Time Travel Microwave

[TW: underage drug/alcohol use]

The single greatest leap forward in the knowledge base of humanity was not earned. It was given. An anonymous messenger hand-delivered a time machine to two enterprising young students at the University of Central Florida. He gave a long and detailed speech about the importance of teamwork, the values of principled experimentation, and the power they now had in front of them. He disappeared in a flash of light just as suddenly as he appeared, leaving behind a mysterious device.

Unfortunately, the specific students he had selected were, at the moment, high off of illicitly acquired edibles.

These are the records of the first two experiments performed with the device.

Experiment 0:

The two recipients of the machine attempt to send a cup of lemon flavored Chobani Greek yogurt five minutes into the future. It wound up in space, because they failed to account for the movement of the earth through space. Demoralized, the team did not attempt another experiment for some time.

Experiment 1:

Over the span of eight days, the original pair gathered several additional followers to the project from within the University of Central Florida. No one outside the student body yet knew about this, since they had yet to acquire proof the machine worked as described. There were no recordings of the first appearance of the messenger, given he appeared in the dorm of a student, and no cameras were present at the time. Just the intended recipient, Calloway King, a sophomore studying computer science, and his roommate, Nian Surridge, a philosophy major in his junior year.

In addition to the two founding members of the team, dubbed “Time Bros 😎” (all subsequent iterations of the team name kept the sunglasses emoji), several friends and associates of King and Surridge joined the exploratory stage of the endeavor.

Amiya Thimblewood (1st year, aerospace engineering) was the on-and-off girlfriend of King, and after hearing about a “time travel microwave,” began exploring the mathematics of how one would transport an object from point A to point B while accounting for the rotation of the Earth around its axis, the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, the movement of the Solar System through the Milky Way, and the movement of the galaxy within the local group.

Polvo Guerroso (5th year, sociology) collaborated with Surridge to research the potential implications of the effects their experiments and actions might have on society, and worked on several write-ups, largely based on movies and TV shows, on “how time travel might work.” He focused specifically on what he referred to as “the Hitler question,” as well as several sub-categories of study, such as “Should we kill Hitler?”; “What happens if we kill Hitler?”; and “Why haven’t we killed Hitler already?”

Xenon Bloom (UCF dropout and self-described “entrepreneurial pharmacologist”) used funds collected from various other members of the team to purchase pizza, alcohol, and marijuana. He was quoted later by Surridge as, “the reason the team didn’t fall apart by Sunday morning.” He was, also, the de facto first paid employee of the group, as he took a 22% cut of all funds raised up to that point for his own use.

The second experiment was again an attempt to send a cup of yogurt into the future. The future destination was selected as a way to avoid creating paradoxes while the technology was still in its infancy. And with the careful equations of Thimblewood, the team was able to calibrate the machine so as to send the cup of lemon flavored yogurt onto King’s nearby desk, at a delay of five minutes.

Surridge placed the yogurt into the microwave. King executed the code he’d written in collaboration with Thimblewood from his laptop computer, sending the instructions via coaxial cable to the microwave-like device that had been placed in the center of the room. Guerroso stood nearby, holding a hand-held video camera and recording the process. Bloom pressed the start button on the microwave.

At the moment the start button was pressed, the device flashed with energy, and the lights of the dormitory building flickered. Thimblewood simultaneously pressed her phone screen to start a five minute timer.

Guerroso moved the camera to the desk, and placed it facing a paper plate, with several concentric circles drawn on in permanent marker. In the video, later shared with posterity as the first evidence of time travel, the subsequent discussion was both cherished as evidence of the fruitful nature of inquisitive minds, and also memed to death:

“Wait. It’s not in the microwave anymore!” exclaims Bloom, ecstatic.

“Of course not. It’s moving through the fabric of space and time, moron,” replies King.

“How will we show the time elapsing in the video?” asks Thimblewood. “Should I put my phone into frame?”

“We can fix it in post,” says Surridge.

“Yeah. Fix it in post,” echoes Guerroso.

A loud knock is heard, offscreen, at the door of the dorm room in which the team is conducting the experiment. Unbeknownst to them, the pizza delivery person who had earlier dropped off the pizzas, Kyle Winstrop, was a fellow student at UCF, and had informed the building’s RA on his way down that he had both smelled marijuana and seen a large bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey in the dorm to which he had just delivered pizza. His motivation for the report was that he hadn’t been tipped, as Bloom had kept the extra funds for himself.

“Hello! This is UCF Resident Assistant Emily Moss!” she announced. “Please open the door immediately!”

“Emily, be cool! We’re doing science in here!” shouts back Bloom.

“Open this door!” Moss shouts in reply. “I’m here with campus security. We have a credible report of dry campus violations in progress in your dorm!”

Later descriptions of what happens next are muddled, but most describe Bloom gathering all the offending substances into Thumblewood’s arms, and pushing her into the en-suite bathroom, whispering loudly to lock the door. The view from the camera of the plate on King’s desk shakes slightly, and shadows pass across the frame. Around this point, roughly two minutes have elapsed from the time the yogurt disappeared from the microwave in the middle of the room.

