"Party Guests" "Time Travelling" "Stadium" by Mel Farr Suppastar of Project 301 PLEASE USE AFS.COM or a DEC PDP-10 TO VIEW THIS "There is a 15% Chance that any person behaving or speaking strangely in a stadium is a man from another time" - Wolff-Ostrov's 3rd Hypothesis, 2nd Corollary I. June 5th 1998, 11pm, Rentschler Field, East Hartford, Ct. By any objective standard, the party was a success. Greg, the diminutive and very bearded bartender was quick and charming. The DJ was playing strictly disco/funk from 1974. Some guy had shown up in a very realistic Cthulhu costume. The party guests were having quite the (stable) time. The mostly empty stadium provided great space and accoustics. Indeed, the only person who wasn't enjoing himself was the host, Professor Wolff-Ostrov, who paced around nervously, because he was nervous. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- II(a) Feb 9 1996, The Alamodome, San Antoino Texas Mr. Spinsane, party guest, stepped out of the temporal aperture. The stadium was empty. It was still 1 week until NBA All star weekend. II(b) October 1st, 1974, Kinshasa Zaire, 20th of May stadium. The DJ stepped out of the temporal aperture. The stadium was empty. Within a matter of days it would be the site of the famous Rumble in the Jungle. The DJ was early for the rumble. But he was just on time for the disco/funk of 1974. II(c) 331 B.C., Greece, Panatheanic Stadium The man in the very realistic Cthulhu costume stepped out of the temporal aperture. He was early for the first olympic games. A slave caught sight of him and screamed in fright. -------------------------------------------------- III. October 10th, 1997 Prof. Wolff-Ostrov was a lonely man, a condition caused by a general social awkwardness and exacerbated by a profession that seemed to require him to pace around his office, writing and erasing equations while muttering to himself. He was not a man who understood the subtleties of human interaction. This left him remarkably unprepared when Hennifer Marks walked into his office. Hennifer Marks was a grad assistant in Temporal-Spatial Physics who was having trouble squaring Schrodingerean Probability with Tractical Geometry. As they talked, Prof. Wolff-Ostrov began to experience a squishy, uncomfortable sensation that to him was most similar to the way bodies effected by gravity are forced toward each other. Hennifer had a habit of slowly twirling her long flowing curls in a way that the Professor found profoundly distracting. Wolff-Ostrov found himself trying to estimate to the centimeter the amount of space between where her shorts ended and her knees began. Despite these distractions, the good professor managed to sufficiently clear up Ms. Marks' confusion and she bid him thank you and adieu. Then, in a moment he could scarecly believe, the good professor offered to review her thesis and help her in any way she needed. Previously Prof. Wolff had hewed to a course of strictly avoiding assisting students even graduate students in their own "projects" but when Hennifer smiled and seemed generally interested, Prof. Wolff felt a highly unusual sense of anticipation. ---------------------------------------------------- IV. December 10th, 1997, 9pm Prof. Wolff-Ostrov was feeling yet another utterly unfamiliar emotion. This one seemed the opposite of that one he had felt so long ago. He tried to run through some familiar equations but it was impossible. He was furious. How could she leave! Just when things were starting to go well! He threw his small model of the solar system at the blackboard. It shattered into 3.14159 pieces. Tim Spinsane, the Dept. Secretary walked in. "Professor, is something wrong?" "No, uh...just an accident, Mr. Spinsane" "You seem very upset" "I...am." "Well it's happy hour at the Rusty Nail @ there usually aren't any students there." "Are you inviting me to get a drink with you?" "Oh no, I'm watching the NBA tonight, but the bartender there has a knack for soothing the emotions." --------------------------- V. December 10th, 1997, 10pm Prof. Wolff-Ostrov walked into the rusty nail. It was a small, hole-in the wall, distinguished only by a rather impressive bookshelf, full of pulp novels the Professor could not imagine perusing, let a lone reading. The bartender was a short bearded fellow who bore a distinct physical resemblance to Gimli, son of Gloin. "What'll it be, sir?" "Uh, something strong?" "Whiskey?" "Sounds great." "Mixed with?" "Don't people drink it straight?" "Some." "Well that's what I'll do." "Sure thing." Prof. Wolff downed the shot. "I'll have another." "Ok." ... "She's leaving, Barkeep." "It's Greg, and they all do, sir." "She's leaving, Greg." "I wouldn't worry about that, sir" "Why not, Greg?" "Sir, you don't know me, but I knew you would walk in here. And I knew it would be about a woman." "What else do you know, Greg?" "Mark my words Professor. What you two have is love. And when she returns, the two of you will be