Trans-Temporter by Christopher M Robinson - HTML preview

Preface

What went wrong? Were they really naïve enough to think that science could provide solutions for conflict rather than confrontation?

“Survival of the fittest,” they call it and it’s all perfectly natural. Every living species is in competition with every other living species. Within each species, there is competition to be the dominant member. We kid ourselves we are civilised and beyond all that, but in reality mankind is amongst the worst species and every human achievement and invention has been utilised to demonstrate that dominance.

We may think we co-exist happily most of the time with the eight billion or so other members of the human race but we are always playing “one-upmanship.” We may delight in showing off or trying to impress in front of our mates or new acquaintances as to who is the cleverest, strongest, wealthiest, best dressed, or so on. All life is competition. We are not all equal.

In reality, all our achievements come at a cost.

And man is arrogant.

We thought we could tame nature; we thought we could use the Earth’s resources to make our lives better but everything we have ever done has only brought destruction. We may not have seen it at the time but with the beauty of hindsight, we see what damage we did with our inventions: how the industrial revolution was the exacerbation of climate disasters for instance.

40 years ago, a new machine was invented that could send things to the future. The inventors determined it would not be used for conflict but that peaceful uses would be found to help mankind. They formed international alliances under the bold title, ‘Swan Science Solutions’, aiming to use science for the betterment of mankind but, of course, as history as always shown, we cannot fight nature. That competitiveness

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won out in the end and gradually those gods of war determined the new invention could be moulded to their purpose after all.

Yes, the Temporter has found its place in history for the good it has achieved and the importance of the international co-operation in those developments should not be overlooked, but as they said when they discovered atomic power, “The Genie is out of the bottle.” There is no going back and we must do our best to ensure it is used for good not evil.

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