A Time Travel Story

Tldr there are 2 books ideas. Don't read this paragraph. It's not part of the post. The first book idea is about capitalist style democracy. Democracy is electronic and you can change your vote at any time. Candidates rise and fall like companies, with votes spiking up and down in days before and after big political decisions. Candidates need to constantly please to stay in office, a small miss-step could have them in second place in minutes. So a boy time travels to the future, and back in his parents time they don't realize time only moves forward, so he is stuck and will never travel back. He explores this new world (where he's a celebrity, first time traveler in history), and learns to cope with the "loss" while getting familiar with a future where time travel abuse (rich people skipping days to live longer, etc) is a hot topic and culture is forgotten (because it should be?). Politics is at the core of the story, in a system where rules change like the wind in the ultimate capitalist system. Second book idea is about the building blocks of serverless systems in the cloud. Start with a big picture, and move through distributed storage (block, database, filesystem, cache), data flow (notification, queuing, aggregating), and serverless computation. Look at systems. Brief talk on systems like cloudformation, terraformer, CDK, for making designs come to life.

Makdol is a big place, and Makyafa is a beautiful one, so maybe this is the reason their parents chose those names. When they worked together, the results would be fabulous spectacles, monuments of humanity people would travel a thousand miles to see. At least this is what Makdol was hoping.

He meandered along the two lane road they called home, and took in the leafy oaks arching over the sidewalks, shading him from the early summer sun. He saw their home across the street, with the patchy grass in the lawn in front of a pleasant two story house. The dullish bricks over the deck gave it a solid and warm feeling.

But Makdol didn't step off the sidewalk to cross the street today, because there was still something to do on this side. Dr. Simon reminded him yesterday to come right after school (he visited the Simon's every day to walk their labrador retriever, Spot), and he was curious to see what was in store.

He pushed open the Simon's screen door, and stepped into the kitchen-y foyer, where everything gleamed. The cold feeling of depression crept into his subconcious as he stepped between the bare white walls and set his bag on the floor. There were no light switches or knobs in this house. Everything was controlled from your phone. He hurried to the back lab, where Courtney Simon sat on a stool, hunched over her computer screen.

Courtney looked up with a grin. "How was school?" ... etc, etc

"So... in my lab up at the University, we had a bit of a break through. It looks like we discovered time travel". She was watching him closely, he wasn't sure how he was supposed to react."Uhhh- what? How? Really?".

Really. She shared her screen to the tv screen on the wall, and clicked play. In the video, he could see Courtney standing with her back to the screen, holding something round and black in her hand. She set it carefully into some kind of a box sitting on the table in front of her, made out of a shiny metallic material.

Then she turned back to the camera. Picking up the box, she angled it down, and now he could see the black object. An eight ball. Classic. Courtney was putting the box back on the table now, and now she was coming right up to the camera in the video. "Ready?" she looked down at them with a soft smile. Makdol was smiling too. He didn't know what to expect from this eight ball experiment, but he was of a fan of movies where people broke the 4th wall.

Courtney had picked up the camera now, and repositioned it so they were looking down inside the shiny box. The boring part of it. Now they were just watching of an eight ball in a box. And waiting. Makdol could hear a clicking sound coming from the speakers, and now a whirring, faster and faster, and now a really loud click, and then silence. The eight ball was gone.

A second passed slowly, and another, and another. Makdol looked up at the real Courtney, who was still starting into the screen. "Is it over?", he asked. "No, no! You're going to miss it!" She pointed him back to the screen. Half a minute ticked by and then, without so much as a flicker, the eight ball was back. Just like photoshop.

And maybe it was photoshop? Making a ball disappear was easy work. Especially against a plain background. Really anyone could make a video like this, and he wouldn't expect Dr. Simon to be wasting her time with cinematography. "Is it photoshop?" "Not photoshop... you can call it magic. Time travel."

