Eden is in the Heart

Desiring to change the past is an inevitable aspect of the human condition. For millennia such pursuits existed merely in the theoretical realm, but as has happened again and again throughout humankind’s storied history, progress came in a great surging spurt in the early 22nd Century.

The people of the time found themselves in a technological renaissance which united the world under a common goal of safety and security erected on a framework of law and order. Citizens’ privileges were arranged on tiers, dependent on the number of Social Credit points they held. Points were awarded in small amounts for activities which benefited the greater good and taken away in loads for misbehavior.

Corporations had facilitated the trend towards a more docile society and one vector point of note was the introduction of MINDS, the Medically Implanted Neurotransmitter Detection System. Marketed as a mood-monitoring device that allowed users to preempt negative emotional episodes, the product was an immediate success. That the company shared its data with the government was of no surprise, as by then no distinction between industry and politics existed.

As the devices were widely adopted, artistic endeavors that aroused the passions and pursuits of intellect that caused debate began to be seen as detrimental. “Check your MINDS!” became an insult, implying that one had become unnecessarily agitated over something minor. Displays of emotion became embarrassing for everyone involved. Dancing became regarded as a cringeworthy exhibition.

These marvels had arrived after a period of turmoil, which included the growing pains of assimilating various emergent technologies as well as war, strife, and ecological disaster. Unlike generations of the past, which had been compelled to cast themselves in fictional apocalyptic scenarios in desire of feeling unique, the people of this time had faced real disaster. The period starting with The Water Wars of the 2030’s and ending in The Decade of Storms in the 2060’s had proven to be humanity’s darkest hour.

Eventually, an exhausted populace decided to end the madness, and embarked on a series of changes which had resulted in a societal landscape that 99% of respondents now reported as Utopian on official surveys. The dissenting minority simply required further indoctrination on the importance of conformity. Failing that, they would be sent to Luna Base, before being shipped off to Martian mining colonies, which were being used to build a planetary defense system. It was far better to stay calm, accrue points, watch sanitized media about productive people who enjoyed their jobs, and carry on.

Industry and Academia had long since abandoned Time Travel as impossible, but advancements in the understanding of quantum fields and various arcane aspects of physics led to a renewed interest in the subject, mostly by hobbyists, as it remained regarded as a frivolous line of inquiry with little substance or practicality. The breakthrough, which involved a tachyon capture system, happened in 2123, not in a well-equipped government lab, but in a basement, as these things sometimes do.

The Inventor was not a theoretical physicist as one might expect. He worked in The Bureau of Pre-Forensic Investigations, and his days were spent mostly consorting with a powerful machine intelligence, named P3R53PH0N3, identifying criminals before they could act. Armed with a massive database filled with the images, histories, and writings of past lawbreakers, they sought similar patterns unfolding in the present. Coupled with data gleaned from ubiquitous MINDS devices, they were nearly infallible. Oftentimes, culprits were detained before they even conceived of the crimes they might commit. The duo prided themselves on their ability to predict the future. The world had never been safer and they felt responsible for that in some small way.

At night things were different. The Inventor would look back at the story of human history and rue that the technologies which had saved the world had been so late in coming. By virtue of his position in The Bureau, he was subject to much less scrutiny and surveillance than the average Citizen, and so his MINDS did not report that he had stopped sleeping. Insomnia began to plague him as his nights were eaten away by thoughts of the true Utopia that might exist, if only this assassination or that theft of something precious had not occurred hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Instead of wallowing in the feelings of helplessness this engendered, he began to build a device.

Alone, it would have taken a lifetime, but with the help of P3R53PH0N3 it took less than two years. Though not her primary function, the ability to explain and reexplain complex subjects tirelessly, without ever getting frustrated, allowed for rapid progress. It is possible that during this time, his professional work suffered, and some crimes that should have been prevented did take place, but they were minor thefts or acts of vandalism that he tried to rationalize did no major harm in the long run, though he had been trained to know better. The Broken Windows Theory was the foundation of law and order in their society.

The only truly egregious incident was the spray-painting of the phrase “WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?” across the Bureau's doors, but the offender was quickly apprehended by the Post-Forensics Department, and a 17 year old female was remanded for reeducation. A follow up examination had revealed several red flags, including two papers she had recently written in History class, as well as the purchase of spray paint and hair dye. The Inventor knew he was responsible for letting her slip through the cracks.

