Fiction: My mail order time machine, fourth part

  My mail order time machine

Fourth

Turns out temporal shielding will not work unless I get Wil Wheaton to reverse the polarity of the chronometric flux amplifiers and he’s not answering my calls. Understandable since if he showed up I’d only make fun of his jumpers. So anyway I had a brilliant idea. I went to future and stole the long haired future me’s time travel machine. I thought he looked younger, so in one strike I’d deprive both of them from the technology they were using to harass me. Got back, and so I had two time machines. A few minutes later future me sent a note through time saying it was a brilliant idea (yeah, I knew that) and thanking me for the backup device. Fantastic.The day started off like many other days in my life. With a medium-strength headache. Maybe it was the whisky, I thought. Or the beers, possibly even the wine. Impossible to know.

The next morning, I woke up with a headache. I figured it was probably caused by too much screen time. Could also be the beer, the wine or perhaps even the whiskey, but it's most probably the screen time. Just spending too much time in front of the computer. I should try to cut down on that a bit, I thought to myself as I wrestled my body out of the bed. I’d read somewhere that the blue light of the monitor screen, especially late at night, really is not good for the eyes, and what is not good for the eyes is probably not good for anything connected to the eyes. At least that’s what I’d think. And the brain, where the headache happens, is quite directly connected to the eyes. That might be a slight simplification, but sometimes I don't care as much about total accuracy as some other times. I walked to the bathroom and stood in front of the sink. I took a good look at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t sure if I liked what I saw or not. With a shrug and a sigh, I opened the cabinet and looked inside. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, maybe painkillers, but I did not keep them in this cabinet, so unsurprisingly I did not find any. I closed the cabinet again and spent another couple of seconds staring at myself in the mirror. Still not sure about what I saw. I stepped into the shower to get ready for the day. After I was done washing myself, I wrapped a towel around my midsection and opened the bathroom door. I peeked around the corner first towards my bedroom and then towards the living room. “Anyone here?” I called out and waited for a reply. There was no answer. Amazingly, it appeared that I was alone. There were no visitors. I had not come to any kind of a conclusion on my research for temporal shielding last night, but maybe a not-so-distant future version of me has cracked it and has extended the protection to cover my present time. I guess that could mean I don't need to worry about it, since it will happen. One could also say that I must keep researching the topic, so that future me will eventually figure out. Let us say that usually time paradoxes involve someone going into the past and changing something that affects their current time, often for example taking away the reason why they would have ended up traveling into the past in the first place. Could I create a time paradox by not doing something in my present time that is required for an already established future situation to exist? It is an interesting thought. To try to answer that question, I feel I first must pose myself another question. Can future be established? I would say yes. I would further stipulate that at any given moment there must be an established future. However, that future, while set, is not unchangeable. Is that already a paradox of some kind? The way I look at it, since I can travel to the future, there must be an established future. It would be based on how things would proceed if allowed to do so without any interference. So, when something happens that changes how things would proceed, that changes the established future. One could say that as soon as I travel to the future, the version of the future that existed in the very moment when I made the jump forward in time no longer exists. But which future am I in then? The future at that point would be changing, based on what the impact of my experience in the future has to me, which effects how I behave and what I do when I return to my own time. And then there is the traditional causes for time paradoxes, the visits from future to past. A visitor from the future can affect the past in such a way that the future they came from doesn't exist anymore. Where do they return to? Is it possible that I could change something in the past that would change where I live, now, in my present time? I suppose if I would blow up the building, I wouldn't be able to have bought my apartment. And what about me and my presence through the timeline? If I were to die now, today, all my future selves would cease to exist. But they have already travelled back and forth in time, so they not only exist in various points in the future, but also in the past. There may be records of those visits, they may have interacted with other people, they may have moved something, created something, or influenced someone's actions. So, if I die, and they are erased from existence, the effect goes around from my present time to future, back to past and through to the present time, creating not only a new future but before that also a new past. This was too much complicated thinking for so early in the morning. I rubbed my temples and tried to reset my thoughts. I should tackle this topic when I'm feeling a bit better and start writing these thoughts down. And then there's my research on the temporal shielding, but I will have to get back to that later too. Right now, I need to get some of that gaming