Principles of Time Travel

By Abdul-Khaliq

A futurist philosophy in the guise of a story, Principles of Time Travel follows the adventures of Spacetime lab as they experiment with quasi-time travel projection technology, setting in motion a chain of events whose effects will extend hundreds of years into in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Social Arts and Technical Alliance
• Release date: Jan 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781955275026

Book preview

1. Of fish and freedom

Dearest M:

I know it has been quite a while since we last talked, and that I owe you an explanation for the strange coldness I showed you upon our last meeting. It wasn’t that I had suddenly lost interest in your company (or that I had somehow lacked such interest to begin with), but rather that I had, at the time, become preoccupied with other matters.

You may not know this, but prior to taking up post as a pedagogue, I held a high-ranking (but little-known) position as a scientist at the Western Bay Laboratory in Victorville, CA—seaside at the border between yesterday and tomorrow. Recall that they say the Western Bay Logistics Complex is one of the last stops one makes before crossing into the chaos of Los Angeles and the Hollywood block—making it the only real spot short of the prime meridian civilized enough to compete with Asia in that far-spanning techno-bravado so typical of our age. I was there, overlooking the once small town in its newly decorated, gaudy asymmetry—a mom and pop store here, an accelerator tower there—doing the work of noble mankind: shallow-sea recovery shields to reclaim the land that the melted icebergs have taken from us, ramming our remote-controlled robots into dolphins’ faces as we took back the watery streets of sunken Compton. That’s what I did for a living.

You know, building bubbles around ocean-covered cities pays pretty well. As engineers my colleagues and I loved the work, loved the prestige that came with our positions as glorified gamers, and fancied ourselves a new breed of conquistador; when you can’t rob people of their land, rob fish. When space exploration becomes stalled by a baking home planet, explore the cool waters to make yourself feel better. Unfortunately, such work does (not surprisingly) become tedious—where members of our team tended to develop a kind of envy towards our sea-bound friends. Here we were, developing elaborate schematics and machines for shooing away sea bass, while the only thing our gilled friends had to do was leave. That they could leave was the rub. It is ironic how we warmed ourselves into a corner and gave the sea bass more (albeit less frigid) spaces to play in at the same time. They could just swim away. We, however, were confined to our computers. Worse yet, as a shallow-sea engineer, your mind was even more confined than you were. We were always thinking about the bigger environment—always considering the interests of humanity. Not out of a natural curiosity but from an institutionalized magnanimity were we forced to be the angels of a collective we could never quite see. Endlessly cleaning up the errors of generations which still remain shortsighted as ever, we burned out at various rates, but always eventually. Four years, five positions, eleven different engineers…like the fish, you just had to get out. And I was no exception. As the initial enthusiasm for the job began to wane alongside my health, I began to think of freer air—longing for the space where futility no longer loomed. To the desert it was, and it would be here that I should begin my new life.

So when I came to Tucson, I already had my share of baggage. Three suitcases full of personal items and four full of disillusionment. Though I never said it expressly, the smile on my face from yours and my afternoon conversations must have hinted at the curative effect you had on me (though I’m sure you had no idea why), while the brevity of our acquaintance added even more of a fated elusiveness to it all. When I remember you, I often think of where I had come from. I remember the Southern California coast peppered with the tops of buildings and the robot caravans in procession like some blinking, dystopian parade. Yet I remember these sights with fondness rather than that former dissatisfaction. There is joy in the thought of returning there with an artist’s eye just as you, the consummate aesthete, taught me. Thus I feel I owe you an explanation for why I treated you so nonchalantly in those final days. It wasn’t that I had forgotten you—far from it. Instead, it was you who helped me remember: Through our discussion of painters and modern art, I finally gained what I needed to close an unfinished chapter in my life.

As a shallow-sea engineer, I often imagined what it would be like to undo the past. Physics has come a long way, you know—such that we can even print basic foods over the web (which reminds me, I need to buy more pancake mix for mine). Chatbots scanning your PET data to deliver custom TV channels? Holophones and GPSshoes? I mean, we really are spoiled. Time-travel, though, is something else. Haven’t you ever thought about the possibility? What if we could go back and un-fight wars or un-say words? Well, as our exchange was approaching its unexpected end, I was wrapped in thoughts of exactly this. It led me to places that I could not have envisioned, and I thought you should be the first to hear of such places.

