(Mis)adventures In Time

What would you do if you received a mysterious gift of $20,000 and a little black notebook filled with schematics for a Time Machine? Would you build it? Would you toss the notebook and keep the money? Would you gamble the money away? Would you give it away? If you have the time, I’ll tell you what I did when a mysterious package appeared, out of nowhere, on my kitchen table.

It began (as most things do) with lunch.

It was a Thursday and I was in my lab failing (as usual) to crack time travel. I could never get the equations to balance properly. I always seemed to get stuck at the same spot, no matter how many times I reworked them. I finally decided to take a break, after having been up all night, and make some lunch.

I was eating my sandwich (as one does when eating lunch) looking over my work to see what I was missing, when suddenly, a package appeared out of nowhere. The worst part of it was the other half of my sandwich had, just seconds before, been right where the package appeared. “Well shit… today just keeps getting better.” I threw out what was left of my now half sandwich, grabbed the package and went back to my lab.

Once I got back, I started reworking my equations - again. I could see the package out of the corner of my eye and couldn’t help but wonder what was in it. There was no shipping label. No address of any kind. No postage and no return address. Finally, I broke down, after another failed attempt at solving my equations, and opened the box. To my utter surprise there was an envelope with $20,000 dollars in it. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I get a mysterious package with $20,000 in it, I don’t question it. I was so thrilled to find the money, I almost didn’t notice the little black notebook in the bottom of the box.

After I safely tucked away the money, I took a closer look at the notebook. The first thing I noticed was that the handwriting seemed oddly familiar. Almost as if it were my own. But there was no way that could be. The notebook looked old. Decades old, at least. I flipped through its pages and found equations and schematics for what had to be my time machine. The equations were the very ones I had been attempting to balance. The ones that - at that very moment - were on my dry erase board. I continued to search through the notebook and studied the very detailed schematics, showing step-by-step instructions on the construction of my time machine. Lastly, there was a section of the notebook that was bound together, separate from the rest of the pages. And it looked like pages had been added to the notebook. Lots of pages. There was a warning on the first page of this bound section.

Do not read any further, until the time is right. You will know when.

“This just gets more intriguing by the minute.”

I spent the next several days poring over the notebook. Reviewing the equations to see where I went wrong. It was a misplaced minus sign, by the way. One. Single. Minus sign. I went over those equations dozens - if not hundreds - of times and I missed it each and every time. But I digress. Once I was sure that the equations were correct, I set out to begin building the time machine.

It took some time, but I was able to complete the time machine. The schematics were even more detailed than I originally thought. They included the exact supplies that I would need, minus the ones I already had at hand - which was super weird - and the stores where I would be able to obtain the supplies. It was not easy, even with the help of the notebook schematics, but I finished it. Now I just had to test it.

I ran a series of computer simulations, to make sure that the equations worked and that the time machine was properly calibrated. Everything appears to be in working order. No errors came up during the simulations. “Everything seems to be in working order, which means that when I fire this thing up, for real, it should take me through time. Let’s find out, shall we?”

Personal note: when testing out your time machine, it’s a good idea to take a watch with you, or your phone, or to at least LOOK at a clock before you depart. That way, when you travel a half hour into the future, you can be sure that you actually traveled through time. Test 1 of the time machine was a bust… I also needed to install an atomic clock into the time machine itself. Don’t know why there wasn’t one to begin with, but that’s fixed now. Then I was on to test 1.5.

After making sure to note the time of my departure - thanks to the newly installed atomic clock - as well as ensure that my phone was on me - just in case - I was ready to make my “first” test jump. Again, I only wanted to do a small jump just to be safe, but this time I made sure to jump well into night, that way if all the clocks broke (which could happen with my luck) I’d know if I made the jump. That, or I got knocked out due to some malfunction and woke up hours later. Fortunately, it was the former. I had officially made the jump through time and become the world's first time traveler. The first ever Chrononaut. The next question was, when should I go?

I decided to go slow and only jumped ahead a couple days. Everything went smoothly and I ended up when I wanted. Obviously, nothing was really different. But it was still amazing that I actually traveled into the future. Next jump would be longer.

On my second, slightly longer jump - ten days this time - I arrived and my phone immediately blew up. I had dozens of texts, missed calls and voicemails from friends, family and my boss. Apparently disappearing for a week (from their point of view) did not go unnoticed. I had been fired from my job. The police were looking for me. And people have been staking out my house and my favorite bar to see if I showed up. Luckily, my lab is hidden, so no one knew I was back. I mean, none of this really mattered as long as I went back to when I left, because then I was never missing - but still. I couldn’t believe all that happened in such a short time. Guess I had to plan better the next time.

For my long jump forward, I decided to go ahead a full year. I remembered to tell my family that I was doing some traveling - couldn’t really tell them I was traveling through time. And I took a leave of absence from work, so no one was looking for me this time around. I’ve gotta say, it was still weird being in the future without it actually feeling like I was in the future. I knew I’d have to go really far into the future (a decade or more at least) before I’d really notice a change, but I figured I would build up to that. For the time being, I was happy knowing that I was the world’s first time traveler. I wondered if there were any future time travelers that had come to the past and I didn’t even know. I mean, that could be said for my entire life - the entirety of all history - but I guess there is no way to know for sure. Maybe, one day, if time travel becomes a normal form of travel, whether for business or just recreation, I would realize that at some point throughout my life I may have met a fellow time traveler.

* * *

The past couple decades have been good to me. I used that mysterious $20,000 to start my own Temporal Travel Agency and allowed time travel to come to the masses. People from all over the world wanted to have a go at traveling through time. Some people went to the past to see family they had never met - or barely remembered - or to learn more about where we come from. Some to the future to see where we are heading (and if it's a place we want to go). It is, for the most part. But hopefully, those that went forward and returned will be able to help us improve upon the future they saw.

We quickly learned that we needed to restrict who could and could not be trusted with time travel. I developed an extensive questionnaire and with some help, developed and implemented a rigorous psychological profiling system to weed out those that should not leave this time. We also had to implement temporal background checks if someone was going backward or forward in time and planned to stay there and live out their lives. We couldn’t have multiple copies of the same person living in the same time for an extended period… Bad things happened to the timeline, which we found out the hard way.

But every new company has its growing pains. Once we really knew what we were doing and had everything in order, satellite offices started opening up all over the country, and eventually the world. Now, more people travel via temporal displacement than by plane.

I traveled all over time. Backwards and forwards, centuries, millennia, even eons. Until one day, I grew tired of the whimsicalness. The novelty of it all had finally worn off. I guess that’s what happens to everything with time.

Throughout my life, I documented my travels through time, so that one day I could tell my story. It was then that I realized what the bound section at the end of the little black notebook was. It was where those that came before me documented their travels.

I should have known who came before. There were plenty of signs along the way, and I knew most, if not all, of the various paradoxes that have been theorized. I suppose on some level I did know. I just wasn’t ready to accept it. I am who came before. All of the notes, all of the writing. It was all me. It is all me. And now I have continued the loop and added more stories to this ever-growing tale. Now I understand the warning. If I had read ahead, who knows how that would have affected things. But now there is one last thing I must do before putting my travels to an end. I must complete the circle. I must start what has now finished. I must send the notebook back. Back to when it all started.