THOMAS CREER AND THE TIME MACHINE

Thomas Creer sat at the breakfast table, munching on toast and scrolling through the news feed on his tablet. Armourer and extreme suit designer Thomas Creer, a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Peru, was a researcher into human health, including time machines.

Thomas rode in the self-driving Tesla, journeying the three miles to Nazca. His gaze fixated on the car’s screen, periodically it with his damp glove. Streams of vehicles whizzed past, their headlights piercing through the darkness. Amidst the flurry of activity, Thomas remained lost in his thoughts which wandered between the optimum shaped windscreen and the ideal size for a tablet. He didn’t think his latest suit would work in Peru, maybe in North America, but not here. Without a break he would like to have given up and take a normal job.

The cell phone rang. ‘Hi,’ Thomas said. He had a good working relationship with Robert Bryant the textile engineer, whose name appeared, who was sometimes cooperative, and at times was like a long lost brother. Bryant had been offered the research project of his dreams at Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, with the mechanical engineering department.

Rio de Janeiro had not been good to Thomas. There were frustrations, particularly the bureaucratic hurdles and he lacked much facility in languages. In other places, like North America, scientific research was held in high regard, but in Rio, it often felt like an uphill battle for funding and recognition. Yet, amidst these challenges, some of the brightest minds in the world resided here, drawn by the city's vibrant culture and natural beauty.

Thomas considered himself fortunate; he had been enticed to Rio and so far, things were going slowly. The other complication in his life was his wife. It wasn't her fault, but Thomas struggled to find a link between his visionary ideas and his determination to bring them to fruition and her mathematical straight talking. Still, she both frightened and captivated him. Together, they were embarking on a fragile journey of shared dreams and aspirations.

It had caused quite a stir in her Chinese family that she was not marrying a Chinese, a sentiment somewhat assuaged by the fact that he was a scientist with a scientist's convictions. This apprehension softened further over time, especially as Thomas, despite being a firm non-communist, demonstrated respect and appreciation for world customs, often participating in her family's Taoist conception of the world.

The early years of their marriage were undeniably joyous. Thomas 's career skyrocketed, particularly in his early thirties when he garnered a prize for his groundbreaking work in the paper, "Chrono-biological Synergy: An Integrative Analysis of Human Physiology and Temporal Displacement Suit Design in Theoretical Time Travel Constructs" which won the Horological Frontier Prize for Pioneering Research in Temporal Biophysics and Adaptive Human Engineering. His belief in technological advancements sparked fervent discussions, and his wife who was called by the English name Sally staunchly defended his ideas.

As Thomas hurried through the bustling arrivals lobby, clad in his checked jacket, jeans and Timberland boots, he exuded his usual confidence. Yet, inwardly, doubts gnawed at him. He was haunted with the idea of giving up and becoming an ordinary clothes designer. But Thomas also believed in his field. It was what he worked on day and night; it was what drove him, what made him wake each morning with a sense of exhilaration and purpose. He had an absolute blind faith that he could achieve a working time travel suit in his lifetime. And it would free him from having to worry about whether in two hundred years’ time anyone would actually invent one.

Thomas’s colleague, Robert Bryant was convinced that Thomas was the only man with the vision and ability to make the suit happen. Thomas had met numerous scientists who found his ideas completely crazy. He’d also met plenty who considered him interesting and stimulating, but he’d never met anyone else who believed as passionately in him as himself. Bryant broke the news that the arrival of a pyramid on the Nazca plain was a time travel machine, merely waiting for present day humans to find its access point. It was their shared belief in time retrocausality that was their main bond, although they were coming at it from different directions. Robert thought he could hook the time travelling pyramid which appeared in Nazca to an external source; Thomas Creer’s suit. That got him musing that paradoxes mighn't be altogether as world-altering as all that. In any case, Robert said the university wanted Thomas to contribute everything he knew as the Peruvian government wanted to use his suit prototypes. Simultaneously, he was looking for what his tablet had to say about Nazca. He end his call on his cell phone and dialled his secretary. ‘How old is the Nazca site?”

