A Time Traveller's Maiden Voyage
My first trip on the Titanic was almost my last. I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for this. Thankfully I was able to work through my demons and make future voyages. Well, additional ones I should better say.
“Future” is such a loaded word in my vocabulary, and context is everything. Future suggests later time, and this instant in this time was about as late a one as I felt comfortable hanging about in, I remember thinking. Sure, once you get over the morbidity of tragic historical situations, one can find a way to enjoy the rich humanity of the moment. And the scene - what a scene! The lavish accommodations, the sumptuous food. One could reflect upon exploring the historical perspective of that important timeline and see beyond the tragedy that would shortly unfold.
It may sound a little bit like I am rationalizing. It was an ethical debate that within me for a long time. Do I avoid places and times of impending tragedy? How can I see and interact with people facing a horrific event and not move to help them. But simple logic told me I couldn’t endeavour to change history without catastrophic consequences.
I discovered through small experiments and through experience later that there is a resilience in time to absorb small perturbations, but outcomes in the degree of life and death is beyond what the machinery of the universe can handle. I could not test that for definitive proof, because a ‘positive’ test could well mean the vaporization of the experimenter.
Finally I found some ethical logic in the idea that getting to know the passengers even a small bit could be akin to helping them to live a little longer in that memories of their lives and who they were could be spread further among the living, in the world beyond the tragedy. But it is no less heart wrenching gathering those stories.
Being there, in such a place - well, the historical significance of the event, and the human cost weighs heavily upon one’s mind.
As the writer of such adventure stories as those I’ve shared, I have been called a bon vivant and raconteur and by some an empath for my insight into famed events. I confess to being a charlatan in the plotting of my novels and short stories. I have very little work to do in that regard, having been there in person. I am rewarded each time solely for my ability to tell simple real stories in great detail.
But as I am in a mood to share confidences, while fans read my ‘insightful’ tales of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, they likely don’t know that, say, the protagonist in my novel “Majestic Voyage,” while classified by most a character in historical fiction, he is actually the very real Henry Wilkes. I chronicled him and his family through several days on the doomed vessel. Sure, Henry’s real name was Thomas, but other than that, I told that story faithfully based on our actual interaction over those last few days.
Indeed, I can say modestly, that my historical ‘fictions’ have given the name “Cutler Phiney” some level recognition among fans of character-driven historical fiction. But I avoid the accolades, and would readily confess to being a fraud were I able to share my little secret. The people are all too real, and my stories contain very little fiction.
The critics have been reasonably kind. In general they acknowledge that my characters have depth, and the reader is generally pulled convincingly into the story. One gathers some sense of what it was like to be in each of my carefully crafted historical locales. I am not the most creative fellow. What readers take for a detailled, constructive elaborations on the historical record creating drama and interest, are merely observations which could have been made by anyone, had they been there. I exploit the unique tools at my disposal, but I am not, I hope, exploiting the people involved. My goal is to share a bit of lives lived and long past, and often lost altogether.
My great source of frustration and, I suppose, amusement is when a particularly picky critic questions the historical accuracy of my account. I have to grin and bear it of course, but I do desperately long to send them a terse note exclaiming, “I beg your pardon, sir, but that indeed is how it happened.”
The importance of precautions while gathering material for a story is not to be taken lightly, as was proved to me on my first project. Now, the risk of paradoxes and the confusing complexity of interwoven time-lines turns out to be not such a big issue. I had had my fears upon arriving in Southampton, and preparing to embark. Regardless, I enjoyed the trip and as I mentioned, I have made others since.
The fact that I would make at least one more trip in my later years became clear to me on that first voyage. I realized then that the gentleman whose gait and stature seemed rather familiar, and who seemed to be avoiding me, may well be me. It did not do much to dispel my worry when things started going wrong. I wished one of my co-located other selves had taken a moment to tell me “Don’t worry, everything will work out fine in the end.” However the rascals did not bother, and I can only suppose that they were guided by concern to not disturb the causal stability on one hand, yet were sustained by recollecting that everything had worked out okay on the other. Besides, would you want to experiment with unknown forces that might well precipitate your demise? I should think not.
