Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY
IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I
generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family
rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to
write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration
(quote, website, podcast, etc) and then a thought or two that came to mind.
These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat,
irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if
anything comes of them.
SF Trope: Time
Travel
Anton Naoumov
shook his head. “You’re not going to get me into that thing. I signed aboard
this ship to practice being a paramedic, not to have my atoms scattered back
and forth across space by this gadget.”
Piia Takala
grinned, “You’re not going anywhere in space, Anton! It’s...”
“I know – it’s a
time machine. But didn’t Einstein have some theory that space and time are
related? Intimately.”
Piia blinked in
surprise and managed to say, “I’m sure you got that wrong. You never had a
physics class, did you?”
“I didn’t need
the class. I’m not a total idiot, you know! Medical majors can dabble in other
stuff, so I did. And I didn’t get it wrong,” he said, tapping his handheld
computer. “It says right here that Einstein wrote about it and W. K. Clifford
described the effect of gravitation on space and time. He figured out it was
easily visualized as a ‘warp’ in the geometrical fabric of space and time, in a
smooth and continuous way that changed smoothly from point-to-point along the fabric
of space and time.”
Piia pursed her
lips. She’d never get him into the thing to go back with her if she let him dig
any deeper. She said, “Granted. Space and time are intimately connected. But
this isn’t going to be scattering your atoms anywhere. The only things that
will be scattered are the quanta that make up the atoms. Those are only going
to be shifted a little...”
He held up his
hand and said, “What do you want me to do this for anyway? What’s so all-fired
important about me doing this?”
She sat down on
the stool in front of the control board. The time-shift chamber wasn’t really a
chamber at all – it was a platform made of ultradense matter that was so
massive, it was making a tiny dimple in local space-time. Above, a bank of high
energy lamps pointed downward to an EM lens that would focus them on the head
of the subject with enough force to shove the person through the dimple and
into another time. The time period was pinpointed by the tightness of the focus
and the depth of the dimple. Piia’d done the calculations three times. She took
a deep breath and finally said, “I want you to stop the Finnish Civil War of
1918.”
He scowled then
said, “How am I supposed to do that?”
“You have to let
the one man who can stop the whole mess die.”
“What?”
“It has to look
like a natural death, too. I figured all you paramedics know how to keep people
alive when they’re on the brink of death, you probably know how to push them
over, too.” She slipped the stun gun from her pocket, flicking it on to maximum
strength and minimum dispersion.
“You want me to commit
murder?”
“Don’t worry
about it – if you’re successful none of this will ever happen.”
“What?”
“I want you to
let my great, great, great grandfather die,” she said as she stunned him.
Names: ♀Finland,
Thailand ; ♂ Bulgaria,
Iceland
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