done, since I don’t know if I’ll be able to do much of it in the future. Based on my observation of the behaviour of my future selves I suspected that for some reason, there would be less than desired amount of time available in my future for wasting on playing computer games. So, I settled down to do some racing in my play seat. I had bought it a couple years ago, complete with a steering wheel, pedals and a gearshift, and it had really transformed racing games for me. My next step would be to get multi-monitor setup, or maybe one of those super-wide curved screens, and then maybe motorized base for the seat to tilt in all directions for a more realistic gameplay, but for now I was quite content with what I had. And I was doing rather well today, setting new records and getting more podium finishes, but something else was gnawing at the back of my mind. My plans for world domination. I was honestly not at all sure what I was planning to do. I should have asked the future versions of me to explain it to me so that I could get a head start on starting to figure out how to proceed. Though did I really want to go through with the plans? I wasn’t quite sure about that either. But to figure that one out, it would probably help to know what I was planning or was going to be planning in the first place. Right? Right, I thought to myself. I wasn’t quite as sure about this as I was pretending to be, but nonetheless I decided that I need to work out my plans. Making a firm commitment to something you are not necessarily one hundred percent sure about always helps to take away the lingering doubts. At least that is what I just decided to tell myself too. I switched the game console off and moved to sit down in front of my computer. I made a mental note to cut down on the screen time later. I hit the space bar to wake the computer up and stretched my arms while waiting for it to become usable. After some time and a half of crunching and whirring sounds, the screen came to life again. There were all the browser tabs on time travel and temporal shielding. I quickly glanced over the information. Sometimes taking a break from something will allow one to have a fresh perspective and see possibilities and connections that were eluding one’s eyes before. That was not the case this time. At least not right away. I really must get back to that research later, I thought, but for now I just couldn’t make any progress on trying to come up with any kind of workable hypothesis for shielding my immediate physical and temporal surroundings from time travel. I’ll have a breakthrough at some point. So, moving on to my world domination plans then. What on earth could I be planning? I did not even know where to start. I couldn't remember ever wanting to dominate the world. I guess for some it could be a childhood dream. If I had ever had a dream like that, I'd forgotten about it. My dreams were generally less ambitious, and I hadn't done a very good job defining and following them so far. Trying to come up with the plans for world domination now seemed like a lot. Maybe I could try to find some kind of a cheat sheet. “World domination for dummies” I typed into a search engine. Lots of hits, I thought to myself looking at the results of the search and started going through them. Most were recommending starting small and expanding when one gains more power and resources. That sounded like good advice, but also something I might have been able to come up with myself. Some made references to examples of people who had dabbled in world domination, these were generally charismatic leaders with a knack for persuasion and rousing speeches. If I were to start giving speeches with the aim to convince people to follow me, I would probably only manage to persuade the masses to ignore me. In fact, that would likely be the best-case scenario, a more likely one being locked up as a potentially dangerous lunatic, if not being euthanised for my own good. There are of course courses for learning to speak to an audience, to become more influential in one’s communication and so on, but I doubt that would work to the level of being able to instigate people to partake in a revolution. If that was even what my plan would ask for. I did make a note to further investigate ways to improve my charisma and persuasion skills. But I was still no closer to having any idea on what I would want to do. The instructions and guides were addressing the how, and I needed to figure out the what. I just could not think of anything, but obviously I will make the plans since my future selves have talked about them. I looked at the time machine on my bookshelf. I guess I could go and take a quick look at the plans. It couldn’t hurt. My future selves must have some notes on the plans somewhere. Maybe even some kind of a command centre with screens and boards. Probably not, though. That kind of stuff happens only in movies and tv shows. Would be cool, though. But probably not likely. I took the machine and turned it on. Only I did not quite know to where and when I should go. Then I remembered that the long-haired one had said he was from ten years in my future. So, I guess that’d be as good a try as any. I set my mind to travel ten years into the future, in front of my apartment building, and pressed the button. I should probably put shoes on, I thought to myself in that very moment, but it was too late. So, I was traveling barefoot. At least it should not be snowing. But it was raining, hard. I dashed, awkwardly trying to avoid my feet touching the wetness of the ground, over to the front door and realised I also should have brought my keys. I concentrated on the thought of going home, and in a flash, I was back in my own time and in my living room again. I picked up my keys from the kitchen counter and put my shoes on. Then