On subsequent trips to that fair ship, I did indeed fulfil the role of the artful avoider, and took pains to ensure that I did not resemble my earlier self too much. Other than one frivolous tip of the hat to an earlier doppelgänger, we all seem to have agreed to keep our distance from one another. We do, however, have to put up with acquaintances telling us about sightings of our double when our attempted disguise is not suitably rigorous.
There was so much to learn in those early days. I did not know if my visit would immediately cause me to wink out my existence due to cumulative changes that might negate my having been born in the first place. I did not know if travel meant sliding into another parallel universe, and if I might find myself lost among parallel strands of existence, slightly different, or very different, than my home domain. Some sort of beacon through time was a first idea to solve the puzzle of helping me to return home, but what if the me in a parallel universe had a beacon too? And if emanating through time, how would I know which signal was the one to which I should return?
The parallel universe theory proved to be a non issue, or at least it has not seemed to be as far as the limits of my perception have revealed. It appears that I always return safe and sound to a familiar home, or one that is so identical as to be indistinguishable from the one I know so well.
What a tedious thing it is for you to listen to me explaining all of this. There is so much complexity wrapped up in the popular notions of time travel. So many questions and rules to be described. However, I am afraid that I cannot record a sensible account of my explorations without first providing some sense of how it all works. I must stop short of disclosing too much detail as I have long decided that in wide use, this incredible capability could very well rip apart our universe. I have appropriately removed all of my notes from accessibility, and determined that this capability will not be something I share with anyone. Perhaps in my late years, I’ll entertain a protégé and gently hand over the reins to someone suitably mature. But for now it is something I keep to myself.
Time has proven quite resilient over the years that I have explored its hidden corners. As well, it is sometimes difficult for me to keep track of the elapsed years of my own life, let me tell you! I have lived many years for each that I let pass in my own biological time.
Perhaps it will be seen as arrogance and selfishness, that I have not passed the secret of time travel on to anyone else, and recorded my experiences only in my “fictional” accounts. Perhaps the technology will go to the grave with me.
I will avoid explaining the workings of the apparatus, but I can convey some sense of the limitations, risks and challenges of the endeavour, so let me digress from recounting my visit to the Titanic for a moment, and provide some background to better illustrate the tale.
The excitement I felt from inventing the first time machine was a visceral, powerful thing. When it was clear what I had on my hands, the urge to jump in and go for a time-spin was almost more than I could resist.
PART II
Of course, there was not really a way to get ‘in.’ Transport is based instead on generating a bubble around the passenger, and defining that everything inside a certain density envelope should go somewhere else. Somewhen.
But my initial enthusiasm was easily checked, as I realized it would be quite a disappointment if inventing such an apparatus was the last thing I ever did. Thus I decided to walk away from the contraption, and think long and hard about what might go wrong.
This proved to be a very prudent approach indeed, due to something one typically ignores in popular explorations of the topic. The universe-in-motion issue came to me when I tried to explain why the first objects around which I erected an enveloping time-shifting field never appeared where and when I expected them. It was only when I created an autonomous time hopping robot that I got an insight into what was happening. My robot hopper simply disappeared and returned. It hopped away, took pictures in every direction and hopped right back. It was gone to the "far side” for only about one second. I was not sure if I would get pictures from a thousand metres in the air, or a view of my own back. Truthfully, I was not sure how good my positioning was going to be with the early apparatus.
It turned out that I had just blackness in all the pictures. I assumed that I must have sent the hopper into the interior of a wall, or deep underground. I was concerned I might have done some damage at the far end, as the process of materializing was one of a one dimensional energy point expanding into a sphere of a size of my choosing. Essentially a sphere large enough to encompass the hopper for now. Later, it would encompass me. Materializing inside a solid object could potentially explode the object from the inside as the sphere took position.
On a closer look at the black pictures returned, I noted a few small points of light. On further investigation I realized that these could potentially be starscapes from somewhere deep in space. The universe-in-motion hypothesis reared its ugly head, and the result was another year of hard work before I could make progress.
The universe is comprised of many, many things. Nothing in the universe is particularly special. What I mean is that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, and really, nothing else is either. What really matters are relative positions. When I sent back my first objects, they did indeed go back in time. However my workshop, was not in the same location in the universe that it had been ten minutes earlier. When one adds up the motion components of the earth, not only spinning, but orbiting the sun, and the motion of the overall solar system relative to our galaxy, and the galaxy relative to all the others, and this particular galactic cluster… well, you get the idea. So a brief launch of an object on a short jaunt back in time of only a few seconds, will result in it arriving perhaps several hundred kilometres, or thousands of kilometres away.