The team opens the door to the dormitory unit. Guerroso stands near his camera, King sits by his laptop near the center of the room, Bloom stands by the doorway to the bathroom, Thimblewood stands behind this same door, and Surridge is the one to open the door for Moss.

“Stand back, we have to do an inspection of the room- Is that a microwave?” asks Moss.

“No, it’s a time machine,” replies Surridge.

Moss pauses, as does Michael Rasturian, the nigh-exhausted campus security guard she had brought with her to this 2AM raid on a student dorm room.

“Har har, very funny,” replies Moss. “Why is it in the middle of the room like that? Are you worshiping it?”

“We’re doing science, ma’am,” answers Bloom.

“Science?” she repeats.

“Science!” shout Thimblewood and King in unison. For context, they were both regulars of off-campus bar room trivia nights in the Orlando area, and this was a common refrain for certain categories of questions at those events. The effect in the room was one that did not dissipate the allegation of microwave worship.

Her vocalization also brought Thimblewood’s existence to Moss’s attention.

“Hey! Someone’s in that bathroom!” shouted Moss.

“Nuh-uh!” replied Thimblewood. She had taken the liberty of trying to dispose of the remaining alcohol, but not down the toilet, as one might assume. She was attempting to chug the remainder of the whiskey, so as not to waste it.

Her phone, meanwhile, had been dropped in the commotion. It still displayed the timer countdown to when the cup of yogurt was expected to return. King had grabbed ahold of it, once he realized it was still running. It showed one minute left at this time.

“I don’t even care at this point,” continued Moss. “You might’ve been able to convince the dean that the alcohol, and the weed — which I can both clearly SMELL in here! — are just youthful indiscretions. And you’d probably get away with it, too. But the whole building has been getting these electrical blackouts. I’ve had people lose work on their computers because of these power outages. You wanna explain to me how reheating pizza is worth someone losing hours on their essay? There’s a reason these things are banned in the Towers!”

Several people replied at once, loud enough to make out on the video recording.

“I’m telling you, it’s not a microwave, it’s a time machine,” said Guerroso.

“This is way more important than some essay, trust me,” said Surridge.

“It’s for science!” shouted Thimblewood, from behind the bathroom door.

King, meanwhile, began to count down the last ten seconds on Thimblewood’s timer, and turned toward the plate on his desk.

Bloom was the next to notice him doing this, and joined him at eight. By six, Surridge and Guerroso cut themselves off, and began counting down as well. No one heard exactly when Thumblewood joined in, and she herself remembered little of this moment down the line. But the whole room, save for Moss and Rasturian, were counting down the last few seconds, staring at the plate on King’s desk at the far side of the room.

As they reached one, the light in the room seemed to be sucked all into one spot, and like a sudden exhale, expanded back out. On the video feed, the frame went dark, and then the next moment, the cup of Chobani lemon-flavored Greek yogurt reappeared, directly where it was meant to, in the center of the paper plate.

The team, save for Thimblewood, saw it. Emily Moss saw it. Michael Rasturian saw it.

This was the first ever recorded incident of time travel. Undeniable proof. An empty plate one second, yogurt the next.

Science.

The video was later uploaded to YouTube. Although King and Surridge were castigated for having illicit substances in their dorm room, they were able to dodge the microwave allegation. On account of it being a genuine time machine.

The University of Central Florida, up to then known for being a school that sent many of its alumni to NASA, also became the epicenter for time travel research from that point forward.

The first several dozen experiments in time travel were done using the microwave-like machine given by the first messenger. Attempts to force paradoxes were done, but foiled in ways that illustrated the exact rules of the timestream. The machine was reverse-engineered, and time machines large enough to fit a human person were created. The US government began to send liaisons to monitor and report on time experiments.

Guerroso’s original treatises on “the Hitler question” were finally put to the test. It became obvious that the historical timestream could not be modified. Any attempts to send assassins after Hitler went awry, and ended up being blamed on either the Soviet Union or America.

But soon, other experiments were designed. Specifically, those meant to seek sociological and historical evidence. For example, the question of how a medieval peasant would react to a Dorito chip was explored, with shocking results.

In time, the team realized that the initial appearance of the microwave was the result of their own doing. A time machine could not have been spontaneously developed, so one of the team, now numbering in the hundreds, had to deliver it. Through the principles of experimentation and the knowledge base of a vast team of people, they knew that there was exactly one moment in time where it would be possible to send a device of such power.

Experiment 302 completed the time loop which gave humanity the power of time travel. The messenger, a now much older Dr. King, delivered the device, and the speech about how valuable the merits of science were, with great self-assurance.

He knew the message fell on uncomprehending ears, for the most part. But he was happy to be able to see his younger self again. He hoped he’d have fun. He knew, remembered, that he did.