The Future Man.

He was merely a hard working individual trying to save enough money from his mechanic's wages to buy a dazzling rock for his girlfriend/soon to be fiancé Sarah, whom he cared about deeply.

One fine morning Manny said, "Back in a minute Fred," to his boss- he then climbed behind the wheel of the car he had just repaired, backed out of the garage for a test drive, and was never heard from again.

The circumstances were strange enough. The customer's Ford Taurus was found three blocks away. A Good Samaritan had considered it odd enough to report. It was parked nose to a hydrant with one wheel on the curb, the engine humming smoothly from its recent tune up.

Poor distraught Sarah had relatives in the police department putting in extra efforts to find her lost beau, but to no avail. There was simply no reason for him to vanish. He was virtually debt free, had no enemies and was generally thought of as a happy, well adjusted citizen.

After a while the police had to turn their attention to more urgent cases. Even Sarah's beloved Uncle Dave, a captain in the eighth precinct eventually had to concede that they had no leads whatsoever. There was no trail to follow. Manny had turned into thin air. What more could they do? Although it went against her every grain, even she had to finally admit the hopelessness of it all.

As the years went by, his friends and family and even Sarah were able to put their lives back in order. None of them ever forgot the good natured guy who always had the latest joke to tell, or who always showed up on moving day to help out a buddy, but they had to move on. They had no other choice. He was now, and would be as long as our current society kept records of such things, a statistic.

Meanwhile, twenty thousand years in the future.....

Wintaashh thought that a mistake had been made. The tiny electrical impulses in the air that had been caused by his minute change in bodily stance and slight facial twitches conveyed into the net and back in less than a microsecond so that Boooshh realized that Wintaashh thought that a mistake had been made. In as little time, Boooshh assessed the situation, found the error and surmised correctly that Wintaashh was right. They started to converse for a while via the net through more impulses (almost three full microseconds) and determined the cause of the error.

It seemed that their experiment had taken on an unforeseen anomaly. Their reputation as the earth's top wildlife preservation, study and catalogue units could be in jeopardy. It was simple human error. When making sometimes as many as a million separate calculations in any given second, the human brain had a way of misfiring once in a while. This was on a small scale, but it could have epic consequences.

They had both been operating the laser array when one of them had misplaced a decimal point on a time dial calculation. As a result, the beam fired around nine-thousand, four-hundred and seventy-two years, three and a half hours and seventeen point three-eight-five minutes early in time. Now, normally this would have no effect, as the beam would most likely fail to pick up on a life-force of the exact mass as its intended target, most likely.

If Manny Blackwell had only been about a gram heavier or lighter, he would have never been picked up by the beam at all, and would have gone on to marry Sarah and have two children as the paradoxile programmer would later figure out.