Dealing with this constant motion meant a whole pile of more work for Cutler Phiney, time traveller extraordinaire. Indeed, I spent the better part of the next five years dealing with this element, while my wondrous apparatus sat unused in my workshop.
Finally, I achieved a scheme for finding a return path. It involves… well, in the interest of brevity, let us call it a quantum thread, dispensed out like an unbreakable gossamer trail of mostly undetectable energy. This proved an effective solution for establishing an orientation in time and space. The apparatus is able to measure through time from where and whence it had came. Thus as I follow the signal back for a month or two, I am not only tracing a just a path back through time, but also a direct, complex path through space as well. With such data and a geospatial model of the world, I found I was able to target any place and anytime on the planet. I would love to don a space suit and have some interstellar adventures, but alas, I lack the spatial information, and have no idea where to get a serviceable space suit.
Now, there are always some small errors that creep into any system, and my time travelling gear was no different, to keep these errors at a minimum, I limit my travel to only about a hundred and fifty years or so. The best process turned out to be one where I used the hopper to make many small jumps and adjust the time and space corrections accordingly.
A disappointment though, of sorts, was that when I first developed my temporal tuner, to find and reel-in, as it were, the thread I had dispensed, was that as I scanned back through the years I could not find any other tachyonic threads of other origins anywhere. Perhaps there were some distance and time limitations to my device, but it seemed awfully lonely to discover that there was not a myriad of other thread signatures among which mine was a fresh new arrival. This said to me that nobody else had ever, or would ever, develop the means to travel through space and time by a similar means.
Scanning into the future, I could see glimmers of my journeys to come throughout the years. I learned a lot by scanning through the continuum. I learned that eighty years hence my thread trail origins would stop. This was likely upon my death, I decided. Shortly before or after my apparatus was likely to be put on a shelf and left unknown to those who would come later.
That taste of my pending mortality was a bitter one. We all know it must come one day, of course. After all, eighty years would put me well past one hundred, and that at least provided me with some enthusiasm. At that point I vowed to avoid exploring my own fate, at least for now. The past could provide me with plenty of exciting exploration, a virtually limitless income and I resolved to focus on that for the time being.
Arriving at the White Star line ticket office in Queenstown, in an uncomfortable early 20th century woollen suit replica from a costume rental company, the world around me seemed to be intensely illuminated; extra lucid and vibrant.
PART III
I had walked along the busy street feeling as conspicuous as if I were riding an elephant, yet was soon reassured that nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to me. I plunked down my just-acquired pound notes to purchase a state-room ticket on the proud ship and in spite of a look from the gentleman reacting to my accent, I soon found myself booked on the doomed vessel. I felt an uncanny sense of history being unwrapped before me, peeled like an orange, knowing that as the ticket agent scrawled my name it was captured in history as well, and I could jump back to the 21st century and see it there on ageing library microfilm.
But it was no small feat acquiring that ticket. Certainly, I might have simply arrived from the future upon the deck of the liner, and saved myself some effort, however, a comfortable accommodation would allow me to better immerse myself in the experience, and so a paid passage was a better approach. As well, getting the arrival coordinates for moving object was well beyond my abilities at that point, so walking about from old terra firma seemed much more within my abilities.
Some groundwork, however was required. First, short of robbing a bank or otherwise pilfering some currency, I would not get far, even in 1912. While a pound-note went further then, I still had to secure some of my own.
I arrived in that town on the southern coast of Ireland with a substantial antique diamond ring, which would not exist for another few decades or so, and quickly found a jeweller whom I had pre-located through some archival searching before my departure. I let him rob me a little, and acquired enough cash to have a luxurious voyage. Apparently the quality of the stone and setting were notable to the proprietor, and I could easily recoup the expense with another dip into my time-travel assisted stock trading account. But that is another story.
I purchased further clothing and miscellanea and made my way to purchase my ticket.
