*****
Threading his body through the crowded classroom, Tom received “good mornings” from every direction. Young college kids moved about the room taking seats as they socialized, but then getting up again as the conversations grew.
Professor Spencer’s classroom housed twenty chairs, of which just a little over a dozen would be occupied. Off to the side of the room was a dark walnut desk with a matching chair and a Bakelite black telephone that was perfectly centered on top of the desk, and nothing else. The phone was screwed into the table so that it could not be lifted. A black cord extended from the base and through a small hole in the wood of the desk, and it reached into the concrete wall. The wall had a small two-foot squared piece of thick glass, allowing for observation.
On the other side of the wall, and through the glass, was ‘The Experiment’.
A bell sounded and the last of the students funneled in. On the wall adjacent to the experiment was a blackboard with a long narrow table. Professor Spencer opened his satchel and removed his yellow notepad and a cup holder full of yellow pencils. He set the pencils next to the paper at the center of the table. He executed these actions via muscle memory.
The chalkboard contained math equations scrawled and squiggled across its surface. From the back of the room it looked to be a form of hieroglyphics. The chalk had been quite busy from previous days of class. White words were stretched and sketched sideways and at one point upside down. To a newcomer, one might say, ‘What in the world?’, but to Tom and his class it all made wonderfully imperfect sense.
With his back to the class everyone went silent. Not because it was time to start, no, the quiet calm was because a certain someone had entered the room. Tom grinned and turned to watch four of the boys stumble over themselves to help a lovely dark skinned blind girl to her seat.
She heard the ruckus and stopped. With her hands on her hips, Emily said, “I’ve been getting to my seat just fine by myself since I was two, so I’m pretty sure I can get it done today, thank you very much.” She couldn’t disguise her flattered smile.
The young men stumbled away with one attempting to form a slightly coherent response. It fell from his lips as charmingly as a croak from a distressed frog.
Emily snapped, “Casey, you’ve made it your business to let everyone in class know, for the entire year, that you have had but one interest. That interest is to make time with the healthy redhead in the front row. I believe she is a sweetheart, so please don’t turn your affections onto me young man.”
Casey scrunched down into his seat. He smiled at the red-haired girl in the front row and ducked his head. Laughter bounced about the room.
The class settled, Tom said, “I had a dream that caused me to wake up with a revelation of sorts.”
The class went still as it listened.
He continued, “As you all may well recall, our conversation on Friday entailed the likelihood that time may or may not be able to be altered. What was the last thing I said on Friday?” Tom pointed and said, “Max, go ahead.”
Max said, “Dreams and death.”
“Yes, dreams and death.” Tom walked across the floor at the head of the class as he spoke. “I’m very interested in the connection that dreams have with time as well as the death connection to time. As we dream is there a sense of time passing? In my dream I felt time pass, but was it relative to my physical state? Is the dream-time in correlation to that state of mind? Our bodies just lay on the bed without any notice of the clock passing. During our slumber we seem to feel time pass, but it’s not relative to our physical being.”
It was quiet a moment. He continued, “And then there’s death. There are different schools of thought on this isn’t there?” He smiled, the class chuckled. “Some believe time will just stop for us. The thought is that there is no afterlife, that it’s just nothing, no time. But if you’re religious or spiritual, you may believe there’s an afterlife. Once this body stops working, shuts down, some believe that we have a spirit that will go on in that afterlife. But even then . . . even then, is there such as a thing as time? Will time exist as we know it, or will it just be a passage of time that is relative, as if we’re in a dream? We’ve all read the stories of people who have been pronounced legally dead and have been resurrected who say they have met their long dead grandparents and whatnot.”
Emily raised her hand.
“Please, Emily, go.”
She said, “No offense to other people’s beliefs, but I don’t believe these people who say they’ve died and gone to heaven. They always say that they met their long dead family members, sure, or their best friend who died when they were twelve. I believe that on the other side there is no time. I believe that when you go you’ll be in a realm and everyone will be there. I truly feel that when we die every person who lived in the past and in the present will just - be there. The person who passes to the beyond and comes back and says that they saw a light and followed it and when they got there, their great-grandkids who aren’t born yet were there, and that their great-grandkids too were there . . . that person I’ll believe.”
