I wanted to knock this all out in a single post, but it just got longer and longer, to the point that it was almost double the length of what I shoot for every week (roughly 2000-ish words).

So, enjoy part one of this two part hack Twilight Zone episode where you’ve probably guessed where it’s going before the second ad break!

Seriously, I really enjoyed writing this, despite it being pretty hacky. Hacky can be fun. Wait, I wrote about time travel two weeks in a row? SPOILERS!!!

A Very Good Man

Part 1

Many wonder how it came to be. They want to know how we got to this place and who was responsible. I write this now, not as an apology, or even a confession, but in hopes that you might understand how a good man can end up involved in something so foul. I am a very good man, after all.

It was in the spring of 2010 that my partner, Camelia, and I, published our first paper on “Chronotron Particle Theory”. Oh, but that might be confusing. Camelia was not my partner in the romantic sense, but a scientific partner. The paper speculated on something we had investigated doing our respective doctoral theses at MIT, the existence of pockets of particles called Chronotrons.

The Earth, we hypothesized, would routinely pass through pockets of these Chronotrons. The Chronotron particles existed in the same space with any matter they had passed through previously. With the application of—oh it would be too boring to explain, when all you want to hear is how we got here. The short version is that these particles could be manipulated with energy to allow matter to pass between the pockets, regardless of at what point in time the pockets existed.

Yes. We were theorizing that time travel was possible, but only between specific points in time where the Earth was passing through these particle fields. If we wanted to test this theory, we only needed an eccentric billionaire to give us a few hundred million, or more.

In our defense, our understanding of the particles, at that time, lead us to believe it would require more energy than what the entire Earth could produce in a single year, to send something the size of an adult human through time. And whatever was sent would be subjected to incredible forces that would likely kill an organic lifeform. The best-case scenario would be sending tiny, automated probes that might be able to observe the past, possibly even collect small samples of soil, or even a few organic cells, but that was kind of it.

In 2014 we had a special visitor to our lab, Nome Sulk, who might need no introduction, if you’re reading this presently, but should you find this in ten years’ time, I suspect his entire life story will have been re-written. Sulk was enormously wealthy. He was a child of privilege who turned that privilege into an incredible fortune with investments in technology. At the time he was heralded as a “futurist” for his work in electric vehicles and space exploration.

When he arrived, Camelia and I had no idea he was there to talk to us about our Chronotron theory. It seemed more logical he was there to talk about solar energy or battery technology for his other work. And maybe that was his stated purpose, but in secret he was there to talk to us.

He was an odd fellow. Talking to him one on one, as someone who actually understood science, and engineering, it was clear he knew enough to sound credible in interviews, but relied heavily on a team of brilliant minds to bring his technologies to life. We bantered back and forth for a bit about other topics before he finally said “I read an interesting paper a few years ago about Chronotron Particles.”

Shortly after that, he asked everyone, except Camelia, myself, and one of his handlers, to leave the room. His handler then scanned the room, presumably for recording devices, before we got down to business. He was interested in investing in our theory. If I’m being honest, neither of us really asked the important question “why?”. We were just so excited by the idea of learning whether we were right.

One thing was clear though, whatever we discovered was going to be his. He wasn’t interested in investing in our lab, he wanted us, working for him, so he could own whatever came out of our endeavor. Red flags upon red flags, but we went along with it.

Oh, you would have done differently, had you been in my place? Well, you weren’t in my place. This was a discovery that rivaled the splitting of the atom. This was a discovery that could completely change our understanding of the universe. The resources required to test our discovery required getting in bed with some questionable characters.

Of course, I now see this was a bad idea, but hindsight is 20/20.

Contracts were signed, in secret, and two months later Camelia and I were off to a state of the art facility Texas, some distance north-west of Odessa, in the middle of scrub land, to work in Sulk’s new laboratory. At first, I was there a month on and a month off, while I waited to move my family there. My ex-wife—though at the time she was still my wife, was hesitant to move from Massachusetts to Texas. She was never able to find a job in Texas doing the same as she had in Massachusetts, or making even remotely the same pay, but that was fine. My vastly increased salary more than made up for it. And the property and taxes were so much cheaper, which seemed really important at the time.

Things progressed rapidly with Sulk’s vast fortune behind us. In late 2015 we could detect Chronotron particles were building, which meant an event was likely to occur in 2016 we could leverage. Now we had a deadline. Sulk’s people had made great improvements on the power front. We believed we had enough energy to send something the size of a baseball through time. And so, in late 2016, we did.

We built a tiny drone, with a pre-programmed set of instructions, and put it inside a reinforced titanium sphere, about twenty-five centimeters in circumference. We energized it and it appeared nothing had happened. But something had happened!

