Time Travel. A History

To the people of the future, the denizens of the past can be employed as “polts” (from poltergeist—“ghosts that move things, I suppose”). Money can be sent or created (win lotteries, manipulate the stock market). Finance has become virtual, after all. Corporations are shells, built of documents and bank accounts. It’s outsourcing in a new dimension. Does the manipulation of people across time create headaches? “Far less than the sort of paradox we’re accustomed to culturally, in discussing imaginary transtemporal affairs. It’s actually quite simple.” After all, we know about time forks. We are aficionados of branching universes. “The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them.”

Not that paradoxes are unknown. At one point a future law-enforcement agent called Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer explains to an avatar—exoskeleton, homunculus, peripheral—inhabited by Flynne, “I’m told that arranging your death would in no way constitute a crime here, as you are, according to current best legal opinion, not considered to be real.” Nanobots are real. Cosplay is real. Drones are real. Futurity is done.

—

WHY DO WE NEED time travel? All the answers come down to one. To elude death.

Time is a killer. Everyone knows that. Time will bury us. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. Time makes dust of all things. Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good.

How aptly named, the time beyond death: the Hereafter. The past, in which we did not exist, is bearable, but the future, in which we will not exist, troubles us more. I know that in the vast expanse of space I am an infinitesimal mote—fine. But confinement to an eyeblink of time, an instant never to return, is harder to accept. Of course, before inventing time travel, human cultures found other ways to soften the unpleasantness. One may believe in the soul’s immortality, in cycles of transmigration and reincarnation, in a paradisical afterlife. The time capsulists, too, are preparing transport to the afterlife. Science provides cold comfort—as Nabokov says, “problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space—and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.”^*7 Time travel at least sets our imaginations free.

Intimations of immortality. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for. What is the fate of Wells’s Time Traveller? For his friends he is gone but perhaps not dead. “He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age.” Entropy can be held off only here and there, now and then. Every life lapses into oblivion. Time and the bell have buried the day. Einstein was explicit about seeking solace in the spacetime view (“Now he has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing”), and so likewise is Kurt Vonnegut’s narrator in Slaughterhouse-Five:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral….It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.

Some comfort there. You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation. If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror. There is your immortality. Frozen in amber.

For me the price of denying death in this way is denying life. Dive back into the flux. Turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing.

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms