Chapter 1

I have always held the opinion that it is much harder to stop a bullet than to deflect a gun barrel before the bullet is fired. In other words, pre-planning works a hell of a lot better than post-planning. (Yes, yes, I know, neither is a valid word. But you get the idea.)

I have also come to the conclusion that damned near everything we are told is bullshit, designed to control thoughts and actions for some else’s agenda. This makes me very resistant to being told what I must do and must not do. Hell, I’ve been doing it my way a hell of a lot longer than any experiment and I can see the effects on my own body. It may well be that eating a single cheeseburger will cause a massive heart attack in some, but I have eaten them all my life and guess who is still here?

On the other hand, failure to prove that something does exist does not constitute proof that it does not exist.

All of this brings me to the reason why I am telling this story.

Anyone who has ever read a book or seen a movie about time travel knows the rules. Rule number 1 is that you must not change the past, so they all go to great lengths to avoid doing so. But tell me this; how in hell do they know exactly what they did previously, down to the level of detail that could conceivably cause a change in the future?

If they go further back, to a time before they were born, haven’t they ipso facto changed the past? How can they be certain no one saw them pop into existence and reported it as a miracle or Devil sighting or whatever it might take to cause massive changes to the society?

Then there is the group like me who believe in parallel alternate realities. I believe that every possible combination of every single action has/will occur in some reality, with whatever end result occurred due to the change. This is my concept of infinity. If there were only twenty different choices to be made, this alone would result in over a million alternate realities.

See what I mean? By the time you get to the breakfast table in the morning, you may have skipped through thousands of either/or decisions, although if you are like me then you weren’t aware of having made any decisions until you have had your coffee.

Which foot did you put on the floor first? Right or left? Did your foot get tangled in the covers this morning like it does sometimes? Did you turn on the light in the bathroom today, or simply leave it off and feel your way around to avoid waking your wife?

We humans and probably most birds go through life continuously making choices. If you don’t think so, then begin keeping a journal of every step you take. Even the act of keeping the journal is a decision you would not have made, had you not decided to read this story.

So, if we have alternate realities, what difference does it make what we do if we go back to the past? Would there not be a reality already in existence for each of the things we might have done? After all, if we do go back to the past, then it is history when we start, isn’t it?

This kind of makes my head hurt, but then I make my living dealing with things that make my head hurt, so what is the big deal?

Although my education is in pure science, my experience has all been in the practical application of pure science to problems in the real world, primarily those that can be dealt with through some combination of sensors, computers and actuators.

This experience is why my buddy Jake came by my office one day. He seemed to have something on his mind, but kept hawing and hemming until I could no longer wait.

“Come on, Jake. Spit it out. What has you so tongue-tied?”

“Oh, ok. I just didn’t know how to start.”

“Well, start anywhere and you can always back up if I get lost.”

“All right. You asked for it. Remember those discussions we have had about time travel?”

“Sure. One week we decide it can’t be done, then the next we we all agree that maybe it is possible, after all. Which side are you on today?”

“Uh, well, there’s this. It just showed up on my workbench. I have no idea where it came from or who might have put it there.”

I looked at the cover page of a fairly thin document. It said, “Report of the Committee to Investigate Temporal Translocation”. It appeared to be a few decades old, and sure enough, the date on the document was December 4, 1959.

“It just showed up?”

“Yep. I went out to pick up some beer and when I got back, it was on my bench.”

“I assume you read it?”

“Yep.”

“I assume you want me to read it?”

“Yep.”

So I read it. As I read, the hair began standing up on the back of my neck.

“You realize what you have here, don’t you?”

“Yep.”

“It pretty much says that they worked out the theory and tested it on the fastest computer available and the theory appears to be sound, but requires that the calculations be performed much faster in order to become operational. Is that what you got out of it?”

“Yep.”

Jake was from Montana. He drank coffee all day and whiskey all night, but wasn’t real big on chit-chat.

“Let’s check out the computational speeds they had back then. Ah, here it is. Wikipedia says the IBM 709 could multiply 5000 integers per second. My new $35 Raspberry Pi can perform 24 GFLOPS, or 24 billion floating point operations per second. This makes the RPi3 about five million times faster than what they had to work with in 1959. Would this be enough increase?”

“The report says that they needed a speedup of at least 100,000 times, which they regarded as inherently impossible. That’s why the project was abandoned.”

“But we can process numbers 50 times faster than that, so we should be good to go.”

“Yep. That’s what scares me.”

Since that was one of the longer sentences I ever heard Jake say, it sort of scared me, too. What did we have here and why? Where did it come from and who left it? How did they know we had discussed this?

“Yep, that’s what I thought, too.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I know, but you thought it. Where do we go from here?”