Trans-Temporter by Christopher M Robinson - HTML preview

Chapter 2

Temporter

It had taken years of experiments and development but my Aunt Lei had helped develop a time machine which they call the Temporter. They learned the hard way that it could be quite dangerous with some accidents along the way. Indeed its inventor had lost his life in one of the accidents.

Its utility was limited in that it could only send to the future not the past although one of the accidents did show the possibility of retrieving objects from the future that had previously been sent there. Those ‘objects’ included my Aunt Lei, to date the only human being who has travelled back in time, though that sounds much more dramatic than it actually was, as you will know if you’ve read my Uncle Mike’s accounts. The one major concern is that the same object cannot occupy the same space as its future or past self or it would cause a catastrophic annihilation like mixing matter and anti-matter. Although it is still thought the accident that caused Dr Petrovitch’s death was from a monumental electrical build-up in a capacitor array, it is still conceivable it may actually have been one of those matter and anti-matter reactions.

So the temporter needs to be handled extremely carefully. This may explain the reluctance to experiment too much further though Auntie Lei realised a possible use with the Hospital Stasis Units she developed using a Temporter that is limited to sending patients just one month into the future to a pre-determined date and time. These were made possible by the Russian invention of a smaller, lighter power source enabling units to be provided to hospitals rather than requiring the constant two way flow of helicopters to and from Lesser Heath.

The HSU’s provided to hospitals included an automated weight control function whereby the mass of the contents, patient and any extra equipment etcetera, determined the amount of electric charge required, whilst also indicating if enough power was available, which it normally would be. Auntie Lei’s teleportation ten years into the future had been the

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absolute maximum at just 60 kilograms so in theory a mass of just over 7 tonnes should be temportable for a month but it would require a massive charge accumulated over at least a week before hand.

HSUs are extremely useful on various levels. It basically means a patient can be held in a state of suspended animation for a period of time, leaving the temporter box a month later as if they had just entered it. This enables teams of surgeons to develop treatment plans for newly diagnosed or deteriorating patients without them getting worse, or even dying, in the meantime. Similarly, undiagnosed patients on a waiting list can also enter stasis to prevent deterioration.

The problem was determining the length of time. A month had seemed like an adequate compromise but it was possible a patient would need to be held longer. The first major development of the HSUs was the addition of a repeat button. If it was obvious the patient would need to be held for longer than one month, before the time had elapsed, initiating the repeat function would automatically resend the patient for another month as soon as the first month finished. Instead of ‘reappearing’ at one month, they would simply reappear at two. Of course this ‘stepping stone’ approach would need sufficient electrical charge to be available to do a repeat time hop.

But what if a patient had been sent too far ahead? Perhaps a transplant organ had become available or something? My dad had said it was not possible to interrupt a time setting once a patient had been despatched into the future. However, reading Uncle Mike’s notes, raised a question in my mind which led to my asking questions a few years ago.

“What about the Valentine’s day accident?” I had enquired.

Uncle Mike had hastened to say it wasn’t an accident as such just a miscommunication. He hadn’t put any sign to say the temporter was in use when he had put flowers in to magically arrive for his fiancée and when Auntie Lei had put the chocolates in to send, it had called the flowers back.

“Exactly,” I said, warming to my hypothesis. “So sending a second object effectively stopped the first temport early?”

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That’s when Uncle Mike called me a genius. He had always praised me whenever I did well in anything but seldom had he used this term. He went on to say, following the catastrophic accident, they had been very wary of attempting further recoveries from the future as they had been so careful to avoid any possible matter and anti-matter interactions.

“But,” I said, “in your very first experiments, didn’t you actually send a laser light beam? If that was the second object sent to retrieve an earlier one, there would be no possibility of it meeting itself at a different point in time?”

“My ‘LASTT’ acronym,” he said. “You Looked and Asked questions and have Suggested something we need to Try.”

Uncle Mike, Auntie Lei, dad and I had discussed possibilities.

Without getting into the whole particulate nature of light discussion, which probably dad would understand the most of the four of us. We queried if a miniature particle could actually ‘arrest’ the temportation of a large mass? Earlier experiments following the ‘Valentine’s Day’ finding suggested that what actually happens is the sent object arrives at its temporal destination but is sent back instantly to the newer destination at the earlier time. Could sending a small object to terminate a temportation by bringing it back from the future actually cause the problems we had compared to matter and anti-matter interactions and to which we had now given the term ‘Dual Existence Conflict’ or DEC.

“Can a DEC occur even with microscopic particles?” I asked. “If so, could that explain the explosion when Auntie Lei returned from the future?” I had no hesitation asking many questions as I had always been encouraged to.

“Ben,” Lei chided. “You’re eighteen now. You don’t need to refer to us as Uncle and Aunt any more. I’m Lei and your uncle is Mike. However, in regard to your question, I think it’s unlikely. I was naked when I departed and wearing a smock that had not previously existed when I returned. It could only have triggered a DEC event if any of it had previously existed in the same space and time.”

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“But that would have affected your return; the explosion was on your departure,” countered Mike. “So, if it had been a DEC event, it would have been that something that was retrieved at your despatch was already existing in the same location. The only object that was retrieved, as far as we know, was the robotic carrier with the electronic tablet but if it had rolled into the space where it already existed, it would have been completely destroyed. Furthermore, the centre of the explosion was the other side of the lab at the capacitor store so your aunt’s right. I’m sure that the explosion was due to the causes the fire inspectors suggested: it was a catastrophic build up of electric charge that blew the capacitors apart and started a fire. But it doesn’t mean we can’t take the possibility of DEC events seriously though.”

My dad was pondering the other query.

“It’s likely the bigger the mass involved in a DEC event, the greater would be the explosion caused,” he said. “If it was a microscopic particle, the DEC event would probably result in no more than a quick flash like a spark, though that could possibly ignite something flammable, just like a gas lighter.”

“How close does an object have to be to itself for a DEC event to occur?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” replied my dad, “but in theory it relates to the size of the particle. So a microscopic particle would absolutely have to co-exist with itself in exactly the same geometric space whereas a larger object may interact a few metres away. Obviously that’s just theoretical; we haven’t conducted experiments to find out.”

So we were back to experimenting again.

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