These people, they would reply, "What's a Micro…?"

"Microsoft," he'd say.

But people would only shake their heads and shrug.

Shot Dunyun: He asked someone, "Has boosted-peak technology been invented yet?" When they shrugged, it didn't matter. He really, really wished he'd paid more attention during math and science class.

Every few years, he returns to spy on his daughter, Esther, his future grandmother. And because he can't invent anything, he says he seduced her, meeting her in secret, giving her money, he tells her his dream for a future dynasty, about his accidental fall backward through time. The car accident.

Echo Lawrence: Whether she believed him or not, if he raped her or not, that girl had a child she named Irene, and the man, now calling himself Green Taylor Simms, disappeared for another thirteen years.

Jarrell Moore: According to the elderly man in question, every generation, each of the thirteen-year-old virgins was willing, even excited, to participate in his project. His experiment.

Echo Lawrence: With every sperm that met an egg, Simms claims he felt stronger. He was hoarding more gold, making a fortune, and stashing it for his future self.

Shot Dunyun: Totally, balls-out crazy.

Jarrell Moore: Geriatric dementia, to say the least.

Shot Dunyun: The moment of every conception got him high. It jacked him up, all his chromosomes or whatall, changed in that instant. Rearranged. New and improved. And, same as any addiction, it was all this guy knew to do, so he did it, over and over and over.

He just kept fucking with the past. Filling the future with a new himself.

Chester Casey: After telling my boy his crazy story, this old nutcase, he asked Buster to roll up his shirtsleeves. The old miser pointed at the shadow bites, the dirt tattooed by teeth into Buster's hands and arms, and he said, "Badger…coyote…pit viper…" Getting every scar exactly right.

Echo Lawrence: Supposedly, Green Taylor Simms asked Rant to go back in time, to crash in a car accident. People were living longer now. Rant could go back a hundred years. Seed more generations of himself. Rant could memorize lottery numbers and invention plans over time, building an even larger fortune.

Jarrell Moore: Along the way, diddling thirteen-year-old girls.

Shot Dunyun: And Simms promised some way Rant could live forever. Become immortal.

Echo Lawrence: Plus, possibly to hide his tracks, or maybe because he's inbred, hybrid crazy, Simms has been sneaking back to murder those Middleton girls in their old age, using poison spiders, bubonic fleas, and killer bees…

Shot Dunyun: Rant tells this crazy old Simms, "Memorize? You don't figure what rabies does to a brain…"

Echo Lawrence: And Green Taylor Simms says, "I know exactly what you're capable of doing." He tells Rant, "I am you…"

Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): Nobody wants to go there, but…wasn't the Virgin Mary, wasn't she God's child? And back in Biblical times, wasn't she, like, thirteen years old?

Shot Dunyun: Sixty years ago, this other Rant Casey got bumped back in time and had to wait his way back to the present, along the way making a few changes. Stoking.

Neddy Nelson: Besides, what about the creepy Old Testament stuff about Lot's two daughters getting their dad drunk and then…"preserving his seed"?

Chester Casey: Close as I can figure, that wild story is how come Buddy drove his car off that bridge. All that crazy coot's dreams, my boy was supposed to fulfill them. But I'd wager that's not exactly what my Buddy done.

36–Hit Men II

Tina Something (Party Crasher): On my last date with Wax, and I mean our final gaddamn date, the two of us were cruising a Honeymoon Night in a hot, and I mean stolen, gaddamn Maserati GranSport, and Wax sees this mess of emergency-vehicle lights down along the train yards off Wentworth Avenue, so he goes to cruise by for a peek.

All's left is smoking metal. Even the middle part of the train looks torched, and the fire guys are wrestling to haul the Jaws of Life over to the biggest balled-up chunk of a Lincoln Town Car. All down this side of the tracks, the smoke blows wedding streamers and junk. A white lace veil soggy with blood. A red rosebud boutonniere.

Allan Blayne (Firefighter): The minute I opened my yap, I knew what I said sounded stupid. What I said to the girl. This job, the worst accidents, I go into automatic pilot.

The situation was a two-car scenario: Vehicle Number One is parked at a railroad crossing, waiting for a freight train to pass. According to witnesses at the scene, Vehicle Number Two rammed the parked vehicle and allegedly forced it against the side of the passing train. Vehicle Two then continued to travel forward in a straight line, colliding with the train. Both automobiles underrode the train's wheels and were crushed and dragged a distance of approximately four hundred feet.

Tina Something: I know all the EMTs, 'cause of working for Graphic Traffic, and when Wax stops to rubberneck, I yell out to this guy I know with an emergency-response service. I ask him what's up, and this EMT says I wouldn't believe it if he told me. Some chick's still alive inside the wreck, all her clothes burned off but not a scratch on her. Shaking his head, this EMT says, "Not even a long fingernail busted."

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): The chief argument against the possibility of time travel is what theorists refer to as the "Grandfather Paradox"; this is the idea that if one could travel backward in time one could kill one's own ancestor, eliminating the possibility said time traveler would ever be born—and thus could never have lived to travel back and commit the murder.

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.

Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): You want I should risk telling you about Historians? You know what happens when a fellow spreads those rumors?

What? You can't think up a faster way to get us both killed?

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Besides Reverse Pioneering, becoming a Historian is the other secret guilty dream of every Party Crasher.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: One theory of time travel resolves the Grandfather Paradox by speculating that, at the moment one changes history, that change splinters the single flow of reality into parallel branches. For example, after you've killed your ancestor, reality would fork into two parallel paths: one reality in which you continued to be born and your ancestor did not die, and one branch in which your ancestor died and you would never be conceived. Each revision one made in the past, the subsequent new reality it created, theorists refer to as a "bifurcation."