He had apologized to his superiors and promised it wouldn’t happen again, truly meaning it, as his obsessive work at night necessitated access to P3R53PH0N3. Later, he had pulled up the girl’s file and begged pardon for failing her. The angry face of her mugshot, under a shock of blue hair, didn’t change. The Inventor comforted himself with the knowledge that, statistically, she was likely to survive reeducation and emerge a fine citizen. He hoped the mistakes of her past would guide her on a path that might even include working at The Bureau one day, a position that came with certain perks, but which required total dedication. That was the night he sent a cat back to Medieval France.

The bottleneck for not just time travel, but any sufficiently ambitious scientific undertaking, has long been the energy required to power it. It took 137 hours of explanation, but P3R53PH0N3 had finally been able to teach the fundamentals of Quantum Harmonics to her class of one.

The breakthrough resulted in calculations that required an order of magnitude less energy to achieve the desired effect. Building the machine involved sourcing several readily available components from a variety of industrial manufacturers and using them in novel ways. For a normal citizen, such a purchasing spree would result in a red flag and investigation, if not a detainment, but, again, working at the Bureau had its perks.

When it was done, the Time Machine sat on the basement floor in two independent parts, the smaller of which was a featureless metal cube two-feet to a side. This was the Traveller. The larger Base of the machine was a rack of equipment surrounding a pressurized chamber containing a smaller version of the cube. Critically,

the base generated a temporal phase-shift, allowing it to persevere, no matter what happened in the past, as Nature abhors a paradox. Quantum-entangled with itself, the system was able to harness stray tachyons and ride them backwards through time. Initial tests resulted in the cube returning at near zero degrees kelvin, but tweaking of the algorithm eventually allowed for it to return at a comparatively balmy zero degrees centigrade. The system was operated by a shell-version of P3R53PH0N3, which was able to monitor a wide spectrum of communication frequencies and transmit a small bit of information back to the cube in the past.

Collection jars and clocks were the first bits of cargo the cube carried back in time. Upon return, the Inventor would pop off the frosty lids and examine the air inside for pollen and particulate matter. Via this method, he honed his temporal and geographic accuracy. When he could reliably place the cube near Pompeii the day before and the day after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD he felt they were ready to try a living subject.

Tethered to the cube by a short lead, so it could not escape, the cat was sent back to 9th century France wearing a wristwatch as a collar. It returned with ice crystals on its whiskers and howled with protest as The Inventor vacuumed its fur. Seeming no worse for wear, even after a month, ambitious thoughts began to swirl in The Inventor’s head.

He pitied the people of the past even more than he did the teenage vandal. At least she had the opportunity to take part in their great, safe society. A little readjustment and there was every reason to believe she’d be a first-class Citizen. By comparison, the generations of the past never had a chance to live in such a way. Their short, brutal lives were fraught with sharp anxieties and deep depressions driven by their lack of security. It had resulted in a perverse, nihilistic culture of individuals who prized their own agency over the common good. He began to think maybe he could change that.

The Inventor asked P3R53PH0N3 what the most egregious impediments to human progress over the course of history had been. Once the list was pared down, and any attempt to change the past that included outright murder or assault was eliminated, the answer was clear. He needed to save The Library of Alexandria. He thought of himself as a butterfly beating its wings to prevent a monsoon.

Despite existing in the public consciousness as having been destroyed by a fire, The Library of Alexandria, the western world’s first great repository of knowledge, had actually crumbled piecemeal over a long span of time, its downfall caused by many minor failings and a few catastrophes. The Inventor thought that by starting with careful observations that he might eventually be able to save the place. His suspicion was that this would usher in a series of renaissances and ultimately prevent the Dark Ages from stunting humanity’s growth as it had.

Small changes enacted long ago theoretically would have greater effect than larger ones handled more recently. Heading off The Water Wars would still leave millions to suffer in previous centuries. The Inventor’s plan sought to prevent all modern wars and catastrophes by striking at the source of the problem.

Despite successes with the cat, who seemed to grow ever more accustomed to the vagaries of time travel, he knew that a practice run of lesser consequence would be required to ensure attainment of his goal. He decided to see if he could save The Temple of Artemis, famously burned by the arsonist Herostratus in the year 356 BCE. History records his motive as infamy, leading to the term herostratic fame, meaning “the pursuit of notoriety,” though the idea that he had acted according to the wishes of the temple elders persisted as a conspiracy theory. His punishment was brutal torture followed by summary execution. Furthermore, it was decreed that his name never be repeated, so as to deny him his goal. Clearly, that had not worked. It seemed that the people of the past were incapable of following their own rules.

