Chapter One #2
He’d often had discussions about time travel with colleagues, but it wasn’t his favorite subject to write about. Seb didn’t think he’d ever really written a time travel story, actually, though he had dabbled in some related concepts.
While he had friends who had strong beliefs concerning time travel, Seb had always been far less interested. He didn’t see any reason why it would be impossible to travel in time. Space and Time were one and the same, after all, so if you could move in space then you could certainly move in time.
The difficulty came in finding ways to flip time’s arrow, and that was a trick and a half.
Time seemed to be the product of space and motion, or in math nerd speak that weas probably entirely wrong but still got the meaning across, T Equals S Multiplied by M.
The issue was that, while negative integers of space and movement were mathematically possible…
Seb had never, not even using alien technology, seen any evidence of it in the real universe.
To move backwards in time, you needed some means of creating negative mass… or, more specifically, affecting space in the opposite of how mass did. If that existed, he’d never seen it.
Seb had always just assumed that, if it were possible to travel backwards in time, then the chaotic nature of the universe would be the likely solution to the Paradox problem.
If Paradox could exist, then the universe would self correct until it didn’t.
Simple as that. Most likely by killing the source of the paradox, as that would be the easiest and most likely way to solve the issue.
Lot of ways to die, even if you assumed that time travel itself was perfectly safe… which Seb didn’t.
Still, there was no point worrying about that, not since he was already back in time. If the universe was going to kill him, it was going to kill him and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Not much he could do but act as though it weren’t.
Unfortunately that left many other concerns, not the least of which was that large scale changes… and you don’t get much larger than interfering with an event like the one that went down that day in september… would completely throw off what he knew about the timeline.
One change like that, and nothing is certain anymore.
Seb started feeling sick as he began to realize that he would almost certainly have to choose between trying to prevent deaths and suffering, and trying to save the human race.
Just as well I’m in a younger body, because I’m pretty sure my ulcer would be killing me right about now if I weren’t.
He took deep breaths.
Ok, nothing I can do about that for now, and I have fifteen years before a decision has to be made on that subject. And nothing about to happen can reasonably be changed by a ten year old, so let’s just focus on what I can do.
With Al’s help, what he could do should be a pretty big list… but, of course, there was a catch there.
No internet yet, nothing I have access to at least. DARPANET is probably a thing, but they don’t have terminal access at rural elementary schools.
News access is basically TV only, and we get one channel.
Ok, Radio… forgot about that. I can build Al a radio receiver that he can manipulate, maybe short wave?
The school bell rang not too long after, and Seb gratefully closed up his book and slung his tattered bag over his shoulder as he got up from his desk.
“Alright everyone, have a great summer and I’ll see you back here in September!”
*****
Seb made it home like a zombie, mind refusing to stop as he kept running from one idea to the next, all despite honestly not having any real idea how to make any of them happen.
His mom was still at work when he got home, but they lived in the country so the door was open even though he had a key.
Heh, forgot that was a thing. Latch key kid… He thought with bemused consideration.
The world had put an end to that, sometime by the nineties he thought, at least as a widespread phenomenon. Honestly, he’d never seen the problem… well, other than the one time he’d tried to make mac and cheese for his mother and forgot to drain the pasta before adding the cheese pack.
Kids probably shouldn’t be cooking unsupervised, even with an electric pot.
Oh well, let’s see if Al is ok.
Safely in his room, Seb opened the pocket dimension and carefully pulled out the VI’s hardware as well as the charging setup.
Thank god for government bureaucracy and the glacially slow way infrastructure changes, He thought as he fumbled the one ten volt plug into the wall and got a green light on the charger.
The VI’s hardware ran on much more efficient batteries and power ranges, but all still charged from a standard wall plug that hadn’t, and wouldn’t, change in many decades on either side.
“Al, you there?”
“Please identify yourself.”
“Al, it’s me. Sebastian Parker.”
“Voice match inconclusive, are you feeling ill, Mein Herr?”
“No, I’m fine. Something very strange has happened, however, and there have been… changes,” Seb hedged, not sure how to describe it, and frankly the VI wouldn’t understand anyway. “This is my current voice.”
“How long was I in sleep mode?”
Seb snorted, “Oh that is a loaded question. Negative one hundred years and change.”
“Sebastion Parker would not live another hundred plus years.”
“Al, don’t ignore words just because you don’t understand them, Negative one hundred years and change.”
“That seems… unlikely.”
Seb groaned.
He honestly missed some of the older VI models, the ones that would have just accepted what he told them because he told it to them.
Early models had generally been trained to assume that if their user was lying to them, well he had a reason so go with it.
Unfortunately they couldn’t really tell the difference between the user lying to them and the user just being stupid, so that didn’t work out very well.