Punishment Read online

  Punishment

  A Spaceman’s Story

  Guerin Zand

  Punishment Copyright © 2018 by Guerin Zand. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Keith A. Johnston

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Guerin Zand

  Website: guerinzand.wordpress.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/guerin.zand.5

  Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/author/show/16948548.Guerin_Zand

  Contents

  Introduction

  Messing with Time for Dummies

  Chapter 1

  Club Gitmo

  Chapter 2

  Team Selection

  Chapter 3

  Contact

  Chapter 4

  Julie’s Revenge

  Chapter 5

  Back to Business

  Chapter 6

  Team Orientation

  Chapter 7

  Adults Talking

  Chapter 8

  Movie Night

  Chapter 9

  Team Briefing

  Chapter 10

  Team Building

  Chapter 11

  The Lodge

  Chapter 12

  Anna

  Chapter 13

  Diane

  Chapter 14

  Maria

  Chapter 15

  The Dawn of the Cold War

  Chapter 16

  New Day, New Plan

  Chapter 17

  The Crux of Confrontation

  Chapter 18

  The Wang Chung Affair

  Chapter 19

  Revenge

  Chapter 20

  A Little Wang Time

  Chapter 21

  End of Days Past

  Chapter 22

  The Ultimatum

  Chapter 23

  Killing Time

  Chapter 24

  Détente

  Chapter 25

  Another Invitation

  Chapter 26

  A Small Gathering of Friends

  Chapter 27

  Another Day in Paradise

  Chapter 28

  The Committee Dinner

  Chapter 29

  Down Time

  Chapter 30

  The Gathering

  Chapter 31

  Another Breakfast with Julie

  Chapter 32

  The Movie

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author Notes

  Introduction

  Messing with Time for Dummies

  My name is Guerin Zand, and this is my “true” story. This book is the second book of my tales as a spaceman, and if you didn’t read the first book, you really should, because, well frankly, because I need the money. If for some reason that is not a compelling argument to get you to read the first book, then here is a short synopsis.

  I was abducted and seduced by a hot space babe. Her name was Milly. The aliens did things to my physical being that made me healthier than I had ever been before, and my lifeline is a lot longer than it used to be. There is some question as to whether or not they actually made me any smarter.

  As a result of a lot of really good alien sex, with the aforementioned hot space babe Milly, I agreed to be their emissary to Earth. Of course, no one would tell me exactly what that would entail so I was absolutely clueless. But the sex was really good. I did mention that, right?

  There was one hot space babe, sex bomb hot, who on top of her hotness was an absolute bitch. Her name was Julie. At the top of my list of really disturbing things about alien society was the fact that they were all FUCKING VEGANS!

  I was returned home only to have the U.S. Government knock down my door, beat me senseless, and transport me to Gitmo for an extended stay. I, of course, believe this was Julie’s doing, hence the absolute bitch comment earlier.

  This is where the last book ended.

  This second book of my odyssey as a spaceman is constructed in a slightly different way than the first. That’s because I wrote this over a series of years, compiled it all together and published it in the now, even though much of it was written in the future.

  This is where it starts to get a bit confusing, and if you’re smart, you’ll just skip the lengthy explanation that follows and simply accept this one basic fact.

  YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE PAST!

  For those of you that want to try and understand time and its intricacies, then please continue reading on. But be warned! Nothing that follows will change this simple fact, and in the end, you will only be confused, probably have a headache, and curse yourself for wasting the time reading this explanation. It also really makes no difference to any part of this story that I currently know about and is really just a clever trick to publish this story before it actually all happened purely for profit sake.

  So, let’s start with terminology. The real problem is we don’t have good words in our vocabulary to express the concepts that we really need to understand this in the slightest. I will use the terms past, now, and future to try and convey these concepts. You have to realize that these terms are concepts and can’t actually be taken literally. The “now” Me that just wrote this word, is not the same “now” Me that just wrote this word. Since writing the last “now Me”, I’m a different “now” Me. The “now” Me that is writing now, is the “future” Me from the perspective of the Me that wrote those other words, and everything you just read was written by the “past” Me.

  If you are following along so far, then let’s continue.

  There are, of course, an infinite number of “past” Me’s, “now” Me’s, and “future” Me’s, so you have to be able to grasp the basics of infinite series math to realize it doesn’t really matter. The tense term I use is not meant to represent any specific tense, but only the more generic tense.

  So, now I can start to explain.

