Chương 83: Tiger Beat (09/15/1987)

DATE: Tuesday, September 15, 1987 LOCATION: La Jolla, California | The Petit Trianon LOCAL TIME: 04: 00 PM PST The interior of the Petit Trianon was a jarring contradiction. From the outside, it was a perfectly preserved replica of an 18th-century French chateau. Inside, Buckminster Fuller had completely gutted the drywall, replacing it with exposed tensegrity shelving, pneumatic tubes, and sleek, minimalist Dymaxion furniture.

I walked in, dropping my canvas backpack by the door, and hoisted myself onto one of Bucky's sleek, minimalist stools. My eleven-year-old legs still didn't quite reach the floor—a physical reminder of the unpredictable, cracking limbo of early puberty I was currently trapped in. Bucky was sitting in a suspended geodesic chair, holding a brightly colored magazine. He didn't look up as I walked in, but slowly rotated the cover toward me. It was the latest issue of Tiger Beat.

My face was plastered across the glossy cover, positioned right next to Kirk Cameron and Corey Haim. The bold, neon-pink headline screamed: CHAD TILLMAN'S SECRET HOLLYWOOD CRUSH! IS HE DATING DREW BARRYMORE? A sudden, traitorous flush of heat crept up my neck, and my adolescent heart gave a chaotic, involuntary stutter. It took everything my adult mind had to ruthlessly squash the biochemical reaction, forcing the hot static down into a cold, exhausted sigh.

I slid off the stool and walked over to the kitchen island to pour myself a glass of water.

"I see Marcus is slipping on his media filtration duties."

"He tried to intercept the mail," Bucky said, his reedy voice laced with dry amusement.

"But I have my ways. I find it fascinating, Chad. You successfully transferred root access of a multi-billion dollar global empire to your uncle. You have kept your hands off the steering wheel for nearly four months. But the ecosystem still demands a narrative from you." Bucky tossed the magazine onto the glass coffee table.

"So," the ninety-two-year-old philosopher asked, peering over his thick lenses.

"Are you? Dating Miss Barrymore?" I stopped drinking my water. I looked at Bucky, my face settling into a mask of absolute, profound revulsion.

"Bucky, she's twelve years old," I said, my voice dropping into the flat, weary cadence of the fifty-nine-year-old executive.

"And you are eleven," Bucky pointed out reasonably.

"In the biological and legal architecture of this timeline, that is an entirely appropriate social alignment. Your father mentioned he was worried you were spending too much time isolated on the studio lot. He wants you to go to the roller rink. To hold hands." I set the glass down. The sheer, suffocating absurdity of my existence pressed against my ribs.

"I can't," I whispered, staring at the smiling, pre-teen faces on the magazine cover.

"I literally can't do it, Bucky." I walked over to the tensegrity shelving, running my hand along the taut rubber bands.

"Do you want to know what the absolute worst part of this human suit is right now?" I asked, turning back to him.

"It isn't the lack of authority. It's the biology. My endocrine system is waking up. My body is flooding with adolescent testosterone. I walk onto the Warner Bros. lot, and my eleven-year-old biochemistry randomly decides to trigger a crush on a child actress." I dragged my hands down my face, digging my fingers into my eyes.

"But my mind," I continued, my voice cracking with a mixture of horror and exhaustion.

"My fifty-nine-year-old mind looks at that same girl and sees a child. A toddler playing dress-up. I see my own daughter, Elise. My last memory of her was when she was fourteen. She's actually older than my physical body. The cognitive dissonance is paralyzing. My biology is screaming at me to act like a teenager, and my brain is screaming at me that if I even look at a twelve-year-old girl that way, I am a predator." Bucky's amusement vanished instantly.

The philosophical architect saw the brutal, psychological trap I was caught in. You cannot engineer your way out of your own chemistry.

"So you isolate," Bucky murmured softly.

"You override the biological impulse with a moral quarantine."

"I have to," I said, pacing the concrete floor.

"If I take a girl to the roller rink, what am I supposed to talk to her about? The crushing weight of a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage? The geopolitical ramifications of the Soviet collapse? I have a 401(k) mentality trapped in a body that's supposed to be worried about algebra homework. It isn't fair to them, and it makes me feel like a monster." I stopped pacing and looked out the window toward the Pacific Ocean. The isolation was suffocating, and I was suddenly exhausted by his moral policing.

"You judge the cages I build, Bucky," I said, my voice dropping to a harsh, bitter whisper as I turned back to face him.

"But tell me. If you woke up tomorrow, a few months before your fourth birthday... but you still had your ninety-one-year-old mind. What would you have done differently? Honestly." Bucky leaned back in his suspended geodesic chair, folding his liver-spotted hands over his cane. He opened his mouth, likely prepared to deliver another lecture on open-source education, but then his mathematical mind automatically ran the timeline. He was born in 1895. Four years old meant 1899. Bucky froze.

The blood visibly drained from his weathered face as the catastrophic weight of the 20th century crashed down on him.

