WABAC To the Future
Two.
I described the WABAC as a 'time machine', though that isn't totally correct. I had intended to build a device that could travel though time, however because of the way the universe is built it isn't quite that simple. Space-Time is composed of five dimensions, four of which are obvious to physicists and cosmologists. Einstein, Hawking, and a few others have described the equations that govern the relationship between matter, gravity, and energy. The universe is both infinite and finite. It has no bounds, yet it does have limits. The WABAC machine actually digs a wormhole though the fifth dimension to connect two points in space-time, and then it jumps into the resulting tunnel to almost instantaneously pop out on the other side.
I had the physics of the device fairly well designed in my head, but I couldn't come up with the means to power it. I did have a suitable energy source, but no engine to work against the space-time continuum, I needed a platform to stand on and a means of giving it a 'shove'. It was during a vacation trip to London that I was given a strange blueprint for a device that would do exactly what wanted. I was in a seedy pub somewhere near the rail station and I found myself pulled into a high stakes poker game between a group of well dressed gentlemen. One of them, dressed in a very brightly colored suit decorated with a pattern of question marks, put up the engineering documents as his grubstake to keep himself in the game. What he didn't know was that I was one card away from a royal flush, and he was bluffing his ass off. My luck held, and I won the pot, including the blueprints that I thought were worthless at the time. But I'm rambling ….
Anyway, besides being a travel device, the WABAC is a recording machine as well. Its virtually unlimited computer memory records every detail of its surroundings wherever and whenever it is. The machine can project a wormhole just wide enough to peek though without leaving its current location, so I can examine history without going back physically to the past if I so desire. Of course actually being there is much more rewarding than spying from a distance, but sometimes discretion has its virtues.
So there we were, Sherman and myself, trapped in a bubble of space-time, isolated from the chaos swirling about us. "How can I have destroyed the present by going into the future?" Sherman wailed.
"Are you sure you didn't go backwards in time at all?" I asked.
"Positive, why don't you look at the travel logs?" Sherman insisted.
"Good idea!" I replied. Since the WABAC keeps an accurate record of its travels I could easily reconstruct exactly what Sherman had done. I could also recall the world events leading up to the disaster since the WABAC is constantly observing and recording everything. Then by using the wormhole telescope to look back from our current position in the continuum, I could theoretically determine what what changed, just as Mr. Spock had done on the Star Trek "City on the Edge of Forever" episode.
It took me only a few minutes to program the WABAC's data base retrieval system and I quickly obtained the information we were looking for.
"See, that's where I was." Sherman replied, pointing to a futuristic looking complex of buildings. Though the signs were all written in Japanese Kanji, I was able to read them, "Institute of Science Complex", I noted.
"Yeah, they had lots of robots there." Sherman bragged. "I spend almost an entire day in the company of one who was a boy about my age."
I used the scan wheel on the WABAC's video processor to quickly scan through many hours of video until I came up with an image of Sherman and a boy about his size touring throughout the city. The boy was a robot wearing only a pair of red boots and a pair of dark briefs topped with a wide green band. He had brown eyes and dark hair with two large pointy cowlicks at the back of his head.
"That's him!" Sherman said. "His name was Atom, and he flew me all around the city."
"You didn't do anything that could have caused a paradox?" I asked.
"How, we didn't go backwards in time or anything?" Sherman said.
"Did anything unusual happen?" I asked.
"Well there was a report of a strange UFO appearing over the harbor. Atom wanted to go investigate, but as there were other robots heading towards the scene he elected to stay with me." Sherman replied.
"So you prevented him from investigating a UFO?" I asked.
"I guess so, is that important?" Sherman asked.
"I don't know, but for now that's all we have to go on." I replied. "Now let's see what, if anything, has changed in the time frame from a few days ago."
I ran a data scan for anything leading up to the nuclear attack on the city. The news report we had seen detailing the raid on the North Korean nuclear stockpile did not show up in a new wormhole scan I made. Neither did any mention of a Kim Young Lee. I then ran a side by side comparison check for data I'd gathered on the Vietnam area during a time travel visit Sherman and I had made for a history report he did on the Southeast Asia conflict.
Sure enough, the WABAC did have a record of a Ms. Lee escaping from a village in suspected Vietcong territory, and making her way to the US where she grew up in San Francisco. I ran a new scan and found no record of her, the village she came from had been totally destroyed in a bombing raid, and there were no survivors. Apparently this was the divergence between the time lines. Previously the village where the future CIA spy was born had been spared from a misguided attack by the USAF when a strange 'Angel of Death' had appeared in the skies over Vietnam destroying the attack force before they could reach the village. In the new time frame, the bombing mission was never diverted and Kim Young Lee died in the attack, she was not available to spy on the North Koreans, and the CIA never had advance warning of the nuclear danger. The 'Angel of Death' was absent.
