If you are like me, you have more fun watching movies the second and third times over. Missing bits fall into place, you are ready for parts that flashed past you too fast the first time. There is also the added fun of having an as yet uninitiated one around so you can keep nudging him/her before the juicy bits come on screen.

Picture then, me with my roomie watching The Matrix Reloaded. The man hadn’t seen a comic book till he was twenty or so. Before the movie started, I had my suspicions about the seemingly overloaded dose of sci-fi I was going to administer him.

An hour into the movie, the suspicions remained. When the credits came up I thought I had imagined the discomfort. The guy seemed to be taking it well.

A bit too well.

Third time over, I realised what I have always known. It is useful to pay attention to suspicions. He pointed at Laurence Fishburne and said, “This guy…. Trinity…. he’s a robot right?”

Gasp! The Wachowski brothers would have turned in their graves. But they are not dead.

Could be mere chance but I seem to be running into plenty of Economics oriented bloggers of late. My limited time spent in Economics lectures was anything but pleasant. But in due course I managed to put that to fair use. The idea is hardly original. It is a way of proving that time travel is possible.

The way our professor told us, the law of diminishing marginal utility works like this: You pay a fruit seller five bucks for an apple the first time. Then you get partially full and are not willing to pay five for the next one you buy. You pay four.

The seller keeps shoving apples into your hands and you pay less each time. He eventually gives you apples for free. When you can’t take any more apples, he pays you to eat apples. Eventually you start charging five bucks for every apple you take.

Now, look this way. If you were to run to the end of the street, touch the telephone pole, and run back to your starting point, you would finish it in, say, five seconds. Assuming that the amount of energy available to you is infinite and that you go faster each time you run to the pole and back, you finish the next trip in four, then three and then two seconds.

Going on, you eventually get to zero (thoretically possible) and then enter negative time. This means, in simple terms, you get back to your starting point even before you leave it.

Yeah yeah, paradox and all. Infinite energy is a farther than the farthest cry. Even energy worth the speed of light is something we may not lay claim to unless we have a black hole or two at our command. That will take some time.

In the meantime all our grandmothers can sleep in peace in their childhoods. No mean murderous time travelling grandsons/daughters coming their way!

There are only so many ways in which you can say ‘old man’. None of them entirely inoffensive. Alezor had an extremely eventful century and a half behind him. He had stood up for truth and justice and things like that. He had battled whatever forces had appeared evil to him in their time. He was an inspiration to good beings in his world and beyond (or so he liked to believe).

Of course, all of this would not have been possible if a freak coincidence had not turned on his latent psychic powers and given him almost god-like invulnerability. It happened when he was young and in school. Once, when he was idling away on the grass, a bully singled him out from among the half a dozen other too-sissy-for-sports kids at the end of the playfield and started twisting his arm. As the pain seared through his being, he seemed to feel a kind of angry abandon that was not his. Without realising it, he was channeling his tormentor’s feelings and feeding off them. As the anger shot through him, he grabbed at something and swung it into the bully’s ribs. It hurt. First the bully and then young Alezor himself, because he still felt what the other one did. But while the brute simply slumped to the ground, Alezor was caught in that moment of agony. He froze.

At almost the same time, far above the playfield and beyond the clouds that drifted over it, in airless space, two cosmic beings of an immortal nature fought to settle scores. One, as is usual, was losing. He needed that little extra edge, a slight nudge from without to outdo his opponent and save face. There were psychics on innumerable worlds, connected to each other and to him too, watching the stellar showdown.

Back in the playfield, young Alezor snapped out of his state and let out something that might be called a psychic scream of sorts. It swept the skies and blew past the clouds into the airless where the cosmic combatants were at each other’s throats. Our man, the loser, saw the wave and knew his time was come. With skills that only cosmic beings of an immortal nature possess and that lowly mortals will never know of, he channeled the wave of psychic energy to his own advantage and blew his opponent into another dimension or something.

As his galaxy-wide audience cheered him, he soared down seeking the source of the wave. Young Alezor was discovered. Many of the psychics in the cosmic beings’ network gasped. Never before had they known such potential in any being in all the worlds they were gods of. Such might and such energy and such foul pent up anger. The one in debt of Alezor freed his mind by connecting him to himself and every other psychic in the known universe. Alezor knew all others in the network at once. He felt the winds from a million worlds brush his face and he felt capable. He kicked the bully lying at his feet in the stomach.

Alezor had, as has been noted before, centuries behind him. That time and many others have passed now. But the old god who keeps losing his staff and would have forgotten his robes on some desolate peak long ago had it not been for the devoted spirits that owe allegiance to him, feels a shiver run up his spine every now and then. The most trying of times is still to come, his heart tells him. But he is an old man.

People publish matter on the web because they want to and they can. The medium is not like the precursors of ‘publishing’. Earlier, one had to be able to write, one had to get noticed and get published (alternatively, one had to pay to get published and thus get noticed), the audience one targeted had to appreciate what one published. All this would naturally translate into further notice and continued publication.

The blogosphere seems to exist as something so much in contrast to this older model that it becomes hard to imagine that the process has anything to do with actual people at all.

I think I am better qualified than most to undertake something of this magnitude. Without much further ado, I give you…. vijay’s master plan for world domination.

It is really simple actually. First, live a rich life and contribute to the growth of human civilisation in every way possible. Live the course of your natural life and enjoy every pleasure of the flesh possible. Then, when the right time and chance make themselves available, move into an artificial and therefore, sturdier body. Transfer all your memories and intelligence into the robot body’s brain.

Then while you enjoy the fame and glory your ‘contributions’ have gotten you, wait for some wise nut to invent the time machine. Better yet, invent it yourself!

Secure a specimen for yourself and wait as long as possible. In the meantime, keep contributing. Make the world as dependent upon your stuff as you can.

Then, one day, blast off into the past, find yourself, younger by fifteen thousand years and kill him.

Funny thing about super powers, they always go to the other guy. You may be the most enthu candidate for the job willing to take up the whole saving-the-day business in full earnest, but it will always be the bloke from the doomed planet or the dud of a scientist carrying out an experiment in the middle of a god forsaken desert or a stupid, stupid teeny bopper who goes and gets himself bitten by a radio active spider who gets the super powers. And then they have to make it sound like a ‘burden’ by using words like guilt and responsibility. Show offs!!