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Time Travel is Possible.

Stephen Marlowe.

It's so strange; when you read all of those science-fiction novels and watch all of those films about space travel, everyone depicts wormholes as just glowing versions of the tunnels you find on the London Underground, Stephen Marlowe thought to himself as he watched his friend and mentor, Professor Frederick Turner sitting at the controls of the time machine.

A real-life time machine.

Time travel was possible.

Okay, granted, it wasn't as sophisticated and as boundless as the time machines depicted in HG Well's The Time Machine, or the TARDIS from Doctor Who, but in some ways, it had the simplicity of the slingshot effect from Star Trek.

There were no black holes, there was no advanced spacecraft which had left Earth's gravitational pull, and it hadn't dive-bombed a black hole, or something insane like that; the chances of going into a black hole, and not be ripped down to sub-atomic particles, only to find yourself in the past were remote anyway.

All there was were particles everyone out there was in two minds about, and they created a formless, invisible wormhole, which transported them back into the past, while at the same time creating a different time-zone so when the versions of himself and Professor Turner set up the time machine, the watch which synchronised the time machine, breaking the Loop of Infinity, would still be there, except, as Professor Turner insisted, it would be in another temporal dimension; the science had confused Marlowe at first, but he had gradually come to understand the time machine split time in half into different time streams; so when Marlowe and Turner spent the next day in the past, the watch would still be here.

It was incredibly confusing, but gradually he had come to understand it.

While it was disappointing time travel into the deepest past, say a hundred years ago into Victorian times, or even further back into the past, such as the Jurassic period was not possible, not with this machine since it obeyed the irritating chronological protection law which stayed a time machine which was built at a certain time and used at a certain time, it could not go too far into the past, the fact remained time travel was possible.

And besides, from what Professor Turner hinted, it would not be impossible to imagine somewhere, out there, in the universe, there was a civilisation out there who had discovered some natural opening in time and space, one which would allow travel into the past, and which obeyed the laws of chronological protection, and wouldn't travel deeper into the past, but thanks to the loophole of its creation allowed time travel into later periods, or they had simply created some kind of time tunnel-based around differing principles to the type of time travel Turner had devised and sent it off into the future, similar to the Eternals from Asimov's The End of Eternity.

Stephen watched Professor Turner while the time machine continued sending them into the past; because of the scarcity of components which could handle high-energy power surges, and because the power needed to start the tachyon bombardment to create the wormhole was enormous; if they used the machine too often, it would create problems for the Professor, though if they were connected to a nuclear reactor, it wouldn't be as problematic except Turner would never allow it.

As he stood over the table, Marlowe's eyes swept over the time machine.

Watching Professor Turner who was still watching his creation which he loved just as much as his daughter Holly, Marlowe wondered to himself what the Professor had in mind for the time machine in the end; annoyingly enough, the professor was very tight-lipped about his long-term plans, so Marlowe couldn't be sure either way.

But Marlowe had come to know quite well, and while he had heard Turner talk about presenting his invention to the world at large, he had also heard the professor speaking about little else but conducting one experiment that he had dreamt up after another in order to test how time travel worked. Marlowe couldn't blame the professor for that; when they had first started, how were they meant to know if they tried to take pictures of different events which took place in the past it would be a temporal paradox and one which caused the photographs to disappear? Or how about their attempt to change history after they had spent about a week looking and listening for something noteworthy enough to change, and they had heard about a robbery of a cafe in the town

What about my own experiment?

Stephen sighed under his breath; it wasn't worth the effort though since the time travel process was making enough noise as it was and the Professor rarely if ever paid attention to anything when he was in this precious room, and yet he couldn't help but feel the same annoyance he'd had festering within him when he had tried, and failed, to provide his younger self with something as simple as a couple of horse race scores; Stephen didn't really go in for anything like that, no matter how lucrative it could be in the long term, but while he had received the letter his other self had sent him when it had been him he had accidentally thrown it in the bin, and he didn't find it until the day the bins at his place were due for pickup.

The letter was in an envelope without a name on it, but Stephen knew if he had just written his own name on it, in his own handwriting, then he would have opened it.

Unfortunately, because it was blank, he had just assumed it was one of those annoying people who kept shoving junk into other people's letterboxes. In hindsight, Stephen had to admit to himself he hadn't even thought anything of writing his own name on the letter. And because of that lack of forethought, Stephen Marlowe had inadvertently ensured the experiment had not worked out.

Time did not allow cheating, and when he had told Professor Turner, not that he'd had much choice given the older scientist had stayed with him and refused for any opportunity for them to be separated; the older man had been sharper than Stephen would really have liked. Turner had not said a word when he had posted the letter through his own letterbox containing the details of the horse race, but when Stephen later admitted to Turner what had happened, the older scientist had said, in that philosophical manner of his, that perhaps time was more complex than they had imagined.

Stephen had not really paid much attention to the scientist, mostly because the professor usually spun philosophical guesses and theories about the nature of time travel before he solidified it in hard scientific truth. Truth he, no doubt, spun to Holly. Stephen knew that Turner's daughter knew about the time machine; Turner didn't keep it a secret, and to be honest, Stephen didn't really care given how the older scientist had inspired the girl into becoming a quantum physicist herself.

No matter.

He had already received a letter from Webb Biotech a few days ago, inviting him to become a part of their organisation. Hopefully, within a few years time, he would have gathered enough power to construct and utilise his own time machine.