Millennium (a book)

Well, if you read my Twitter you’ll know that I was late in getting home from work because I was so caught up in a book. It’s not a new book, in fact, it was published in 1983 (the year I was born, dingos)! I came across it through a forum about Lost (the tv show), where some guy was claiming this book had all the answers.

Don’t get me wrong: I did not read this book thinking it had anything to do with Lost, in fact, while reading it, I totally forgot about any connection with Lost. It’s just that the summary he gave made it seem like a really great sci-fi book. And it is!

The Lost connection the poster was talking about was the mystery of how the survivors of Flight 815 were “found” in the wreckage, when, how could that be?, they’re on the island.

Well, in this book, time travelers from a future human society where we’re all infertile and dying thanks to no less than nineteen nuclear wars come up with a plan to “snatch” people from the past in order to create a utopian society so that humanity can somehow survive. Anybody who knows anything about time travel knows that if you go messing up people’s lives in the past, that means bad shit for the future, because if some shit doesn’t go down that was supposed to, how in the fuck is someone gonna go back in time in the first place and mess shit up all over again?

Paradox, is what they call that.

Example: I go back in time and stay the fuck outta the way. Some ho ass trips me, and I trip someone else by mistake. “Bitch ass,” the person says, carrying about their day. No harm done, right? Well, those three seconds that retard called me a bitch ass, is one second late he’ll be in stepping into the Apple store. In those three seconds, a customer has asked for the last iPhone when in fact, that whole reason the guy went to the mall was to get an iPhone and he was in a hurry, and originally he was supposed to get one but now he doesn’t. So he’s mad. The thing is: the guy is nuts and pulls out a gun and blows everyone up. As it turns out, I only went back two days in the past in order to stop myself from buying a cookie. The guy shoots my past-self. I no longer exist so, two days later, cannot go back in time to accidentally trip the guy. Are you confused? You should be; the universe is, too. That’s why it’ll explode if it happens.

Okay, that’s a bad example, but you get the point: don’t go messing up shit that’s happened.

So, to get around that, the people manufacture “used” bodies and put them in place of people right before their impending doom. Terrorist attacks, boating accidents, etcetera. The book focuses on a particular plane crash when they got a little sloppy and left something behind. After the crash, the investigator finds this artifact and digs a little deeper. One of the things he finds in the plane’s black box was a transcript of one of the flight attendant’s yelling: “They’re burned! All the passengers are dead and burned!” Then, the plane crashes.

So shit hits the fan, and the story unfolds from there. If you want to know more you should read it, it’s good. You can borrow it.

[spolierzz] About a third of the way though I started getting my own ideas for a similar story. I had it all mapped out and good surprises and everything. Then I read the last quarter of the book and exactly the same thing happened. Adam = bummed out. I always wanted to write a story where, at the end, the two survivors of some MASSIVE disaster that wipes out all of humanity realize that they are Adam and Eve. Well, that’s what happens.

“It’s all been dooonneee….. before…….”