United States Federal University. El Paso, Texas. April 21st, 2061.
“But how would you know that what you are doing is the cause of any effect you observe? This whole experiment seems poorly thought out, especially when you can’t even measure the presence or strength of this postulated chronon field. Even if you see something, why would anyone believe you about the cause?”
Dr. Reyes’s voice was getting louder and my blood pressure was increasing. I could feel the sweat under my arms and at my collar, where I wished my shirt was just a centimeter larger. I was glad I was wearing a jacket, even if it made the building heat all the more intense, because then, at least, no one could see the growing wet spots. I glanced at my advisor, just to see whether she was going to come to my rescue, but she was just sitting back, relaxed, like everything was under control, and not like my future career was on the line. I took a slow breath through my nose, and then tried to answer.
“I agree that some parts of my plan are not ideal, but this, I know you agree, is the cutting edge of science. We’re talking about identifying the nature of quantum time and then hopefully, finally enabling us to unite general relativity with the quantum gravity model, and the revised standard model. Once we finish this experiment, we should be able to then use those results to develop detectors for the chronon field and the chron particles.
“We’ve meticulously designed everything to isolate all known sources of interference from any external field or particle, as well as adjust our results for any virtual particles that appear in the test chamber.”
Dr. Reyes again, but a little quieter. “Those facts are wonderful, but they still don’t support such a large leap. You need to focus more on the fundamentals. We need to be able to detect and measure the chronon field and its associated particles, and confirm they exist. An experiment should enlighten us whether or not it works the way we expect it to. This plan is going to make world news if it works, and if it doesn’t, you’ll have wasted millions of dollars. The science foundations may never fund this kind of research again. You are a student, you don’t need to shoot for a Nobel prize just yet, focus on the basics, and then people may be ready for this great leap.”
I was not winning this argument. Dr. Reyes was well respected as a scientist, and a generally kind and constructive person, but he valued the incremental approach above all else, and that just was not an option for us here. We were stuck. This leap was necessary if we were ever going to crack this problem.
Just then, the quiet Dr. Amiri spoke up for the first time in two and a half hours. “Isn’t anyone going to bring up the potential safety issues with this line of research? There are stories that Ivan Ozerov’s lab in Siberia at the Russian Hypercollider was destroyed in 2047 because of investigations like this…”
“Hold on, Jalil.” Now, finally, my advisor speaks up. “We have been speculating about that disaster for over a decade now, but that’s all it is, speculation. I do really wish we knew the cause of that tragedy, but with the Petrov government not allowing any independent investigations, or any visitors at all, and not even reports by any of our trusted Russian colleagues, we just can’t know what the cause of that event was. All we have are rumors. There are so many conflicting stories including assassination plots, that I don’t think we should shut down this line of research unless we can point to a credible reason to believe there is a hazard.”
I spoke up then, to support this point. It isn’t like I was going to be knowingly putting my own safety at risk. “We have limited the power to the extent possible. Even if something with the hypercollider disaster was related to this, we will only be operating at 0.4% of that system’s power. We have the chamber isolated from electromagnetic and gravitational interference, and not packed in among a variety of other high-powered accelerators, magnets, and detectors. Our target is only 0.6 grams, which is 1,000 times smaller than the targets that Dr. Ozerov was reportedly planning to use. And, again, we don’t know whether he ever went through with those plans.”
“Remind me again what the resolution is on your target clocks,” Dr. Amiri said.
“It is 0.3 nanoseconds. That’s 10 times better than what the new micro-GPS satellites use. And, we are planning to maintain the time displacement to no more than an hour or two at most.”
“You’re planning to, but you don’t actually know how to do that until you attempt it. This is the problem here. You have no basis to calibrate the inputs with the size of the expected effect until after you have started the experiment”, Dr. Reyes added.
A pause. I didn’t really have anything else to add. We have been going around this difference of philosophy for nearly 3 hours now. We looked at each other in silence for nearly 2 minutes, which seemed worse than waiting for water to boil, which is what I felt like. Finally, my advisor spoke up.
“Thank you, Adler. This has been a long and interesting discussion. Please go wait in the lounge for a few minutes. We have a few things to discuss as a committee, and then we will call you back in to report our conclusions.”
I nodded, mumbled a “thank you”, and stepped out into the corridor, closing the door as quietly as I could behind me. The air in the hallway felt about 10 degrees cooler and so much more full of oxygen than the exam room where the stifling attention of a trio of the world’s top physicists would pass judgment on me.
…25 minutes passed…
As the flood of stress hormones left my body, I began to feel intensely tired. I sipped on a cup of water and perched on one of the side tables, not wanting to risk falling asleep or otherwise drifting into incoherence on one of the couches or armchairs.
