I didn’t have any conscious realisation that my experiment had worked, nor was there any physical indications. I’d of expected that maybe I would see my past self standing there enacting the final preparations for the go on the experiment, but there wasn’t a second me. Looking down at the stop watch in my hand I watched as the numbered leapt and raced each other one line screaming ahead the other just tottering along. The numbers say that it worked. I had travelled backwards in time.
Is anything different? I look around and everything is the same, except I get this strange feeling that I’m a step behind my own shadow. I take a walk to the corner store to buy some chocolate, a sudden desire for chocolate had over came me, and there wasn’t any in the house. Walking home I recounted the experiment in my mind, aligning the results, tabulating. My method seemed just too easy. The science behind it seemed too overtly convoluted and nonsensical yet somehow in practice it just works. But I seem to be at a lost. Why hadn’t I seen my past self? On top of that I had materalised somewhere different from where I’d left. That’s right, I hadn’t checked if my future self was where I’d intended to be. I need to repeat the experiment.
When I got home I searched for the Time Alteration Device but couldn’t find it. I had gone 5 minutes back in time, so where was the T.A.D. at that point? Wait, aren’t I getting a little ahead of myself here? Am I concluding already that the T.A.D. does not make the transition between time shifts? Damn, another question that needs to be answered. Will I then be needing to build a new one every-time I time travel? Never the less I had one built in the time frame of this jump. Searching I’d feel certain I caught glimpses of it in reflections laying in the middle of the floor, but whenever I looking in that direction there would be nothing. Eventually I did find the one from this time sitting on the charger. Damnation! At least I found that bit of information out now instead of later on down the track. Before I repeat the test I decide to build another T.A.D. familiarising myself and memorising the process as much as possible.
The way the T.A.D. works is by creating a temporal shift in the molecules and atoms in the surrounding space altering their signature and pattern, so where as they would ordinarily oscillate in a particular pattern, that is changed to something not quite reversed but also not exactly random. By expanding the field and speed of the oscillation of surrounding space we can theoretically control the length of time that the object being sent through time travels. In my previous experiments I was unable to demonstrate that the machine worked in sending an object backwards in time. I had demonstrated that it would send objects somewhere, but it wasn’t until I’d stopped focusing on the past and sent something to the future that I knew the T.A.D. worked.
I spent the next few days pouring over the blueprints, diagrams, schematics, buying the parts and assembling the new T.A.D.. Now as a scientist I wanted to discover what went wrong last time. As a human, I’m greedy. Can you change the past? Ethically I could list reasons against attempting to alter the sequence of events, but it didn’t matter to me that people I have no knowledge of might suffer due to my changing of something, so I decided I would use my future knowledge to financially benefit myself. Gambling was the best way to do this, so I looked up the results for various gambling events the previous week. Having sufficiently memorised them, it was time to repeat the experiment.
Gripping the T.A.D. in my hand, I dialled in the desired intensity and activated it. The air around me began to swirl creating a vortex which increased in size the longer the machine was active. Then suddenly everything collapsed in on itself and I was staring at my computer monitor. Computer monitor? Clenching my fist I notice the T.A.D. is not there. Getting up out of the chair I went into the living room where I had been just a moment prior. Nothing. Walking back to the computer I checked the date, 4th January 2012. I’d sent myself back to the day I’d intended. Grabbing my wallet it was time to change the past.
The TAB was a place I hadn’t been to before in my life. Nor was placing a bet something I had any knowledge of, but all the same I laid out my money, filled in the cards and watched as the horses I bet on galloped to victory. In order to avoid suspicion at my winning streak, I rotated the venues I placed my bets at. Starting at the TAB, I went to the pub, the leagues club, the RSL club, on into the next suburb. My day was spend joyfully racking up the wins. Then something happened I hadn’t counted upon. My horse lost. After another couple of rounds of loses, I was flustered, how could I be losing when I know the results already. Cutting my losses, I headed home to count my winnings.
It was past 3am when I got back to the house and I crashed on the bed into an instant sleep. Lucid dreams flowed, it almost seemed like I was wake. My dreaming mind tired to justify the events of the day. But it was throwing in details that could not have happened. Surely those other people were not there with me. I’d have recollected if I saw them.
