Things That Cannot Stand
He opened the past for justice. The world used it for revenge.
The garage was dark and damp. Water stains crept across the ceiling and walls. Martin Timi sat at his contraption: a small metallic sphere suspended between six gold plates. Six rings spun around the structure. Numbers raced across the computer screen.
The spindles spun faster and faster; a deep whirring echoed through the garage, and burnt ozone filled his lungs. He pushed it faster. The mass reading climbed. The rings spun still faster; the heat sensor stopped on an error code. Then there was a flash of light. A pulsing sphere engulfed the equipment.
“That’s not possible,” Martin said. The mass meter read five nonillion kilograms. It continued to grow. Martin marked the time: five minutes from activation to wormhole stabilization.
Martin faced the glowing orb. He reached out, sliding his hand into the sphere. An intense tingling ran through his body, and his hand simultaneously froze and burned. He pulled it back. Normal. Unharmed.
As a child, Martin hid under his teacher’s desk. The scent of mahogany filled his nostrils. Somewhere in the distance, guns crackled.
Martin closed his eyes and trembled like his childhood self. It never should have happened. So many things should never have happened. If this device worked, he could undo all of them. Inside the spinning orb, Martin saw himself hiding, holding his breath so no one could hear his sobs. He saw a chance to ensure this could never have happened.
His heart slowed. The orb was a portal to justice. For every child who ever hid in fear. For everyone who smelled mahogany.
Martin checked the time: 2:22 p.m. as he ducked into the orb.
Pressure. Tingling. Burning. Freezing. Then falling. Faster and faster, accelerating into the ground.
Stop!
Martin stood in his garage beside the same pulsing orb. Back where he started. Martin’s heart sank. He turned back to his computer. Another Martin sat at it.
“Martin?” the other Martin asked. “Or… me?”
Martin asked, “What time is it?”
The other Martin nodded slowly. “It’s 2:15 p.m. Thursday, April 7.”
It worked. The past was accessible. His hands trembled. “You just turned it on?” he asked.
The other Martin nodded.
Martin leaned over his own shoulder and examined the computer. The readings were identical to his. “How long did it take to warm up?” he asked his past self.
“I just turned it on, and then it stabilized like this. But look at the mass, that’s impossible. The gravity from that much mass should be inescapable.”
“That much mass must be exerting force somewhere,” Martin said. “What if the force is distributed out across multiple timelines?”
“If that is the case, we didn’t build a time machine. We tied a knot with timelines,” past Martin said.
“I need to spend some time with the numbers,” they said together.
Martin held his notebook. He couldn’t believe he had missed it. A simple arithmetic error. The machine shouldn’t have worked at all. But there it was: a pulsing sphere of near-infinite mass, heat, and tangled time.
He hadn’t built a time machine; he had built a Time Magnet. It pulled the long tails of every timeline into itself.
He ran the shutdown simulation. His jaw tightened. If the machine lost power, it couldn’t redistribute the mass quickly enough. It would pull mass into the vortex, increasing its gravity, and pulling in still more. Each captured electron would increase the machine’s mass until nothing could escape. If he shut the machine down, it would draw every bit of matter in the universe into itself, recreating the universe before the Big Bang.
He ran the numbers again. Then again. Days smeared into months. He didn’t shave. Didn’t shower. His phone filled with missed calls. Colleagues tried to reach him until they gave up. Nothing he could do would change the facts.
When he presented the information, the community turned on him.
“Doctor Franklin, Ketchikan Polytech,” a man said. “How exactly can we verify your experiment?”
“If you mean ethically, you don’t,” Martin said.
Doctor Franklin said, “Right, because the time for peer validation was before you turned the damn thing on.”
“I don’t currently know how to shut it down safely.”
“What if it becomes unstable?” a voice shouted from the audience.
“I can’t let that happen,” Martin said.
Doctor Franklin said, “We are supposed to trust the stability of the universe to you keeping a device running in your garage.”
“Multiverse would be more accurate,” Martin said.
“Excuse me?”
“Multiple timelines are tangled in the Time Magnet. Multiverse, maybe even omniverse.”