Long faculty discussions were generally not good news. At least failing this exam would only mean I would have to rework my research proposal. Still, I couldn’t even bear the thought of that at the moment. Two years of work here at this university might have to be set aside. Even small changes could mean months of delays. I wasn’t sure I had any of that in me.
A soft knock on the door frame brought me out of my rumination. It was my advisor, a pleasant and caring, but otherwise inscrutable look on her face. “Hi, Adler. We’re ready to discuss our conclusions with you. Can you come back to the exam room now, or do you need another minute?”
Standing up and taking a deep breath, I said, “Sure, I’m ready. Let’s go.”
I tried to walk with my head up and all the dignity of a prisoner headed to the execution chamber. Once we reached the room, Dr. Fischer motioned me into the room. Drs. Jalil and Reyes were still sitting, not standing and ready to shake my hand in congratulations. I took a slow breath and looked at them expectantly.
“I must say that this is not the kind of research that I would have planned,” began Dr. Reyes. My heart started to sink. “However, Mr. Roth, your work so far has been outstanding. You are one of the top graduate students in the short history of this department. I think you are taking some major risks here, ones that you would be wise to heed my advice on, but I am not going to stand in your way. Congratulations, candidate Roth. You have passed your exam.”
It took me a moment to register the meaning of his words, but once Dr. Reyes had stood up and extended his hand, it finally sunk in. A wide smile of relief grew across my face as I shook his hand and then that of my advisor.
Dr. Jalil came over to me last. “Adler, I share some of Dr. Reyes’ reservations about this, but I have no reservations about you. You may transform our field, but please promise me you will be careful.”
I clasped his hand firmly. “Thank you, Dr. Jalil. And thank all of you,” I said, glancing around. “I appreciate your confidence, even if we don’t always agree.”
Susan invited me out for coffee the following morning while I gathered my things and our meeting finally disbanded. I don’t quite remember what I did with the rest of my day, but the words of my committee members stuck with me. We had strong disagreements, but they weren’t just professional disagreements. They were genuinely concerned about me. They actually wanted me to be safe and successful, and were afraid I was being too rash so as to jeopardize that.
I resolved to double check everything again, before we constructed the chronon field apparatus. I doubted everyone’s gut instinct on things like this, but, now that I could proceed, it would not hurt anything too much to give the entire plan another careful review. I would also try to find out everything I possibly could about that incident in Russia. I didn’t think my plan was too similar to anything they were doing there, but there was something about that story that left a nagging feeling in the back of my mind, too.
* * *
“Javier and Jalil are not going to be here. They each found conferences in South America to attend this week. They both insisted to me that this was not related to the experiment, but I don’t quite buy that.”
“Well, it's not like there is even room for extra observers in the lab now that all of the isolation equipment has been installed. I barely have room for my own desk in there,” I responded. “I assume you want to watch,right? Where are you going to be?”
“I think I’ll just be in my office. I’ll connect to the lab video feed from there. I’m not going to miss this.”
“Okay. I need about one more day to complete the last set of calibrations. So, does 9:00 am on Wednesday work for you?”
“I’ll be there.”
I had exaggerated a little about how long the last set of calibrations would take. In reality, I spent all my time in the lab between that Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning. I only slept about 4 hours in total during that time. But, in the end, I was ready at 9:00 am on Wednesday, even if I hadn’t shaved and my neck was getting a bit itchy.
“Well, how are things looking? Are we ready to go?” Susan poked her head into the lab promptly at 9:00 am while I was looking over the display readouts. She scrunched her nose a little bit as she finished her sentence, probably detecting that I had been in that lab without a shower since we last spoke. Thankfully, she didn’t comment on it.
“Yes, I think so. I just need to choose a target, place it in the chamber, and activate the isolators,” I replied.
“Alright. I’ll be in my lab connected via the video link. I will login to the lab terminal, too, just in case I can do anything to help. Let me know if there is anything I can help keep an eye on. Give me 10 minutes to get over there and set up.”
I nodded and she quickly backed out and disappeared. I walked over to my desk and rubbed the long piece of dark, slightly misshapen metal. It was a piece of Dr. Ivan Ozerov’s lab apparatus, possibly a part of the electromagnetic isolators from his chronon field chamber from the looks of it. I wasn’t quite sure whether this would bring me good or bad luck, but I figured I would try anything to nudge fate in the right direction.
I opened the storage cabinet where our targets were kept. Each one a 0.64 gram cube made of acrylic with a tiny atomic clock, battery, and a low power radio transmitter sealed inside it. I put on my gloves and picked up the first one with the transfer tool, and verified its current accuracy and power levels with my handheld interrogator. Everything was within expected tolerances, so I stepped over to the chronon chamber and placed the target on the central ceramic platform. The chronon chamber’s internal dimensions were only about 15 centimeters in all three directions, so the tiny target cube didn’t look so out of place, until you closed the door and then stood back to catch sight of the entire system that took up the space of a cube with 8 meters per side. My desk sat on a raised metal platform at the central level of that room about 3 meters above the floor, which was covered by cables and cooling tubing.
