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Pablo was happy to have his job at the Lab. When you're dreaming about a better life in
the North, this was just the kind of job you dreamed about. As night janitor at the National
Temporal Research Institute in Colorado Springs, Pablo was given a small room in the basement
with a cot, a TV and his own hot plate. His duties were simple--mop the floors, straighten up the
offices, feed the rabbits and alert the staff if and when the arrival light came on. For this Pablo
was paid $175.00 a week. A veritable fortune in his dusty native village where living standards
remained trapped a couple of centuries in the past. Compared to the poverty back home, Pablo’s
salary at the Institute was more than enough to improve the lives of his extended family in El
Salvador.
The arrival light on the wall next to the “chamber” flashed red. The chamber, a shielded
box hooked up to some highly sophisticated electronics, formed the physical link between the
present and the future. It was through that small portal the future spoke. Though what language
the future was speaking was the subject of much controversy. The arrival light indicated that
something from the future had arrived. Pablo dutifully alerted the staff. An arrival was always a
source of excitement. Maybe this time it would be different; maybe this was the breakthrough
Whenever the arrival light came on, the institute responded with frenzied activity. A
team of scientists grabbed their instruments and ran to see what had arrived. Whatever it was, it
had to be photographed, cataloged, analyzed and quarantined. After that initial burst of activity,
the best minds in physics would pour over this latest “communication”, desperately looking for
something meaningful. So far it had all been in vain. All those millions spent on building the
projector, all that brain power exhausted on interpretation; all of it was beginning to look like a
giant waste of time. The future was not making any sense. But the light was blinking and Pablo
climbed the steps to alert the staff that the future had again reached out to the present. Pablo
followed the eager scientists down to the chamber and felt their disappointment when all it
The scientists working at the lab were a young, generally friendly bunch. They formed a
close knit community of, linguists scholars and academics numbering several hundred strong.
Ever since contact with the future was firmly established, the lab buzzed with activity at all
hours. The night time was somewhat quieter but still, many young engineers and researchers
worked crazy hours. Pablo got to know many of them by name and though his job was menial,
he was well liked and respected. Even Dr. Anthony, the father of chrono-physics and titular head
of the Institute, knew Pablo’s name. Dr. Anthony had an office on the third floor and, although
his presence was increasingly rare, he was considered a father figure to all.
Dr. Anthony was still sharp enough to be worried about the prospects of the field he
pioneered. If the future didn’t start communicating effectively soon, chrono physics would lose
its funding and become a dead end— a curious by water in the history of science. As a Nobel
Laureate, Dr. Anthony’s reputation rested on his great breakthrough — the chronon projector—a
complex device that could send and receive material objects across space and time; work that
promised mankind solutions to all its most vexing problems—pollution, over population, war.
“Just think of what we could do with a single newspaper from a world a decade hence,”
Dr. Anthony would ask. It was arguments like these that won research grants and financed the
institute; but with the future’s persistent incoherence, that funding was in danger of drying up.
So far that future newspaper never arrived. Nor did the future physics text nor the blueprint for
the next big idea. Lots of stuff did arrive and that stuff was analyzed down to the molecular
level, but if it contained any useful information, it escaped detection by the Institute’s anxious
staff.
The future was trying to respond. It wasn’t a one way conversation. After many false
starts, it looked like the future might actually be trying to tell us something. Unfortunately that
something was not what the world was expecting. Plans and blueprints for undreamed of
technologies that would push humanity centuries ahead. No that is not what the future was
giving us. Instead, what the future was sending was pure, unadulterated gibberish—rocks,
“Not another bloody rabbit, dear god,” a bleary eyed scientist was heard to mutter. “Is
this what we have to look forward to, a world filled with bunnies.” It was this sort of expensive
gibberish that kept linguists and philosophers wracking their brains trying to decipher just what
As Dr. Anthony suspected deep in his heart, it wasn’t the future’s fault at all, it was the
universe’s doing. Some immutable law was preventing the future from sending any real
information. Call it the conservation of information but it was becoming increasingly clear that
there was not going to be any breakthrough technology that the past and present didn’t earn by
its own hard work. No solutions to those insoluble social problems like crime, war, the Middle
East and AIDS were going to arrive in the next delivery. Whatever progress humanity was going
present and future like the world hoped, time would get hopelessly tangled up in paradoxes. The
future would lose all meaning. Future discoveries would already have been made. Where would
the original ideas have come from? Such a violation of the arrow of time could simply not be
allowed to occur. Information from the future was something the quantum universe couldn’t
allow.
