All Our Wrong Todays(3)

If you were to teleport even a few inches in any direction, your body would be embedded in a solid object. One inch, you’re wounded. Two inches, you’re maimed. Three inches, you’re dead.

Every second of the day, we’re all three inches from being dead.

Which is why teleportation is safe and effective only if it’s between dedicated sites on an exactingly calibrated system.

My father’s early work in teleportation was so important because it helped him understand the mechanics of disincorporating and reincorporating a human body between discrete locations. It’s what stymied all previous time-travel initiatives. Reversing the flow of time isn’t even that complex. What’s outrageously complex is instantaneous space travel with absolute accuracy across potentially billions of miles.

My father’s genius wasn’t just about solving both the theoretical and logistical challenges of time travel. It was about recognizing that in this, as in so many other aspects of everyday life, our savior was Lionel Goettreider.





5


The first Goettreider Engine was turned on once and never turned off—it’s been running without interruption since 2:03 P.M. on Sunday, July 11, 1965.

Goettreider’s original device wasn’t designed to harness and emit large-scale amounts of energy. It was an experimental prototype that performed beyond its inventor’s most grandiose expectations. But the whole point of a Goettreider Engine is that it never has to be deactivated, just as the planet never stops moving. So, the prototype was left running in the same spot where it was first switched on, in front of a small crowd of sixteen observers in a basement laboratory in section B7 of the San Francisco State Science and Technology Center.

Where I come from, every schoolkid knows the names and faces of the Sixteen Witnesses. Numerous books have been written about every single one of them, with their presence at this ultimate hinge in history shoved into the chronology of their individual lives as the defining event, whether or not it was factually true.

Countless works of art have depicted The Activation of the Goettreider Engine. It’s The Last Supper of the modern world, those sixteen faces, each with its own codified reaction. Skeptical. Awed. Distracted. Amused. Jealous. Angry. Thoughtful. Frightened. Detached. Concerned. Excited. Nonchalant. Harried. There’s three more. Damn it, I should know this . . .

When the prototype Engine was first turned on, Goettreider just wanted to verify his calculations and prove his theory wasn’t completely misguided—all it had to do was actually work. And it did work, but it had a major defect. It emitted a unique radiation signature, what was later called tau radiation, a nod to how physics uses the Greek capital letter T to represent proper time in relativity equations.

As the Engine’s miraculous energy-generating capacities expanded to power the whole world, the tau radiation signature was eliminated from the large-scale industrial models. But the prototype was left to run, theoretically forever, in Goettreider’s lab in San Francisco—now among the most visited museums on the planet—out of respect, nostalgia, and a legally rigid clause in Goettreider’s last will and testament.

My father’s idea was to use the original device’s tau radiation signature as a bread-crumb trail through space and time, each crumb the size of an atom, a knotted thread to the past, looping through the cosmos with an anchor fixed at the most important moment in history—Sunday, July 11, 1965, 2:03:48 P.M., the exact second Lionel Goettreider started the future. It meant that not only could my father send someone back in time to a very specific moment, the tau radiation trail would lead them to a very specific location—Lionel Goettreider’s lab, right before the world changed forever.

With this realization, my father had almost every piece of the time-travel puzzle. There was only one last thing, minor compared to transporting a sentient human being into the past, but major in terms of not accidentally shredding the present—a way to ensure the time traveler can’t affect the past in any tangible way. There were several crucial safeguards in my father’s design, but the only one I care about is the defusion sphere. Because that’s how Penelope Weschler’s life collided with mine.





6


Nearly every object of art and entertainment is different in this world. Early on, the variations aren’t that significant. But as the late 1960s gave way to the vast technological and social leaps of the 1970s, almost everything changed, generating decades of pop culture that never existed—fifty years of writers and artists and musicians creating an entirely other body of work. Sometimes there are fascinating parallels, a loose story point in one version that’s the climax in another, a line of dialogue in the wrong character’s mouth, a striking visual composition framed in a new context, a familiar chord progression with radically altered lyrics.

July 11, 1965, was the pivot of history even if nobody knew it yet.

Fortunately, Lionel Goettreider’s favorite novel was published in 1963—Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Vonnegut’s writing is different where I come from. Here, despite his wit and insight, you get the impression he felt a novelist could have no real effect on the world. He was compelled to write, but with little faith that writing might change anything.

Because Cat’s Cradle influenced Lionel Goettreider so deeply, in my world Vonnegut was considered among the most significant philosophers of the late twentieth century. This was probably great for Vonnegut personally but less so for his novels, which became increasingly homiletic.