Fanboy 4D Taping

by Eric J. Kregel

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

About 8 pm, a knock came on the door. I charged to open the door and discover that it was Blake.

Blake, how I remembered him. Blake, with a speedy metabolism belonging only to marathon runners; Blake, with the quick smile and impish twinkle in his eyes; and the real Blake, unlike the sad fellow who did Cup Fu in front of me as a threat. A little gray around the side of his head, a small crow’s feet around his eyes... but still him.

“Blake?” I asked. He nodded. “And who, then, was here this morning?”

“Also me, but not the fellow who stands before you now.” His face lit up, his green eyes aglow. “Confused? You won’t be soon enough. Let’s watch some TV, Ben. It’s so good to see you!”

He marched through my front door and, seeing my TV in the living room, quickly charged to my DVD player and from his briefcase, produced a DVD. As I went to take a seat near the screen, he had already turned on the set, entered the DVD, and was waiting for it to load.

“You had, if memory serves me, the biggest crush on Vetta Derring. Am I right?” I nodded. “Well, let’s suppose that Duke Spear was not only a hit, but huge! And let’s say that the fellow playing him got into a horrible car crash. And on top of that, the show’s producers did a spin-off show with Vetta Derring that lasted seven seasons!”

“But none of that happened, Blake. I researched the show! The actor who plays Duke is still alive and -”

The DVD popped on and the title credits of “Vetta Derring” rolled, with scenes of my former crush racing through space, time, and dimensions. For a few moments, I was speechless. I couldn’t look away, wanting to see what the next episode would bring me. A new song, although vaguely reminiscent of the Duke’s, with different characters in the credits.

“But this didn’t happen,” I said feebly.

“It did happen, you just didn’t know about it.” He reached for my remote and pressed “pause” on the DVD player. “Ben, in seven seconds, tell me the number one problem with time travel.”

I remembered this one, from all of our late-night chats. “Say I go back in time and alter things, causing myself never to be born. How then can I go back in time, if the changes I made have created a paradox so that I should not exist to make them?”

“Bingo!” he said in a loud, sonorous crash. “Paradoxes not only present the biggest problem in traveling through time, they also make it undesirable. Hence the ‘butterfly effect’.” He leaned in close to me. “But to go as an observer, traveling back and only making documentation of history. That presupposes no ‘butterfly effect’, no paradoxes, and no problems.”

“You went back in time for this season? But ‘Vetta Derring’ didn’t exist in the past? I don’t get it, you can travel through time?”

“Let’s forget limiting time travel to time exclusively. Let’s talk going into alternate realities,” Blake said pulling back and shooting to his feet. “I haven’t only figured a way through time and space but through any and all dimensions.”

Did I get this right? Blake Henry, the last I heard was a fanboy of fanboys for a fictional show about a hero who travels through dimensions, has figured a way to complete the mission that was only a TV show previously?

“Let me explain,” he said to me. “Every time an individual is faced with a decision, they pick one: should I get up out of bed or stay in bed? Should I vote Democrat or Republican? Shall I marry a blond or brunette?

“Certain decisions are fixed, with only an appearance of choice. You have the free will to chose to jump off the building and fly, but you don’t have the means of wings. But for every decision that’s equal in feasibility, the one you chose creates your own reality; the other choice, unmade, creates another dimension, another reality.”

I nodded, soaking in most of this. “Good,” he said as he pat my knee. “So let’s say you can travel through dimensions, like jumping from one boxcar on a train to another? When you got there, you’d run into another you — only different, because it would be the ‘you’ of that world, enduring/enjoying the other side of a decision you made. If you tamper, it’s like the ‘butterfly effect’.”

“I get all of this, but what does this have to do with the 4th season of Duke Spear or Vetta Derring getting her own show?”

“Remember the feeling you got when you found out that Duke Spear was cancelled?” He pointed to the TV screen, with Vetta’s frozen image looking back at us. “You probably thought, ‘Why was that taken off? It was a good show. It should have stayed on the air. “Well, I learned to hop into a reality where that show remained and it lasted long enough to get other seasons.” He then looked into Vetta’s frozen expression. “Or in a reality where the heroine gets her own show. Or in another one, where they have different actors or different plots or -”

“An infinite number of different seasons,” I said in a song, begetting the trance-like state I was in.

“Correction, an uncountable number of different seasons. We, my friend, are finite beings and do not have an infinite number of possibilities. However, it’s impossible, I believe, to count, in a lifetime, how many choices we have passed up and, consequently, how many worlds out there we, as humans, have created.”

A white fog rolled over my mind as I tried to grasp what this meant. Somewhere, there was a world where Hitler won WW2; Britain lost Waterloo; Jimmy Carter was re-elected; and the Celts drove the Greeks out of Europe. Worlds within worlds, and Blake could travel them as easily as one tours from province to province.

