Tempus Fugit – Part 1

He was the richest man in the world by quite a lot but he looked like he had seen a ghost.  I had interviewed him several times and had always gotten along better with him than the rest of the journalists around.  Maybe because I had treated him the same whether he was schmoozing the Democrats or the Republicans.  And that was because I found him interesting.  And that was because he actually did stuff that was interesting.  He made personal helicopters and robot servants and had invented a cure for baldness.  He was a Thomas Alva Edison for the 21^st century and he was always surrounded by a bevvy of super models.  What wasn’t to like?

But when I showed up at his office for our appointment the man looked stricken.  His face was completely colorless and his eyes were blank.  I had been let into his office and he was sitting at his desk but he was looking past me at the wall behind me.  After an uncomfortable minute I said, “Devon, should I come back another time?”

His eyes slowly shifted to my face and he shook his head, “No, you’re here.  Let’s talk.  What do you want to talk about?”  I said, “Well, I guess I’d like to know what happened to you?  Was there a tragedy in your family or with your friends?”

He thought about that for a bit and said, “Yes, in a way there was.  A very sad story.  But I’ll have to tell you the whole thing for it to make sense.  Why don’t you sit down.”  He opened up a drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up and said, “For the last ten years one of my government contracts has been a research project into a faster than light (FTL) space drive.  For five years we looked at all kinds of reasonable and crazy ideas and we found exactly nothing that was even remotely possible.  I hired every physicist that graduated from MIT or Cal-Tech and every single one of them came up with nothing.

But eventually I heard about a brilliant theoretician who was wasn’t working on space travel but instead had been investigating the fundamental basis of time.  He was attempting to find the tachyon, the basic particle underlying the phenomenon we call time.”

I said, “But Devon what would this research into time have to do with faster than light travel?”  His face showed a glimmer of life for the first time, “Because in the general theory of relativity it is assumed that time is just another dimension along with the three spatial dimensions.  If you can control time, you can control the speed at which the other dimensions are traversed.”

I nodded my head with a somewhat confused look on my face and he continued, “This time researcher was a very strange man.  He was in a sense, self-taught.  He had attended a state college as an undergraduate and done exceptional work in physics but he didn’t have the money to continue on as a graduate student so he dropped out and somehow found himself at work in my company as a laboratory technician.  I discovered that one of my labs was using an inordinate amount of electrical power and I traced it back to this fellow.  He was running his own experiments off-hours.  When I told his boss to fire him, he confessed that they’d be lost without him.  He had an astounding collection of skills with the advanced electronic and high energy equipment that was needed for this faster than light research so replacing him would take months and require hiring five or six separate technicians.  I relented but ordered that the pirate report to my office for “orientation.”  I wanted to meet this strange man.

And strange he was.  He was about thirty years old.  He was about six feet tall, brown curly hair and very thick glasses.  He had an intense expression as if he wanted to ask a question but didn’t know how to say it.  This sort of intrigued me so I tried to put him at his ease so that I could delve into his peculiar circumstances.  It turned out he was incredibly well versed in almost every aspect of general relativity and particle physics.  He had a theory about the speed of light and how it related to the “viscosity of time.”  He said that photons were laminar flow phenomena and what he was investigating was turbulent temporal flow.  I at first assumed he was completely crazy.  I later discovered I was wrong.”