I returned to the future. The rain had stopped but the ground was still a bit wet, glistening with the full sun from what seemed like fully blue sky. I walked over to the front door and tried my key. It worked. I stepped inside and checked my mailbox. It was empty. That must mean that either I had already taken the mail, or there had been none today. I am a regular Sherlock Holmes. There was no way to know if I was home though. I walked through the hall and opened the door at the other end, peering into the little courtyard. A few meters across the courtyard there was a door leading to the garage, and next to that the door to the staircase to go up. And down to the storage rooms but I was planning on going up. On the right there was the entrance to access the ground floor apartments. It was pouring rain again. I walked over to the door to the stairwell, only getting slightly wet as I did so. I opened the door and stepped inside, letting the door close behind me but stopped it just in time before it made an audible bang against the frame. Then I ascended the stairs to the top floor. There was a door to leave the staircase, and I opened it carefully. There was a suspended walkway with a door at the end, leading back to the main building where my apartment was. The door was currently closed. On the right side of the walkway, was my bedroom balcony. One could just hop over the railing from the walkway to my balcony. I had never done it. I didn't do it now either. I looked at my windows though. The curtains were closed, so I could not see inside. I walked over to the door to the inner hallway and opened it, stepping inside. I held the door open behind me just in case I would need to make a quick exit. My apartment door was at the far corner on the right. I looked around. It was quiet as usual, and there was no sign of anyone else. This was normal, of course. In the time I had lived in my apartment, which was close to 5 years now, I had never seen any of my neighbours in the hallway. By 'never’, I mean almost never, or very rarely. I closed the door behind me and walked over to my apartment. As I got to my door I stopped in front of it, looking up and down with the keys in my hand. There was just no way of knowing if I was inside the apartment or not. I shrugged and put the key in the lock and turned it. It unlocked the door. Either I had not unlocked the door yet today, or I wasn’t at home. I turned the key further, until I was able to push the door open. It occurred to me in this moment that I could have pressed the doorbell downstairs. It is possible, even likely, that I would have answered, if I was inside. But I did not want to go back downstairs. Not now, I was already here, and had already opened the door. Carefully I peered inside, listening for any sounds from the apartment. There were none. It was quiet. I stepped in and closed the door behind me. It looked like I was still living at the same apartment ten years later. Or was I? I had used my key to get in, but it could just be that the locks had not been changed, which would not even be that unusual. I looked around. The place looked mostly familiar, but some work and improvements had been done here and there. The floor had been redone. The door to the living room with the open kitchen had been permanently removed and the whole doorway made a bit bigger by knocking out the narrow glass wall that had stood next to the door. There was a new set of a sofa and a coffee table, and a new TV. I didn’t see any game consoles, so that might explain why the future versions of me were so keen to play on mine. I reminded myself again to game more, while I still can. The kitchen had also been completely redone with a new stove and overhead extractor. The fridge was standing free instead of hiding behind a cupboard door and there was a little breakfast bar with a couple of stools. The question was, was this still my place? I walked out of the living room and to the bedroom door. The door was ajar. I pushed it carefully and peeked inside. The first thing I saw was that there was a baby bed. And next to that a double bed. Both were luckily empty. But there was a bed for a baby, which implies there is a baby. The future version of me hadn’t mentioned becoming a medical miracle, so one assumes there is a mother for the baby. Was he married? Or was he living in sin with some poor hapless girl? How the heck has he managed to get a girl looking like he does. Looking like me. Being like he is. Like me. An important question, but I was obviously assuming that my future self was living here. Was he? I looked around for a computer but didn’t see any in the bedroom. I never used to have my computer in the bedroom either. I walked back to the living room and at first didn't see anything but then I noticed a laptop on the book shelf. Right next to the time machine. I looked at the laptop and then at the time machine. It looked like my time machine. I guess if there was any doubt, that was confirmation that I did still live here. Unless I had left it behind for the next person living in the apartment. I thought that would be a quite unlikely scenario. I wondered if my future self was out traveling in time, or just out in a more conventional way. It dawned on me that he could appear out of thin air any moment without any warning. Or hardly enough warning to do anything about it. Though I supposed if he were to step in through the front door it would not be so different. I would still be caught in the middle of his apartment with nowhere to go or to hide. If it came to that, I'd just have to wish to return to my own time, and hope that it worked quickly enough. But whatever I wanted to do here and now, I had better try to be quick about it. I took the laptop and opened it. It woke up at once. As I was looking at it, it