In The Grid: The Assemblage of Aeolian.

    Clearly, Donald Parkinson miscalculated. Clearly, the realm of scientific inquiry he'd entered into should never been attempted alone, without controlling factors to reel him in. Settle in, fellow archaeologists, and learn from his mistake. Learn what the price of failure brings, when you're experimenting with mental abilities long-thought impossible or extinct for homo sapient. Journey with me into the past, where a long-dead man's failure has outlived both him and his legacy. Journey with me to a long-dead civilization called the Aeolians, and what they yielded once discovered. And mourn for Donald Parkinson. We are James Kortum and Karolina Seaman, and this is Stratum, Inc: the only time-travel tourist trip in America, and we thank you for joining us.
    #
    1950's-era Missoula, Montana. It's colder then than it is now. You and I are invisible to the rest of them. They traipse around us in their common lives, paying attention to the minute details that give them no great advantage over us. And we in kind ignore them. This kind of time-travel is imprecise, of course. There's no telling where we'll end up, occasionally. I do apologize for that. All we can really do is hone in on the last few known coordinates for our prey. So we'll hit up different bars in this area. We'll look around libraries for Mr Parkinson. Of course, bars and libraries are two of the most common places to find an archaeologist in this time: as with now, archaeologists are prone to two addictions, the field and the booze. It is no coincidence that our search spans a mere forty-five minutes, and we find Mr Parkinson at the Old Post. As ever, we in the time travel industry find it important to know our prey. Know your enemy, so goes the old adage. And so we did: before we left for this excursion, we memorized every bit of useful data we could. We didn't need to bother disguising ourselves, as we were only incorporeal beings, so that was a nice time-saver. Incidentally, Mr Parkinson was no enemy, merely future urban legend about to hatch from speculation's egg.
    Fascinating work, ours: to watch a man make the most important, and most fatal discovery of his life, yet not be able to intervene at the cost of your own. In the early days of our program, some pioneers tried that very same procedure. They vanished, and legend has it that the universe swallowed them up as a warning against future involvement. Hell hath no fury like a multiverse scorned.
    It was his balding pate and navy blue cardigan that led us to him. Unmistakable in that era, as well, were his owl-like giant-rimmed glasses. In fact, in the right lighting with his bird-shaped frame, one might mistake him for a slightly bearded owl. There we were, hunting this fowl legend of ineptitude as speculative specters, resigned and consigned to forever be merely spectators. Have heart, though: what we witnessed was truly worth our trip.
    We managed to catch Donald Parkinson, thirty-nine, unwed save but to his work and his bottle (both of which would disappear very shortly forever if he did not manage to make some discovery that would justify his next grant) staggering along home. He was clearly intoxicated at a nearly fatal level. Archaeologists have a fascinating predilection towards this sort of thing, at least in colder climates like Montana. It seems that this liquid courage allows them to ignore the bitter colds when they need to most. So it was to some surprise that he staggered off to his lab at the last moment, once he spotted it. It seemed that we caught him just at the nick of time: our records stated he made his world-altering discovery around then.
    Karolina noticed the bones in his lab, first. Even lacking a body, she let out a triumphant shriek! “We did it, James. We did it! He's gonna--”
    I shushed her ferociously. “Not in front of the customers, Karolina! We'll blow the whole trip for them! Let them watch it for themselves!” My intrinsic energy-field radiated anger-energy at her, and she fell silent. Our clients' energies were confused at first, but the outburst's death allowed them to return to a calmer state.
    Yes, much like a scene from Shakespeare, our beloved Donald Parkinson raised one of the paleolithic skulls from the table it was placed on. He regarded it curiously, drunkenly, slightly swaying to and fro as habitual drunks do. “That's it!”, he slurred. “I've figured out why this skeleton's cranial capacity is so randomly different from the others we've found! Like Neanderthals before them, this species was subsumed by homo sapients.”
    Our hearts (back at home, not here) pounded with anticipation. The moment was at hand. We were ready to witness the eureka moment of them all. And we were not disappointed.
    Ã¢â‚¬Å“These were the first telepaths, by jove! I'll be rich! Rich!” Captivated, we knew there had to be more coming of this historic moment. More, sadly, simply meant that Donald Parkinson, anthropology professor at the University of Montana, life-long conservative, and general overall curmudgeon, simply toppled over like a sawed log and puked all over everything.
    Still, we had time on our side. We also had nicely-fossilized indentations of the skull as it lay, in-situ, in the limestone formation it was entombed into once its owner died. It certainly had odd impressions, especially where the frontal and parietal lobes would have been. This made us suppose that the strange drunk's crazed theory could be true: if telepathy were at all possible, it would most likely manifest itself in the frontal and parietal lobes. Yet he'd need more, and we'd need to witness more. More would sadly have to wait until morning, when his body and brain recovered from the liquid poison it ingested only minutes before.
