The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  Early experiments were done using super-compact matter-anti-matter reactions in massive, hundred-story power-houses, massive reactors capable of generating almost an entire star’s worth of power in a single milliChron. It took nearly five years to fully build up a charge, and the resulting release was only large enough to send a single atom one Chronological unit (or chron, which is slightly less than one second) back in time, but there was another problem.

  When they did the experiment, the atom disappeared from the time travel chamber, but it never reappeared earlier as was predicted. In all actuality, it had reappeared, but the experimenters had taken for granted one vital clue to the time travel conundrum. The entire universe is moving. Not only is the universe expanding, but within it the galaxies are all orbiting each other. And within those galaxies, all the stars are moving around one another. And within those star clusters, planetary systems are all orbiting one another. And on each of those planets, the planets themselves are moving around. Nothing in the universe is staying in place. When they sent the single particle one Chron into the past, the Earth had moved some three hundred and fifty million kilometers from where it had been, relative to the rest of the universe, only one Chron before. The atom did, in fact, travel through time. They simply failed to calculate its position in space.

  Like a chess game, every piece on the board affects every other piece on the board. You can't just take the Earth's rotation, or orbit into account when trying to calculate where the universe was before it expanded into what it is now. An asteroid in some distant galaxy has the ability to throw a planet slightly off course. And that planet has the gravitational force to slightly tug its parent star slightly off its course. And that star has the gravitational power to pull another star off its course. This goes on and on until, even though it may only be a relatively small amount, entire galaxies are slightly set off course from where you think they will be in the fabric of space-time. So, calculating where a single atom will be when pushed backward in time somewhere in the universe becomes extremely difficult. After all, you're not just sending something backward in time, you're sending something backward through the expansion of the universe.

  Almost twenty-five years after the first particle experiment, breakthroughs had been made in the power amplification technology, as well as in some various forms of materials. A new kind of energy, known to them as hyper-fusion, had been developed. The new hyper-fusion generator, while still being massive, was able to produce infinitely large amounts of energy in a relatively short period of time through a compressed matter-antimatter reaction. It was essentially a compressed artificial star squeezed down by folding all ten dimensions of fermionic space around it into a contained environment. The hyper-fusion generators were so incredibly dense that they had to be contained within thick walls of anti-gravity plating to counteract its gravitational pull, but the power contained within was leaps and bounds beyond what they had been using.

  The hyper-fusion generator was not only half the size of the original power supply but could also build its charge up in about four megaChrons (forty days) and generated enough energy to make a worm-hole large enough to send several million atoms at once back through time. This major breakthrough meant that for the first time the scientists in the newly formed Temporal Sciences Center would be able to create a tiny probe to replace the single atoms they had been using. A probe had the advantage of being able to record what had happened to it and return the information to the scientists.

  The first probe to be sent back was about eight millimeters in diameter, spherical, and contained various instruments that would allow it to obtain its relative position in space-time and send a beacon out into space to report back the limited information it obtained. Within the tiny sphere was also a power supply capable of lasting for up to about one hundred years. This allowed the scientists at the early Temporal Sciences Center to send the small probe backward or forward through time at greater distances and almost guarantee results. For the first time, their time-traveling instruments could report back to the scientists with the information they needed to start mapping the space-time continuum.

  To the scientists’ frustration, the first twenty probes that they sent backward and forward through time returned to them a mix of confusing results. They were already expecting the random placement of probes throughout the continuum, but other strangeness plagued them as well. For instance, almost all the probes sent into the future never reported back to them at all. Granted, sending something forward in time requires that you "catch-up" to it before you'll hear the report. But even still, when the scientists finally reached the point in time to which they had sent the probes, there was no report. The future simply wasn’t where they predicted it to be.

  The probes that they sent backward in time had been reporting their positions in space since before the scientists sent them back. This conundrum worked in their favor since they got the test results back before they did the test, and it gave them a bit of confidence that their tests were going to be successful. However, the probes never reported from the place that they were predicted to be, and they quickly discovered that when they tried to alter the results to hone in on one location in space-time, the information they got simultaneously changed to meet their alterations, but in a seemingly random and confusing direction. It proved to be problematic because it meant that if they wanted clean results they had to stick to their plan, even if they didn't like what the probe was sending them before they sent it back in time, and that meant they had no way to control or predict where the probe would end up.

  The random placement of the probes through the space-time continuum would cause some to rematerialize deep within the Earth's crust, while others would rematerialize deep in space, too far for even their best deep space vessels to reach. When they plotted the data, there seemed to be no predictable way to send something back in time with any degree of certainty as to where it would end up. It seemed that if they were ever able to send back a living traveler, there would be no guarantee that he wouldn't be plopped in the middle of interstellar space with no way to get home.

