The Time Traveler's Guide to Grammar Read online

  Monday, September 22, 2361

  There was the click of Caden’s lighter before she even realized that he was standing next to her.

  “So, what’s an interrogative?”

  “How in the world am I supposed to know?” She looked crossly at him. She hated people sneaking up on her. This seemed to be a fact that Caden already knew. “Unlike you, I did my homework for today the normal way, with mathematical equations.”

  “I just thought that you would have immediately gone home and learned every grammar term in the book so that you could come back here and show off how smart you were.”

  “Yeah, and you would be so much of a pompous dickwad that you would go into the future and see which terms I had not learned. Then, you would ask me precisely the questions that I didn’t know the answers to.”

  “Glad we’re starting to know each other.” Caden smiled. Today he was wearing a black sweater and a pair of gray slacks. His shoes were jet black and polished, in a style that had not seen the light of day since the 2330’s. His blazer, gray with stripes of brown and black, did not look like a style that had been conceived yet. “Let’s start off more simple then. What is a noun?”

  “Person, place, or thing. I’m not in kindergarten you jackass.”

  He did not even flinch at her insult. “Verb?”

  “They assert something about the subject of the sentence and express actions, events, or states of being.”

  “And when travelling in time?” This was a far more complicated question. She did not only have to recite the definition that had been ground into her back in elementary school, but seriously consider how a verb positioned her in space and time.

  “They are what pushes the computer into action. Without verbs, time cannot fly.”

  “Prepositions?”

  “They link nouns, pronouns and phrases to other words in a sentence.” She tried to dredge up more about prepositions. Below the level of conscious knowledge the definition of a preposition obstinately sat. When she finally remembered a sufficient definition, she was surprised how it seemed as if prepositions were made to help people travel in time. “A preposition indicates the temporal, spatial or logical relationship of its object to the rest of the sentence.”

  “An example would be?”

  “In ten seconds, I am going to turn your face into a large blob if you keep persisting in asking me for examples. Grammar is simple. We really don’t have to go over all of the basics.”

  Caden flicked the filter of his Amma-B away.

  “Alright, ready to go test out your expertise?”

  She paled. She really did not want Caden treating her like a little kid because he thought she had no clue what she was doing, and the last thing she wanted was for Caden’s actions to be justified if it turned out that she actually had no clue what she was doing.

  They made their way up the stairs. School had just let out, so there were still several people milling around the halls in small groups. As they wound their way up the flights of stairs, the students disappeared until they came to the top room where the time machine was housed. This room was the central social hub of the school. Normal schools had their popular smoking spots, their small corners with seating areas to occupy while skipping class, and their cafeterias where mobs of students pressed into the rows of unwashed tables to eat and gossip. Midgar’s social hub was the place where their lessons were put to the test. Using the time machine was simultaneously their unalienable right and their largest responsibility.

  One of the convenient things about going to a school centered around the study of space and time was that people almost never had to wait in line, even though the school had only one time machine. This was because, once a student successfully learned how to travel in time, the next step was to learn the equation for travelling to an unoccupied time machine.

  Unless every time machine on the planet throughout the entire course of time was occupied, there would never be a scheduling conflict. If it ever reached the point when every time machine was full, the computer had an emergency code to begin condensing hours of Individual Time into instants of Real Time. Scientists guessed that the maximum quantity of IT that could fit into RT was around 800,000 seconds IT/ 1 second RT, and vice versa. This meant that for every minute spent in the time machine, you could have spent an eight hundred thousandth of a second in the machine of your life. Conversely, eight hundred thousand seconds of your own life could occur for each second in the time machine (a little over a week per second). The computer still worked on a 1sec RT/1 sec IT ratio, unless programmed differently by the time travelers. Even if half the population of the world became time travelers, it would still take a thousand years for the computer to have to work in a ½ sec RT/1 sec IT ratio.

