Time Travel

  Most of his contemporaries were still technological optimists and would remain so for another generation, but in his strange novella The Machine Stops, Forster creates a grim vision—“a reaction,” he admitted later, “to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells.” Some unspecified apocalypse, presumably self-inflicted, has driven humanity underground, where people live alone in cells. They have transcended nature and abandoned it. All their needs and desires are met by a global apparatus called the Machine, which is their caretaker and, if they only knew it, their jailer.

  Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars.

  A second apocalypse looms (the title gives it away), but most are oblivious. Just one person sees their imprisonment for what it is. “You know that we have lost the sense of space,” he says. “We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves.”

  The “literature epoch” is past. Only one book remains, the Book of the Machine. The Machine is a communications system. It has “nerve-centres.” It is decentralized and omnipotent. Humanity worships it. “Through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being.”

  Remind you of anything?

  * * *

  *1 “Nothing can change the end (written and filed away) of the present chapter,” wrote Nabokov partway through Ada. Of course, it was not true when he wrote it.

  *2 Beckett’s translation. (Si du moins il m’était laissé assez de temps pour accomplir mon oeuvre, je ne manquerais pas de la marquer au sceau de ce Temps dont l’idée s’imposait à moi avec tant de force aujourd’hui, et j’y décrirais les hommes, cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux, comme occupant dans le Temps une place autrement considéable que celle si restreinte qui leur est réservée dans l’espace, une place, au contraire, prolongée sans mesure, puisqu’ils touchent simultanément, comme des géants, plongés dans les années, à des époques vécues par eux, si distantes—entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer—dans le Temps.)

  *3 The problem of verb tense and time travel provides endless fascination in popular culture. Volumes have been written, but most are fictional, beginning with an invention of Douglas Adams in 1980: “The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

  “Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up.”

  FOURTEEN

  * * *

  Presently

  We’re well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flashforwarded and flashbacked yet still kept on rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We’re post-history. We’re post-mystery.

  —Ali Smith (2012)

  WHY DO WE NEED time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.

  Wells’s Time Machine revealed a turning in the road, an alteration in the human relationship with time. New technologies and ideas reinforced one another: the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the earth science of Lyell and the life science of Darwin, the rise of archeology out of antiquarianism, and the perfection of clocks. When the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, scientists and philosophers were primed to understand time in a new way. And so were we all. Time travel bloomed in the culture, its loops and twists and paradoxes. We are experts, we are aficionados. Time flies, for us. We know it all now, as Ali Smith says semi-ironically, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of tweet. We are time travelers into our own future. We are Time Lords.

  Now another temporal shift has begun, hidden in plain sight.

  The people most immersed in the advanced technologies of communication take for granted a persistent connection to others: habitually bearing mobile telephones, flooding the channels with status reports, rumors, factoids. They, we, engage or inhabit a new place, or medium (there is no escaping the awkward terminology). On one hand is the virtual, connected, light-speed realm variously called cyberspace or the internet or the online world or just “the network.” On the other hand is everything else, the old place, the “real world.” One might say we are living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience.*1 Cyberspace is another country. And time? Time happens differently there.

  Formerly communication occurred in the present, perforce. You speak, I listen. Your now is my now. Although Einstein showed that the simultaneity was an illusion—signal speed matters, and light takes time to travel from one person’s smile to another person’s eyes—still, in the main, human intercourse was a melding of present tenses. Then the written word split time: your present became my past, or my future your present. Even a blaze of paint on a cave wall accomplished asynchronous communication. Telephones delivered a new simultaneity—stretching the present across the spatial divide. Voice mail created new opportunities for time shifting. Messaging returns to the instant. And so it continues. The devices, wired and wireless, are always sending and always listening. With persistent connectedness time gets tangled. You can’t tell the recaps from the prequels. You scrutinize time stamps like tea leaves. The podcast in your earbuds seems more urgent than the ambient voices bleeding through. A river of messages is a “timeline”—you’re in my timeline; I heard it in my timeline—but the sequence is arbitrary. Temporal ordering can scarcely be trusted. The past, the present, the future go round and collide, bumper cars in a chain of distraction. When distance separates the thunder from the lightning, cyberspace puts them back together.

  —

  A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT. A young woman wanders through a boarded-up house snapping photographs. She disregards the posted warning: Danger Keep Out Unsafe Structure. Peeling wallpaper reveals letters scrawled on the wall beneath. “Beware…” She peels back more paper. “Oh, and duck!” she reads.

  “Really, duck!”

  “Sally Sparrow, duck, now.”

  Sally Sparrow (for that is her name) ducks, just in time to avoid a thrown object that smashes the window behind her. Apparently an exercise in asynchronous communication is under way.