At that point the video link screen came to life and Dr. Fischer appeared and said, “Hello.”
“Hello Dr. Fischer, I just loaded the target into the chamber. I am about to go ahead and activate the isolators.”
“Understood. If this works, Adler, I’ll spring for the fancy hotel on our next conference trip.”
“Don’t jinx us, Susan. How about we get the fancy hotel whatever happens. Either way, I think we’re going to need it.”
I powered on the electromagnetic isolators that sensed and negated any surrounding charge, electric fields, or magnetic fields within the test chamber.
“Okay. Deal. It looks like the electromagnetic isolators are working at lower power than usual, is that right?”
“Yes, I think so. I convinced all the neighbors here to power everything down in their labs this morning just as a precaution. We never know when someone might generate some kind of interference beyond what we can handle… I’m turning on the gravitational isolators now.”
I flipped the three switches for the gravitational isolators. These had only been invented 3 years ago thanks to some impressive engineering on the basis of a partial theory of quantum gravity devised in the 2040’s. They were large and used a lot of power, but could negate the force of gravity within a small volume.
As the gravitational isolators came online, the target cube rose just slightly off its ceramic platform. Since there were no forces and no movement within the chamber, it didn’t wander, but kept its place.
“I think we should double check that everything is nominal.”
“Agreed,” Dr. Fischer answered. “Let’s each go over every value just to make sure.”
“That’s just what I was thinking. I’ve been staring at these numbers too much over the past day and a half to fully trust myself.”
Everything checked out, so I charged the chron emitters. Or, as Dr. Reyes would have said, “We don’t know what they’re emitting. We just know what they aren’t emitting, so call them ‘nohn-emitters’...” It was funny, if it wasn’t your future life on the line.
But, that said, theory predicted they were emitting chron particles, even if we had not developed the technology to detect them yet. We were about to find out.
I looked up at the video feed. “I think that’s everything. Let me know if you are ready for me to throw the switch.”
Dr. Fischer carefully scanned all of the readouts available to her, making a few notes on her sketch pad. I felt like this was my career on the line, but hers was on the line, too. She had been fundraising for years to get to this point, and they were about to see if it was all for naught, or if we were on the verge of upending Physics.
She looked straight into the camera with a confidence that she had grown accustomed to practicing over the years, but never quite truly felt deep inside. “Let’s go, Mr. Roth.”
I flipped the switch. Or rather, I entered the name of the script, “test1_final” into the command line of my computer and hit the enter key. The script included a 20 second countdown, marked with audible beeps, so I got up from my computer and bent down to directly observe through the small window in the test chamber. Susan was watching via the chamber’s video camera.
As the final beep sounded, the electronic hum of the equipment increased in volume. I made sure not to blink, and with my own eyes, I watched the target… disappear…
I was stunned.
I looked over to my computer and the video feed to see if they would also confirm that the target was no longer there, as if my eyes would be deceived, but the machines wouldn’t be. They said the same thing. No target on the video feed. No time signal coming from the target. It really wasn’t there.
“Adler, what just happened? Am I seeing this right?”
“Wait! Hold on…” My mind was still trying to catch up to explaining what was happening. “Yes! That’s right…” I went back to the computer to initiate a quick, automated calibration check. It just seemed like the thing to do.
Then, I remembered something. I opened the cabinet beside my desk where I threw the notebooks that I had filled up. I didn’t keep them organized, but the first few pages usually had dates on them. I pulled out a stack of notebooks, and started looking for the one I was using just about a year ago, when Susan and I had been up late after dinner at a conference talking about ideas and strategies for working around new problems. I had quickly flipped open and tossed to the side seven or eight notebooks. I pulled out a new stack.
“Adler, what is going on here? What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for something… hold on…”
“Clearly something happened here. But, what? I am looking at data from the chron emitters, and they power up and discharge, and that is when we lose the signal from the target… It wasn’t destroyed, was it?”
“I don’t think so…,” I mumbled. “Hold on… found it!”
“You found what?”
“I found the notebook I was using during that dinner in Seattle. Do you remember what we talked about that night?”
“Some. We were having a bunch of problems with the isolators and still trying to come up with a test procedure for the chron emitters.”
“Right, but then we talked about what results might look like. We were both fairly confident that what we would see would be that the target clock would instantly move forward by one hour, give or take, when the chron emitters discharged.”
“Yes, that sounds familiar.”
“Then your friend from Georgia Tech sat down at our table with a cocktail and started talking about all kinds of weird stuff, I think he had quite a few that night already.”
