"A Tale of Time Travel," by Caleb Bearss

It was the fifth of March when it happened. What am I talking about; well you see Mr. Tucker was a very special boy, well a prodigy really. I can't tell what year it is, well I know what year it is, I just can't tell you. You may be asking yourself, why, why can't he tell me what year it is? Well I guess it's because it just doesn't matter. Back to Mr. Tucker now, as I have said he was a prodigy, and on the night before his twenty-first birthday he had created the first Particle Acceleration Device, PAD for short. At first the PAD, by ways uncertain to me, accelerated the particles of any object put on the Particle Acceleration Platform (PAP). The particles accelerate at superluminal speeds; after sped up to the correct speed for the distance the object is needed to travel the particles are encased in Anzium, undoubtedly the shiniest of all metals. Anzium is a metal of strange qualities. Anzium has been tested at the extremes of the extreme temperatures and stays structurally identical. Anzium if moved and shaped slowly is the softest of all metals, what makes it so good for time travel is that at speeds faster than 60 miles per hour the outer wall of the Anzium shell the particles are encased in will never and can never break or crack in anyway, they actually have to keep the Anzium shells vibrating at 60 mph at all times or over the course of weeks they will lost their shape, while the inner wall of Anzium stays as soft as a bed of foam. It is said that Anzium was actually discovered by Samuel Graive. Scientist aren't completely sure if Anzium was discovered or actually invented by Samuel Graive, when asked about it Samuel denied ever hearing about such a metal let alone invented it. At any rate Anzium was the only thing that kept the subjects alive during extensive time experiments. Again at the age of twenty-five Mr. Tucker invented something else, the vision he had had for himself his whole life, a personal PAD, which he so ingeniously named PPAD (Personal Particle Acceleration Device). The PPADs work in a similar fashion to the PAD, but instead of the PAP, the PPAD uses what is called a Chronovisor, which is a set of goggles that let the user view the interface of the PPAD, after the time of transportation is picked the Chronovisor then starts it's highly powerful tumblers. The tumblers take one third the time to accelerate the particles of the human body then the PAP takes.

I guess I should tell you a little about Mr. Tucker before I go on. He is a very tall man, which makes his motions seem awkward and heavy. Ever since his terrible accident, which happened when he was only eleven years old, he had not been able to keep a steady hand. This is one of the reasons that he needs his assistant Philbius Graive, without him Mr. Tucker would have never been able to complete the device, you see there is much work in which one would need a steady hand to accomplish. Mr. Tucker is about seven feet tall; people sometimes wonder how anyone could get so tall, if anyone does ask him how he will usually come up with sometime that he thinks is clever, like “genetic experiments gone screwy” or “Implants!”, sometime he just mumbles something about quantum this or genetic manipulation this, blah blah blah.

Not much is known about Mr. Tucker’s family, but records do say that they left him a very large sum of money when they died. All of Tommy's family died right around his eighth birthday, the family while on the way to the airport, they were going on vacation. Mr. Tucker is the only want who survived that terrible accident that took place that night. Mr. Tucker has told me that he no longer will talk about it.

After the invention of PPADs Mr. Tucker felt as though all of the things that he wanted to accomplished had been done and so he retired leaving Philbius to run the experiments on his own. Most of Philbius' experiments consisted of sending different objects into the past to see if it would change the present, which really wouldn't work out to well. Philbius says that Mr. Tucker sabotaged one of his experiments, which never really happened Philbius sees things, he does go day on end with no sleep performing those tests. So after he claimed to see this happen the first time he went in search of Mr. Tucker, so he made my way to Mr. Tucker's house. When he arrived Mr. Tucker wasn't there, but Philbius knew that he still lived at the house, no one else has such a nice looking place in this neighborhood. He hide in Mr. Tuckers room, Philbius hide there until he came back, he hide there with a club in his hands, he was there until Mr. Tucker fell asleep. After her had fallen asleep, Philbius snuck up to Mr. Tucker's bed and hit him on the head with the club, just hard enough to knock him out for a good amount of time. When he woke up he found himself still in his own house but he was strapped to a chair with a PPAD attached to his wrist counting down to the point the speed of particle acceleration was meet. Philbius did however leave a recording on the PPAD for Mr. Tucker, most of which was indecipherable after the jump; the only thing Mr. Tucker could make out was Philbius saying something about proving that there was multiverse. He did notice that the place he ended up was very different from the place he left.

