived as a security threat.  The committee that I chaired was disbanded, or I think reformed but without me, and a warrant was issued for my urgent arrest.  I went along with it all for a little while, but whenever I got bored, I would trip somewhere else. You can imagine how this infuriated the agencies looking for me I’m sure.”

Carol had put down her pen and pad and was just watching Trevor as he spoke.  “I can, that must be very frustrating for them.”  She reached under her desk and pulled out one of the original belts that the Wave members wore to bale out of a trip and return to their base of operations. She placed it on the desk and said, “As part of my research I got hold of one of these from a source, can you tell me what it is?”

Trevor smiled and said, “Of course, but can I borrow a piece of paper from your pad and your pen first please?”

Carol pushed the pad and pen cross the table and Trevor started to write, just a paragraph, then he turned the pad over so that what he had written was obscured.

“That is a bale out belt, we used it to abandon a trip in an emergency situation, it immediately bombarded us with frequencies and zapped us back to the base.”

Carol prodded at the belt and asked him, “Is it safe to try on, I’d like to try it on please.”

“I’m sure it is, just don’t pull any handles.”

Carol tried on the belt, and it fit badly and felt chunky.  “It’s heavier than I thought it would be.”

“That’s an early model, we eventually got them a lot slimmer and lighter than that, it was based on an old military belt style.”

“Can I see how it looks on you?”  Carol smiled, took off the belt and pushed it across the table.

“Sure,” and Trevor stood and put the belt around his waist. “Feels like an old friend,” and he grinned.

Carol reached under the desk and pulled out a small remote, pressing one button a couple of small lights on the belt started to glow and a very gentle hum could be heard.  “Trevor I’m sorry about this, but a girl’s gotta eat, and they paid me a wad of cash to get you to put that on.”

“So, this is bombarding me with the frequencies of this instance to get me to stay here, correct?”

“Fucked if I know Trevor, my interest stopped when you put the fucking thing on.”

Trevor laughed, long and loud, a head back comic book villain kind of a laugh.  “Well, I gotta be going anyway Carol, or whatever your name is, I left you a note.”  The belt fell to the floor as Trevor simply vanished.   Carol looked around to the ‘sound engineers’ and yelled “I’m keeping the money you freaking muppets.”

She reached over and picked up the pad and laughed as she read the note.

“You obviously weren’t paying attention when I told you just some of the things I can do.  I knew exactly how this would play out and exactly what you will say when you read this note .. ‘Really’ … I knew.”

Carol laughed more and simply said, “Really…”

Peter Draper    ©    2022

Samantha’s Swansong

Leaning against the alley wall Sam had one foot at knee height and was busy rolling a fatty. Just enough to take the edge off she promised herself. Her agent, or that ‘lazy scumbag piece of crap that never finds me good jobs’, as she liked to call him had told her to look fresh when she auditioned for the tampon ad. Fresh! Someone on her period had to look fresh because she’d just stuffed some new brand of tampon up her fanny. “Unlikely,” she muttered and licked the paper to close the roll.

She lit the end and drew in a big breath of smoke, held until she couldn’t any longer, then let the breath out. “I’ll show them fresh alright,” she murmured as she looked at the fatty with both love and disgust. Sam had tried to clean up her act many times, and she always saw this is a gateway drug, but as a gateway leading out, away from the crack and the H.

It never worked though. She had moved to London to become an actress and a model. She had done precisely two soft core porn video shoots, actually one was not so soft core, and one dodgy job for the government pretending to be a reporter interviewing some scientist, who was beyond weird, in fact he was freaky weird.

The job hadn’t quite worked out how they had wanted it to, but she kept the money anyway and scored some good coke to celebrate. “Oh, I’ll show them fresh,” she said out loud.

She drew two more long hits off the fatty and pinched the end to save some for later. She brushed down her clothes, a smart summer dress that she had just stolen from H&M paired with a light cardigan courtesy of Zara. She had some nice, low heel, multipurpose black shoes that she had tried on about an hour ago. The salesman had run his hand way too far up her leg when he was fitting them on her foot, causing her to shudder at his nerve. When she had both shoes on, she had said she wanted to walk around the shop to feel how they fit, and ‘Kevin, creepy freaking Kevin’ had said OKAY. She stood and walked. She walked straight out the door and kept going to the nearest alley, when she cut through and carried on walking to Soho Square, leaving her old beaten-up trainers at the shop.

“You can keep those Kevin, maybe you can sniff them while you diddle yourself, thinking about my leg.”

There was an hour to go until the audition for the kind of tampon that made you feel fresh, so she had taken the opportunity to get a minor buzz going. She had ducked into an alley, rolled one up and here she was, ready and waiting and feeling so desperate she wished she had stayed at home, with Mum and Dad and got a job at a local office. “But no, you had to be a damned actress didn’t you?” she said to herself.

She was staring blankly at the wall opposite, just lost in a feeling of melancholy when a man walked out of the wall. Not out of a doorway, or even through a window, he walked through and out of the wall.

