The Time Machine That Was and Wasn’t at the Same Time by Jonah Jones.

Several years ago or yet to be, Frank Fullie had written on a whiteboard in his garage:

“You can jump forward in time by falling asleep.”

“You can jump backward in time by looking at old photographs.”

“Sideways in time by having empathy with another.”

“Outside time by dying.”

As an afterthought he’d written “Does the Higgs field come into it?”

After an after-afterthought, he realised he could never figure his way through that one, so decided it didn’t. After all, who’s in charge here?

Based upon those principles, he had begun construction. Simply a hobby at first, the project had become something of an obsession over the years, to the point when Grace, his wife, only became concerned when he didn’t appear at meal-times.

Occasionally, he noticed new refinements appeared upon the board, such as

“Any mean little proton be he ne’er so vile, may travel ’gainst time’s arrow.”

Without realising that his own activity in the garage had caused a rift and partial healing of quantum possibilities, he wondered for a while if Grace had written the extra lines, or his neighbours or that perhaps he had taken to somnambulation with associated somnascribing.

Not that he understood that last inscription, nor even who might have written it. It seemed rather retro but then he was dabbling in the fundamentals of time itself – or would be, once he got the pistons working more smoothly. However, photons travelling backwards in time might be worth investigation, centrifugal governor having been taken into consideration.

“Best way to start – start” appeared upon the whiteboard and Frank took its advice.

Some refinement was still required, but he sat in it for the first time just now and adjusted the bootstraps, to discover himself in the process of sitting in it. He tightened his swimming goggles, pulled on the thorn-proof gauntlets and set to launch himself into the ever-rolling stream.

‘It’s a time-machine,’ he said proudly from the cockpit as the lights flashed and various components hummed, hissed and buzzed while the centrifugal governor went round and round.

‘What is that great big thing covered with flashing lights you’re sitting in?’ Grace asked, cookies and coffee on a tray.

‘Yesterday.’

‘When did you build it?’

Frank seemed quite as expected to her, if a little blurred by the inherent instability of poorly healed space-time frameworks, but there was something that was right out of kilter. His mustache was considerably longer, as were his eyebrows and hair. He scratched his head and wondered whether he needed a new comb.

‘Oh yes,’ he assured her. ‘Relative to you I’m in the future.’

‘Does it work?’

‘I thought you would be.’

Grace was genuinely impressed. ‘I’m impressed,’ she told him.

Frank shifted a rat’s nest of wires from his lap, undid the seat belt, pulled the rawlplugs from his ears and stepped out of the machine.

‘So what do you think?’ he asked her.

‘I told you – I’m impressed.’

‘You must have told me that in the future.’

‘No I didn’t. I told you a minute ago.’

‘Ah but I was in your future, even if you weren’t. It’s a straightforward series of events for me. Time only goes backwards and forwards for the rest of the universe.’

He beamed at his wife and bit into one of the cookies as she figured out what he’d just said in her past.

‘So it should have been the past for you too.’

‘No – it was my present but now it’s my future.’

‘How can it be your future if it was my past?’

‘Because you haven’t got a time machine.’

At the cross-over point of space-time that was relevant to both possibilities, Flavia walked into the room. Quantum mechanics had always been something to be swept under the carpet for Frank and so he ignored it yet again by shutting his eyes. The previous ongoing continuum re-established its integrity, so Flavia walked into the room again when he opened his eyes again. All three of them looked at the other two, Flavia and Grace having no idea who the other might be, as Frank’s head reached a point of near disintegration.

‘But,’ he began as the other two simultaneously interrupted him by demanding to know who the other woman might be.

Fortunately, the relief valve on the machine vented with a shriek, giving Frank enough space-time to notice the old man sitting in the corner, wearing a captain’s hat and to ask him what he was doing there – the old man, that is.

‘I’ve been here all the way through these shenanigans,’ the old man said. ‘You’re the ones that keep flipping about like demented quanta.’

Not having got that concept gripped either, Frank focused upon the possible explanation for two equally valid wives to be present at the same time and in the same space. Relative time lurched back into moderately sensible and he noticed someone had written “God does not play dice!” cursively on the whiteboard.

‘I think we’ve busted a barrier between separate universes,’ he replied with the old lame argument they all use when faced with this paradox. ‘You’re both my wife.’