Waking up the next working, I wanted to find out how much had changed. I checked the race result for after I packed it in last night. None of my winners I’d memorised placed ask I remembered. Maybe it was because I’d not given myself enough time to memorise and the individual races all managed to blur together. Either way I had the feeling that somehow I’d altered the flow of the universe.
At the time I didn’t realise it but I was correct. I had altered time. I had travelled though not backward in time, but between dimensions. I would try explaining it in a complicated theoretical way, but then I don’t even understand what people are talking about when they do that. It’s much easier to simply say, when I activated the Time Alteration Device I was not transported anywhere, instead reality was recreated and my consciousness was transposed into the nearest body. I use the word recreated, but that is not strictly correct. It was a dimension that existed, that would always exist, though we never knew it did. The best way to describe it is to think of a story tree in one of those choose your own adventure stories. You start at one defined point where everything is equal, everything is possible, then you get given a choice to make. Those choices become a branch, which lead to another choice and another branching. Eventually you end up with wildly differing possibilities depending which branch you took. By simply using the T.A.D. I created a new dimension. I did not know this was the case, not immediately, and even then that was not the most disturbing realisation I would make.
But before I tell you that, I must explain why my betting scheme failed. Firstly it was doomed from the get go. As I said the T.A.D. sent me off onto a new branch, which I was to discover maintained the formulae of the previous branch for arbitrary till midnight. So for that singular point in time I chose to travel to, so to say, it was the exact replica of that day from the previous branch. Anything before and after was simply ghosting. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.
I spent the next week discovering just what had altered since the last time I lived this week. Unhappily though all I discovered was that I’d been too busy wrapped in the cocoon of my experiment that what had changed I did not realise had changed. Life seemed to be going on just the same as it had always done, unpredictably. I would remember that this event had happened, but even though the details seemed to coincide there was an element of the unpredictable. I didn’t like. I had travelled to a time that I had already lived though. I expected deja vu! Not only did I expected it but I came to demand it to the extent that I was going to recreate it. I was going construct the T.A.D. and I was going to travel back to the 4th of January 2012 and relive this week.
Needless to say since I’m telling this story, something went wrong. Every jump from branch to branch the week was still unpredictable. I learnt that the 4th always played out the same way. That when midnight clicked over, not to overuse the sediment, I could not predict what happened next. It became a game. First I attempted to replicate every single detail of every action I partook. I realised eventually that I could never achieve. In that epiphany I understood that time was unpredictable because I was unpredictable. So the game changed. Now I wanted to see how wildly differing the outcome would be depending on what I did. The scope of my actions, the magnitude of the outcome. I became an outright anarchist. A terrorist. I was burning down buildings, I was calling in bomb threats, I was indiscriminately murdering, raping, pillaging. 4th January 2012 was my outlet. Everything I felt I never could be, never wanted to be, ever wished I could be, do, I did. Then I would sit back and see how I changed the world.
But no matter how extreme my measures, in one solitary week I could not grasp if my actions caused any kind of momentous shift in the fabric of time.
So the game changed yet again. I mentioned how I only new my invention worked once I tried travelling forward in time. I began focusing on that aspect. It became apparent that I could use the T.A.D. to speed up time. Well not so much speed up time then to skip time. Akin to putting something into cryogenic stasis. I could simply preserve something within yet without time. It would not experience the effects of time, it would seem to it nothing happened, that time moved around it.
In this way I started seeing how far reaching my actions were in the grand scheme of life and sadly discovered that no matter how hard I tried, in the short term it was forgotten quickly and in the long term everything balanced itself out. As unpredictable as I thought the future was, the only unpredictable thing about time was what you did with it. I tried accelerating the development of technology, but even then understanding was stinted by the same factors. Adoption I noticed made no difference.
Then my personal disaster happened.
It was no longer 4th January 2012. Instead it was 4th January 1949 and I was no longer G.W. Thalbery. I was T.H. Quarterby.
Tags: Forever the Branches Break, short story, time travel