The white fog passed and the reality of what he was proposing all of a sudden hit me. Blake Henry, genius that he was, had the ability to look into the consequence of every major decision the world has ever made and decided, instead of observing history or saving worlds from the wrong decision, decided to tape old TV shows.

I laughed wildly, enough to where my face turned red and I was shaking. He asked me what the matter was and I could not tell him until I calmed down. After I shared this with him, he sat back down and wore such a proud, self-congratulatory grin that you’d think he won a beauty pageant.

“My friend,” he said quietly. “Keep in mind the ‘butterfly effect’. If I interfered in time, wouldn’t the same be true for dimensional travel? No, no. I’m not a political scientist! I don’t care what would have happened at Dunkirk’s evacuation if it was a clear day! No, I did this primarily to enjoy other dimensions and make a huge profit.”

“How?” I asked in blast.

“You witnessed it yourself! I offered you the sale of an unseen season of your favorite TV show for a grand! And don’t tell me, once I proved it could be done, you weren’t the least bit curious of parting with that money?

“I mean, think of all of the billions of dollars, every year, people spend on fan fiction, conventions, memorabilia, and artwork based upon their favorite TV show. And think of how much people are willing to pay to see one more season, one episode they haven’t seen and believed they would never see again? Our culture loves its story time and will go to great lengths to keep the stories going.”

He was right. If Blake wasn’t my friend, if he didn’t use that piece of cheese to bait me into a contact, and if I was just some fan... what he was offering me wasn’t too small a price. Keep in mind: I’m not married to a wife, I make lots of money, and I spend all day working on a site that broadcasts TV shows of which I’m a fan. A grand, for many people like me or worse, would be seen as a necessary payment.

“So how do you do it?” I asked, changing my tone along with the topic. “How do you find these shows and tape them without interfering with their alternate histories?”

“Don’t you want to know how I first learned how to travel through time and dimensions?”

“You’re a scientist, and I figured that answer would be beyond my comprehension, or most people’s. Think about it, no one has done it before and therefore it’s beyond our modus operandi.”

“How I did it and how I tape these shows are part of the same answer,” he said, returning to the chair next to mine. “You see, I didn’t figure out how to travel through time and dimensions. I spent a decade trying, researching and experimenting... and always failing. Sure, I made a lot of breakthroughs in other areas — enough to finance my research — but never did I crack the code.

“Until, one day, I visited myself.” He waited to see my reaction, to which I was poker-faced. “Rather, the ‘me’ from another dimension came to my dimension and described the way to do it. You see, I had made a few bad decisions on how to make this thing work, whereas he made the right ones and popped over to visit me.

“With this knowledge, I made contact with all of my other ‘selves’ and found them in similar places: working on dimensional travel. Some were successful, many frustrated. And all of them fans of Duke Spear, or their version of him.

“So I asked them to tape the shows for me. I’ve created a dimensional rift for them to deposit the tapes into my own reality.”

“A rift? Please explain,” I said.

“A rift is like a tear in the fabric of the wall that separates dimensions. A rift can exist anywhere and allow people or an object to pass through. I created a rift just above their mailbox and above mine, so we can trade tapes. Every night, I get a request for new shows from our reality and then I tape them; every morning, I look in my box and collect the DVDs. Some realities are still on VHS and some use laserdisc or beta tapes.” He blinked twice and grinned at me, finishing his exposition.

I looked over at Vetta, who now faded into black as the screen saver took over on my machine. Without looking at him, I asked, “So why tell me all this? I mean, it’s great to know, and I’m touched you’ve come to see me, but why disrupt my reality? Why introduce me to all this?”

“In another reality, the ‘me’ is already using the ‘you’ there and it’s spreading. Quite simply, we’re partners in that world and I’d like the same kind of partnership in this world.”

“And all of the ‘Blakes’ are on board with me joining you?”

“All except one. A round, angry version of me from a miserable version of our world is the one who stands apart from what we’re up to. For him, he sees the way we jump from dimension to dimension is dangerous and destroying the universe. So he pops around and tries to tell us all to stop.”

“Is he right?”

Blake chuckled quietly to himself. “Hardly. You see, he’s a product of all choices I made to study science or not. For him, he’s the most uneducated out of all of us.” He pressed play on the DVD and another image of Vetta popped onto the screen. He froze it and pointed to her lovely face. “You know, in one of the other realities, you marry the actress playing her.”

A bolt of energy shot through my being. “How so?”

“When you’re writing your book, you get an interview with her. She was feeling vulnerable at the time of the interview, you say some comforting words, and hit it off. It turned out to be a good match. I think, somehow, there’s a connection between you two, which is why you’re still a fan of the show.”

He looked over to me. “So, do you want to toggle to another dimension? Be a part of one of the best money making schemes of all time? I mean, we can expand beyond Duke Spear. Name the show and if there’s a fan base for it, we can score big bucks.”

“I’m in,” I said, before I carefully thought about it. The answer just came, shooting from out my gut and past my brain. “But first, let’s watch a little TV. I don’t think I’ve seen this one yet.”