1
“I’m Serena Wilcox, former private detective, wife and mother of three. I did investigative work for President Ann Kinji, as you already know.”
“Yes, we know who you are.” Agent Estep folded his arms over his chest and extended his legs far out in front of his chair, crossed at the ankles.
“Agent Estep and I go way back. Don’t let his attitude fool you, we’re buddies.” Serena winked at him. “We worked together during Operation Covert Coffee.”
Estep addressed the group without budging from his slouched nearly-prone sprawl. “Who here doesn’t already know Serena Wilcox?”
A small wiry man raised his hand.
Estep scoffed. “One guy. You’re giving us this spiel for one guy?”
Serena ignored him and resumed reading from her notes. “Now that President Ann’s term has ended, she is ready to launch the Gödel Solution Institute where she is owner and CEO. You are of course already aware of this, as you are the first members of the GSI board of directors. President Ann—I think I speak for all of us when I say that she’ll always be President to us—asked me to kick things off because she wanted you to see the person who is doing the traveling. I suppose she thought you’d keep me safe if you saw my face.” Serena paused for laughter but none was forthcoming. She continued, “Thank you for this opportunity to pioneer in time travel crime investigation. I can’t even begin to express what this means to me.”
Serena sat down amid a smattering of polite applause. The lone person who hadn’t previously met Serena popped up and took her place at the front of the board room.
He took a few sips of water even though he hadn’t yet said a word. Then he studied his audience, which was composed about fifty-fifty of Covert Coffee leftovers (Ann Kinji’s investigative team) and his own people (mathematicians, technicians and scientists): the dark-and-unruly-haired quick-tempered Agent Estep, the 40-something high-energy petite brunette Serena, the infamously burned agent-turned-national-hero Beav, the red-headed curly-haired lass from Ireland, Jo, former agent (and briefly Vice President) Lehman, Ann’s contact Professor Dr. Kendra Wellington and five members of Eduardo’s hand-picked team, Roger McCloy, Gentry Davis, Malirah Cravitz, Jorgi Gorantisch and James Edison Spector. He nodded to his team, they returned the greeting, and then he finally spoke. “I’m here to brief you on Project Scarecrow. I’m Eduardo Martin.”
Eduardo paused to smile at them. Everyone smiled back. He continued. “I assume that you are familiar with the Manhattan Project. In 1939, farther back than we can currently time travel, Albert Einstein sent a letter, drafted by prominent physicists of the time, to President Franklin Roosevelt. Einstein warned of a weapon being built by Nazi Germany that was more powerful than the world had ever known. He was referring to the atomic bomb. The course of history was changed: the United States developed an atomic research program using the code name The Manhattan Project, all because of Einstein’s letter. What if I told you that another such letter existed? A letter that also has the power to change the course of history?”
“Einstein wrote another letter?” Serena asked.
“I didn’t say that.” Eduardo drank the rest of his water as if his brief speech had drained him dry.
Jorgi Gorantisch’s voice boomed from the back of the room. He was a man who never needed a microphone, and given his six-foot-five two-hundred-thirty pound presence, he was seen as easily as he was heard. “Forget Einstein.”
Beav, whose foot had fallen asleep and whose stomach had been rumbling for the past several minutes, entered the conversation. “Then what is this about?”
Eduardo picked at his thin mustache as he appeared to mull over his words before speaking. “The only connection between what I’m saying now and Albert Einstein is that I want you to focus on the letter; how one letter was the catalyst to monumental change. There’s been another pivotal point in history involving a letter, but unlike Einstein’s, it will never lead to world change because it was never delivered to the right people.”
Serena raised her hand and then spoke without waiting for an invitation. “To be clear, this letter has nothing to do with atomic bombs, the Manhattan Project, or Albert Einstein.” As soon as Serena said this she heard Estep groan. She mouthed, “What?”
