Read Button in the Fabric of Time for Free Online

or subsequent
persons are not truly the identical of the original, because their
life experiences are not the same. Each person has individual
emotions, feelings, and thoughts. That gives them different
personalities. Those who copy others are more like the person they
copy than they would be if they were the child of that person, but
it isn’t the same as being their child. Each person records his or
her DNA, and records are kept to prevent confusion.”
    “Well, it’s confusing to me,” I said. I
looked at the other people who had gathered and was keenly aware
that they were smiling, watching, and listening. They weren’t
joining in on the conversation, but their expressions showed the
intensity of their curiosity.
    Roc-2 and Jan-3 said goodbye to them and led
me to the transporter. The transporter is what I had seen earlier,
and was walking towards, when I heard their laughter. The station
was a glass enclosure attached to a glass tube that had an opening
in the side.
    Roc-2 pressed numbers on the surface of a
pedestal, and a cocoon-shaped glass compartment appeared. We got
in, and Roc-2 pressed another set of numbers. The door closed, and
we moved silently and smoothly away. Only the changing view
indicated that we were moving. The temperature in the keri was
perfect, and its softly textured seats felt wonderful.
    “How did you manufacture a machine that
operates so silently?” I asked.
    “It is silent because there are no moving
parts,” Roc-2 replied. “The keri generates and travels in its own
magnetic field.”
    “How do you prevent collisions?”
    “There’s no possibility of colliding,” Roc-2
replied. “All keris travel in their own positively charged magnetic
field. It works the same as two like-charged magnets. They repel
one another.”
    “That’s remarkably simple, but how do you
propel them?”
    “That’s equally simple,” Roc-2 said.
“Like-fields of magnetism repel, and unlike fields compel. The
operator controls the magnetic force by directing it to compel in
the direction he or she wants to travel, and they control the speed
by controlling the strength of the compelling force. We travel at
extremely high speed in only special areas.”
    “How fast can the keri go?”
    “Theoretically, it could travel at the speed
of light, but some undesirable things happen when we approach the
speed of light, so we don’t go that fast,” Roc-2 explained.
    I looked down and saw what in the
twenty-first century was called California. I had flown over this
terrain many times, and the outline of the mountains and valleys
was the same as I had remembered, but the canyons once dry and
ugly, were now flourishing and resembled a magnificent park. Bright
clear streams ran through the canyons and flowed to the sea.
Wildlife was everywhere. The countryside was clean and orderly,
with no evidence of animal or plant waste.
    “How do you keep everything so clean, and
what do you do with the waste?”
    “Thousands of people clean the land daily,
and there is no waste. We discard nothing. Everything is collected,
processed, reduced to its elemental components, and then converted
to other uses,” Roc-2 explained.
    “What do you mean; you reduce it to its
elemental components?” I asked.
    “As an engineer, you know that all matter is
comprised of elements,” Roc-2 explained. “Most of what you refer to
as waste is carbon-based. Our historians tell us that in your time
you burned or buried it. We use solar energy to incinerate it at
temperatures in excess of five thousand degrees Celsius, which
reduces it to carbon, metal, and gasses. We use the carbon and
metal in many ways, and then release the beneficial gasses back
into the atmosphere. We reduce the harmful gasses to their elements
and either reuse them or return them to the earth where they become
plant food.”
    “In my time, this was a desert. Where did you
get the water to irrigate it?”
    “I don’t understand your question, ‘where did
we get