  There was another major problem with time travel. Even though it was still in its infancy, it was already clear to the scientists who had achieved it that there was no way to make a return journey. The amount of power it took to send the smallest thing back through time was far more massive than the probe itself. This meant that if it took a power supply that was large enough to be housed in a twenty-story building to send a tiny pebble back through time, then the power it would take to send a power supply that big back through time, just so you could return, would be bigger than the planet Jupiter.

  For all this time the Temporal Sciences Center had been creating raw wormholes using nothing more than energy to create a singularity that would cut backwards across the fabric of the universe. With all the knowledge and data that had been mined over the nearly five hundred years of time travel experimentation, one group of scientists had come up with a device that they called the Temporal Core. The Temporal Core was a sort of relativity rifle that employed a new technique they called space-time multi-directional lensing. In essence, this device did indeed work like a rifle. It was a long semi-cylindrical tube that used both the fabric of space-time, and the gravitational distortions that it created to force a singularity back through time in a specific direction. The device required four separate hyper-fusion generators to force a singularity along a specific path in the fourth dimension. In this way, for the first time ever, the scientists of the Temporal Sciences Center could guide a probe to a specific point in both time and space.

  The Temporal core changed everything. Within twenty-five years of its invention the Temporal Sciences Center had been able to direct a probe back through time to a point within a hundred kilometers of when and where they wanted it to go. This was a fabulous breakthrough, made better by their newfound ability to create a singularity large enough for a single person to fit into. At this point the technology h
ad improved so much that the Temporal Science Center decided to enlist the world's first-time traveler.

  It was decided that the lone time traveler, a scientist name Irugy, would be sent to a point somewhere roughly one hundred kilometers beyond the orbit of Earth's moon and to a time one day before the mission was to take place. In this way, he would have the best chance of not re-materializing deep in the Earth's crust, or in the middle of an orbiting satellite. While their abilities had improved significantly, a margin of error of one hundred kilometers was still too loose to try and land him directly on Earth. Besides, a retrieval ship could reach him within a kiloChron of his re-materialization and bring him safely back to Earth from there.

  Irugy had the privilege of being the first man ever to send himself off on a dangerous mission. He was sent one day into the past. The flight was a huge success. Irugy arrived back on Earth before he left. There was great fanfare as, in an exciting paradox, he was there to assist himself on the journey back through time. He got to spend an entire day with himself, preparing for the mission, telling himself how it felt, studying the results of the test and finally seeing himself off into the past. He experienced it twice, from both of his own perspectives. Once as the scientist getting ready to go back in time, and then once from the perspective of the scientist who had already gone back in time. Irugy was known forever more as the first man to have ever met himself; the first person to ever live out a temporal paradox.

  As exciting as this first trip through time was, it also raised an interesting series of questions about the future of time travel. While it was a fabulous parlor trick, being able to greet one's self, it offered very little practical use because there was no way to make a return trip. What was the point in sending a researcher into the distant past if there was no way for them to come back and report what they learned? This problem was purely one of power.

  The success of Irugy's trip through time bolstered the world’s desire for real, practical time travel. This led to a redoubled effort for some way to create a smaller, more powerful energy source that could create a wormhole large enough to send, not only a ship and crew, but also a power supply big enough to return them to their own time. This was the crux of the time-travel ambition. Despite the success of the hyper-fusion generators and the Temporal Core, they were both still so large that it was nearly impossible to generate enough energy to engulf them. They were still centuries off.

  Irugy made another great contribution to the study of time from a time-traveler's perspective. Since they didn't have the means to make return trips, Irugy suggested the idea that select volunteers could make purposeful trips into the distant past, to make studies that would then be returned to their own time by use of the natural movement of time itself. In other words, he suggested that volunteers go back in time to live out the rest of their lives, and in the distant past create media that would be embedded with certain key phrases that would let their future selves know who they were from, and what the research entailed. Then, the files would sit in archives for however long was necessary for the future folks to find them. There was no guarantee that the writings or research would survive. The files had to be somewhat encoded to keep the people they traveled back to from knowing that they were from the future. It meant that the researchers themselves would become living probes, sent back through time with no way return. Irugy was the first volunteer to make this journey. He went one thousand years back and was never heard from again.

