Fourteen Point One

“Are you familiar with a Faraday cage?”

She looked at me from under eyebrows so blonde they might as well have been transparent and stopped slurping from her milkshake. “That’s an odd question to be asking a lady on a blind date.”

I sat back in my chair, stunned. She was right. I’d become so focused on my project that I’d forgotten how to be good company. “I’m sorry. You’re right. That was an odd opener.”

She smiled and licked a smear of pink ice cream from her lips. “Don’t stop on my account. I think I’d rather hear about your cages than listen to another jock reliving their glory days.”

“Really?”

“Sure… So, what’s a Faraday and why do you have to keep it caged?”

I laughed. “No, Faraday was a scientist. The cage is named after him. You know that grid in the window of a microwave? That’s a Faraday cage. They keep wavelengths… er, energy, like electricity in, or out, of a space.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” she said, her face lighting up. “Like those guys making those weird lightning song things on YouTube.”

“Yeah, kind of like that.”

“Well, then I guess I am now officially familiar with Faraday cages.” She speared a cherry tomato with her fork, waving it with practiced nonchalance. “Why do you ask?”

“I built one,” I said, leaning forward with my elbows on either side of my untouched burger and fries.

“Ooh,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Are you going to make lightning music videos, too? Can I be in them? I bet that would blow up my followers.”

“No. It’s not about music or lightning or followers.” I had to stop, biting my tongue to keep myself from adding, “you silly girl,” to the end of the statement. “This is so much more important. I can control more than electricity.”

“Okay, Mr. Science. What more can you control?”

“Time.”

She sat back in her chair, flipping her ponytail out of the way and cocked her head. “Bullshit.”

“No. It’s real. I caught tachyons in the cage.”

“Yeah, so. I see those in lecture halls all the time.”

“What?”

“Yeah. It’s not only tacky, but rude. I mean, I get it, the professor is boring, but…” She mimed an expansive yawn, complete with sound effects and stretches.

“Tacky yawns? You thought I said tacky yawns.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Tachyons… tack-ee-ons. They’re faster-than-light particles. They travel in time. Look, I can show you my lab. Do you want to see my cage?”

“Oh, I think I’ve seen enough,” she said, tossing her napkin over her salad. “You must think I’m stupid. Maybe I’ll just stick with the jocks. Or soldiers. So, no. I do not want to go back to your place to see… whatever. Thanks for the date, weirdo.”

“But… I… It wasn’t a…” I stuttered, but she had already left.

My face burned, and I tried to turn away from the other diner patrons. I had no need of their pity or condescension. I’d show them, though.

I’m going to break the time barrier. Immortality awaits.

***

My lab, a laughable space rented from the university in the attic of the physics building, had issues to spare. The temperature in the cramped space bounced between freezing in winter and boiling in summer, with no middle ground in spring or autumn. Exposed beams left knots on my head and splinters in my scalp. In a few places, the plaster had chipped away, and the exposed, mouse-chewed insulation made me sneeze. Yet, it had what I needed: space, electricity, privacy, and rent I could afford—utilities included.

In the center of the room, an ornate sphere rested in a web of chains hooked to massive eye bolts I’d set in the beams. Those eye bolts would cost me my deposit if anyone looked up after I left, but for now, they were necessary. Besides, if this worked, I’d just go back and remove them… or never use them at all. Brilliant.

Twisted cables of all colors and sizes snaked across the rough plywood floor, feeding the glowing, segmented globe or assorted cameras and computers. A wide ribbon with rainbow colors twisted out of sequence at one end, fed into a computer console. Again, the computer console was a joke. There was no way I could afford the rent and the time in the supercomputer labs. I had my laptop, top-of-the-line to be sure, and banks of peripherals I’d cobbled together, networked with several self-contained NUCs… mini-computers.