Tom smiled. “Perfect.” He paused and added, “For those working on the experiment, we’ll meet every afternoon this week.”
Some moans echoed off the walls of the cramped classroom.
“Hey now, let me finish, you come when you can, but I want a concerted effort on this.”
He continued, “Now, let’s talk about if the project is a success.”
Tom went to the board and pointed to a drawing as he spoke. “I believe, and some call me crazy, but entangled particles, theoretically mind you, two connected particles, at the smallest of the smallest…entangled particles. Let’s say they’re twins. These twins are connected, no matter their place in space. If you alter one, the other will respond in the exact same way. Now, if we can get said twin to react to his brother--”
Emily interrupted, “It’s a boy and a girl.”
“How’s that?”
“Let’s say the boy is here in the present, and his sister is there in another place or time.” She smiled that captivating smile. “It’ll be easier to keep the theoretical scenario straight in our heads.”
Tom said, “Right! The brother is manipulated and if we can get his sister into a different time, we will be able to cause her to react in exactly the same way. The trick is getting sis to slip into a different time as we manipulate her brother.”
The class took notes. Tom pointed at the black telephone. “That’s the place where it’s going to happen first.”
A hand shot up and a marveller of Emily’s asked, “Alright, professor, are we now talking about calling forward or backward in time?”
“Our experiment is to call back in time. I know everyone wants to call forward into the future in order to find out what is about to happen, but said person who you speak with will not be able to respond to your inquiries. See, if we call back in time, we’ll hear the phone ring in the past, and we will then know our experiment is going to be a success. Also, many theorize that a call to the future is not possible, so how it would be accomplished is unknown.”
Everyone shifted in their seats to face the phone.
“If that phone rings, we will know that a call came through, whether we hear anything when we pick up or not. It will be confirmed that we were able to call back in time. But if we can manipulate the twins and encode information into that manipulation we should be able to send data back in time. So two things: we send the sister back in time and then we tell the brother a secret, like maybe who is going to win the ’53 Pennant race…or who wins the World Series. The sister will tell the secret, thus letting us know that in nineteen fifty-two that the Brooklyn Dodgers will lose out to the Yankees. We will all make a buck. Right?”
One of the students said, “I want to be a part of that experiment.”
Tom said, “Next year.”
Emily interrupted the laughter and said, “But the universe may not change.”
Tom nodded. “That’s true.” He went to a blank section of the board and drew a simple diagram. “If we are successful in sending the sister back in time, the phone will ring on said day in the past. Then if we are successful in telling the brother a secret and the sister receives that secret, we will have two possible outcomes. This is where it gets super weird.
“The universe will do one of two things. In one scenario, it will alter our universe - the path will have changed. We’ll be sitting at the telephone sharing the outcome of the World Series with our past-selves one second, and as soon as we hang up, we will all be somewhere else, like Sorrento Italy, drinking cappuccino and enjoying the wonderful fruits of our labor. Or we’ll leave the message and hang up and nothing will have changed. We will just be staring at a black telephone. And in that moment we will know that an alternate universe branched off at that point in time in our past and our alternate universe selves will be on vacation, lounging and drinking. So it seems to me the question will be answered, but whether or not we know it is another question altogether. Very crazy stuff.”
A hand shot up, and said, “Professor, it seems that you’re talking about two separate experiments. One is to see if a call can be sent to the past. The second is if these entangled particles will talk to each other.”
Tom nodded. “That’s right. We’ve been able to get them separated by position in present time. Like I said, it’s all theoretical so we will punch forward.” He paused to breathe, and then, “I am really looking forward to seeing this through. I want to know the answer.”
Emily said, “I hope we’re ready for that answer.”
Tom, with hands in pockets, said, “Me too.”