‘Around two thousand years old.’

‘Tell me why the newspapers think it is the product of unknown technology.’

‘It arrived, didn’t it?"

‘The pyramid?’

‘Yes, exactly, that’s the point, Thomas, you know it's actively here and from something beyond our level of technology.’ She stirred her morning coffee and sipped the froth with an air of connoisseurship.

‘Yes I know time hasn’t elapsed for future humanity, unless of course…’ ‘Did you read this report?’

‘I’ll read it when you get back.’

Thomas headed indoors to the laboratory. He went to his desk and opened the book ‘Technology and the Possibility of Time Travel’ his secretary had placed on his desk. In it was an inserted sheet beside a chapter he had written himself. He read it.

"The Nazca lines, etched into the desert, resist obliteration, embodying our civilization's cosmic dance on the earth’s surface. The people were deeply connected to the heavens, merging artistry and astronomy.

I am experiencing overwhelming sensations in this place, surrounded by living colors and textures. I feel a connection to the Eternals. (Sally Padeira-Creer)".

Thomas read it then placed the book back down. He went to the window, to the very spot where he had theorized his successful biomedical model of a time travel suit. The government were rushing into the testing stage with an official interest, proposing and regulating the Mark 1 assuming there was no flaw in his model. Thomas tapped his pencil. 'I deduced . . ‘ and he went to look at the end of his equation. 'I deduced that my suit would only work in the theoretical time construct at the exact geographical location of Nazca's pyramid. A paradox will arise elsewhere but here not.’ Then he took a walk, past the SETI office and its astrophysicists, past the theatre, where he turned off the road, then to the river, where it provided a bridge leading to the other side of the hill.

“The radio said a pyramid landed. But I don’t think it landed from what I could see from here, looking out on the Nazca plain. I think it punched a hole in space.”

Thomas was about to shut the blinds.

“What does it look like?”

“It’s still rooted to the spot.”

He stepped back into the room with a practiced gait.

“Did you see helicopters?”

“They’re all over the place,” his secretary said. “But it looks to me like they’re not getting too close.”

The Canadian Spacetime Agency came up on Thomas’s cell phone. ‘What do we have on this pyramid?” asked Thomas.

“Landed on the Nazca plain, no discernible markings or identifiers.”

“What about potential threats?”

“No readings of any hazardous materials, no signs of radiation. It's just... there.”

“What are we dealing with?”

“Could be some sort of experimental structure, or maybe even... extratemporal.”

“Extratemporal?”

“You mean Eternals who want to prevent us from exploring space like Isaac Asimov said.”

“We can handle a pyramid,” the voice on the other end said. “But it’s not going to stay a pyramid.”

“What is it going to do?”

“It’ll break into 9,000,000,000 pyramids. A brown shell of a pyramid it is now. And as of 2037, our population will be exactly nine billion.” One day to go.

“Have you found what kind of material it is?”

“It’s called Promethium. It is not found on Earth. This is a substance we don’t have more than a few grams of on Earth.”

“What does it do?”

The CSA wasn’t sure what it did. Mainly it was capable of a molecular multiplication cascade with an intrinsic quota lock.

“That’s what you say. What does that mean, that they knew our meter standard measurement?”

“At first the journalists said that. But now they say whoever sent it projected what our population would be.”

“Well, evidence won’t place it anywhere except someone from the future who knows our present population.”

“How do you know that?” the voice said.

“I just know. It’s perfectly obvious. It’s probably been rigged to trip when our population reaches exactly nine billion..”

“What if it does?”

“It could’ve started to.”

“No, it's just one pyramid, with a base of 73.6 meters.”

 “They sent for the helicopters?”

“Of course. It’s reached the highest level.”

“As of now we need to eliminate those Nazca lines. For any number of reasons they ought never to have been there.”