"1899," Bucky whispered, the number sounding like a death sentence. He wasn't just thinking about the humiliation of being a child, or the agony of waiting two decades to court his wife, Anne, all over again. He was looking down the barrel of the Somme. The 1929 Stock Market Crash. The Great Depression. The Holocaust. Hiroshima. One hundred million bodies, and he would be a four-year-old boy trying to scream warnings that no adult would ever listen to. His hands began to tremble against his cane.

When he looked up at me, the professorial distance was completely gone. He looked terrified.

"I would know about the trenches," Bucky choked out, his reedy voice cracking.

"I would know about the gas. About the camps in Europe. And I would be trapped in a nursery."

"Yes," I said softly, the anger leaving me entirely, replaced by a dark, shared solidarity.

"You would know every date. Every victim. And you would realize very quickly that drawing a blueprint for a better house isn't going to stop a Panzer division, Bucky. You can't anonymously mail a 'Trim Tab' to Berlin and expect it to stop a genocide." Bucky closed his eyes, his breathing shallow. The absolute horror of the scenario had completely shattered his moral high ground.

"I would go mad," Bucky confessed, a tear slipping beneath his thick glasses.

"To carry the ghosts of a hundred million people in a child's frame... I would scream until my vocal cords tore. I would do anything—anything—to stop it."

"You wouldn't just be trying to stop the wars, Bucky," I said, stepping toward him. My voice dropped to a surgical, devastating whisper. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. Bucky opened his eyes, the tears magnifying the exhaustion in his gaze.

"Alexandra was born in 1918," I said. Bucky stopped breathing. The name of his firstborn daughter hung in the cold, subterranean air like a ghost.

"She died in 1922," I continued relentlessly.

"Polio and spinal meningitis. In your timeline, you spent the rest of your life blaming the drafty, damp housing you lived in. It drove you to invent the Dymaxion house. But if you woke up in 1899 with the mind of a ninety-one-year-old futurist... you wouldn't just design a better roof, Bucky. You would know the virology of polio. You would know the methodology of Jonas Salk. You would know the mechanical schematics for an iron lung decades before it was ever invented."

I stepped directly into his space, refusing to let him look away from the mirror I was holding up.

"Would you honestly just anonymously mail the concept of a vaccine to a medical university and hope they figured it out before her fourth birthday? Or would you hoard the capital? Would you build the medical laboratories yourself? Would you bribe the politicians, extort the medical boards, and ruthlessly manipulate every single variable on Earth to map your future knowledge onto 1918 tools, just to ensure your little girl didn't die?" Bucky stared at me, his lower lip trembling.

He gripped his cane with both hands, his knuckles bone-white. He didn't offer a defense. He didn't cite the "Trim Tab" principle. He knew exactly what he would do.

"That is exactly what I am doing," I said, my voice hardening into absolute, concrete certainty.

"I have a broad knowledge of what technology can do in 2025, and I am mapping what I know is possible onto the tools available to me right now. I am building the iron lung for my family. And you don't do that by trusting the crew, Bucky. You do it by taking the wheel." Bucky looked at the glowing green terminal monitors, then at the heavy steel blast-doors of our bunker. The philosophical divide between us collapsed, leaving only the dark, shared solidarity of two fathers terrified of losing their children.

"I have spent my life designing systems to elevate the human spirit," Bucky said, his voice hollow, stripped of all judgment.

"But you are right, Chad. Faced with the abyss of losing her again... I would have compromised my soul to stop the bleeding. I understand why your heart has turned to concrete." He reached out with a trembling, liver-spotted hand, gripping my small shoulder. The condemnation was gone, replaced by a profound, tragic empathy.

"I am so sorry, Chad," Bucky whispered.

"Who did you lose?" I looked down at the concrete floor. The silence in the bunker suddenly felt heavier than the millions of tons of stone curing above our heads.

"I lost time with my children, Buck," I whispered, the nickname slipping out with the exhausted intimacy of a fellow soldier. I closed my eyes. The ghosts of a life I barely lived flashed behind my eyelids—the smell of diesel in Bagram, the suffocating humidity of the Caribbean, and the brief, static-filled video calls on secured lines.

"My youngest, Alex, was born in 2016," I said, my voice hollow.

"I was in Afghanistan from 2017 until 2020. And then I was in Cuba from 2022 right up until October 2025, when the hurricane took my plane." Bucky's brow furrowed, a deep sadness in his eyes. He understood the mechanics of war, but he couldn't reconcile it with the fiercely protective boy standing in front of him.

"Why did you leave them for so long, Chad? What system forced a father to abandon his post?"

"The oldest system in the world, Buck," I said, a bitter, self-loathing laugh escaping my throat.

"I needed to make money." I looked up at him, the tears I had been fighting for years finally breaching the dam, spilling hot and fast down my eleven-year-old cheeks.

"We were drowning. So I took the contracts. I worked every single day in the dirt and the dust, and I sent ninety-five percent of what I made back home. I thought I was being the ultimate provider. I thought I was saving them." I wiped my face roughly with the back of my sleeve, my chest heaving with a grief that spanned decades.