“It’s good to know that existence is in the hands of a man who uses science-fiction terms in a physics discussion.”
The U.S. government agreed with Doctor Franklin.
Martin sat on a video call with his attorney. The attorney said, “Since the Thirty-First, they don’t have to pay you anything if they can show you acted with reckless disregard for public safety. Take the deal before they change their minds.”
“The machine needs to be kept running,” Martin argued.
“That is their point. This is too big to trust to one man,” the lawyer said.
Martin watched from across the street while the military demolished the house his grandfather built. He could still see the dark gashes along the front door where his grandfather had tracked his growth. He saw holes ripped through the living room where his grandfather held him after the shooting. He cried as workers raised fortress walls around the property.
A mahogany bench stood ten feet from Martin. He couldn’t get any closer. Martin closed his eyes to push back the percussion of bullets.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
For two years there was no information about the Time Magnet. Military personnel patrolled the perimeter constantly.
He saw the sign before the ads.
All Time National Park
Take a Vacation Through Time!
Coming Soon!
The slogan bookended the commercial. In between, sappy music played over a mosaic of weddings, dinosaurs, and historic reenactments. Bright colors. Smiling faces. A beautiful travel ad.
The world rarely holds beauty for long.
Walking the street in front of his old house, Martin overheard a conversation.
“How was the trip?” a man asked his friend.
The other man laughed. “I killed the bastard who fired me. Checkmate, motherfucker.”
Goosebumps exploded across Martin’s skin. His gaping mouth made no sound. He had hoped it was isolated. The news killed his hope. They didn’t call it vacation. The news called it terrorism.
“A recent study showed that seventy-five percent of trips are used for illegal activities. Murder, sexual assault, and torture are common. In a separate poll, the most common reason stated for use was revenge.”
The shots kept coming. The scent of mahogany followed Martin everywhere. He tried to free justice from the bounds of time. Instead, he sowed more time for pain.
How could I ever have believed in mercy for people like this?
Every trip created another universe. The magnet would absorb each new timeline into its knot.
More mass.
More energy.
Less stability.
His letters went ignored.
The first time he saw a time slip, Martin was in the grocery store. The cashier’s hair went from dark, almost black, to auburn, then back again. Murmurs rolled through the growing crowd. Martin knew what he had seen. He stood paralyzed. The hair color had bled through from another timeline.
This can’t be. Not this soon.
He left his cart full of groceries and rushed home.
Inside, he sat at his computer, three different notebooks open on the desk. Even at twice his estimated trips, this shouldn’t be happening. Then he saw it.
What about the other timelines?
If it spread force across timelines, then the Time Magnet existed outside of spacetime. Every trip, from any timeline, created a new universe.
He adjusted his models and waited. He watched the orb grow on the computer screen. Spacetime folded deeper into the orb. In ten years, maybe less, all reality would collapse into the magnet.
“Okay, Martin, your data shows a collapse of all space-time in the next decade. What does that actually mean?” the host from Hughes Network News asked.
Martin took a deep breath through his teeth, accidentally whistling. He said, “Think of the Time Magnet like a spool, and each timeline is a thread tied to it. Each trip into the past adds another. The more threads you add, the larger the knot. If I’m right, we have maybe ten years before the knot is so tangled that the threads become indistinguishable.”
“And if we stop using it, will this end the threat?”
“No. It’s not just our timeline; it’s every timeline that uses it. We can slow it down, but we can’t control them.”
“So, you are saying running it will destroy reality, and shutting it off will destroy matter? A catch-24. Why does it matter what we do?”
Martin turned red and clenched his fists. His voice wobbled as he shouted, “We need to slow the destruction of known reality, Jesus, man.”
“If it’s going to be used by others anyway, why should we be left out?”
Martin spent every waking hour looking for a solution. Gunshots haunted his dreams. The end of everything haunted his days. When he found the solution, he tried to reject it. There had to be another way. For three years, he tried. Until he could wait no longer.
He hadn’t spoken to anyone in the scientific community since presenting his findings. His hand shook as he held the phone. Michael. His finger hovered over the name. Would he even answer?