After all, it was you who inspired them. I owe you at least this much.

Attached are my notes to you, many of which were written in the middle of my investigations of space-time. Contained in these notes are the last eight months of my work with U. Arizona and the Federal Annex. It is ultimately the pursuit of such work that kept me away from you. Though I have no idea if you will read these (let alone be soothed by them), I hope that they at least provide you with some sense of how deeply you have inspired me. I also hope these letters find you well in general.

Yours faithfully,

Ezra

11:06am, Thursday, September 29, 2067

I. Letters from Spacetime (March 2067 – September 2067)

2. Some background

Religions have outlined the basic principles. Screenwriters have made movies about it. But what is time travel really? I know what you’re thinking. Lit-up chairs and flying machines, wormholes to other worlds perhaps? Actually, I don’t know about all that, but I will tell you that time travel is possible even today, that we humans can do it (kind of), and that I am one of the lucky few blessed with the opportunity to engage this sport as a pioneer. For reasons that I have yet to explain to myself, I’ve chosen to document for you, M, the progress of my journey—that you might, through letters, be a witness to the work of the new science. I’ve always had a fondness for you—as a student, then as a peer and finally as a muse. Thus, as a tribute to the good memories of you, I will endeavor to explain what got me here.

About 50 years ago, when scientists first popularized the idea of quantum teleportation as a reality beyond the journals, people immediately began to speculate about the implications for machines which could beam items from one location to another. They also envisioned the creation of tangible holograms and (of course) time travel. Since then, our government (compelled by necessity to remain on the cutting edge of all science) began studying quantum mechanics in greater detail for three main reasons: the advancement of weapons, the control of information technology, and the sustainment of international advantage. This last effort, headed mainly by a newly-founded subsection of one of the handful of joint intelligence committees at the time, mainly consisted of theoretical research intended to push the technology as far as possible.

The focus back at the turn of the 21st century was not (contrary to what many even now believe) so nefarious as to warrant secrecy, but was simply aimed at putting the funding where it mattered. Many private companies (such as AT&T and Wells Fargo) as well as universities such as Stanford (before it moved) and Caltech benefitted from what was then a new science funding initiative, as our government studied everything from how to blow up enemy weapons with anti-particle pulses to non-intrusive mapping systems. Under such programs, we quadrupled the capacity of the airwaves, perfected solid state phones, and planted the seeds for the switch from paper money to personal credit which is currently underway. Time travel, however, wasn’t on anyone’s mind since it was seen as fantastic—almost mystical—in nature. That is, until someone published a very important paper.

The authors are not important, and I don’t recall the exact name of the paper. But the basic premise was that scans of the mapped brain, combined with stimulation to certain parts of that brain could serve as inputs to a kind of game. If the back of your head glowed red on the screen, researchers figured you were visualizing something. If it glowed red while the center of your brain glowed orange, you were visualizing something emotional. If the scan suggested you were viewing an emotional scene, but certain motor areas remained dark, it suggested that you were watching without the inclination to act—thus prompting the writers of the article to conclude that the main difference between mental experience of the present and mental experience of the past lay in one’s expectations for his own capacity to change the event. The past, the author’s claimed, was seen as being immune to one’s action, the present was all about action, and the future was like the past—only with less emotion and more controlled (prefrontal) supposition. Duplicating the experiments of Penfield (who zapped brain areas to create experiences in patients’ minds), the researchers were able to create fake memories in the subjects and watch the results at the same time, providing unequivocal evidence for certain families of brain activity over others when it came to experiencing different senses of time.

In light of the paper and subsequent follow-up studies, people began to think of time travel not in terms of snazzy devices and whirling portals, but instead in terms of the greatest transport device of them all—the human brain. When you think about it, this makes sense. The brain sits atop a combination of genetics and socialization to form uncountably many experiences within uncountably many personalties, driving some to enlightenment and others to insanity without any effort on the part of a funding agency. So people began to ask, If we can teleport small particles into a person’s brain (‘zapping in’ certain sensations), and do so as feedback to what the person is already viewing, can we not effectively read minds AND talk to the minds we read? (The answer turned out to be both yes and no—a somewhat long story which I may explain in a later letter.)