One camera operating at one thousand frames per second detected it vanishing for roughly five one-thousands of a second, and then it re-appeared. It also changed orientation, slightly. The opening at the top, to let the drone out, was three degrees off from where it started. And, of course, there was the drone inside.

The drone itself had limited primary power. It was programmed to fly up from the sphere once per day for about 30 seconds, take a three hundred and sixty degree panorama, take some air measurements, and then settle back into the sphere. It would repeat this until its power was drained to around twenty percent. We estimated this could last up to two months. After that, it would simply sit in the sphere in low power mode, slide open the door, take the air measurements, and then close up until it reached five percent power. This, we estimated, could go on for a year. And at that point it would shut down everything except a clock, so it could calculate how much time it spent in the past. And then there was the final reserve power bank. If the primary power was down to its final percent, the drone would move one kilometer away from the facility, far clear of it, and bury itself as far under the soil as it could manage. The idea being we could then unearth it decades, maybe even centuries later to gather its data.

The great unknown was how long it would be gone. We just had no idea. The theory was that the latent energy in the charged Chronotron particles would build, until it sent the device back. This turned out to be the case. But how long was it gone? And to where did it go?

Sadly, the drone’s images told us very little. Based on the horizon, it was in the same location, but none of the structures were there, nor the nearby town. All that meant was that it went further back than 1974, but not so far back that the climate was vastly different. It wasn’t an ice age. There weren’t giant sloths or mammoths wandering around in any of the images. We intentionally chose such a remote place to avoid having the device come into contact with an existing structure, or humans, for that matter.

While no details emerged from the visual tests, one massive detail emerged from the air measurements. The background radiation levels were before atomic testing took place. While it still didn’t conclusively tell us exactly how far back the device had gone, we had another clue that it had gone back at least seventy years. The only other obvious data was that the device sat in the past for six months in total. Technically it was one hundred and eighty-seven days, six hours, twenty two minutes, and nine seconds.

It wasn’t our job to look at the full breadth of the data. One of Sulk’s other groups would pour through it all and try to draw conclusions. It didn’t take them long to figure out precisely to what point in time the device had gone, but they were careful not to share that information with Camelia and me.

I honestly didn’t know. That is the truth.

If I had been more observant, I would have started to notice changes in Nome Sulk’s behavior. Quips here and there that just seemed a little off. He was this brilliant futurist, but he wouldn’t shy away from occasionally dropping a bigoted phrase about marginalized groups. He would casually comment about “blacks” having more rights than “the whites”. If he noticed we were upset, he’d quickly walk it back and claim to be embarrassed that his upbringing lead him to say things like that now and then. He promised us he was a good man.

Maybe it goes without saying that he was conservative in his politics when it came to money. There was nothing too shocking about that. He made his billions and he wanted to keep it. Somehow that seemed rational to me. After all, with the high salary he was paying me, I was right on that track behind him. Lower taxes? Yes please.

What a fool. Yes, I was being paid well, but the man was worth almost two hundred and fifty billion at that time. If I worked for a million years on the project I still wouldn’t have as much as him. Though, I was ultimately working on a time machine, maybe I fooled myself into thinking I would somehow be a billionaire when we were done.

Camelia picked up on Sulk’s misanthropic world view sooner than I, because she was a direct victim of it. She was quiet about her private life, but I knew everything, because we worked so closely together. Sulk assumed she was single, since she never brought a date to any company events or parties. The truth was that she wasn’t comfortable living her life openly where we were living. She kept that very well hidden. Sulk, despite being on his third wife, continuously made advances toward her.

I suppose she was an attractive woman, but I just never thought of her that way because I was so buried in our work. She was my friend. She was my equal and my partner. Sex never entered into my mind when thinking about her. So, I never recognized the threat he posed to her. I never saw the pressure he put on her to be anything more than misplaced workplace horsing around. Giving her a little ribbing the way “the guys” do to one another.

He called her a “dumb dyke” once after she definitively rebuked him. He laughed. We all laughed. It was just a bit of fun. We were all good men, after all.

Camelia didn’t laugh.

In late 2018 Camelia left. The last thing she said to me was “They know where the probe went. They aren’t telling us.”

I asked if she knew more. She didn’t. Or at least she claimed she didn’t.

I never heard from her again. I want to believe, despite knowing what I know now, that she’s just out there quietly hiding, but in my heart of hearts I know that’s not the case. Sulk’s people knew where she went. And she knew too much about the project. That knowledge could never get out.

Part 2 is coming next week! It’s already written… mostly.