“Right. That was Matthew Klinger. Then, he started asking about what we were doing, and throwing out all kinds of odd suggestions…”
“Yes, but I wrote down a few, and one of them was this: that the target clock wouldn’t jump forward when hit with the chron discharge; it would disappear and then reappear when the rest of the universe caught up to the time the target had been sent forward to. From the target’s perspective, it would seem to have jumped to that point in the future instantaneously, but for the outside observer, it would seem to have skipped over that amount of time by disappearing and then reappearing.”
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“Okay, so you’re thinking that drunk Dr. Klinger was right, and we just wait an hour or so, and we’ll see our target reappear?”
“I don’t know. But, that’s all I’ve got to go on at the moment.”
“Alright. Let’s keep all the data and video recorders on and keep the isolators running, too. I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself for an hour, but if you need me, I’ll probably be here staring at this screen.”
…1 hour later…
“Adler, I still don’t see any target in our chamber.”
“I know! I know. I don’t get it. Maybe the calculation of the magnitude of our discharge was off. I can hear Dr. Reyes’ questions already… Maybe we wait a bit longer?”
“I think that’s all we can do for now. We can’t leave that equipment on all day, though. The facilities staff will start calling me about our electricity use. One more hour, then we shut things down and think about how to regroup.”
The target never reappeared. At least not during the two additional hours that I sat there waiting for it.
I scoured the data looking for some lost bit of energy that might have signaled the target’s annihilation, but found nothing. I powered down the equipment, let the neighbors know they could go about their usual business, and headed home to sleep. As I slept, my dreams took me though a vision of fantastical and mundane resting places for that little cube. But, none of them turned out to be true.
Unknown to Susan or me, at about 53 minutes after the target disappeared, a small acrylic-encased device traveling through space at the relative rate of 3.2 million kilometers per hour towards the Earth, burned up in the atmosphere in an unimpressive sight, if anyone had been around to look for it.
* * *
In the end, working with Dr. Reyes, we came up with a long list of possible explanations for what happened in our first chronon field experiment. Unfortunately, we were unable to test any of them without running another experiment. We mostly kept him on task without too many “I told you so’s” and he was able to offer some fresh insights about the potential dimensionality of time that we had not considered. That led to all three of us being squeezed into the lab together two months after our first experiment.
“So, I have lowered the emission energy by a factor of 200. According to the model, this should result in a maximum time displacement of 5 milliseconds.”
“But what do you think that will change?” Dr Reyes asked. “If the target still disappears, then how will you know if anything different happened?”
I was getting more comfortable with Dr. Reyes’ questions in that they didn’t fill me with dread any longer. “My thought was that the disappearance might be a kind of interdimensional jitter that we discussed earlier, so that even if it does not reappear in the same exact position, it will reappear near enough that we can detect it, hopefully still within the chamber.”
My advisor had been digging at this relentlessly for several months, too. “I did some of the math myself, Javier. We have to make some assumptions about the folding of the extra dimensions, but using standard values there, we get an expected variation in position from a 5 millisecond time displacement of about 1-2 millimeters. That should keep it within the chamber.”
“I remember some of those discussions a few weeks ago. I’m just trying to make sure that we aren’t missing anything. What could happen here?”
“We definitely know that the target is not moving–It just disappears, and presumably reappears somewhere else after its time displacement has been resolved. If it were accelerating away from its initial position, for example, we would have holes appear where it left the chamber. We know that it isn’t annihilated–there was no adequate increase in energy detected to account for the target’s destruction. I suppose that some of the interdimensional effects could mean that the target is going somewhere that we won’t be able to detect.”
“Ok, what else?”
“I suppose we could be wrong about the expected displacement and the target staying inside the chamber. If it reappeared outside the chamber or within one of the isolators, that could cause a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“It could make the isolator nonfunctional, by introducing some additional mass to it while it was running. I suppose we could get some kind of electrical discharge, if the target rematerialized at an unfortunate spot in the isolator. They run on 48,000 volts, so that probably isn’t something we want to be here to witness in person… but still, I think the chances of that are really slim. We have re-checked those predictions dozens of times now.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, Adler. It’s just that we’ve been surprised more than once on this project already, and I want to narrow down how many remaining things might surprise us.”
The three of us relocated to Susan’s office in the Physics building on the other side of campus from the lab. It was a Sunday morning, and we had the building manager ensure that no other labs were populated that morning, which wasn’t met with too much grumbling.
As Susan and Javier talked about department politics and sipped on coffee, I connected my two portable computers to the network and established control over the chamber back in the lab. That done, I executed the startup sequence and tried to distract myself by updating my notes before the test.
Once the startup sequence had finished, I let Susan and Javier know, and we accessed all the lab and chamber cameras that we could, while I pulled up the direct instrument readouts of every sensor we had inside the chamber. Then, I started the 10 second countdown and held my breath.