In any event, scientists did scan subjects’ brains over the next couple of decades; they did irradiate those brains with particles, and did advance the science—sometimes with horrendous results. Aside from causing cancer, stroke, and all kinds of neurological problems in over 2,500 people over the course of a 27 year span, the science of zapping (as it came to be called) also took its toll on the government. People began to complain that government funded zapping was far worse than any paid pharmaceutical study because it was not as if you could just unzap the damage you had caused. People were sent home like dummies, high as a cloud, low as rats’ feet, manic, paralyzed, and scary. Having waived all of their rights to sue in exchange for a couple of thousand dollars, the early victims of science experiments in zapping were left without recourse. The public reeled, the sea level rose, and nobody wanted to hear any more about it. Thus, the program went underground.

Fast forward a few years. 2031 arrives and people realize that California and Florida really are sinking, the U.N. won’t help us dig them up (saying something about how everybody has the 3 foot problem), so displaced and economically scarred people become interested in cognitive time travel once again. This time, however, it is no longer a matter of government mind control, but one of commercialized escapism as people long for the days before the total virtual lifestyle (impoverished in one’s high-tech cube-condo). You may know all of this already, but I’m making a point here: Time travel was never dead, you see, just dormant—which is how I’ve come to be involved at a pretty stable stage in the game. People want this. We need our what ifs to be addressed. Twenty years of tweaks, and here we are.

Today, the National Science Foundation oversees the Spacetime Project (which is really all about time travel). The basic idea behind the NSF’s initiative is, if we can zap a person into a mental simulation of days past or future, who needs a DeLorean? Indeed, any person can imagine the past or future; any decent hospital can scan him as he does so. It is easy to find computers that store a person’s brain patterns as that person describes what he is seeing. All you need is a way of reliably reproducing the actual past or the most likely future in a person’s mind in such a way as to defy their will to change their setting. (It turns out that this is not easy, let me tell you. Nonetheless, the NSF and U. of Arizona have done it.)

* * *

Taking a break from my position at the school (while still at the Art Academy), I was recently invited to a U of A. seminar on the topic of student presence in the virtual classroom, where the speaker mentioned the upcoming retirement of the NSF’s chief space-time Jumper, who has apparently been doing the job for four years. The Jumper (whose name was Luo) cited a growing sense of foreboding concerning his own sanity after 6 jumps. As an audience member, I asked why this was so and the lady giving the talk replied, Jumpers live in a world of strong paradoxes, and not many sane people can handle that. When I pressed further, referencing a little about the history of zapping, the lady seemed surprised at what I knew, offered to answer further questions after the talk, and seemed to address more of her words to me directly from then on.

Well, M, I did speak to the lady after the seminar, found out her name was Dr. Barbara Calder, and was summarily invited to apply for the position of civilian Jumper. Somewhat incredulous, I asked why she had been so quick to hand me an application and she said (much to my amazement), Our simulations suggested I would find Dr. Luo’s replacement here, that he would be controlled in action and reckless in thought, and that he would ask questions for which any answer would be an acceptable one, without believing anything he heard.

Oh, come on. You don’t even know me like that. After a thirty minute conversation and a handful of seminar questions? Come on, I balked.

You’re right, Dr. Calder told me. Our simulations aren’t that good. Yet. But we do have some excellent tools for verifying our intuition. If you get the job, I may tell you about them.

Such an answer was enough to convince me, so I applied. Two weeks later, I was hired.

That was a little over a month ago. Today marks my 33rd day at the U of A School of Cognitive Biology, Spacetime Lab and I officially consider myself indoctrinated. Oh, the tales I could tell you! Unfortunately, this letter is getting long, so I’ll just summarize in bullet form:

While going on talks, Dr. Calder wears those scanning contact lenses you may have heard about, as well as a mobile NNS (nuns or nanospin scanner). Yes, that’s the device that sends out a signal when your brain fires with a specific pattern. One of her NNS cues lets her broadcast what the contacts see to others in the lab. The lab mates can type tiny messages back onto the contacts as a reply. Pretty nifty, eh? Apparently they used this trick to run a background check on me while I was asking my second question in the seminar. Creepy.

