I originally wrote this story as a school project but in light of recent events will post it here,
The Machine
“If you can’t take it, don’t use it. You made a choice to be here. And the Machine tells nothing but the truth,” the dark-haired scientist stated as he kicked the machine in front of him and it buzzed to life. “There we go.”
The apprentice eyed the Machine, wary of the whirring creation. It was an incredible experience for her to be standing here, on the brink of the future. A time glimpsing machine. It could calculate the predicted course of the time space continuum, showing what events would take place, many thousand years in the future. But she didn’t know if she wanted to go. It was easier to believe that somehow, the world would be a better place in the future than to actually journey there and see.
“Don’t illusion yourself. The world will still be a horrible place because humans are undeniably horrible. I don’t know what you’re expecting, but social problems haven’t been solved in the billion of years we’ve been here, they won’t change in a few more centauries,” her mentor growled as if he had heard her thoughts. “Humans are inherently evil, inherently selfish. And it’s not going to change.”
Something hardened in the young woman. He was a large factor of her fear. “I’ll see for myself.”
The dark-haired scientist grimaced, not a flicker of positive emotion across his face. “Good idea. Suit yourself.”
The apprentice marveled at the handsome scientist’s intelligence. His technology was out-of-place in the mundane inventions of 1980, and sometimes, she wondered if he had himself was a time traveler. She knew nothing of his background, nothing of where he came from, and he provided explanations of the Theory of Relativity that no scientist had discovered since Einstein some sixty years back.
According to the dark-haried scientist, Einstein had been correct about time and space being connected into Spacetime. And it was more simply explained that the Now of anytime would only be accurate when both the space and time of the Now was the same. For someone many miles away, the Now would be different, because even if the time was the same, the space was different. By the time the someone had moved into the same space, the time would be in the future. But if that someone was far away but moved at the speed of light to the location, to them the time of the Now would be the same one they had left from, but for the rest of the world the time of the Now would be the future. So, the someone would not perceive the change, and time wouldn’t affect them, but they still be in a different time of Now, and the same space of my Now as well.
Complicated, the apprentice noted. The scientist added another layer of complication onto the matter. According to him, the world was 4d, which was impossible to perceive as a three-dimensional human, but essentially if you took three-dimensional space and imagined it as a fabric, it was easier to understand. A fabric also explained the gravitational pull of planets, for they caused pulls in the fabric. Black holes were complete holes in the fabric, mysterious portals to unseeable planes of cloth. Which, according to the scientist, could be portals for time travel.
So if space was a single plain of cloth, the scientist said that time was vertical threads perpendicular to the fabric. He said that there were billions of different time threads, timelines, attached to any spot on the space fabric, creating a conical shape. The timelines also branched off of each other, intersected each other, and even looped together. It was as if a cat had gotten to billions of yarn balls at once. Everyone was just living on the intersection of space and time, constantly following the tangled time threads.
As for the time reading part that the machine did, apparently the machine knew the time thread would intersect eventually with the space plane. And it could analyze when a certain point on the future timeline would intersect the space plane and accordingly construct the Now of that future moment.
She still didn’t quite understand it. The other extra layer of complication was that because the timelines were so tangled it was extremely easy to accidentally predict the future of different timelines and not the one she was on. So, the future that the machine predicted might not even happen as she perceived it. If the machine wasn’t precise enough, it could ride another timeline and even completely transfer she to a completely different plane of being with fantastical creatures or something.
There were different timelines in different spaces, and different spaces on the same timelines, and no one’s Now would be the same ever, and thinking about it all hurt her head.
It didn’t matter much, she trusted the scientist, and gruff as he was, he knew that she was the only person willing enough to participate in his mad experiments and losing her would lose the only willing guinea pig. Anyways, it’s a miracle I can partake in such great science. And I’m sure this will be educational and reassuring. Because she was SURE that the scientist couldn’t be correct. She lay on the testing site, as the headset was lowered onto her eyes. She was ready for her glimpses to the future.
To be continued