Martin called.
“Hello?”
Martin almost smiled at his college friend’s voice.
“Hi, Michael, it’s Martin.”
“Yeah, I know. What’s going on?”
“I need your help. There’s data and a few models I need you to look at. I hope I’m missing something.”
“Martin, I could lose funding just talking to you. You’re persona non grata.”
Why do I smell mahogany?
Martin almost hung up. Instead, he said, “I… I’m sorry. I’m not looking for validation. I need to be wrong.”
“Send it to me, and I’ll take a look,” Michael said. “But Martin, don’t make me regret this.”
Martin sent his work to his old friend. Three days later, he received a call.
“I’ve looked at the data,” Michael said. “No mistakes. I tried a couple of tweaks, but as far as I can tell, you have to stop the wormhole from stabilizing.”
Boom. Another shot in the distance. Another child gone.
Martin went cold. Goosebumps rose along his spine. Martin already knew what he had to do, but hearing it from someone else made it real.
“Martin? Are you there?” Michael asked.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“This only works if you come from the same timeline that started the machine. Our timeline. Intervention from any other timeline would only decouple that timeline from reality.”
“Yes. It has to be me, and I have to do it within five minutes of the wormhole stabilizing.”
“By my calculations, four point seven three minutes. But I’d try to keep it within three if you can.”
“The past can’t be changed, can it?”
Boom, boom.
“No, Martin. I don’t think so.”
For a site once controlled by the military, the All Time National Park had surprisingly weak security. Martin walked into his appointment with a handgun on his hip. No one seemed to notice. If they did, they didn’t care. Time terrorism was too lucrative.
Time terrorism: going into the past to cause suffering. The machine he had built to ease the pain of the past only created more timelines. More terror.
With his hand on his gun, Martin stepped into the glowing orb.
As the world came into focus, he stood in his old garage, looking at himself. Martin turned to him, wide-eyed.
“Martin?” the other Martin asked. “Or… me?”
“A few years from now,” Martin said.
He glanced at the clock on the wall. 2:15 p.m. He had two minutes before he had to act. He continued, “You have to shut down the Time Magnet, now.”
“Time Magnet?” past Martin asked.
“Yes. We made a mistake. The past can’t be changed. This machine attracts and binds spacetime across different timelines. Look at your formula for mass and energy growth post-entanglement.”
The younger Martin opened his notebook and looked at his notes. “God damn it. I can fix this.”
Past Martin pressed a sequence of buttons. The whirling stopped. The gold plates cooled, and the sphere crashed onto the plate beneath it with a deafening clang.
“You need to stop this research.”
“There are things in the past that cannot stand. If God won’t protect us, then I will.”
Martin wrapped his fingers around the handle of the gun. “Did you forget who you are talking to? There is no preemptive justice.”
“What happened to you? Why did you give up?”
“I turned that machine on already. It will either consume space-time or all matter. If you let the wormhole stabilize, we will destroy everything.”
“It’s not ready yet.”
Martin checked the time. 2:19 p.m. “We’ll never be ready,” he said, pulling the gun from his waistband.
“No,” the younger Martin pleaded.
Martin looked into his own eyes. He saw his history. His soul. He built a portal for death, and now he killed, pulling the trigger over and over. Like the boy at his school. Past Martin fell into a pool of blood. The standing Martin did not breathe. Why could he smell mahogany in the gunpowder?
The Time Magnet collapsed into itself with a loud pop. Martin’s ears rang.
Martin knelt next to his dead body. He was still warm. “I know you didn’t intend it, but you are a son of a bitch, Martin,” he said.
2:20 p.m.
An unseen hand ripped Martin through a brick wall at the speed of light. All sensation stopped. His eyes saw only black. His ears only rang. His body was neither warm nor cold. Most of all, he couldn’t breathe. Around him: void. Martin was the only thing in the universe: a broken body suspended in nothing. He grew dizzy, and his mind went blank. He replayed a conversation.
Intervention from any other timeline would only decouple that timeline from reality.
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