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THE LOST DISCOVERY

Once upon a time there was built a time machine. The most brilliant scientist ever to have lived built this machine; his name was Franklin Derrold. The reason why his name is not familiar will be evident subsequently.

Time, as has often been suspected, does not have to move only in one direction. This does not mean that we are all free to travel backwards and forwards at will, but that the past is existing in somewhat the same way as other physical locations are existing. The difference is that we are creating more of the past all the time. When a place, however inaccessible, exists, it is simply a question of how to get there. Mr Derrold knew; we do not. Our own time travel is limited to the old molecules: we, each of us, process and renew then expel molecules of the past, stale molecules that float through our present day like radio signals from long ago trapped within the planet’s atmosphere and forced to bounce and reflect until they are processed or else dissipate. At times these particles can congregate to create a sort of cloud or pocket of past time; it is at these moments we find ourselves lost in reverie. Certain cold medicines and bourbon can facilitate your absorption and assimilation of the particles; their effects wear off as they join with your metabolism and are renewed, but a second later they are old again; an abandoned cave will be full of the past, while a fresh wind brings you nowhere but the present moment.

The present moment is the zero hour for time travel; one may not travel into the future because the future has not happened yet; it is not possible to travel into the future at a speed in excess of 1 second/second. The past is set in stone, a final draft, and whatever changes may be effected there have already taken place; the only way it may happen is the way in which it has happened. There is one other way in which one may travel into the past, but it is entirely subjective: you can travel from the moment of your conception up to the present moment, but you are limited entirely to what sensory information was absorbed at the time. Past events may not be altered (in any of the forms, even physical time travel, because whatever you alter in the past has already been altered by you in the past), only their perception. It is called “dreaming,” and it can change the future.

The reason for Mr Derrold’s exclusion from our history books is that he has never accomplished anything of note. Rather, at the exact moment when Mr Derrold, on a customary afternoon walk, was struck by the inspiration that would some day lead to the completion of a functioning time machine he was instantaneously replaced with a Mr Derrold who never made such a discovery.

In that instant, what could be said to happen was this: Mr Derrold, using this inspiration, began a series of inventions that would one day culminate in the invention of a time machine. After perfecting it they performed a test: Mr Derrold locked a room with a partition for an hour; then entered and found waiting for him a note from himself informing him that the test had been a success to that point; he then had his machine wheeled into the partitioned area where he traveled one hour back in time and wrote the aforementioned note; then he traveled back to the present time (the instant after he left, that being the furthest future time created before he left) and declared the experiment a rousing success.

For the next experiment he set up the machine on the rooftop helicopter pad, carefully researched and known to have been vacant at the appointed time, some weeks before the institute housing Mr Derrold’s research was to open. His intent was simply to return to this time and leave a cryptic but meaningless telephone message he recalled having received some years before on his own answering machine. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen weather conditions (they received inaccurate records of the weather in the area on the target date), the time machine and its owner were struck by lightning at the instant of their rooftop materialization.  Perhaps the message was a wrong number, or maybe the result of another parallel but similarly unsuccessful venture which reached one degree further before its own failure. The scientists of the soon-to-be-opened institute found him dead at the controls. They then deduced the purpose of the machine, and through reverse-engineering they discovered its principal secret, without which it never could have come into existence. During this short time the young Franklin Derrold (then still attending Kettering as an automotive engineering graduate student, as would have been noted by history books had they been written to include him) was surprised twice, first by being hailed as the greatest inventor of all time, then by seeing his own corpse. They all asked him how he did it, even though he hadn’t done it yet. Then they discovered how, so he never did, at which point this entire reality winked out of existence.

It seems that one may not duplicate the divine spark of inspiration. There is a moment, a fusion, when all the assembled materials come together in a mind, and what were previously miscellaneous items form together into a new idea. One second spare parts, the next “Eureka!” It is this leap that cannot be transferred, duplicated, falsified or reverse-engineered; and with the product of the inspiration preceding the inspiration itself, there was no need for the inspiration ever to take place. So it didn’t. None can say how many times this loop may have occurred, how many discoveries and inventions have been lost, cures for diseases and hardships, with the best intentions.

In the reality that took place, Mr Derrold’s afternoon walk went on exactly as usual: without the intuitive leap that would lead to the creation of a time machine.