  Parts of this book haven’t actually been written as of now, yet I have those parts written by the “future” Me’s. It is actually the “future” Me’s who compiled the book, which the “now” Me’s then took and published so that you can read it in your own now. Also so the “now” Me’s can profit from it.

  I know the question you are all asking at this point is how. Well, as I like to say, that is the crux of the biscuit. I’m not sure what that means since I actually stole it from the Frank Zappa song Apostrophe, and I just like how it sounds. Apostrophe is also a really fucking good tune. If you can understand that song, then this should be a piece of cake for you.

  The Bree, the aliens I mentioned earlier for those of you who couldn’t be bothered to read the first book, have this quantum matrix storage thingamajig that they use to store data. It’s like a really cool hard drive that is actually a gigantic matrix of quantum entangled particles whose twins exist in another one of these same storage matrices. So, when you write to one of these storage matrices, it magically writes the same data to the twin storage matrix at the same instance. It’s not really magic, but I will use that term to describe technology that is beyond the scope of human understanding. You could call it a quantum raid array, I guess, to put it in simple Earth terms.

  This is the mechanism used to pull off this little time trick, but it’s not the tricky part. See, one of the storage matrices is encompassed in a time dilation field
. That slows the passage of time in this one matrix while the other matrix exists in this universe’s normal spacetime. The dilation factor is important because it is based on this factor how far in the future the matrix’s now is, in this time dilation field, compared to the now of the matrix not in the field. As with most things, the bigger the dilation factor the better.

  Now, sending data to the future is a no-brainer. You simply write to the storage area reserved for your current now. There is a shitload of storage that can handle several hundred million years of now. The “future” You can read what was written by “now” You at any point of now. In this case, you are writing to the storage matrix that is not in the time dilation field. You could also temporarily disable the time dilation field on the other storage matrix and write to it in the proper location, but that would simply be redundant, and is sort of a breach of the protocol set forth for this all to work. You don’t want to dick around with time dilation fields unless you have to.

  To send data back to the past you simply turn off the time dilation field just long enough to update the matrix, which is far less than a picosecond, so it’s negligible when talking about infinity, and then turn the dilation field back on. All this is handled for you by a very smart interface, so you just really have to date the data and send it off, which is really automatic since the smart interface can tell the local time.

  When you write to the matrix in the time dilation field, you write to the storage location that is reserved for your now, and not this matrix’s now. Remember that this matrix’s now is your past because of the tricky time dilation thingy. If you try to write to an area of storage reserved for any time before your now it simply won’t work. That’s because that area was written to in your past, so it is like ROM, you simply can’t write to it. Like I said right up front:

  YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE PAST!

  The only limitation is the dilation factor. So, you could have a dilation factor that would make this matrix’s now, the one normally in the time dilation field except when it is being written to, which is different from the “future” You’s now, but the same as its twin matrix’s now, that’s what time dilation fields do, a thousand years in the past of the “future” You’s now, thus limiting the “future” You to sending data only as far back as the “past” You of thousand years ago. If the “now” You falls within this dilation factor, then “now” You has access to that “future” You’s data. I can’t make it any simpler than that.

  I know a lot of you are probably confused, have a headache, or just stopped reading this, but still, a lot of you that made it this far just want to say, “BULLSHIT!” Well, this is “Messing with Time for Dummies”. The detailed proofs are left to the reader. For the more advanced students, you can email me and I’ll send you the link to the quantum storage matrix location that contains the fifteen-hundred-thousand-page dissertation I wrote, taking most of my fucking unnaturally long life, that explains all of this in excruciating detail. You should thank me for condensing that crap down to a single chapter for you. For now, you’ll just have to accept this as fact and we can move on.

  SPOILER ALERT!!! The “now” Me writing this is maybe a “future” Me, or a “past” Me, depending on when the “now” You is reading this, so some of the following information in this chapter may contain spoilers, and you might want to skip on to the next chapter, which of course may also contain spoilers. If this bothers you, then you should stop reading this book now.

  Ok, now that we understand the basics of how to send messages back in time, you probably want to know how is it that messing with time like that doesn’t just fuck everything up. Ok, I’ll say it again:

  YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE PAST!

  This is the only universal truth there is. Not that Einstein crap about not being able to exceed the speed of light. As soon as we get to the point where we can get anything moving even a fraction of that speed, we’ll see that’s absolute bullshit. That was a spoiler in case you didn’t notice, or maybe not, it depends on when your now is.

  The “now” Me’s have never read the stuff written by the “future” Me’s. First, it’s a violation of some bullshit rule, but most importantly, if you just remember the one universal truth, it doesn’t matter.

