by Josh Karnes
Hindsight
by Josh Karnes
Copyright 2015 Josh Karnes
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Sunday
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Monday
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Tuesday
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Wednesday
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Synopsis
Free Preview of The Griffin Paradox
Prologue
After many years of development, Daedalus engineers have begun to demonstrate the world’s first partially-functional teleportation device in a Thermion laboratory on an island leased from the United States Department of Defense in Puerto Rico. In late spring of this year, the Daedalus project scientists were routinely teleporting 1 cm cubes of carbon from a portal in their island lab. Where these cubes were being sent remains a mystery. Thermion’s billion-dollar science project has a bug.
Daedalus is the brainchild of physicist and project leader Larry Duncan. Drafted by defense contractor Thermion right out of college, Duncan had spent most of his life searching the true final frontier. No, space is not truly that final frontier. Duncan knew the truth.
Space is not much of a frontier at all. Consider: why is space vast? Why does it seem to have no boundary? Why are the boundaries unreachable? What is the fundamental cause of man’s inability to fully quantify and contain space? The answer is simple: time.
Man is inextricably bound to follow a linear path at a preset pace along this continuum of time. Space is only big because of the finite quantity of time that each man has available to explore it. It is only huge and without boundary when considering that to find the boundary would likely take an infinite quantity of time. And while space appears to be without limit, time is an absolutely critical resource to humankind, limited for each and every one of us. One can only explore that which he can reach within some reason of time. The attribute of space that is the cause of its vastness is time. Space has no limit. Yet time has only limits.
Yes, according to Duncan, the final frontier of man is not space. It is time.
Given the ability to control the pace of time, man can explore all of space. Humankind could plumb the depths and measure the boundaries. Must we speculate what lies beyond our universe? No, we can simply go and see. That is, if we can control time. If we can skip through time at some pace of our choosing.
Even our observation of the space around us has the iron fist of time holding us back. With telescopes, man observes the edges of space as light makes its way to the earth. But even that light cannot escape the grip of time. We are doomed to observe only those things that happened in the incredible distant past. We do not ever even know the present of our own universe. Our entire observation of our existence is fundamentally bound in desperate service to the master of time. It is the one thing humankind has never overcome.
As men, we can only measure time. We hurry, to produce whatever result we desire within some limited quantum of time. We exalt great men and women who overcome the ordinary limits of their timely existence to do great things: to make money or innovations within the limits of their youth, or within their lifetimes; to touch or influence more people with their ideas than anyone else can do within their lives; to move beyond the failures that consumed some portion of one’s life and excel within the remnant; to score more points than the other before the buzzer sounds or to cross the finish line before the next competitor. To be the first is to be the best. To innovate is to become great by being quick. Nearly every human achievement is inextricably linked to this constant of earthly existence that we call time.
Yes, truly time is the final frontier. And to conquer time, to master it, is the domain only of God.
It is this pressure to overcome this fundamental human limitation of time that has driven Larry Duncan nearly his entire life. One of Larry’s oldest memories is the first time his little brother Zach joined in to play kickball in the street with the other neighborhood kids. Larry was the Duncan boy who had always been the best at this kind of thing. He was carrying the torch. But that day when little 5-year-old Zach came to play, suddenly nobody could run fast enough or throw the ball quick enough to get this kid out. Zach was just so fast. And that day, Larry realized that time was his enemy. Even the two-year head start he had over Zach was not enough to make him faster. And that wasn’t the last time Larry was the slowest.
He never got picked. When all the guys would meet up at the vacant lot to put on a baseball game that summer between 3rd and 4th grade, he’d get picked dead last. Not because he couldn’t hit, because he could. Not because he couldn’t catch the ball and make a tag out with the best of them. He could do that too. But he was slow. He always got beat running the bases. He rarely could chase down that grounder quickly enough to get it fired off to second base and prevent the double. Larry just was not fast, and eventually he figured out there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t control how quickly he could cover that distance. But deep down he knew that if he could just take a shortcut through that field, between Mr. Gibson’s mailbox that served as 1st base for their kickball game and Zach’s sweatshirt standing in for second, if he could somehow just bend that road or that field and skip over it, he’d never be beat. He wouldn’t have to be fast, if he could just be that smart.
