“Young Zachary Wallace desired to be a scientist. The intensity of that desire affected Joe Tkalec, and the protégé magically has his mentor. Young Zachary was bullied in seventh grade by a ninth grader, and the exposed weakness created a desire to lift weights. Enter Troy and his conditioning regimen. New parallel universes divert from the old as you learn the game of football. Would you have become a marine biologist without my involvement? A running back without Troy’s coaching? Perhaps. But of all the possible outcomes you could have experienced, the ones you did experience resulted from the ability of your consciousness to alter the frequency of matter—the so-called aligning of the stars. The phenomenon is real, and those who discover how to control it can remove the chaos associated with existing in a dimension so far from the energy source. Then again, others can abuse their conscious thoughts for themselves alone, creating chaos.

“Now let us add the variable of time to the equation. Recite the two theories of time authored by the philosopher John McTaggert.”

I sat back in my cushioned chair and rocked. “McTaggert’s A-Theory stated that the only real time is the present. The past is gone and the future exists only as a probability distribution, a potentiality of the possible things that can happen. Since the future isn’t set, it’s not real.”

“And his B-Theory?”

“That the past, present, and future all co-exist simultaneously. Since the past determines the future, everything that has happened since the Big Bang was predetermined. Quantum physics is based on B-Theory, that everything that could possibly happen has already happened, or, as you say, time is dependent upon the observer.”

“And what do you say, Zachary? Is it possible to alter the present by changing the past?”

“I don’t know. If you were to go back in time forty years and murder my father, then you would have changed my birth parents. Still, who’s to say I would have turned out any different? My new father might have been a womanizing alcoholic just like Angus. If everything is predetermined, then you might board a different train but all tracks lead to similar outcomes. In the scheme of things, consciousness may not have the big effect you’re alluding to.”

“Let’s hope you’re wrong.” The entity appearing to me as Joe Tkalec closed his eyes and rocked quietly.

Joe or Alien Joe, I knew better than to interrupt.

He opened his eyes. “Zachary, in a previous communication we discussed the frequencies of the ten dimensions and how their wavelengths—let’s call them vibrations—corresponded to different colors of the electromagnetic spectrum. There exists an eleventh dimension exiled from the ten, a dimension associated with darkness, which is defined by the absence of light. The darkness feeds off the slow, dense vibrations generated by negative energies: fear, ego, lust, greed, hatred, and violence.