  This is London, the year 2007, and the writing on the wall is signed “Love from the Doctor (1969).” You, the viewer, know the Doctor as the protagonist of the long-running and multiply reincarnated television series Doctor Who. The program had its first go-round on the BBC in 1963, inspired partly by The Time Machine—not the book so much as the George Pal movie, released three years before. The Doctor is a survivor of the ancient alien race of Time Lords. He travels through time and space in a vessel called the TARDIS, which for reasons understood only by the most devoted fans has the permanent outward form of a twentieth-century blue British police telephone kiosk. Although the Doctor is an alien from far, far away, with the entire universe at his disposal, his travels are highly Earth centered, and his time-travel adventures favor historical tourism in the style of E. Nesbit’s magic amulet and Mr. Peabody’s WAB
AC Machine. He meets Napoleon, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Kublai Khan, Marco Polo, and many English kings and queens. He swaps tradecraft with Einstein. He discovers a time-traveling stowaway called Herbert, whose calling card gives his name as H. G. Wells. Time travel in Doctor Who is always good for jokes. Occasionally, however, the problems and paradoxes come to the foreground—never more acutely, never more cleverly than in the story of Sally Sparrow, the episode titled “Blink,” written by Steven Moffat and broadcast in 2007.

  Still baffled by the writing on the wall, Sally returns to the abandoned house with her friend Kathy Nightingale. Sally loves old things, she says.*2 We already know that old houses are redolent of time travel. Kathy wanders offscreen. The doorbell rings. Sally answers. A young man hands her a letter from his late grandmother, Kathy Nightingale: “My dearest Sally Sparrow. If my grandson has done as he promises he will, then as you read these words it has been mere minutes since we last spoke—for you. For me, it has been over sixty years.”

  We have a puzzle to solve, we viewers and Sally both. We’re getting hints. There are monsters about. Their victims are liable to be transported into the past, willy-nilly, with no way to return.

  If you were trapped in the past, how would you communicate with the future? In a general way, we are all trapped in the past and we are all communicating with the future, via books and epitaphs and time capsules and the rest. But we seldom need to message particular future people at specific future times. A letter for hand delivery by a trusted courier might work, or writing on the wall of an old house. In Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie Twelve Monkeys (an elaborate remake of La jetée) the unwilling time traveler played by Bruce Willis dials a mysterious telephone number and leaves voice mail. These are one-way messages. Can anyone do better?

  Kathy’s brother Larry works at a DVD store—that is, he is a specialist in a particular short-lived information medium (“new, second-hand, and rare”). We glimpse television screens in the background. Many of them display the face of one man, whom regular viewers will recognize as none other than the Doctor. Why is he on TV? He seems to be trying to say something urgent. “Don’t blink!” for example. He speaks in disconnected fragments. He can be heard explaining in the classic time-traveler tradition: “People don’t understand time. It’s not what you think it is.”

  Larry has discovered this man in a hidden track on seventeen different DVDs: “Always hidden away, always a secret,” he tells Sally. “It’s like he’s a ghost DVD extra.” Sometimes Larry senses he’s hearing one half of a conversation.

  The screen starts up again. The Doctor appears to be answering the big question. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,” he explains, “but actually from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly…timey wimey…stuff.”

  “Started well, that sentence,” Sally snarks (for who among us has never talked back to the TV?).

  The on-screen Doctor answers, “It got away from me, yeah.”

  SALLY: Okay, that was weird. Like you can hear me.

  THE DOCTOR: Well, I can hear you.

  Now the conversation begins to get complicated. The Doctor must persuade Sally (and us) that he is a time traveler who has been separated from his time machine (a blue phone box) and hurled back to 1969, that he has been trying to send her messages through an old house and various long-lived human couriers, and that now they are talking to each other via a recording he has concealed on seventeen DVDs, all of which she happens to own in 2007. Larry has heard the Doctor’s side of the conversation many times. For him it is preordained: bits laser-engraved on a plastic disc. Finally he is hearing the stereophonic version. Sally talks to the screen, the Doctor talks from the screen, and Larry writes it all down.

  SALLY: I’ve seen this bit before.

  THE DOCTOR: Quite possibly.

  SALLY: Nineteen sixty-nine, that’s where you’re talking from?

  THE DOCTOR: Afraid so.

  SALLY: But you’re replying to me. You can’t know exactly what I’m going to say, forty years before I say it.

  THE DOCTOR [pedantically]: Thirty-eight.

  How is this possible? Let’s review the rules of time travel. Sally is right: he can’t hear her. That’s an illusion. It’s really quite simple, he explains. He possesses a transcript of the entire conversation and is reading his lines, like an actor.*3

  SALLY: How can you have a copy of the finished transcript? It’s still being written.