Sally’s head appeared from behind the door. She had been listening. She said a neighbor had told her the pyramid was a forty five degree pyramid with a base of 73.6 meters and a height of 36.8 meters. People were being told the government initiated it.

“There’s been a correction,” Thomas told her. “Tell them they ought to think of it as becoming 9,000,000,000 small pyramids.”

Another helicopter flew over, heading in the direction of the pyramid.

“Will we have to leave?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“They’re using radioactivity detectors to test it,” she said.

“What kind of radioactivity does Promethium give off?”

“I don’t know but it’s supposed to be rendered harmless.”

“People are keeping it from breaking up only by dying,” Thomas said. “When do we eat?”

‘l'm sure there's plenty of time," Sally said, "or they would have told us to hurry."

Twenty minutes later they had eaten brisket of beef with carrots and sweet potatoes, mushrooms and broccoli and were heading to the Tesla. Thomas made a remark about time branching off like stalks of broccoli. Sally held tightly to the wheel, despite the automatic drive.

"Abandon all homes. Now, now. Pyramid dividing." The police were hurrying them.

“That was up a stress level to Defcon 2 .”

“What are you taking about?”

“The time traveller's pyramid.”

“That means it’s worked out how to bypass the quarantine.”

“There’s more,” she said. “It’s expected that some sort of special team has been killed.”

“They’ve got my work on time travel suits I hope.”

“Hope so,” she said. “They’re certainly looking into it as being a time travel machine.”

They heard sirens again, a different set this time, a larger sound—not police, fire-engines, or ambulances. They were air-raid sirens, Thomas realized, and they seemed to be blowing in Palpa, a small nearby community.

“Could the Pyramid be dangerous?”

“They’re calling it the world-destroying Pyramid.”

“Why is that not relatable?”

“It means they’re looking into the thing properly.”

“The important thing is it’s there, we’re here. We’re getting out of here.”

Thomas ate the snack she’d brought – nut cookies, quietly and neatly, reducing the size of his bites as the plate’s contents got smaller.

It wasn’t until the sirens stopped that an amplified voice which was unclear was slowly interpretable.

“Head to Puquio refugee camp.”

They reached Puquio at the dawn of the year 2037. There were checkpoints at all the road exits. State troopers and Red Cross workers handed out instructions.

They had some food and coffee. They read, WELCOME EVACUEES.

At noon a rumor went around that technicians were being lowered in time travel suits from army helicopters in order to get into it.

Thomas turned to Sally, “There is just no end of surprises."

Thomas and Sally sought solace in the hand-painted sign which read 'Sama restaurant'. The café's pastel hues and sleek furniture, provided a backdrop for their conversation. The TV on the wall interrupted with news of the progress on quarantining the pyramid.

Both ordered Americanos, discussing their evening plans just before the waiter arrived at the table. While they realized the future weighed heavily on them, they focused on the interpretation of the pyramid as a time machine on the TV news.

Sally questioned the necessity for each part as conceived by the Eternals, if each human being would 'own' a cube of 2.5 centimeter size which had been dubbed a ‘guardian object’. Thomas explained to her the Nazca’s focus on the abstract figures, overlaying animals and plants, suggesting they were formed from more than water-seeking primitives. Many archaeologists had worked on decoding the messages, static or otherwise.

Thomas got the server to fill his coffee mug up again. When the evacuee’s compound door was wide open, he raised it and took a long slow drink from it then took a look at the weather.

He went to the alcove by the window then stopped. Someone had taken out a library book and the page missing was Montague’s formulae for avoiding paradoxes in time, with annotations involving concerns about errors in his calculations.

That evening Thomas went ahead with his talk:

“Ladies and gentlemen of Puquio, it is with great pleasure and profound excitement that I stand before you today to recount the mysteries of the universe with respect to the possibility of retrocausality.

Within these mysteries, we confront Einstein's formidable speed limit, which asserts that we can never exceed it. This limit beckons us to press on, navigating through the interfaces and coordinates of the cosmos, journeying through the vast expanse of years. We stand at a time where accomplishment seems within easy reach, yet even that feels like a tangible possibility.