  This meant that the student had to learn to change not only the time they were in, but the time machine as well. Looking at the large group of first year students who were likely still trying to achieve their first time travel, she figured this meant that they would not know how to transport themselves to an unoccupied time machine. This meant more pressure for her to time travel quickly so that everyone could have a chance to use the time machine.

  “Ready?” Caden asked her.

  “Shouldn’t we first write out the sentence we will be using before we go into the machine so that we won’t take up a lot of time?” she whispered to Caden while glancing nervously around the room. One group of four people looked inquisitively at them. Another girl from her trigonometry class waved to her.

  “Come on, I’ll move us to a less busy time if you are nervous about that.” Caden took her hand and gently pulled her towards the time machine. She considered grounding her heels in the floor and refusing to go, but realized that would look cowardly and childish. Truthfully, she was scared to enter the machine again. The stress, shame, and pain that she had experienced the last time was so overwhelming that several times in the past week, memories had sneaked their way into her dreams.

  By the time she thought of a good excuse, she was already through the door. As the door slid shut, from far away she heard someone call out “Good luck!”

  Then there were only the pure white walls and the darkly clad Caden. He had already placed a sheet of paper on the scanner.

  “Are we moving to a differe---?” Her question hung, uncompleted, on the air. Her stomach could already sense the change in their position. Her feet buckled under her, her head felt light, and her entire body shifted to the side.

  She had not realized that Caden was still holding her hand, but she was suddenly grateful for something to cling to. She did not even have the breath to protest when she careened sideways and he slid his arm around her waist to keep her from crashing to the ground. She figured being pressed up against him for a second was less embarrassing than falling over herself.

  When the sensation of rocking on a boat in the midst of a hurricane finally subsided, she heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Does it always feel this miserable to move to an empty machine?”

  “Not usually. I guess the computer bumped us around a few thousand years so it would not have to deal with any scheduling conflicts since likely half the school is practicing with a time machine right now.”

  “Oh.” She noticed that Caden was looking down at her as he spoke, and that he had yet to loosen his arm from around her waist. Come to think of it, they were still holding hands.

  She stepped back away from him, going to sit on a white couch that had been absent from the other time machine.

  “So, what did you write down to get us to this lovely location?”

  “Like I’m going to tell you. You would likely get mad at me and decide that it would be a wonderful thing to go off and travel through time alone, then get yourself stuck in deep space.” That actually sounded exactly like something she would do, but she did not like the idea of Caden knowing her so well.

  “At least tell me the concept behind what you wrote.”

  �
��Or, we could go nicely in the order of the grammar terms that I have prepared for today, using each term with a few example sentences, then testing out how the term translates to a command to the time machine.”

  He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and waved it at her. His expression was so jubilant that she could not help but feel a sense of aggravation within her. At the same time she could not help but smile too. Caden’s smile was wide and almost goofy, and it made his ears look too large for his face. This sudden alteration to his narrow jawbone made him appear a lot younger and far less intimidating. She might not trust Caden, but she did trust her future self. Somewhere along the course of her life, that future self had seen something in Caden to want him in her future. She just hoped that she did not kill him out of sheer exasperation before she got to that point.

  “I am going to rip that grin off of your face if you do not give me more of a challenge.”

  “Think you can turn that sentence around to use a gerund? We’ll start off with the verbals.”

  She knew that a gerund was a word with –ing at the end, but was at a loss to say what word with an –ing constituted a gerund.

  Sensing her confusion, he began, “you know gerunds end in –ing. I will also assume you know that gerunds are different from other verbs. Here’s a hint: they act chiefly as nouns. Knowing this, you could compose the sentence, ‘ripping poor Caden to shreds seems to be Quinn’s favorite hobby.’ Now, in this sentence I used a linking verb. Think you can identify where that is in the sentence?"

  “Um,” she frowned, “the ‘seems to be’?”

  “Perfect. Why?”

