I had a dream that I was riding my bike trying to get to toys-r-us. I was riding a bike trail through some hills and woods cuz I thought that’d be more fun, but I got a little lost and came out near freeway. The sign said that the road went to Fresno. I was like “Fresno, California? I’ve never heard of any Fresno, Michigan.” I think I’m a little lost. I’ll go get Amelia. She’s better at navigating.

So I rode back home and got Amelia. She rode on the back rack of my bike. Again, we came out by that freeway. I was like “See? WTF?” She was like, “No, this has to be the way. Keep going.” I was like “if you say so…”

Then we came upon a stadium. I was like “Is that the old Tigers stadium? I think we might’ve gone a little too far…” What was even more strange about this was that there was a game on. At this point, I was like “This must be a teleporting bike! Let’s keep riding it until we get to California!”

I was psyched because I was thinking that we could go to a farmer’s market in California and we could keep getting fresh, local produce all winter… for some definition of “local”. It would feel local.

Well, we kept riding until we needed a break. Fortunately, we found what appeared to be a cool co-op, and the cool kids there were just getting ready for dinner. I looked around at the landscape and judged us to be in Arizona. We stopped in and introduced ourselves and we were invited to dinner.

I was like “Okay, this is a kind of a funny question, but… where are we? Is this Arizona? We started biking from Michigan at like noon, but I think we might have a teleporting bike.”

They were like “Well, look at the clock right now. See? It says it’s about noon. Arizona is in a different time-zone, so if you really teleported there, it wouldn’t still be about noon.”

I thought about this for a second. But then I thought of the solution: “What if the bike has power over both time and space!”

The person responded, “Don’t you think it’s a little more likely that you’re just in Michigan but you got a little lost?” I admitted that it was, and we had dinner with them.

When I was getting ready to leave, I found that our bike had been stolen! Oh no!

Then they fessed up. “Okay. The truth is that your bike really is a teleporting, time-traveling bike. But it was our bike. We are the aliens that crash-landed at Roswell. The government stole the engine from our ship and kept it at Area 51. We had a person infiltrate and build the engine into a bike and sneak it out. It was lost, though, and apparently you had it. Thank you for returning it to us. Now, we can attempt to get you home using these other, inferior engines. They were all we had to work with for all these years.”

They showed us their inferior engines. They were built into stationary bikes. They said that these things were supposed to teleport you to the nearest doctor, but they were kind of erratic. They thought they could have it teleport us to a doctor in Michigan instead.

We agreed. Amelia went first. She started pedaling and then disappeared.

Then it was my turn. I got on the bike and started pedaling. I teleported out of there.

The teleportation was kind of rough, and left me with a bloody nose. I was standing in a field at a farm. The farmer standing there said “Oh, a bloody nose? A little surgery can fix that right up.” He pulled out some rusty iron farm implements. I started to run away, since he did not look like a very qualified doctor and I doubted the teleporter’s judgement.

He shouted after me, “Our fighting boys are still coming out of the woods needing all sorts of doctorin’. They’re glad to have it. And here you are, running away from it.”

I ran into the woods and thought about that. Did the machine teleport me to the CIVIL FREAKING WAR?

Then I was scared to move around much in the woods. What if someone shot me?

So for like a month, I hid there, occasionally raiding the farm to steal food and things.

Finally, the aliens came on the good bike to pick me up.

“Sorry about that. Someone must’ve thought that’d be a hilarious practical joke. I’ll take you home for real now.”

I asked what had become of Amelia.

They said that she had figured out how to make wireless mesh networks work in the past! That was awesome. We could network with history, and receive messages from the future.

Just before I woke up, I was back at the civil war farm, trying to convince them to let us put up a wireless access point there on the farm. Yeah. That’s what it’s about.