As we watched through the video monitor, the target vanished. As I, Javier, and Susan considered the once again shocking outcome and began to think of an explanation that would make sense of this event, a boom shook the building like all the doors being slammed shut at the same moment. As we looked up, the fire alarm began to sound, and so I entered the commands to shut down the system, and followed Susan and Javier out of the room and down the hallway to the stairs. Further investigation would have to wait.
The alarm was much more piercing in the hallway and encouraged them to move as quickly as we were able towards the stairs. As we passed the seating area near the elevators, small irregular glass cubes littered the carpet from a broken window. The warm dry breeze displacing the air conditioning carried a mixture of worry and confusion.
I and the faculty checked in with the safety officer outside and learned there had been an explosion of some kind at the Sun Bowl football stadium on the University of Texas El Paso campus, a distance of 4.5 kilometers from here. There was no perceived threat to our campus, and everyone was asked to go home and wait for further instructions.
Susan, Javier, and I looked at each other with our tired faces deep in thought, before we hurriedly said goodbye and left campus in the bright sunshine of late morning, the clear skies and mild temperatures contrasting with the dark and stormy thoughts within our heads. Was this a coincidence? I was still so confused.
Watching the news reports later that night, I learned that the explosion had damaged part of the football stadium, though no one had been present, thankfully. There had been no events or practices ongoing at the time. Authorities had not detected any radiological or chemical agents, and there had been no claim of responsibility and no known motive for the blast. Engineers were yet to complete their inspections and estimate the damages. It would probably be some time before the stadium was safe to use again, a substantial blow to the culture of this West Texas city. Damage to nearby buildings was a bit more severe than what had occurred near our lab. Luckily, only minor injuries had been reported, no deaths.
Some details were likely being kept secret so that they would have better grounds to prosecute whoever had been responsible. It didn’t seem to make any sense, and yet, I couldn’t let go of the coincidence between the timing of their experiment and the explosion. Could there be a connection? He didn’t see how it could be possible, but his mind kept him occupied with that thought all night. Sometime around 3:00 am, nearly 15 hours after their experiment was interrupted this morning, I fell into a restless sleep.
* * *
I stood in the blocks on the track focusing on the lane in front of me, competitors on both sides, the finish line only 100 meters in front of me. As I waited for the starter gun, I felt my hairs stand on end. Suddenly, I found myself crouched near that finish line without the starter blocks, the gun sounding in the distance. I stood up confused looking back as the seven or eight faceless sprinters charged past me and crossed the finish line, while I just stood there.
“What happened? Did you see that?” I asked. The others just walked away from me and talked to one another in pairs or triples not looking at me.
I touched another racer on the shoulder and looked into their face that wasn’t quite there. “How did I get to the finish line?” They didn’t say anything and started to turn away again, before I pulled them back.
Getting frustrated I yelled, “How did I get here!” And then suddenly I was standing on top of the transcontinental high speed train, or at least something like it but longer. The wind was rushing all around me, but it wasn’t difficult to stand.
I turned to see Javier Reyes standing there next to me with an amused half smile on his face. Despite the wind, we could easily speak to one another. “What do you think this means, Adler?” he asked.
“What does what mean? The train?”
“What does time mean?”
“I don’t understand. Time doesn’t mean anything; time is a dimension.”
“Is it? Come into the future with me.” Then Javier took my hand and jumped up into the air and I felt that same prickling feeling of my hairs standing on end, while my body jumped along with him up to a height of nearly 2 meters.
We instantaneously appeared in the air above clear tracks just in front of the train engine quickly approaching us. As we fell, the engine and several cars quickly passed beneath us before our feet met the surface of the roof.
Lightly touching down against an impact that should have sent us tumbling, Javier released my hand, and asked me another question. “Now, do you understand?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What does time mean? What does velocity mean?”
“I told you I don’t know. If you know, why don’t you tell me the answer?”
“I was wrong, Adler. I didn’t know what they meant, but you do. You figured it out.”
Frustrated again, a growl came into my voice, “Javier, I don’t understand. Just tell me!”
Then I woke up, still frustrated with what dream Javier wouldn’t tell me. I rubbed my face with my hands, the stubble of my beard being a little too long for comfort. I glanced at the clock: 4:42 am.
Something was right there at the back of my mind nagging at me, and not just frustration at these failed experiments. I didn’t understand yet, but there were connections I could feel. They were just out of reach, like catfish moving under the surface of a muddy pond. The longer I stared at them, the less likely they were to be in that spot. I layed there looking at the ceiling until after the sun came up.
* * *
The shockwave of the explosion had hit their campus building about 12 seconds following the disappearance of the target inside the chamber. It was hard to deny the suggestion that there had been some connection between the two in our minds. I wasn’t sure what that connection could be, but Susan and Javier told me to shut everything down and lock the lab until we had some answers. Susan was increasingly sure that there was a connection between the two events, though she couldn’t articulate what it was more than her own intuition.
