Miles stopped dead-cold under the entranceway of their university’s dilapidated concession hall, dumbfounded. They had consent to use it for a physics experiment, but this looked like someone threw a grenade into a lab at MIT.
“Miles! Christ, man, could you have taken any longer?”
Cables, tubing, and exposed copper wire snaked in every direction; even up. Ping pong tables were lashed together, shouldering myriad chemical lasers, optics, and prisms. Tanks of liquid nitrogen seemed to be keeping the electronic’s temperature at bay—hell, the murky atmosphere in this old hall seemed as if it was already standing on the edge of the sun’s corona. Huddled in between this bewildering mess were hundreds of servo-controlled, rectangular parabolic mirrors. The air smelled of ozone.
[spoiler]All were tracking and focusing the summer’s sunlight, which blazed through the hall’s leaded glass, onto a metal plated sphere; its conductive petals flowering out toward a dish that hovered above. This metal tree-like fixture was entwined by thick cables, like vines. It was Miles’s design, he worked out the amount of time needed to accumulate enough of the sun’s energy to build up enough charge to send, at most, 100 kilograms of mass backward in time by at least four hours; five if they were lucky.
So, while Miles was visiting home, Tristan had put it all together—without him.
The metal sphere was essentially a time-bomb. It was capable of retaining the equivalent amount of energy released by Little Boy over Hiroshima; so long as the coolant held. The trick was unleashing it within a few picoseconds into a gamma-ray burst the thickness of a needle aimed toward a tiny quantum-entangled plate, no bigger than the size of a fly’s dick.
“Miles!” Tristan yelled.
Miles’s gaze switched from his bemused fixation on the surroundings to his colleague, who was not only yelling something, but seemed to be holding a limp body in his arms. The blazer of the body matched his own. So did his hair. Also his face.
The body was full of blood and badly burned. Miles’s head began to redden with blood as well. Rage. Confusion. Fear.
“I don’t–”
“Shut up, and careful where you step! We have a fucking situation here; I need you to look at me, Miles. Look me in the eyes, and focus on what I’m about to tell you.”
Miles’s gaze drifted again. He was beginning to swoon.
“Miles! My eyes! Tell me you’re with me!”
His eyes snapped back onto Tristan’s. Tunnel vision seemed to crystalize his focus. They were both geniuses in their own way, and each had a way of keeping the other in check—Tristan, impulsive yet brazen; Miles, focused like a laser, yet antisocial and prone to anxiety. Yet, each brought the best out of the other, and with little more than an hour before the inevitable, the only one who can save both their lives today, was the recently departed.
“I—I’m with you.”
Tristan took in a breath and began to explain.
“I need to talk fast, there’s only so much time.” Tristan’s eyes flicked over to a monitor that displayed an ominous countdown clock. Miles’s eyes followed over to the display and saw the red countdown pealing backwards, reading ‘01hrs:18min:05sec:08hths.’
“This morning, I fired it up; a simple systems check, and I swear to you, it wasn’t on for more than fifteen-seconds when you—shit, man—You just appeared in the cage.”
“How? How did this happen? I can’t wrap my head around it!”
“Miles, I know. I know. It was stupid, but we’re gonna have to curb our emotions right now. I’m exhausted, and what can I tell you other than, for some reason, at 3:11 PM later this afternoon, you step into that cage, and arrive earlier this morning at 11:27 AM? You collapsed, right here. Blood just started coming out of your ears and nose and—you were coughing up so much blood—”
Tristan was whimpering. He looked back down at future-Miles’s lifeless body, and remembered something. He collected his thoughts.
“You were able to tell me something before you died.”
“What? What did I say?”
Tristan sighed, “You said, ‘Make sure I still go through.’”
“No. No way! How could I say that?”
“Miles—”
“No, we need to power this down. Can’t we just power it down?”
“No, Miles, we can’t.”
“Why not? I’ll just pull the mainline on the Chevrefoil Sphere.”
“If we power down, we loose the entanglement. You, of all people, know the math. See for yourself, it’s been continually tracking the Riemann geodesics along complex-spacetime. We sever that, and there’s no chance to salvage this outcome.”
“Jesus. I didn’t say anything else?”
“Um—yes, but Miles, you were—delirious.”
“Tell me.”
“It was, well—you called me ‘honey.’ ‘Make sure I still go through, honey.’ That’s what you said, verbatim. It was kind of sweet, really, but like I said, your brain was fried, man. Maybe you were thinking of Marie.
Miles looked to the ceiling in helpless exasperation, shaking his head “I don’t call her ‘honey.’” Tristan just shrugged and despite the awkward turn, his face couldn’t look any more serious.
“How 'bout, I just won’t go into the cage?”
“But, you do go into the cage. Here you are.” Miles couldn’t help but look into his own lifeless eyes.
“That’s fatalism.”
“You know the math.”
Of course he did. It was Miles’s own brilliant breakthrough, using the field equations of the New Physics, that moved his beautiful theory into an experimental reality. The Nobel Prize seemed inevitable, although now that was uncertain; the Nobel Prize isn’t awarded posthumously, inventing time-travel or not.
Miles distantly recalled the bleak prediction, “It becomes a quantum-paradox. If I don’t go through, the paradox will accelerate every atom which is supposed to traverse beyond my past light-cone to the speed of light. All the matter that makes up—me—will collapse into a micro-black hole and evaporate in an instant.”
