Flash Forward: A Science Fiction Anthology

12: Relatively Safe

Discovering how to travel forward in time had been simple enough. Scientists had been experimenting with the accelerator for decades, perfecting safety limits, performing animal testing, making it ideal for human use. Using the machine was easy. Set a dial, flip a switch, and a human being will be frozen in time until a set date and time. The hardest challenge had been getting the accelerator to move properly with Earth's rotation through space, but once that final kink had been worked out, nothing could stop us from traveling to the future.

The real trick, we knew, would be traveling backwards through time. Accelerating someone to the point of time freeze fits neatly within the standard rules of relativity. The faster you move, the slower time passes. All we had to figure out was how to remain stationary and safe. But traveling backwards? That was a whole different can of worms. It raised questions about string theory and temporal paradoxes.

My obsession with solving this mystery began in graduate school and followed me throughout decades of my career. Over and over, theory after theory, investment after investment, they all came out the same. Failure. My colleagues told me I was mad. They warned me to halt my experiments before I bankrupted myself. They told me that it couldn't be done, not in a thousand lifetimes.

Eventually, I came to believe them. So I made the only logical choice.

I decided I'd just skip ahead to when it could be done and prove them all wrong.

As I said, the process was simple enough. The accelerators were getting ready for commercial use, to freeze people with serious illnesses until a cure could be found. Given my notoriety, wealth, and lingering respect in academia, I was able to receive a testing unit. After that, I had only one thing to do.

I took it home, set the dial forward by a thousand years, and hit the switch. Protocol said that when they discovered my body in the accelerator they had to put it in storage until the thousand years were complete. The capsule's outer shell could protect me from natural disasters, wars, and other calamities. The external sensors would delay my unfreezing if the atmospheric conditions around me were unsafe. Only the destruction of the Earth itself could keep me from waking up.

And so it was that I found myself on this strange new world. I woke up, feeling fresh and excited, and took my first breath of that oxygen-heavy air. The sky was dark, lit only by two pale moons and clusters of unfamiliar stars. The ground had a dusty, copper tint. The only vegetation was twisting, tangling blue vines.

Checking my chronometer, I found that I had been in temporal acceleration for over ten billion years. The Earth must be long gone. Destroyed by our dying Sun. Maybe even destroyed by humanity itself, a thousand years in my future, ten billion years in your past.

You found me disoriented and confused, barely surviving on the bitter fruit growing from those blue vines. Mad with loneliness, I welcomed your assistance with open arms. 

I've subjected myself to your tests. I've told you all I know about how I got on your planet. I've answered every question you have thought to ask me these last few weeks. Now please, answer one of mine.

How do I go back in time? How do I get home?