A day after I wrote this I came down with symptoms of COVID-19

The Wooden Time Machine - A fever dream by Alexander Barnes

I'm writing this just moments after waking up from a dream. I had to call a friend and tell her all about it just to get it out. Many people have been telling me to start a dream journal just because of how freakin’ vivid my dreams are, and I guess today is the day I start.

Here's a tiny bit of backstory that I think played into aspects of this dream. Last year I had a 3D modeling contract where I produced 3D models for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Everything under the ground in the city is poorly documented, and my project was designed to create 3D models of some of the city’s infrastructure for training and education purposes. So, basically, I spent some time down at the South East Sewer Treatment plant becoming acquainted with the blueprints and procedure that I would be modeling and animating. The culture around this place is striking. The people I worked directly with are fantastic and are, frankly, underemployed. Everyone outside of our group was, well, rather than the cerebral, creative, crowd I'm used to working with designing apps or collaborating on writing projects, they are significantly more "Salt of the Earth" to put it nicely. They're also all conspiracy theorists who think the government has a tracking satellite GPS locked to spy on the plant and watch them. These people serve a valuable part of the city’s functioning, but to say I'm a world apart from them is like saying the Pacific Ocean is damp. This should be enough context for some of the elements that were in my dream. Stick with me; you're about to see some serious shit...

San Francisco’s South East Sewage Treatment Plant.

I was walking through the parking lot of the SEP. It was early afternoon, and I could smell the methane that vents off clarifier tanks. I was making my way toward the main building when a guy in his early forties came stomping over to me in his heavy work boots with an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder.

    "Hey, smart guy, you off to your ivory tower?" he said in a southern, yolk, accent.

    "Something like that," I replied, trying to be playful but dismissive.

I knew most of the people outside the team I worked with saw me as an anomaly. I regularly had guys from the machine shop coming up to me and giving me shit for not exactly fitting in. Remember that children's song, "One of these things is not like the others." That's definitely me. There's a great episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "Samaritan Snare" that I identify with and am reminded of every time I am at the plant. Poor Geordi LaForge.

    "There's a new smart guy in there giving a presentation," this guy yelled out to me as I passed him, "He's gonna take your job, he's gonna take all of our jobs. But I've got his time machine."

    Of all the things I hear down at the plant, this machine shop guy claiming he found a time machine was forgettable, I'm serious.

    As I pulled the door open on the admin building, I could hear someone giving a presentation in the large cafeteria room. That wasn't uncommon. It was a large multipurpose room, and one time I walked in on a bunch of nurses with syringes and medical equipment while plant workers were donating blood.

        At the risk of sounding redundant, dreams have a weird way of incorporating elements of your life and presenting unconscious thoughts to you in ways that don't seem strange at the time. It's like your suspension of disbelief is dialed all the way up to eleven. I read somewhere that all of the faces we see in a dream are actually real faces we've seen. The article mentioned that the human brain, while amazing at recognizing faces, has trouble spontaneously imagining one. Ask any artist; they have to base their character art off real people.

That said, it wasn't strange to walk into the multipurpose room and see the washed-up TV evangelist Ray Comfort, yes, the banana man, standing there giving a presentation. He was standing there with that embarrassing mustache talking about some revolutionary new process for dealing with the city's water that was going to make all of us obsolete. Stranger still was that he was talking in his New Zealand accent. Like, my brain even got that spot on. I remember him waving his arms and pointing at things on a projector while everyone grumbled and sighed. Like the real Ray Comfort, I rolled my eyes and left the room. I was working on a 3D modeling contract, this wasn't my full time job, and if the whole plant disappeared tomorrow, I'm confident I can find a new design contract.

Ray Comfort’s Wiki page

    "Told ya, you had competition," my heckler from before said, tuning his guitar as I crossed back into the parking lot. From here on, let's call him Dave.

    "I'm not worried, there's always a politician downtown giving jobs to their idiot cousins to keep them off the streets," I replied.

    "He's no idiot cousin. He's a time traveler, I've got his time machine."

There it was again, that bit about the time machine. I learned not to ask questions of people at the plant. They'll keep you there all day trying to manipulate you into an argument about how Trump is fighting the deep state against the shape-shifting lizard alien Hillary Clinton.

    "Ya wanna see it?" Dave said.

