(TFWC) Time in a Bottle

......"Bullship" was my first response when he told me (No really that's what I said, it's an inside joke). My second thought was thank goodness I'm not the Time Travelers Wife. He stood there in his apartment, it was obvious by his appearance that the middle aged man hadn't eaten or bathed in days and he was rambling on and on about tech stuff, quantum theory, dark energy, etc etc, It was all way over my head.

Ian was one of the most intelligent men that I've ever known, he had an almost intuitive understanding for how things worked. While I did think he was losing it a little bit, he was a genius. At least I thought so.

"Ian, plain English, please!" I said. "Ok, Ok," Said Ian. "I forget sometimes"

"Forget what?"


"I forget how slow you are, I'll try to dumb it down." He said.

I couldn't get angry this time, because he was right. The leather chair I was sitting in creaked. Like everything in this apartment of his, it was old, and it smelled old. If I had a dollar for every antique or ancient object I helped him carry up to this fourth floor apartment, I'd be rich.

"Time was compressed farther back, concentrated, time is expanding. Forget all that crap about alternate realities." He said.


Then he dropped the bomb. I didn't realize the implications when he first said it:

"All points in time, exist simultaneously."

"All points in time, exist simultaneously!" He repeated excitedly.

"Our limited perception is what changes."

"It's the only way that it works"

Then he started to ramble on has to how "it" works "the Wells Field" was this science or baseball?

"Ian"

"Ian!"

"What works?" I said.


Then Ian took a deep breath and said "Time Travel"

reply to post by dusty1


"Time travel"?

I decided I needed a drink. I stood up and helped myself to Ian's liquor cabinet. I grabbed what looked like the oldest bottle of scotch he had, and poured myself a drink. We went back and forth for a while, and even though Ian wasn't one for practical jokes, I thought he was pulling my leg. He finally convinced me that he was dead serious, and into the night he tried to explain his discovery of the true nature of the universe and his experiment.

"Time, all points in time, exist simultaneously, but are separated from moment to moment by a barrier. One can travel to any point in time by penetrating the barriers that exist between points. I have been able to create what I have termed a Wells Field, which can pass through each barrier. However one needs an anchor point in our time and a marker, an object from the past which sets the destination. Like this." Out of his vest pocket he produced a gold Roman Aureus. "The gold in this coin conducts a small temporal field, all gold conducts this field on a minute scale. However once gold is perceived by intelligent eyes and manipulated, the temporal field appears to strengthen at those points. When it encounters a Wells Field, it becomes active and acts as a conduit ".

"Wells Field, that's original" I snorted, but I played along.

"So you can theoretically travel back in time, but how about forward in time" ? I asked.

Ian answered " Well, look, you cant just dial up a date and travel there, you need a marker. If a traveler from the future, brought an object from the future, to us, we'd have a marker, and we could travel there. To my knowledge that has not happened, but it would be possible".

"OK genius", I said "I know you are extremely intelligent and you've made a lot of people a bunch of money with your discoveries and inventions, but how on earth did you ever begin this line of reasoning, and what could you possibly need me for, other than to question your sanity, or watch me question my own intellect?"


Ian then looked out the window for a long moment walked into the other room and carried out what looked to be an ancient broken clay bottle and said:

"This is what started my line of thinking,"

"and I need you, my friend, for my experiment".

reply to post by dusty1


Nice story, and well written. Not too technical, but interestingly enough, left very open ended.

SnF.

reply to post by dusty1



As it turned out Ian's "experiment" had been going on for a while.

For weeks I reflected on what Ian had told me that night. The clay bottle, or actually what was contained in the bottle, had been the key to his understanding of the nature of time. He did not say how he came into possession of the artifact, but described it as a gold cylinder that was possibly the oldest man made object ever discovered. Ian had to use an electron microscope in order to view all the markings, the amount of data contained was enormous.

He had only collaborated with one other individual in this matter, an ideogram expert, half way across the globe. Ian had become very careful over the years, because on more than one project he'd had colleagues steal his work and take the credit, and the money. Gotta love science.

Ian trusted no one, no one but me that is.


I had suspected that Ian had made a lot of money over the years with his ideas ( I mean A LOT of money), Yet he stayed in this apartment of his, I just assumed it was because he was a creature of habit.

