Jason - Time Travel

On the writing

This is actually a short story version of a longer novel I have imagined writing.  It still needs some work, but this week has been pretty hectic.  Please excuse all the spots that need to be edited an reworked a little bit.  I have given it a read through, but I fear there are still rough spots.  I think the story and the concept will make it through, though.  I hope you like it.

The Choice

01 January 2016

Today, I was awakened from my nap, which I seem to be taking more and more frequently, with an idea. Really, it was somewhat more that. Well, let’s not oversell it,it could be more than that. As a man of science I should report, it is an untested idea, a mere thought, nothing more. But a thought that has given fuel to a depressed mind. I don’t dare admit or deny it, but it may be the first raft of hope which can lift me above the grey waves that drag me down. Perhaps I can have her back.

This isn’t what this log is supposed to be about, but I think I need to explain where I am coming from. In the early part of November, I left my wife, who was feeling just a little under the weather, to go to a meeting. The meeting was not that important, something for our daughters at their school. I had no idea it would be the last time I ever felt normal, ever really wanted to face tomorrow. I never made it into the building. The girls called me home, they said the paramedics were already there, there was something wrong with momma. When the young man told me there was nothing they could do, I tried to be analytical, rational. I needed to hold it together. I did, right up until our youngest asked, “Is everything okay?” Our yard was full of people waiting for my answer. I gave them tears.

You might think that three months would dull the pain, but the truth is there has been a hopelessness which has wrapped itself around me and won’t let go. It keeps me up at night, smashes my focus and my desire to do, well, anything. I have had no answer to the question, “What is the point?” So, I play the good father for my daughters and I try to not push my friends away. I do what I should because I want for nothing.

That was true until right up until thirty minutes ago. In my dream I was thinking about the time dilation that the International Space Station experiences. I was thinking how because of the velocity and gravitational forces items on it age at a slower rate. I remembered thinking how they must have a system just to adjust the clocks, because they would get out of sync with those on earth.

The image in my brain kind of wobbled a little bit as I could see that velocity and gravity doing their time bending work on the space man. What was it? What was it that caused them to ever so slightly skip like a stone over segments of time? Why would they not be anchored to all the points in we are? It was the energy, it gave them a kind of temporal velocity. If you added that energy they would touch less and less points, effectively slowing down. With the right controls you could “skip” anywhere. Objects and people could slide forward and backwards across time.

I could get a few more moments. I could undo this wrong which had been done to me. I could finally answer when asked, “Is everything okay?”

23 May 2016

Blissfully in the last five months I have let my work consume me. Long hours of research and experiments. Making full use of the university lab and even developing a bit of a workshop in the basement of our home. I don’t just mean ours, mine and the girls, I mean the whole family. Sure, I have had fits of loneliness when my hand wanders to her cold side of the bed, but then I remember it is just a matter of time. I fantasize about what that moment will look like. How I would turn back the clock and fix what had been broken for all of us.

I have not told the girls. I don’t want to get their hopes up. In science more things don’t work than do, but it is this kind of truth I refuse to look full in the face myself. I work as hard as I do because I believe. I have to believe. Whenever I let the shadow of doubt cover my face, I hurt, for me and for the girls. I imagine how our lives can go on and . . . . I can’t.

The guy from the funeral parlor called today to let me know the headstone would be installed next week. I look forward to being able to explain my progress to more than a spot of thin grass. I miss her so much. I just want to tell her about every little success. I want her to tell me what to call this temporal matter or “gravatrons” or “velocules”. I want to explain to her how these are the keys to bring us back together. I want to hear her response. I have hinted to the kids, but I don’t dare draw the connection for them. So, this has become just another odd thing their Dad is working on. What ever they will be called, these things will become the bridge our love will be reunited on.

I have found them in everything. They are separate from, but in nature seem to correlate to, the mass of an object. They are the reason gravity works the way it does. They seem to pile up on objects going at high rates of speed and leap free again when that object slows down. In many cases when a body is experiencing resistance a portion of that resistance is this temporal matter. I just need to find way to manipulate them. To control the skipping.

The idea goes like this, if I want to move forward in time, skip forward I pile these things on, if I double the amount the object should fly forward in time twice as fast as normal. I remove them, make it so an object has less, time will fly around the object as it stick to each moment more strongly. There is a threshold, though, like matter changing states, that causes a slip, can cause that object to either move forward or back in time without touching the moments in between. The math works out, but I will have to be very precise to do this right.

