The Observer

A time traveller on a doomed mission visits the personal affairs of an Earth-bound human

I observed in my travels to the past a planet with bipedal primate mammals as one of its dominant species.

Unique in my quest, one of these bipeds was able to observe me. In all my experience across the planes of Time, I have never had a conversation with a subject of my observation. I asked the stranger about himself and his species. He—for this species that calls itself human is generally bisexual—named himself Alex Chimlinski, hailing from a nation known as America on this planet he called Earth.

In time, Earth’s sun will boil its oceans and consume the dead rock in its dying flame, but Alex lived many billions of years before that eventuality and was not so bothered when I told him of his homeworld’s fate.

“Yes,” he said, “it is part of the cycle.”

I asked Alex how he had come to contact me, to which he answered that he did not know. I questioned him as best I knew how, eager to learn something—anything—from this man who, uniquely among the universe, seemed to be able to travel more deeply in Time than I. He insisted he was not traveling in any unique way to his species, simply following the straightforward path that was available to him.

Perhaps, I pondered, this was a special people, attuned to the waves of the Universe in a way never yet observed, though their culture and civilization seemed simple enough, destined as it was for a likely self-destruction in pursuit of the Great Escape, like all the rest.

He smiled at this, charmed by the compliment, but assured me that humanity struggled against its fate like any other.

Disbelieving him, for the sake of foolish hope, I asked him to show me his world, to which he obliged with the caveat that he could only show me his life, for despite what I surmised was an advanced people, Alex had no way to efficiently take me around his world, nor communicate its story to me in the confines of the time he was given.

So I accompanied Alex home, where I witnessed his sad family affairs. Alex had partnered and, with his partner, had conceived a single offspring. He told me of his wife and daughter on the infuriatingly slow journey to his home, speaking of them with wistful joy.

Upon arrival, I waited outside Alex’s house so as not to frighten his family. Listening through his walls for the sake of my curiosity was stranger than my observation of privacy; I heard and felt a sad and subdued conversation between Alex and his wife. It seems she wished to end their partnership and had taken formal steps to do so while he had been away meeting me. I did not read surprise in him through his walls, only resigned grief.

It was then that I noticed their daughter slipping out of the house’s back door. I chanced to observe the girl more closely, for Alex had told me that she was a bright and special individual, and that all his hopes lay in her.

My own hopes that she could speak to me as her father could were dashed, as she was impervious to any of my communication probes—verbal, mental, visual, and olfactory.

I was left to simply observe her as I had observed scores of others across space and time, unable to connect, trapped in a silent library of partial understanding.

Outwardly, she did nothing of interest, lying on the ground and looking up at the night sky. Observing her inward experience, I saw ripples of the resigned sadness and angst of her parents, but the longer she stared at the stars, the more peaceful and content she became.

So entranced was I by this innocence that I did not notice Alex’s presence at first. I don’t know how much time had passed since he came outside, but he, like me, simply observed his daughter’s observation of the sky. It was the same state in which I’d met him the night before: not unaware of the chaos of the expanding Universe around him, but not afraid of it either—simply observing the moment for its own sake, with no questions to be answered or agendas to be pursued.

On my fool’s errands, I had never in all my travels afforded myself this luxury, driven only by the fear of my people’s inevitable demise.

Just then, as my observation turned from the peaceful moment in front of me to the impossible task of finding the trailhead of our next Great Escape, the girl turned to look at her father. They shared a smile, and I dare say for a moment she and her father both cast their smiles on me.

An idea bloomed in me then that I have been unable to expound upon nor dismiss: perhaps the trailhead to the Great Escape does not lie in the secrets of the past or the progress of the future, but instead in the pure enjoyment of resigned observation.

Also,

Thanks.