My body soaks in the sugar. Whoever these people are, can they reasonably expect to manage time to their benefit? Even I’d be hard-pressed to know how to do that. But that’s because I know what I don’t know. That’s rare knowledge.
Two things happened in the late 1980s. The first was the fuss about cold fusion. Until then, fusion was a process deep in a star happening at millions of degrees. It’s the ultimate source for all energy and chemical elements. There are attempts to duplicate the conditions in the middle of a star and create a manufactured source of energy for the planet, but we’re not there yet. Then along come two chemists (this pains a physicist) who claim they’ve achieved fusion at room temperature in a big test tube. It’s cold fusion. That was unbelievable and mostly unbelieved except by credulous journalists.
Around the same time, and much more distressingly, two other scientists find that a reaction involving certain chemicals in certain proportions at certain rates of addition produce a burst of tachyons that accelerates time within a limited burst radius. Whatever object is within that radius is temporally accelerated forward or backward, back then in an uncontrollable way, until it comes to rest at somewhen in the future or the past of when it should have been. They had all the evidence that this was happening, painstakingly analyzed and documented. First it was rudimentary evidence - a glass flask whose design post-dated its first discovery was found sitting on the scientists’ lab bench, encrusted in several years-worth of gunk. It was in old photographs. The manufacturers confirmed its production date, although they didn’t know why they had been asked. This was crude evidence at first, but then they began to put the pieces together in a rigorous way. The one second per second rule had been violated. Test after test of growing sophistication confirmed what was happening. Quantum coherence analysis, carbon-14 dating, a slew of other methods all cross-validating and confirming each other. And from a chemical reaction of all things: not from some hyper-energetic event like a nuclear blast or a collapsing star, but from boring chemistry in a small, underfunded Midwestern lab.
By this time, like cold fusion, the circles who became privy to the research shrunk drastically. The evidence fed to the broader scientific community justified both findings being laughed off. But in a small inner sanctum, the science of chemo-tachyonics–tackychemistry to most of us–was born. It was the science of time travel, and more importantly, the science of its prevention.
I pace Joe’s living room to the extent that the tiny living space allows. What to do now? There are thirty-some people in the world by my count who are close to understanding tackychemistry, and we’re the ones with even an outside chance of resolving this catastrofuck. Thirty-some minus one of them are missing. It feels like something can only be up to me. So that’s a shame, because I’m clueless. And now that I think about it, being in the home of another TMAer is a really bad idea.
SIX
It’s a problem and there’s no solution that involves just me. And anyone who could help is now part of the problem. They’ve gone. So my idea is one of withering stupidity that violates, in word and in spirit, every TMA regulation in the sizable volume that sat on a recently collapsed book shelf. The fact of the matter is that I already have a list of violations to my name; this idea would be just one more. If all came to light, and if the world is not sucked into its own ass of temporal paradoxes, and if I was on trial, I’d just ask for the new crime to be taken into consideration during sentencing. I drive toward home. I know there may be someone waiting for me, but I’m going to take the risk. I have to.
It didn’t take long after the discovery of temporal acceleration for the question to be asked–can a person be transported? And it didn’t take long after that to try it. There was great care taken that the first hapless volunteer wouldn’t be ripped and flung apart–eyes to 1995, spleen to 1912 and gonads to 2500. There was already a growing understanding of how the parameters of the chemical reaction affected the transportation radius, the temporal acceleration rate, and the terminal point. Objects of increasing complexity and structure were used as guineas pigs: a bottle of Perrier, an electric kettle, a microchip, a living plant, a cockroach, then an actual guinea pig if I remember right. And then the first person.
She took no convincing. They aimed for an hour forward, but overshot by a day because it was, and still is, an art. Yet she arrived intact and in rude health. Then, enter the temporal logicians. Different animals altogether from tackychemists. We are entirely focused on the How? while the temporal logicians were about the Why? and Why Not? with emphasis on the latter. After tortuous deliberation, the Why Not? could be boiled down to simplicity itself: Because we don’t know what the hell could happen. The rest is embellishment. So temporal acceleration became absolutely taboo, and the TMA was born.
The car behind me honks and I look up at the traffic lights. Something, although I can’t tell what, is confusing me. I pull into a side street and step out of my car. I look around to get my
