So... this is my novel, at least the beginning of it, I took it off the poem blog because it is significantly longer than any novel of mine, so it distracts from them and detracts from them. That said, I hope you read it (I try to make it worth reading) and I would appreciate it even more if you would comment on your thoughts on it, or even better, some constructive criticism. Thank you
It is tentatively named "The Time Traveler" until I can think of something more original.
Well, he did not travel time so much as he travelled space, which is actually traveling in time, but only in the forward direction. There were no visits to past selves in vain attempts to change the past's future, which just happened to lead to the present's particular predicament.
It was a familiar predicament for anyone who did not hoard gold in a pit in the ground, like his next-door neighbor. It was falling at a perilous pace while everyone was waiting with baited breath for it to pull-up and level out, like airplane passengers weighing their options on a fast descending 747. Was it worth it to bail with a parachute on ones back? Or would everyone laugh at them once the airplane was safely back on course? Well this was the stock market, so one never knew when it was safe.
Well actually millions of people knew, they heard the "top ten ways to best invest your money" every bloody morning from the perfect orange talking heads who's smiles would last through the most depressing funeral (stories which they often covered with feigned sympathy and shallowly furrowed eyebrows to show the depth of their sorrow). So these people were quite well informed, listening to talk show hosts and motivational speakers cover tips for investing as if this is all you ever needed to know in order to thrive in the stock market.
Not that economists know any better, he thought to himself. Every single one of them disagrees so completely on the collective meaning of the last century's economic patterns that it sometimes it seems downright religious. Some follow the hallowed theories of Adam Smith and lassaiz' faire and others follow the cannons of John Maynard Keynes and his focus on government regulation and help, with many views in between.
So really, no one knew when it was safe, because those flocks watching the tube all went the same direction as those leathery faces pointed, which caused all sorts of instability, and those academics, spouting off on the evils of the opposing view, always found a way to turn that instability into the other side's fault, and the perfect hairdos just kept spouting their advice. Thus a nice little see-saw was born called the bubble-bust cycle. It was very nice to be on the top of the bubble as long as you got off before it popped, and who knows when that will be. Well in hindsight, it was yesterday, and today is really not any better.
In fact, it was far worse. His rent was due, and even worse than that, his thoughts had been described to the finest minutiae to complete strangers, without even being introduced. He was a tall and thin, athletic was the term he used for it, but he was not much of one, for besides aikido lessons as a child, and some volleyball in high school (he was recruited for his height), he had not really done much in the way of exercise. Which was fine by him, except when he had to evade the ancient landlady demanding her dues, which will be seen later. He wore fitting canvas and plaid shirts, with matching denims and converse shoes. His hair was longer and wavy, and black, so black in fact that his physics professor had thought it contained bits of dark matter in it, or perhaps was made of strands of carbon nanotubes, anyways the hair had a certain light-sucking quality about it. His skin was ever so slightly olive, but looked absolutely pale against his hair. His name, was Alex.
Well actually the entire thing was Alexander C. Wainswright IX, which was entirely too auspicious for his tastes and for anyone who tried to pronounce it with any degree of speed. He hated being the ninth, and dreaded the thought of having to name his eventual son the tenth. Long ago he decided that this lineage had lasted far too long. It was like some straight-to-video movie series that refused to die, or some video game line that reinvented itself with each incarnation. His snobby parents on the other hand disagreed. He was from a long line of blue-blooded money that refused to die, like a hydra with one last head left.
Although the most of the money itself had died with his grandfather, which was no surprise due to his enterprising nature and the various oddities he invested in. The crazy old man had gained many powerful friends though, which was the only reason his family was still on it's feet. His father had a token job at one of these auspicious companies: he was on the board. He never really made any decisions, but enjoyed protesting loudly and violently at any seemingly unimportant decision so that he could have a good long speech about how things should be how they used to be, while everyone was thankful for the pause in useful information and promptly plopped their head forward and took a nap.
Thus we come to Alex's money problems. Grandpa's friends had made sure he was accepted to all the most prestigious universities and he ended up going to Oxford to study Economics. He switched majors to Philosophy during his second year, when he was taking a required course called "Great German Philosophers" where he encountered the cryptic Kant. Kant told him that time was simply an illusion forced upon reality by his mind. He liked that, so it was promptly decided that the time it took to graduate was really an illusion, and not an important one at that. A year later in a physics class (the same one with the odd physics professor, though the odd ones are the rule, not the exception, in physics), Einstein told him that time was proportional to velocity: the faster you are going, the slower your time travels in relation to everyone else's. He then decided he wanted to learn more about this and that he would not worry about time so of course he switched majors. But the problem was that he was moving faster through his money than through his major. This indeed was a problem, and the admissions office saw him as a menace for changing his mind so often and forcing them to do so much paperwork, what with signing his auspicious name all over each new documents and request and whatnot. They never believed he was going to make it all the way through college without becoming intensely interested in a completely new subject, so the next time he decided to change his major, a year later (to history of all things), they simply dropped him.
He was left with a four year degree in EconoPhiloPhysics with no little signed paper of recognition to go with it, and with a set of loans that were piled to the sky. This was how he learned that Time really was money, and that lenders had obviously learned nothing of the true illusory nature nor importance of Time in college because they could treat it so cheaply.
His parents promptly paid off the loans for him and gave him 100,000 Euros in cash for him to make a name for himself with, or rather, to reestablish the family's name with. Either way, he liked the money, but was rather annoyed at his own lack of independence and self-sufficiency. This was their way of goading him into the auspicious and lordly profession of his forefathers: business, entrepreneurship, and the stock market.