  THE DOCTOR: I told you. I’m a time traveler. I got it in the future.

  SALLY: Okay, let me get my head round this. You’re reading aloud from a transcript of a conversation you’re still having.

  THE DOCTOR: Yeah. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.

  The TARDIS still needs to reunite with the Doctor. The Doctor still needs to get his hands on the transcript. Before the intricate machinery of this plot is complete, Sally, who now understands the whole story, will have to meet a version of the Doctor who has not yet grasped it. Now her past is his future. “Blink” is all the paradoxes rolled together with a Möbius twist. It’s Predestination and Free Will conversing in real time, via technology new for one and obsolete for the other.

  By 2007 the internet was in full flow, but it plays no obvious part in the story. Cyberspace is an offstage presence—the dog that doesn’t bark in the night. This unusual episode of Doctor Who expressed something about our complexified relationship with time. Nowadays, Sally Sparrow’s in-box will be overflowing with thousands of emails, mingling past and present, which she may view threaded or flat, and the number only grows, and she is entirely capable of carrying on multiple conversation threads, SMS and MMS, emoji and video, simultaneous and asynchronous, with two participants or many, and meanwhile, with or without earbuds, she hears voices and glimpses screens everywhere, in waiting rooms and on signposts, and if she pauses to think, she may have trouble placing all the information in proper temporal sequence—wibbly wobbly, timey wimey—but who pauses to think?

  —

  WHEN THE BROTHERS Louis and Auguste Lumière invented the cinématographe in the 1890s, they did not begin by filming actors dressed in costumes. They did not make fictional movies. They trained operators in the new technology and sent Clément and Constant and Félix and Gaston and many more across the globe to record snippets of real life. Naturally they filmed workers leaving their own factory—who could resist La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon?—but by 1900 they were filming a cockfight in Guadalajara, and the foot traffic on Broadway, and men smoking opium in what is now Vietnam. Audiences flocked to see these scenes of faraway live action. The creation of these images marks an event horizon. When we look back, the pre-1900 past is less visible. It’s good we have books.

  So much of the world comes to us on screens now, with sound as lifelike as the picture. The screens range farther than anyone could ever see unaided. Who is to say that these are not time gates? People “stream” music to us and video, the tennis match we’re watching may or may not be “live,” the people in the stadium watching the instant replay on the stadium screen, which we see repeated on our screen, may have done that yesterday, in a different time zone. Politicians record their responses to speeches they have not yet seen, for instant broadcast. If we confuse the real world with our many virtual worlds, it’s because so much of the real world is virtual. For many people, there is no personal memory of a time without screens. So many windows, so many clocks.

  “Internet time” became a term of art. Andrew Grove, chief executive of Intel, 1996: “We are now living on internet time.” Often this was just a cool-kids way of saying “faster,” but our relationship to time was changing yet again, even if no one quite understood what or how. On internet time the past bleeds into the present. And the future? There seems to be a feeling that the future is already here. Blink and it has happened. Thus the future vanishes.

  “Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revi
se themselves,” wrote J. G. Ballard in 1995—science fiction, as ever, the canary in the coal mine. “The future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us.”

  We are annexing the past as well. Institutions from Scientific American to The Bridge World spill open their archives to reveal what was new 50 Years Ago. The online front page of the New York Times recycles its first reporting on bagels and pizza. Backward reels the global mind. Just when the obsession with newness seemed more ferocious than ever, Svetlana Boym, a time-twisting theorist of nostalgia, observed: “The first decade of the twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for newness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias that are often at odds with one another. Nostalgic cyberpunks and nostalgic hippies, nostalgic nationalists and nostalgic cosmopolitans, nostalgic environmentalists and nostalgic metrophiliacs (city lovers) exchange pixel fire in the blogosphere.” For all this blooming shape-shifting nostalgia we can thank the time travelers. “The object of romantic nostalgia must be beyond the present space of experience,” Boym writes, “somewhere in the twilight of the past or on the island of utopia where time has happily stopped, as on an antique clock.”

  What a strange ending for the twentieth century! The new century—the new millennium, for those who were counting—arrived with televised fireworks and bands playing (and computer panic) but scarcely a glimmer of the glorious optimism that lit up the year 1900, when everyone seemed to be rushing to the prow of a great ship and gazing hopefully toward the horizon, dreaming of their scientific future: airships, moving sidewalks, Schönwettermaschinen, underwater croquet, flying cars, gas-powered cars, flying people. Andiamo, amici! Many of those dreams came true. So when the new millennium dawned, what bright dreams for the year 3000? Or the year 2100?