Eduardo’s mustache picking escalated to the point that his upper lip was now stretched tight across his already taut face. “To be clear, no it does not.”
Beav was a man who kept his own time, and was not typically hurried by any outside stimulus, but at this moment his stomach was complaining of hunger. He prompted, “Our first project is to send Serena back to the year that the letter was written and see that it’s delivered to the right people?”
Eduardo’s face reddened. He stopped picking at his mustache and reached for his now-empty water glass. He scowled at the glass before directing an even deeper scowl at Beav. “My usage of the word ‘letter’ is metaphorical.”
Beav fought back the urge to rub the skin of his own upper lip as he watched Eduardo’s mustache pulling act. Beav was sporting a goatee these days. He also had long tresses that he had pulled back with elastic and had topped off with a bandana that brought out the gypsy in him. If Ann or Serena were to request that he wear a monkey suit, so be it. Meanwhile he sported a sleeveless t-shirt and his favorite denim.
Beav’s appearance belied his formal manner of discourse. His rebuttal to Eduardo was unhurried, his empty stomach temporarily forgotten. “While I understand what you are saying about using the word ‘letter’ metaphorically, I am at a loss about what you do mean in a literal sense. I too am frequently led astray by my own musings. However, if we can pin down…”
Agent Estep snarled, “Can we please get back on track? Some of us have to get back to our day jobs.”
Estep never missed an opportunity to rub salt in Beav’s wounds. Regardless of Beav’s hero-celebrity status, he had no hope of ever being reinstated. On the contrary, Estep was still in the agency’s good graces and even basked in the loyalty of the top brass. To top it off, Agent Estep was awarded a ridiculous number of sparkly medals following Operation Covert Coffee. Estep had, after all, carried President Ann Kinji out of harm’s way—literally in his arms, like a prince saving the princess, a story that the media would never tire of packaging into yet another feature. Beav couldn’t avoid seeing Estep’s digital smug mug for weeks on end, and now he was up close and personal with him again on a regular basis.
Eduardo had fetched himself a new glass of water while Estep and Beav stewed, refusing to look at each other. If Eduardo had picked up on the tension he didn’t show it. He launched into the rest of his speech uninterrupted.
“We are limited in our time travel by what we call the memory window. You see, each of us is born with a brain capable of nearly limitless possibilities to store sensory input, experiences, data and memories. Most of us have a relatively short memory window of about five years, give or take, meaning that we don’t remember much that happened beyond five years into the past and we have no access to the ‘memory’, or shall we say ‘awareness’, of future events.
Whereas, in individuals thought to have psychic ability, the areas of the brain that are completely untapped for most of us are accessible to those who ‘see’ the future. We now believe that there’s a simple scientific explanation to explain psychic phenomenon: Brain damage, birth defects, and anomalies can cause a spillage, an access point, into the areas of the brain that store future events.
We have discovered that human brains contain our entire life maps, from the womb to the grave. Normally we can’t see much beyond the five year memory window I mentioned. People with remarkable minds, most often due to brain anomalies and abnormalities, may have a photographic memory or might see glimpses of the future.
But what if we could access the entire memory window? What I mean by this is; what if we could tap into the entire life span of a person? For example, if we had access to a person who is over one hundred years old we could acquire quite a record, at least from that person’s perspective, of up to one hundred years into the past.
Keep in mind that we’d only have data that this individual has heard, read, viewed, sensed, and so on. Not all impressions are subjective; some are spot-on accurate because they come from official sources or verifiable events, but we do have to proceed with caution. For example, the memory of having read a letter would give us a reliable databank of what someone actually communicated, whereas the memory of a verbal conversation could be faulty due to the listener not hearing the spoken word correctly, or misinterpreting the meaning of what was said.
And what works for the past can also work for the future. If we go in the other direction, we can tap into a newborn’s brain and see into the future as far as that particular newborn’s lifespan. Assuming that the newborn in question leads a normal healthy life and dies from natural causes, a single subject will offer us a memory window of about one hundred years into the future. These days it’s not uncommon to discover lifespans of one hundred and fifteen years or more.