She tried to go into the details. There was something in chemistry and physics called entropy, he would probably learn about sometime this year. The rule of entropy is that it always increases, and in a way this means everything is getting more random. So her lab was looking for a way to make a connection, a short cut, to a place where entropy was higher. She said it was like a slide, they were moving along time at one speed with entropy slowly increasing, and the idea was to add another slide, a faster one. Now the eight ball could take this new short cut- this new slide, and quickly roll into the future.

Makdol didn't quite understand. Just because the future has higher "Entropy", why would the eight ball go to it? Unless the future had higher entropy because the eight ball rolled to it. But that didn't really make sense. Having an eightball now and in the future didn't seem like a very random thing, and he was pretty sure Courtney said that having higher entropy was about being more random.

Now Courtney was talking again, her voice was raised and she was talking very quickly. "The thing is, I didn't really believe it either. It could just be photoshop, except we didn't do any! Still, I didn't believe it, and I had to try something else. Which is why, I took some of the lab equipment home, and did this...".

She was pointing across the room, and now he noticed. In an otherwise white-walled room, in the back corner, there was something shiny. Something metallic. A human sized box.

"In mid May, I finished putting together my home setup, and it took me a couple weeks to work up the courage, but then last weekend my huband was taking the kids away to visit their grandparents, and I knew what I had to do. I set a timer on the computer for the trigger, and then I.. I..."

"You went in the box?"

"Yeah... and there was that clicking sound, and that whirring, and I knew this was all a big mistake, that my kids would never forgive me for killing myself in such a stupid way."

"And then I heard the final click. And I was still alive! But otherwise.. nothing. So I opened the door, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water to calm my nerves. I was a little disappointed it didn't work, but mostly relieved I made it back in one piece. And can you guess what happened 2 hours later?"

"....the kids?"

She sighed. "The kids. My husband came back with the kids! I thought it was still Friday night, but it wasn't. It was Sunday. My period came two days late too, but I don't really want to concern you with the details. The thing is, it seems to work."

So now he was wondering this crazy thing. Why was he here? He, Makdol, a 15 year old kid worrying about high school classes and drama club. And he was only the dog walker! Why would she tell him all of this? ... did she want him to try it? His parents would never approve. Unless they didn't know?

"Ummm. So. How long am I supposed to go for? That is why you invited me, right? To have another person try it?"

She bit her lip... "So it's complicated. And yes. But actually I really know it works already. So I don't really have a reason to test it again." She was avoiding his eyes. She looked down at her laptop screen. Courtney's fingers clicked against the keyboard. Was she sending an email?

Makdol frowned slightly. He checked the clock, but a glance back at Courtney made him pause. "I do have another test. I know it works, but I was wondering if you might help me with a different kind of test." Her hard brown eyes locked on his, and he held her gaze. Her voice came across the room so slowly, so heavily, he could see her in a Marvel movie, giving the game changing news that while humanity had been saved when the Avengers redirected a nuke into the enemy compound, Captain America didn't survive. "I want you" she took a breath, "to test the limits".

The plan was simple. Go forward. Go back. Dr. Simon would send Makdol as far forward as reasonable, 100 hundred, 200 hundred years, and- assuming humanity didn't destroy itself in that time- he would use the same technology in the future to send himself back. The plan had major flaws. A lot of risk. And this was what life was about. Back to the Future. Time Travel. Something his parents would never agree to, something beaureaucracy would not legalize.

Hi I'm the author and I want to jump in here and say the experiment is completely unnecessary. If Courtney really wants to test the limits of time travel, she should be sending the eight ball forward 100 years, and seeing if they send it back. She could put a sticky note on top. "Hi! I'm an eight ball from the past. Please send me back 100 years to Dr. Courtney Simon to complete her physics experiment. Thanks!" Anyway, this wouldn't work in the context of the rest of the book, so she sends Makdol instead.

Makdol stepped in the metal box. Courtney closed the door behind him and, funnily enough, this one did have a knob on the inside. He took a deep breath. Just a heist. Get in, get out. No deviations. No changes of plans. Courtney's steps echoed off the walls and she called out, "Ready?". ready. Click-click-click-click, the clicking phase. The whirring phase. And finally, Makdol heard the final click of the past he had called home for 15 years.

And silence.