Honestly, she wasn’t alone. I was feeling that sense of connection, too. I sat down and started writing on the back of some flyer that had been placed on my desk. I drew out the vectors between our lab and the Sun Bowl with distances and the time of event as near as we could determine them: the target disappearance, the detonation at the Sun Bowl, and the shockwave reaching our campus 4.5 kilometers away.
That would make the velocity or apparent velocity (I wasn’t sure anything was actually moving yet) equal to 375 meters per second. That was just faster than the speed of sound at this altitude (333 m/s). Well, that made sense. A supersonic shock wave with most of its energy dissipated will arrive just a bit faster than the speed of sound.
Writing smaller to fit in the space around my diagram, I calculated the apparent velocity that would have been responsible for my target causing the explosion. With a 5 millisecond displacement I got 900,000 meters per second–an astounding value. What could possibly allow something to move at such a velocity? Did it have to accelerate? That would mean 900,000 m/s would only be the average velocity, it would have been moving nearly twice that fast when it stopped.
How much kinetic energy was that? I scribbled some numbers and asked my computer for some data. It came out to be 972 Megajoules or 0.2 tonnes of TNT. That actually seemed too small to account for the damage. But, it couldn’t have been going faster. What was going on? I was getting more sure that our experiment had caused the explosion at the Sun Bowl, but I was getting further away from a solution. I folded up the flyer, slipped it into my pocket, and walked out of the office to head home. I wasn’t getting anywhere here.
I paced around my apartment two or three dozen times, and then finally fell onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling. What could make something move at 900,000 m/s or more?
As I layed there, my mind restless, I imagined flying through the clouds tracing the path that our target may have taken. Four-and-a-half kilometers in five milliseconds. No holes in the chamber. I imagined being inside the chamber. I disappeared and then reappeared outside it in the future. Then, I did it again. I disappeared and reappeared in the future, unmoving.
I asked my computer, “how fast does the Earth move around the Sun?”
”29,700 meters per second.”
“And, how fast does the sun move through the Milky Way?”
“200,000 meters per second.”
“How fast does the Milky Way move towards Andromeda?”
“112,000 meters per second.”
That still wasn’t enough velocity. Certainly not 900,000 m/s no matter how you added it up, but was I on to something? What if it wasn’t the target that was moving when it was displaced forward in time. What if the target remained fixed in its place once we separated it from our time, and the Earth was moving past it?
I looked over at the clock. It was almost 2:00 am. I had to know. I hopped out of bed, grabbed my jacket and flew out the door and down the stairs to my car. I kept the windows down as I drove to the lab to keep the numbness from overtaking me. I needed to feel that I wasn’t dreaming.
On arriving at the lab, I removed the padlock and tape we had used to seal the door. I fumbled through the prototype targets in the storage cabinet. I needed a different one, not our usual miniaturized clock. Coming up empty, I tried a second cabinet, and I found some of what I was looking for. Targets with approximately the same mass as our final design, but these had a radio transmitter. I made these when we thought we may need to look for doppler shifts in emitted photons to see whether any time displacement was occurring. Our investigation eventually went in a different direction, but I had kept these targets around anyways.
The clock said 2:37 am as I sat down in the operator chair next to the chamber, and began to power up the systems. The script for this process took almost an hour, and I was far too impatient to sit around waiting on it, so after placing the target into the chamber, and getting a positive status message, I got up and paced through the darkened halls hoping to find the building as empty as I expected.
Half an hour later, I was back at my lab having only found one lonely postdoc asleep at his desk. The startup routine was nearly 80% complete. I went back to the folded up flyer in my pocket. The calculation was rough–not my best work, but I didn’t need to be that accurate. I was going to try and send this target out past the orbits of the geosynchronous satellites.
I entered the time displacement parameters into my computer, and then calculated the signal strength that the radio target would have from our position.
Not strong. I would need at least a 4 meter dish to pick up the signal. We had a radio astronomy lab in the next building and it had a 6-meter dish on the roof. Thankfully, it wasn’t a personal pet project and belonged to the university’s shared lab equipment. I logged in to the shared instrument reservation system. Luckly, no one was using it at 3:00 am this morning–the radio astronomers didn’t have to do most of their observing at night. I reserved an hour of time, and then stared at all of the settings I would need to provide to have the dish search for the part of the sky and frequency range I needed.
The target I thought had destroyed part of the Sun Bowl had been displaced nearly towards the horizon. The Sun Bowl was located to the southeast of their campus. Was that the direction things moved during time displacement? I had no idea with only a single data point.
I took a chance. As long as I built in a buffer, I could make sure that any reappearance of the target would take place far outside the Earth’s atmosphere and well away from any people, including those in the orbiting labs. One Earth diameter away from the surface would be enough to avoid anything that I knew about. Assuming this 900,000 m/s velocity remained the same for this target as the last one–again no reason to think that it would, but it was the only data point that I had.
