The Resident (part eighteen)

Chapter Three

Tithonians

iii.

The example always used is a vinyl record. You know what that is. [Nods.]

Students of some eras need props. Right. The needle drops into a groove, a particular song plays. The needle drops onto another track, a different song plays. The needle, as an object, remains itself. The record retains its integrity, a whole containing multiple realizations.

Time experiments on the particle level had been an ancient thing, begun much earlier than 2018. Ancient…yes, Debra, when you bear in mind our Tithonian view begins a thousand plus years after this current present. Physicists had noticed anomalies, been excited these might prove displacement, or simultaneity, if not the chance of time travel itself. In the bunkers following the cataclysms, successful experiments in switching were done with molecules.

The chronosynthesists understood the mechanics by then. They had made great progress overcoming that first hump, particles to molecules. Within a century, they could make single-celled organisms disappear—and bring them back, once they’d crafted control of a limited timescape. But single-celled organisms don’t wear clothes.

No, Deb, it seems funny, but accoutrements are the essence. If I could send an apple back in time and return it, that wouldn’t prove the safety of some other apple, theoretically displaced. Displacement once had looked the less magical of theories. A strong school of scientists favored it. Old experiments seemed to suggest a finite number of ‘things’ in the universe, where, like a bucket filled with ping pong balls, shoving in one pops out another. But if that were so, time travel was impossible. How could a fully clothed human go back, displace a myriad of atoms composing sneakers, jeans, tee shirts, glasses, tattoos, scents, flesh?

Still, the experiments felt imperative. Two thirds of the human population had died, vast numbers of animals were near extinction, plants were plummeting in diversity. If the groove could be found…

You get me. If I wait a day for the dispatch of an apple, sent two days ahead, and if my apple is sliced and arranged on a ceramic plate that has two chips, simultaneity proves itself. Halfway.

We wait with our apple, and a fellow experimenter arrives with the original. The apple, its configuration and dimensions after slicing, the plate and its chips, have duplicated. These were all thoroughly imaged beforehand.

So why is this not more magical than displacement?

I will disappoint you and say, we know it’s true because it happens. Displacement, as I’m sure you can see, fails. We send a Tithonian to 1910…the clothing can’t displace, not even if we unearth an original Singer, and stitch up a shirtwaist as period as can be made. Not just because the cloth would be modern, the thread would be modern…

31

Dark Paneling

The Resident (part nineteen)

(2022, Stephanie Foster)