“Miles. I have a plan.”
“One that involves me going through? To only meet this fate!” He pointed at his burned corpse.
“There are coefficients we can fudge! The energies were too high. Yes, you need to still go through, but we—you—can fix this!”
“I’d have to know dozens of variables, let alone how many terajoules we used! How can I possibly compensate for something that we haven’t even done yet?”
"Those,” Tristan shifted his head toward the mirrors. Miles looked at them, all silently whirring, sitting like unhatched eggs ready to birth their potential. He understood what Tristan was getting at; you tend to develop a shorthand when working with a good partner.
Simple extrapolation. If Tristan kept accurate logs of the energy the mirror-arrays had been building up over the last two weeks, working out the projection would almost be trivial.
“How tight is your array data?”
“Hey, what kind of physicist would I be if I did run a tight ship?”
“Let’s not get carried away, you couldn’t balance a checkbook.”
“Who uses a checkbook anymore? That’s why we have computers—the logs are on terminal two,” he motioned in the direction of a computer at the end of the hall.
Miles gingerly traversed the labyrinth of cables and mirrors, making his way to the terminal, as if crossing a turbulent river, hopping from one slippery stone to another to make it across. His toe caught on two ends of frayed copper wire. It connected briefly with another exposed lead nearby, and a blue-white spark zapped across Miles’s Converse shoe. Tristan let out a tiny yelp, but all seemed fine.
Miles plopped into the computer chair with a heavy sigh. Sloppy.
He pressed the spacebar, killing the screensaver, and a login screen appeared.
“Uh—password?”
“‘Honeysuckle.’ All lowercase, zero for the ‘o,’ a one for the ‘l’.”
“‘Honeysuckle?’ Shit, Tristan—‘honey.’”
Tristan stared blankly; it didn’t click with him. Miles sighed again.
“I wasn’t calling you ‘honey,’ dipshit. I was referring to Chevrefoil!”
“Well, you were pretty incapacitated. You mean the Sphere?”
“Christ, man, not the Sphere,” they both looked up at the apparatus that was the locus of this entire fiasco. “If I know myself, and I think I do, I was referring to Chevrefoil. Medieval French Poetry. It’s French for—”
“Yeah, I know what it’s French for, Einstein. I’m the one who came up with the name.” He came up with “Chevrefoil Sphere,” because of its honeysuckle-like appearance. That, and it just sounded cool.
Miles recalled the 12th century lai; a romantic, lyrical rhyme of love, passion and fairy-tales. It tells of an adulterous love-triangle between a King, his wife the Queen, and the King’s beloved nephew, a Knight. The story, however, alludes to a cyclical and indefinitely repeating nature of romantic passion versus the cold, harsh nature working against it all: Reality.
That’s when it all clicked into place: The centerpiece of the poem is how the Knight is able to overcome his exile and redeem their love and make peace with his Uncle. She would be en route to a festival, so the Knight hacked off a branch of hazel, entwined with honeysuckle, and carved notches, crafting a wooden flute only she would recognize; she was familiar with his craft. The song would draw them together.
The stick became more than a signal. A symbol of their love; their lives. The carved notches formed a tally; some equation the future added up saving both their lives that day.
Miles turned away from the monitor filled with array data.
Tristan was expecting good news. “Well?”
“It’s absolute shit. Totally unusable.”
Honeysuckle inseparable from a hazel tree lest they both perish. A symbol. A tally.
He looked at his arm, then back over to Tristan.
“Bullshit. Why are you smiling?”
“Look at my arm.”
He squinted in confusion toward Miles’s left arm, as he was rolling up the cuff on his blazer.
“No, dipshit, his arm.” Tristan looked at the blood-smeared forearm of the corpse. Just past the rolled cuff, he spotted tally marks scrawled on his forearm in red Sharpie marker.
Four red lines with a diagonal slash striking through, and one more line beside it.
Realization dawned on Tristan’s face, his revelation almost lightened the room.
“We’ve done this six times? Six times!” As Tristan was taking it in, Miles wore a knowing smile. He looked down at a red Sharpie there on the desk. Beside it was an old pad of yellow sticky notes.
“Check my pocket.” Miles was pointing to his shirt pocket, peeking out behind his blazer.
Tristan, still wide-eyed, reached in and pulled out a folded sticky. Scrawled on it were several equations which read like divine music. They now had the data to make a seventh jump—or more.
Miles drew not six, but seven red tally marks on his arm. To Tristan’s amazement, the first six markings were perfectly identical to those on the corpse. “This has all happened before,” said Miles.
• • •
He tucked away the sticky note with all the information they’ll use on this seventh attempt and entered the Faraday cage.
“I have to admit, you’ve got some mighty balls.”
“Made of brass, they are.”
“Hell, tungsten carbide if you ask me.” Tristan pulled the cage door shut, latching it. The countdown read, ‘00hrs:00mins:22sec:73hths.’
“Miles—I’ll see you in the morning,” and with that, Tristan Gotelef, Ph.D, tapped the ‘enter’ key on terminal two. In mere picoseconds, future-Miles’s corpse collapsed into a singularity. To Tristan, it seemed he simply vanished—both of them—in a brilliant flash of heat and light.
• • •
When Tristan looked away from the cage, he swung around to see Miles smiling under the main entrance—there were eleven red tally marks on his forearm. Tristan was speechless.
“Happy to see me—honey?”[/spoiler]
