FRACTAL Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Quote

  Title II

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Acknowledgments

  Contact

  Sign-Off Quote

  Notes

  FRACTAL

  Tony Ortiz

  Copyright © 2019 by Tony Ortiz

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is fictionalized or coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations for a book review.

  For any inquiries regarding this book, please email: [email protected]

  Cover Design by: Mihai Costea

  Published by Tony Ortiz

  www.SpunToday.com

  For Aiden

  “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything” - George McFly

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  PROLOGUE

  Life is linear. You're born, you live, and then you die. I remember when that was an undeniable truth. A type of consistency that we all inherently shared. I could never reconcile the ‘ignorance is bliss’ sentiment until I learned what I now know. Don’t get me wrong, I still can’t whole-heartedly say that I would choose bliss if I knew it came along with ignorance, but now I can at least appreciate those that do make that decision. For those of us that choose truth and justice above all else ... what a murky place the puddles of time have become.

  We pick and choose the forums where we feel we could influence and express our altruistic goals. Where we can leave behind a net positive impact. I can wrap my head around the infinite uphill grind between good and evil. There's an exhaustive journey that comes along with that grind, which we knowingly sign up for. We just try to win as many battles as we can along the way. What I haven’t been able to quite come to terms with though, is the thought of how many things I'm unknowingly ignorantly blissful about. That’s what keeps me up most nights. How could we fight against something that we don’t even know to be in the wrong? Or better yet that which we don’t even know exists? I know there are levels to this existence and we probably won’t ever know how many realms or possibilities there are. But what we can do is optimize our current plane. We can make the most of the levels that we do have an ability to influence. That’s how I’ve been approaching and navigating through my days after the skipping began. I guess that's my way of coping with the responsibility.

  Oh, and if I sound like I’m complaining ... I’m not. I wouldn’t change my skip-ability if I could. It all began with a single dream, and although I have no way of knowing how long it had been happening, what I know for sure is that dreams and reality have been blurred ever since. It’s what we do after-all though, isn't it? - We dream our dreams into existence and wake up to new realities.

  CHAPTER ONE

  We’d been discussing 9/11 in class, the most tragic, non-self inflicted attack on American soil ever. I was obsessively thinking about it for the rest of the day. I wondered what it would be like to have been one of the three thousand killed, or six thousand injured. Imagine you’re walking down the hall toward the office kitchen on an idle Tuesday morning. You begin stirring up a cup of that shitty instant coffee that you've become accustomed to and you casually glance over your right shoulder and out the window. You stop stirring and freeze-up to the sight of a Boeing 767 that’s about to collide with your existence. Are we even capable of fathoming that level of fear? Of helplessness? Or is it one of those truly once in a lifetime experiences?

  How about what’s going through the mind of a little girl inside one the weaponized planes? Having just enough awareness of the situation to understand that something bad was happening, but the inherent ignorance stemming from her innocence keeping her from realizing that she would never get to run around at recess with her friends again.

  Think about the cognitive dissonance and mental debating felt by the hundreds of people that chose to die of their own accord. - A USA Today article that I read stated that: “For those who jumped, the fall lasted 10 seconds. They struck the ground at just less than 150 miles per hour — not fast enough to cause unconsciousness while falling, but fast enough to ensure instant death on impact. People jumped from all four sides of the north tower. They jumped alone, in pairs and in groups.” The fact that within minutes the heat and smoke made it impossible for them to bare breathing, rationalizes the choice of jumping to the rest of us. But are we capable of wrapping our heads around those chilling 10 seconds on the way down? It may not seem like a long time, but try counting to ten right now. 1, 2, 3 a real ten seconds, 4, 5, 6 your last ten seconds, 7, 8, 9 and all the while being conscious of it.

  I mean, truly put yourself in these positions. Picture that you were one of the “lucky people” that didn’t have to make that leap because you were on a floor that was below the point of impact. Hurrying and trying to make your way down the hundreds of flights of stairs, toward the ground level and the outside. Then before reaching it, hearing the building above you collapsing into itself and bringing with it the crushing certainty of death.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of all these scenarios. The pain and confusion and the anger their families must’ve felt in the aftermath. The collective solidarity of the Nation thereafter, mixed with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance. I felt these emotions so viscerally that you’d think they were first hand experiences. They felt intensely genuine. It’s hard to describe because it wasn’t sympathy. It was more empathetic than that. I began to feel like I was there ... until I really was.