I crossed my fingers and did yet another data scan. At one time the WABAC had made a visit to the Area 51 air force base at Groom Lake Nevada. Sherman and I had debunked the myth of Alien UFOs hiding on the base, though we barely got away with our visit. Hopefully the WABAC might have stolen some information from the USAF computers dealing with the Vietnam area. In fact, I lucked out. Buried in the petabytes of data on the WABAC hard drives was a report by the flight crew from the lead B52 on the bombing raid over Kim Young Lee's village. They gave a rather detailed description of the 'Angel of Death' that had destroyed their squadron. It was a nine year old boy in red boots.
"So how do you change the past by going into the future?" I asked Sherman. "Simple, you prevent someone from the future from going back into the past to change it!" I added, answering my own question.
"I don't get it." Sherman said.
"Somehow your robot friend Atom was supposed to go back in time and prevent the destruction of a village in Vietnam." I explained. "You apparently arrived in the future at a point in time such that you prevented Atom from being transported to 1969 where he became the 'Angel of Vietnam' that those pilots called the 'Angel of Death'. Go read the descriptions of the events from the pilots point of view. Those documents were never made public, and for a good reason!"
Sherman sat at the WABAC computer screen and read the reports that I had managed to uncover from among the vast storehouse of data collected by my invention during its many journeys through space-time. "That's Atom!" he sobbed, "You're right! Now what do we do?"
"Indeed." I thought out loud. "By preventing him from going into the past you changed it at several key points. This creates a time paradox, but not a circular one, for since Atom never went into the past, the world ends now and Atom will never exist to even go into the past."
"It sounds like we can't fix this," Sherman sighed, "For now there is no future to go into where Atom exists so we CAN send him into the past!"
"Maybe not." I said. "If the timeline had been irreparably damaged one would expect that our knowledge of what was would have evaporated. Since we clearly do remember the events of our own timeline, then it must logically still exist. Right now we are floating in a status field within the 5th dimension, a region that exists between the planes of the four dimensions of space-time. It is though this 5th dimension that the WABAC projects a wormhole to travel between points of existence in the space-time continuum. I believe that there are alternate planes of existence, parallel universes in which different realities co-exist. By changing the past you've merely jumped us from one plane of existence to another. Perhaps the WABAC can find the plane of existence where you prevented Atom from time traveling. Then we'd have a chance of repairing the damage."
"Do you really think so?" Sherman said hopefully.
"Logically, it makes sense." I replied. "Now, I'm guessing that the UFO you were talking about was some sort of time ship, and that by coming in contact with it Atom was transported back in time to 1969. What we need to do is to arrive at a point in time just prior to where you met Atom in the first place. Then we make sure that he finds that UFO."
It took me several hours to make the necessary calculations, and a few more to rewire the WABAC's control systems. The machine had never been designed to move selectively along the 5th dimension, and I suddenly realized that there was yet another coordinate in the matrix that needed to be considered if this was going to work, effectively creating a 6th dimension to space-time. I hoped I was correct, and vowed to send correspondence to Stephen Hawking about my discovery if we ever got back.
Sherman helped me enter the necessary commands to the computer, and to double check my coding. When we were both happy that I'd gotten it all right, I allowed Sherman to hit the energize button.
A long and winding wormhole appeared in front of us, which sucked the WABAC machine into it. Brightly colored rainbow like lights filled the tunnel, as a star field blue shifted in front of us, and red shifted behind us, filled the view screens. The machine began to vibrate and rotate clockwise due to friction with the walls of the worm hole, and the temperature inside our command capsule rose. We both watched the hands on the travel meter, the 'from' hand and the 'to' hand on the clock like dial approached each other slowly at first, and then much more rapidly. The two indicators met at the 12 o'clock position, and the WABAC came to a violent stop. We were suspended about twenty feet in the air, a few hundred feet off shore near the harbor. For a split second it seemed like we'd just hover there forever, but then all at once the law of gravity was once again being obeyed and the WABAC plummeted towards the ocean below us. We barely missed hitting several ferry boats full of passengers as the machine hit the water with a huge splash and sank below the surface. It was then that I realized that our stealth shield hadn't been activated, and that our appearance over the harbor had been seen by quite a large crowd.
I quickly regained control of the WABAC, the machine is capable of flying through the air, or in outer space, and can also withstand the pressure of traveling under water as a submarine. I brought the craft to the surface, this time with our invisibility shield powered on, and flew us towards the institute of science building. I checked our current coordinates, we had arrived several hours before the WABAC's previous landing in 21st century Japan. "Now all we have to do is to find Atom and make sure that he gets abducted by that time traveling UFO that will take him back to the 1960's," I told Sherman.