Non-Minkowski Space (Patreon)

Human Trial #1 -00:01:00

One minute left. My mind was racing. This must have been what the first astronauts felt. Any small error and it would be over for them, only that I had it worse. This was all my invention, my design, my engineering. It was all on me. Not an army of the best and brightest of the country, pouring over every calculation, assumption, circuit and weld to find flaws.

But I’ve sent literally hundreds of probes already. I’ve tested every element on the periodic table I could get my hands on. I’ve tested complex organic materials and verified them after they came back. I’ve tested insects, rodents and my neighbors bunny. I haven’t tested any large animals, but I’ve tested masses larger than me, and volumes larger than me, and just yesterday I tested 214.2 lbs, exactly what I weighed at that point.

All tests were flawless, except for equipment issues. That’s were I would be worried. The science is as solid as it is simple. By inducing harmonics to the sub-atomic elemental spins in a body of mass you can get its positional waveform to interfere with echos of itself from the underlying space structure and create a local probability top at a different time and place. Time travel, teleportation, or both, depending on the harmonics you use. For a short while at least, until the harmonic subsides and you return back. The math is a nightmare, but the actual hardware isn’t that difficult to set up even in an apartment. Which I did.

Human Trial #1 -00:00:30

I’m a theoretical physicist, not an engineer, so of course it is the equipment I’ve had issues with. But I can’t think of a scenario that would be fatal to me. Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here. Any misalignment or feed issues with the field generators would just create dissonant harmonics that would fail to take me anywhere. Since the actual displacement is instant I don’t worry about power failures either. Once there I have 45.3 minutes until the harmonics dissipates and I’ll return back regardless what the equipment is doing. I’ve already probed the location multiple time. It’s a back alley in Seattle in 2202-08-15 22:01. My autonomous drone managed to do some surveying and get some photos of local fashion. I feel ridiculous in my approximation of the clothes, but you need to start somewhere. Document everything and iterate. I don’t expect to get any groundbreaking inventions in the first visit, but as I get better and better at blending in I can hopefully get hold of more and more advanced schematics.

Human Trial #1 00:00:00

It just happened. No light effects. No sound. Just instantly standing there. It looked just like when I loaded the 3D capture in my VR goggles. I carefully walk out into the street. Not many people around, fortunately. It would have been safer to show up somewhere further from downtown, but the goal now is to collect as much everyday information as possible. Look into the shop windows. The drone had shown that was still a thing, even in Amazon’s home town.

Human Trial #1 00:00:00 [+00:07:12]

The alarm is sounding “Contamination Alert” over and over. I start to move away, but the sound follows me. I don’t see where it comes from. Less than 30 seconds later someone in a police uniform with a face covering helmet steps in front of me, gun drawn. I barely understand his accent, but it’s clear he wants me to remain still. Bright lights are hovering above me. I look up but see nothing but blinding, white dots shining down on me. Then a sort of transparent shower curtain is lowered all around me. Without warning it collapses in on me, like a vacuum pack machine preparing a steak for sous vide cooking. I can breathe, I can wiggle, but I can’t move. I’m lifted off the street and transported away with the city rushing beneath me.

Human Trial #1 00:00:00 [+00:21:44]

I’m lowered into some sort of ER and placed on a bed. Medical staff wearing full protective gear and breathing apparatus secure me to a bed before they cut away my confinement, and clothes. They strip everything from me, including my watch. A well rehearsed sequence of objects are placed on me, like small, high tech snails. I’m not that worried about essentially being tied to a bed. All devices are still recording. In 20 minutes I will be back in the apartment and can start go over everything they captured, and there is so much technology in this room.

Despite the strong accent I can understand some of what they are saying. Phrases like “I thought all of them had already been solved” and “they will have to make a full sweep. This will not be good for the senator”. An absolutely stunning nurse enters my field of vision. She looks at me with kind eyes filled with pity. She inserts some sort of breathing apparatus into my mouth and secures it. She strokes my hair and tells me in a low voice “This will all be over soon”.

I start to panic. If they cut anything off it will be detached even when I blink back. If I die here I die everywhere. Anything injected or inserted however will remain. But what happens to things that chemically bonds? Oh, God! I should have thought about chemical interactions. Breathing should be fine. I inhale oxygen, but that binds with carbon that I then exhale. When I swap back, will all the oxygen in my blood stream remain and I suffocate? No, Bun-e survived and didn’t even look hurt or even surprised coming back.

The staff start arranging equipment around me. Someone attaches a drip bag to my arm. Two other start placing adhesive pads on specific points on my body and connecting them to a machine. Despite my rising panic I note that all of them look like photo models. Then they all leave the room.

Human Trial #1 00:00:00 [+30min?]

It takes a minute, but then everything comes to life and starts whirring and humming. I can feel a warmth spreading throughout the body. I can see a counter on one of the displays that probably is time. 15 more minutes and this will all be over. I can feel my body shift slightly.

Human Trial #1 00:00:00 [+55min?]

Still strapped in bed. I can’t tell time precisely, but by now I should definitely have jumped back. Though my arms and legs are still held in place, even from this locked down position I can see that my body has undergone drastic changes. My belly is gone and instead I have a much more athletic physique. Is this why the probability function isn’t collapsing back? The mass is too entangled in the new mass that this has become the new, most probable position. That shouldn’t be possible, although as the foremost and only authority in my field of time travel I admit there is more research to be done.

Human Trial #1 +00:00:01

I’m back in my apartment. I hear equipment and pieces of torn clothes falling down around me. No, I was right. Introducing atoms with different harmonics and chemically bond them will introduce dissonance that prevents concurrent collapse. So instead, like metronomes on a table, they will slowly synchronize and then decay in unison until the probability wave collapses back.

I realize I’m still doing theoretical physics instead of facing the fact that my body is unrecognizable. I look younger, feel younger, although I’m buffer than I’ve ever been before in my life. I get up and rush into the bathroom. What did they do to me?

Human Trial #1 +00:00:24

I… I guess I can live with that.

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