All Our Wrong Todays(6)
9
My father’s experiment, set for July 11, 2016, will send the first human beings back in time to witness the moment the original Goettreider Engine was switched on, using the Engine itself as an anchor in time, its tau radiation signature tracing the Earth’s trajectory through space to July 11, 1965, fifty-one years earlier.
The year 2015 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Activation of the Goettreider Engine, which was obviously a big deal—every city on the planet competed to outdo the others with their local celebrations. The collective blood pressure of the Danish people ratcheted dangerously high as they seized the opportunity to remind the world that even though his great scientific discoveries were made in the United States of America, Lionel Goettreider was born in Denmark. But the marquee event happened at the Goettreider Museum, built up around the original San Francisco State Science and Technology Center, its drab cement walls and squat windows preserved inside a modern edifice—a spectacular crystalline whorl that refracts sunlight in the day and moonlight at night.
On the morning of Saturday, July 11, 2015, standing on a dais with the Goettreider Museum perfectly poised behind him for every media report, Victor Barren kicked off the semicentennial celebration by publicly announcing that the world’s first time-travel experiment would occur exactly one year from that moment—at 10:00:00 A.M. on Monday, July 11, 2016. He gestured to a large clock on the dais and began the countdown: 31,622,400 seconds, 527,040 minutes, 8,784 hours, 366 days. It would be the greatest experiment since, well, the Activation of the Goettreider Engine. And once the appropriate government safeguards had been satisfied, the technology would become commercially available to the public, with licensed chrononaut facilities allowing anyone and everyone the chance to safely travel in time. People freaked out in anticipation. My father’s time machine was assured to be among the most successful products ever launched.
This is how Victor Barren made himself the star of the Goettreider Engine’s fiftieth anniversary.
Transported to the Chrononaut Institute in Toronto, the big clock continued its countdown, as if the precise moment my father would take his place among the giants of science was a mathematical inevitability. All that was required was for that clock to run out of numbers.
By the way, the fiftieth-anniversary thing had no scientific significance. It was a bit of theatrical razzle-dazzle to build public anticipation and impress the financiers who bought into my father’s supposedly game-changing new form of high-end entertainment.
But for it to be a viable business, my father had to actually prove people can safely time travel. Enter the chrononauts.
For security and safety purposes, the prototype time machine is programmed for a single, fixed destination: Lionel Goettreider’s basement laboratory in San Francisco, California, on July 11, 1965. The tau radiation trail leads there and only there. This should prevent a miscalculation that sends the chrononauts to the wrong era. The prototype is like a gondola strung between two alpine peaks—you can’t just use it to go wherever or whenever you want. Once the experiment is successful and the path between 2016 and 1965 is accurately mapped both in space and in time, further exploration will be possible. But until mission launch, it’s still just a very expensive untested theory—so the chrononauts need to be ready for anything.
It’s a six-person team, apparently the ideal number for this kind of mission. Psychologically, it’s large enough to feel like a unit but small enough to cultivate reasonably intimate individual bonds. Each of the six is painstakingly trained in multifaceted survival. Not just physical, but cultural. Let’s say something does go wrong and instead of five decades in the past, they travel back five centuries, or five millennia. The whole team needs to be acutely familiar with the on-the-ground conditions of whatever era they may find themselves in.
There’s an abort protocol to slingshot them back to the present, but it takes crucial seconds to engage regardless of mortal threat. There is of course an automatic rebound function that activates in the event of a catastrophic systems failure so, even if the whole team dies, the technology itself isn’t lost in the past, wreaking unknowable consequences on history.
Obviously it makes more scientific sense to send back an inanimate object or a trained animal. But there are two problems with a more cautious approach. First, my father wants to knock everyone’s socks off right out of the gate, and sending a team of people back in time is way cooler than, like, a robot drone or a bunny rabbit. Second, the margin of error is so minute when you’re mucking about in space-time that you want nimble human minds making considered decisions, so if anything unexpected happens nobody accidentally triggers a calamitous change to the timeline. That would be bad.
Almost anything could go wrong. You need people who are resolutely calm under pressure and can survive in unpredictably lethal situations. Six chrononauts, each among the most impressive individuals alive.
Which is why it was totally absurd that I was involved in this mission.
10
I guess now is as good a time as any to mention that my mother, Rebecca Barren, died four months ago in a freak accident.
Yes, despite the many technological marvels of my world, people still got killed for no good reason. People also acted like assholes for no good reason. But, sorry, I’m trying to tell you about my mother, not my father.
Like a lot of high-impact thinkers, my father needed everything that didn’t involve his big brain managed for him. Of course, most of these functions could be automated, but my mother embraced a handmade quality to our family life that could be seen as tactile and quaint and also could be seen as neurotic and sad. Like, if she didn’t personally fold my father’s clothes, clean his study, serve his food, he wouldn’t be able to unlock the mysteries of time travel. And it’s entirely possible she was correct. Because he did unlock the mysteries of time travel, and within a few months of her sudden death, everything was a total disaster.