 |
| Image by Gentry from Pixabay |
We thought the ends justified the means, and that was our mistake. We never realized that the means colors the ends, that it shapes it like a surface can shape clay.
Reducing carbon emissions.
What? Oh, sorry, I thought you asked what our goal was. All I can hear sometimes is the sound you hear out there. It’s a rushing, hissing sound. But you don’t care about that, you want to know about the children in that aircraft.
I told them not to use children.
Anyway, all of them wanted to go. We didn’t force anyone. All of them wanted to make the earth a better place. They’re very environmental-minded. And the thing with children is they’re smaller, so they can get inside the machinery to fix it.
The Blackbird, the fastest aircraft can circumnavigate the planet in six hours. That’s the time it takes to go from New York to Seattle in a commercial airplane. But it’s not designed to transport people or carry cargo. Ours can. And to prove it, we put cargo on there. We can get around the world just as fast, and do it in a way that will have the airlines queuing.
Well, they might not now. Now they probably won’t want to be associated with the people who lost a planeful of kids in the fourth dimension.
You ever watch the old black-and-whites where some kid just rolls off their bed into the fourth dimension? Yeah, it’s not that easy. I’d tell you how we do it, but then I’d have company lawyers jumping down my throat.
The thing is, the black-and-whites weren’t entirely wrong about things. It doesn’t look how they show it, but it is time like they say it is.
Yes, you have that right, it is time travel. People have weird ideas about time travel. They think these kids are going to end up with the dinosaurs or accidentally marry their grandparents or something. That’s silly.
Here, I can tell you this, it’s like exploiting an echo. You know how if you yell in a cathedral or even something as pedestrian as a parking garage, you hear yourself a second later? Or like when you see a flash of lightning and then hear the thunder seconds later? There is a gap between the seen, the physical, and the heard; between the waves of light and the waves of sound. That’s all I can say.
Where are they? That’s the wrong question. “When are they?” is what we like to say.
If we could bring them back, we would.
Yes, I suppose if we had to do it again, we would do it right. The problem is, the progress we were making was too slow. To change things, and to change them radically, we had to be willing to do things we would normally see as wrong.
I guess it took this for me to see that some things are always wrong no matter why you do them. The ends don’t justify the means. They never do.