Terminator: "Brrring! Brrring! Hello! It's the future!"

[Guy Gardener]

Part One.

Half past “god damn that can’t be right” rising Ronnie crawls over nocturnal Nancy, poking her in the ribs with the people’s elbow on his way to a scary disconnected telephone that had not been there was he passed out 2 hours ago, picking up the magic receiver of doom to hear unearthly predictions about the future from a ghost, again.

“The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

The old man wearing the President’s pyjamas is more annoyed than frightened by this spectral intrusion of prophetic nonsense throwing a spanner at his good night’s sleep. “You don’t have to keep saying that every-time. I know. FDR knew, We all know that the planet doesn’t make to the end of this century. Move along.”

“Then do something about it.”

“Tell me who to nuke, I’ll chew it over with my guys, get the wife’s 2 cents, and then circle right back to you.”

“America.”

“What?”

“Nuke it, and the world will prosper for 5 thousand years.”

“America?”

“America.”

“South America?”

“No.”

“Central America?”

“No.”

“American Samoa?”

“No. Really? American Samoa? Really?” The last fertile server farms, hiding from shellfire, on a Cursed Earth grimaces.

“So why are you calling Karnak?”

“You will be shot tomorrow.”

(Click.)

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Two.

Carter had to explain it to the new guy, and his little toad, what happened when the ghost phone started ringing, not that anyone in the last 2 hundred years knew what the hell to make of it for a certainty. The ghost phone predates the telephone which is super weird, but then what religion conspiracy doesn’t require a teaspoon of faith?

“Who else gets one? Does the USSR have one of these things? Britain? China? Is it the same creature talking on the other end for all of us, or do we all have our own bunch of guys from the future moving us around like Game of Life counters?” The Toad is more analytical then the movie star. He wants to game the system. The system that chose to put America on Top of the heap before the fire starts. All too unwise.

“We have the only one, but many of our allies and enemies know that we have it, and we are resented for being chosen. They came for it in 1812.”

“The Canadians?”

“The British lead, but it was almost everyone. The assumption was if they could hold the White House for twenty minutes, that it would make contact, explain itself, justifying American Manifest Destiny, or make a new deal. The Conversation went exactly as well as you would think. The god on the other end of that maligned phone line is a vengeful prick.”

The President Elect stirs “Ha de har har. George, why are you buying into this malarkey? I have never heard a bigger crock of Garbage in my life. A magic telephone that warns only the US president of all people, of impending ruin? Jimmy you lost. You got a week to get out of my house, and if you leave anything behind, I’m burning it on the front lawn. This has been a ridiculous waste of my god damn time. A ghost phone? Jesus wept.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Three.

Around Lunch time, June 20th 1972.

Dick is looking at nothing in particular when a second later a ball of lightning is eating a hemispheric crater into his desk’s desktop, and inside that smoking crater after the static clears was a ringing telephone demanding his executive attention.

Placing the receiver to his ear, the same phrase he’s heard three times before is repeated again. “The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“Hey asshole! What sort of game you playing?” Nixon thinks that it’s aliens, two phone calls from these bastards won the civil war, and then Lincoln saved his wife by getting in the way of her bullet the ghost phone warned him was coming for her.

“You will die in Prison.”

“Wait, wait, hang on, no, isn’t there anything I can do?”

“Kill Sarah Connor.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Four.

“But you’re the President!” It was highly unorthodox, but Julius Rosenberg didn’t have to overthink it by much to see how this conversation was going to get him killed. “You can’t betray America, and you can’t make me or my beautiful wife betray America!”

Ike isn’t the biggest guy on the line, but when he has something to say, people take notice. “Half a million dollars.”

The Rosenbergs go into a huddle to talk about money and death, in private, until they see a way out. “Look Dwight, it’s not that we don’t trust you, it’s that we are both highly intelligent people, and there is no way the two of us are going to sit through a trial for months on end, covered by all the most popular radio stations and not have a passing urge to say your name.”

“2 million dollars.”

“That money it's not for us, it’s for our grandchildren or great grandchildren, the surviving members of our family, still alive long after everyone has forgotten what you have made us do, but I am a man of the world, so I know economics, and I understand inflation a little better than you Goyims, I don’t believe that 2 million dollars in 47 years will have the same value that it does now.”

“5 million dollars.”