    Maybe the tangible quality of his claim is what made me pause, or perhaps I just wanted Dave to lead me to that guy's DeLorean in the parking lot, "Okay, Dave, let's see his time machine."

    The plant, and San Francisco in general, has a bunch of abandoned concrete buildings and bunkers. The ones at the plant are old sections that were made obsolete by modern equipment or process, while the abandoned bunkers along the coastline, where I live, are leftovers from World War 2. Believe it or not, everything up until this point was the fuzzy, hazy part of the dream that required a little embellishment to write. What happened next was so vivid, well, that's why I modeled and rendered it.

Old coastline bunkers.

Suddenly I was following Dave down a narrow concrete walkway of one of the abandoned coastline bunkers. I could smell the fresh air of the ocean and the faint scent of eucalyptus as he took the padlock off an old rusted gate that leads further into these forgotten structures. Dave, guitar still slung over his shoulder, took me through a second fenced gate and led me into a large living room sized concrete space. There, in the center of the room, is a large piece of cherry wood shaped and polished into a strange jetting shape. I've never seen anything like this before and, as strange as it looked, it could have been a modern art piece in a sitting area of an upscale outdoor mall in Marin County. What made it so suspicious was that it was sitting here, in this bunker, illuminated only by the sunlight that came in through the tiny rectangular windows along the top of the room.

I was dumbstruck, "Did you find this down here, or did you bring it here?"

"I brought it here. Found it in a park," Dave confidently replied.

I remember the overwhelming disappointment that washed over me, thinking Dave had just stolen some city council members commissioned art piece from Golden Gate Park because he thought it was a time machine. As disappointed as I was, I was also curious about how he moved it. Cherry wood is dense and heavy.

"How'd you get it down here?" I asked, walking around the strange shape.

"I picked it up, it's real light."

I bent down toward what I assumed he thought was the "front" of this time machine, and to my amazement, it didn't seem to be made out of wood at all. It felt as light as one of those chest-tall plastic houses you buy your toddlers to play in. It felt like hollow plastic with a laminated pattern on it to appear like cherry wood. The entire mass had no visible seams or pour notches. No writings or engravement, so I assumed Dave just didn't see the brass commemorative plate that was probably on the slab of concrete where he found this thing.

"Weird, huh?" Dave said, breaking the awkward silence.

"We should probably put this thing back where you found it." I said, not trying to let on what an idiot I thought he was.

"And let that asshole giving the presentation at the plant have his time machine back? No way. My momma didn't raise no dummy."

"Why do you think this is a time machine?" I finally asked him.

“Cause, I saw it pop in and that dude got out of it."

"What do you mean it 'popped' in?"

"Well, I was walking through the park, and one second it wasn't there and the next it was."

"And the guy at the plant got out of it?" I had to keep from laughing at the end of my question.

"Yeah, watch this."

Dave stepped forward and pulled on the "front" of the shape. To my amazement, a large section snapped off as if it was held on by a magnet. I hadn't seen any seams when I lifted it before. Nothing felt floppy, and there was no indication that it was anything other than a piece of plastic with an air gap inside because of how light it was.

"Cool, huh?" Dave said, "Watch this."

Dave unslung his guitar and sat down on the newly separated mass. He gave me the strangely cocky look before he strummed a note. To my shock, the note sounded significantly louder than it should have, even standing in front of him. It seemed amplified like he was sitting on a speaker that his guitar was plugged into. He strummed out a brief tune. I can't remember what the words were, but he sang with perfect pitch, once again sounding amplified like he was singing into a microphone.

"I tell you what, I ain't never sang that well before," he said, standing up and pushing this piece of the shape over to me with his foot.

I picked it up with both hands, but it was so light I balanced it in my right hand and spun it around with my left, looking for a plug, or a label, or a "made in china" sticker on it.

"Figured that out just by playing with it."

"And you found this in a park?" I asked, starting to feel perplexed.

"Yup, you're a smart guy. You tell me what it is."

"I don't know." I said, looking back at the larger section, "Are there any more parts that snap off?"

"Probably, I watched this whole thing slide open, and that motherfucker climbed out."