  At first while I was scrolling through my photos I thought I had just absentmindedly downloaded some of those images from the net while researching about 911. The pictures were strangely familiar though. Dejavu-ish. The towers got closer with each swipe to the left. Then I scrolled onto a video. A murky combin
ation of foggy flashbacks and confusion flooded my mind as I watched myself in the video, covered in a white powdery soot that thousands of us wore in common as we ran away from the freshly collapsed North Tower. I stared back up through the phone saying:

  My name is Hector Herrera and I don’t belong here. I don’t know what’s going on. I was born on April 19th, 1993. This has to be a dream. I was a kid when 9/11 happened. Whoever finds this, please help me. This is not a hoax.

  Then he - I pointed my phone around and aimed it toward the cloud of smoke which blanketed lower Manhattan, and the video ended.

  I could even remember the smell. An indescribable smell that can't be compared to anything I've ever smelt before or since. I remembered it so vividly after watching the video, that I could smell it again. It was a stench that words alone couldn't come close to describing. I could only liken it to a melody of melted medal, burnt bbq and a thick musty layer of dust.

  But how could this be? I was like eight when 9/11 happened. How could I be there at 22? Also, there weren’t any iPhones back then. I looked up that what was in back then were some sort of walkie-talkie phones called Nextel’s and flip phones called Motorola StarTAC’s. How could I have captured this footage on the phone that’s currently in my hand, in present day 2015?

  I was filled with questions after witnessing that. Questions that would eventually snowball into insurmountable puzzles, before defrosting into digestible answers with limitless possibilities. You know how they say that when one door closes another opens, or that you’re about to start the next chapter of your life? This was kind of like that, except that it wasn’t the next chapter, it was the first chapter. All that came before would become something of a prequel to my life. The world as I knew it was about to be flipped on its head. Light was about to be shed on areas that I didn’t even know were dark, all while casting an even larger shadow on what was beyond those areas. I had to come to terms with knowing that even if I lived forever, this type of uncertainty would consistently be a part of my reality.

  I was scared of the experience and even more terrified that I hadn’t remembered going through it until I saw the footage. What else had I blocked out? How long has this been going on? Maybe it’s been months, years or forever and I just noticed it. Or maybe I'm just losing my fucking mind. All were plausible. While I tried wrapping my head around what what going on, every movie I’ve seen or story I’ve read about Time Travel, started flooding my brain. What if I went back and interacted with someone and broke something in the world by way of a butterfly effect. What if I go back and unknowingly erase myself or someone else from existence? To put things in perspective though, my dreams were not always this intense, and most up until this point have been pretty trivial actually. I’ve brought back images of sunsets I experienced for example or cool looking street art. Stuff like that. I couldn’t tell you how any of this was possible or what made it work or why it wasn’t every dream that wound up leaving behind a trail of bread crumbs in the form of photos and videos in my phone. Actually, it wasn’t even every picture that I took while in these dreams that came back either. As time went on I started becoming more cognizant of what was going on by actually paying attention to each experience. I felt aware in the way lucid-dreaming accounts are described - and that was key. I came to realize that the bridge between dreams and reality is lucid dreaming. I became so mindful of it that I could fairly accurately predict when a picture that I’d taken or a video I’d shot would actually come back to reality with me.

  Here’s a practical example. I was having a conversation with my boy Steve once, about going to a drive-in-movie theater when I was a kid. My older cousins used to take me. I remember it being my favorite place to go to while it was still around. The movie they featured was completely secondary. The experience took center stage for me. If the movie sucked, I still enjoyed going. If it was good, then all the better. I loved the vibe of that place. That night I dreamt about it vividly. I could smell the buttered popcorn and fried dough in the crisp evening air. I watched the Sun melt away into the horizon before the feature started. The next day I checked my phone and sure enough, I brought back video footage of the scene when Raphael gets thrown into a dance club and Vanilla Ice improvises the Ninja Rap performance which incorporates the fight that ensues between the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tikka and Rahzar. ‘Go Ninja, Go Ninja, Go.’ It was an epic throwback that I was proud to have.