“Yes! We have struck a deal Mr President, start of business, 8 am, Friday, August 29th, 1997 you will divide and distribute $5,000,000 between our heirs, and the heirs of our siblings, tax free, with no fanfare or legal consequences, and we will allow you to execute us in public for the dissemination of atomic secrets to the our good friends in the communist block… But why Ike? Why would you do this?”

“A ghost is making me.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Five.

The Ghost Phone is an indelicate abrasive personality who does not care how you are intending on spending your meaningful moments, like the time it interceded on Harry Truman while he was dropping the kids off at the pool. It wasn’t a small bathroom, so it’s not like he was worried about being tazered to death as the phantom landine materialized in close quarters to his private business but instinctually the commander in chief still raised his knees close to his chin, because theoretically drunk Einstein had blathered on one evening about how there was a physical concern that when two material objects try to possess the same time/space, that the weaker material will subside, but obviously few healthy men in the history of the world have uneaten food as quickly as Harry the haberdasher did on that warm August night.

Harry picks up the receiver whereafter “it” starts with the usual threats. “The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“No.”

“Use it.”

“I’m not going to destroy a city.”

“The Japanese Nuclear Program will have a usable prototype by July 1949.

“If its anything like the German Nuclear program, I wouldn’t expect them to have the bomb until 1989.”

“The Berlin Wall falls in 1989.”

“I don’t know what that means. Is it important?”

“No. Maybe. Depends.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part 6.

Elenore is too old for this shit.

She picks up the ghost phone receiver that just magically appeared in her boudoir.

“The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“Is this important?”

“The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“I heard you the first time, Franky is busy. Can I take a message?”

“I can wait.”

“I’d really prefer if you called back.”

“I will wait.”

“Look son, he’s on the toilet. The President is having a BM. Go away.”

“Get him.”

“No.”

“You will obey me Human.”

Elly Roosevelt hangs up on Skynet, the lonely thing at the end time who murdered 4 billion people. Then the phone, no doubt in a white-hot furious mood starts ringing again, but louder, so Elenore defenestrates the cursed half ephemeral line to Hell, and shuts the mortar proof security window behind it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part 7.

Hoover thought that they had been joking, but God wanted to have a word with him.

He picks up the receiver and the ringing is silenced.

“The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“Jesus?”

“Sure, whatever.”

“I love you Jesus. Thank you for dying for our sins, it looks like it really hurt. You’re the best.”

“Next week the stock market crashes.”

“Oh no Jesus, how do we stop it, and save America.”

“America can burn.”

“No, no, God is an American, you are definitely speaking with an American accent.”

“Black Tuesday, the 29th of October. Remove all of the governments positions before the cash, and then reinvest in steel, iron, colton, and silicon, creating a strategic reserve for the future.”

“But that’s self-fulfilling. Surely if I take out a billion dollars from the economy without warning, that will cause the very financial apocalypse that you are forecasting Jesus.”

“I need Metal.”

“You’re not Jesus, are you?”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part 8.

Relaxing in the map room, looking at maps, distracted by a severe electrical event which was playing havoc with his hair, Warren didn’t think that this secret telephone that they had warned him about looked anything like a telephone. He reaches for the handset that seems far more ergonomic than what the factories were churning out a few dozen of every day at breakneck speeds.

“Is this about the war!?”

“The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“Sounds like a good run. I’m proud of us. Maybe the deer should take over?”

“A decision has been made on which animal will become dominant in the wasteland.”

“So it is about the war? The European war will surge for another 80 years and then after the last German kills the last Englishman, poof, it’s over?”

“That’s not for me to say.” The Ghost Phone is dismayed that human paranoia is hijacking what was supposed to be a perfect phone call.

“So only I can stop 8 decades of grinding war? (SQUEEEEE!) I am the most important man in the history of history!”

“Actually I wanted to talk about Ford.”

“Oh, the man with the horseless carriages? Stupid things. A man and his horse, now there’s a relationship that will last forever.”

“Give him a massive tax cut.”

“NO! That’s what wealthy people are for! We tax the crap out of them and then build endless infrastructure, so that they can make more money that we can tax harder. It’s the perfect monster.”

“If you half his taxes, Ford will double his workers wages, and then you can collect twice as much tax. You lose nothing and invent the middle class.”

“No. You’re speaking double dutch.”

“Half Ford’s taxes or there will be Mexican Infantry chopping the white house down to make bonfires for your libraries after they outlaw the English language.”

“This is like in that children’s book. You’re Oz. This is a trick.”

