Chapter 1 – Making Time
Bentley's Lab, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 10:45pm 25th March 2013.
Another day of hard work down, and another night of hard work begins without time for transition. Every day seemed to be like this for the duo of Bentley and Penelope as they worked tirelessly to finish their secret project, a time machine. It was almost complete, they were both more concerned about who should test it if anyone at all. They didn't want either of their lives to end prematurely as they were transported through space and time without knowing where they had gone or indeed if they had gone anywhere at all and had not simply been vaporized in a single visceral instant. It's not that they didn't have confidence in their new machine, they were two of the most brilliant minds on the planet that no one in the public knew of, but time travel had never been done before and that in itself is scary.
It sat like a fountain in a courtyard, prominently in the middle of the main area so that they could see how it rose from the ground and turned into this large box with a multitude of dials and readings on the side giving the approximate date, time and place of where and when the transported item was meant to go. The machine was big enough to fit a person inside, just one at a time though with it's polycarbonate semi circular window that created a tubular space inside that backed onto a huge array of sensors and scanners concealed behind a steel plate also bent into a curve to make the interior consistently cylindrical. The main problem with building a time machine is the required computing power it needs to scan every single atom inside the chamber, it wouldn't be good if only parts of someone were transported, leaving someone dead and the ground messy. Therefore, a powerful but reasonably compact supercomputer was built to count and remember every single cell and it's exact position so it could be all transported without distortion. A normal computer could be used but it would weeks to do tiny objects like a pea, but this is no normal computer of course.
In fact, the main problem was much more basic than that and it was something that Bentley and Penelope with their collective genius could not figure out an alternative to. This machine needed an object from the time and place where the object was going to be transported to in order for it to locate the correct time and place. It meant that the choice of destinations was dependent on what they had and could not chose their destination at will, which frustrated Bentley greatly. Having something out of his control made him feel less secure about it's use, knowing that they needed a present day object to always get back to the right time and other objects so that they could go to certain times, most of which were already figured out. They wanted to just go 5 minutes back at first to make sure that nothing went wrong and they could test the various paradoxes and rules associated with time travel so they could set some sort of rules.
"Just tell me why we can't use carbon-14 again?" Penelope asks Bentley as she installs more processors onto the machine.
"Because it only gives us the time and not the place of the object. It could put us kilometres underground, trapped in an oil deposit or molten lava." Bentley rebuts as he writes more code for the time machine.
"I'm sure if we pursued this idea, we could figure it out." Penelope optimistically says.
"I just don't see it happening." Bentley argues.
"Theoretically, we just have to figure out why the place of an object actually matters in where the machine goes." Penelope thinks out loud.
"We've already talked about this and this is the only way I can see this happening successfully and without failure or worse..." Bentley explains, imagining himself at the end being stranded somewhere remote and barren with no computer or internet in sight. "…Is that we stick with this method, I know it's not ideally what I want, but It'll have to do for now."
"I don't suppose you have a scanning tunneling microscope somewhere around here." Penelope jokingly asks.
"You and I know perfectly well that we can't fit one in the space we have. If we extend it out it's possible." Bentley wonders.
"Perfect, It might be a bit noisy for the next few days but it'll be worth it." Penelope says as she walks off from the machine after putting in the last memory board for the night.
"Are you done already?" Bentley asks.
"It's not hard once you do a lot of them." Penelope replies.
"Economies of scale." Bentley mutters to himself. "Well, goodnight."
"Same for you if you actually go to sleep." Penelope says, almost out of sight.
"I don't need sleep, I need answers; theories; possibilities and solutions." Bentley explains as he deletes a line of code.
"Whatever you say." Penelope says as she leaves the room and into her personal quarters. They may be in love and very close to each other, but they are not the type to get intimate. It is more of a working relationship than a personal relationship but no one would tell them that, it's as close to love as either of them had ever felt before. Penelope shuts the door on her room and opens up a laptop on a small desk that's littered with papers and other trinkets that should have been thrown away but yet can't be let go. She wouldn't let go of any of her ACES memorabilia, including the many trophies and pennants and posters of herself disguised as the once infamous Black Baron; all of that is adorned all over the room where there is space to do so. She looks up a manufacturer of her desired new toy and promptly orders one for a large sum of money, an amount of money that would make 3rd world countries feel appalled. The delivery is what surprised her most, they can get one in next morning, it's way too good to be true, but when one shells out millions on a high tech quantum microscope, once could expect such expedient delivery.