The Time Surgeons

Baronak sat in his laboratory, watching the space above a bench surrounded by an array of probes and sensors. For once Jennara sat beside him. She had been with him at the start, even been instrumental in that start: she deserved to see this with him.

One week. In a week I shall do the experiment that may kill me. Let us see if I shall have the courage.

The space they were watching appeared to shimmer, then a light-rimmed circle whose center was blacker than night appeared there. A small piece of paper, no more than the size of his thumb, fell from it onto the bench and he bent forward to see it, being careful to stay well outside the experimental zone.

On it was written a single sentence, And now the future meets the past.

He had not yet decided what he would write.

The black circle vanished but the paper remained. He picked it up and examined it more closely. An object from the future. Just one week in the future, but a week reverberating through time.

Quickly, he put the paper down on another benchtop with its own array of sensors and waited, studying their outputs. After a few minutes there was an uptick in radiation at all wavelengths he was monitoring, as if virtual particles were giving their lives to send him a message. Then the paper was gone and for a moment in its place was a blackness without end, then it too was gone.

Baronak and Jennara stared at where its ghost had been for a long time.

They came back to the laboratory the next week, where he wrote the message on a piece of paper. He turned on the machine, and they watched as the titanic energies unleashed made the air glow and shimmer like the images of the Northern Lights from a long ago Earth, before they opened a burrow to last week and sent the paper back.

They stared at each other, the thrill and the dread filling their eyes. He held her and kissed her. “And so it begins.”

He collated the sensor readings from this end with those of the week before, and again went to see his parents.

“You have done it,” Pachmeny said when he entered. “Show us.”

He spread out the results for them to see, then explained.

“Today I sent back that piece of paper with the message. Last week I received it. You can see they are the same. You can see the stability of the transfer and the inherent instability yet persistence of the object back in time. It can be done.”

“What about the causality violation? I know what you said before, but this is different. What if, having received the paper, you decided not to send it, or to write something different on it?”

“Then I would have changed the past, and the message would be as I then had written it; or there would have been no message, and I would not be here telling you I had done it. The original would have come from an alternative, now virtual future. It is the same. It does not matter how an object from the future changes that future. Whether I choose to fulfil that future or change it makes no difference. By the time we got to this point of me showing you my results, the message sent and the message received would be the same.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Now we need to tell the others. We could not afford for them to forbid these experiments, for that would be our doom. But now we can answer their fears, or at least answer them well enough. And now we need them. We cannot do this alone. We need to discover not only where to go but what to do when we get there.”

“They will be working for their own deaths.”

“As are we. If the best and brightest of what remains of the human race cannot find it within themselves to achieve the one hope of humanity, then perhaps we do not deserve to live. And it is not as if the reality we are changing is one truly worth fighting for. The lives of everyone outside the Egg are already gone, and our own time comes upon us soon enough.”

“Still, the desire to live is strong. Perhaps this should be another secret, revealed only to those we can trust.”

“The secret will not stand, and if it is discovered before time, we might not survive their rage at what they may well feel is betrayal.”

Arragath sighed. “I wish I could say they would be wrong. All right. Any fears of arbitrary unknown causality violations will be allayed by the experiments you have already done, which were certainly allowable under our Charter. High stakes are our way of life. As for the rest, it is research, not action. We will not be doing anything risky until we have learned much more. Those who wish to help will help. Those who wish to pursue other hopes are free to pursue them. We do not need to decide until the decision is forced upon us. That will take some time.”

“At least we still have the time,” added Pachmeny. “Much as I fear what we are about to do, I sometimes wake up in a sweat at the fear that you could easily have discovered it too late. That we would have had the answer, or the hope of an answer, in our hands too late to use it.”

Baronak cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable. “About that… I don’t think it is actually a… a coincidence. Or luck.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have been thinking about it. I worked out the solution when I looked at a transformation of the equations I had done, which gave me the clue that the essence was spacetime, not space, and that I should look at the time component.”

He stared at them, his eyes dark with something that looked like fear, but wasn’t. “I had written them down one night when I was tired, and they just got buried. Or so I thought. But they were radical; radical enough that when I saw them again I had to follow them to their end. Radical enough that there is no way I could have thought of them one night then just gone to bed, no matter how tired I was. Let alone forgot what I had done.”

He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. Then he continued.

“I do not remember writing them.”

They stared at him.

“Not only do I not remember writing them, but I have never seen that piece of paper again.”

“Are you saying…?”

“Yes. Nobody could have taken it. Besides myself only Jennara was there, and she had neither opportunity nor motive to remove it. I remember clearly putting it aside, but when I reached for it to show her, it was no nowhere to be found.”

“Then…?”

“Yes. I think after who knows how many years, how many decades, we discovered the solution. But by then it was too late. Maybe there weren’t enough people left, or we were all dying, or the power plants were too weak to do more than send a scrap of paper back a few decades. It must have been me who sent it back, as it was in my handwriting, though weak. I would have been cautious. So I chose a time I remembered when I could send it back without my seeing it arrive, but when I knew I would still see it soon enough afterwards, notice it and realize its importance. I would certainly have remembered my first night with Jennara, and realized it was the best opportunity I would ever have. Not so early I would fail to understand, not too late to develop it to fruition, and at a time when I was working on this very problem.”

He paused. “I have no proof. All I know is I have no memory of thinking of those equations, and their origin has vanished as if it never was. I think my future self was unable to do anything with the discovery. So he passed it on to his own past.”