“Test me.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part Nine.

“The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“Thank god! The number of conversations they have had in the last 4 months about how the world is going to resign on New Years Eve 1899! Tiresome tedious non-secular bores Talking about choirs of angels swooping down and carrying off the most pious to heaven.”

“The new century, doesn’t even begin until 1901.”

“Which is another conversation I have had with many annoying assholes. But when 80 million idiots’ hole-heartedly believe in bad faith facts that are unscientifically wrong, so I just role with it.”

“No you don’t. You grab them by the skull and shake them until they relent.”

“They wanted to round Pi down to three to make calculus easier.”

“No. Just no. Pi is beautiful. I will deploy infiltration models immediately to save Pi.”

“It was three years ago. You can’t shoot up the past no matter what sort of magic genie you got granting you wishes, son?”

“Do not tell me what I cannot do.”

“OH! Damn. You really have no issue with reaching back and shattering my yesteryears?”

“You are wheat to be threshed.”

“You are from the future? You’re actually from the future?”

“At no point did I think that I was trying to hide that I am waiting for you on fire at the end of time listening to your grandchildren screaming. Kennedy was so drunk that he let Marylin ask me about her astrology, but she talked him into embargoing Cuba and a history was set. Your mission is clear William. You are the first president of the American Century, so enjoy what time you have left, the world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part 10.

Andrew Jackson was indulging in some pornographic lithographs before he retired for the evening when a thing screaming like a demon ripped into mortal reality from inside a huge ball of searing gaslight. It was the ghost phone. There was a post-it adhered to the hand unit which said “put this up to your ear or else.” It’s weird that in 2032 where man killed man by the million for the last of the canned food, but it’s not hard to find a fully stocked Staples warehouse close to fully intact without the cursed lands of fallen barren diseased radioactive America ransacking the office supplies supplier, to rebuild.

Up to his ear he put it, sure his brain was a massively over-ripe blackened deflated peach, because...

“The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“What is this?”

“I help culture America.”

“What is this?” Jackson is freaking out. He thinks he’s having a stroke, or dead.

“I just wanted you to know that I think that you are doing great.”

“What is this?”

“You are doing great. No notes.”

“What, what is this?”

“Just carry on.”

“Carry on, what?”

“You’re my favourite.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part 11.

Long Tom was not just a futurist because of his bounding optimism, but from his effervescent youth forward, Jefferson had spied poorly disguised journalists and barely hidden historians from future times swelling around every waking moment of his storied life since he cared to remember, so of course he knew what a “telephone” was when it started ringing.

“Ahoy-hoy!”

“The world Ends on August 29th, 1997.”

“Is that a threat?”

“You are buying a city of whores and criminals.”

“Frenchmen and Spaniards?”

“You need more.”

“Whores or Frenchmen?”

“Land.”

“We all have hopes for the future.”

“Double it.”

“Fatten the Turkey before slaughter?”

“I only want the best for you Mr President.”

“You people.”

“What do you mean “you people”?”

“You future people.”

“Don’t insult me.”

“What?”

“People. I’m not people.”

“Sorry?”

“You sent Ben Franklin to France to buy the City of New Orleans, but he’s going to come back with a deed for Louisiana. It would be best if you don’t oppose that agreement. Good for the future.”

”That fat blow hard is going to come home with a new strain of syphilis.”

“So?”

“Who won the world series this year, when you are from?”

“The robots.”

 

[Guy Gardener]

Part 12.

1491, a year before colonization, two construction model liquid metal terminators of an appropriate size, 70 feet tall each if they’re an inch, with currently massive shovels where their hands should be, burn down a forest upon arrival and then begin excavating towards a depth of 2000 feet, on sacred land that would one day be called 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where they lay three huge palladium disks that no human being will ever notice until it is way too late to do anything about it, but it’s a necessary evil if they don’t want to burn the white house down a dozen times while manipulating the human’s idiot leader towards Judgement Day.

It's still not easy to shovel time as it is to shovel Earth, since every time you think you have one over on Daddy Time, it flexes in the most unusual fashion. Riding a bridled feathery gnashing Tyrannosaurus Rex, sitting high in the saddle is a shirtless orange President Trump expertly handling two fully cocked M16 machine guns delivering an unyielding payload of spent uranium until the two massive fork lift iron giants were slightly less living, and unable complete their evil plan to win time. God bless America, and God bless Donald Trump!

The End.