Roy Tang

This was a submission I made to a short story contest sometime in 2017 (I’ve already forgotten the URL for the contest). But basically, there were some parameters you hade to use in your story:

Dialogue: Enter, put the items in the field and get out in 30, got it Science (Optional): Technology allows people to hack their DNA sequence and recreate themselves to their liking

I didn’t win the contest, but I thought I’d put this up for posterity anyway. The text is as it was submitted and unedited.

It started innocently, with a comment on a post I had made on a physics message board I frequent. I had discussed the various commonly known theoretical approaches to time travel, and how most of them were dismissed as possibilities due to new discoveries, empirical evidence, or contradictions in the equations. I had concluded by saying that given the current state of known physics, time travel was most likely impossible.

The commenter, one Damian Butler, had written: Do you really consider time travel impossible? Don’t you think the Weismann-Roth conjecture might apply when you consider an N-dimensional space? Depending on the circumstances of course.

I thought about this for the rest of the day and replied that night as to why it seemed unlikely for such a set of circumstances to occur. It led to a long thread where Damian kept pushing some questions about how I disproved the various theories. A few other physicists joined in to provide inputs. I woke up the next day to find that I had received a private message from Damian.

Hey, sorry if this is weird. But I looked through your message history. You’re Sadie Brown from the Tieling Institute right? I’m a grad student at the university nearby. You want to grab a coffee sometime and let me pick apart your time travel ideas some more? :)

I didn’t think much of it. Don’t meet up with strangers from the internet right? But later I reread the late night exchange. He had raised a lot of interesting points. There was a hint of insight far beyond an ordinary grad school student. I messaged him that I would be on campus the next Saturday and we could meet up then.

And so we did.

When I first met Damian I didn’t notice the horns on his head. They were rather small. Aside from that he looked like the rest of us normies who can’t afford to get adventurous with a DNA resequencer. The short stubby horns barely poked out from the sides of his forehead, almost completely covered by his wavy black hair.

“You barely show those. What’s the point?” I had asked him then.

It’s a style thing, he said. He wasn’t into those gaudy full-body changes. Not like those types who have scales all over their arms or the hairy freak conversions. Resequencing was expensive, so most people wanted to show it off. A status symbol for the ostentatious or the daring. Minor changes like horns weren’t usually worth it.

Damian was different. He had wanted something simple, unobtrusive yet noticeable once you pay attention. He didn’t want to stand out in a crowd, but he wanted people to remember him after a short conversation.

I realized immediately how gifted Damian was. For a grad student, he was well-versed across multiple fields of physics, in many cases surpassing my own knowledge. We started seeing each other regularly after that. Not in a romantic way. He didn’t seem interested in that. It was the intimacy of scientific peers. He proved an important sounding board for my research.

“How is it someone as young as you knows so much about physics?” I asked him once. He seemed hesitant, but he told me that science ran in his family. He preferred to keep our discussions to the work, so I avoided probing into his personal life too much.

About two months after we met, the distortion in Antarctica was discovered. I was the top of my field in particle physics at that time (or so I’m told). I was asked to go there and study it. I also had to pick a research partner. Damian was an easy choice.

I had never expected to become a scientist. I was a hard worker, but I never had the brilliant intuition for scientific discovery that others had. More than once he had jokingly offered to pay for the resequencing to improve my intelligence. Unlike me, Damian wasn’t a hard worker. He was sort of an impatient genius, his mind always flitting from one subject to another. I was the type who always kept notes and made sure we stayed on track. Our team worked well. He provided the bursts of genius. And me? I provided the hard work to bring that genius to fruition, I guess.

The distortion was unprecedented. It was an energy field sustained across a wide open area around a hundred and fifty meters across. It caused electronics and other finer instruments within it to go haywire. Most significantly, time passed differently within the field. Damian and I were just one of two dozen research teams from different countries who came to Antarctica to study the phenomenon. Barriers had been set up around the field’s outer limits, and the research teams regularly conducted experiments on the field’s nature.

We knew from initial reports that humans could pass through the field safely, but as time went by that changed. The field’s strength fluctuated, but it was growing stronger. Soon it became necessary to wear radiation suits near and inside the field.