I just saw the date. Today is her birthday. I want to say I believe that this is all going to work out, most of the time I hold on to that idea, but just the realization of the date makes me sad. I think about how we loved celebrating with Shelly, who loved her birthday and buttercream frosting. I think of the graduations and weddings and every little event she is missing. I think the girls and I should do something, but I can’t imagine a better use of my time. Do I believe or not?

I think I will call them Shellitrons.

29 July 2016

Today was a banner day. I recorded my first successful results with the Shellitron harnessing device. I didn’t push my luck, but the future looks bright.

Given the technical details in both the setup and measurement of the device I did this experiment in the university lab. I must say the lab assistant I worked with, Gary, did an excellent job and he seemed to grasp what was going on even before any of the results came in. When he asked why I had called them Shellitron’s I couldn’t finish the story. He didn’t make me. He explained his mother had died when he was a child and let the silence fill in the rest of the story.

We set up two identical, highly precise, Ultrak 460 stop watches. They stood on clear plastic bases which elevated them six inches above the black slate workbench. This placed them both beneath the tips on the actuating arm. These would start the watches at exactly the same time. Additionally, the materials of the bench and the bases would be heat and charge resistant, making them ideal is isolating the effect of the device on the second watch.

Do you ever get phantom smells? You know, you smell something which can not possibly be there. It comes from nowhere, it makes some memory flash, some thought, then it retreats back to the ether. Just as I pushed the start button, causing the arm to dip and the watches to start racing forward, I caught a whiff of my wife’s perfume. It was just Gary and I, and it wasn’t strong, so I said nothing. I imagined her lying on our bed, comfortable, smiling and I drew a deep breath, trying to get just a little more, trying to hold onto the image. It was gone.

The watches hit 100 seconds and I turned the knob on the device. The invisible stream of Shellitrons hit the second watch and for a moment nothing happened. Then, although I could not see it, it started to lose it’s grip on time, well, my time. When the control watch hit 104 second the test watch was at 103.8. As I turned the dial I could spread the distance between the times. It seemed to have no ill effect. Gary stood amazed, then started taking vigorous notes, I was certain he had already imagined the paper, the journals this would be published in.

Although I knew the answer, I asked him if we should move to part two of the experiment, reversing the flow. It too was successful. We could, at least in some small way, change the way an object interacted with time. We repeated this experiment three times and every time we got the same result.

I thought I was almost ready to tell my daughters, to let them in on my secret. I wanted to tell someone. I didn’t care about the fame or prestige this would certainly gain me, I wanted my Shelly. I wanted more than a memory inducing scent. I wanted to tell my children they would have their mother back. I wanted to be at that part of the movie where the main character wakes up and just holds onto his loved one, because while he has lived another lifetime, to them is was just the blink of an eye.

Through blurry vision, I could see it.

12 August 2016

I suppose I have said the name Schrödinger enough to explain to Gary how I am feeling. I am both profoundly happy with the progress of the experiment and profoundly sad at the same time. Shelly is both alive, in my hopes and in my work, but also so very far from me, lost in the sea of time. I feel like I am getting closer to her, but I can not share with her the progress. The cat is inside the box, but because it is not opened it is considered both alive and dead. Every success, every moment I would share, every good thing comes with the hooks of loss.

Anyway, I arrived this morning to the university and on my desk sat a book. It looked like it came from a small press, perhaps even self published. Anyway, it makes specific reference to Erwin Schrödinger’s 1952 work on the concept of a multiverse and seems to be linked to Oxford press. It is something about avoiding paradoxes, which we have talked about, but I think they, in an unseen way, they avoid themselves. For now, though, I must set the book aside.

The watches still sit on their bases. We have repeated and adjusted the experiment on time dilation nearly 300 times, but today we have enhanced the device. We have figured out the standard density of Shillitrons on an object to have a “normal” weight on time, a T1, and then written formulas correlating that density to T number. So, T1/2 would age at half the speed, while a T2 would age twice as fast.

All of these things have been put into the new device, which can now analyze an object and determine the number of Shellitrons needed for a specific rate and determine the number it has at present. This allows us to preset a rate and with a single press of a button have the dilation take place immediately. It is perfect, except for one, I guess predictable thing. The issue we have been having is that at T4.6692 there seems to be a barrier. I believe this the temporal zero line, meaning any T number greater than that actually causes an object to begin to be propelled backwards.

