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Episode 7 - Art learns about time-travel
Lee Fyu Choor, head of TimeTravelTech, was cheerily briefing me for a new campaign and explaining how time travel worked – I’d heard it before…
“..so about 2 and a half centuries ago, two folk in Old USA – way before it was BigMex - called Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, observe random static patterns on primitive wave receivers. They surmise these patterns left over radiation from big bang. In a way they right. The patterns are like 3 dimensional pixel images, they run through everything.” He paused for breath and absent-mindedly twirled his pony-tail. – I noticed he had redecorated the building.
“What they really are is a kind of flux. The pattern of this flux determine where things are fixed in time. So all you have to do is create a field where you can re-programme this flux to earlier configuration and you effectively return it to an earlier state. You can keep a ‘recording’ of a flux pattern and then jump backward and forwards, like coat peg you saw in reception*. That’s the easy bit,” (*see episode 6)
Lee leaned forward suddenly, eyebrows raised, to see if I was paying attention.
“So what’s the hard bit?”
He sat back,“ If the object not already been monitored in the field, we have major task to calculate, from the seemingly random patterns of flux, what it would have been like in the time we want to go back to. And that takes a lot, a lot, a lot of power.”
“Gotcha.” – I hadn’t.
“Anyway, we finally work that out too, so we can get any object – as long as it’s relatively simple – and send it back to an earlier state. Importantly, once we have that code, we can extrapolate the pattern and send things forwards too.”
I wanted to sound interested, “So what are the commercial applications?”
“As long as we have all the bits we can renew and fix broken components. We can genuinely age things, and we can reset chess boards at the end of a game, or replay moves.
I thought I should 'add value' - “But you can use it for medical purposes?”
He leaned forward and whispered...
“We working on that, but it take time, and very, very tricky,”
I thought I was being clever… “You could fix bones, cure cancer…”
He held up a hand, his happy smile disappeared “Yes, indeed you could.” He went on,
“You know my PA, Doreen?"
"She's very pretty"
"Yes, she very smart lady. She smart, but not clever. So, she watch as we fix small components, she see how it’s done and R&D let her have a go now and again.”
“Anyway, she on her own, it lunchtime and she break fingernail, opening Ho-Fun ready-heat pack of instant Peking noodles with crayfish and lobster tail.”
“She think ‘I know, I stick finger in field and send it back to earlier state,’”
He looked at the floor.
“But she not know you gotta have finite edge to field, or flux pattern escape, set up resonance in surrounding cells and they all fight to get away from one another….”
He looked me in the eye
“I get back from lunch and she all over the place,”
“What, she was crying?”
“No, she really all over the place, she one cell thick on every surface in building.”