I remember rotating and squeezing the piece in my hands, trying to get it to flex, before putting it down. I could put my whole body weight on it without getting the material to bow or even creek like plastic. Focusing my attention back toward the larger piece, I began to push on it, getting it to slide across this dusty, cracked, concrete floor of this otherwise forgotten room. Suddenly, there was an intensely bright rainbow pattern in my eyes, as if someone was holding up a prism to the ray of light coming in the window. It made me step back and close my eyes, it was so piercing. That's when I noticed the intense rainbow pattern I was seeing wasn't being projected on the walls of the room, but rather the inside of my eye. Almost like someone shining a laser pointer at me from a great distance and at an off-angle where I couldn’t see the pin of light. I took another step back, and the intensity began to fall off as if it had something to do with my proximity to the mass.

"What happened?" Dave asked.

"When I pushed it into the light, It was like shining a laser into my eye," I said, incredulously.

As if the demonstration wasn't enough, I stepped forward again, braving the bright rainbow light long enough to push the shape back out from the beam of light. The pattern faded once again. I stepped back, confused as to what had just happened and checking my vision for bright spots like when a camera flash goes off. Strangely enough, my vision seemed fine, no after images or bright pink smudges.

"It was overcast this morning when I got it down here with no light coming in from the windows." Dave said, "Looks like you found another strange thing about this shit."

There was this looming, foreboding quality to the room now. There was something obviously strange about this mass in the middle of the room but to go so far as to say it was a time machine? That was a stretch at this point.

Now, you'll have to forgive me. This was a dream, so this next segment might make less sense, but suddenly my little brother, who lives about three hundred miles outside of the city, walked in.

"Hey, saw you on Find Friends." he said, "What are you guys doing down here? I thought this area was blocked off."

I turned and looked at Dave, almost frustrated with him, "If Tyler found us with an app, don't you think that guy can find his time machine in here?"

"I didn't know what else to do!" Dave barked back.

"What time machine?" Tyler asked.

"Dave thinks that's a time machine," I said, pointing to the larger of the two shapes in the room, the smaller one Dave snapped off now at my feet.

"They make time machines out of wood?" Tyler asked sarcastically.

"It's not wood," I said, picking up the smaller piece and handing it to him. Tyler examined it and seemed to think it was weird but hadn't seen or heard any of the strange things we had. He began walking around the larger shape, knocking and tapping on it.

"That's not even the best part of all," Dave said, reaching into the inner pocket of his jacket. "When that bastard down at the plant got out he left the thing open, and this was inside."

Dave handed me a small booklet that's front and back cover was made of the same faux wood the mass was, bound together with a black metallic spiral. It could have been anyone's notebook or sketchbook and seemed perfectly innocuous except for the circumstances in which Dave said he had found it. I opened it up, and the first fifteen pages were marked "Day 1, Day 2, Day 3," as if a template for keeping a fifteen-day journal. Nothing was written for any of these days and the pages were blank and new. After the journal pages, there was a series of hand-drawn, almost color pencil looking drawings with handwritten instructions on them. The first was for a set of cocoa beans and how to plant them in the proper soil. The instructions gave directions that these beans were designed to proliferate in a day, and would tell the planter something about the soil as if for scientific reasons. The gist was 'put these in this type of ground, and after a day when you have a full plant if the leaves are this color then you know the isotopes of the radioactive elements in the ground.

A similar design I saw online while writing this.

The next page had the same style of drawing. This time of a small lizard that would burrow into the ground and retrieve a sample of ice or water. From the pictures, the lizard would return it to the person these instructions were written for.

I quickly glanced at the next set of instructions. They looked like an instruction manual on how to arrange the pieces that could separate from this seamless mass of faux wood looking, hollow plastic. I only got a quick glance at this section before Dave interrupted me, "Okay, smart guy, how do you explain the instruction manual?"

"I don't know. These drawings are literally drawn on the pages. They aren't printed. It's like someone put this booklet together by themselves."

"Check this out!" Tyler yelled, causing our attention to snap to him. He was standing there, on his tippy toes holding what looked like a pealing off of the surface. It was as if he had found a seam, and this cherry wood pattern was a carpet wrapped around this random shape.

"It's heavy. Help me."

Dave and I ran over to him and grabbed the edges of this long, rectangular wrapping he had peeled off. It was dense and heavy, heavier than the entirety of the object it was still attached to. It had the consistency of a thick rubber pad, but was weighted down as if lined with little deposits of some heavy metal.