Thirteen point three seconds of displacement into the future. That should place the target about 12,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, in the direction the Earth was moving. No, that was too close. I might not be able to detect it before it burns up in the atmosphere. Three point six minutes should put it half of the distance to the moon, and I’d have enough time to detect the signal.
I checked the charge on the chron emitters. They were ready. Susan was really going to kill me for this. Every charge was billed to her for over $1,000 in electricity. There was no way to hide this from her. I hoped I could accompany that with good news.
With the dish and the chamber ready, I closed my eyes and said a prayer for the first time in my life, I’m not sure to whom. Then, I keyed in the execute command and watched the chamber at the moment of discharge. The target vanished. This time I expected it, but it was no less baffling.
I looked over to the radio dish receiver data and waited. The target should emit a clear binary oscillating series of numbers at a frequency of 2.2 GHz. Nothing. I waited a few more seconds. Still nothing. I started to lower my head to the keyboard ready to wallow in despair, but as my forehead began to gently depress the keys (I wasn’t going to bash in a perfectly good head or an expensive keyboard), I stopped. My calculation wasn’t all that good, I remembered. I set the dish on a narrow search pattern spiraling out from the expected location of the target. I didn’t have much time. It the target was where I suspected it was, I only had three minutes left until it hit the atmosphere.
I waited. Seconds seemed like minutes. And, there it was… and wasn’t again. Ahh! I stopped the dish search and set it back to the previous inclination. There it was. The sound of the signal came through the speakers as a thin buzzing sound, and I watched the U-waves of the signal bounce across the screen. There it was. The target that I had sent three-and-a-half minutes into the future was there floating in space, while all of us on the Earth rushed towards it at 900,000 meters per second.
* * *
Stockholm, Sweden. December 10th, 2087.
I sat there alone. Well, not truly alone. There were 7 other people there at the table eating dinner with me, asking me questions, and talking about their own lives and bad experiences in secondary school and university-level Physics classes. Susan’s health was deteriorating, and she was unable to attend the ceremony with me. I had no family able to attend either, so I think, in the most important ways, that I was really alone there amidst that crowd of finely dressed people from all over the world.
I waited for my turn to speak with a familiar knot in my stomach that grew increasingly uncomfortable; something I had not felt in quite a few years. It was almost like welcoming an old friend back, one that I had not seen in decades, and even though we did not always get along with one another, the reconnection was welcome.
A diplomat droned on with an excessively flowery and long-winded introduction. “...and then twenty-six years ago, Dr. Roth conducted the first experiment that would lead to the discovery of the Fischer-Roth displacement field and unlock another level of our understanding of space and time…”
His description was not exactly correct, I noted. Susan and I called it the chron displacement. Other people started calling it the Fischer-Roth field, but we didn’t really know what the cause of the displacement effect was. All we knew today was that there was another vector to our velocity through the universe that we couldn’t see from observing any other thing in the universe. All observable objects had an apparent velocify of 2,850,000 m/s through space separate from the relative velocities of any specific object that was only evident when you displaced something forwards or backwards in time. When you put that together with the motion of the local group, the galaxy, the Sun, and the Earth, one ended up with an apparent velocity that varied between 863,000 m/s and 891,000 m/s depending on where you were on the planet or where the Earth was around the Sun.
It would probably take another generation of research to figure out the true cause of the chron displacement. It could be part of some fundamental field, some force of nature, we had not previously observed, but to jump to that kind of conclusion was premature. Nevertheless, names were sticky things, not easily changed.
As I heard my name being said again, followed by applause, I stood up and made my way to the podium. Placing my three cards of handwritten notes on the surface in front of me, I began my speech.
“On behalf of myself and Dr. Susan Fischer, I want to express my gratitude to His Majesty, the Nobel Committee, and so many of our friends and colleagues that are too numerous to count…” I didn’t really care for highly formal speeches like this, but the style did offer the opportunity for a certain detachment that eased my stomach and helped me prepare for my final paragraph that I had not cleared with the organizers.
“There is one last thing… Susan and I strongly believe that all nations on Earth should immediately negotiate a treaty to ban the production and use of chron-related technologies for military purposes. This ban should even extend to certain kinds of dual-use scientific research as difficult as such a limitation may prove to be. As our own experience has noted, this technology can be dangerous, and if we allow nations to develop, manufacture, and deploy chron-based weapon systems, we will be leading our civilization down an uncertain and precarious path.
“Having only recently climbed out from under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, we should not allow our society to fall under a new shadow. One where targeted assasination and surgical destruction is hailed as a better, safer alternative to conventional lethal conflict that we have mostly moved past. The temptations to use these systems will be too great for many leaders to resist. A new age of conflict could arise, as perceived safe and effective means of combating rival nations become part of leaders’ toolboxes. Such a destabilization could undermine so much of the human progress achieved over the last three or four decades.