“Well I guess that would happen after all, things being different...” Mr. Tucker said, talking to himself. “What did Phil mean when he said he had proved that there was a multiverse? I mean the whole concept of a multiverse brings up more questions than it answers. I first time I heard about the multiverse was in Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Infinite possibilities over infinite time lines over infinite universes. One of the problems that a multiverse brings up is that if there are infinite possibilities over infinite time lines in infinite universes then one of the universes would have created a being that has the power to destroy all other universes and in one universe this being has already used this power, meaning that we wouldn't even exist, at one point we did though, but wait in still another universe a being was created that could stop all of the other universes from being destroyed, you can go on infinitely when the possibilities, seriously you could go on forever. But since the second Law of Thermodynamics states that usable energy decreases over time a universe would burn out eventually as the molecules and energy become evenly distributed. Thus ruling out any claims that any universe could be eternal, however, this would make a multiverse desirable. A multiverse would be necessary in the maintaining life, may it be human or otherwise.”

After explaining all of this to himself Mr. Tucker set off for the nearest building. The dome shaped building was the largest he had ever seen, it seemed to be made of metal, an extremely shiny metal at that. Mr. Tucker noticed that the days were less bright here. While traversing his way to the dome shaped building he saw something shining in the distance, a lot of something at that.

“I wonder why that is so...” thinks Mr. Tucker “I wonder if it is because the sun has become a red giant. If so the Earth, since it has survived the expending of the sun, would have had to have been pushed out into space so it would not be engulfed by the sun. They seem much closer I suppose...”

Mr. Tucker's voice trailed off at the sight of an unknown creature. This creature from what he could tell looked much like an elephant, a very small one, but only walked on two legs and was very agile. Not thinking he chased after it. When he had almost caught up to the creature he tripped, flying through the air he landed on his head and was knocked unconscious. He woke to a strange buzzing noise. He did not know how much time had passed. He found himself in a strange place, not anywhere he saw outside, not even from far away.

He saw the small creature again and was startled. Thinking of all of the bad things that could happen and could have already happened he backed away. While backing away he heard the creature speak to him, but not with words. The creature wasn't even moving its mouth. It said “Mr. Tucker, do not me I know all about your predicament. My people call me Big Bear. We are all but extinction now. Your people have killed almost all of us. You need to find a way to destroy your time travel device. Your partner Mr. Graive was correct, there is a multiverse and we are just the occupants of this one. Ever since you created your device people have been coming to this universe and killing my people, they think us to not obtain consciousness, but they are wrong! If you do not find a way to stop yourself from creating the device then all of my people will die and the multiverse will become unbalanced.”

After that the creature ran away Mr. Tucker didn't know what exactly he should do now that he doesn't even know where the dome is. He decided to get out of the cave. When he exited the dwelling he saw a strange forest, the kind of which he had never seen. He thought it strange knowing that he saw no forest where he was before. Even the sky here is blue, it showed the sun at its previous state, not as a red giant but a as the yellow dwarf it once was. The sky reminded Mr. Tucker of home. He at that moment remembered something that the creature, who called himself Big Bear, said something, something that Mr. Tucker didn't think he had actually heard at the time, something he thought he heard in a dream. Big Bear told him that he was going to bring him to the dome, since that's were his people had lived, so there was plenty of food and drink there. Mr. Tucker hurried to find something to eat since he was hungry, and did not know how long he had been outside. When he found water he drank it, so much that it made him sick. After a while of letting his stomach settle he continued to explore the place he was in, which he now knew was the dome shaped building he saw outside. Not too long after he set off he found the food he was looking for, or at least he thought it was food, it smelled good but looked completely disgusting. Mr. Tucker had to choke down the food, which did not taste as good as it smelled. After eating the, what must have been rotten, food he took rest.