The Inventor made his final preparations as his matter-compiler generated period-appropriate clothing and coinage. P3R53PH0N3 led him through lessons on the Greek, Anatolian, and Aramaic languages. He had been growing his beard out, which led to some ribbing at The Bureau, but it was growing ragged and unkempt by design and he knew it would be better to act soon, than be subjected to a personal appearance inquiry at work. A dental implant, indistinguishable from a real tooth, which allowed primitive communication with P3R53PH0N3 via a one-way datastream, replaced one of his molars.

The goal was simple: he planned on arriving at the temple just after nightfall, finding Herostratus, and talking him out of committing his crime. According to legend, the temple burned because Artemis was in Macedon, attending the birth of Alexander the Great the night of the arson. Religion and spirituality had been largely replaced by logic and reason by the 22nd Century, but The Inventor couldn’t help but feel his mission was divine. Admiring himself in archaic leather shoes and kaftan, he hoped his appearance would not raise too much suspicion if he was spotted by passerby, or worse, the temple elders.

Artemis, later called Diana by the Romans, was the goddess of the hunt, and The Inventor imagined her hand, cosmically large, drawing back the bowstring of fate, then loosing him into the time stream. The transition was instantaneous. He was in the basement, and then suddenly he was on a rocky hillside overlooking Ephesus at sunset with tendrils of cold nipping at his feet through the leather soles of his sandals, breathing the sweetest air he had ever tasted.

It is human nature to become accustomed to almost anything. The species’ versatility allowed it to spread to even hostile corners of the globe and survive in all but the harshest of climates. This adaptability is one of humanity’s most enviable traits, but it is predicated on short memories and the ability to ignore natural instincts. Global initiatives at the end of the 21st Century had gone a long way towards cleaning up the damage done to the environment since the Industrial Revolution, but within moments of arriving in the distant past, he realized these efforts had hardly been a panacea. The never-polluted wind gusting across the landscape made The Inventor’s head swim with its untainted purity. He stepped off the cube onto the rocky ground.

A stream of information buzzed in his molar. From her position in the distant future P3R53PH0N3 was set to tune into the ambient datascape and search for keywords related to various historical figures and events. With real-time updates from her position in the timeflow, The Inventor would be able to gauge the success of his mission without returning to the original temporal point of his departure: Alexander-no deviation; Caesar-no deviation; Christ-no deviation…

The Inventor had expected that the demands of his task would result in the same sort of pressure he would experience when working hard on a case, but instead found himself suffused with a sense of calm purpose. Rather than rush headlong into the city, he sat for a while, near the cube, and watched the skies over Ephesus turn orange, then purple, as the starscape settled over the land like a blanket. Looking up at the cosmic tapestry from a world unmolested by light-pollution, he caught a glimpse of what millennia of progress had cost his species.

The clear cosmos above redoubled The Inventor's dedication to his mission. If things went according to plan, he had predicted that electricity would be discovered around the 10th Century. Based on his calculations, there was every reason to believe that upon return to the 22nd Century he would find a thriving civilization spread across the solar system, if not further. As he set off down the rocky hillside he reminded himself that this was merely a trial run and he shouldn’t expect to see many significant changes result from preserving the temple.

One of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis was still merely one of countless shrines that had been built to honor many gods and goddesses. The Cult of Artemis was a significant, but minor, player in the early history of Western Civilization, but had been supplanted by Christianity during Roman times and was already waning by the time Alexander passed through Ephesus on his way to Babylon, where he would die young under mysterious circumstances. Knowledgeable about history, The Inventor reminded himself that the cult, despite worshiping a fertility goddess of the hunt and dancing, was still a powerful force at the time he found himself in, and he’d do well to remember that.