The truth is, Larry Duncan was only slow when it came to foot speed. While Zach would run off and leave him, often literally, any time they were running or playing football or swimming or riding bikes, almost nobody could keep up with his quick mind. In any feats of mental acuity, Larry was always several steps ahead of everyone else. In complicated math problems, he could just skip past the work and get to the result in just one move. Like great basketball players are said to have “court vision” where they seem to see the entire court and how the play is evolving all at once, Larry had “math vision” of sorts. He could see the entire range of a problem all as a whole and derive the answer from this three-dimensional space of the problem rather than having to move linearly like most ordinary thinkers. If a problem were like a maze, everyone
else would have to go through and turn corners and move in a linear path even if they never made a wrong turn, but Larry could see the finish and mentally move there as if skipping right over the top of the maze.
Duncan’s cognitive superiority was not only contained to math. Problem solving was his forte. Logical problems, computer programs, algorithms, solutions to multifaceted problem sets, this was Larry’s true area of strength. And he spent most of his energy applying these great mental strengths towards solving the problem he first encountered as a child: how to bypass space, create a shortcut, in order to cheat time. Be fastest by being the smartest.
While this search for the ultimate final frontier is what had driven Larry Duncan to become a physicist, Daedalus was not about being like God. Daedalus was about building a specialized machine for the United States Department of Defense. Time travel is the stuff of science fiction and fantasy, but has little practical market value, even if it were possible. But being able to shortcut through space, or make an object cover ground very quickly or nearly instantaneously, well that is an idea that got the attention of Thermion CEO Carson Lee. That is a project worthy of investment. Larry Duncan was just the man to head up this project.
Daedalus represents the culmination of a lifetime of seeking a shortcut through space for Larry Duncan. Albert Einstein offered many theories suggesting the possibility of time travel, but after more than a century of effort, great scientists standing on the shoulders of those standing on Einstein’s foundation yielded no success in actual time travel. The foundational concept is that objects which have mass create a bending of this fabric of space-time, creating an effect known as gravity. One other effect of mass is the distortion of time: time passes more slowly for objects in high gravity compared with those subjected to less gravity, somewhat analogous to the object traveling along a curved path of space-time. If that curve could be deflected so far that it folded back upon itself, such as making point “A” touch point “B”, where A and B were different points along a timeline, then in theory, an object arriving at point B would return to point A, thus traveling back in time.
For a variety of reasons, however, creating any type of controlled “time travel” was at a minimum unfeasible and in most cases considered logically impossible. All of this suddenly changed with the discovery of a reliable method of creating a stable form of matter with so-called “negative energy density” by Larry Duncan’s small team of scientists working in the lab on a skunkworks, off-books project. Such matter is like ordinary matter only it has negative mass, and behaves in many ways opposite to ordinary matter.
Once this new material was discovered, many questions about the properties of matter with negative mass were soon answered, and some questions still remain. One critical discovery is that the physical force of gravity created by one object’s positive mass can be reduced or nullified by placing a negative mass object near it. This discovery alone opened the door to something akin to time travel, since the time-traveling object would no longer experience a crushing force of gravity that would prevent it from arriving at its destination intact.
In due time, a high negative density material that could be manipulated in position with electromagnetic energy was forged, and aptly named Gravium. With a manipulable material, Thermion had found the path to create their teleporting device. The bending of space-time sufficiently to travel back in time, while possible in theory, was still considered a dream; the stuff of science fiction. But the ability to make an object travel from one place to another extremely quickly was at hand. A little bending of space-time gives just the shortcut that Larry Duncan had been seeking for most of his life.
Thermion’s execs committed to use this novel new material in a device that enables the rapid transport of some object, such as munitions or equipment, into a target or a theater of war so rapidly that the enemy would not be able to defend against it or impede it. With enough mass and enough distortion of space-time through localized gravity, it would be possible, in theory, to deliver materiel almost instantaneously over any distance on planet earth. The Daedalus project was initiated by Thermion with the goal of creating such a device. Larry Duncan was appointed project manager, fittingly considering his team had discovered the material in the first place.
Now, after painstaking construction of what is likely the most advanced device in the world, one which makes the Hadron supercollider look like a Lego toy, the Daedalus team is on the cusp of revolution. For months now, they have been teleporting 1 cm carbon cubes using the Daedalus device portal on in their island lab. Thirteen of these cubes have been put into the portal one at a time in controlled experiments, and each one has duly vanished from point “A”. The only problem is that none have arrived at point “B”. In fact, Daedalus engineers and scientists do not know where they have gone. The Daedalus device has a bug.
Sunday