"It got heavier the more I peeled off!" Tyler groaned.

"How'd you find a seam?" I groaned back, trying to help him hold up this heavy carpet of material.

"I just rubbed my hand across it, and the seam appeared and rolled up."

We helped him peel off another few inches before it got so heavy the three of us had to just drop it. We caught a glance at the surface under this wrapper. It was a flat shade somewhere between an adobe clay and light pink, almost like skin but was utterly featureless, without blemish or damage. Our glance was brief, the sheet of material began to fall back in place. First, as if under its own weight, but then it started to seem more deliberate, like memory metal snapping back into place. We watched totally stunned as this carpet of material sealed right back up, returning to its seamlessness.

We all took a step back, rocked to our core about what we had just seen. Dave was out of breath and was bent over panting, holding himself up with his hands on his knees. We all stood there, silently, less Dave's heavy breathing, for a few seconds. Fear would be the wrong way of explaining what we were all feeling, more like shock, confusion, and curiosity. At least that was what I felt when I reached out toward the object again.

"No! Don't touch it!" Dave yelled, suddenly worried about what we were doing.

"What!?" I yelled back.

"We don't know what the fuck this thing is!"

"Ten minutes ago, you were convinced it was a time machine! And that was after you handled it all morning, somehow reached inside of it and pulled out a spiral notebook with hand-drawn instructions in it, and now you're afraid of it?"

"This is a time machine? What am I missing here?" Tyler blurted out while Dave and I argued.

"That was before I knew just how fucking weird this shit is! What if we're being bathed in radiation right now!?"

"This is a time machine?" Tyler asked again, in inquiry, going unanswered.

"Then, we're already dead." I barked back at Dave, "Don't you want to go to the grave with some idea of what this thing is?"

"I already know it's a time machine!" He screamed back at me, shaking.

"You don't know what the hell this thing is! You're an idiot!"

Dave balled up his fists band began to take the guitar off his back, "Why I outta, you smart kids always thinking you're better than us down at the plant! I'll knock you into next week!"

He held the guitar up by the neck as if he was going to hit me with the body.

"You're a moron, Dave. Getting scared and violent when you don't understand something. No wonder you work in a sewer."

"That's it, asshole!" Dave motioned toward me as if to hit me with the guitar.

Tyler interrupted, "Wait! Wait!" he said, stepping in between us, "Why do you think this is a time machine?"

The question was so obvious it caught us all by surprise. I don't know why I hadn't asked it, but I was used to people at the plant telling me borderline psychotic things. I had learned asking "why" would land you in an hour-long conversation about vaccination, causing autism or how the moon landing was faked.

"Because the pilot told me so," Dave said matter of factually.

"The pilot told you so?" I asked, not believing my ears.

"What pilot?" Tyler asked.

Dave lowered the guitar to the ground, "The pilot, the guy at the plant giving the presentation, the guy that looks like TV evangelist Ray Comfort. When I was walking through the park, and this thing blinked in, it slid open, and he got out. He asked me if I had ever seen a time machine before. I told him no, but I had seen a UFO once. I started to tell him the story but thought it strange to be telling a time traveler a story about a UFO since, for all I know, he could be working with them. He told me this was his time machine, and he was here to make a lot of money by revolutionizing the way cities deal with water transport, but we'd all be out of a job... So..."

"Sooooo???" I asked, trying to get him to continue his story.

"So I stole his time machine after he walked away."

Tyler beat me to the audible "Hah!" moment, exclaiming loudly.

"See, I ain't no dumbass. I'm not gonna let him make a billion dollars while I get the boot. No, sir!"

The noise Tyler made was somewhere between a laugh and a squeal, and ended with an "oohhhh'kaaay..."

"There was this guy down at the plant earlier," I began to tell him, "He was giving some sort of presentation to a room full of people frustrated at seeing his plan to replace them... And he looked like Ray Comfort."

All of a sudden, I was on the receiving end of a  look I had been beaming at Dave all day, "Don't look at me like that." I said, "He's the one claiming it's a time machine. I'm trying to approach this with some rationality."

"Uh, huh," Tyler said sarcastically.

I closed the gap between myself and the larger section object and nearly effortlessly pushed it up against the back wall of the concrete room, "Five minutes ago we peeled a section of this object off and it was so heavy it took three of us to hold it. Now it's virtually weightless again, help me understand that."