Spacetime holds within it a subtle contradiction, challenging our comprehension of events unfolding simultaneously yet distilling into finite slices of reality.” He paused to take a drink.

“General relativity, with its portrayal of spacetime as a malleable entity, opens the door to the notion of traversing the corridors of time itself. The idea of encountering those from the future who wish to avert a self-imposed crisis we have begun with their own imposed stability is immanent and contiguous to the appearance of an artefact from the future." He hoped he had not gone over their heads.

"Einstein's theories, by allowing spacetime to be flexible and dynamic, have laid the foundation for us to imagine the construction of a retrocausality structure. We think that is what the pyramid is.

 While the theoretical framework for time travel exists within the elegant equations of our understanding, the practical implementation of such concepts remains elusive.

But that may not be the end of the story.”

ii

 Thomas discussed his ideas during a meal with the council of Puquio whose head was Dr. Montague . He especially wanted to return to that period and said it would require a big budget, equivalent to one-tenth of the Peruvian taxes. The brown pyramid's secret revolved around its ability to protect humanity. It divided up into 9,000,000,000 pieces, one for each human, if it broke into 2.5 centimeter cubes. Sally reacted with astonishment, that Thomas could conjecture this irresponsibly, unless he knew more than he had told her.

As he evidenced star charts and ancient artifacts, Dr. Montague, the head of the council, who was also a skeptical time theoretician, entered the Sama café.

“ Ah, Dr. Montague!” Thomas said, “Come in, come in. I’ve been expecting you. Have a seat.” Dr. Montague looked him up and down and said, “Thank you, Thomas. What’s all this about? You sound alarmed.”

“Alarmed! You’re breaking through my armor,” retorted Thomas wiping his mouth with a napkin. “You see, I’ve made a remarkable discovery. The ancient Nazca lines in Peru—they’re not just random geoglyphs. They’re a message from the Eternals.” , Dr. Montague showed enough restraint to convince the other to go on.

“Hear me out, Doctor. The Nazca lines form intricate patterns—geometric shapes, animals, and even a humanoid figure. But it’s their alignment with celestial events that intrigues me. The Eternals, you see, set up the pyramid to observe humanity’s progress!”

Dr. Montague laughed. “Eternals? Really? Thomas, you’re pulling my leg. Those ancient people were skilled astronomers, not futurists.”

“Consider this: The Nazca lines align perfectly with the solstices and equinoxes. The precision is uncanny! And the pyramid—oh, the pyramid—it’s a beacon from the future, transmitting data across time.”

“These are stories.”

“My stories cost nothing for one thing, and for two, we shall go back and see when the Nazca lines were made. And it’s true that they made them to catch a time machine, so to speak, it’ll be as real as I sit here I tell you.” Thomas's voice had hit home.

Dr. Montague appeared to doubt. ‘Show me the data. Where’s the proof? You’re saying the Nazca civilization collaborated with the Eternals to build that?’

“The Eternals shared their advanced knowledge, and the Nazcans were reciprocating with… well, pottery- no, also inspired weaving transferred to the desert sands.”

“Oh, they had llamas and pottery, and lived on rugs, Right? You’re a brilliant young man who should not give up a promising career, don’t do it, Thomas. The Nazca lines served as ceremonial pathways, irrigation channels, or just ancient doodles.”

“But Dr. Montague, what if they left a message? We must decode it. And the pyramid—oh, the pyramid—explain that away!’

Dr. Montague was composed. “ I’ll entertain your theory. But let’s stick to evidence-based research as I say. Deal?"

Thomas grinned. “Deal! But mark my words, one day, we’ll decipher the Nazca code, and the Eternals will send us a friend request.”

Finding the Nazca would not be easy. A feeling of connection to the ancient civilization grew. The Nazca appeared to have made the first contact between themselves and the Eternals.