This is What Time Travel Feels Like

An event horizon is only frightening if you can see it...

                The sensation of traveling through time, or traveling through deep space, is much akin to the feeling of being in an airlock while it pressurizes. I guess that’s not something the average civilian in the early 21^st century feels. It feels like a great rushing wind, only pushing in on your body.

        

        In an airlock this is because there is literally wind putting pressure on your body, then your body adapts and you return to the usual feeling of no pressure. In time and space travel it is because your body is being compressed into a near-singularity, along with all the other matter within your intended route. Then, seemingly an instant later, you are decompressed, having been moved to the other side of the compression stream.

              

  Like I said earlier, there are a couple principles of physics which have not yet been theorized in your time that are essential to deep space and time travel. I’ll explain them to the best of my ability.

             

   An Atom, the smallest form of matter commonly known in your time, is built from smaller pieces: protons, neutrons and electrons. Even those are broken down into two more particles: quarks and leptons, which are bonded with something called bosons.

               

Once scientists were able to dissect bosons, they were able to easily break the bond between leptons and quarks, thus separating all matter into its rudimentary forms " pure energy in one hand and a pile of quarks and leptons in the other. It was believed, early on, that putting the pieces back together would be excruciatingly difficult and time consuming. That wasn’t the case at all.

Scientists discovered that quarks and leptons carry faint traces of connection points to each other " after all, they’re made of energy as well " which can be detected and used to put them together in the proper order. Not only that, but they naturally gravitate towards their partners.

So a computer could easily tag and trace each quark and lepton in a desired field, then dissect all of the bosons, collapse the unlinked particles into a near-singularity. The bosons are then recharged, quickly forming connections with the quarks and leptons in the incredibly dense arena. As the computer monitors the reconstruction of matter collected and dissected, it watches for signs of the travelers and pushes their molecular pieces towards the destination end of the compression stream.

The traveler is fully broken down and reassembled in less than five hundred seconds using current technology at maximum capacity. The amount of matter and distance desired affects the time it takes to complete the process as well. A journey from Earth’s orbit to the Moon can take less than thirty seconds. A trip to Mars will take a passenger ship a couple of minutes. The trip for sixty tons of asteroid matter to travel to the processing facility just outside the lunar orbit will take a full eight minutes.

The process for traveling through time is similar, although the science is different. In the time you will be reading this, three dimensions are known as and traversed as dimensions; Height, Width and Depth. It has been theorized (most historically by Jules Verne) that Time could be a fourth. This is true and became unquestionably evident with the more complete understanding of String Theory.

Through understanding of subatomic particles and the manipulation of raw energy (which lead to deep space travel), scientists came to understand that time is a traversable dimension, just as any other. Similarly, one can traverse multiple dimensions, including time, at once. Just as a person can choose to walk only along the width of an object, you can choose to travel only along the time of a point in space.

Time became a major issue when attempts to theorize what would happen if one wanted further than the asteroid belt to, say, Alpha Centauri. This is because the amount of time it takes to travel to the location could be drastically different than what we see from Earth, due to the speed of light.

By traveling through compression streams, the aspect of trying to travel at the speed of light became obsolete. However, travel which is not relative to the speed of light becomes an issue with attempts to travel extended cosmic distances. This is due to the time it takes light to travel great distances. From Alpha Centauri, it takes like almost four and half years to reach Earth, meaning what we see happened four years ago. The amount of time it would take to travel by compression stream would be roughly two years. That means that without time travel, the traveler would arrive at Alpha Centauri six years after the image seen by Earth took place.

For cosmically short trips, inside our own solar system and close neighbors, it’s easy to see what you will be traveling into. For a longer trip, it may be difficult to see what is in store for the travelers by the time they arrive. If they are able to simultaneously travel back in time and forward through space they can arrive at the destination at a time much closer to when the light visible from Earth was generated.

However, the unimaginably complex mathematics and vast energy requirements for extended and practical compression stream travel have, as of when I wrote this, made it near impossible to travel much further than the asteroid belt.

The centuries of successful deep space and time travel flashed through my mind as our guide, Max, told the group the different possible types of nausea they could expect to feel from the journey. Matt and I knew already; we took a trip to Mars just after general school.

I thought about the horrible headache I had after that trip and sighed. I really wasn’t looking forward to repeating the experience. Matt didn’t experience any adverse effects that first time and he wasn’t expecting time travel to be any different.

He shifted the straps of his pack, turning to me and rolling his eyes at the woman in front of him, asking two questions for every sentence from Max.

“I heard that the air is so polluted it could make us sick; are we going to be extra sick if we’re already sick from the compression?”

Max turned to Shannon for the seventh time since he started his speech, “yes, if you are already have stream sickness the effect of the air could make your headache or nausea worse.” He picked up a metal case from the desk next to him, entering a code to open the magnetic seal.

He withdrew a pistol from the case, handing it to Skiff, the next to Shawn, then Shannon, Matt and finally myself. “I want you to keep these with you at all times. There will be cases when one or more of us have to use them. Did anyone here not take their firearms safety and proficiency course?”

