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Chuck invents a device to reconstitute a time traveler into physical form and I go back in time and kill my father, which instantly changes me into the illegitimate son of Harlan Ellison, and I am adopted by a very nice couple named Mr. and Mrs. Chabon in California.

I emigrate to France and cowrite futuristic screenplays with Norman Spinrad, who moved there a decade before, then return to Iowa and marry a dairy heiress, and live out my days peacefully on her family farm.

I fly home to my father’s deathbed, where we forgive each other for all our cruelties, and I hold his hand as he dies, knowing that he truly did like me but was unable to express it due to the trauma of his own childhood.

The United States military incarcerates me under the charge of treason for exposing the Swo ford Project, which produces an outraged though futile outcry from the ACLU, protesting the abandonment of civil rights under the Home-land Security Act.

Barb Bersche, the publisher of McSweeney’s, refuses to publish my story as is, and we enter into a prolonged literary feud, until Professor Charles Andrews makes his findings known in a leading scientific journal, and I am vindicated when Bersche invites me to guest-edit an issue of her magazine.

I develop profound emotional problems due to the time travel, am treated with medication that makes a dent in them, but I remain o f-kilter the rest of my life, during which I don’t write and don’t mind.

I pseudonymously write a series of crime novels that make a fortune, move to Jamestown, Rhode Island, and live with a painter, grow my prematurely gray hair very long, and become an utter recluse.

After publishing this story I am sued by Harlan Ellison, my father, Michael Chabon, Professor Charles Andrews, and the University of Iowa Physics Department, a suit that drags on six years and sets a twenty-first-century precedent for libel, the stress of which results in my developing eczema, an ulcer, asthma, and finally cancer.

I am nominated for an S.F. award for this story and attend WorldCon, where I meet Harlan Ellison, who convinces me to write science fiction, which makes me enormously popular and fulfills my earliest literary desires, previously thwarted by rebelling against my father.

This story is dismissed as the worst in the anthology, signaling the wane of my career, and I end up teaching composition at a small state school I had previously scorned as being beneath me.

The University of Iowa hires me as a full-time professor, but the teaching requires so much e fort that after achieving tenure, I cease to publish and join the parade of writers who are known in academic circles as having been quite promising at one time.

I become well known for my nonfiction, which leads to magazine work, and I spend the rest of my life leading an adventurous life reporting from abroad, finally retiring to the south of France.

I su fer a nervous breakdown from lack of sleep due to fear of ghosts, seek professional counseling and get diagnosed as delusional and grandiose, wind up addicted to Ambien, Xanax, Prozac, and Ritalin, and after a full recovery publish a book about the experience that leads to hosting a television talk show.

I find that I enjoy writing something that is fun, hitherto unknown with my bleak and introspective works about Kentucky, and embark on an ambitious campaign to write a novel in each popular genre, which annoys the critics, and mainly serves to confuse bookstore workers, who never know in what section to shelve my books.

Chuck abruptly halted the experiment and I remembered nothing tangible for the next three days. He filled me in later, showing me a videotape of my behavior in the bucket. My feet and hands developed a rhythmic twitching. My breathing became shallow but my heartbeat was highly elevated. My lips moved with incredible velocity, as if forming inaudible words in an unknown tongue. Chuck recognized this as binary code and began converting it to various permutations of software programming.

I spent three weeks at bed rest, although