{"id":33171,"date":"2025-05-05T05:00:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T09:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=33171"},"modified":"2025-05-04T22:24:25","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T02:24:25","slug":"tempus-fugit-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/05\/tempus-fugit-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Tempus Fugit \u2013 Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

He was the richest man in the world by quite a lot but he looked like he had seen a ghost.\u00a0 I had interviewed him several times and had always gotten along better with him than the rest of the journalists around.\u00a0 Maybe because I had treated him the same whether he was schmoozing the Democrats or the Republicans.\u00a0 And that was because I found him interesting.\u00a0 And that was because he actually did stuff that was interesting.\u00a0 He made personal helicopters and robot servants and had invented a cure for baldness.\u00a0 He was a Thomas Alva Edison for the 21st<\/sup> century and he was always surrounded by a bevvy of super models.\u00a0 What wasn\u2019t to like?<\/p>\n

But when I showed up at his office for our appointment the man looked stricken.\u00a0 His face was completely colorless and his eyes were blank.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After an uncomfortable minute I said, \u201cDevon, should I come back another time?\u201d<\/p>\n

His eyes slowly shifted to my face and he shook his head, \u201cNo, you\u2019re here.\u00a0 Let\u2019s talk.\u00a0 What do you want to talk about?\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cWell, I guess I\u2019d like to know what happened to you?\u00a0 Was there a tragedy in your family or with your friends?\u201d<\/p>\n

He thought about that for a bit and said, \u201cYes, in a way there was.\u00a0 A very sad story.\u00a0 But I\u2019ll have to tell you the whole thing for it to make sense.\u00a0 Why don\u2019t you sit down.\u201d\u00a0 He opened up a drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up and said, \u201cFor the last ten years one of my government contracts has been a research project into a faster than light (FTL) space drive.\u00a0 For five years we looked at all kinds of reasonable and crazy ideas and we found exactly nothing that was even remotely possible.\u00a0 I hired every physicist that graduated from MIT or Cal-Tech and every single one of them came up with nothing.<\/p>\n

But eventually I heard about a brilliant theoretician who was wasn\u2019t working on space travel but instead had been investigating the fundamental basis of time.\u00a0 He was attempting to find the tachyon, the basic particle underlying the phenomenon we call time.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cBut Devon what would this research into time have to do with faster than light travel?\u201d\u00a0 His face showed a glimmer of life for the first time, \u201cBecause in the general theory of relativity it is assumed that time is just another dimension along with the three spatial dimensions.\u00a0 If you can control time, you can control the speed at which the other dimensions are traversed.\u201d<\/p>\n

I nodded my head with a somewhat confused look on my face and he continued, \u201cThis time researcher was a very strange man.\u00a0 He was in a sense, self-taught.\u00a0 He had attended a state college as an undergraduate and done exceptional work in physics but he didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 I discovered that one of my labs was using an inordinate amount of electrical power and I traced it back to this fellow.\u00a0 He was running his own experiments off-hours.\u00a0 When I told his boss to fire him, he confessed that they\u2019d be lost without him.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I relented but ordered that the pirate report to my office for \u201corientation.\u201d\u00a0 I wanted to meet this strange man.<\/p>\n

And strange he was.\u00a0 He was about thirty years old.\u00a0 He was about six feet tall, brown curly hair and very thick glasses.\u00a0 He had an intense expression as if he wanted to ask a question but didn\u2019t know how to say it.\u00a0 This sort of intrigued me so I tried to put him at his ease so that I could delve into his peculiar circumstances.\u00a0 It turned out he was incredibly well versed in almost every aspect of general relativity and particle physics.\u00a0 He had a theory about the speed of light and how it related to the \u201cviscosity of time.\u201d\u00a0 He said that photons were laminar flow phenomena and what he was investigating was turbulent temporal flow.\u00a0 I at first assumed he was completely crazy.\u00a0 I later discovered I was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He was the richest man in the world by quite a lot but he looked like he had seen a ghost.\u00a0 I had interviewed him<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2510,1289,1263,4],"tags":[1290,265],"class_list":["post-33171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-sff","tag-my-fiction","tag-science-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\nTempus Fugit \u2013 Part 1 - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/05\/tempus-fugit-part-1\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tempus Fugit \u2013 Part 1 - 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