No one said anything. “Alright, I’ll go over some basics.”

As he began to explain the basic operations of the pistol, I held the barrel of mine to my eye level, rotating it to inspect the four metal rails running from the rear of the grip forward seven inches. The front of the rails was open, allowing the round to be fired, while the back was sealed and capped with a small electromagnetic generator an inch long and with the diameter of a dime.

The rail pistol was invented one hundred years ago, based on very old and very speculative technology abandoned by the United States Military during the height of the consumption crisis. It was far more powerful, accurate and safer for the user than a combustion firearm. Upon inserting a magazine, the bottom two rails are forced aside, “chambering” the round. The user must place at least three fingers on the sensors along the grip before the electromagnet will charge.

The rails become magnetized and move a fraction of an inch away from the round, to which a negative charge is transferred through the firing pin as the trigger is pulled. If the fingers remain on the sensors, the next round is pulled into the opening between the bottom two rails by magnetizing the round within the magazine. If the fingers are removed, the charge on the rails is lost and they move closer together, making the gun safe again.

“Rudd, what’s this part of the pistol?” Max was holding his gun up, pointing to the trigger.

“The trigger,” I said.

“Good, did you take the firearms course?”

“Yeah…”

“Then stop staring at the damn thing like you’ve never seen it before.”

How come you weren’t this harsh with the girl asking dumb questions? Matt glanced at me just long enough for me to see his smirk; he was probably thinking the same thing.

Max talked the group through all the last-minute information and emergency procedures before handing each one of us three magazines and a map. When Matt found out we were getting a topographical map of the area he complained that it “would take away from the adventure of the trip.” Max assured us that the trip would be plenty adventurous even with the map. Besides, the point was not to get us all lost and killed.

When it came time and everyone was satisfied that they were prepared, Max turned on the timeship. It was a little larger than the average cellular phone from the 21^st century " approximately four-and-a-half inches by two-and-a-half inches. On a standard-issue timeship, the screen had two small icons, one lead to a dial to select the destination time and reality, the other to a virtual globe, to select the destination location; a third, larger icon lead to the command which started the compression. This particular timeship was only authorized to travel among two destinations: our current time and reality and where we were about to travel.

The year we were about to enter, Max told us as he confirmed the authorization codes, was 2109. A sudden whoosh came from behind our guide and the event horizon of the compression stream opened. The air was still in the room, though the sound of rushing wind filled my ears. I’d never imagined I would be stepping into the compression stream.

I grabbed Matt’s shoulder, his eyes lit up like a child getting the toy they wanted all year for their birthday.

“I’m having second thoughts…” I heard Shannon say to her husband.

“Quit whining,” Skiff’s rough voice was almost lost within the sound of whirling wind. Perhaps that was his intention.

My heart raced as I approached the event horizon, passing Max and tightening the straps on my pack. It’s not any different, I told myself, it’s exactly the same as space travel only I can see the event horizon. That event horizon was intimidating, though. The center was completely black with swirls of color reflected from the walls and furniture behind it slicing inward from the edges. I wanted so much to walk around it; was it flat or did it funnel away from the open side, as it appeared to? Would I be able to enter from the back side or would I simply walk through it?

A glance at Max told me to hurry up, so I swallowed my reservations and stepped through, immediately feeling the rush of wind pressing against my body.

Reviews

[The Perfectionist]

Are you writing a story or teaching a history lesson? As someone else who wrote a tale from a future perspective, I know the temptation to drag the reader fully along for the ride before you get going. The problem with this is that if your story lacks a hook - or if you're just terrible at descriptions - you're going to be up a creek, because no one is going to read it long enough for you to actually get to the good parts.

I'm a little bit of a nerd, so I'd say the ideas of your concept of rapid transit through time and space appealed a bit more to me than they would the average person, and your terminology, while mostly dumbed down, meets the same problem. Having tons of explanation in Chapter 1 is fine, but by Chapter 2 we need a reason to give a damn about these characters, and you didn't provide that. Interest in your theory can only go so far.

This is really well written, don't get me wrong, but I have no proof that you can actually tell a story. All I've got is a pretty picture of time travel, and even devoting two chapters to explaining it, you still can't even begin to touch on what would be a full overview.

Let's look at what you've accomplished after two chapters:
Explained Setting: 7/10
Explained Plot: 4/10
Introduced Characters: 2/10

13/30 is not where you wanna be after two full chapters. You're devoting too much time to convincing the reader you've thought this out, and not nearly enough to making us give a s**t. If you don't want to advance the story yet, that's fine, but cut back on the physics and give me more character. We can learn about time travel as we go, with little anecdotes. The way you have it now, it reads more like a textbook than a story.

[Katie]

The start of this chapter once again has that classroom type feel to it. You seem to have a very interesting mash up of personalities in the group which will undoubtedly make for an interesting story. The idea of time travel, and different dimensions is certainly interesting enough on its own. I can't wait to see your version of what earth would have looked like.