Chronopunk: A novel (Episode 1)
If you went back in time, what knowledge would you gift the past to save the future?
Who controls the past now, controls the future. Who controls the present now , controls the past. (Quote: Rage Against the Machine)
Chapter 1
Now (2006)
His arms feel like bricks. He stretches. Groans. Stretches again.
“Why is it so hot here?”
He groans again, even louder. His joints ache.
“This feels like shit. The hell with the ‘small step, big step’ speech. Sorry, mankind.”
Mody crawls up a sandy beach under the scorching Mediterranean sun. It’s nearly 40 degrees Celsius. His thoughts drift.
"Why do they use Celsius here?"
He lets the question linger.
"Anders Celsius introduced the centigrade scale back in the mid-18th century… The Enlightenment! Ha, what an era!”
The stretching helps. Mody feels energy seeping back into his body. Now he’s excited, still lingering on Celsius and his iconic invention.
“People stopped fooling themselves and started searching for real answers. What a time!" He sighs.
"Celsius replaced an ancient, muddled system of measurement with something so strikingly simple—zero for when water freezes, one hundred for when it boils. So clean. So symmetrical. Symmetry, my friend. Yeah, symmetry, what a concept. What an idea!” He chuckles.
His moist palms feel like wet sandpaper as he softly moves them up and down his torso. He stretches again. Then he looks up at the blue sky. A burst of emotion shoots through his nervous system.
“Hey Anders, can you hear me? Thanks for starting this… this thing we call science. What an idea! What a concept—go look for truth, don’t listen to them. Find out for yourself. Drive a wedge of consciousness between human suffering and hope. Ask questions. Demand answers.”
Mody’s eyes tear up as he looks across the turquoise postcard Mediterranean Sea behind him.
“And here I am, just three centuries later, journeying through time on the other end of a trip for the ages. What a marvel of technology! All thanks to science! Thanks, Anders, and all your fellow scientists for making this possible. Now it’s my job to preserve it. That’s why they sent me here.”
Chapter 2
Mody’s training was grueling—six months of intense physical and mental preparation for the first intergenerational journey through time, followed by an additional three months of mission fine-tuning. And then, finally, Lisa Chu, his boss and longtime lover, had given the green light for the mission.
Lisa discovered Mody while he was still in grad school at the University of New South Wales, where they both worked under Professor Mongarthy. Mongarthy’s groundbreaking work in solving the dark matter puzzle with time symmetry earned him the Nobel Prize in 2054. Lisa, a postdoc at the time, made significant contributions to merging the Schrödinger equation with Mongarthy’s time symmetry conjecture. After leaving academia, Lisa worked with several startups before joining SpaceX as head of the newly formed time travel division. It was there that she recruited Mody for a special operations team while he was working on his PhD. They later left SpaceX for a covert project funded by the Department of Defense, a project they were still working on.
Chapter 3
Now (2061)
Somewhere deep in the Colorado Mountains, Lisa and her crew sit in the control room, monitoring every data point Mody’s Neuralink is sending back to them. The moment has finally come. Mody is launched. His journey back to 2006 marks the first intergenerational time travel of a human. It’s 2061, and time travel has been around for a while. Just two years after Mongarthy won the Nobel Prize, a startup out of Prague rolled out the first commercial time travel service, named Chronoport. Its success launched a whole industry, which led to time travel mania on Wall Street. Numerous startups emulated Chronoport, which eventually led to what Wall Street dubbed the “Chronobubble.” Eventually, the bubble burst, and the industry consolidated. One major factor which, according to Wall Street analysts, led to the demise of many startups is the crucial limitation that time travel has been restricted to one generation only. Customers can only go back to visit their own past, but no further. Journeying back more than one generation has not been possible. Mongarthy’s time symmetry conjecture provided a general solution by addressing the probabilistic outcomes of conception. However, integrating Mongarthy’s time symmetry conjecture into the high-dimensional space of the multiverse turned out to be a tough scientific nut to crack. It took several years until Mongarthy and his graduate students, Lisa among them, found a practical solution to the problem. Lisa succinctly described the issue in one of her TED talks:
“We know how to send people back to their own past, like sending a thirty-year-old man back to his teenage years. However, we’ve been struggling to send him further back to his grandfather’s time. The challenge isn’t getting him there; it’s returning him to today. This difficulty arises because we haven’t fully solved some crucial problems around how birth affects time symmetry. In short, we didn’t understand birth back then. More research was needed to comprehend how conception works so we could reverse the process. Think of it like unscrambling an egg. Thanks to Professor Mongarthy’s groundbreaking work, we might actually have a solution for this complex problem. Mongarthy has taught us not just how to unscramble an egg but more precisely how to reconstruct the intricacy of birth. It’s not only about the chemical process of sperm fertilizing an egg. It’s the entire cascade of events leading up to that moment: the initial attraction between individuals, their sexual desires culminating in the act of conception. In short, it’s about understanding the myriad emotional and biochemical processes that transform a fleeting glimpse of attraction into a human fetus. Mongarthy’s work has given us a framework to model and potentially reverse this complex sequence of events.”
Once the project got out of stealth mode, Chief Technology Officer, Dungart Prespiton, gave a press conference outlining the algorithm designed to address the intergenerational time symmetry problem. As Prespiton explained,
"We know how to send you back in time to visit your grandma. However, we can’t guarantee your return to the present, or more precisely, to the exact region of the multiverse where you began."
One significant condition mentioned by Prespiton is that the individual traveling must not have siblings. Siblings complicate the process considerably.
“We believe we’ve found a solution for single-child scenarios,” Prespiton added.
“Unfortunately, this applies to all generations. In other words, if you wish to visit your great-great-great-grandmother, none of her descendants could have siblings. This limits our options.”
Mody checked all these boxes. Beyond attracting Lisa since they met and serving as her intellectual muse and lover, he was a former MMA fighter with a PhD in cosmology.
"Which multiverse do you come from?" Lisa teased after their first night together. "You’re perfect for our project."
"What project?" Mody asked.
"Can’t say yet," she replied, "but maybe soon."
After clearing it with her chain of command, a few weeks and several passionate nights later, they sat in a barren conference room on an Army base in Colorado, where Mody was introduced to the intergenerational time travel project.
According to General Douglas, the project’s lead, “This is bigger than the Manhattan Project.”
Mody, however, wasn’t particularly impressed.
“You want me to go back in time? Plenty of people already do that. Isn’t it basically the new Disneyland—taking kids to see their young grandma? I remember the Chronobubble; isn’t that old news now?”
“Yes,” Lisa said, “but here’s the catch: you can’t visit your young grandma. The chronoindustry limits time travel to your own past—like your teenage years—one generation only. A Chronoport trip lets you revisit that, nothing more.”
“Intergenerational time travel is far more complex,” General Douglas continued.
“We’ve been tackling it for decades, and Sergeant Chu’s team seems to have cracked the code.”
When Douglas glanced at Lisa, her sharp black glasses accentuated her allure, making her even more irresistible. Mody struggled to suppress his sensual biochemistry, aware that Lisa likely knew her effect on him—which only deepened his discomfort.
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