Since my wife has been gone I can not stop feeling like she got off on a stop and I have been left on the train. I am rocketing forward, pushed away from her. At a T4.7 I could actually be riding that train backwards, approaching her rather than leaving her. At some T number, I don’t know which I could be beside her, holding her, protecting her from that day in November. I can look to my children, who then will not know the pain I have seen then experience now and I can shield them from it. I can be a better husband and father.

What I don’t know is what happens if I run into myself, my past self. The movies and stories seem to predict some sort of cataclysm. Perhaps you kick off a series of paradoxes which destroy your own existence. This seems, to me, fictional. I have never seen, nor would I ever write in a paper any speculation of a paradox. Science doesn’t work that way. Unless… I will have to consider this some other time.

I need to calculate the length of time it takes Shellitrons to resume a normal density. This will be used to derive the T number needed to go back a certain number of hours.

19 September 2016

Earlier today Gary and I pushed the T number on the second watch across the barrier. It was amazing and then a little perplexing. We set the device to T4.8, a number which should cause about 1 hour of instant time regression. We pressed the button at the watch disappeared. Not invisible, but gone. For a moment we sat waiting for to reappear, but that was not the expected result, it actually should have just blinked and appeared like it had been running for an hour. But, that is not what happened.

We discussed if perhaps it have held in space, meaning the earth's rotation had caused the watch to go back in time, but appear about 1000 miles around the globe. Gary then suggested it was impacted by the rotation, it might also be possible it is impacted by the orbit. Perhaps our watch appeared an hour ago in the middle of space. The problem is, because of the link between Shellitrons and gravity, we have expected to held to our approximate location what time was being adjusted. With an empty stand, we didn’t know what had happened.

We decided we would break for the day, think about an experiment we could run to determine what had happened in our respective homes. I wanted to be around the kids.

They, as happens so often, were not home. So instead I read that Schrödinger book.

The main thrust of the book was an extension of his theory on the multiverse. The multiverse idea says beside the universe we reside there are thousands or millions or an infinite number of other universes. They each exist as the result of a different choice or even taking place in those universe. So, on one fish developed into the dominate species and on another everyone has a holiday where they celebrate Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. The causality doesn’t matter, what matters is all of these streams flow forward in time for the most part not aware or impacted by the others.

He then talks about time travel and how traditional travel through time has some significant problems if you decide to go backwards in time. The simplest of which is how you can have moment in time when time traveller you both existed and did not exist. This, he speculates, can not happen. He speculates on a kind of temporal physics which would prevent it from happening. This, though, he says does not altogether eliminate time travel. Instead it would allow the time traveller to move back into a parallel universe in which the time traveller always appeared, never did not appear. Meaning, in some way, the act of time travel birthed this new dimension into existence.

Now, this is all theory, but it would explain what happened to the watch. We sent it back in time, just not to our time, to the time in which a watch mysteriously appeared.

I can not write more right now. The implications, professional and personal, need to be digested.

2 November 2016

It has been one year since I lost the love of my life. In the movies, in the common philosophy, in the lyrics of songs they tell you that time heals all wounds. That is a lie. The wound may change, it may go from fresh and bleeding to something else, something more dull and more permanent. It is a scar that aches.

I have fought everyday to hold onto the hope of getting her back and that fight has dulled the ache, but today I embrace the truth. I could let the Shellitrons take me back to one year ago, perhaps a year and a day, and I could save her. But, it would not be her. She would not be my Shelly, she would be the Shelly some time traveler saved in another dimension, but it would be at the expense of everything.

I could press that button and do what had never been done. I could travel back in time and save a life, but I could never get back. I would save one life, but I would lose my own. My children would go from suffering the loss of their mother, to orphans. I could pretend I don’t matter that much, rationalize, but that is a cop out.

I was disassembling all of the equipment which I had brought into the workshop, I had created in the basement of our home, when my youngest came downstairs to see what I was doing. She just watched my for a long time, trying to puzzle out why I was breaking it all apart and packing it all into boxes, but she didn’t say anything. It is possible my tears confused her. Held her still for a moment.

Then, with padded footsteps, she got right beside me, while I was distracted. “Is everything, okay?” she asked, in much the same way she did that night and again it just broke me. New tears mixed with old.

No. Yes. I don’t know. My brain tried to puzzle through the answer.

“I love you girls so much, but I can’t fix it. I thought I could, but I can’t. I choose you. I choose now.”

She hugged me as tight as her little body would allow. She did not fully understand, but it did not matter. Everything is not okay, but I hope it will be.