My Mind is Made Up

© 2014 Mr. David R. Dorrycott

Chapter One

I’m pretty sure you have read at least one time travel story in your life, they were very popular in the19th, 20th and 21st century after all. So many people write these go-in-the-past and do-over-stories, almost all using the plot lines of Aladdin’s Lamp, Aliens, Time Machines and such. That is fine for fiction, but my story is based completely within science, and what really happens when you do try to jump back in time. Forward? Forget it, there isn’t enough energy in the universe to do that. You see, one Thomas Creed Gardner, that’s me, I was one of the unpaid Graduate Student assistant researchers who helped do the dirty deed. Oh not dirty in the sexual term, but dirty in that I had to take over another persons body, their life and not even a person in my own reality. No, Time Travel is real, we proved that mathematically, it was nailed down tight in 2032 with the Hawking-Barrister equations. It would be relatively easy to build the machine, even with vacuum tube technology from two hundred years ago but, yet as always there is that little nasty word BUT, there were exactly two problems.

One; Anyone going back in time, even a nano-second, would create an entirely new time line, one that would have a fifty-fifty chance of ending the instant that the traveler died.

Two; The energy required to make that trip was exactly the absolute remaining power output (as defined in standard radiation equations) of our home star. Yeah, that’s a lot of used D cell batteries.

So, how did I manage this feat, using the total power output of a standard twelve volt automobile battery? Simple, I traveled to a different reality, one moving exactly two hundred years behind ours. That meant, since I was in 2120 when I left, that I ended up in 1920, but it wasn’t my body that made the trip. No, even though equations say that you can transfer matter from Dimension A to Dimension B, we were a long, long way from getting there, about five hundred years away, if humans still exist in five hundred years that is. What traveled then was my mind, my memories, my personality.

You need to understand that though there are several days buffer between the actual departure time and arrival time, it is vitally important that there had to be a still living body, one that had just died within two minutes before the new mind arrived but still had the potential to survive. Brain death had to have already occurred, because though the memories would be retained, the travelers own personality would push the fading original one out, out intro wherever we go when we do die. Along with that the a subject had to be within two point five miles of our machines location due to power restraints. So Professor Carter (one smoking hot University Professor, even if she was in her forties) assigned the six of us to locate a qualified recipient, the soonest target located would be used first. Of course what that bitch didn’t say was that the person who found an acceptable host would be the one going, whither they wanted to or not.

I wasn’t planning to be that person, not even on a bet. You see I’m a Physics Grad Student and I have, or had, plans. Mars was finally opening up for full colonization, they had finally found, reinforced and sealed enough old lava tunnels, then hand built enough underground shelters connected to them to offer a place for some three thousand humans. Three thousand humans? Sounds like an awful small number doesn’t it, at least until you take into consideration that only about a million five are still alive on the planet, and that number that is dropping daily thank you World War Three. Projections are that within eighty years, thanks to the modified viruses, radiation and other nasties now floating around, there will not be a single mammal alive on the planet and getting off was still very difficult. You had to be of good health, capable of reproducing, intelligent and not infected with any of the virus’s on a certain list. My girlfriend and I were already chosen, depending upon my getting my Doctorate in Theoretical Physics in time. Patricia already had her ticket, she was a wiz programming an AI already, though part of that were ideas that I had come up with during our goofing off time, not that I cared one bit about that. Her flight was tomorrow and we intended to celebrate tonight, very actively.

So off we went like good little hamsters chasing Doctor Carter’s little target, with everyone but I heading for the library stacks. Me? I went to the West Lafayette Journal & Courier collection, downstairs in the library’s third basement. No one had looked at those files in at least thirty years, unless it was because some Professor sent them there. Purdue University had acquired the original newspaper collection when the Tribune finally went belly up seventy or so years ago. Knowing how to use the stacks as any good little Grad student should I was fast, so in less than ten minutes I had the target, of course I was using a portable version of my loves latest A.I. to help in the search. Very soon I was headed back to Dr. Carter with a hard copy of my prize, knowing that if this worked then even those who could not leave the planet might survive. It would also have been an instant Nobel prize for Doctor Carter, if anyone still lived in Sweden to give it, which they don’t. Mainly because that area of the planet was nothing but radioactive ooze now.

My gold key was one Heather Rose Baker, daughter of one Billy Hank Baker, a farmer and his wife Mary Lynn Baker, mother of seven. Heather had slipped down a muddy bank into the Wabash river and unable to swim she was never seen again. Most likely swept downstream in the heavy current was the considered opinion of the newspaper reporter.

When I returned twenty minutes after leaving it was to a very surprised Doctor Carter, everyone else had just gotten started on their search, I knew because she had a tracer on one of her larger monitors showing her where everyone was. So she thanked me for the information, then offered me a drink in celebration. I don’t know why the hell I agreed, maybe it was the fact that Dr. Carter’s blouse had apparently popped a few buttons while I was gone. Truth is, I was still a naive young buck, still ruled more by the things slapping around between my two legs than that mass of grey goo hiding under my skull, at least where attractive women were concerned and even at her age Dr. Carter made my love look almost plain in comparison. Yep, I was hot for teacher, a teacher that was headed for the interplanetary ship in three days and I wasn’t the only one. I was still talking over young Heathers story when the world faded away.