‘We can’t be,’ came the reasoned reply, in unison.

He turned to Flavia ‘You’re the wife I had – I mean have – when I didn’t think about building a time machine. And you, Grace, are the wife I have when I did, I mean, when I do.’

Flavia snorted in disbelief. She was the one when he wasn’t building a time-machine, remember. ‘When did you find time to build such a thing?’

‘I didn’t. Not when I was married to you.’

‘You’re still married to me.’

That took a bit of unexpected figuration. ‘Well, yes and no…’

‘Either you are or you are not.’

Boxed in by theory, Frank was non-plussed and plussed at the same time.

All three felt that the situation was impossible but only Grace had any sort of answer.

‘What about the past then – can you go backwards?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Flavia retorted, ‘it doesn’t work. Time machines don’t.’ She had a degree in astrophysics and knew what she was talking about. That’s why she’d been part of the universe where it wasn’t possible and consequently, Frank had never built one.

Now Grace had a smile on her face that could induce diabetes. ‘Then you won’t mind him trying to go back to the time before he married you.’

At which point Frank found he required another gap in the continuum and to his astonishment, it was provided by his own separate sense of how things were proceeding. He was the observer and by observation, was able to alter the results. Never having been much of a one for profundity, he was thrown into a world that needed a different means of validation. Rather than being immersed in time, he was skipping over the surface of it, making contact, then breaking contact, although to his perception, it all flowed continuously. Observing other people, he concluded that he was also skipping across the surface of reality – not his, but theirs. His reality, like his sense of time, made perfect sense but evidently, only to him. Every non-Frank saw him as a bouncing stone, he saw his own mass upheld by the surface of reason.

Time, reality, Higgs Field. He’d made an unexpected connection between them all.

There was another helpful line squeezed into the remaining space on the on the white board,

“Time is on a ribbon attached to a stick, twiddled around the motion of the dance and the only one to make sense of it is the dancing twiddler.”

In that phrase there was something of Shiva’s dance encapsulated, he sensed, as he stepped back into the machine, wondering what might happen this time, while also wondering who Shiva might be because he hadn’t read The Tao of Physics yet. That would be sometime next August.

Prior to twiddling or twisting any of the controls, he looked across at the old captain in the corner who was shaking his head in belief. Older and wiser than Frank, until Frank started up the machine again, he knew people shouldn’t fiddle with things they don’t understand. He’d lost a lot of students that way, disappearing into non-existence.

‘Ow!’ Frank shouted as he landed on the concrete floor, wearing neither goggles nor gauntlets.

He looked around to see that Grace was next to him in the garage with a plate of cookies in one hand and two mugs of coffee in the other, the tray option having been on another timeline together with the partially eaten cookie.

‘Where did the time machine go?’ she asked him.

‘What time-machine?’

‘The time-machine you built.’

‘I haven’t built a time-machine.’

Grace inspected the room and came up a blank. ‘But it was here just now. Maybe I should say, just then.’

Frank took a cookie and coincidentally bit into it in an exactly similar way to the one he’d bitten into in the other version of the universe.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, spilling crumbs onto the floor, ‘whoever heard of a time-machine that worked?’

‘You – I mean we – must have gone back to the time before you invented it.’

The other Grace would have found it hard to describe but this version, the one without the tray, had it better gripped.

‘Flash…bang,’ she said, ‘and then it disappeared up its own fundamentals, I guess, just as I walked in through the door.’

‘Hmm…I wonder how it worked.’

Following a quick muse, he picked up a notebook and asked her ‘What did it look like?’

‘Well I don’t know anything about how it worked – you know me and quantum mechanics,’ they both laughed at that, ‘but it looked like an upside-down Model T Ford with an “I Like Ike” sticker on the back bumper. There was a heap of flashing lights inside, a couple of cow horns on the front and a thing with balls on that went round and round.’

‘Headlamps?’

‘Under the fenders.’

Outside time, Einstein says ‘Told you so,’ every time it happens, because he’s still in denial.

While a square-rigger ship, in other-place and other-time, sails serenely on its own time’s rippled surface. Captain Higgs looks out from his poop-deck with concern because he and his boson know what’s really going on

or back.

Jonah Jones

Image: a circling of old-fashioned clocks vanishing into a spooky misty distance from Pixabay.com