Submitted for the December 2023 prompt: Treasures, Brightly Wrapped

The first time I remember my father telling me I’d save the world, I was five years old. We were walking home through Central Park, when we stopped to buy a candy apple. Before I took my first lick, he abruptly jogged away, dragging me along until he halted beneath a copse of trees.

 

“Tommy, come down right now!” a woman’s voice yelled.

 

I heard rustling, a plaintive yelp, then slapping leaves and snapping branches. The woman shrieked. My father deftly caught Tommy before he hit the ground. The woman ran over, sobbing.

 

Tommy was bruised and bewildered, but, thanks to my father, without a broken head. I gave Tommy my candy apple.

 

As we were walking away, my father ruffled my hair, “When you grow up, you will save the world.”

 

That’s what I always imagined he was doing all the time he spent away — a CIA secret agent, or a special UN ambassador, or even, after reading one particular story, a Time Patrolman. Whenever I asked, he said he worked in insurance. Though sometimes it sounded like he said ‘ensurance’. Once, distracted, he muttered that he listened when the Universe insisted. I had no idea what he meant.

 

* * *

 

I never knew my mother and quickly learned not to ask about her. If I did, my father would get a faraway look, as if contemplating something, and then disappear into his office. The next day he’d be gone again for no predicting how long — days, weeks, months…

 

As a result I was raised by a dizzying succession of nannies and tutors from everywhere. By seventeen I was fluent in eight languages and could get by in forty-six more. Once he even hired a Columbia graduate student to teach me Sumerian cuneiform.

 

“Why cuneiform?” I asked during a chance week he was home.

 

“Never know when you might need it,” he replied.

 

“Like they’re going to suddenly revive cuneiform.”

 

He laughed, flicked open a holo-panel, and quickly stroked a string of wedge shaped symbols. Much slower to translate, I finally got, “You will understand one day.”

 

From then on, I’d randomly find cuneiform messages throughout the house. Right before my freshman orientation at Princeton I received, “I’m proud of you. You’re going to save the world.”

 

I just wished he could have been proud in person.

 

Like when I was fourteen, and my father didn’t disappear the entire summer. We rented an electric SUV and zig-zagged the country. Weeks of sightseeing and museums interspersed with camping and hiking. And only one anomaly the whole trip.

 

We were on Rte 66, heading west to Albuquerque, when he suddenly veered the wrong way. Fifty miles later we pulled up to a corner in Sante Fe. He powered down the window and asked a young woman for directions. She looked at him funny — who asks for directions these days? Then she took a startled step back as a malfunctioning autobus careened through the crosswalk she’d been about to enter. My dad just waved and asked the onboard AI to plot a new route.

 

“Another no-jump freebie,” he said. No idea what he meant by that either.

 

* * *

 

The first time I felt the Universe insist, I was twenty five. Already late for a graduate school lecture, I instead followed an irresistible pull home. My father was sitting in the front parlor, old and shrunken in his favorite chair. He looked over a hundred. After levering himself up, he shuffled into his office, beckoning me to follow. He slid one of the bookcases aside and slowly stepped down stairs into a basement I never knew we had.

 

A large table, empty except for a splotched silvery cube and a slip of paper, centered the room. He handed me the paper, muttering that he’d be back soon. A brief blinding flash filled the space, but I barely noticed, mesmerized by the contents of shelves running around the entire basement.

 

One clear box, nestled before a charcoal rendition of Mona Lisa, contained a desiccated chicken bone. A card in front, in my father’s handwriting, read: Heimliched out of Da Vinci. Here was a picture of Sante Fe woman, much older, receiving a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Over there a cuneiform tablet — an IOU for 1200 shekels of grain in gratitude for saving the high priest’s son. And here a holograph of a woman. The card read: Averted nuclear annihilation by negotiating peace between the Asiatic Union and Fifth Caliphate. (Tommy, Central Park, great-great-great grandfather.) On and on, thousands of lives-saved mementos overflowing the shelves like a mad-hatter’s museum.

 

Another flash occurred, followed by high pitched infant squalling. Astonished, I scooped a baby and the now pristine cube from the floor. I finally read my father’s note. Tap the blinking icon on the cube. I did. The room vanished. And reappeared, except the shelves were bare.

 

The table bore two new items. One was a memory wafer which revealed what I already suspected — the cube was a time machine. The wafer’s thorough set of navigation instructions finished with a warning: on jump 8128 a massive chroniton leak would deage everything in the machine’s transit field 117 years.

 

The other was an offprint from Classical and Quantum Gravity, “The Jinn of the time machine: nontrivial self-consistent solutions.” In fact, it was my copy, which I’d acquired from the discard box outside a retiring professor’s office. In the margin, next to Lossov and Novikov’s articulation of physically possible systems containing bootstrapped originless objects, was my notation: gifts from the universe. Below, in an identical hand, a new inscription had been added: We are such a gift. Listen carefully and repay the Universe.

 

Upstairs the house and furnishings were as I remembered them as a child, except new. In the front parlor I settled into my father’s chair and rocked the baby until he drifted off to sleep.

 

I whispered in his ear, “When you grow up, you will save the world.”