"Yeah, it's strange. Real strange. It's even stranger if this was a time machine, why does it look like a big piece of polished wood." Tyler admitted.

We all stood there, just looking at the two objects for a few moments. Eventually, Dave stepped out of the room for a cigarette, and Tyler leaned up against the wall and began flicking through his phone. At some point, I had dropped the little spiral-bound notebook, so I took this moment to pick it up and started flicking through the pages again. The notebook had page after page of the color pencil drawings. Some were utterly unintelligible while others seemed to be step by step instructions on how to operate the equipment the pilot was issued. Things like the cocoa beans and the lizard. Eventually, I came back upon the pages that seemed to diagram where to push, press, and even rub your hand to get different sections and compartments to pop open. The entire shape could be "adjusted" by pulling pieces off and reattaching them elsewhere. All without a seam insight. One of the drawings I recognized as the piece Dave had pulled off earlier. It was now sitting near the door he had exited to spark up. I walked over to it and picked it up.

"What are you doing?" Tyler asked.

"I think I found the page depicting this thing."

Tyler watched as I moved the barstool sized section over to the larger mass. When I moved it within an inch or so, the surface almost seemed to reach out, like a magnetic putty before relaxing back to the shape it had been in when I entered the room.

”What'd that do?" Tyler asked.

"I don't know, but that's what it looked like when Dave and I got here. He said he moved it here this morning and, at some point, figured out how to remove that piece."

"Let me see the book," Tyler said, reaching for the notebook in my hand. I handed it to him. The drawings were somewhat whimsical, almost like a kid had drawn and colored them in. Still, there was a line quality that seemed to indicate that it wasn't just some kind of coloring book. Oddly enough, I did recognize some of the ancillary shapes drawn around the image of this section it was depicting. There was a set of three arrows drawn in perspective and were marked x,y,z, and were color-coordinated, showing depth, length, and height. Anyone who has used a 3D modeling program like 3D Studio Max or Maya would recognize this user interface element. As far as I could tell from the drawing, this was showing the jetting out piece as the front of the object, and that it did, in fact, travel linearly in this direction. Why a time machine would need to move in a forward direction is beyond me.

"You said the guy Dave thinks is the pilot was giving a presentation at your work?" Tyler asked.

"Yeah"

"Have you seen this page?" Tyler handed me the book back, which he had scrolled to a page that had a drawing of tubes with a blue wavy, watery-looking substance flowing through them. There were words written in cursive in the margins I couldn't read, but on the subsequent pages it seemed to depict a sun with lightwaves coming from it. There was an entire section of this notebook dedicated to showing different types of waves. Notes scribbled across the pages were written in either another language or handwriting so poor it might as well have been another language. At this point, I couldn't deny how overwhelmingly weird this entire thing, this entire day, this object and this whole experience was. It was so outside anything I had ever experienced that I started to consider maybe, just maybe, Dave was telling the truth. Maybe this was a time machine. Maybe the pilot, who was the spitting image of TV evangelist, Ray Comfort, New Zealand accent and all, was giving a presentation at the South East Sewage Treatment Plant.

"What'd you find?" Dave asked, having finished his smoke and wandering back in the room.

"Sound is a wave, we know that." I said, flicking back through the moments from the day in my mind, "When you sat down on the piece you removed, your guitar got louder, like it was being amplified."

"Uh, huh." Dave nodded.

"When I moved the larger section into the beam of sunlight coming through the window, I suddenly had a very bright rainbow in my eyes like I was holding up a prism. We know that light is an electromagnetic wave."

"Uh, huh."

"When we tried peeling off that section, it got heavier. I'm not totally sure why but..."

"Uh, huh"

"Well, thanks to the Ligo Observatory, we now know that gravity waves exist."

"Uh, huh. So?" Dave asked.

"We've seen this object amplify and focus three different types of waves..." I couldn't believe what I was about to say. Not because I was afraid of slipping into the twilight zone but because, given the context, at the moment, it felt like a brilliant idea, "Maybe time is a wave, and this craft simply amplifies and focuses it to move back and forth through time. Maybe that's the reason it's shaped the way it is, to catch time waves. "

There was a stunned moment of silence while I contemplated the concept.

"Told you it was a time machine. I just need your help to figure it out.”