Chapter 31

“Are you comfortable, Aimee Keiko?”

“Quite comfortable, thank you. Why, do you plan on making me uncomfortable?”

Solomon laughed nervously. “No, of course not. That is, I don’t plan on it. However, this is a long explanation, and you may perhaps find it very boring. I just want you to be as comfortable as possible before I begin. Would you like some more café-nouveau, or perhaps some more wine?”

“No, Solomon,” she said with an irritated quirk to her mouth. “I’m quite comfortable, I don’t want any more coffee or wine, and I’m looking forward to hearing every word of it. Is that clear?”

“Yes, certainly,” Solomon said. Although she was clearly irritated, he noted Aimee’s repeated use of only his first name, which spoke more clearly about her comfort level with him than her reassurances. He felt a little more comfortable about telling her all of the details.

“So what comes first?”

“Pardon me? Oh, well, I thought I’d start with the general theory, then perhaps we’ll get a little more into the physics of it if you’re still interested.”

“Of course I’ll be interested!”

“Okay, great. Fine.”

“And?”

“Oh, sorry! Yes, well.” Solomon felt like he was back in Selection testing, trying to explain a complicated premise in the oral section. He had known this woman most of his life. Why did she make him feel like a tongue-tied little boy? He turned away from her and spoke to the wall, pretending he was alone and just trying to get his own thoughts together.

“Okay. To begin with, Time is simply another form of energy, as is implied by your knowledge of quantum mechanics. Actually, it’s a combination of many forms of energy, as well as other factors. All of these energies and factors are innate parts of our lives, and have an intimate relationship with all forms of matter, both organic and inorganic. Therefore, if an object intrudes itself strongly enough into the current, it can actually have an infinitesimal impact on the flow of Time. I must apologize in that I have this habit of explaining the flow of Time as somewhat analogous to that of a river.”

“That’s fine,” she shrugged.

“People know this innately, in that the brain can actually affect the passage of Time under the proper conditions, such as during great duress or an extremely high excitement level. We call this the Alpha state. ‘Time seemed to slow down,’ or ‘It all happened in a flash,’ some people have said. ‘It was like slow motion.’ These blind explanations have actually turned out to be more than mere phrases, in many cases. Many people, under certain circumstances, can actually affect the passage of Time in minute ways. In the past thirty years or so, we have actually found people who can have this impact on Time without being in an Alpha state, or while still being in a relative Beta state. They can slow it down, speed it up, perhaps with a total impact of a few minutes relative to the rest of the world, and with a range of up to a quarter of a mile.”

“How do you mean, a range?”

“When a person enters the Alpha state, or when a Talent manipulates Time, as we call people who can alter Time while in a Beta state, it could never be powerful enough to affect the entire world. It may only warp the natural energy flow that directly surrounds the person, which is why other people right next to them might never even notice. It’s not like a massive adrenaline rush, which can temporarily give a person superhuman strength, and is perfectly obvious to anyone nearby. On the other hand, there have been many cases of timepieces gaining or losing a couple of minutes with no known power surges or outages in the area, sometimes affecting entire neighborhoods. As a Regional Engineer, I suspect you are much more aware of these phenomena than almost anyone else.”

Having either regained his confidence, or being so caught up in his subject he had forgotten to be intimidated by her presence, Solomon turned back to his audience.

“Most of these occurrences are attributed to natural causes, even though there is no logical explanation offered for the phenomena. There have also been many less explainable cases that are put down to mass hypnosis or mass hysteria, with dozens of people within an area being totally disoriented. They act as if Time had shifted on them, and so on.

“In the most extreme case, one of my predecessor research teams documented an entire village of African natives who were thousands of years behind the rest of humanity. In the past, it was assumed that such villages in certain pockets of Africa, Asia, South America, or wherever the ancient Regions were called, were simply slow in developing. It was assumed the inhabitants had for some reasons chosen not to accept any modern advancements, whether in farming, hunting, clothes making, or use of technology of any kind. After careful study, however, it was found there were a number of people in the village – sometimes almost all of them, as in this particular example – who were subconsciously but deliberately slowing down Time for the entire village or tribe. Evidently, leaders in their distant past had decided the ‘old ways’ were best, and they did not want to progress. These leaders had the Talent to impact their entire area. As these leaders had advantages in both procreation and survival of their offspring, they not only handed down this non-progressive attitude, but also the Talent from generation to generation. This particular village was really the first major breakthrough in understanding localized Time manipulation, and led to test projects very similar to those nearly two centuries ago – that is, around the era of my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather – when people with psyonic powers were grouped together with attempts to understand and harness their power.”

“And did any of that older experimentation ever work out?”

“No,” Solomon said with a smug smile. “You see, the researchers all had the same two basic flaws to their approach. In the first place they were, as I mentioned, trying to harness the powers of their subjects, as if that power was inherent in the individuals, rather than inherent in the universe. Secondly, they really had no clear-cut focus, no absolute goal they wanted to achieve from their research. Whereas I, on the other hand, did.”

“Your temporal displacement mechanism.”

“Exactly.”

“So how did you do it?”

“By separating the phenomenon from the conductor. As I said, virtually anyone can do it under the right circumstances. So, rather than focusing on the innate ability of a few individuals, I started by assuming there was some force of nature always present, but that most people could only tap into it accidentally. In addition to the Talents, I studied ordinary people. Using hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other less traditional techniques, I created situations that would put my test subjects into different extreme situations. This included danger to the point where they feared for their lives, extraordinary mental stress, and perceptions of emotional crises. I then tried just about every kind of measuring device I could think of to see if anything registered. Remember, my theory was that Time is some sort of constantly moving force, like a powerful river you can actually enter and move with or against if only you can find a path through all of the trees and brush and other obstacles and somehow reach the bank.”

