Chronesthesia
What if you could go back and do it all again? Jump back in time, re-enter your own life and live it a new way? What would you do? Make better career choices? Better romantic choices? Stop a tragedy? What would you do if time travel, so long the stuff of fiction, were real?
By the second decade of the 21st century, it is. Time travel is finally available to anyone who can find out where to get it and can afford to pay. But you don’t sit in a time machine and move the lever forward to go to the future or back to go to the past. You don’t stand in a transporter room and beam yourself back to days of old when knights were bold. You don’t fly through a wormhole in space and you sure as hell don’t drive to the past in a DeLorean. You do it with a drug. A very illegal and very expensive drug that everyone wants but few can obtain.
Niccolo Bonetti wanted to escape his sins by jumping back in time, and what he wants he gets, because Nick is the meanest Mafia hood in L.A. He didn’t go back to do good. He went back to get revenge on everyone who ever crossed him. But his second trip through life isn’t turning out to be quite what he’d planned.
Somebody came back after him to get their own revenge, and instead of living the perfect life he’s in a duel in his own past with an unknown enemy — someone with knowledge of the future equal to his own, and a very serious beef with the gangster people call Nicky Bones. Any of a hundred bitter enemies could be just a shadow behind him, and that’s not even the worst of his troubles.
He doesn’t know it yet, but up ahead, in a new future for which he has nobody to blame but himself, the cop he thought he’d escaped in 2019 hasn’t quit looking for him. And what Detective Jimena Flores wants, she gets.
Nicky Bones is about to learn that time travel is not an escape.
It’s a trap.
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Regarding the title: Be assured that chronesthesia (mental time travel) is really a thing. The journal article my characters are writing at the start of the story is just something I made up, but the reference cited within it is is not.
Consciousness of Subjective Time in the Brain, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), by Lars Nyberg, Alice S. N. Kim and Reza Habib, is a real published journal article as cited in the story. If you have a head for tech stuff, you can find it | Here |
Regarding Lyndon Baines Johnson: Before you take me to task for having LBJ’s appearance in Chronesthesia feature him using the ugliest word anyone can call an African American, read this well researched and skillfully written essay on the contradictions of the man who did so much for the civil rights cause. (I especially like the part about the gas station guy with the tire iron.)
I researched LBJ in order to make his cameo appearance in my story seem as realistic as I could. That’s the job. | More Here |
There is also the book The Man Who Killed Kennedy, by Roger Stone, which is terribly edited but much of the material in it can be corroborated elsewhere, so it strikes me as legitimately researched even if it is highly subjective. You can get it | Here |
Regarding time travel: Einstein said maybe and Hawking said no way. Michael Crichton seemed to be saying what the hell, other times are the same as other universes, so let’s just go.
But for the actual physics vs. the fiction of it, here are two articles that summarize the real science quite nicely | Here | and | Here |
Finally, regarding the music: If you read with the right kind of ears there’s music in a novel, because all of those pictures unspooling in your head make every novel a movie of the mind, and you sure can’t have a movie without a soundtrack.
Readers with a head full of classic rock might happen to think of some of it when reading certain words and phrases, the English language being what it is. But here is a link to the finest movie-reading music of all: The website of The Warning, a new band that completely outclasses everything that came before them, just as The Who once did when guys like me were young.
The Warning is a dish best served LOUD, so try cranking the volume on Animosity or 21st Century Blood when you hit the end of Chronesthesia. This band’s music has a way of staying inside your head, though. Be warned.
