You’d think the world’s first time travel-capable device would have been birthed from a military facility, deep beneath a baron stretch of American wilderness and a 50 mile gauntlet of landmines. Or a sterile, overfunded laboratory in Cambridge. Or in the sub-sub-sub basement of a glass box on the edge of a malevolent tech giant’s campus.But thinking that would make you the kind of idiot that sees the world as an endless quilt of lazy stereotypes.
The third instance could have had the honour, if the laws of market economics didn’t stipulate that every time a company developed such a lucrative technology, a representative from a rival firm in the near future would appear near-instantaneously to burn the whole facility to the ground. Hoping to retroactively monopolise the time travel market but inevitably binning off that entire tangent of history.
Officially, Dr Hamish Lyon is credited with constructing the first device capable of transporting matter to different points in time. He did so within the confines of an office on the third floor of the Hatchfield University Humanities Institute. Where you might assume a time machine to incorporate smart materials, bright lights and a retro-futuristic flair of white smoke, his was built from a cheap yet spacious plywood wardrobe and parts harvested from laptops he accrued from HU’s poorly-guarded lost property office.
Hamish therefore has the secondary honour of developing the first device that can both defy the laws of physics, and be flat packed.
Much of what we know of Hamish’s not-quite paradigm-shifting work is taken from the infamous diaries of Anya Dean, who briefly occupied the role of his research assistant. Anya had been looking for any means to establish herself in philosophy academia, no matter how vague the job descriptions or salary were. A non-descript job as an assistant to someone who’d seemingly done nothing in his 40 year career at HU, other than attach his name to forgettable articles nitpicking at others’ research, and meeting the bare minimum of his teaching obligations, would have to do.
Anya wasn’t surprised by his claim that his cupboard could send objects back in time to his first semester of employment at the university. She assumed that most people in this line of work experience severe brain rot after a few decades and his outfit of a pocketwatch, waistcoat and stained jogging bottoms only bolstered the stereotype. But he was persistent.
“It’s true!” he told her. “Every day I put an apple in there, programme the machine to send it back a few years, and it disappears! Then I record the results, and bring the apple back. I devised the theory behind it all in a month, I built the cupboard in 4 days, and I spent the following 38 years making it time travel capable.”
Anya noted in her diary beside the dialogue that she calculated a few weeks of babysitting Dr Lyon was worth a lifetime of precarious employment and chronic underpayment in the field. She was also shown an archaic spreadsheet of his ‘results’. 60 rows of data reading: “item: apples quantity before: 1 quantity after: 0 comments: n/a” Hamish prescribed her the task of suffering the same fate as the apples to provide more accurate and detailed findings. Emphasising the importance of his employer’s never hearing a word of it.
Hamish had purposefully omitted this from the job description for fear of the ethics committee kicking his door down and proclaiming some nonsense about not experimenting on humans or interfering with the fabric of spacetime.
Humouring him, Anya obliged, asking “how does it work? It’s barely got any wires?” To us, Hamish’s response was one of a man who understood what he was doing so fundamentally, that he couldn’t fathom how the world could be so ignorant of something so obvious.
“I don’t mess around with speed, or wormholes or the power of love or the word ‘quantum’ or any waffle like that.” he scoffed. “It’s just logic. The apple appears somewhere else in time because it makes sense for it to be there. That’s what I tell the machine. An indisputable argument that the apple isn’t here, but there.”
Expecting several weeks of entering a cupboard, only for nothing to happen and Hamish to wonder what the issue is as he further nosedived into madness, Anya had no reservations about doing as instructed. Her first venture was to accompany an apple 12 years into the past, to a day where Hamish wasn’t in the office, and so couldn’t be disturbed, and observe anything noteworthy.
When asked why she couldn’t follow the apple to somewhere where they might uncover a great historical mystery like the building of the pyramids. Hamish questioned her mental aptitude for the job. Of course he couldn’t send an apple there, he could only send apples to the cupboard, and it had never been to Egypt.
Any sense of intellectual superiority over Hamish suffered a quick death. Once Anya pushed open the cupboard door to see a dark office, furnished in exactly the same way, save for Hamish’s PC appearing to be in a much newer condition. Fewer dark splodges on its case and no greasy film on the monitor.
Anya’s diary then features a 300 page stretch detailing her whimsical adventure tracking down her teenage self, and trying to nudge her life choices in the direction of someone she wouldn’t grow up to resent. Encouraging good habits, motivating study, pursuing lost romances. All that stuff.
I won’t get into it for two reasons. Firstly, because the decision to actively interfere with the passage of history despite being exposed to 1000s of hours of media depicting its dire consequences, is grossly irresponsible. And we should therefore not indulge her. And secondly, because I’m not paid by the word, and in fact have my pay docked for every word that isn’t at least tenuously about technology. If you want an emotionally turbulent story about the human condition, warning of the dangers of nostalgia and regret, read a different article. But not Anya’s diary. It’s not interesting. It reads alarmingly like the plot of a Hallmark Christmas film.
When the reader finally gets back to the subject of timetraveling storage solutions, we find that Anya’s route back home was as simple as sneaking into the prof’s office on a day where he wasn’t there, and an apple was.
Hitching a ride back to the present in the plywood vessel, she was dismayed to find that Hamish had absolutely no idea who she was. He was quick in accepting her explanation. After all, it made sense, and that was the core tenant of Lyonic timetravel. He plodded as rapidly as the weak seems in his stained joggers could carry him, to his ancient PC. Hoping to see what this tangent of reality’s Anya had accomplished with the privilege of transdimensional hindsight.
“Remarkable” was how he described it. In spite of the guiding hand of a life already lived, and visions of the consequences of every bad decision she could make, this Anya had accomplished nothing of note. Her online presence consisting of nothing more than bland social media profiles and bad fan fiction she was too foolish to write under a pseudonym.
The older Anya, didn’t like this tangent of existence. At least in the one she’d come from, she still had some of that blissful ignorance that hope gives you. She couldn’t stay anyway. Two Anyas would be a nightmare for dating and credit scores. And English bureaucracy struggles enough when there’s just one of everybody, let alone two.
Fortunately, the journey back was also simple. She just had to go back to the day she was originally supposed to return with the apple, and do as her employee had initially instructed.
She made it home unscathed enough to profit from the experience, and according to the Hamish’s of both realities, no harm done. The two tangents, with the two Anyas would continue, allegedly, without consequence. However some critics have blamed this incident for September of that year failing to occur for the first time in centuries and that week where the pigeons stopped.
Perhaps Anya’s story is a lesson in the nature of reality and fate itself. Perhaps it’s a physics lesson about predetermination. Perhaps it’s a sociological lesson about how systemic forces keep us from achieving greatness. Either way, I’m not paid to care. I just want to see those blueprints for cheap office furniture that can transport matter through time. It might be my ticket out of sub-minimum wage freelancing.
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