Deja Me

The Anachronistic Code #1

by Dwayne R. James

Those who cannot remember the FUTURE are condemned to repeat it. I'm Josh Donegal, and, as unbelievable as it sounds, I'm a time traveler. Don't ask me how because I honestly have no idea. I went to sleep in 2035 and woke up in 1985 in the body of my teenaged self, reunited with family and friends I'd lost a long time ago in events I'd rather not get into right now. But as comfortably familiar as it is, this 1985 isn't exactly the same as the one I lived through before. I'm finding anachronisms, subtle changes to the era that, like me, don't belong in it. A changed song lyric here, a different line of movie dialogue there, things that only a person who had already experienced the pop-culture of the 80s would notice. Have these changes been made in the hope that I, or somebody like me, would notice them? Could they be a kind of message from the future? The thing is, I know a little something about the future, seeing as I used to live there an all, and it's not pretty. The world as we know it ends in 2025 in the aforementioned events that shall-not-be-named, with the few remaining survivors clustered together on Prince Edward Island in the Canadian Maritimes. We were told by our new authoritarian rulers that it was the only safe place left on Earth, and they wouldn't lie to us, right? Naturally, now that I'm back in my own past, I've been wondering if there's a reason for it. Am I here to help stop the events of 2025 from happening again? If so, is it possible that these anachronisms are a set of instructions? Yeah, I know. It sounds too good to be true, but what would you do if you could do it all over again? Would you hug your loved ones a little tighter? Take back those angry words before you even said them? Keep the one that got away from getting away again? How about saving billions of lives? Me? I'm going to do all that and more. The Anachronistic Code, the epic eight-part time-travel mystery series from Dwayne R. James starts here! AS A BONUS, HERE'S THE VERY FIRST PAGE OF THE Swallowing awkwardly, I looked at the date on the newspaper again. Wednesday, April 17, 1985. “Is this yesterday’s paper?” I croaked, addressing somebody who, until just a few minutes ago, had been dead for more than twenty years. My mother came up behind me and, as if to prove that she wasn’t an incorporeal ghost, leaned lightly against my lower arm as she looked down at the newsprint that I was holding, rather unsteadily, in my hands. “That’s the one,” she said, before commenting on the subject of the paper’s main headline, the imminent launch of New Coke. “I can’t believe that it’s really going to happen. They’re actually going to change Coke.” I swallowed again as, somewhere off in the distance, I could hear the voice of somebody else who should be dead. “What I can’t believe is that it’s front page news,” my father muttered from the kitchen table, his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. “It’s a geedee soda pop.” He continued to speak, but I wasn’t listening because I was staring at the date again. 1985. My mind struggled to do the math, already overwhelmed with the absurdity—the ludicrousness—of everything that had happened to me since I had been awakened earlier by an oldies song on the radio that was, at least according to the Disc Jockey, being played for t

116 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 18, 2019

About the author

Award-winning watercolour artist and author Dwayne James lives in Peterborough, Ontario where he writes and paints as often as he can, that is when he's not spending time with his very forgiving family.

Dwayne has a Masters Degree in archaeology, something he claims is definitive proof that he knows how to write creatively. "Indeed, the most important skill I learned in university," he posits, "is the ability to pretentiously write about myself in the third person."

After spending close to a decade as a technical writer at a large multi-national computer company, Dwayne opted to look at their January 2009 decision to downsize him as an opportunity to become a stay@home Dad for his newborn twins, and pursue his painting and writing whenever the boys allow him to do so. It is a decision that continues to make him giggle with wild abandon to this very day.

Reviews

[Deb Mohr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clever premise. Will read the series for sure. #1284