It is true that Dr. Calder and others knew they would find Dr. Luo’s replacement at the seminar. How they knew was amazing in itself, but I will save it for another letter.

I will be Spacetime’s 4th Jumper. Jumper 1 quit after an initial, failed (and what he called disturbing) trip to the future.

Jumper 2 suffered intraparenchymal hemorrhaging, dying of his stroke 40 minutes into his second jump.

In light of the dangers, I will need to train for at least another three months before I am allowed to jump at all.

Dr. Luo is the 3rd Jumper, and is set to retire the week after I complete my first jump in June. In the meantime, he has no plans to jump again. Why the hesitancy? I’ll tell you next week when I ask him.

Cordially,

Ezra

1:09am, Friday, March 4, 2067

3. The first rules

You may ask yourself why time-travel involves training. I spent the first two days here trying to figure that out myself. After you talk to people, however, and get their opinions on the matter, it all becomes very clear.

Time travelers are in the business of trading the real for the unreal.

I wish I could have recorded my conversation with Dr. Luo this morning—I mean really have filmed it, mannerisms and all. As Spacetime’s chief engineer and only Jumper, Dr. L. is a little over medium set, round-to-squarish faced Chinese man, with a short, slightly graying haircut and orange-tan skin. With his 5’11 frame and confident jaw, he just seems out of place in a science lab. This one doesn’t wear glasses or a lab coat, prefers camouflage shorts and a regular tee shirt, along with an expression that just screams Don’t tell me what to do. I’ll tell you. Actually, he’s naturally quite intimidating (perhaps due to what I’ve observed to be an intolerance for incompetence), and I can’t imagine how lesser minds function around him. To add to the intimidation, Dr. L. speaks in a very drawn out, unamused accent more typical of a mobster than a published scholar. He also demands rigorous, non-sloppy thinking to the extent that, as you to slip too frequently into those oh-so-common Uh, I don’t knows and Let just try its, you can be sure that you are probably getting on his nerves. It shows both on his face and in his Why I oughtta…" tone. Really, M, I’m not sure if you would like Dr. L. I think the two of you would argue without end, but he means no harm by it—just wants the world to be as near perfect as the science in which he is expert. Sloppy thinkers make the world worse, I think he would say. But everyone in the lab seems to know that he will use his work to serve all 12 billion idiots to his dying breath—which makes for a good combination of frustration and satisfaction.

If what Dr. Calder said about Jumpers living in paradox is true, it is no wonder that Dr. L. has survived the work for so long.

What do you really know about time travel? Dr. L. interrogated me this morning with his typical inquisitor-style skepticism.

I know that our current present is what it is, and if people were really able to travel backwards they would have tried it by now—to this age.

How do you know that? Dr. L. continued, busily washing his mug in the break room sink.

Well, I don’t know for sure, but—

How can you not know? Aren’t you supposed to be my replacement? Haven’t you studied this?

Honestly, I haven’t really. Uh…I studied a little but, uh… (Clearly I was out of my league, stuttering and wreaking of incompetence. Had I not been on a quest to answer the question posed at the end of my last letter, I suspect I would not have made it out of there with any dignity at all.) "I just wanted to know why you—er uh, why I—I mean—should be hesitant to make the first jump."

You tell me, Dr. L. responded tersely.

Jumper 2 died. Jumper 1 ran. We’re playing with the mind’s sense of reality. Maybe like telling a child to unlearn four of his English alphabet letters and replace them with Cyrillic. I imag—there is a good chance that one has to be focused on the overall expressive goal far beyond the level normally expected of people.

Good. And are you that focused, Dr. Hall?

No, Dr. Luo.

Why not?

Because I have never been forced to respond to fake environments in the way that time travel requires.

What do you mean by ‘fake environments?’

I mean I have yet to figure out whether the simulated time or the one I have already stored should be treated as the more real one.

Dr. Luo paused. I suspect that this last answer I had given was a good one. Sure enough, the doctor replied with a little more talkativeness a couple of seconds later.

There is so much work to be done in the field. Even with all of the physics in the world, time travelers simply cannot take their experiences back to the reality they’ve left behind.