I notice that some of you look dismayed. Don’t worry; no one is harmed by brain tapping. We need only a laser incision to insert the sensor. The sensor converts brain impressions into usable data. The data is then processed by my esteemed colleagues here.” Eduardo gestured toward his team.
When no one responded he resumed. “The science has been with us all along but we had no way of conversion. With the emergence of the digital age it was a short hop, skip and a jump from our understanding of the laws of physics to our ability to mine for the information we needed to make time travel possible.
We have already collected data from thousands of subjects, and thirty-three time travel pioneers have already gone before you, Serena Wilcox. We have done it, we have mastered it. My fellow physicist Jorgi was misguiding you when he told you to forget Einstein. No, my friends, we can’t do that. It all goes back to Einstein.”
Eduardo stopped himself and looked at Serena, who was staring up at him with her lips slightly parted as if she were about to speak. He hastily said, “Before you ask, no, this is not about the letter. I’m talking about Einstein’s field equations published in 1915; a little something called general relativity.”
Eduardo noted the blank expressions on every face in the room, excepting those from his own team. “Hold on.” He moved to the presentation tablet.
The tablet’s stylus had been misplaced so he used his fingertip to write an equation: (curvature of space-time) = (mass-energy density) * 8 pi G / c4.. He spun around to face the group with the wide-open rapidly-blinking gaze of someone who believes that his point has been made. However, his gaze was met by droopy-lidded eyes that blinked slowly, like those of a reptile in an observation tank.
Eduardo sighed. “I don’t know how I can make this any clearer. If you aren’t familiar with basic physics there’s not much I can do to help you understand the science of time travel.”
Malirah Cravitz stood up. “May I try?” She carried herself to the presentation tablet on her long dancer’s legs. Her dark skin in contrast to her canary yellow suit dress, the afro that floated in a six-inch halo around her head, and the shimmery crimson lipstick cast her as a runway fashion model instead of the physicist that she most certainly was.
It had been a battle to get the male-dominated world of science to take Malirah seriously, but she had done it without giving up any of her glamour. Her intimidating height helped. Only three men in the board room were taller than she, and Eduardo was especially dwarfed by her. He stepped aside without another word.
Malirah drew a picture of a funnel. “Let’s start with a cone shape, like an e-collar that prevents a dog from licking his wounds.”
She drew a hound with sad eyes, wearing a lampshade around his neck. Then she shook her head so hard that her afro kept moving long after her head stopped shaking. She scrubbed out the picture of the dog. “I have a better analogy. Think of a hovercraft park. Riders can make an almost infinite number of different paths, while always going back to where they started from. Gravity brings all skaters back to the same common point eventually.
Even though each rider follows an entirely different path, they are all riding on the same curve; let’s call it the same timeline. Imagine that time and space are like a hovercraft park, and we are all riders. Some of us are in the past (either because we have traveled there, or because we live there), some of us are in the present—the fixed point where riders start and stop—and some of us are in the future (again, either because we have traveled there or because we live there). But none of us have left the curve, ‘us’ meaning every human being who has ever lived, and will ever live.
Now, of course, the humans who have already died will never have the opportunity to be in our present or our future unless we go back in time and use time travel technology to bring them into the present or into the future. Conversely, people who have not yet been born can’t show up in our present or in the past unless we—or they—use time travel.
Imagine that riders in the past have limited paths that they can travel, and can never reach the fixed point that we call the present. Imagine that the same is true for riders of the future. But for all of us living in the present, we can access the fixed point and part of each side of the curve—on the path destined for us. However, we only get one ride. Now imagine that we are all time travelers. Not only can we access the entire curve, but we can take more than one turn—we get an infinite number of rides, theoretically.”