Instantly Sam knew who it was, it was the creepy bastard she had interviewed and kinda betrayed and she had a feeling she was in for an ass kicking.

He had told Sam that he was ex-military, ex-counter terrorism and she thought that he could probably handle himself. Besides she had watched him put his hand through a table and just seen him walk out of a wall. Presumably he could reach into her chest and pull her heart out if he wanted to. Suddenly the monkey that she had earned for the job didn’t seem enough.

“Damn it,” she said very quietly.

“Hi Samantha,” Trevor said, and he crossed the alley and stood next to her. Sam visibly shrank, shoulders hunched forward her spine compressed, and her head hung down.

“If you’re going to give me a hiding can you spare the face, I’ve got a damn tampon audition in 40 minutes.”

“A hiding? Why would I do that? You were just trying to earn a little money, and there was no harm and no foul really. In fact, it was quite good fun.”

Sam let out a long slow breath and stood more upright, “If you say so Mr. Blackman.”

“Oh, come on, Trevor please.”

“Okay Trevor. If you say so. Trevor.”

Trevor looked at the girl, feeling both sorry for her but also remembering his own tough times when he had left the Air Force. He had done his share of sleeping rough and scoring drugs too and really felt sympathy for her plight.

“Wait a minute,” he said and instantly vanished then reappeared less than a second later. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, you don’t get the tampon job, sorry Sam.”

“So, it’s not even worth my time going to the audition?”

“Oh, you should definitely go, you never know who you might meet there, well, I know who you’ll meet there, but you don’t. Yet.”

Sam looked at him with a blank expression then said, “You are really, really annoying, do you know that?”

“I’ve been told,” Trevor shrugged.

“Well, whoever told you wasn’t telling you porkies, that’s for sure. So, what do you want? Money? A blow job? You know us junkies, we’ll do anything in the right circumstances.”

“I’m going to show you something else,” and he held his hand out, “Watch closely.” As Sam watched his hand it was suddenly full of money, at least another few hundred, and she hadn’t seen him flinch or move.

“That’s some freaky David Copperfield shit right there, so I guess you don’t need money, just as well really ’cause I popped the money from our interview on coke.”

“Sam, I don’t need, or want, anything from you, I just want to tell you something.”

Sam sighed, thinking a motivational speech of some kind was about to come. Trevor relaxed against the wall a little and offered Sam the money, which she snatched out of his hand like Kung Fu Caine snatching the grasshopper from Master Kan’s hand.

“Thanks.”

“When we ‘interviewed’ I took a little look at what you would consider your future Sam, there’s an infinite number of potential outcomes, some better than others, depending on choices you make in the next few hours. I already told you that you’re not getting the tampon job, but I am telling you that you should go to the audition, you should try to be fresh and above all be open to new conversations. I can’t say much more because of something called the Significance Algorithm, we kinda touched on that during the interview, remember?”

“Oh bless, you thought I was listening, didn’t you?”

“I know some of it got through or you really are a better actress than your agent thinks you are, but that’s the reason I’m here. Just a reminder, go to the audition, be fresh be open and talk to people.”

“Whatever. You finished?”

“Yep.” He disappeared.

“That’s always going to be freaky,” she said aloud to nobody.

Surprisingly, Trevor reappeared about 2 seconds later and gave her a paper bag, it was full of toiletries and a whole bunch of cash.

Looking inside the bag Sam’s eyes started to well with tears, “What’s this for?” she asked.

“Let’s just say it’s some fresh start money from a fan of ‘Alice’s Office Adventure’ a great work of art.”

Sam blushed, “You saw that?”

Trevor winked and disappeared again.

Sam walked through Soho Square, she felt her shoulders pull back and for some reason she was smiling. Finding the address of the audition she buzzed through, and a receptionist ushered her through to a small studio, without even making eye contact. Sam stood still at the desk and then said, “Excuse me.”

The girl looked up, “What?”

“Thank you,” Sam said, smiled and walked through to the studio. A director and an assistant were sitting at a table and Sam waited until she was called to the front.

“Name?”

“Samantha Glass.”

“Nice to see you Samantha, twirl for me, then say ‘Ah. Fresh… please.”

Sam twirled and said, “Ah. Fresh.”

“Thanks, we’ll let you know.”

Disappointed, Sam forced a smile then started to walk out of the room. As she went through the doorway a tall woman, wearing cargo khakis and a white tee-shirt stopped her and said, “Hey, you Sam?”

“Umm, yeah?”

“Great, my name is Anita, you can call me Nits. Do you want a job?”

“What will I have to do?”

“Front for me and my colleague Simon. Too many people are looking for us, we need an agent, a fixer, a Jill of all sorts really. You come recommended.”

“By Trevor?” She asked.

“How do you feel about travel Sam?”

“Well, I haven’t done a whole lot err… Nits was it?”

“Yeah, Nits is fine, look put this belt on and hold my arm tight.”

“Really?”

They were gone.

 Peter Draper    ©    2024