Time Travel: A History (33 page)

There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

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 WABAC 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