Odd Prompts: Time Travel

This is a one-shot vignette for this week's prompt. Just me playing around. 

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“The best argument for the impossibility of time travel?” 

She looked up from her cup of coffee, which she had been nursing like it was a rare commodity. 

“It hasn’t happened yet.” 

She raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure?” 

“Fully certain.” He put the wrench down. 

She took a sip, more to buy time to think than anything else at this point. “The current theory is that time travel is only possible with a leap into the future. If you cannot return to the past, then perhaps...” 

He swung around on his heel, shaking a finger at her, his face pinkened with excitement. “That! That is against every law of physics we currently know! Everything else we study can be reversed. Everything! If time travel were unidirectional it would undermine the system we have been studying all these years!” 

Behind him, the construct he’d been working on loomed over him, providing a dramatic backdrop to his pose. He hadn’t been to a barber in months, so the hair was even right. 

“You realize you look like a mad scientist.” She leaned over and put the plain white mug on the nearest horizontal surface, a strut for his machine. 

“I am not a mad scientist!” He ruined the effect of his bellow by running his fingers through his hair and pulling it out into a full halo of salt-and-pepper strands, illumined from behind by the purple flow of aequorin and calcium through the transparent tubes. 

She stood up and stretched. “Quite, quite mad.” 

He relaxed, deflating suddenly. “Mad? I grant you. But mad engineer, please. I do things with my madness.” 

“Like this.” She murmured, opening her arms wide and gesturing in a full circle. The space they stood in, on a platform of polycarbonate, looked like a movie prop. From the cold light generated by calcium and aequorin that created no heat unlike most other lights, to the carbon dioxide that reaction shed as a waste product which was being harvested as fuel. She didn’t follow the complexities of his engineering. That wasn’t her job.

“I wasn’t mad when I designed this.” He followed her gaze, upward, to the weirdness above them. The fractal ceiling, spiraling into infinitesimally small circuits, each one gleaming with a gold wire, because gold, he’d explained to her, could be manipulated until it was not more than a molecule thick. 

“What will it look like when you turn it on?” She let herself flow from the hands raised into a long stretch, then folded up, stretching one leg, then the other. The special suit he’d also designed, with it’s mass of circuits woven into the spider silk fibers, stretched with her. It wasn’t the softest or most comfortable thing she’d ever worn, but it was certainly the most expensive. 

“Like nothing at all. Do you see electricity before it reached the diode in the lamp?” He had his back turned to her, like she was doing something intimate and private and he was giving her privacy. 

“No. That’s disappointing. As wild as this is, I was hoping for a show.” She finished with her limbering and stood on her slippered feet, ready. 

“Timing doesn’t matter.” He turned slowly, a contrast to his first pivot. “Because if we succeed, then there is no time.” 

“That sounds ominous.” 

“You signed up for this.” He shrugged. “They wouldn’t let me, in my madness, try it first. I am sorry for that.” 

“If it works, then you’ll get your chance.” She remembered the coffee mug. 

In turning to reach for it, she missed him stepping outside the small space, and pressing the button. She grasped the handle, and... 

***

I was prompted this week by Ray Krawczyk with "What do we want? / Time travel! / When do we want it? / Doesn’t matter!" 

I prompted Becky Jones with "They call the wench Mariah." 

You can read all the prompt responses, or join in the fun yourself, over at MOTE.