I dig graves for a living. Not the kind that fit a single person, not anymore. I dig mass graves. I live a good twenty miles from the nearest city, in a compound with a chain link fence and barbed wire, with 20 or so other men whose names I never learned. Bodies arrive by the truckload, and there needs to be a hole ready so the animals don't eat them. That's how diseases spread, I've heard.
Burial is the least we can do for our dead. A lot of people don't bother with last rites these days. They don't have the time, or maybe they don't care. Last rites are more to comfort the living than anything else, but comfort is easy to come by these days. Easy for them, that is. Not out here.
Nobody is allowed to leave the compound until their contracts expire. I'm four years into a decade of work but some men sign away their lives. Those are usually the calmest among us.
e had someone keel over a month back. We should have buried him, but that would mean more digging and digging was the last thing any of us wanted to do. We left him outside and by the next morning, only his bones were left. It wasn't long before we found out why.
Our new visitor was tall and gaunt with a bloated stomach. His mouth was wide but his eyes were small and they caught the light in such a way that you could always see four pinpricks staring at you from beyond the fence. Staring is all he did. He stared and he followed. We started spending more time indoors from then on. Even if we were safe outside, nobody liked the feeling of being watched.
Spend enough time with the same people in a cramped space and you will start to hate them. It's a fact of life, a law of nature. Without the wind to blow in new air, smells built up. The mess hall stank like a latrine. The barracks were even worse. It was loud, too. Every conversation bled through the walls and kept you up at night. If there was an argument, everyone knew exactly what it was about. It was miserable. But it was better than being outside.
I'm in my room alone now. It's a small wooden box with nothing but a cot and a table. I'm covered in grave dirt, and I smell terrible. I heard it climb the fence earlier. The barbed wire didn't stop it. Everyone else is asleep. It's making its way down the hall now. Slowly. Stopping at every room.
It was a miracle. A child born made entirely of gold. It was smarter and nicer than any other child. It could sing, and dance, and do so much more. It never lied or talked back. It never cried or made mistakes. It was perfect.
The Golden Child was something the world had never seen before. Many think it's something the world will never see again. But when I told my mom I wanted to be her Golden Child, she was so excited. However, she told me, it wouldn't be easy. I had to stop talking back to her. I had to stop crying. I needed to learn how to sing and dance and do so much more. And I needed to be gold.
Mom spent a lot of money on my new golden skin. It goes over my old skin, covering me completely. It's hard to move or breathe in my gold skin. I'm allowed to take it off, but only when noone else is around.
Mom is taking me to an event where everyone can show off their Golden Child. The others have golden skin of their own. Mom doesn't like them.
Everyone gets a chance to go onstage and perform. Whoever has the best performance gets to be a Golden Child and make their mom very proud. When it's my turn, I go up and sing. Mom made me sing over and over again at home until I was good enough. It was hard to sing at home because my skin was too tight, but it doesn't feel as tight here. Everyone is watching me. Everyone is listening to me sing. Everyone sees me make a mistake.
I don't know what I did wrong but I know I did something wrong. I start singing louder. My skin starts to fall off. Everyone sees what I look like underneath. My hair isn't golden, it's black and tangled and sticky. My face isn't golden, it's red and puffy and wet. My arm's aren't golden, they're pale and splotchy and covered in band-aids. My skin is in pieces on the stage around me. I curl up and close my eyes and cover my ears. The song is over but I can't stop singing.
When I open my eyes again I'm somewhere behind the stage. Mom is yelling at a man in another room. He comes out and tells me to leave. I made a mistake and so I can't be a Golden Child.
Mom drives me home. I'm in the backseat with my skin. I say I'm sorry. She says it's okay, and that I'll have another chance to be a Golden Child. I ask if there is something wrong with my skin. She says yes, but she's going to get me new skin that's even tighter.
Disclaimer: I am not a real scientist and this is not real science.
The idea of using a machine to instantly warp from one time to another is as farfetched as using a machine to teleport from one space to another. That is not to say time travel is impossible, but that it would look vastly different to how it is frequently envisioned.
All objects exist upon a number of axes equal to their dimension+1. For example, living in the third dimension means you exist upon four axes. The fourth axis, what we call time, was thought immutable and was as such not counted towards the labeling of the various dimensions. Living in the third dimension means there are three axes upon which you can move freely.
Some pedantic sorts will tell you that time is not the fourth dimension, and that there are infinite spatial dimensions, and they are sort of right. The truth is that there is no distinction between spatial and temporal dimensions when you remove the perspective of a human observer. Time is simply the axis we are forced into motion along.
Everything that exists must be in constant motion along some axis. You cannot move freely along all axes, as doing so grants the possibility of being at rest upon all axes. Objects that do not move along any axis are stuck in spacetime with no way to begin motion. They will appear from nothing, exist for mere moments at a fixed point, and then disappear forever. (And that's if we're being generous.)
Consequently, moving freely through time necessitates constant motion across one of the spatial axes. In addition, the same restrictions we face when traveling through space would also apply to traveling through time. Just as you cannot be in two places at the same time, a time traveler could not exist in the same space at two different times. There would also be a travel space corresponding to the period traveled. (A "period", for the sake of this essay, being defined as any length of time.)
If you saw through the eyes of a time traveler, the world would be unrecognizable. At your side you would see an ever-shifting infinitely thin slice of space. At your front and back would be long temporal snakes, silhouettes of past and future actions forming continuous streams. Now imagine how someone used to this world would feel seeing your perspective.
You too would be seen by the outside world as a continuous stream. But that is only if you do not move through time. Say you took a step backwards in time and then returned to your original position. An outside observer would first see you at your rearmost point. You would then split into two copies. One would step backwards in reverse, the other would step forward normally. Both would stretch to fill all the space you spent idling before and after your excursion, and then disappear.
The use of a messenger freely moving through time would allow for information to be sent into the past, provided the recipient was somewhere along its path through space. However, the use cases for such a messenger fall far outside practicality, and communication with a time traveler would be close to impossible. The gap between perspectives is so vast that neither party may even recognize the other as something that can be communicated with.
The thought of going to the past is an exciting one. Unfortunately, things are rarely as simple as we imagine them to be. But if time travel is possible, maybe someday we will find a means and a use for it.
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