Looking Backward from the Tricentennial

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Standing outside of the warehouse, waiting for Edith to open the door, Julian felt the vitality of the air flow through him, the fillings in his teeth emitting a metallic taste, the crackle prodding his eardrums in a thousand directions, the hairs on his arms standing, saluting, rising up in worship of the god of the twenty-first century, electricity.

Edith pulled the door open, revealing a dark portal by which to exit the bright spring sunshine. "Charlotte chose this place because it's adjacent to the regional substation," she explained. "We're going to need a lot of power to get you where you're going. Or should I say when?"

Julian followed her inside. As his eyes adjusted, he could make out rows of empty shelves, looming in the dimness like skeletons from a mythical age. They made their way into the interior, where Charlotte stood behind a large stainless steel bench, illuminated beneath a bank of lights. She was a white woman about Edith's age, wearing a stereotypical lab coat with her silver hair pulled back into a ponytail.

"Oh, my God, you look exactly the same as you did back then," Charlotte said as they approached, casually resting her hands on a contraption that dominated the bench, protruding off the front and back. "Which of course you should, because cryo girl knows her stuff, but it's amazing. Anyway, act surprised when you meet me again."

"If you're fifty years younger, that shouldn't be hard," Julian answered. The device had a triangular base, with the corners an arm span apart. LEDs flashed different colors on various electronic components. In the center, a disc about the width of his body appeared to be free-floating. "You invented time travel?"

"This woman," the physicist replied, pointing a friendly finger at Edith, "swore up and down that the mystery man who walked into the bar that night was from the future. She was absolutely convinced that you'd meet again two years later."

"And we did," Edith said. It was clear from the banter that the women had had this discussion countless times over the decades.

"You were drunk; you weren't really a credible witness."

"Being drunk and right aren't mutually exclusive," Edith countered, beaming at Julian.

"She was right," Charlotte acknowledged. "And when that happened, I had to believe her. It was a fun side project, keeping my eyes peeled for any promising lines of research in the scientific journals. Had to keep it on the down-low because no one wants to get a reputation as one of those time-travel nuts at physics conferences.

"Finally, about a decade ago, there was an experiment that successfully manipulated time-flavored quarks within a high-energy field. Those quarks generally grip the stream of time, ensuring their atoms flow forward at the same rate as everything else. The experiment was able to shift them to a neutral state, raising the anchor, so to speak, but it took an incredible amount of power to keep them in that state," Charlotte said.

"If you had that much energy to waste, there were even applications in my field," Edith continued. "Why freeze a person if you could literally suspend them in time?"

"But for you, Julian, we want to move you against the flow of time, pushing you backward. And that's what this machine does." Charlotte spread her arms with a flourish, indicating the device in front of her. "I call it the timepad."

"She spared every expense in developing the name," Edith said.

"Glad you noticed," Charlotte replied. "I have a junior version that works for manipulating small objects, but this is the full-sized model." The octogenarian easily lifted the floating disc from the center of the machine, transferring it to an empty space on the bench and revealing a curved hollow underneath, where a short metal rod protruded upward.