unlocked automatically. I guessed it recognized my face. I wondered if this was the first time in history that breaking into someone’s laptop turned out to be so easy. If time travel would become more common, people would definitely have to rethink their use of facial recognition and other biometric security features. I checked for any active programs or open windows. There were none. My current self (that is, I) leaves everything on when he put his laptop to sleep, but evidence suggested that was one habit my future self might have dropped at some point. I clicked on my computer. The icon, that is, using the touchpad. Then I double-clicked, and the file browser window opened on the screen. I opened my documents, and quickly looked over what I could find. There were a couple thousand documents, many named book1, book2, another book1, document1, doument2, etc. I sighed. Some habits seem harder to drop. It did not seem that I would be able to find anything very quickly. I tried searching for things like world domination, evil plans, and other similar terms. The searches returned nothing. I shook my head in frustration. Nothing. And yet I was sure what I was looking for was on this laptop, if only I had time to go through everything. But I felt time was something I didn’t have right now. My future self would surely appear any moment. I looked at the time machine. It didn’t seem like it was on. When I used my machine, I had to press the button when I was deciding when and where I wanted to go, and when I pressed the button, the light would go on. The light on this machine was not on. I picked it up and looked at it, thinking. According to my understanding of how the machine works, the future me was not traveling in time right at this moment. Which meant that he was not using this machine right at this moment. Which meant that there was no risk of him being stranded in time if he suddenly did not have his time machine. Wait, was that actually a real risk? I stopped myself to concentrate on that last thought. I might want to store my own device a bit more securely, especially when I was using it. I did not want to find myself stuck in some other time just because someone might break into my apartment and steal my time machine. Of course, I did not even know what the impact would be if someone would take it somewhere else. Would my point of return be where the machine is? Or would I still return to where I had left from? Would the distance the machine was moved make any difference? And what if the machine is moved to a different time? Similarly, would the point of return in time move with the machine or remain at the original point of departure? I decided I should try to study this a bit more. But now I wanted to make sure the future me would leave me alone for a while and if he did not have his time machine, he should have some difficulty coming over to my time to bother me. I held on to the machine tightly, and let my mind be filled with the wish to return home. In a flash I reappeared in my own apartment. I looked around, and felt I preferred the future state of the apartment. I put the time machine on the shelf next to my original and went on to my computer to look for a new floor and some other improvements I had just seen. A couple of hours later I had ordered a new kitchen, was busy scheduling a replacement of the floor and was looking at some options for a new sofa, when the time machine suddenly rang. What is this now, it’s also a phone? “There’s a message from Jari,” the machine spoke. “Would you like to hear it?” “Yes please,” I replied, bewildered. There was a second of silence, then my voice spoke from the machine. “Hey there old me. What a brilliant idea to steal my time machine.” I smiled to myself, thinking the same. But then how was he - “So now we have two machines. I had been thinking about getting a backup machine, and you solved that problem, so thanks very much!” I took a deep breath and shook my head. Super, well done. “Would you like to reply?” asked the voice of the time machine. “No,” I croaked. “I didn’t quite get that; would you like to reply?” the machine repeated the question. “No, I do not want to reply!” I shouted as clearly as I could. The machine light blinked a couple of times and then went off. I took another deep breath and slumped into my chair. Well, at least none of the future versions of me visited me today, even if my mission was not successful. And, I had some home improvement projects planned now, so that was a win for today. All in all, I should be happy. I went to the fridge and got myself a beer and a ready made meal which I popped into the microwave. When the meal was ready to eat, I switched on my tv and retired to my sofa to enjoy my dinner and some streaming tv gold. Much later that night, I wrote an update to my loyal social media followers. “Turns out temporal shielding will not work unless I get Wil Wheaton to reverse the polarity of the chronometric flux amplifiers and he’s not answering my calls. Understandable since if he showed up I’d only make fun of his jumpers. So anyway I had a brilliant idea. I went to future and stole the long haired future me’s time travel machine. I thought he looked younger, so in one strike I’d deprive both of them from the technology they were using to harass me. Got back, and so I had two time machines. A few minutes later future me sent a note through time saying it was a brilliant idea (yeah, I knew that) and thanking me for the backup device. Fantastic.” Of course I had not even tried to reach out to Wil Wheaton, nor had I even considered it. I am not a complete idiot, even if evidence might sometimes indicate otherwise. I just thought it would make the update a little bit funnier. Though to be honest, I am not sure how many of my connections even know who Wil Wheaton is.