  “It acts as a connector between the subject and the predicate…” she fumbled here.

  Caden slid in quietly, “the predicate nominative or the predicate adjective….”

  She picked back up seamlessly with, “that completed the sentence or the clause.”

  “Other examples besides ‘to be?’” Caden began pacing around the small room.

  She counted off with her fingers, “feel, appear, look, become….”

  “Now there are the auxiliary verbs which are used with other verbs to show tense, voice, or mood. Want to give me some examples of auxiliary verbs?”

  “Be, can, have, do, may, might, should, will, would.”

  “Give me an example sentence with one of those verbs that we can put into the time machine.”

  She blanched. It was one thing to give Caden a word that fell into the wrong category. It was quite another matter to use that word in the time machine and get the both of them stuck in space. “Maybe we should stick to math for the moment….”

  Caden laughed, long and hard and to the point where she felt like smacking him. Instead she just crossed her arms and glared at him. When he finally finished his chortling and composed himself he started off with, “for one thing, you failed miserably at using math with the time machine.” He finished with, “and another thing, you just used an auxiliary verb correctly. Now just write a sentence down that might give the computer a little clearer direction.”

  She smiled suddenly, and took a piece of paper.

  “Here,” she said, and gave it to Caden.

  He read out loud, “We will go to Alaska in the year 2050 where Caden will have to exit the time machine before he may travel anywhere else. But before he may enter the time machine once more he will apologize for laughing at Quinn’s valiant attempt to use the time machine.”

  Caden smiled broadly, which made her attempt at revenge considerably less sweet. “Cool! I never had anyone to try out this sort of imperative sentence.” He then placed the paper into the scanner.

  This time there was hardly a stirring under her feet as the machine moved. As the machine settled down, a picture of a thermometer appeared on the screen. It read 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Caden opened the door onto a flat white prairie. A herd of caribou watched them warily, unsure of why an oddly shaped mound of snow had appeared out of nowhere. As Caden hopped outside, the caribou moved back a few feet at the appearance of this short, smelly creature.

  Caden yelped, startled by the cold. Jaw clenched and arms pressed to his side to try and keep warm, Caden turned towards the time machine, and bowed awkwardly, for he was waist deep in snow. Then he called out, “I am very sorry to Quinn, from the bottom of my heart, for laughing at her while she bravely endeavored to get the time machine to work.” His words were more soaked in sarcasm than his slacks were soaked in snow.

  Then he hopped back into the time machine.

  “That was not a real apology,” Quinn grumbled under her breath.

  Hearing her, Caden shot back with, “That was not a very nice way to get someone to apologize to you.”

  Caden stripped off his shoes and his slacks. He scribbled something down on a piece of paper and scanned it in. Then, he reclined beside her on the couch as the time machine began to move. When it had finished, Caden opened the door. The time machine had let them off in a tropical paradise. Around Caden’s body she caught a glimpse of a turquoise sky steeped in late afternoon sun. She heard the roar of waves, and smelled the salt sitting on the breeze.

  “Is it alright to leave the time machine for a little while?” she asked. Her family was situated well in the middle class, but her relatives were located in Iowa and Vermont. On her summer vacations, her family did not have the money to fly both to Vermont and Iowa as well as Fiji and the Bahamas. So she got to go and experience winter for a second time with her cousins.

  “Of course.” Caden shed his shirt. “Race you to the water!”

  He dashed off, leaving her to scramble out of her shoes and check that the time machine was set to open up only to them. Then she made her way slowly out into the sunshine. Even as her feet sunk into the sand, this tropical island did not seem real. She glanced around; on one side of her was a rocky outcropping, and on the other stretched a tan silk ribbon of beach that disappeared into the horizon. It seemed as if no one had ever set foot on this beach before.

  Caden was body surfing before she touched the water. The water was luxuriously warm, the temperature of bath water. As she stepped into the water, little red and orange fish darted away.