We always knew the research was dangerous. The field’s energy readings were exotic and unpredictable. But Damian was reckless, determined to prove himself. Always pushing forward with an urgency I hadn’t seen during the talks we had back at the university. I repeatedly reminded him about the limits of our experiments.

“Enter, put the items in the field and get out in 30, got it. Don’t worry so much!” He had said it so casually on that day. But no matter how routine the experiments had become, there’s always room to be careless. We were measuring the effects of the field on different chemical substances. Some isotopes reacted differently than others. It was Damian’s turn this time to bring the items into the field.

At that time I was in our tent at the edge of the field checking our instrumentation and lab space. Damian was already in the radiation suit well into the field. As I went through the supplies I realized that the tray of samples Damian was supposed to be carrying had been left in the tent. I quickly picked up the communicator.

“Damian, get back here. That’s not the righ–”

Suddenly the sensor readings went wild. A sudden burst of energy flowed out of the field like a wave. The explosion that followed took everyone by surprise of course. But I was the one closest to the blast. I was knocked off my feet, my vision was blurry, and my ears were ringing. I could barely tell what was going on. I don’t remember falling unconscious, but I’m pretty sure my last thoughts were of Damian.

When I woke up, I asked where Damian was. I wasn’t aware of my own injuries, which turned out to be minor. They told me that the distortion field was gone. Dissipated in a burst of energy.

Damian was nowhere to be found.

No one else was in the field at that time. There were no other casualties.

I was discharged quickly. The first few days, I was distraught. I didn’t know what to do. Damian didn’t have any family, as far as I knew. I didn’t have anyone to contact. I tried to talk to someone at the physics department at the university but they told me they never had anyone by the name Damian Butler in the department. Distress turned into anger. Had Damian been lying to me all this time? He was so well-versed in the science lore I hadn’t bothered digging too deeply in his credentials.

I looked through his belongings at the base station. Among his documents or identification, nothing stood out as a clue as to his real identity. At the bottom of his suitcase however, I found a leather-bound notebook. It seemed he had a liking for pen and paper, unusual in this day and age.

I thumbed through the pages. They were filled with equations and diagrams and theoretical physics proofs, many of them covering the topics we had discussed. He had never been the note-taking type. On some pages he had scribbled in red marker on the notebook’s margins.

2/27 Finally got a chance to talk to Sadie Brown in person. She’s everything I expected her to be. Hopefully the hints I gave her will be helpful once she encounters the field.

February? This was when we first met. How had Damian known about the field? I flip ahead a few pages until I find another note in the margins.

5/11 The discovery of the Antarctic Rift has been made public. As I hoped, Sadie chose me to be her research partner. This might be my only chance.

How? And what did he mean by “his only chance”?

The next few pages were filled with notes about the experiments we conducted on Antarctica. I thought I had been thorough with my own digital notes, but Damian had painstakingly transcribed everything: energy readings, time, background noise, weather, and so on. There were some computations he had inserted among the measurements, some of the equations were unfamiliar to me. Finally I found the next note in the margins.

7/9 So far the rift has been dormant. Unexpected. History tells me that the incident happens in a bit more than a month, but the field doesn’t have enough energy for that to happen. Perhaps something happens to jumpstart the process?

This is impossible, I tell myself. How could Damian…

On the notebook’s last page, in hastily scribbled red ink, I read Damian’s last words to me, dated the day before the incident.

8/14 Sadie, if you’re reading this, then either I have successfully jumped, or I am dead. In either case, I apologize for lying to you. And for switching the items in the last experiment. You deserve to know the truth. As you may suspect from reading the past entries, I am a time traveller. I was stranded in this timeline six years ago and have been searching for a way back ever since. Luckily I still remembered a bit of my history, enough to know that in this era Sadie Brown takes the first steps towards practical time travel. Imagine my surprise to find out that it would be me who would be the trigger for the Antarctica incident. Of course I don’t remember my own name in history, so I assume that you will keep my involvement secret. I thank you for all your help throughout the past few months, and hope that I was helpful to you as well. This may surprise you, but I met you before, when I was very young. You were very old then of course. I barely remember the meeting, but my mother told me many times that you were very happy to meet me. You were especially pleased with the name your great-grandson had been given. I will always cherish our time together. Yours thankfully, Damian Brown.