to a white door with a light purple frame.
Subtle snorting and laughter find their way to his ears: the kind that should be, but never is, reserved until the subject completely leaves the room.
He shuts the door behind him and turns the lock on the handle. He rattles the handle testing the lock, and it wobbles but refuses to turn. Snickering from the other room follows the handle jiggling.
The bathroom is definitely one decorated and used by women. The light purple toilet seat cover perfectly matches the shade of the soap dispenser, the tissue box cover, the hand towel hanging on the wall near the sink, and the curtain-like material that wraps around the front of the vanity. Framed pictures also speckle the walls, but he has no time or interest to pay them any mind.
Sliding the device out of his pants pocket, his thumb nervously presses on its power button.
Nothing happens.
He tries again. Just a dim reflective screen that shows the fear on his face. It had just worked the night before. It’s been a reliable device since he finished it. Panic begins to raise his heartbeat.
Then he remembers his tinkering with the fire alarm. Diving his hand into his pocket, he hopes it is still there, and his fingers slide over its smooth metallic surface. With familiar speed, he pops open the battery compartment and snaps the battery in place.
Sliding his finger over the power button again, the screen illuminates, and so does his spirit.
His machine was designed for speed, but the brief moment that it takes to load its operating system is presently an unbearable wait.
At the sight of the welcome screen, his fingers start dancing along, diving from one folder into another, racing down the path to the image that he needs to see. Finally, it is before him, answering an unsolvable problem to physicists.
The image is the same as the night before, different than the printed paper he dropped atop the sink countertop.
He had theorized that the picture in the device would be the same; he believed it would be, but he had never tested it. No one has ever had any way of testing it before now.
Theorists had nearly universally claimed that if one managed to go back in time that care would be needed to prevent erasing one’s own existence. For example, they claimed that going back in time and killing one’s father would eliminate one’s own birth years later, leading to the disappearance of one in the past time since one would then never exist in the future to journey there in the first place.
It seems to be a logical assumption, but Chester’s always known it to be wrong.
A could buy a stick of dynamite in his youth, keep it for twenty years, and go back in time nineteen years bringing the stick of dynamite along with him. At this point, there would be two sticks of dynamite, the one that exists one year after buying it, and one that he brought back with him from twenty years in the future. Both of the sticks could be placed right next to each other.
If he lights the dynamite stick from the future, it can blow up itself and the stick from the past sitting just beside it. There is nothing to stop both sticks of dynamite from exploding, no mystical force to maintain continuity. According to the theorists, the future stick could not exist without the past stick still existing. For the paradox to hold up, the stick from the future should not be able to blow up the stick from the past because the future stick couldn’t exist without the past stick lasting nineteen more years and then surviving a trip to the past to meet itself.
Chester knew that either the universe would have to magically break rules of physics in preventing the dynamite from exploding both itself and its past counterpart, or the paradox is a lie.
A time traveler could go back in time, kill her parents before her own birth, and still exist. She would not spontaneously fade away. If she went back as a witness only, she could watch her past self be born, and then two
Subtle snorting and laughter find their way to his ears: the kind that should be, but never is, reserved until the subject completely leaves the room.
He shuts the door behind him and turns the lock on the handle. He rattles the handle testing the lock, and it wobbles but refuses to turn. Snickering from the other room follows the handle jiggling.
The bathroom is definitely one decorated and used by women. The light purple toilet seat cover perfectly matches the shade of the soap dispenser, the tissue box cover, the hand towel hanging on the wall near the sink, and the curtain-like material that wraps around the front of the vanity. Framed pictures also speckle the walls, but he has no time or interest to pay them any mind.
Sliding the device out of his pants pocket, his thumb nervously presses on its power button.
Nothing happens.
He tries again. Just a dim reflective screen that shows the fear on his face. It had just worked the night before. It’s been a reliable device since he finished it. Panic begins to raise his heartbeat.
Then he remembers his tinkering with the fire alarm. Diving his hand into his pocket, he hopes it is still there, and his fingers slide over its smooth metallic surface. With familiar speed, he pops open the battery compartment and snaps the battery in place.
Sliding his finger over the power button again, the screen illuminates, and so does his spirit.
His machine was designed for speed, but the brief moment that it takes to load its operating system is presently an unbearable wait.
At the sight of the welcome screen, his fingers start dancing along, diving from one folder into another, racing down the path to the image that he needs to see. Finally, it is before him, answering an unsolvable problem to physicists.
The image is the same as the night before, different than the printed paper he dropped atop the sink countertop.
He had theorized that the picture in the device would be the same; he believed it would be, but he had never tested it. No one has ever had any way of testing it before now.
Theorists had nearly universally claimed that if one managed to go back in time that care would be needed to prevent erasing one’s own existence. For example, they claimed that going back in time and killing one’s father would eliminate one’s own birth years later, leading to the disappearance of one in the past time since one would then never exist in the future to journey there in the first place.
It seems to be a logical assumption, but Chester’s always known it to be wrong.
A could buy a stick of dynamite in his youth, keep it for twenty years, and go back in time nineteen years bringing the stick of dynamite along with him. At this point, there would be two sticks of dynamite, the one that exists one year after buying it, and one that he brought back with him from twenty years in the future. Both of the sticks could be placed right next to each other.
If he lights the dynamite stick from the future, it can blow up itself and the stick from the past sitting just beside it. There is nothing to stop both sticks of dynamite from exploding, no mystical force to maintain continuity. According to the theorists, the future stick could not exist without the past stick still existing. For the paradox to hold up, the stick from the future should not be able to blow up the stick from the past because the future stick couldn’t exist without the past stick lasting nineteen more years and then surviving a trip to the past to meet itself.
Chester knew that either the universe would have to magically break rules of physics in preventing the dynamite from exploding both itself and its past counterpart, or the paradox is a lie.
A time traveler could go back in time, kill her parents before her own birth, and still exist. She would not spontaneously fade away. If she went back as a witness only, she could watch her past self be born, and then two
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