No Time to Travel

Time now answers the me, I’ve discovered its dirty little secrets and have convinced it to yield me its powers. I stand on the precipice of eternity, all at my fingertips. Quite literally, of course, because my time travel machine is operated by a coding language that I invented and only I know the rules of. Not to tilt my hand too much, but it’s a combination of C++ and a thick blend of my mental peculiarities. As such, I have no fear of people being able to steal and operate my invention, because no one who is not me ever could.

I sit, fingers poised over the keys that can take me to any time in the world and I wait. First, savoring the moment. Then, feeling anxiety for wasting the moment. Finally, feeling overwhelmed with my available choices in that very moment and deciding to do something else for a while until I can properly focus on the “when” that I should go to.

Something I hadn’t considered before… I should also carefully plan out the “where” in addition to the “when.” The “when” is whenever I decide, as long as I don’t make any coding mistakes, but the “where” is wherever I happen to be. My time travel is limited to the exact space on Earth that I happen to occupy at the time of operating my machine. If I want to go to the heyday of the Roman Forum, I need to first travel to the Roman Forum and then enter in the specific operation that will take me to the exact heyday that I desire. I have a busy week coming up, but maybe the week after that I can sit down and hash out all the details.

- - -

Now that my life has calmed down a bit, I can finally decide on where to go. I get the overwhelming feeling that this could take a while… it took me 47 minutes to decide which fast food restaurant I wanted to eat at that was also on my most direct route home from work. And that is an arguably easier decision to make. It was Wendy’s, by the way. Maybe I should travel back to meet Dave Thomas? No, where did that idea even come from? I wouldn’t want to meet him even if he was alive today and worked at the Wendy’s I frequent.

I open my computer, and decide that my time travel decision needs to be a defensible one. A decision I can be proud to tell others about. I type into the only search engine that I know of “Best time in history.” The little robot feature that roughly summarizes things people have said on the internet told me that now, the current period of time we live in, is technically the best time period to live in because of various percentages and figures that get more damning the more you recede into the past. In general that may be correct, but doesn’t really answer my time travel question.

I decide to be less concerned with the thought of people reverse-engineering my search history to discover that I do actually own and intend to operate a working time travel device. So, this time I type it “Where and when would be the best time/place to time travel to if hypothetically given the opportunity, for a man of Irish heritage born in the early 90s.” The results were… not what I was looking for.

A total of four suggestions, two involved going to Ireland (really concerned about my heritage, I guess), one involved going to London, and one recommendation to go to New York during the “thriving hip-hop scene.” All the suggestions for the “when” were in the 1990’s. Please note, throughout all of human history and beyond, the robot in my computer thinks I should go back, at most, to a time period that I have been alive for, and to take in the “vibes” of the 90s. Not to prevent human atrocities, not to meet the historical Jesus, and not to see the wonders of the distant future. “Go experience London in the Summer of 1996,” is what this idiot robot told me. This, obviously, was a decision I would have to make on my own.

- - -

It occurs to me that I have only ever tested the device going forward in time. Because I live alone and seldom have weekend obligations, skipping a Sunday in time went largely unnoticed. However, if I were to travel to some point in the future, that would effectively mean that any effect the remainder of my life had on the future would not be included. I would be living in some sort of It’s a Wonderful Life future that would be at least slightly different, and perhaps vastly different, because of my absence. I’m betting vastly different, by the way, because an existing time machine will likely change history.

I never tested going backward in time. I had figured that things could get rather dicey. I would not want the test to be more than a day or even an hour in the past, but returning to a time in my lifetime seems like a bad idea. Wouldn’t interacting with myself be bad? And not just in an awkward bad, but like the kind of bad that 80’s time travel movies warned us about? However… since I am now thinking about testing it out, I would just need to wait about ten minutes and travel back to right now when I am fully expecting me from the future to come talk to me.

…My head hurts with this idea. If I have my mind set on returning to this exact time, why isn’t the future me here now? Could it be that the timeline I’m in now is different from the real(?) timeline that will exist once I do return in time? Something is strange… I don’t like it.

- - -

The narrator was never able to finish his story; in fact his life is essentially over. Not in the way that he will discover the secrets of the afterlife, mind you, but in an infinite loop from which it is impossible that he will ever escape. Allow me to explain:

10 minutes from when he wrote his last entry, he did travel back to the time in which he had just finished writing his entry. Unfortunately, his time machine does not transport his physical body through time as he imagined. The same exact particles cannot exist as duplicates in the world in which they already exist. All of him, every particle of his existence was transported back to where it was at the moment in time he traveled back to.

To further elaborate: all the particles that make up his human form at the moment of time travel were rearranged to where they were at the “when” he returned to. Had he traveled back to before he was born, he would have no longer existed because the particles that make him up had not been neatly arranged into the human body that he inhabits. Essentially, he would have vanished from time and space until the moment of his birth. However, since he traveled back 10 minutes, the particles of his body, to include the shape, structure, and neural network of his brain, returned to that moment as well. Therefore, he never knew that any time had passed, in fact, for him it hadn’t. Now, his eternity consists of a loop of that same 10 minutes without him ever feeling as though he experiences it multiple times and never has any awareness it is happening. He is both immortal and trapped for his own personal infinity.