Serena gasped. “Are you saying that we’ve found a way to become immortal?”
Malirah’s afro bobbed as she vigorously shook her head. She held up a manicured hand for emphasis. “No, I didn’t say that.”
Eduardo attempted to regain control of the podium. He addressed the room as a whole and avoided making direct eye contact with Serena. “If you have an interest in physics, by all means do your own research or talk to one of us. We love to talk shop and we’ll gladly bend your ear.”
Beav raised his hand and waited for permission to speak. Malirah cocked her fingers in loaded-gun fashion and fired. Beav said, “If this is going to go on much longer I suggest that we take a lunch break.”
Malirah’s afro bobbed. “No, I’m done with my bit. I’ll turn it back over to Eduardo.” She strode back to her seat and managed to sit gracefully even though the chair was too small for her.
Eduardo assured them. “I’m on the wrap-up. Let’s hold off on lunch until I’m finished. Back on topic, I wanted to mention that The Gödel metric is an exact solution of the Einstein field equations. I thought you might find it interesting to know where the Gödel Solution Institute got its name. And that’s where we’ll leave the science of time travel.” He paused mysteriously. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the grandfather paradox.”
Eduardo’s hand shot straight to his mustache for a twist, tug and pull when he saw that Serena had opened her mouth to speak.
“I think I know this one,” said Serena. “If I go back in time and kill my grandfather before he meets my grandmother, I’ll never be born, meaning that I couldn’t grow up and time travel, so Grandpa is safe. It’s a paradox, like what came first, the chicken or the egg.”
“No, it’s not like the chicken and the…” Eduardo’s mustache tango went up-tempo for a few mesmerizing seconds before he let let Serena’s ignorance slide. “But you understand the concept of the grandfather paradox well enough. Here at the institute we believe that the past cannot be changed to the point in which it will throw the curve out of orbit. I like Malirah’s visual of a hovercraft park. We believe that we can join the riders, we can interact with them, and we can mix things up a great deal, but we can’t remove any riders from the curve. This isn’t a code of ethics, but a law of science. It is impossible to create a paradox: the universe does not allow it.”
“God doesn’t allow it.” Serena smiled.
Eduardo gave his mustache such a yank that the hair follicles were likely to be permanently damaged. “Yes, well… Let’s stay on track, shall we? I need for you to hear what I’m saying. While we don’t believe that we are in any credible danger of a paradox, we do believe that we can alter the course of history, and that the changes that we make may have unintended and undesirable effects. Remember the hovercraft riders? As long as the riders are contained within the curve, we can add new riders if we wish, therefore the current riders may be then be thrown off their original intended paths. The universe, science, or whatever you choose to believe, allows this. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Serena?”
Serena nodded. “You are telling me to stay in my own lane.”
Eduardo worried his sore upper lip until specks of blood appeared. “Ms. Wilcox, I have my doubts as to whether or not you can manage time travel without adversely changing the course of history.”
Agent Estep snickered and coughed.
Serena protested, “But isn’t the whole point of me traveling so that I can change history? Or is my investigation an intelligence gathering mission only?”
Eduardo glanced upward and held his gaze for several long seconds. Then he locked eyes with Serena Wilcox. “You’ll have your assignment. Stick to the plan and avoid your grandfather.”
Serena whined, “I thought you said that the grandfather paradox is impossible. Now you’re saying I have to worry about creating a paradox? What level of ‘bad’ would this be: ‘the whole planet could implode’ bad or ‘global warming just got warmer’ bad? What would a paradox do exactly?”
Eduardo drank the rest of his second glass of water in one long draught. He said, “This is an excellent time to conclude our first board meeting. Enjoy your lunch.”
Everyone sprang from their chairs except for Serena. She remained seated and called out, “But you didn’t answer my question.”
Eduardo was swallowed by the group of hungry board members as they exited all at once. When he emerged at her side he bent down to rasp in her ear, “Ask God.”