    Classically, there were two schools of thought about our situation. We could return to our own time, and in our own bodies, and monitor the situation from afar. Problematically, there was no way of knowing that we'd return on time, or that we'd even return to the same time. This happened, sometimes: the machines were sometimes difficult to calibrate, regardless of how we fine-tuned them. Precision is as much a matter of perception in relativity as anything else, it seems.
    The other school of thought was simpler: we'd remain in this comparatively prehistoric time, but in a suspended state of being. Time crawled at a much slower rate, to help us appreciate what it was we were experiencing. Our minds became existential sponges, absorbing ludicrous and copious amounts of information about the 1950s, as broadcast by our fellow denizens. We enjoyed it while we were there, though: there was no way we could smuggle this conceptual contraband with us to our time once finished. Our clients didn't know this, and didn't know how to handle all the overload. We guided them as much as possible, but I've heard that most of them went clinically insane once we got back to our time. A shame, that.
    However, our situation took faster than anticipated, for our noble Donald awoke after only five hours of intoxicated sleep. It was time to rejoin the fray, huzzah! It was time to start the day. He cradled the impressions in the limestone lovingly: they were to be his scientific masterwork. He grabbed plaster and tiny brushes, so as to make casts of them. All the while, he muttered to himself. “This is how it starts, you see. These lines, here, they're where the brains transported all that energy. Now I'll simply take these samples to a genetic lab, and see if they can derive any DNA from them. That'll prove once-and-for-all that these guys read each others' minds! Glory! Oh, glory be to discovery and to me for this moment. Glory be!” Chattering to himself excitedly, he almost dropped the fossil before placing it back on his desk ever so gently.
“...close one, old fool. Close one.” He muttered this to himself viciously, and stormed out of the room to call the very same geneticist.
    He came back, moments later, red-faced and embarrassed. “Impossible, he says. Whole thing is rubbish. Why, I've a mind to show him just what rubbish this really is.” He grabbed the skull angrily, studying it with fervent intensity. “The trick is to try to replicate the ratio of this skull's markings where the frontal and parietal lobes rest, and the rest of the brain and skull lie in proportion to it. Yes, that's it.”
    It was then that we witnessed his other break-through. It seems our glorious Donald Parkinson was a believer in keeping an open-mind. He explored aspects of underground culture that mainstream archaeology wasn't ready to embrace, particularly in the 1950s. So it was that we witnessed this social cripple embrace a long-dormant Buddhist meditative technique that broadened the physical structure of his very brain. He groaned lightly, presumably in some sort of moderate pain. It seemed his nose bled slightly for a time. But, triumphant, he arose. Unsteady on his feet, he took a moment to steady his posture.
    And then he looked right at where we were. Impossible. Impossible to a layman, that is. But—could it be? Were we truly witnessing the first modern telepath? Who's there? His inquiry roared through our thoughts like a lion's declaration of impending doom. He clutched at his head, stunned by the sonic-like feedback of the process he'd just initiated. You must hear me, clearly. I can feel you there. But if I'm sensing things that aren't visible, am I mad? Have I failed? Will they remember me as another Peking Man? Donald knelt to the ground in despair. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't have responded. But we had the proof we needed. We witnessed the greatest unknown discovery of all time, even if we could never show it to anyone. It would stay with us in our minds eternally, however.
    We'd timed our exit so as to miss the tragic finale. As ever, sometimes the best intentions do not pan out so well. It seems the esteemed Donald Parkinson, balding, thirty-nine, thought of as a never-was by his colleagues, miscalculated his greatest discovery. He forgot to take into account his own mental state. If one considers the transformation of an every day human being into a telepath (Mundane into Bloomer, nowadays), something to consider is that the process is much like dropping an egg from a height akin to the velocity and gravitational pull of a fall from the Empire State Building. It's quite understandable that Mr Parkinson exploded under the pressure. We tried our damnedest to leave before we experienced what the urban legends claimed happened. Sadly, the impreciseness of our traveling device failed us.
    Donald Parker grabbed a trowel. He made use of that trowel. He made use of that trowel in a creatively disturbing way. And we witnessed the first telepath of the modern era end himself in a manner not fit for discussing in front of young women or children or even most gentlemen. Karolina tried her damnedest not to scream out with her essence, even though such a thing was a practical impossibility. It reverberated on a level most life-forms never feel, out through the universe and possibly through some of the Multiverse as well. She never could handle death well, the poor thing. Right as his body fell, it seems our time machine felt we witnessed all we were meant to.
    And so we awoke in our own time, in our own bodies, with the journey of a life-time and the regret of another's ending that we'd forever grieve for and live with. Yet, we witnessed a legend, and it's rare that anyone else could say the same. I daresay we were the first to witness the rise of the Bloomers, and there are those among us who would object that we should have tried to stop them.
    But that's a story for another time.