A COLD, SILENT NOTHING

CHAUCER

The machine was inelegant. It was beautiful in a way, sure, but the thick wires running along the floor leading into large electrical ports that would incinerate anything inside its domed head were it not for the Faraday cage beneath its rubber skin were unsightly. Walking into the room I imagined that I was about to willingly enter a giant, blind octopus's maw. Everyone called the machine CHAUCER, after the medieval poet that wrote of righteous travelers, but I never saw the connection. I understood the reasoning, just didn't agree with it.

Bill and Neil watched on a remote feed from a location several miles away. The machine required so much energy and there was so much that could go wrong, it was safest for anyone that wasn't a traveler to be outside of any potential blast radius. That's why CHAUCER was built in the desert, 30 stories underground, only connected to the outside world via the cables and video feeds that Neil and Bill now used to monitor me.

Otherwise, I was alone with CHAUCER. Neil's voice came from the speakers built into the wall above the machine. "I think you should turn back. Aside from the danger to you, if we get caught..."

"We'll only get caught if the three of us can't keep a secret for another hour. After that, it'll be done and it won't matter. I'll have the knowledge. They won't be able to take that away."

"If you don't end up like Dr. Orson," Bill interjected.

"He's not the man any of us thought he was," I said, wincing at my own blasphemy.

There was a long silence over the intercom. I didn't blame them for not believing me. I didn't believe myself. Not fully.

There was no special suit to wear, no additional precautions to take. CHAUCER was designed to operate remotely, safely, with the traveler's only responsibility to do just that—travel. I climbed inside the contraption.

The inside of CHAUCER was spacious, its walls smooth and dark. When I pulled down the door behind me the area became pitch black and silent. Because of the faraday cage that acted as the skeleton of this octopus (if you'll forgive the inaccuracy in service of metaphor), there were no electrical signals coming in or out. Neil and Bill had no way to communicate or monitor me.

And I had no way to turn back.

There was no way to prepare for travel. On my other journeys it had been instantaneous; I stepped into the machine and after a few moments of blackness the time I was sent to study would pop into existence. I did some of the classics early on—the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the moon landing, the construction of the Great Pyramids—but eventually turned to more esoteric moments.

I became obsessed with the minutiae of life. Choosing a random time and place in our past to pop into and observe how people from all social strata and cultures lived. Human history was littered with the beautiful intertwined with the tragic. I wish it had occurred to me then to get data on the number of smiles I'd seen, laughs I'd heard, tears I'd wanted to wipe away. Of course, no data could fully capture the lived commonality between an Incan child in 5th century Peru and that of a Russian child in 22nd century Siberia. Those similarities could only be experienced in those times, with those people, and the memories later brought together to compare and contrast and always find, no matter what, that they shared so much more than they didn't.

These memories flit through my mind as I waited for my consciousness to be sent into the universe, untethered, to arrive at its new destination as an omnipotent observer. It had to have been nearly ten minutes since I had entered CHAUCER. Something was wrong. I moved toward the door, calibrating the level of irritation to use in my voice when I asked Neil and Bill what the fuck they were doing. But the door was no longer where it should have been.