“But didn’t your subjects object to the things you did to them, even if intellectually, as you imply, they knew these were only artificial situations?”

“On the contrary, Aimee Saito. You can’t imagine how boring such a world as ours must be for the vast majority who have no choice in their professions, very little variety in what they can do or where they can go, and little danger or any other kind of excitement in their lives. My research provided two things they could virtually not obtain in any other way: the perception of danger and adventure without really ever being threatened (except psychologically, perhaps), and a way to legally earn a few more credits.”

“So Time is a complicated flow of energy, something like an electrical current?”

“Certainly a part of it is electrical, as all elements in the universe, both organic and inorganic, are charged with positive and negative ions. But I suspected that was too simple. I used every kind of device I could to measure all possible light spectrums, decibel levels, radioactivity, electrical currents, radio frequencies, heat discharges, and so on. Using all of the mistaken research of the past, fortunately having started with essentially the right theory, and using hundreds of millions of credits, it took less than eight years to isolate the predominant elements of Time.

“Not surprisingly, it involves the basic elements in which life exists. These include mass, energy, light, and sound. In the temporal sense, color, smells, texture, density, motion, which includes velocity, and so on, are all byproducts of those elements. When people alter the flow of Time with mental energy, it’s like putting your hand into that river and using brute force to change the current. You hold your hand steady to slow it down a bit, sweep your hand with the flow to speed it up, and push against it to significantly reverse the current. But this is done within a localized, tiny area compared with the flow of the entire river.”

“So, before you could travel in Time, you had to be able to control all of the elements of which Time was made up?”

“Exactly. In order to truly interface with Time, it was necessary to blend with these essential properties, to emulate the elements of Time’s flow in order to travel up or down its current. Especially if one wanted to manipulate Time effectively, one had to become a part of its basic nature rather than just an insignificant ripple in its flow. It took ten years, and nearly three billion credits of my inheritance as well as the funds of the Institute, to find a way to blend those elements into a coherent mechanism to serve my goal. Not only did so many tiny elements have to be blended together, in addition to the main ones, but they had to be in direct proportion to the way Time recognizes all of them.

“This involved reproducing a three dimensional image of a person or object so it could be reassembled and animated in another Space/Time Continuum. It included tapping into that basic electrical/energy flow and regulating its current so I could ‘target’ a destination in Time and arrive exactly then and in the same space. Most importantly, as I learned with experimental animals, it meant harmonizing the life force so that a living being could actually live in a Time in which its natural life force did not exist. That little consideration is why the even flow of Time was so critical, in that predictability is paramount in getting all of the variables just right. This is why what I call the acquisition signal was in many ways the most difficult to perfect.

“It’s a really good thing that radioactivity is not one of the basic elements of Time, because I would never have obtained access to adequate amounts of isotopes without strict Government supervision and control of my experiments. As you know, that would have been virtually impossible.”

“Yes,” she admitted with a mixture of pride and regret. “We certainly tried to make it so.”

“And you succeeded!” Solomon exclaimed, trying to make it sound like praise for the diligent efforts of Aimee and her fellow engineers. “You had to protect what you thought was vital to the continuance of the society, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s true. It was our Assignment.”

There was an uncomfortable lull for a while while both wandered in their own thoughts. It was Aimee who asked the next logical question.

“So what about the actual physics involved?

“Ah, yes. I assume you had a couple of classes in Advanced Training on quantum mechanics.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Right. And you remember the irregular behavior of quantum particles?”

“I believe so. As I recall, these tiny particles can actually change their energy levels and move erratically, correct?”

“More or less. They can only possess certain properties, such as energy and angular momentum, and only in discrete amounts, which are called ‘quanta’. You obviously also know that, under the right circumstances, their exact level of normal energy may be reduced by some fraction, or possibly even increased. Okay. Well, as a neutral condition, Time has an amazingly even flow relative to the ebbs and surges of most natural energies. Which is critical to the proper functioning of my equipment.”

“And this basic science was mastered a little more than one hundred years ago?”

“Well, actually, I suppose what you call the ‘basic science’ is what we already use for teleportation. In that sense, yes. The quantum mechanics of the physical transfer are very similar, although you must be aware of the many limitations in the equipment used at teleportation stations. Primarily, I greatly increased the probabilities of exciting all quantum particles simultaneously to achieve the velocity of light, resulting in a much higher reproduction of the object being transferred.”

“I vaguely remember a discussion of Einstein’s theory of relativity in relation to teleportation, but there had been some flaw in the logic. Is that what you did, correct that flaw?”

“No, that wasn’t necessary. His theory wasn’t a problem to any great extent.”

“You mean to tell me that the theory of relativity had no impact on time travel?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean that. At least, not exactly. It has some great meaning to quantum teleportation and therefore to my TDM as well. It just didn’t work out the way he thought it might.”

“Could you please explain that to me?”

“Well, you have to remember that Einstein was operating under a very limited knowledge of quantum mechanics. Although he was one of the people who contributed to the theory, he was primarily developing his own work in other areas. It turned out he was right about the velocity of light being critical to actual movement through Time. However, he believed it was a case of the macro system – that is, the object or objects being sent – reaching light speed physically. Einstein maintained that no particle could attain the speed of light on its own. Mass would go to infinity, remember?