Lovers Out of Time

from the preface

Welcome to the first installment of my novel-in-progress and also the first short audio of my dreaming insights. Glad there are some other crazies like me out there into this kind of thing. As Kurt Vonnegut said, sane people seem crazy in a crazy world!

Here’s the audio, then below it the intro to the novel. Everyone is getting this but next week only paid subscribers will. Gotta provide some extra value for the $8 a month. I know, I’m competing with Netflix, etc. so thanks for the support!

Lovers Out of Time

An angel saw God creating human beings and warned:

“You're making them as powerful as you are.”

God laughed. “Don’t worry. I'm going to split them in two: male and female.

If they can ever manage to put themselves back together,” he mused,

“they’ll know how to handle their power.”

Then He smiled at the angel and said:

“You know, they could use some help.”

Origins

This story began for me on a Tuesday evening in September of 2000. My wife and I were watching a movie at home in Maui when we heard three distinct knocks at our door. It startled us because our home is very open, with screened decks on all sides, and we can always hear footsteps when someone approaches. But we heard no footsteps that evening.

I paused the film and walked tentatively into the foyer, turning on lights and calling out as I went. There was no one at the door. But someone had definitely been there and they’d left a small package on the doorstep.

I carried it back to our den where we unwrapped it, thinking that perhaps a friend had dropped off something and chose to spare us the interruption of a conversation at this late hour. Inside, we found a thick stack of notes, some typed, most handwritten. It seemed to be an extensive journal of sorts, written by someone named Robert Cameron.

We’d never heard of him. Neither had anyone else in our community, I soon discovered. And we never found out who gave us the package. Oddly, the last journal entry read December 3, 2001, which was over a year in the future at that time. I decided this must be a science fiction manuscript that someone wanted me to critique. I’m a writer and have done that for friends when asked. But there was no note of explanation.

Why the mystery?

About a week later, after I’d glanced through the papers a few times, I began reading in earnest. That proved as frustrating as examining pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with no picture of what the assembled result should look like. But the pieces were fascinating, and I was quickly hooked.

Suddenly I had a new hobby, organizing those bits and pieces into some kind of a coherent story. The process took me a few years, off and on, and included some intriguing research, most of it done pre-internet.

My wife and I moved back to the mainland a few years later and the box containing these materials was lost en route, along with clothing and some artwork. I more or less forgot about it for over ten years. Then one night, the phone rang. My wife picked up and a moment later, she called out to me.

“That was so weird,” she said, as I sprawled on the coach beside her. “Here.” I read the note she’d scrawled. It was an address which I recognized as a few blocks away and, under it, the word “NOW” in capital letters.

“What’s this?” I asked.

She shrugged. “The phone call. This guy says you have to go there, right now. Says it’s important.”

“Well, who was he?”

“He said his name was Robert Cameron.”

The hair on my arms stood straight up. “Robert Cameron? You’re kidding.”

“You know him?”

“Know him? That’s the guy... from that crazy manuscript someone left us back on Maui, the guy who supposedly wrote those notes. It’s his story!”

I grabbed the keys, was out the door, found the street, and slowed to read numbers. There. I hit the brakes, sprang out of the car, and found a cardboard box at the curb. There was just enough light from a nearby streetlight to read the note pasted on top of it: “It’s time.”

The box wasn’t taped shut so I opened it and immediately recognized the lost manuscript and all my research papers. Incredible! I hoisted it into the car, got it home, and resumed working on the story. Long story short, here it is, over 20 years since that knock on the door in Maui and this story is finally going to print. I’m proud to include it with my two recent books as the final installment in The Humanity Trilogy. If you’ve read those, or when you do, you’ll see how they all fit together.

Most of this manuscript was assembled in the 90‘s and contains references to pay phones, audio tapes, and answering machines. I’ve left all that as is. I’ve also preserved Cameron’s “voice,” which is simplistic, almost innocent in places, and he doesn’t do a whole lot of character development. Obviously, Cameron wasn’t a writer, but what a story! In those places where I couldn’t fix or figure out what he was saying in his notes, I’ve added explanations or speculations at the bottom of the page. And, sometimes I just wanted to make a comment in my voice.

Is any of Cameron’s fantastic story true? Is it some sort of prophetic vision of things to come? Or is it a total fantasy, delivered to me by someone too lazy to find a publisher? Or, maybe, afraid to? I have to say, I have noticed a difference since 1999, when the first of the three alignments Cameron writes about supposedly happened. And many of the children born since then do seem different.

I’m hoping that Robert Cameron - if he is a real person and still alive - will find this manuscript wherever it meanders and contact me. I know what I’ll ask him, besides whether his story is true:

“What did you mean with that note on the box that said, ‘It’s time!’”

~ Will Wilkinson, Maui, May 1, 2022