by D. J. Gelner
No matter; I engaged the button on the temple of my smart spectacles to reveal the cloaked ship and invisible access panel. I ran my fingers across the smooth surface to reveal a touch pad, and placed my hand on the pad to reveal an open door on a remarkable contraption, straight out of a forties, pulp sci-fi novel; a perfect, brushed alloy disc with counter-rotating, magnetic halves that could manipulate gravity on a whim.
One year ago to the day, I had completed this most modern of marvels, an honest-to-goodness, working time machine. At least, at the time, I thought it worked; I hadn’t yet tested it in great part due to the particular peculiarities of my Benefactor, who insisted that he would not pay for a shakedown flight when I had a far more important initial destination, one that could answer thousands of questions that had been asked for centuries should I take the time and effort to learn the language and customs:
Ancient Judea.
My goal was to meet Jesus Christ.
What a capital idea it was by the Old Bird! The man whose name has been damned more times than all of the sinners in all of time, who has been invoked by the bearers of countless flags throughout history in their offensives seeking to secure more territory, and yet a man whose honest actions have provided a simple, basic moral code for the rest of the world to live by for two-plus millennia. A man who would be able to answer so many questions about the Bible and its meaning. And my Benefactor wanted me to be the one to meet him! Not only would I eventually be able to publish my treatise to redefine the laws of physics as any human understood them, but I’d also have occasion to write a memoir about my conversations with Jesus Himself (though I thought Conversations With Christ would have been a catchier title—it later went unpublished for what will become obvious reasons).
So my Benefactor hired Avi and a few other teachers to school me in ancient Aramaic, Hebrew, and several other ancient languages, in case the gravity drive and tunneling laser missed their mark and I had to make do sometime else. Weeks of lessons culminated in this moment, the evening of July 6, 2032, a date which would eventually reverberate through history with the force of a thousand church bells.
“It’s important to blend in, ya know,” my Benefactor had pulled me aside and said to me one day. “Butterfly effect and all. Don’t wanna screw up the future for the rest of us!” (Pardon my barbaric print rendition of an American accent). As he spoke, his secretary, Helene, invariably would spill coffee or scotch on me and pardon herself.
Damn you, clumsy tart! I would think.
“Think nothing of it,” I would say with a dismissive wave of my hand.
Indeed, though, my Benefactor was right. One slip-up, and I could set a chain of events in motion that resulted in the Nazis winning World War II, or a vast totalitarian government controlling the entire world; there were countless ways that, were I not careful, could result in our already dire world becoming positively unlivable.
I removed my lab coat and cast it aside, so excited was I that “best lab practices” were all but forgotten. I giddily stripped down to my underwear and, after a pause for unnecessary modesty, slipped those off, as well.
Naked as a jaybird, I ran back to the table where I had been studying with Avi not but moments before and opened the drawer to reveal a locked case. I picked up the key (which lay, in hindsight, rather carelessly next to the metal box), inserted it into the lock, and turned it.
The lid popped open to reveal a standard military-issue Baretta nine millimetre in a shoulder holster.
My hands trembled as I secured the holster around my torso; though I was loathe to admit as much at the time, I was terrified of handguns, and found the idea of discharging it to be repulsive. One could never be too careful, though, and I took solace in the fact that should the need ever arise to fire it, I would likely end up destroying all of space and time through the cascading reverberations of the very Butterfly Effect of which my Benefactor warned that would change all of history from that point forward.
Once my holster was secured, I wrapped a simple, linen undergarment around my waist, and then threw on a similarly-crafted linen tunic, specially-made and devoid of any tags. I fashioned a beige keffiyeh out of a cotton-wool blend, and wrapped it around my head before I secured it with a modern Saudi headband (don’t ask how I had it smuggled into the States). I then laced up the Roman-style, upper-calf sandals that I had procured via eBay, completing the image of a confused Middle Eastern tourist at “Romanland” or some similarly ghastly amusement park in pre-War Dubai.
I punched a sequence of buttons on the frame of the time machine and entered. The interior was rather spacious, if I do say so myself. The cabin was maybe sixty feet wide and occupied most of the saucer’s interior. A set of bunkbeds was situated in a small room off to the right behind a sitting area, and an equally economical head was located opposite the quarters. To the left, a pantry and kitchen were tucked behind several walls, stocked with enough foodstuffs to last me several years. In front of me was a flight deck with a single chair and several touchscreen panels that could be switched to holodisplays, though I found the holograms dreadfully tiring, and after a while my aching shoulders would beg for the more conventional, two-dimensional setup.
I sat in the chair with a satisfied “whoosh” as I pulled off my spectacles, which would have surely drawn some unwanted attention in ancient Judea, and placed them in the spacious glove box under the dash, which was really a large recessed cabinet that I had designed more out of a sense of familiarity and convenience than anything else. I double-checked its contents; a “file” with numerous changes of clothes, vacuum-wrapped and era-specific, with all identifying tags removed, a simple canvas drawstring bag filled with gold that had been pressed into near-exact replicas of Roman coins, one universal charger for all manner of modern gizmos I may bring along, one First Aid kit, complete with laser omni-tool for suturing and decontamination, as well as Purell, bandages, and other dressings should the omni-tool fail, one digital tape recorder, should I wish to interview anyone discreetly, and several paper books, including an updated and annotated version of David Macaulay’s book, The Way Things Work, as well as an historically annotated almanac, a guide to basic Aramaic that Avi had been paid to put together, and, of course, a copy of the Bible, King James edition. I also had thousands of other books preloaded on my tablet, but just in case it was destroyed or lost, I wanted to ensure that I had some way of surviving in the past should all else fail.
