Einstein's Nightmare

A family takes a trip to a park on the first day of spring: dirt trails, a candy-colored play area, the laughter of children, high sun peeking through tall oak trees. The mother had visited this park before, many years ago, but had forgotten. As she watches her children climb the yellow jungle gym, scale the wooden mockup pirate ship, giggle as they swing on the swing set, she is reminded of that earlier trip, and that memory pulls her into the past.

Now this mother watches other children playing on that very same pirate ship decades before. The scene has changed: the yellow paint on the jungle gym is fresh and bright, the trees bear the reds of early autumn, the insect chorus and bird calls play at a lower pitch. And no one carries a cell phone. 

Her younger self attends a birthday party for a friend-of-a-friend she barely knows. She wasn’t sure she’d have fun but now she’s playing on a swing, flanked by children on either side she only just met. All laugh, all delighted in watching their arcs come into alignment, then out again. They each shift their momentum just enough to bring all three swings into perfectly parallel arcs. Their giggles become distorted by the parabolic movement. The sounds flutter in their ears, prompting further giggles.

The woman watches this play out from the picnic area on a nearby hill. She turns and sees another little girl approaching, with hair so blonde it's almost white. “Who are you?” the girl asks.  

The woman points to her younger self on the swing: “That’s me, with the braids. Or rather I’m her in another thirty years. Look at how dark both her and my hair are.” 

The girl stares at the woman in wonder. Eventually, an adult calls the girl back for cake and presents. The woman watches for another minute, then fades away, back to her own time.

You likely realize this is not some reminisce, not a day-dream or a hallucination. This woman was transported physically by the power of memory. A wormhole opened in spacetime and returned her to a time and place filled with emotional connections, connections stirred within her by the trip to the park. For in this world, human memory possesses a gravity all its own. In this world, the laws of physics include the pull of emotion.

When the woman returns to the present, and her family, no time has passed. But if any were watching her face, they would see her expression change in an instant, from watchful contentment to a strange, languid stare. It will take many minutes for the woman’s mind to catch up, and until then she will appear distant, and react slowly.

Time jumps are common in this world, and most people experience at least one a year; always to the past, always triggered by a mysterious mix of thoughts and details. These emotional connections often prove fleeting, typically lasting just a few minutes. Indeed, time jumps often end the second a person goes beyond passive observation to consciously thinks about what is happening to them. This is like how when you realize you’re in a dream, you are likely to wake up. 

And you might think that these experiences are generally benign, even positive. Who wouldn’t want to return to the past to witness a compelling episode in your life from a different perspective? And while it’s true that most of these experiences prove ephemeral, they often leave their subjects feeling unfulfilled, or disturbed.

Take our experience with the woman from earlier. Let’s name her, as we’re spending so much time together. Her name is Carol. When Carol returns to her own time, she looks at her experience as a positive one, a pleasant dream of the past, pure nostalgia. She got to return to a happy time after all.

Yet the little girl who talked to her, the little blonde girl, haunts her. Over the course of the next day, Carol tries to remember who that girl is, what her name was and whether she knows her. Finally she realizes: that little girl was her best friend.

She’d forgotten somehow. She’d been very young, but now she remembers tea parties attended, fairy tales written in collaboration, and bug collection marathons ending with releasing all the bugs at once.

But somehow Carol and this other girl had drifted apart, that day in the park was the last time the two met as close friends. There was no breakup, no angry words or changed residences. They simply hadn’t scheduled another play date. 

And the more Carol thinks on the matter, the more she wonders if her presence at the park, her adult presence, had been the catalyst that ended the friendship. Carol tries to remember the girl’s name, but can’t. She considers calling her mother to see if she remembers, but decides against it. She has a family to take care of and doesn’t have the time or emotional energy to track down a lost friend from adolescence. And besides, most people don’t like hearing about time jumps.

Carol is left with a troubling thought: did her trip to the past cause the end of her friendship? Did learning that a future version of Carol was watching her frighten this girl, causing her to shy away. Or perhaps she told her parents about the encounter and decided to end the play dates. 

Most of these experiences conclude with similar disquiet, no matter how harmless they appear on the surface. A brief trip to the past often shows people things they’d rather not see, or seem to cause issues they at first merely revealed.

