Chapter 1

“I thought of writing a funny quote on time travel. But you didn’t like it. -Unknown”

I will get the obvious out of the way first. I am very smart. “Gifted” is the term most often used. But, not to toot my own horn, perhaps the truth is that I am a gift. Everything I do, music, math, theoretical physics, there is really nothing that doesn’t come to me as naturally as breathing.

I don’t tell you this to put you off. I just want you to know this before I tell you the rest of my story. Everything hinges upon you knowing that my mind works differently than most others.

Alas, intelligence rarely equates to popularity among “normal” people, especially when those people are children you grew up with. When I entered school I was doing long division, while the other kids were learning colors.

Yes, I am perpetually “that weird kid”, and the “weird kid” is usually the first to become the victim of bullying. So was it for me as well. At least once a week I would find myself the victim of neighborhood kids sneaking onto our property at night and banging on my bedroom window to scare me while I’m watching TV.

Perhaps a quick introduction would be in order. I’ve already introduced my mind, now it’s time for the rest of me.

My name is Brad. Bradley Alex Wheeler. My family is from Clinton, Indiana, which is near Terre Haute. And, in case you don’t know where that is, it’s about an hour west of Indianapolis.

I’m your typical 15 year old geek. I like sci-fi and fantasy, reading, online D&D games, video games in general, and girls. Not that THEY like me back, though. The furthest I’ve been able to get was a couple kisses from a girl I met at a camp my parents forced me to go to a couple years ago. She ended up giving me mononucleosis.

I was a geek with plenty of access to porn on the internet, but no access to any way of relief, other than my right hand.

So, I busied myself with TV and video games, and it is therein where my idea first was able to germinate.

It was a typical lonely Wednesday night for me. I had just decided to re-watch one of my favorite low-budget British sci-fi comedies (try saying that five time fast!), “Red Dwarf”.

Lister was getting ready to go into stasis after refusing to hand over his cat, while Todhunter explained what stasis was:

TODHUNTER: “Oh, you don’t feel a thing. The stasis room creates a static field of time. See, just as X-rays can’t pass through lead, time cannot penetrate a stasis field. So, although you exist, you no longer exists in time, and for you time itself does not exist. You see, although you’re still a mass, you are no longer an event in space-time, you are a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero.”

In that moment, the scales fell from my eyes, and the full power of my mind was suddenly focused on the possibility. I paused the DVD and sat staring at the screen, mouth agape.

Stop. Time.

Well, not exactly stopping it, per se. Time is a constant, it can’t be stopped. But what if it can be diverted?

I had always viewed time in the boxcar model. You traveled through time like a series of train boxcars, moving from one moment to the next, and the next, and the next, and so on.

But what if, instead of you moving through time, time moved through you, like a river flowing?

What if you could divert that flow around you, instead of through you? What would that be like? What would that look like to an outside observer?

I lost all track of time, no pun intended. My brain was firing synapse after synapse. Building theory, discarding, re-evaluating, taking the kernel of one idea, building upon it, seeing where it lead.

I grabbed a notebook and began drawing equations. Equation after equation filled pages. I was relentless.

Did I figure it out that night? No. I might be smart, but even THIS question couldn’t be figured out that easily.

I wrestled with it for weeks until I nailed it down. It wasn’t an elegant solution, but ... it might work. Or, it might melt down all of existence. But, either way, my days of being the victim were going to be behind me.

But the theory was only part of the journey. Now I had to see if it actually would work.

I ordered parts from all over the country, never buying more than one or two components from any one supplier. The PCBs I ordered from China.

While I waited for the parts, I wrote the code. Nights after night I would be hunched over my computer, tapping away.

I knew that, in the wrong hands, this could be a weapon. Almost every breakthrough is weaponized.

So I wrote the program with fail-safe’s. It was password protected, and if three or more incorrect passwords were entered, the drive would wipe itself. I then put the program into an AES encrypted hidden volume on my computer.