“Susan and I do not regret our discovery. This knowledge together with the practical guided development of chron technology could revolutionize human exploration of the cosmos. The knowledge that will open to us through this door is barely conceivable to the minds of current researchers like us. In the paths before us then, we must resolve to take the one less traveled, and not turn every technological advance into a weapon before we put it to the use of science and human development.”
I stepped back, took a deep breath, and quickly retreated to my seat among the crowd. Some polite applause with an undercurrent of murmuring accompanied my steps, along with some scattered cheers. While this audience was not at all representative of the global population, the reaction here was clearly mixed.
The masters of this ceremony did not bother to comment on my words, and moved on to the next laureate, with another long-winded and flowery introduction. The risks that awaited us were so clear to me, and I desperately wanted everyone to know and make the wise decision to avoid them.
While I didn’t usually follow the news media, I did deign to read a few articles and watch a few videos about reactions to my speech. It turned out there was some support for my recommendation, though the politicians were never quite specific enough to lay out clear proposals.
Over the following months, many of the major nations continued to talk about some kind of chron-technology treaty, while heavily investing in their own domestic research into the field. Everyone wanted the other nations to yield first as a precondition for negotiations. I feared we were too late. The evolution of this technology now had a life of its own, and whether or not human society survived its development would depend on our continued evolution.
* * *
China National Space Administration. Haidian, Beijing. August 8th, 2092.
Major Shen Yin was waiting for the computer to finish compiling targeting solutions for the next set of temporal bombardments. The status bar suggested he had to wait another four and a half minutes for the calculations to be completed for his set of 16 objectives. He was one of three military officers stationed at the National Space Administration, a backup command and control center for the Chinese Space Command, which oversaw both reconnaissance satellites as well as their modern fleet of temporal displacement weapons.
The war with India had only broken out into open hostilities 12 days ago, yet the space command was down to the third of their four operations centers, the other two, including the headquarters, having been destroyed by an Indian temporal weapons strike during the last week. The civilian population, at least everyone who still had family or knew someone in the countryside, was trying to flee cities like Beijing and any other military or industrial centers. It wasn’t a bad decision. Combined with conventional weapon strikes near the borders, India’s temporal weapons had devastated their own leadership and communications infrastructure.
News reports in China said that hundreds of targets had been destroyed in India with hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties. They were deploying more than 100 temporal weapons per day, as many as their supercomputers could calculate solutions for. Reports on domestic casualties were not very clear, possibly due to the state of communications in the country, but Yin knew from his access to foreign reports as an intelligence officer that they were not in good shape. He was glad that his wife and daughter had been able to escape to his mother-in-law’s farm in remote Shanxi province. Yin had not been able to contact his own brother in more than a week, but wasn’t sure whether that was because of the communications difficulties or because he had been one of the casualties of this war.
At least there was no radioactive fallout to worry about. For whatever reason that remained elusive to him, both India’s and China’s governments considered the use of nuclear weapons, and the violation of that treaty, to be a forbidden escalation, and so they had not launched any. Of course, given the pinpoint devastation of temporal weapons, most of both their nuclear forces were likely severely reduced, and they were such crude tools compared to the precision of their new implements.
A pop-up notification on major Shen’s computer indicated that the calculation was complete. He now had the targeting solutions for 16 critical industrial, government, and military targets within India. He transmitted the displacement calculations to the orbiting weapons and sent the confirmation code to his supervisor. Once he and his supervisor authorized the launch, the weapons, each a sphere of dense tungsten and depleted uranium surrounded by a set of miniaturized chron emitters, would displace themselves through time by the precise fraction of a second necessary to reappear in the solid crust of the earth just a few tens of meters below the buildings that they were meant to destroy. The resulting explosions would create craters that swallowed the buildings and sometimes those nearby structures as well, all without chemical or radiological explosives.
Still, the pinpoint accuracy of these new tools of war made their use seem almost without suffering. Certainly the people in the buildings would be killed, but surrounding areas would hardly be scathed, except for broken windows. As long as they restrained themselves to critical, war-related targets, which they did because these weapons were not cheap, they felt almost noble, such an elevated way to execute conflict than those previous warriors relying on blades or gunpowder.
Yin looked over to Colonel Xiao and nodded. They both entered their passwords to authorize the deployment of the weapons and then waited for the confirmation messages to appear on their screens that the weapons had received their instructions. As they watched and waited for the text to appear, a temporal warhead appeared in the stone about 40 meters below them. The dense sphere materializing within the stone, resulted in a few grams of matter being annihilated and converted into energy. This energy vaporized several meters of stone, pushing the layers upwards and outwards. As Major Shen and Colonel Xiao waited to see their confirmation messages, the floor briefly rose beneath their feet and then collapsed into a fiery hot crater that stretched from Fucheng Road to Yuyuantan Park.