Dr. L. continued, replacing his mug in the steel cabinet over our blue flat top stove, After six jumps I only know what I think could have been—only because the simulations tell me. I remember some of my trips, but only a small fraction. Without someone else to travel, well— the doctor paused again, this time in noticeable shift from irritation to resignation. How is an unvalidated future any better than a random dream? If I have seen the future and no one else can see that I’ve seen it, then where did I actually go?

For what must have been a whole minute, I stood there—then sat—silently as Dr. L. continued to wash dishes. Finally, he perked up.

You wanted to ask me something?

Yes, Dr. L. What would you say is the first rule of time travel?

Ha ha ha ha ha, the doctor laughed heartily. Do you want the book answer, the practical answer, or the philosophical answer?

All of them.

Ha ha ha. Oh, that is too funny. Dr. L.’s countenance darkened slightly. "You know, I was the chief theorist before Justin died. He asked me the same question, and I gave him all three answers. But I shouldn’t have done that. He should have remained Jumper 2 for at least two more years. *Sigh*"

I remained silent.

Dr. Luo continued, The highest rule of time travel? It’s probably the practical one: Don’t ask questions you’re not prepared to accept the answer to. That means, don’t tempt fate, don’t ponder whether the sights are real, and don’t ever, EVER create a new past for yourself before preparing to erase an old one.

The book answer, he said, I will not give you.

Around this time, Dr. Calder joined us.

Here, Dr. Luo finally arrived at what I think to be the most important answer of all. Philosophically? Alternate realities are as close to movie time travel as we will ever come, but inasmuch as they are considered alternate, these other realities are not real enough. I think that, if we ever succeeded in changing humanity’s past—the wars, the foolishness, the selfishness—we would simply replace it with another flawed timeline. And who would know that you did it?

The 3rd Jumper Luo sighed again, Don’t be a fool. They tell me that you’re Buddhist, Ezra. Is that true?

Not exactly.

But you believe that existence is a mirage?

Yes, basically.

And what if you’re wrong? What if you die and go to Hell?

If there is a God or a Hell, I’ll ask that God how I was supposed to know the truth of it with certainty—based only on the workings of this world and the lies of its men. I’ll tell God that I did my best to be good, and if he still sends me to Hell for whatever reason, I guess that’s just the way it is. Can’t argue with the Big Cheese.

Dr. Luo smiled slightly, but Dr. Calder didn’t find my flippance nearly as amusing.

Well, as 3rd Jumper, I can see that you’re more ready than our first two. But you will need to train much more before you are ready to replace me.

With this last remark, Dr. L. patted my shoulder and left the room.

I looked at Dr. Calder.

After some thought, Barbara said rather seriously, He still feels guilty for confusing Justin. It shows all over his scans. You must have caught him in a moment of regret, because he never says ‘I think.’ But after so many jumps as penance, he has to know what Justin’s problem was.

And what was that?

Did you ever try to repair a car as you were driving it? Or try to ride your car like a bike while doing both? When a person time travels and tries to write a past which he knows didn’t happen, that’s what he’s doing. Based on our studies, you kinda hope he fails. Because if he succeeds—especially in changing his own memories—he will come out a different person. Who knows what that person will look like.

"What about changing this world? I assume you all are still studying how to do things like bring Justin back?"

Heh heh heh heh. This time it was Barbara who laughed. Haven’t you learned anything in a month of training? Even if we could bring Justin back, Dr. L. wouldn’t be the 3rd Jumper! Four years of corrective work would be irreversibly altered. And you definitely wouldn’t be here! All for what? So that we can add more years to a life which—like all lives—ends anyway? Maybe you should complete the basic mission briefing again."

I turned away in shame. I’d asked a stupid question.

The movies lie, Ezra. Time travel isn’t about forcing the will of one man onto the rest of humanity’s history books. Believe it or not, there really are some things that man can’t do. Stopping the flow of time is one of them, ‘unexperiencing’ something is another. We here at Spacetime are not into hopping through portals so that we can conquer the centuries before us. We just sit in the chair and watch simulations of other times. Because we wanna learn what those centuries had to tell—Things we didn’t learn the first time.

I continued to stand next to the trash can with egg on my face.

Barbara concluded, Anybody can rewrite the past. She then paused. "If only they recall it differently in the present. As