Chương 50: Chapter 49: The Crash (03/17/1984)

DATE: Saturday, March 17, 1984 LOCATION: La Jolla, California | The Sand Castle LOCAL TIME: 02: 00 AM PST The heavy steel door of the subterranean bunker sealed shut behind me, cleanly slicing off the roar of the Pacific Ocean. Down here, surrounded by Roman concrete and the low hum of the Archstone servers, the air was perfectly climate-controlled. It was quiet. It was the only place on earth where I didn't have to act.

I walked over to my workstation, reaching up with clumsy fingers to unclip the cheap Sears bow tie my mother had made me wear for The Tonight Show. I tossed it onto the steel desk. I felt physically hollowed out. My eight-year-old central nervous system was flooded with the toxic aftermath of adrenaline, spent from lying to ten million people with a flawless, boyish grin.

"You survived the King of Late Night," a gentle, gravelly voice echoed from the corner. Buckminster Fuller sat at a massive drafting table under a halo of warm tungsten light, peering through his thick glasses at a complex wireframe blueprint.

"I survived," I said. My voice dropped instantly from the high-pitched chirp of 'Young Chad' to the weary, flat baritone of a fifty-four-year-old man. I dragged myself up into the oversized leather chair beside him.

"I looked right into Camera One and sold them a fairy tale. I didn't even blink, Bucky. It was too easy." I stared at the glowing green text on my terminal. The memory of the Splash premiere still suffocated me. Earlier that day, Evelyn had confirmed the final delivery of the negatives to Vanessa Williams. The media machine had been starved of its prey. I remembered my daughters in the original timeline watching the media tear young women apart, learning brutal lessons about how the world treats vulnerable girls.

I had spent the last four years building a multi-million-dollar corporate fortress exactly so I could intervene.

"I felt it in the theater," I confessed, the bunker's sterile silence pulling the truth out of me.

"Watching the mermaid on screen, trying to mimic the humans so she wouldn't get dissected. I'm a monster, Bucky. I'm a cold, calculating machine wearing a child's skin, manipulating my own parents." Without looking up, Bucky muttered, "You sound cranky. Maybe you just need a nap. It sounds like you had a big day."

"Maybe you're right," I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose with a small hand.

"I keep catching myself on the verge of tears, or a few seconds away from a temper tantrum." Bucky stopped examining the blueprint. He set his pencil down and turned his chair to face me.

"It's exhausting," I said, leaning my head back against the heavy leather.

"And the body almost always wins. I have the mind of a fifty-four-year-old, but I'm trapped inside an eight-year-old's chemistry. When I got the flu last winter, my adult mind knew exactly what was happening. I knew it was just a routine virus. But this body doesn't care what my mind knows." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. I looked down at my patent leather shoes, dangling six inches above the concrete floor.

"The panic is completely primal," I continued.

"My temperature spikes, and my heart races like I'm dying. I can sit there in bed, perfectly rational, completely calm in my head, while my tear ducts just open up and I start sobbing uncontrollably." Bucky nodded slowly, a deep empathy in his eyes.

"It's a humbling thing, being trapped by your own biology. I watched Anne go through menopause. She is the most intelligent, rational woman I know. But none of her intellect mattered when her hormones began to shift. The chemistry simply overrode the logic," Bucky said.

"Did you have any memories of that with Olga?"

"Not that I remember. Olga was forty-five when I left, and I was only around maybe one month out of the year for the previous three years." I rubbed my eyes and let out a dry, hollow laugh, the sheer absurdity of my situation briefly cutting through the guilt.

"You know what the worst part is, Bucky?" I dropped my hands to my lap.

"The guilt. Not about the money, or the timelines, or playing God. It's the guilt about my own kids. Back in my original timeline... I was a father. I had small children." Bucky remained perfectly still, letting me unravel the thought.

"When my kids were this age, I expected them to be rational," I confessed, the shame heavy in my throat.

"I expected them to listen to logic.

'Calm down,' I'd tell them.

'Stop crying, it's not a big deal.' I used to get so frustrated when they'd melt down over being tired, or hungry, or overstimulated. I kept trying to force them to act like miniature adults. I lost track of the fact that they were literally biologically incapable of it." I pressed my small hands against my face, feeling the sheer vulnerability of my own skull.

"Now I have the exact same body they had. I feel the panic of a blood sugar drop. It isn't a choice; it's a physical takeover. And I punished my kids for it. I stood there, a grown man, getting angry at a child for not being able to out-think their own chemistry. I had no idea what a warzone their little bodies were." Bucky's eyes crinkled with a sad, humanist understanding.

"We frequently mistake biological limits for moral failings," he observed gently.

"You were expecting children to have the emotional regulation of adults, Chad. You didn't have the perspective you have now. You couldn't feel the storm from their side."

"I didn't have the empathy," I corrected him quietly.

"I just had the expectations." Bucky absorbed the deep regret of a father who finally understood his children forty years too late.

"A difficult lesson to learn," he murmured.

"Your mind is moving at the speed of a seasoned executive, but it's running on the volatile engine of a child. And your expectations for them were just as mismatched." I let out another exhausted laugh.

"And you know what the truly terrifying part is? This is just the warmup phase. Right now, I'm just fighting off sleep deprivation, missed naps, and sugar crashes. In about four or five years, I'm going to hit puberty." Bucky offered a rare, sympathetic chuckle, pushing his thick glasses up his nose.

"If a simple blood sugar drop makes me want to throw a tantrum," I said, shaking my head, "imagine what a flood of adolescent testosterone is going to do to a fifty-four-year-old man's brain. I'm going to have the geopolitical leverage of a superpower, and I might accidentally initiate a hostile corporate takeover just because some girl in homeroom didn't smile at me."

"Nature's ultimate disruption," Bucky agreed, highly amused.

"Puberty is chaos even for a normal boy. For you... well, you'll have to build some very strong mental safeguards, Chad, or you're going to make some spectacularly bad decisions."

"I'm going to have to lock myself in this bunker until I'm twenty," I muttered.

"Or at least throw this Donkey Kong Game & Watch at the wall." I stared blankly at the wall for a long moment, the silence of the room settling heavily over me. My brain sluggishly replayed the last five minutes of conversation.

"Wait..." I blinked, turning back to him.

"Did you say menopause?" Bucky smiled, turning back to his blueprints.

"Get some sleep, Architect. The empire will be here tomorrow."