  The further back in time one went, the harder it was to "aim" the temporal core both in time and in space. The further back they went it wasn't just the where that became less accurate, it was also the when. It was possible that Irugy rematerialized so far from the time that they sent him to that the Earth either hadn't caught up to his position or had passed him by years. Another possibility was that he re-materialized deep in the Earth or Moon's crust, or that he crashes landed to his death. Some believed that he made it back to Earth just fine, but for whatever reason his slow message back to the future simply never made it.

  Whatever the reason for his disappearance didn't seem to matter. New volunteers eagerly came forward to make similar attempts. They were reluctantly given their opportunities. Irugy's disappearance had made the Center a bit shy about trying it again, but the sheer number of volunteers, despite the initial failure, overwhelmed them until they had no choice but to give in and send select people into the past.

  It turned out that nearly four in five attempts always returned positive results. The time travelers not only made it back to Earth, they also managed to get some message back to the future through the slow march of time. Rarely were they ever sent further than a few generations back into the past. The furthest back any volunteer ever successfully reported back from was just less than a thousand years, and that was considered a significant distance. Most volunteers usually went back no more than one to two hundred years. Some went back as little as thirty, forty or fifty years.

  Unfortunately, this method of sending people back in time was a death sentence. Every time a researcher went back in time, the future lost another scientist. Volunteering diminished, since the whole purpose behind time travel was lost on getting stuck in the past. The interesting thing about this approach to time travel was that the volunteers usually got to learn about their own research before they made the trip back. This also foretold of the diminishing volunteering that starting to take place. Fewer recordings from the past meant fewer volunteers. The practice eventually ended when it became clear that it really wasn't feasible to maintain over long periods of time. The push for the return trip became the new driving force behind time travel research.

  The problem remained that the power generation needed required a facility many hundreds of times larger than the largest temporal wormhole that could be created. The obstacle was so overwhelming that it took another six hundred years before it could be cracked. During this time, a few volunteers still took the journey back through time, though the further back they went, the less likely they were to ever be heard from again. The use of probes had a new breath of life during this period, being the preferred choice of research over losing researchers to history.

  Over this six-hundred-year period the hyper-fusion generators grew smaller and became faster at building up a charge, although basic limitations to their size and speed prevailed. At the same time, the size of the temporal wormhole that the scientists could create became larger, allowing for larger probes, and eventually ships to be sent back in time.

  The climax of all these efforts came when a young man named Dr. Ca'aury invented a new kind of hyper-fusion coil that could maintain a charge without a generating station. They took longer to charge than the current iteration of regular hyper-fusion generators, but they could hold their charge indefinitely until their power was released with one major burst of energy. Unlike the power generators of before, this new coil was like a battery attached to a flash bulb; it could hold energy in its capacitors for one massive burst or release minute quantities of it slowly to power the ship’s functions. This was the first step toward the return trip.

  While a normal hyper-fusion generator system could create a wormhole of significant size using only four generators, a similarly sized wormhole could only be generated by no less than twelve of the new coils. However, this new capability quickly led to another innovation by Dr. Ca'aury. By placing the temporal core within the center of a ship, instead of around it, and by equipping the ship with enough of the small hyper-fusion coils, he could essentially turn the ship into its own battery station. It was a technological marvel that some thought they would never achieve. The time-ships would still need an external generator and coils to power them up for their initial trip back through time, and to charge up the super-compact hyper-fusion coils that were carried inside the ship with the additional Temporal Core. In this way, they were able to create two energy bursts that could create two separate wormholes; one to go back, and the other to go forward.


  Dr. Ca'aury had given them the advancements they needed to achieve real time travel. It had taken over one thousand four hundred years, but they had finally done it. There were still problems to be overcome, however. Their guidance system had to be re-engineered to accommodate the return trip. Because of some of their previous limitations, the distance backward through time had always been somewhat limited, mostly because the further back they went the harder it was to get usable data back. Thus, at this point, the further back they went the harder they found it to navigate. Several ships were lost in these early days of real time travel because their data had thus far been somewhat limited. This problem led to the creation of the temporal rescue department. A team of scientists and Elite guard sent back through time to attempt to retrieve the lost ships from failed missions.

  Another issue that hampered some of these first round-trip missions was the full realization that even though you are traveling through time, it still takes time. The further back in time they went, the longer it took to get there. Thus, a trip back one hundred years would only take one point five kiloChrons, but a trip back ten thousand years would take almost two days. Longer trips meant longer exposure to the perils of a wormhole. It also meant that more amenities would be needed on board to keep the crews alive and in good health for this period. More amenities meant more power needed to be generated, and more power meant a larger ship, which meant a larger wormhole, which, again, meant more power.