together. Happily ever after." "How can you know that, Greg?" "I've seen it, sir. I'm one of the beneficiaries of your...discoveries." "You're a time traveller?" "Aye, sir. I've seen you and Ms. Marks in the future. You two are very happy together. When she returns from her sojourn abroad, you will be reunited!" At this Prof. Wolff-Ostrovs face lit up with joy. He got up beaming, and walked out of the bar. But just before he left, he turned: "Greg, if you're from the future, What are you doing here in this time period then?" "The music sir, I love the music of this era: Chumbawumba, Paula Cole, Will Smith getting Jiggy with It - I am convinced that 1998 will go down in history as the greatest year in the history of popular music." ------------------------------------------------------------ VI. June 5th 1998, 10:45pm, Connecticut Greg had suggested that the Professor throw the party to celebrate the return of Hennifer Marks from her 7 month fellowship in South America. The party could coincide with the Professor's discovery of a feasible method of time travel. He had assured the Professor that once he demonstrated the secrets of time-travel she would be incurably smitten. Prof. Wolff-Ostrov had agreed at once. And now the moment had finally arrived. ... Finally, Hennifer Marks arrived, and she was more than the Professor could have imagined. She had gained an enormous amount of weight. Although this was somewhat mitigated by the fact that she was dressed in long robes that made her long basically formless. "Professor!" she shouted, eyes beaming with joy. Prof. Wolff-Ostrov almost couldn't speak. "I want to hug you..." she said "but the Church Fathers tell me that it is sinful to hug an unmarried man." "Oh? "I have so much to tell you!" she continued "Before the trip I had thought that Mormons were a cult, but now I'm a member! I can't wait to teach you the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints!" "Oh." "Anyhow, I have to go! I have to be up at 5:30am for Prayer. But I knew I had to stop by and say hello! And If any of you want to know more about Jesus, feel free to reach out to me!" And with that she left. The professor stood, shocked. Greg walked up to him. "Professor, I'm sure you are very disappointed. However, you have a party full of guests fully expecting to time travel in this stadium. With your permission, hand me the transitory dialectic and I will handle the temporal-portation. We wouldn't want this party to be a failure." The professor nodded, absentmindedly. -------------------------------------------------------------- VII. And in the end, that was the tragedy of time travel: it was so damn inconveinent. Forget the possibility of paradoxes, the potential rupture of the space-time continuum. Forget the money required just to construct a transitory dialectic. None of that was more than a trifle compared to the actual inconveinence of the process. When Professor Wolff-Ostrov discovered the actual requirements for his theory to work, he nearly gave up right then and there. Most problematically, there was the space involved. Time travel requried the creation of a series of fissures and abrasions in the space-time continuum. These fissures and abrasions contained energies that had a substantially corrupting effect on the space-time continuum and more importantly on the surrounding physical environment. What Wolff-Ostrov discovered was that even a "minor" trip (say, two people, a few days into the past) needed to be "contained" and the only regularly occuring containers: stadiums. For some reason, the harmonic structures of stadiums tended to contain and mitigate the disturbances. The container had to exist at both the origin and the destination, and it had to, for humanitarian reasons, be basically empty. This alone put enormous restrictions on time travel. -------------------------------------------------- VIII. June 6th 1998, 12:10am, The Rusty Nail "I don't get it Greg. You assured me that we would be together." "It was a lie, Professor, a noble lie." "But why Greg, why?" "Because, Professor, the stadium party needed to happen, for a number of important events in history. Because of you, the DJ will go on to found disco-funk making the late 70s one of the most important party zones in history. Because of you, `Cthulu` will help inspire the Greek Mythology that will shape Western culture for Millenia. And because of you, Mr. Spinsane was supposed to prevent Brent Barry from winning the 1996 NBA Slam Dunk competition. But unfortunately Mr. Spinsane will fail. And Brent Barry will win." "And what about me, Greg?" "Well Warpus," Greg said, calling the Professor by his first name "you'll impregnante a prostitute and raise the child as your own. Then you'll carry on a longstanding affair with Grindking's wife. Eventually you two will get married and develop a Blender...I mean, `blended' family." SAUCE00Wolff-Ostrov's 3rd Hypothesis Mel Farr Suppastar Project 301 20150411¢(