While Mr. Tucker was dreaming he had a dream, one that did make any sense at the time. His dream was about Big Bear talking to him but he couldn’t understand anything that Big Bear was saying. He awoke dazed and confused and stay like that for much of the day. He wondered around until he found something that he had never seen before, something shiny. It was a piece of the metal that the building was constructed out of. He had this strange feeling that he needed to examine this strange metal. Complied he examined it; the strange metal was Anzium, and then it came to him; all of the shiny metal he saw outside must have been Anzium nodes. But then how did it get to his universe.

“There is only one way that it would be possible” he said. “Mr. Graive would have had to create his own time machine, travel to this exact universe, and bring enough of it back for me to use in my device. But as far as I know Anzium is the only way to get the subject safe from one point to another. I guess it is always possible for there to be a different way to keep the subject safe during travel, but I just haven’t figured out another way to do it yet. Hmm… maybe if we could somehow figure out a way to keep water in its liquid state will also keeping it in a certain shape then maybe just maybe that would protect the subject long enough for him or her to travel through time or he could have used the PAD that I would have made, using some other material for the shell, which would have taken longer, and then traveled into the future, well another dimension’s future. There he would have discovered Anzium, and brought it back to the past, where he knew I could use it for the shell so that I could would create the device much sooner than before…”

The earth began to shake. It felt as if the ground was opening its’ mouth to swallow up the gargantuan building. Mr. Tucker tried to run for safety when he tripped, hit his head, and was knocked unconscious.

When he woke up it was dark, so dark that he couldn’t even see his own hands. He stumbled around feeling the walls so that he could get a good picture of the room in his mind. He searched until he found something that felt like a door, he knew it, he was being held here by something, what it was he had no idea, but something was trying to keep him in that room. He just wanted to go home. As he thought about it he wondered “Maybe this is a stupid idea, but I wonder if the door is open”, as it turned out it was. When he left the room he instantly felt like he was being watched. He was being watched by the thing that put him in that room. He needed to go; he needed to hurry and just go, he felt like if he didn’t get out of there he didn’t know what would happen.

He was leaving when he saw it. It looked as if it was, or used to be, human, but it seemed like it had no bones, just a glob of jelly in chair. The image of that person… the creature… that thing would stick in his mind forever. He felt like just seeing it gave it control over him, even if it was only a small amount and so he ran… he ran until his legs gave out. When he couldn’t run anymore he knew that he was far enough away.

“There are all of these strange creatures on this planet, dimension, all very different from anything you could find back home. All with strange powers. All of them could kill me and I don’t know why they haven’t. Maybe they just want to make it harder on me, being here and all. I think that must be what they are trying to do. Maybe they don’t want to harm me at all. Maybe, just maybe, but probably not, I mean why they wouldn’t want to harm me is beyond me. I bet on could even suck the intelligence from me, so why, why don’t they just do it already.”

As he said that he walked toward what he thought was a cavern. It was light shining inside the cavern and he heard voices. “Could it be?” he thought “Could it be… others?” When he entered the cavern there was a great surge of light. He rushed into the room where all the noise was coming from. Where he found it a new PPAD just lying there, he took it and used it.

Now Mr. Tucker is back at home. Back to sipping scotch and smoking cigars, he once says that he would never forget what happened that night. In his later years Mr. Tucker wrote a book about this experience, it was titled, My Tale of Time Travel and Big Bear, the Friend I met in a Different Dimension. It was a best seller, but no one thought that any of it was true, you see, no one had the chance to travel to that dimension. Which was okay for Mr. Tucker, he would wish that fate no one, not even his is biggest enemy.