About three years ago John Bottomley, an insignificant scientist in West Yorkshire, woke up at 02:15 with a thread of an idea that wouldn’t go away. He went downstairs, made himself a strong cup of tea and went into his study and wiped his chalkboard clean. He stared at it as he sipped his frankly too hot tea and then started chalking.

He would put some equations down, then erase some, do some more, and so on. Two hours later he had finished.

“Oh fuck, I think that’ll work,” he said as he finished his too-cold tea. “Bloody Nora, why has no one thought of this before?

Too excited now to sleep, he started to think of the practicalities of demonstrating that it would work. He worked out the rough logistics, and it soon became apparent to him that he needed electrical help and engineering help. He looked at his watch, half past six. Was it too early to ring people? He had a friend, Sakish Amour, who owned a small engineering company; he could help with the manufacturing. Another friend, Glen Watkins, owned an electronics company that manufactured the electronics boards for washing machines and vacuum cleaners. He needed to talk to them; he got on the phone.

Annoyingly, it had been ten o’clock before they could all three meet.

“You are insane,” Sakish said. “You are telling me the finest scientists in the world have not come up with this?”

“Obviously not; otherwise, we would know about it, and the universe would be ours. I have the idea; mathematically it works. I need to build a prototype to prove it; then I can go to the likes of SpaceX and try to sell it to them. My proposal is this: I set up a company with us three as shareholders. I shall have eighty per cent, as it is my intellectual property, and you ten per cent each for your technical knowledge to make it happen. I shall patent the product, but I shall disguise what it is in the name. If the prototype works, I shall invite SpaceX; they are looking for new ideas now that their innovative founder has passed and won’t accept less than a billion dollars for their licence to use it.”

“I’m in, but it’ll be hashed-up electronics for the prototype; if it works, I can integrate the circuits into a small board,” Glen said. “What’s ten per cent of a billion?”

“Me too, a hundred million.” Sakish said, “You really think this will work, John?”

“Yes, I do; the maths are there; it is just that no one thought it could be done.”

“What about general relativity? I thought we couldn’t do this.”

“No, we can’t, but if you step outside General Relativity you can, and that is what we will do if you agree.”

Over the next month the prototype was built. They had many discussions on where to test it. They obviously couldn’t test it in space, but they had the Dales close at hand; they could go somewhere remote. The day of testing arrived, and they loaded the prototype on the back of a Land Rover pickup and headed into the dales early to avoid any humans and ended up about five miles from the nearest road.

They set the prototype down on the heather just off the track and backed away about a mile.

“I hope this is far enough away,” Glen said.

“I guess if it isn’t, we won’t know anything about it,” Sakish commented.

“I wonder if there will be a sort of sonic boom?” John wondered aloud, I had never thought of that until this moment.

“We’ll soon find out,” Sakish said, “are you ready?” He pressed the initiate button.

The area where the prototype was went black – literally no light for about a second; blink and you’d miss it. Through binoculars they could see that the prototype had gone.

“Will it come back though?” Glen asked.

It did, exactly five minutes later, as Glen had programmed it. They went and picked it up; it was icy cold, and they had to handle it using gloves and towels and went back to Sakish’s factory and removed the memory cards. Perfect close-up pictures of Jupiter. It had worked. It had gone to Jupiter, taken photographs and then returned in five minutes; a watch onboard was showing the same time as Glen’s watch. General Theory circumvented.

And that was how the BTD, the Bottomley Time Bubble, came to be. SpaceX initially offered a billion for exclusive use; BTD Limited, the owners of the patent, declined. They said that their next port of call was Boeing. SpaceX finally agreed to one billion per year for exclusive use, for a ten-year period, paid in advance. A British scientist, engineer and electrician all suddenly became very wealthy, and the universe opened up to mankind. The science fiction from the twenty-first century became science fact in the twenty-second. Warp drive had arrived.