Cold Curtain Series

Time Travel Institute: Episode 1

"Bridge the gap with closed minds through careful dissection of ideas and solid presentation of fact."—Maximilian Dengenerez

"A ten minute presentation. That's what I'm dealing with. It's already ten at night. The presentation is at eight in the morning. I don't know what the heck I'm doing yet. If only I could just go to another dimension. Maybe I should try looking under my bed..." Alexander said.

"I told you to write the thing before you called the newspaper," Benjamin said. "What would you look under your bed for?"

"Anything!"

"Why not just make it up as you go along?"

"Because if I do that, they'll leave before I finish saying, 'This is a time machine that lets animate and inanimate objects travel to the past.' And wear a tie tomorrow."

"Why?"

"Because we're seventeen years old. They will probably think we are playing a prank anyway, but we shouldn't make it easy for them. We don't even know it works the way it works!"

"Why not say that?"

"You can't start a scientific presentation by saying, 'I don't know how this works. Whatever it is, I can make this bunny travel in time without disintegrating him.'"

Benjamin thought. "Okay. 'Reversing time dilation around an object results in moving the object backwards in time. Moving the object faster-than-light results in moving the object to another point of space.' What else?"

"Paradoxes," Alexander said, and the rest of the presentation came naturally.

"Unlike what presentism and eternalism say, the past, present, and future are all a permanent part of nature. The grandfather paradox says the time traveler may change the past, such as by killing his grandfather. This is very unlikely to exist because if it did, it would rip a hole in the universe."

"Don't scare them!" Benjamin said.

"At the worst," Alexander added. "At best, the future would be changed so that anything altered by the time traveler's actions, including himself, ceases to exist. The theory of compossibility says that a time traveler who attempts to change the past will not succeed. At this early stage, this seems more likely to exist than the grandfather paradox. The Novikov self-consistency principle says that a timeline is a permanent part of nature. The time traveler cannot change history. His actions can potentially cause history. This is a causal loop. It means that the origin of an event which caused another event cannot be determined. Events exist by themselves. Mutable timelines are generally considered logically incoherent. The solitary existence of events means they must occur in a set location. Therefore, time travel is possible because all events are fixed in time and space."

"Uh-huh. And you are a seventeen year old homeschooler who built this machine in your barn," the reporter, Rebecca Foster, said.

"Yes, ma'am," Alexander said.

"And you helped him?"

Benjamin nodded.

"Are you two properly socialized?"

"I take ballet, work at a horse riding school, go to church, and rock babies and visit the cancer ward at the hospital, ma'am."

"I go to public school," Benjamin said.

"We can show you how it works," Alexander said.

"Okay, but only because I want to encourage kids to keep studying science and eventually study something scientifically possible."

"What's place where you were in public?" Alexander and Benjamin pulled the foot-thick door to a metal box open.

"I filled the tank at the 7-11 station on 11th Street Northeast," she said.