Some put this phenomenon down to the romantic ways humans often view the past, that to see the past as it really was will inevitably ruin some memories. Or perhaps we are pulled to specific times to learn key details, the human mind subconsciously seeking to solve mysteries from their past even if those solutions bring more questions than answers. 

Others attribute malign or knavish intelligence to the universe. That an evil entity is playing with mere mortals for amusement, selectively revealing the past to cause disquiet, or even causing humans to retroactively sabotage themselves.

The potential pitfalls of getting pulled into the past are many. You might be forced to relive a low point in your life: a divorce, a humiliation, the death of a loved one. Pain dulled by years can suddenly be thrust upon you because of an errant thought. 

And think of the people from the past. Think of what it might feel like to see your mirror image, however older, suddenly appear to share your pain. And in that moment you realize there’s no getting past this, that this pain is strong enough to pull you back decades hence. That the hurt is eternal, that the pain is prophecy.

Scientists from this world have studied the phenomenon and come up with a list of prescriptions:

1. Location matters. Distance in space offers some protection. You are far more likely to time-jump to the past if you’re in the same location as in the memory.
2. Details matter. The more vivid your memory of an event, the more easily it can be triggered by similar stimuli.
3. Reminiscing about the past increases the likelihood of a time-jump.
4. It is possible to jump to an event you weren’t present for, if the emotions and described details are strong enough in one’s mind.

This last point has led to some particularly dramatic situations. The months following a national tragedy: a mass-shooting, an assassination, a natural disaster, are particularly fraught. The risk is great that people will learn too many details of the disaster, become deeply emotionally invested, and find themselves time-jumping back into the middle of that disaster. As a result, governments regularly withhold key details from the public, and the sites where these disasters happen are cordoned off for months or years afterwards.

People have been known to jump into tragic situations and be killed. In one bizarre example, a man named Thomas time-jumped into a landslide he read about. His body was pulled from the rocks and identified, and when the authorities contacted his family, they discovered he was still alive. Thus, Thomas learned about his time jump before it happened to him. He knew how he would die, and was filled with fatalistic dread. This fear drove his fascination with the tragedy, and thus helped cause the time jump that killed him.

In this world, people have to manage their thoughts carefully. They learn which places not to visit. They learn not to reminisce. They learn to keep their thoughts on the present and the future.

There is no sure way to avoid time jumps, however, and unique cases continue to confound scientists. Once, a woman in New Zealand studying medieval history got transported to an interrogation during the Spanish Inquisition for several minutes. It was later discovered that her location was the antipode, the exact opposite spot on earth, of the place she was transported to.

In this world, documentaries and history books are regulated to not include too many details. In this world, the news is heavily censored, especially when reporting on tragic events. In this world, the sites of famous battles, of massacres, genocides, and unethical experiments, all are cordoned off. The risks of visiting such places, and suffering a time-jump, is simply too great.

Occasionally, a historian or thrill-seeker will defy these rules and try to call a time jump into being. They’ll break into the sites of historical events after learning every detail they can, wallow in the emotion of a tragedy in an attempt to spring back in time and view what happened for themselves. These attempts rarely work, however, as attempts to influence emotional gravity inevitably pushes that gravity away.

And most would rather leave the past in the past. In this world, Auschwitz was torn down and forgotten. In this world, Gettysburg isn’t a public park. In this world slavery, wars, and apartheid are only taught as high-level electives in schools, and require extensive safety wavers.

This is a world where humans fear the past, fear their own emotions, fear letting their minds wander. This is a world where no one says “never forget.” Instead they say “try not to remember.” In this world, proverbs like “live in the now” carry a warning.

Theoreticians from this world predict an event they’ve termed “The Apocalypse Gap.” The Gap will manifest as a lowered reporting of visitations from future people, then the cessation of all such visits. When this happens, it will mean that the apocalypse is near, because it indicates that soon there will be no people left to remember the present, and return to it.

So sociologists and psychologists regularly track and describe reports of people who jump into their present. And researchers catalog this information and look for patterns, predict the future based upon who returns to the present from it. And these researchers live in fear that the number of reports will dwindle. Just as everyone else lives in fear of what might happen to them if they jump to the wrong past event, and learn something they’d rather not.