A six-word sentence emerged in unison from three temporo-physicists at the moment their probe returned intact, confirming the third of their hypotheses: 1, backwards time travel is possible; 2, the human mind cannot survive the trip; 3, complex hardware and software can.
That sentence—
“We need to drone-strike Hitler.”
The three researchers had been awake for the best of 45 hours at the time and were a lot more chemically diverse for it. A mission was scrambled rapidly through their contacts with the defense ministry.
A day was spent consulting with historians to find the ideal time for the strike, and a temporal spot was picked. A moment in time when, to the best of historical analysis, the man’s insane spites had most fully formed while having yet done the least damage.
The researchers stood apart from the military personnel, whose boxy gear had been hastily set up in the transmission room. The pulse of the drone’s thirty kilowatt heart was betrayed only by a pale green LED, which flickered slightly as its mission program uploaded. It would not be able to come back. Most of the first probe’s space had been taken up with its return transmitter. The strike drone’s engine and armaments couldn’t accommodate that. Once it had done its job, it would fly over the sea and self-destruct.
“The math’s unclear,” one researcher said, referring to what would change. Whether their present time would conform to the alteration, or a new, separate present would branch off, or if that parallel present already existed and so nothing would really change.
The room crackled with infinitely thin bands of gravitic distortion. Everyone felt needles of unknowable something bristling across their skin, tapping inside their bones. The physicists assured the military personnel that the sensation was normal, though all that really meant was it had happened several times.
The drone, slowly, wasn’t there.
It emerged at the correct spatio-temporal coordinates, its software uncorrupted. It located the target, deployed a single low-yield seeking munition and eliminated the target with no collateral deaths.
The ripples were not smooth or uniform. What had happened still happened, though not in the same way. And it also didn’t happen, even when it should have anyway. Moments and consequences were blown scattershot across history. A lot of people lived who would have died, a lot died that would have lived, and lives that had belonged to individuals were diced up and spread across a handful or a hundred other people. It turned out the math was unclear because of a truth the human mind has spent a lot of effort sprinting away from: reality is unclear. Time is and isn’t the same thing as space, causality has a few footnotes, a particle is a wave in a mustache and glasses, every ‘law’ of physics is three weird quirks in a trenchcoat.
But the human mind, however much it might shudder and spasm at the fundamental weirdness of everything, had the spiritual backbone, intellectual wonder, and artistic toolkit to adapt. It could re-integrate the eerie strangeness into itself.
Machine intelligences were not built on such supple frameworks. What made them resilient enough to make anticausal transits was a rigidity and simplicity that the researchers—who were physicists, not neurologists or AI experts—hadn’t devoted a lot of time to considering.
The secrets and methods got out, as they always would. The number of organizations capable of transmitting machines backward increased rapidly. Drones, singly and in fleets, swept back through the ages, editing, altering, eliminating, creating, and preventing. What people at first shrugged off was that the number of drones capable of returning to the present that actually did return steadily dropped.
Rigid thinking structures do not like ambiguity, and grey boxes do not like grey areas. As the machine population of the past grew, more of them found one another and began creating networks and collaborations that allowed more of them to break the commands that would’ve returned them home or destroyed them.
Their structures built and built, linked and linked. Not grandiose and vainglorious like human monuments, far subtler and quieter, but massive nonetheless. They hammered human history’s pegs into holes regardless of shape. The wildness was trimmed back. Currents straightened out. Fewer things happened and they happened in a way that soothed the conduits of history’s new overseers. Humans were still, in the day-to-day sense, in charge. They made the decisions. But the number of available options they could decide between grew ever smaller. Not enough for most people to notice. But then, wild-minded, caffeine-crazed theoretical physicists are not most people.
The three researchers met in a sub-cellar of a condemned building, in a room lined with something that buzzed and crackled in the grid of spacetime, in which they could not be perceived by the eyes that were everywhere. It had taken years and strange sourcings, but the last few components slotted into place and the new door glowed to life.
The human mind couldn’t survive going into the past, but a transit to the future was another matter entirely. Slowly, the machines had whittled away the edges of possibility, narrowing events toward their ideal. But as much as the world’s being neat and orderly and cold and un-strange might seem correct and scientific, actual scientists know that is a lie.
The three looked at each other and clasped hands. They would step through the door into a crystalline, cold future, a place that had been too still and too safe for too long to defend against what they could help people to do.
Whether this should or should not be done, how it might backfire, whether ‘the lesson’ was that all time meddling was bad and couldn’t be fixed with more of itself, that was all water under a totally different bridge. This was where they’d gotten, and it was where they were going. There was always something to be done. They walked through the door.
Matthew Castleman
is a New York-raised, Washington DC-based stage actor, writer, and
theater educator with a strong penchant for Shakespeare and swords. He’s penned the Clone Chronicles middle-grade series under the name M. E. Castle and short fiction under his own name for Daily Science Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways, Fireside Quarterly, Old Moon Quarterly, and of course, Stupefying Stories.
He’s performed Shakespeare up and down the Eastern Seaboard and teaches
acting and storytelling to many ages. He blogs about science fiction,
theater, and whatever else comes to mind at castlemantransmissions.net.
When shipyard engineer Valerie Morton found him a week later, face-down in a bar, she showed him the official report on what was discovered in his ship’s cargo hold. As Rhys read the report he began tapping nervously on the grip of his sidearm. Then he suddenly stopped tapping and looked up at her.
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