  Let’s say when you were a small child you had just got done with Christmas day and opening all your presents. The next day your parents tell you that for next Christmas they’re going to get you the DiddlyWokenShagPro starter kit. They actually bought it during the day after Christmas shopping sale. Tell me, what do you have to look forward to? I’ll tell you what you have to look forward to, NOTHING! For the next year, you’re not going to be looking forward to getting the DiddlyWokenShagPro starter kit, because after you were told, you just forgot about it. Even if you were to decide at some point you didn’t want the DiddlyWokenShagPro starter kit, your parents already bought it, and that’s that. The next Christmas, you get the DiddlyWokenShagPro starter kit and you are totally underwhelmed by the experience, and all your whining that you wanted something else was just a waste of your time.

  Knowing the future is just a good way to take the joy out of your life. If that’s what you want great. Go ahead and cheat. Read your future on the quantum storage matrix and enjoy a future with no joy or amazement. You’ll probably find you don’t have much of a future after that point since slitting your wrists is the only future you have.

  “But, Guerin, doesn’t that mean that by reading my future I changed it and slit my wrists?” The answer is a simple NO! You can try to ignore the one universal truth, but it won’t ignore you. The truth is you were a loser who was going to slit their wrists because you were depressed, and you thought by reading your future you could fix that, but you didn’t.

  Ok, I’m sure this is confusing more than a few of you, but the whole time thingy is tricky. Like I said at the beginning, you were probably better off skipping this chapter, but you wouldn’t listen. Timey stuff is recursive. Think of time as a really cool feedback control system where time is not a factor. Ok, here is another hint, time is not a factor of time. Although it can be seen that way, it isn’t.

  Here’s another simple example. Let’s say the “now” Me’s send a message back to the “past” Me’s when the “past” Me’s were in college. This message tells the “past” Me’s to invest ten thousand dollars in an unheard-of company called Microsoft, and if I did, I could retire a billionaire at the age of thirty. The “past” Me’s, of course, were living on peanut butter, ramen noodles, and Rosita tequila, and would have simply laughed at the thought of investing ten thousand dollars, like I even had that. The only difference that would have made is that “now” Me’s would be regretting not selling “past” Me’s young sweet ass on the streets to raise that money. In other words, the “now” Me’s would just be more depressed about it.

  Simply put, the now will always dictate the future based on the state of now that exists. Never does the future dictate the now. It’s not as some like to say, that the future is predetermined. That’s simply not true. Every day your decisions shape the future, but those decisions are always based on the now. No matter what you know about the future, you have to deal with the now based solely on the now. A lot of stories based on time travel deal with this issue by showing you no matter how much you try to change the future, it never works out. The moral of these stories, and this chapter, is that you can try and ignore the one universal truth, but you are its bitch. Get used to it.

  Now some of you may believe in this stupid theory of alternate realities, or parallel realities, or whatever the latest goo-goo bullshit of the day is. This, of course, is just more total bullshit. This is like imaginary numbers. Sure, it makes for interesting math, and can actually be used to solve problems which we can’t currently solve without them, but the fact is there is no such thing as the square root of a negative number. That’s why they just made up the symbol “i” to represent something that is impossible. Any top mathematician who wants to argue th
at it’s not bullshit, well, just ask them to tell you what that number actually is, just to a few significant digits to try and make it easy for them. Go grab yourself a drink and sit back and watch them squirm.

  Alternate realities are the same sort of bullshit that I will use the symbol “b” to represent, and you know why. Why not a capital “B” you ask? Because that’s reserved for a special kind of bullshit, a more encompassing superset of which “b” is only one member.

  This symbol actually represents the answer to the age-old “Grandfather Paradox”. That’s the problem where if you went back to the past and killed your grandfather, you wouldn’t be born to go back to the past to kill your grandfather.

  The truth is, there is no paradox.

  First, you can’t travel to the past, period! You can send messages to the past using the quantum storage matrix, but you can’t actually travel back to the past. So, just drop that line of thinking right now.

  Some smartass reading this might ask, what happens if you send a message back to someone to get them to kill your grandfather for you? The one universal truth will beat you like a bitch if you try this, over, and over, and over, and over, ad nauseam, until you realize who the bitch is, and that it’s not really worth the hassle. Some would call this a time ripple, but they’re also wrong. Remember, timey shit happens outside of time, so this whole infinitely recursive beat down takes no time at all. It is, you are, I am, and that’s that! (Proofs available upon request for a nominal shipping and handling charge.)