Jul 12, 2007

[GeekyScrawl] A Science Fiction Attempt

GeekyScrawl is how I'll be identifying my original compositions that will be posted here on the Geeky Guide for now. I'll be using the blog as a venue to testing ideas, writing styles and to generally get back into my creative writing groove.

Feel free to leave your comments about my writing and don't feel awkward about giving negative feedback. I don't expect my initial works to be anywhere near where I want to be, but I'll never get there without working on it, eh?

My first piece is an attempt at a short story - it took me a while to get this far and it's not quite right, obviously. I'll keep working on it. I don't have a title yet and this is just "part one" of a slightly longer piece. No edits yet - I tend to write in first drafts and then wait to see what comes out. Here we go...

Science Fiction Story - Part I


Time travel looks really simple in the movies. Mad scientist invents some version of a time machine, goes back into the past for forward into the future and has all these zany adventures. At the end of the day, they all get to go back with things being slightly different than before but things remain, for the most part, none the worse for wear. In truth, time travel is never that simple.

Matthew knew this to be true. His life had always been about preparing for eventualities, trying to foresee complications and factor in the unknown. It's just the way his mind work. He couldn't help but project all actions in his mind at least 20 steps again in a never-ending attempt to compensate for chaos of everyday life.

It's this kind of thinking that allowed him to achieve great success as a scientist and inventor. His name became a household commodity when he first created warp tunnels, massive constructs that could transport matter across thousands of miles. Once in place, anyone could travel between any two warp tunnels instantaneously. It was a tremendous invention that changed the nature of long-distance travel forever. Gone were the airplanes and automobiles of old - now one simply had to get to the nearest warp tunnel terminal one could travel around the world in the blink of an eye.

But Matthew didn't stop there. It was precisely because of his invention did he start thinking about time.

We are used to referring to the world in terms of three dimensions - we aren't flat after all. What most people forget is that time is another dimension as well; objects take up length, width, height and a place in time. The concept of space and time being tied together in a single continuum has always been something left to the Star Trek geeks of the world. To Matthew it was elementary and it led to natural conclusions.

His tunnels allowed someone to change his location in space without changing his location in time. So what if he could achieve the opposite? What if he could change his position in time without altering his location? In a way, he was already doing it. The tunnels allowed people to pause time - to almost stop it while they moved. They were already traveling through time, although only in a forward direction.

He became obsessed with the idea and spent the next year in deep study and experimentation, working and re-working drafts and designs, computing for a solution. He was not rushing his work - he was simply driven by it and very deliberate in his actions. He was as methodical in this endeavor as he had been in everything else in his life. It wasn't even a choice for him - it was already his nature, built into every fiber of his being.

I'll not bore you with the specifics of his development - suffice to say that more than a year later he had a working prototype of a time machine. It was designed to allow a single individual to move through the waters of time freely given the device could create a temporal field only the size of an individual. He had run prior tests on a larger construct based on his warp tunnel technology but that proved too unstable. A temporal field that large required too much power and put too much stress on the fabric of space-time. No, a one-man solution was all he could manage for now.

The device was very simple in appearance - a metallic belt was the main component of the machine with the controls located where a buckle would normally be. Wires emerged from the device, tracing up and down his body like some strange silver skeleton superimposed on his clothes. The entire thing was powered by a rather large backpack that contained a fusion battery - another of his developments that was necessary for this warp tunnels to be created in the first place. The fuel cell in itself wasn't that large but the machinery that allowed for the battery's energy to be utilized was significantly larger. He was still working on that part.

He had determined that it would be sufficient to run very limited tests in the beginning - no more than a few hours worth of temporal displacement until he was more certain of things. He was a careful man after all, and he knew time travel was very serious business. He had no clear idea in terms of calibration for the device initially, so the first jump would be quite a risk. He set the device for a very short jump forward, the natural flow of time and primed the capacitors.

It was a risk, but a highly calculated one. He was quite certain this would work and the data from this first jump would allow him to calibrate his invention further to make better and more precise jumps. The battery pack chimed the ready tone.

Without blinking an eye, he triggered the suit.

There was no flash of light. No colorful lights or choirs of angels. There was just a faint ripple in the air, like you just missed something move out of the corner of your eye. Matthew surveyed his lab. The atomic clocks lined up on his shelf (three of them in order to obtain a fair sample in order to base a more accurate approximation of the time) indicated he had moved forward at least 67 minutes into the future, plus or minus 23 seconds.

It had worked.

6 comments:

  1. very interesting, so far.....

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  2. thanks for taking the time to read it, Pat.

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  3. Dude this is definitely something that can lead to a very very good story!

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  4. thanks, ton!

    much appreciated.

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  5. I LIKEY!!! I love how you ended it with "It had worked". Cant wait for part two.

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  6. Part Two is already up and I'll try to finish Part Three tonight.

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