Navigating the throngs of well-wishers and 3rd class passengers I took up residence in a lavish on-board apartment. The port and town of Queenstown laid out below me would, I knew, be renamed by its traditional name Cobh again in a decade. The ship itself had already called at Cherbourg, France, where many of the first class passengers had boarded.
I ensured that my watch, and three other time pieces to boot, were all in good condition. Some technology of a distant future origin was among them -- I would take no chances with not being certain of the date and time. I would be gone before the night of April 14, at 11:40 p.m when the fateful iceberg met the boat. In fact, I ended up leaving a couple of days early, as the morbidity of the loss gradually overwhelmed me. Only 700 or so of these thousands would survive, and knowing was more than I could bear.
Years later I went back and picked up from where I had left off, in the cabin that I knew would be empty. But, truly, that first trip was almost my last. I did not know if I could take the feeling of helplessness, and restrain the desperate feeling I carried of wanting to tell everyone what would happen to try and save their lives.
I boarded on the Thursday and stayed until the Friday night. The arrival of the weekend, and the knowledge of the destruction of Sunday night was too much to bear, and I punched out in the evening, after a lavish dinner, and conversation with a delightful young couple. I did not find out for years whether they lived or died on that Sunday evening.
It was weeks after my return that I decided to take another trip, and for a long time after, I avoided disastrous events. Instead I found pleasure instead in situations where survival against the odds, and historic occasions were the central theme.
After my Friday night dinner on the shiny new ship, I had sat comfortably in the ship’s lavish Café de Paris and drank an espresso slowly, enjoying the opulence. The conditions were wonderful. The sea had been beautiful all day, and the sunset too was spectacular. Next to me an older couple talked about all they would do in New York when they arrived. I tried to put it out of my mind, but I knew that I had to leave.
I finished my coffee, and went to my stateroom. I was about to pick up my bag - that symbolic final act of departure, when I realized that I might someday wish to return for the final couple of safe days. So I put my wallet in the toe of my shoes, and pulled the travel device out of the hidden pocket in my jacket. I had almost forgot about my backup travel unit, and so pulled that out of my pocket, and tucked it into the other shoe, and pushed them both under my stateroom bed.
I stood then upon a stack of books, and extended the wires from the unit (the early unit used wires to form a sort of field-supporting antenna). They draped down below my toes and a rigid one poked up above my head and I then keyed in the sequence that charged the field and returned me home.
With a drop I fell the next moment into my workshop, and collapsed on the hard floor. The covers and several pages of the top book on which I had stood lay on the floor under me. I picked myself up and ensured I was in one piece. A note-to-self moment resulted in me later installing a thick padded exercise mat in that room for my return location.
As I said, I didn’t travel again for weeks, as I thought through my experience and how I could rationalize the emotional challenges I felt from being among doomed people, and resisting messing things up or damaging history. It was a heavy heart that I carried around for the following days.
I decided though that writing historical ‘fiction’ would also help me to deal with some of what I felt and accumulated from my travels, and bring some insight into the lives of those who had lived in a distant time, and were often lost in tragedy. It wasn’t all depression and angst, though I must say. I have made certain that a particularly dour trip was followed by others with much more positive outcomes.
In the first few years of my adventure, I was in a small bookstore in South Africa. My first couple of novels were only just seeing small volumes in a few spots, and Capetown was one of them. After signing a few copies, a young man approached me and said that he was particularly stricken by a scene in which I described a conversation between Thomas and the Reverend Archer, while enjoying a glass of brandy. “It is so incredibly strange,” he began, “It sounded almost verbatim like a scene that my grandmother described. Except that the real reverend’s name wasn’t Archer.”
“Did she read the book as well?”
“No, she’s passed on now, but she was 15 years old on the Titanic, and recounted a few stories to me when I was a child, and that was one scene that always stuck with me. Surely you must have met my Gran at some point to get that story from her?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t been through Capetown before. Just a lucky coincidence I guess.” I countered weakly, feeling exposed.
He just shook my hand heartily and thanked me again for writing the novel. “It reminded me of the stories she used to tell me,” he finished. “It was an uncanny feeling reading something so similar in your book.”
I had felt strangely guilty in that interaction. As I wrapped up that event I couldn’t help remember meeting Thomas and his young daughter just so recently, and sharing a brandy with him and the Reverend Carter a couple of days before the iceberg.
- The End -