  Caden swam over to her.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely gorgeous. Where are we? And when are we?” She walked slowly into the water, savoring the feeling of the warm water lapping at her calves.

  Caden shrugged. “I have no clue. I just told the computer to take us somewhere warm.”

  “So the computer can’t understand sarcasm, but it knows the perfect place to go when you want somewhere warm?”

  “Or maybe the computer can understand sarcasm, and you are merely being mean to it because it showed me a bit of mercy.”

  She laughed half in amusement at his comment and half in surprise. Usually she was the one with the outlandish comments.

  “Highly doubtful.”

  “In 2405 we develop computers which have consciousness, so much so that religious figures seriously consider how to have a baptism without water. Even in 2405 electricity and water don’t work well together.”

  She had no clue how to respond to that statement, unsure whether Caden was joking once more. Instead she waded deeper, relishing the feeling of the sand squishing between her toes. For a few minutes, she swam around, then simply floated on her back.

  When she stood up, she turned to see Caden watching her. She realized that he must be annoyed waiting for her, for he had likely gotten bored swimming at beaches a hundred times prettier than this one.

  “Here, let’s go sit down.” She motioned to where a palm tree sat, waving lazily for them to come over. “What other adventures have you gone on?”

  They sat on the beach, looking out into the ocean as the sunset slipped its orange fingers through the sky’s hair.

  “One time I used an auxiliary verb, which is used with other verbs to show tense, voice, or mood. I wrote �
�I would change my mother’s time of death if it would not cause any damage to me, her, or the world.’”

  Quinn turned white. “That is a criminal offense! You are not supposed to be messing with people who were meant to be dead!”

  Caden looked at her, his eyes for the first time sharp and cold. “She died when I was seven. If you’ve ever lost anyone that you were close to, you would know that each extra moment that you could have with them means more than any punishment that the Time Traveler’s Council could administer. But the thing is, I only said that I ‘would’ change circumstances, and only on the condition that I would not be harming anyone. It was the computer that decided.”

  Quinn did not know if this meant that Caden expected that the computer was also the one that would be guilty for any alterations on time. “What happened?”

  “I went back to when I was seven, but I was still in this body. I tried passing myself off as a nurse in the hospital that she was in, but she knew right off the bat that I was her son. She said she had met me a few years back when I came to show her our first child. She knew then that she would not live to see her grandchildren naturally. The computer only allowed me to alter her death by three days, but in that span of time I got to speak to her as a grown man. I had always envied my friends and how they had gotten to know their parents as both an authority figure as well as a friend. That time, I got to say a proper good-bye to her. I guess you should know that is also why I am continually wearing black clothes to school. I went back to visit her on the first day of school.”

  There were no words that she knew to say. She had only lost one of her grandfathers in tenth grade, but she remembered hating when people said “sorry for your loss” or “I’m sure he really loved you”. Those words did nothing. Instead, this time it was she who placed her hand over Cadens’ and gave it a light squeeze.

  He half smiled, which loosened the tears from his eyes. “On a happier note, I tried finding the ‘most perfect’ day in existence and I broke the time machine that I was in. That day I learned my lesson on trying to add modifiers onto absolutes. By the way, some other absolutes are ‘unique’ and ‘pregnant’. You can modify them to say ‘nearly unique’ but you cannot say that something is ‘very unique’. Anyway, I got stranded in 4120 trying to ask a Ngoath what their equivalent of roadside assistance was. I was happy though that the computer had tried valiantly to give me the ‘most perfect’ day that it could find, and so I did have excellent weather while I waited.”

  That story got her chuckling. “But what’s a Ngoath?”

  “An alien. They look like seven-foot tall celery sticks with frog faces. Nice fellow, horrible taste in music though. I had to listen to his music for three hours while he fixed the time machine.”

  “So we shouldn’t be expecting to get any good new music from alien cultures?”

