Save Geoffrey

Geoffrey is a genius with an incredible hand for research. He has always been fascinated with time-travel, but when he unlocks the secrets, has he gone too far?

He finally did it; Geoffrey created a stable time travel device. After 30 years of research, he created a cell-phone that would let him travel to the birth of any person he calls, and see them grow up while no time passes during the span of only a few actual hours, so he doesn’t age as he watches the person he called grow up. However, he can also influence the person he called positively or negatively and change how they grow up and how they are in the present.

            Geoffrey remembered how he was bullied in school violently, but although he had friends, he was still made fun of but could never do anything about. He decided that he would call himself, and influence himself to become stronger by acting as his younger-self’s conscience. He dialed his cellphone number with his time-travel cellphone and was whooshed away to his birth.

            He sees the years go by but only starts to get involved during his 5^th grade year, when the first major bullying incident occurs. Instead of running away from it and being afraid for the rest of his life, he told his younger-self to fight back, and to his surprise, his younger-self won. Geoffrey knew that was all he had to do after seeing the people in school the next day stop doing little annoying things to him, and people stopped making fun of him. Geoffrey then watched as his younger self grew up through the 6^th, 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th grades without signs of bullying. He watched a little longer and he noticed his young self was starting to bully others instead of defending, and noticed that each time he would bully somebody; thunderstorms would start, the worse he bullied somebody, the worse the storm. Geoffrey then returned back to the present, and knew he had gone too far. He franticly started trying to research a way to reverse what he had done.

            Before long, he realized that he had no memories of him actually bullying anybody other than when he watched his young-self do the bullying, so he figured that his machine didn’t actually work. He also thought that maybe because he didn’t have the first person experience that it didn’t transfer over to the present, or maybe he had to keep watching himself until the present. Either way, Geoffrey thought that he was safe and the monster he created during his time using his time-travel cellphone was fake and just showed him what it would be like other than actually changing it.

            A few months went by and nothing really changed, he went through his daily routine and worked kept working to perfect his time travel device because he found a few bugs with it. However, after coming home from his lab, he realized that he didn’t have any milk to eat his midnight Lucky Charms snack, so he drove over to the nearest Walmart and picked up to pick up some milk and a few other things, like more cereal. Next thing he knew, it was a blackout. There he was, in the middle of Walmart, with cereal and his milk, ready to spoil if the lights didn’t come back on by the time he got home, Walmart was able to turn their generator on and let people purchase their items before trying to head home, so he headed for the check-out counter.

            As he rushed up there he accidently bumped into somebody and said “Excuse me, I’m terribly sorry.” Just then, he heard a loud strike of lighting, louder than he had ever heard, and saw the strange man look up with fire in his eyes. Geoffrey realized at that moment that his time-travel cellphone actually had worked. The man presumed to be another form of Geoffrey punched the real Geoffrey hard in the chest while yelling profanity while people watched, until the peoples voiced were no longer heard and there was nothing surrounding the two of them, they were in a limbo like state, neither of them said anything for a while, just staring at the nothingness. Geoffrey spoke up and asked the man presumed to be the Geoffrey he guided throughout most of his school life whether or not he was bullied in school. That Geoffrey said; “Only once, in the 5^th grade, but for some reason, I fought back although I wasn’t strong, I felt like running but something inside of me told me to fight. Ever since then, I fought any time somebody annoyed me, hurt me, or even laid a finger on me.” The real Geoffrey responded by saying; “That voice… was me, I was your conscience, I created a device to go back in time and let myself be the person I never was, the person who fought back.” “That’s crazy! Do you realize what you’ve done to me!? I have never been able to live down the voice in my head because of you, but now that we are here at the same time shows that we aren’t even the same person anymore. You are the same you were before you went back in time, you created me, and now we are two souls that are incomplete and without each other, the world has broken. This can’t stay like this, one of us needs to disappear, forever, and I’m not the one going because I’m the one with a gun” exclaimed the Evil Geoffrey as he pulled out a pistol he kept consealed under his shirt. He aimed and fired at the real Geoffrey as he just stood their contemplating what he had done.

            When the bullet struck him, there was no blood, there was no scream, and there was no body. It was just the Evil Geoffrey holding a gun with smoke coming out of the barrel in the middle of a Walmart, with an unmanned cart holding almost spoiled milk and five boxes of Lucky Charms. The Evil Geoffrey knew he was finally complete and the real Geoffrey now because now there was only one Geoffrey, it was him. Not long after the realization, he started screaming, while a flood of knowledge and memories filled his mind. It became apparent that the real Geoffrey was now inside of him, because they are the same people and now that there is only one living in the present, the memories of the old and true Geoffrey were transferred into the new and evil Geoffrey. Not knowing what to do with himself, he had an identity crisis, thinking of himself as two different people in the same body with no real answer as to what to do next.

            Quickly finding himself without a job led him to committing heists on banks and jewelry stores, then selling the contents to fences and other crime lords around the city. It was the day of the biggest heist he would ever commit, it was at one of the smallest but most valuable jewelry stores in all of Europe, he went in and started by pointing his gun at the head of the man running the counter, and after all it was only him, no security guards, and no customers. All he had to do was pull the trigger, but then the man behind the counter quickly pulled out a shotgun from underneath the counter. Both of them froze in place, and Geoffrey’s old self came flooding back to him, he remembered how nice he used to be and how he despised bullies, but how he was always nice and didn’t like hurting others. Just then, Geoffrey dropped his gun, fell to the floor and started crying uncontrollably. He didn’t know how to deal with his double identity.

            Eventually, some police armed to the teeth came in and found Geoffrey in a pool of his own tears, continuously crying about how he didn’t use to be like this and how he thought the real him was dead but all it took was fear to bring the real one back. The police quickly took him away and kept him in a high security prison while he was waiting to be tried for countless murders and robberies. He quickly confessed to the judge while sobbing that he did all of the things that he was charged for and was sentenced to death row and to be executed by the electric chair, by his own choosing.

            While in his cell, waiting for the inevitable, he remembered the fun that he had with his real friends, and the fun he had researching and the mistake he made by negatively influencing his old self. He kept thinking about how terrible he had treated so many others and how he wished he had never created the time-traveling cell phone because of all of the trouble it caused him, and how he wanted to go back and prevent this from happening. He walked off with the guards on the final day to the electric chair and told everybody in the room and anybody that could hear him; “Hindsight is 20-20.”

Author's Note

This is currently a rough draft but I do not expect much to change, and remember that this is my first short story I have written that I have been proud enough to share. This came from me needing to write a short story for my 10th grade English class's blizzard bag assignment where we needed to create a short story about within the Gothic Genre. The picture attached was my outline that I created for the story before I wrote it.