The NUCs were redundancies—five of them. My father, an actual rocket scientist who retired from NASA, taught me all about redundancies. Ironically, he never varied that particular lesson. Each hosted a discrete Large Language Model that analyzed the results from scripts set up to run in GNU Octave. Yeah, free, open-source math software. My funding had dried up, and MATLAB’s price tag put it way out of reach.

The computations to pull this off took days per equation as the instructions squeezed through nanometer-scale logic gates. The LLMs compared the results, double-checked them, and verified them. When three out of the five NUCs agreed, my laptop displayed the results.

The math remained a necessary burden. Perhaps nature maintained its balance that way, making the beautiful things hard to reach, and my sphere, my machine, was beautiful. And not just in the eye of that proverbial beholder way. I thought it would look just fine on display at the Louvre. Art.

As much as I’d like to take credit for that, its looks were not by design. The interlinked tri-metal mesh I developed glowed in scintillating colors as it held back the tachyons. A living sculpture of science and light. And me? I’d be safe inside the double-walled cockpit. I’d glow, but where the exterior hummed, the interior would be silent thanks to an inverse noise generator. That took no math… I stole that tech from my noise-canceling earbuds. I could always go back and say I invented it to begin with.

Whoa. I had to push back from the keyboard. That thought…

I could do anything.

Like fixing the look on Professor Middleton’s face. The man had some nerve rejecting my dissertation, but the icing on the cake? He referred me to a remedial physics class and pulled my funding. I still seethed when I thought about it.

And to think the project started as a joke. Dear old Dad insisted on physics classes, and I went along. Tuition could be a bitch sometimes. Just to annoy him, I took the weirdest electives—fiber arts. I knitted a Faraday cage. I’m cheap, so I used the least expensive metals, broke four sets of bamboo knitting needles, actually passed the class with a better-than-average grade, and made an electrified hacky sack. Tah-freaking-dah.

And it radiated Cherenkov blue.

My spiteful, goofball jab at my Dad could contain high-energy particles. Those zippy bits of subatomic wonder proved to be tachyons. Somehow, the cheap metal and the tight knitting, when given a charge, created a bizarre magnetic bottle effect, slowly filling with energy. The longer it charged, the fuller it got. With enough stored up, a “push,” a calculated inverse charge, could change their direction, sending them forward or backward… in time only. Once pushed, they dissipated or burned up. I didn’t know. They were gone.

Of course, the scale… Oh, I didn’t mean size. Yeah, that was impressive, too. I calculated all of that. Most of it. I should have figured on the carpal tunnel diagnosis, but who thinks about things like that when they’re young? No, what I hadn’t counted on was the derision my little joke would produce.

Yes, joke, check, laugh or groan, check. I expected that, but this… this had too much potential to only be a joke. Yet, when I pursued what they all began calling the “Faraday Follies,” I noticed every grant drying up and Dad was more than a little pissed…

I had to make this work. Then I could fix everything.

The low, pulsing thrum that used to set my teeth on edge sounded like a symphony, and the glow radiated outward. My lab looked and sounded like a slow-motion rave in a stuffy attic with only one dancer who also happened to be the DJ, and it was all being recorded from several angles in all spectra. I’d need to capture my departure and my arrival and have ample, irrefutable evidence to back it all up.

But the timing had to be right. If the multispectral video and real-time computer data didn’t convince them, then their data would. If I performed my first transit at the right moment, the burst of energy—harmless, I wasn’t trying to blow anything up—would show up on their scopes. But the deadline approached, and the damn computers weren’t cooperating. One calculation. One. One computer, the tie-breaker, sat in a recursive loop eating cycles like popcorn at an all-night Lord of the Rings marathon. With the tie-ins and the original animations.

The flip clock that filled my laptop screen changed from green to orange. In seven minutes, it would turn red. After that, I’d have another eight minutes to complete the jump. If I missed it, I’d have to wait months for another alignment like this. Not to mention the capacitors; they held a massive charge that needed to go somewhere or…

Nope. I wouldn’t think about that. I was going to stare at this damn computer because that would make it go faster.

The calculations on the other monitors looked right. Even the two that disagreed gave me a better-than-passing chance. After all, I’d set the programming parameters to consider anything under seventy-five percent a fail.

If I adjusted that threshold… I spun around and scribbled numbers on a whiteboard hung crookedly against the pitched ceiling. Carry the one, follow with the seven…

The odds were in my favor, and the clock just flashed red.

I made a decision.

As littered as the floor was, I went to the two primary cables and yanked them free without hesitation or stumble. The machine swung like the world’s gaudiest pendulum, but only a centimeter or two. Once disconnected, the pulse accelerator, sandwiched between the walls, quit firing, and the inner and outer walls opened up at a zipper-like construct I was particularly proud of. My fiber arts professor said I had invented a new stitch and named it after me: The Stan Garvey stitch.

Ha.

I called it the electric zipper stitch: stacked purls magnetized by the accelerator seamlessly connected to the decreased knits on the opposite side.

Inside, cramped and contorted, I switched the accelerator back on and watched the walls sew themselves shut as a giddy thrill swept through me. Goosebumps crawled across my scalp as a warning for the nervous sweats that followed.

Six minutes remained.

The accelerator would eat up two of those warming up, but by then, I’d have enough of a tachyon field to jump forward fourteen point one seconds. Why that number? I’d like to say there’s some cosmic significance to it, or maybe something karmic, but no. That’s how much energy I could store in the capacitors I’d scavenged. Fourteen point one seconds would be more than enough to prove my theory. Doubters could kiss my assorted data recordings. Besides, there would have been no Armstrong on the Moon if not for the Wright brothers.

I had to go forward. The machine, with or without an occupant, cannot occupy the same space as itself in the past, and I don’t have enough power to move back all the years I’ve been building this thing. Once proven, I’ll build a bigger model. Something with an onboard generator or reactor. And a bathroom.

To the naked eye, the sphere would sparkle like a demented disco ball and vanish. Fourteen point one seconds later, the world’s first and only time traveler will have had been arrived. Something like that. I’m going to have to work on tenses if I write a memoir.

At four minutes, the power indicators turned green, and I flipped the first switch. My noise-canceling sound system flooded the cockpit with Al Stewart singing, “Time Passages.” It was not easy to find just the right song for a maiden voyage.

My finger rested on the second switch, a big red one, and “click.”

As planned, the sphere sparkled and vanished, immediately reappearing precisely where it would have been fourteen point one seconds from launch. The confirmation blinked green on the screen mounted in front of my face.

That was when the vacuum ripped the air from my lungs.

I had jumped fourteen seconds into the future, but my lab had not. It, along with the planet it was attached to, continued in its orbit as if nothing had happened. Yep. A second window displayed the Earth hurtling toward me at 107,000 kilometers per hour, while the International Space Station zipped past at 28,000 kilometers per hour.

Then my eyes turned into icy marbles.

Well, shit.

I read somewhere that a person could stay conscious for up to fifteen seconds in a vacuum. That didn’t sound like much, but it was enough time to realize that, in moving through time, I’d not calculated for space. I materialized where the lab would be in the future. Four hundred and eighteen kilometers in space. I bet that calculation was what locked up the fifth NUC.

Still, I was a freaking time traveler.

I wish I had champagne.

A spacesuit would also be nice.

I hope you’re proud, Dad.

***

“Houston, ISS, over.”

“ISS, Houston, go.”

“Did your scopes pick that up? We just saw a flash on the horizon, and—whoa, where the fuck did that come from?”

“ISS, Houston, repeat.”

“Houston, ISS. Sorry about the language. Satellite just raced past… less than five hundred meters.”

“ISS, Houston. We have it. It’s in a decaying orbit. Probably a dead com sat.”

“Houston, ISS. Roger. We’ll make a note in the logs. Hooray for space junk.”

“ISS, Houston. Stay safe. You’re making history up there. Out.”