I then checked at the locked armory cabinet at the rear of the cockpit and took a quick mental inventory. There would be the reinforced sword, the updated colt revolver, several other pistols, as well as some more modern weaponry like two fully automatic rifles and even the prototype laser pistol that I had designed on a whim while researching my thesis on hypermagnetic tunneling laser containment, which now seemed like such a quaint pursuit all of those years ago.
The engine had been running for quite some time; not only did it need to run for the cloaking device to remain engaged, but it’s also rather difficult to prevent a matter/antimatter fusion reaction from occurring once the switch is flipped and the magnetic containment on; to do so could end the Earth as we know it!
This is all a roundabout way of noting that I didn’t have to turn any kind of ignition, which was, in hindsight, perhaps a bit of a design flaw. No, instead, I merely spoke a quick command to the computer, and shifted the mechanism into gear, which caused the dash to produce one of my finer creations; the omni-yoke. When controlling a craft that is unbound by traditional physics and can travel in literally any direction, a simple joystick just will not do, as it’s far too “two-dimensional” to control something that requires a third (and fourth, as we shall see) dimensional input. Nor would a traditional airplane yoke be able to fully realise the amazingly acrobatic maneuvers of which this craft was capable; it relies far too heavily on momentum and other concepts, which have no bearing on my time machine, unbound by the restraints of bothersome gravity.
As loathe as
I am to admit it, the answer to this problem lies in holograms. The omni-yoke is a horizontal representation of a ball floating in the middle of a cubical grid. Simply “grab” the ball and move it in whatever direction you want the ship to go, and the ship follows suit. In this way, you can make the craft travel in straight, zig-zagging lines, or wide, regular arcs in any direction; the choice is entirely up to the driver. Though I agree that I generally prefer to control a vehicle by some means physically attached to the craft on the rare occasions where the government hasn’t legislated such simple joys as “driving oneself” out of existence due to the supposed “safety” of self-driving vehicles, the omni-yoke was the only discernible way to deal with the rather complex problem of controlling the craft. Besides, I wasn’t nearly as concerned with “where” the ship was going as “when,” a factor that would solely be controlled by the touchscreen consoles located comfortably nearby.
One half of the screens flashed with the current time and location. The other contained a simple “dial” imprinted on the OLED screen, which I could manipulate clockwise and anti-clockwise to adjust the date that was imprinted above. Though I hadn’t much time for television over the past decade or so (as most of my free time was occupied with turn of the century American cinema—one thing the Yanks actually do well), I’d be lying if I said that Star Trek: The Next Generation wasn’t an inspiration for the panel designs, both in colour scheme and font (SWISS 911 Ultra Compressed BT, if you must know).
I turned the digital knob anti-clockwise and the years ticked away, slowly at first, and then more quickly as the “dial” built up “momentum.” Somewhere behind the panel, the quantum computer performed an amazing number of calculations per second to flesh out the position of the Earth, not only within the solar system, but also accounting for progression relative to Earth’s gravity well. I’m sure this is all terribly boring to some of you, but it’s wonderfully fascinating to me, so bugger off.
I slowed the rotation of the dial as it approached the single digits, then fine-tuned the date to “31 A.D.” A map of the world flashed in the bottom left corner of the display, and I pinched to zoom in to the Middle East. Another thing I’m terribly proud of; I (or I should say I guided the quantum computer to figure out how to—and, to be fair, that likely goes for far more of these discoveries than I give the stupid thing credit for) even programmed the little map to account for continental drift should the need arise.
I selected “Nazareth” and the edges of the screen pulsed with light (it’s a better “busy” indicator than a flipping hourglass). The upper right corner scrolled through numbers with a prominent percent sign at the end, and after several moments settled on one single number:
“99.9%”
These were the odds of successfully plotting a course to that exact date and time. And why shouldn’t it be so high? After all, I had designed the damned thing with that moment and those coordinates in mind. Those were the very calculations that the computer was calibrated around—in fact, I was more than a bit peeved at that missing “.1%.”
I eyed the bright red “Engage” button that appeared in the middle of the console. Is this really it? The moment that my entire life has been building toward? I thought. I gather it’s what most footballers feel on the eve of…whatever the big football championship is…”Euros” or some such thing. Never been much of a fan of sport.
I realised that I was squinting, and produced a pair of contact lenses from the glovebox. I hated the dastardly things, as will become apparent later, but needed them to see, so poor was my eyesight without correction. I wrangled with them for several minutes before I finally jammed the plastic discs onto my eyes, and was able to see once more, albeit uncomfortably.