  “Oh, no, he wasn’t listening to any of his own music. He was listening to what we know as our Pop music, which will shift to being called Transync to Tesik to RMK to Rubica to Madrin---somehow, you can always tell what the generation’s Rittany Pesars or Jestin Rebir is.”

  She flipped her still wet hair to the side, her sea green eyes wandering over his face. Caden was turning out to be quite an enigma. “What else have you seen? Have you witnessed any historical events? Or has the Time Traveler’s Council banned you from any important time?”

  “Funny that you mention that…” Caden blushed and refused to meet her eyes. “I was really mad when I was eighteen because I could not drink yet, so I put into the computer ‘I want to go somewhere where I can drink like a fish.’ I did not quite realize that the computer does not understand idioms or any expression that cannot be fathomed by its individual elements.”

  “Did you land in the ocean?”

  “Close. I landed on a dock somewhere in the Philippines. A guy named Cristo Kodo was having his first exhibition on the GiLu Device. It is a contraption that sticks down your throat so that you can breath underwater without a bulky air tank. It takes some getting used to, but by the end of the day I was in fact able to drink like a fish.”

  “Not exactly what you were expecting?”

  “Not at all. However, it made me far more cautious about what I scan into the computer. What if I had used ‘haul someone over the coals’ or ‘beat one’s brains out’ or even ‘be a piece of cake’? I could have seriously injured someone, or be stuck as a pastry for what would have likely been the short remainder of my life. You have to realize that even though using language makes travelling in time easier, it still has just as many powerful consequences. It definitely has less reliable outcomes, because there is always the potential to extrapolate a different meaning from the same words.”

  “Yet you still love travelling this way.”

  Caden beamed. “You got it. The freedom and the surprise of where you’re going in time is more of a rush than any motorcycle or hovercar.”

  “I’ve never ridden in a hovercar.”

  “Well then, we should change that. It looks like we’re going to the 2400’s for dinner.”

  “Alright!” The excitement in her voice surprised her as much as it seemed to please Caden. His entire attitude had shifted from standoffish to boyish. Her change in perception of him might have aided this.

  They got up and began walking back along the beach. The time machine had turned a ruddy burgundy in the setting light. She looked at Caden in the light, smiling to herself. Her annoyance with him had been long forgotten, replaced by a pleasant comfort in his presence that perplexed her. It had taken her years with Greg to feel this comfortable. God, she probably should go back now and skip dinner with Caden. Greg’s mother had said that she was cooking special pasta and hinted that Quinn’s family should come over and join them. She hadn’t thought of Greg at all in the past three days and was suddenly feeling a bout of guilt.

  “For this trip we are going to have to locate a hovercar. We will need to know about definite and indefinite articles.”

  “ ‘A’ is an indefinite article, and ‘an’ is like ‘a’ but placed before a,e,i, o,u. This means that you are not referring to a specific object, but one of many of the same objects. As for ‘the’ it is a definite article, and means that you are referring to an object that both the speaker and listener know.”

  “Impressive. Now, let’s find ourselves a hovercar.”

  They smiled at each other, and stepped into the time machine. Maybe being partners with Caden would not be that bad after all.

  That night she looked online to learn about interrogatives, and repeated the definition to herself so that she would know it for the next day. She hated allowing anyone to best her in any academic area.

  Interrogative sentences ask for information or confirmation or denial of a statement.

  They can be Yes/No interrogatives, like:

  Was she forming a crush on Caden?

  Yes.

  They can be wh-word interrogatives, and elicit open-ended responses, like:

  What the hell was she thinking?

  They can be added on to the end of declarative sentences, like:

  You have a boyfriend, don’t you?

  They can be alternative interrogatives that offer two or more possible responses and begin with auxiliary verbs, like:

  Do you want to complete your training as a time traveler and go on to Princeton, then live in this time as a professor? Or would you rather like a guy that will only bring you deeper into the community of time travelers and detach you from everything you hold dear in this time?