With this in mind, he ran off to New York in hopes he could do whatever it was his parents really wanted of him, without actually being near them while he was doing it, to kind of get the feeling of independence without the reality of it.
And here he was on his knees in the center of Wall Street with his head in his hands. He had lost it all except thousands of junk stock in some strange astro-engineering firm. The rest of the stocks he had bought were from companies that declared bankruptcy in the wake of something or other that was catastrophic. Everything here in America was catastrophic, the stock market, the hobos, the gangs, the movies, the manners, the fashion, and especially the fact that a taxi traveling at close to the speed of sound (as New York taxis do whenever they can) was about to run over him. He was, after all in the middle of Wall Street.
A loud thump was heard echoing around the busy street and the normally nonplussed investors stopped and stared, wondering if they were envious of him or sorry for him. They quickly decided that these were not entirely conflicting emotions and that they needed to get back to buying and selling if they were to keep themselves from feeling too envious of him, so they adopted both feelings about the now crumpled Alex, and went back to their furious chore.
Loud shapes were surrounding him, speculating at his injuries or death, casting lots for his expensive but seemingly uninjured briefcase. Someone called the ambulance and here it came, all noise and chatter, as catastrophic to his senses as anything else he had experienced today. He blacked out from overstimulation.
He awoke to his loving landlady staring down at him carnivorously, the way he always imagined a vulture to look, if the vulture wore ornate dresses and extensive silver jewelry, and had multiple piercings all over it’s wrinkled face. She was a short, stout Indian woman in her late 60‘s, who's Indian husband had died before the "blessing" of a male child, or any child for that matter, and she did not really mind doing without spending all the money and time it took to raise that little "blessing" so she never remarried.
"Gawd Mawning, hun," said the hungry-looking creature, her New York accent and mannerisms so incongruous with her appearance that Alex had to contain his laughter every time she spoke, she was not amused.
"Ahh, Morning Miss," he said drearily, annoyed that his scheme to feign sleep had been seen through. She had all the time in the world.
"I sappose yewl waunt an extinshawn," this was something else he hated about America, or rather New York: they pronounced everything all wrong.
"ahhhyahhh," he gingerly stretched out and yawned in a way the landlady thought to be luxurious, she was in secret envy at this point: there being nothing she enjoyed more than laying in bed all day and stretching and napping with her cats.
"Wall dawntcha lawk camftable," she squawked. "Tall ya what, A'll give ya untal tumarruh, if ya cahnt get it in buy than, yawr awt! Anjoy ya bayooty sleep swaytie." He cringed at the nickname and hurriedly said goodbye, in hopes it would hurry her out the door, but she took her time leaving, giving him one last hawkish glance before leaving the room.
He sat there trying to assess the state of his body. Well first it was very difficult and painful to move his neck, in fact it was absolutely solidly stiff. He tried to move it with his hands, but whats this? A cast. Oh now this is just wonderful. Fortunately his limbs were intact, but rather bruised. He did not even want to know what his face looked like. He could not look down to see his chest but he felt the dull throbbing pain of multiple bruises. Just bloody wonderful. How the hell was he supposed to get the money for rent? Oh and broken necks are not cheap either, at least not in America’s bloody capitalistic healthcare system. He was not going to get money from his parents, he set his mind to taking care of himself come hell or high-water. Unfortunately he had reached that point, and it was getting hard to breathe.
It would be best to trace this catastrophe to it’s inception. Coming to America gave him roughly a third more money for him to invest with. He set out with the noble and high-minded goal of getting rich as fast as possible, so that he could go back to Oxford and spend forever learning whatever the hell he wanted to. In this spirit, he invested in one of the most volatile sections of all the stock market: tech startups. He being the wise judge of money, philosophy, and technology that he was, decided that he would only invest in the most interesting of startups. These included such ventures as ETV, TWE, AII, and STOP. ETV stood for Extra-Terrestrial Vacations, it sounds like a company that sets up tours for Area 51 fanatics, because it was, but Alex assumed it was a company that did vacations into space. On that misguided assumption he plopped down a small amount to buy a controlling share in the company (which was not as expensive as you would imagine). AII stood for Artificial Intelligence Interfaces, which tells you nothing. The idea was that an easy way to program artificial intelligences was needed, so they were dedicated to writing a programming language to control them. The problem was that AIs are still in a developmental stage themselves, so writing this language was a little too ahead of it’s time. He was intrigued by the idea of the company being ahead it’s time, so he invested a little in it. TWE was Trans-World Enterprises. This, the most normal of all the names was also the most misguiding, because they actually were preparing to establish a new “world” on other planets. They were so specific about it too: “This star has collapsed into a gigantic diamond, mining it is of utmost importance to raise funds” or “This world would be optimum for mining heavy elements and exporting them for fuel so we should set up hyperspace relays relatively close ASAP.” ASAP meaning within the next two millennia. They sat around playing Monopoly and RISK with the known planets all day, but their ideas were so well thought out and they had potential (not that you would live to see it) so Alex bought a controlling share in the company for the cost of a cheap supercomputer (about 15,000 dollars). Which is incidentally what they bought with the money he invested. STOP, however, was a complete mystery to him, other than the fact that all the fine chaps at TWE praised the company so highly that Alex just had to have a piece of it, so he bought it outright, spent the rest of the money on it, sight unseen and acronym unexplained.
He was really regretting that right now, the other companies had either vanished into obscurity or declared bankruptcy, but STOP was remaining mysteriously afloat despite the current economic woes. He wanted to sell it, but no one wanted a piece of it, and he had no way of contacting the company because they had no web site and he had only bought the stock through TWE, but now that they had disappeared, he was SOL.