  In time, I had footage of never before seen perspectives of events like the Kennedy assassination, John Lennon getting shot, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s I had a Dream speech. I started being able to dream about certain time periods and about specific events. Then I’d just have to locate what I intended to see from there. For example, I went back to California in 1985, then again in 1989, acted as a courier and was able to finagle my way onto the sets and behind the scenes of a couple of my favorite movies; Back to the Future I & II. Night after night, I was deeply immersed in the experience of my dreams. I could never quite figure out if I was really going to these points in time, as they actually were, or just “visiting” my own personal reenactments of them based on what I’ve gathered from movies, anecdotal accounts that I read about or just my imagination. Then things started to change for me in the present. The ripple or butterfly effect as they call it. At first it was little innocuous things. Like that shirt that I really wanted but decided I couldn’t afford and then regretted ... there it was, overused and in the back of my closet. It’s like I had suppressed the memory of when I went back and switched the price tags with a fairly inexpensive shirt before the me of back then would see it at the mall. - Then he - I actually bought it.

  The fender bender accident I had on Willshire Drive a couple years ago ... I went back, blocked off the street with a couple orange traffic cones that I lifted from a nearby construction site, forcing the me of that time to drive down Fountain instead. Voila, no more bent bumper or eye-sore dent on my fender that was too expensive to fix and not severe enough to have to.

  Then the selfish-fun stuff began. My High School and College grades got way better. I didn’t just go back and cheat on every exam and project though. I made myself earn it. That was my way of rationalizing what I was doing, I guess. Don’t get me wrong, I was never the valedictorian type and didn’t want to be. I was always preoccupied with and prioritized my social life over school work. But I also never wanted anything I didn’t earn. So I wound up going back to the day that graded exams were returned to see my borderline scores and review the answer key. Then I got even better at pinpointing and aiming my dreams. I’d go back to a week before the exam and highlighted the sections in the text book and in my notes that I knew would be on the exam. This pretty much forced my procrastinating High School self to at least review all the highlighted stuff. I wound up going from a C- to a B+ student in no time. In retrospect, that experience served as a sanity check of sorts. It was important for me to see how real of an impact I could have, in a tangible way that wouldn’t adversely effect anyone else. My school grades were the first thing I could think of that fit that directive. Plus, who am I kidding, my GPA was hurting.

  I had fun with things like that but it became old fairly quickly. Beyond changes that directly effected me, I had zero clue what was really going on at the time and to be honest I didn’t like thinking in the direction of the potential of this ... this ability. I was scared of what it could mean if I could effect other people's lives and honestly, I didn't want that responsibility. What College kid would? I didn't want to meddle in that way. I mean, who was I to impose my views of how things should be? I wanted it to stop. I knew in my bones that I was dealing with something greater than me. I felt like I had just dipped my toes in the ocean of possibility and was creating ripples that indiscriminately flowed in any direction. I don’t know if it was fear of the unknown, not wanting the responsibility or a combination of both, but I was over it.

  I tried telling a couple of my closest friends, just for some mental re
lief. But they either wouldn’t believe me or would just laugh it off and say things like; “stop dropping acid bro” or “bring me back tomorrows lottery numbers”. - I wound up playing it off like I was joking and laughed with them. Then I reluctantly decided to tell my Mom about the whole thing. I could always speak to her about anything, but I was hesitant because I didn't want to add to her stress. She hadn't been the same since my Dad passed and she's been on heavy meds and therapy to help her cope with her depression. She hadn't even been meditating at all lately. I didn't want to add the burden of my bullshit on top of all that. But a Mother always knows, and she called me out on it. Once she broached the subject of something being off with me, I spewed it all out like a gusher.

  Hey, I'm making a lasagna for dinner, she said.

  Ok cool.

  Ok cool? Is that all you have to say to your tired mother slaving away over a hot stove to make her sons favorite dish?

  I'm sorry Ma. That sounds great. I can't wait. Thanks.