Here’s where my old self finally got to stand up and say something, and I was glad to have him along.
The material says Mars. Says there were people on Mars — first, second, third density, the whole ladder — and that they were so hell-bent on war they wrecked the air, and a crowd of cosmic lifeguards scooped up what was left of them and brought them here. About seventy-five thousand years ago, it says.
And I sat up straight, because that part’s wrong, and I happen to know it’s wrong. I read science for fun, it’s the one respectable thing about me. Mars lost its water and its magnetic field something like billions of years ago. There is no version of the timeline where there’s a third grader on Mars seventy-five thousand years back, drawing pictures of his mom. The dates don’t even wave at each other across the room.
So I sat there pretty pleased with myself for about a minute. Caught you. Whole thing’s a fairy tale after all.
And then the other thing happened, the thing that’s been happening, and it shut me right up. Because under the part of me that was busy being right, there was a much older part that wasn’t arguing about dates at all. That part just went very quiet and very sure, the way you go quiet at a funeral, and it said: the number is wrong and it doesn’t matter. You know that red dust. You know the way the light goes thin and orange right before the worst of it. You were there for the end of that place, and time is not the thing you think it is.
I went looking, of course. And it turns out when somebody asked these voices flat out how long ago, exactly, they wouldn’t pin it down either. They got almost cagey about it. Said something about how time isn’t what we take it for — that a thing can be both slow and sudden depending on where you’re standing, that “a matter of years is but a blink.” Which is either the world’s oldest dodge or the truest thing anybody’s said to me all week.
I genuinely cannot tell you which. That’s the state I’m in now.