The cab pulled up to the old stone apartment building that housed my friend, and that day, I would learn the real reason Ian resided there.


"Well, it's time I showed you the experiment" Ian said.

"Should I call a cab"? I asked.

He smiled and said "come with me".

We got in the small, antique elevator. Ian pulled out a key, put it in the panel, and hit B1.

"Today I want to show you the vault." Ian said as the elevator doors opened, to a hallway in the sub basement and I saw the huge vault door. "Years ago this served as a bank vault, now it houses my experiment". He entered the combination and opened the large vault door. The room was dimly lit, the center of the room was walled off with plastic. We opened up the center of the plastic wall, and I could not, believe my eyes! In the center of the room stood a large structure made of,,,,,,gold.

"This machine creates the Wells Field". Ian said

"We're rich"! I think I said

The machine was made of solid gold. Ian had apparently taken his personal wealth, and according to him, "leveraged it" and slowly put this thing together.

Up til then it had been the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Ian went on to show me the ancient cylinder, that when unrolled, was about 2 feet long. The object was etched all over. It was incredible.

"I try to create a decontaminated environment before and after the experiments". He went on to tell me that he had already sent animals back in time, (mice, yes, time traveling mice). What he had discovered was that a living creature sent back in time with a marker (like a gold coin from that time period) had to remain in contact with the marker at all times, or the being (in this case, mouse) would snap back, into our time. "So I can bring you back at an appointed time with the Wells Field or you can simply drop the marker and you'll come back. The only problem though, is if you drop the marker in the past, we will no longer have it in our possession in order to return to that exact moment in the past".

He looked at me like I was a chicken dinner.

Then it dawned on me.

"No, no, no way"! "There is no way I am going back in time Ian. I'll work the machine and send you back".

"You're not smart enough to operate the machine. I'm the only one that can safely do it". Ian said smugly.


"Name your price" He said..............

reply to post by Druid42


Thanks Druid!

reply to post by dusty1


"Name your price", he said. The first time Ian said those words to me, he was twelve years old, and on one cold evening I wound up climbing a water tower with a coil of copper wire. In the end, Ian was a hundred and twenty feet closer to zero point energy, and I had an autographed Babe Ruth baseball card to add to my collection.

I stared at the glittering machine, in the dimly lit vault, I could feel a breeze coming from a nearby air shaft that fed the room. "Ok Ian, I'll do what you ask. As far as my price, I'd like to see my dad one more time."

Ian smiled and said "Let's get to work."

The golden scroll laid on the black velvet cloth atop the heavy oak table, Ian explained that on a microscopic scale it contained the secret to the true nature of time. In it were the mathematical formulas, as well as the actual blueprint to creating the device that generated the Wells Field. It is what made possible the ability to pass through the barriers separating one moment from the next.

Apparently the Wells Field creates a vibration that opens a hole in the membranes between moments. I really had a hard time wrapping my mind around the concepts. Traveling through space made more sense to me. "We have to calculate and adjust for the rotation and orbit of the earth when we go to another moment in time", said Ian. That was another aspect of time travel, from moment to moment our relative position in space changes. It's all fun and games, unless you go back in time, and you appear, not on land, but under an ocean or not on earth but in empty space. "The machine does not travel with you, you'll will simply appear in another moment of time". After sending mice back thousands of times the need for a life support system for a manned mission, as a precaution, became clear to Ian.

Thus the NASA space suit.

Ian was always prepared, and I knew he would not put me in harms way, unnecessarily, of course. Ian even coated his sterile mice with a chemical that would make a predator vomit, if it happened to eat the time traveling mouse. "We wouldn't want to upset nature", he said. I also learned that Ian owned the old vacant apartment building, which is why I never saw anyone. "I can't trust anyone else with this. Many people would slit my throat to get their hands on this much gold, many others would take the secrets here to their government, or use it to there own advantage. You my friend, are the only one that I trust, you are an explorer, you live in the moment, and because I knew, that your price, would be to see your father one more time".


I had asked Ian several times, how old the artifact really was, and how and why could the understanding of time, and this technology exist in the past. I still can barely fathom it in the present.


"It's off the charts ancient, as I have stated. Because of where it was found, It should be hundreds of thousands of years old." His brow wrinkled.

"However I honestly don't know if it is really from the past, or If it's from the future, that is what I want you to discover".