"But the math didn't work. The inflation, the debt... it eats everything. Despite everything I sacrificed, our financial situation didn't change a single decimal point. I became trapped. I was a ghost, working in a warzone to support a family I only got to see for one or two months a year. That is time I will never get back." I gestured frantically at the glowing green terminals and the cold, reinforced walls of the Archive.

"Do you understand now?" I wept, my voice cracking under the sheer weight of the confession.

"Do you see why I built Archstone? Why I bought the gold when I was three years old? I'm not a megalomaniac, Bucky. I am just terrified. I am terrified of being poor, because the lack of capital is what stole my children from me the first time!" I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to force the tears back into the dark.

"And the ultimate joke is," I sobbed, "I am doing the exact same thing all over again. I am locked in a bunker, hoarding all the money in the world, isolating myself from the family I already have, trying to build a fortress so I don't have to leave the family I haven't even met yet." I lowered my hands, looking out toward the window, out toward the ocean that separated me from everything I wanted.

"And besides," I said, my voice softening to a quiet, devastating ache.

"I'm already married." Bucky didn't speak. He just waited, allowing the silence to pull the truth out of me.

"Her name is Olga," I said, staring at the horizon.

"In the other timeline, we had a life. Right now, Olga is eight years old, living somewhere in Vladivostok. She's learning how to read Cyrillic, entirely unaware that an eleven-year-old boy in California is building a global infrastructure just to make sure the world doesn't burn down before she can grow up and meet him. I'm marooned, Bucky. I am marooned in time. I have to wait twenty years for my own wife to become an adult so I can finally have a conversation with someone who doesn't look like a child to me."

"Is it her that you are mourning, Chad?" Bucky asked, his voice dropping to a near-whisper as he searched my face.

"What exactly is the issue? Are you afraid she won't accept the man you have become?" I shook my head slowly.

"It's not her," I whispered, my voice breaking under the weight of an impossible, irreversible calculus.

"It's them. John. Elise. Alex. Even if I wait. Even if I find her, and I somehow manage to make her fall in love with me all over again... the timeline is broken. The exact biological timing, the microscopic variables that created those three specific souls... it can never be replicated." I pressed my unblemished, eleven-year-old hands against the cold glass, the sheer magnitude of my own actions finally suffocating me.

"My kids—the ones I raised, the ones I remember—are gone, Bucky. They were erased the second I woke up in 1979. I didn't just lose my wife. I murdered my own children." Bucky stood there, leaning on his cane, holding the architect of the new world as he fell apart.

"When did you realize what you lost?" Bucky asked gently, his voice barely rising above the hum of the cooling fans.

"Was it when you woke up in 1979?"

"No," I whispered, the word scraping painfully against my throat.

"It was every time I got on a plane and left them. It was after every phone call I made to them. It was every single time I wasn't focused on a problem at work and had a moment to myself." I pulled back just enough to look at the blinking green text of the terminal screens—the physical manifestation of my obsession.

"That is why I spend all my time doing something, Buck. Thinking about a puzzle to crack, a timeline to fix. I can't stop focusing on solving problems for the present or the future... because the second I stop, the silence rushes in. And I don't want to think about what I don't have." Bucky looked at me, the profound tragedy of the boy-king finally fully illuminated. He understood now that the Arcology wasn't just a lifeboat for humanity; it was a distraction for the Architect.

"I am like a shark," I whispered, staring blindly at the screens.

"If I stop moving, I drown. But I know what I am, Buck. I know I am a monster inside. I was a monster long before I woke up in this timeline." I let out a ragged, trembling breath, the shame battling the adrenaline in my veins.

"I only recently started puberty, and I burned a city to the ground simply because a historical society told me no." I shook my head, my voice cracking.

"But this rage inside of me... it isn't just the hormones. The hormones just make it feel good when I let go." I looked up at him, my eyes wide and terrifyingly self-aware.

"I have been white-knuckling my own sanity since the day I got here. When I was four years old, I laced my father's scotch with barbiturates. I paralyzed him, just so I could unleash the rage that had been growing inside of me for decades. I broke my own father's mind just to vent my anger." Bucky's breath hitched, a sharp, ragged intake of air. His liver-spotted hands tightened convulsively around the handle of his cane as the absolute horror of the confession washed over him.

He was standing alone in a bunker with an eleven-year-old boy who possessed the power of a god and the restraint of a sociopath. He could have pulled away. He should have pulled away. But instead, the humanist fought his way back to the surface. Bucky stood his ground, offering a grace that I did not deserve.

"You are carrying a debt that cannot be paid with concrete, Chad," Bucky murmured softly into the quiet hum of the servers.

"You must forgive yourself for the time you lost in the desert. Because if you do not, you will spend the rest of this life burying yourself—and everyone else—in the sand." I let out a long, ragged exhale, the exhaustion finally pulling me under. I leaned my weight against his side, staring at the dark, reinforced walls of the bunker I had built to keep the world out, realizing for the first time that I had actually built it to keep myself in.

"Then I guess it is good that I have you to keep me under control," I whispered. Bucky's hand tightened gently on my shoulder, a silent promise in the dark. He wasn't going to leave. He was going to stay and hold the monster back.