It is a frustrating truth that, despite the vast forces at work in the universe, it has only been possible up to now to capture enough of it in one go to power an electric hat.

This poses more problems than you might imagine. Despite the proliferation of tiny gadgets that require microscopic amounts of energy to ruin your day by telling you the wrong time, losing your messages and randomly directing your vehicle over the nearest cliff, anything really useful that a new species needs to do can only be achieved by burning vast quantities of fossilized trees.

Once the fundamental particles of nature had been smashed to bits and reassembled into an approximation of order based on colour, flavour, shoe size and political inclination the attentions of bored scientists turned to other ways of poking the universe until lumps of it snapped off and floated away.

The Calcularium of Vork, an austere body that only probed the fabric of reality until it bent slightly, had long been responsible for setting the scientific agenda. As it also handed out the annual prizes for achievement in every field, the academic community waited nervously for an announcement while they edited their acceptance speeches.

Eventually Happlawow, a Calcularium spokesbeing, appeared on a high balcony and waved the massed ranks of scientists into silence. After the essential pleasantries were dispensed with (a list of magnificent achievements, a longer list of the explosively deceased) she finally got to the point. The new subject of galactic, collaborative scientific endeavour was to be time travel. The crowds broke ranks and ran for it. Here was the new challenge and awards and glory were at stake. It was every being for themselves.

The mechanisms of time travel were quickly discovered (relaxing space-time by beaming neutrinos through an enormous vat of fabric softener) and soon scientists were publishing papers and being incredibly careful not to wipe out history.

Ob Gella-numfarbe, a leader in the field, having perfected his machine, decided to see how far back in time he could go. He managed, one-hundred and twenty-three years, five months, seven days, eleven hours and thirteen seconds, (measured in local time) and arrived just in time to watch his own Ha-grak-tna (a manhood ceremony involving a long, complicated speech about the nature of money and how to be frugal with it and a secret oath involving walnuts).

The process used all the energy in his lab and blacked out most of the neighbourhood. After he apologised to his mother and replaced all the fuses he went back down to the basement and tried again. After several months he'd rebuilt the system with bigger batteries, a bigger generator and much cleverer mathematics and pulled the lever. His improvements took him back to exactly the same moment. All the extra power had only extended his reach by the months he had taken to generate it.

The date Ob discovered was a fixed point in time that no-one could travel beyond. Every yearly exponential leap forward in the creation of energy was only enough to get the scientists back to exactly the same date no matter how hard they tried.

New and weirder methods were tried to break into the distant past involving the use of some particularly nasty explosives, the galaxy's largest ball of rubber bands and a wobbly planetoid built of high-quality fabric softener.

Despite these efforts all the scientists got to see was Ob eating a handful of nuts. This was not seen as helpful, productive or a fun afternoon out.

Decades later scientists pushed a neutron star into a close orbit around a red giant, surrounded them with a solid shell of energy converters, plugged the whole thing into the time device and then crashed the stars together. The resultant supernova was absorbed and channelled into the timefield. For a split second the portal opened and showed the small audience a small room and Ob's mother fussing over a plate of sandwiches.

The death of two stars had pushed the frontiers of time travel back an additional six minutes.

As the only way to create more energy is to collapse the universe itself the whole project was scrapped before someone stupid decided to actually try it.

Meanwhile Halpi Zemm, a clearer thinker with an eye for the practical, appeared on the scene with a machine that solved the problem with a watch battery and some common sense. All you need to travel anywhere in history are two time machines that create a timefield bigger than the machines themselves. Just turn one device on, push the second device through the portal and repeat the process, shuffling back at up to twenty years at a time. With a little fine tuning this device was reduced to the size of a packet of biscuits, put into a drawer for safe keeping and was lost forever.

This simplicity was the cause of much embarrassment, but at least it won Halpi a major award from the Calcularium, a big dinner with his jealous colleagues and lots of news articles that conveniently covered up the sudden disappearance of two perfectly useful stars.

Entry Ends.

The Lost Transmissions Archive

Tim Stevenson

30.01.12 Front Page

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