He wound his way through some farmland adjacent to the city proper, seeking to avoid contact with the locals as much as possible. Ideally, he would speak only to Herostratus before absconding back to the future. Legend claimed that the arsonist had been motivated by the desire for fame, and The Inventor believed that it would be easy to demonstrate the folly of such a motivation. In preparation, he had studied Anatolian until he could plead his case eloquently. As he walked, P3R53PH0N3’s updates buzzed into his head: Gutenberg-no deviation Martin Luther-no deviation…

Darkness had fully fallen as he approached the temple. Against the backdrop of the night sky The Inventor marveled at the magnificence of its construction. Feeling revenant, he muted P3R53PH0N3. Towering nearly twenty meters overhead, the structure was not just a profound demonstration of devotion, but also of ingenuity. Making his way around, he was amazed at the design of the place, with its flawless columns standing in ranks supporting a vast wooden roof.

He paused for a moment, stuck by a thought that had infected the minds of the wise and the mad, but in his case it was true: I am the most knowledgeable person on the Earth. He thought about Alexander, not yet “Great,” perhaps awaiting his first sunrise in swaddling cloths a hundred leagues away, perhaps still struggling his way out of the womb in his first act of conquest.

The temple was deserted and quiet, but he found a man with a torch loitering in the rear near a ladder placed against the side of the structure. With Herostratus in sight he knew this was the moment he had been preparing for. An oratory about the folly of small-minded pursuits and the horrific punishments that would be endured for this crime, sat poised on the tip of his tongue, ready to be delivered in Anatolian. The man spoke, catching him off guard.

“I’m doing it, Boss. Don’t worry,” he said, indicating a basket full of oil-soaked rags near his feet. Stunned, The Inventor realized that the whole affair had, in fact, been a conspiracy. This was going to be easier than he thought.

“We’ve called it off, Herostratus,” he said, pleased with his accent.

The man held his torch out and regarded The Inventor’s face. Rainbows played across the oily sheen on the rags. “Really, Boss?” he asked.

“Really,” said The Inventor. Inspired, he began to improvise, and added, “Come by the temple in the morning and we’ll record a substantial donation in your name and you’ll be granted not only freedom, but Citizenship.” Showing his face after tonight was sure to be a death sentence.

“Was this a test, Boss?” asked Herostratus.

“Yes, this was a test, and you’ve passed,” said The Inventor.

“Good,” replied Herostratus, “This place means a lot to me. I have found much comfort at this temple and would miss the dances more than I can express. Plus, I know what you all said, but it’s hard to believe that Artemis wanted this, though who am I to question Her wisdom? Or yours?”

“Go, Herostratus, you’ve done well,” beamed The Inventor, taking the torch.

Without a look back, the man turned and walked away, leaving The Inventor to marvel at his handiwork. The Temple stood firm against the celestial backdrop. He suddenly remembered P3R53PH0N3 and unmuted her stream.

Alexander-Major Deviation; Caesar- Not Found; Christ-Not Found… Beads of sweat erupted from his brow and his heart pounded as he waited for the next iteration of data, which would expound on the deviations. The rich olive smell of the rags became cloying.

Alexander, it began, Religious awakening at Ephesus, 334BC…Correction, Year 1; Renames Babylon “Alexandria 2,” Year 5; Dancing Cult Conquest of the World Begins, Year 8; Faith of the Dancing Goddess reaches every continent, Year 21…

The Inventor listened to a tale of world history he could not, in his wildest dreams, have imagined. Received at the Temple of Artemis with great celebration, Alexander had experienced an epiphany and diverted his attention from military conquest to the advancement of his new faith, which he spread in a wave, via dancing festivals. Somehow contagious, the faith proliferated, fractally, across the globe. Every shred of knowledge was sent back to The Library of Alexandria 1. Learning and Joy became the pillars on which culture stood.

P3R53PH0N3’s reports indicate that by her present time, most of the world’s functions are overseen by Machine Intelligences based in Alexandrias 1-26937 who provide for a human society that lives among nature, freely pursuing whatever endeavors of art or philosophy move them. They gave awards for works The Inventor thought depraved and lauded ideas he thought dangerous. Off-planet mining provided for all the needs of people and machines alike. Alexandria 26937 is located on Pluto and eagerly searching for Extraterrestrial life. Kissing and fistfights are common in this hellscape. P3R53PH0N3’s last transmission was that her time-slip had been detected and she had been found.

What horrors have I wrought? thought The Inventor. This was no monsoon caused by a butterfly, it was the nightmare undoing of all civilization, and it was his fault. He called to Herostratus, but the man had long gone into the night. Knowing what tortures awaited the arsonist, it was with a deep pang of regret that he shouldered the basket of rags and hubris and began to climb.