I went through one final mental checklist. Coordinates…supplies… guns…door… The door! I hastily re-opened the glove box and pulled out a rather archaic-looking bodge of a garage-door opener. Though such devices had long since been integrated with smartphones or vehicles themselves, my preference for tactile feedback led me to have workmen install a rather simple retractable ceiling on my workshop, complete with a motor and chains. I pressed the large button, and the ceiling rolled off of the building to expose the clear Maryland sky above. I could only see a sliver of the starry night from my current vantage point, but I found the sight to be simultaneously ominous and intoxicating, like the first whiff of insanely expensive scotch while on holiday in Las Vegas.
I picked up my tablet, which was synched up with the craft, and with a few swipes of my finger, selected a fitting soundtrack for this first flight: The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” It was between that and Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” but in case of a tie, my British heritage was always going to be the determinant.
As Mick Jagger’s voice strained in the background, I buckled myself into the seat and hit the bright red button with a flourish. The cloaking device disengaged (as much power as an antimatter reaction may provide, I am confident telling you that it’s not enough to both cloak the ship and travel through time), while the window in front of me paradoxically appeared to expand to the ceiling above, though this, too, was an illusion, as the saucer would appear solidly metallic from the exterior (provided all systems were nominal).
The ship took off and floated upward, casually as a cloud meandering through the stratosphere. Though the inertial dampeners should make such a feeling impossible, I still imagined I could sense the floor begin to rotate in one direction as the top portion of the saucer rotated opposite. For a few blissful moments, I looked upward and saw the starry night sky, with so many orbs that hung so tantalizingly close. With any luck, I’d be able to re-jigger the time machine for reliable interstellar travel within a decade of my return, but that would be a project for another day.
Suddenly, the craft shot straight up in the air at an incredible rate of speed. It was all that the machinery could do to keep my body together until the artificial gravity could compensate. It must have been quite a sight in the greater Baltimore area, though I may have failed to mention that the craft wasn’t exactly FAA-legal; though it had running lights, I had turned them off for the time-being, lest some slack-jawed yokel report a UFO sighting in the vicinity of my lab. I swiped a finger across one of the consoles and two displays came into focus on the window; one nightvision, the other infrared. Either would be enough to fly the ship.
Eventually, the deep navy blue of the sky and the whisping clouds that parted as I zoomed by were replaced by a stark blackness with specks of brilliant, twinkling white light. Though I had always dreamt of being an astronaut, I could now truthfully say for the first time that I was one, and in a way that no human being had ever experienced before…unless one would count my ostensible rematerialisation in ancient Judea, as it would, by necessity, have to have occurred at some point in the past.
The time machine hovered at the edge of the Earth’s gravitational envelope for a moment and re-calibrated before I piloted the craft to a safe distance away from the planet below.
The mechanics involved in time travel are obviously incredibly complex, as I’m sure anyone reading this book can imagine. For the uninitiated or slow-witted, though, perhaps the best way to explain how it works is by way of an analogy. Imagine that the known universe is a simple, cardboard coffee cup. Inside of that cup is boiling hot tea (I refuse to use coffee just to give a proper “bugger off” to the Yanks reading this), just sitting there, for our purposes relatively static in any one location, but always pushing up against the sides of the cup.
The mechanism that I devised uses the gravity drive and tunneling lasers as a “stirrer” of sorts; as an artificial gravity semi-singularity (a temporary almost-black hole, to the layman) spins spacetime, and draws it inward, the result is that the very fabric of spacetime itself is brought closer together, like two points on a tablecloth that are drawn nearer when the cloth is formed into a cone.
Amazingly enough, though one may think that such an arrangement would make interstellar
travel all the simpler, due to the vagaries of how space and time are arranged, before one can build up enough gravity to travel long distances, the lasers create a rip in the fabric of spacetime. Depending on the force of the singularity, its location, the intensity of the lasers, et cetera and so forth, I (or the computer and I) can pinpoint the exact date and position in the universe to which a given rift will lead, give or take one tenth of one percent.
Another “button” came up on the console, this one brilliant and green. The words “Time Shift” flashed in futuristic lettering above it. The take-off hadn’t really given me pause; after all, I had fleshed out the advanced “normal” physics of the whole thing years ago, and checked them and re-checked them numerous times.
The time travel physics were so utterly new that I had to trust the quantum computer to re-check my work, and ensure that everything on board was in working order. Classic cinema buff that I am, I couldn’t help it as visions of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey danced in my head, though I always imagined the “QC” as a wise-ass Irishman; not the cold, calculating serial-killer type, but that’s neither here nor there.
I closed my eyes and braced my jaw for an impact that never came as I lowered my finger to the blinking green button.
And that’s the last time anyone from my time, my home, cared about Phineas Templeton.
Chapter Two
Travelling through a temporal wormhole is initially a thoroughly wondrous and invigorating process. On the one hand, that first wormhole represented a tangible manifestation of decades of hard work. On the other, it’s fantastically beautiful; colours that I’ve never seen before on this planet jumped out at the ship as it passed by as if trying to impart hue and tenor to the well-brushed alloy, succeeding only for brief flashes against the reflected light of billions of stars.