To Pablo, problems of future linguistics were neither here nor there. His limited education
didn't allow for much theorizing on trans- temporal communication. His interests were far more
mundane. He had floors to mop and rabbits to feed. The dozens of rabbits the future inexplicably
sent. “Time bunnies” is what people called them and say what you like about gibberish but to
Pablo they were a miracle, a gift from people not yet born.
In nearly four years of contact, the future had sent back in time a total of 41 rabbits as
well as a hundreds of other random objects. What may have started out in some future laboratory
as a perfectly useful item somehow got scrambled by unknown forces and arrived in our present
reconfigured into something else entirely. Often that reconfiguration seemed to take the form of
Aside from the rabbits, Pablo worried about his family back home in El Salvador
scratching out a meager existence in utter poverty. It was his regular remittances that allowed his
wife Carmelita, his daughter Rosa and his two sons Jesus and Juan to attend school.
Rabbit care had become Pablo's favorite duty. At first he helped the lab techs clean the
cages and feed them. Before long, he was their primary keeper. The rabbits were all of a similar
variety; all were white and floppy eared, docile and hungry for fresh greens exactly like rabbits
What to do with all the rabbits? It became a running joke in the physics community.
Temporal physics was becoming a laughing stock. Word came down from the third floor, from
Pablo had no more idea than Dr. Anthony why the future was sending back rabbits but he
was happy to be around them. He named them, handled them and began to putting them together
for conjugal visits. Rabbits being what they are, it wasn’t very long before there were more
rabbits than anyone knew what to do with. The hutches were filled to capacity. The word filtered
down the chain of command until finally reaching Pablo—“dispose of them all.”
“They are slashing the budget, Pablo, there is no money for bunnies. You understand,
“Poor innocents,” Pablo whispered to them, “what a waste.” Pablo remembered hunting
rabbits with his uncle when he was a boy. That was different; those rabbits died for a reason, to
feed his family but to just kill them because they were an embarrassment to someone seemed
wrong.
Pablo’s mother made rabbit stew. He could remember what a treat it was— a taste of
home and youth. Soon his basement room was giving off an irresistible smell. It didn’t take long
before most of the institute staff was stopping by for bowls of time bunny stew. Pablo was in
business. He bought bigger pots to cook with. He charged a couple of dollars a bowl and
couldn’t keep up with demand. In the evenings he would make rabbit's foot key chains and cure
pelts to make little stuffed time bunnies. They became sought after souvenirs. In the months
before the Institute closed its doors for good, Pablo’s stew may have been the best thing to come
Of those who ate of Pablo’s stew, many would go on to achieve success in their fields.
Former employees included the the brilliant and the plodding the healthy and the sick, the
satisfied and the frustrated were essentially like any other random group. Many who wore the
rabbit-foot charms swore that their luck improved, but go and try and prove a claim like that.
There were engineers, researches, and lab techs who ate Pablo's stew and would swear
that they were transformed by it. They would say they did better work, lived happier, more
productive lives, Many went on to make names for themselves in their various fields. But how
do you connect a few bowls of stew with all the intangibles of a complex life? Such evidence is
always anecdotal and will have to remain so since the Institute closed and its brilliant staff
One piece of hard evidence remains as testimony to the transforming effect of the future’s
gift to mankind. Thanks to his stew, Pablo was able to earn enough money to start his own small
restaurant. His business prospered which enabled him to rescue his wife and children from their
hopeless situation and bring them to the relative splendor of Colorado Springs.
Carmelita had a tiny house and yard; Rosa and the boys went to a proper school. Rosa’s
brilliance was recognized early. She was mentored and allowed to grow to her full potential
becoming the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Colorado. She went on to
head the Nobel Prize winning team that cured cancer once and for all in 2045. The boys too
found successful careers in music and art. Juan as a painter and young Jesus as a composer.
A strong argument can be made that humanity’s effort to contact the future was a dismal
failure. What, the critics would say, did we get out of all those billions of dollars, a few dozen
rabbits? Ask Pablo and you’ll probably get a much different answer. Funny how things work
out.