The Pursuit of Time

It’s earth year 2670.

Interviewer: So how did you manage to pin down time travel for humans? As I understand it was not an easy job to do and plenty of people have spent their lives in vain attempting to solve this.

Roy: Yes. Well, I had a lot of help. My family…

Interviewer: Your family? They are not people of time¹ at all.

Roy (eye roll): No, none of them study time. But it’s a long story how intricately my family is related to me discovering safe human time travel. I’ll only explain the workings of time travel in this interview. The backstory sounds pretty crappy actually.

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TIME TRAVEL

By INU-3488 Roy

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PREFACE

The beginning, of why I started to pursue time travel as my field of study, is actually just a normal story, where a child found their ancestral belongings, accidentally. It was not my parents’ exactly. It was one of their siblings. The studies and notes, from the generation before mine, belonged to INV-4578 Roy, my Invie², born a female of the pure human species. Invie was a troubled person and died at the age of 30 earth years. My father told me my Invie was not like how I knew them when they died. Invie was a very happy person and then they found the notes and their life became a nightmare. They started acting like how one of my grand-invie’s, who also died at the age of 30.

This must all sound confusing.

I will try to explain it from the beginning.

The notes start from the 21^st century of the Earth years. That was 600 to 700 earth years ago.

Things were much different from these days, so as far as I could understand was that this great-great-…-grand-aunt of mine was a female and never got to choose her gender. So, she was the beginning. She became obsessed with time and spent her short life on working on how to reduce the second law of thermodynamics into merely a case study. She died at the age of 30(since I’m speaking of historical events, please assume all this is in earth years), leaving pages of notes, all of which were archived and were discovered by her brother’s youngest son, who went on to live a similar depressing lifestyle as his aunt, added his own work and died at 30, again. This went on for generations-where one of the kids would find their aunt’s or uncle’s (in terms of their sex at the time of birth) notes, live terrible lives, disappoint their biological parents, mostly, add to the notes and died before they turned 31.

It was a curse in the family.

But it seemed the curse was alive and intended on being passed down. It did not wish to die down with the death of the generation. If there was a single child of the parents, it skipped a generation. No one found those archives till the next generation.

But here is what you, my dear reader, are wondering. Your author is a single child (not assuming you know me- if you did not know, you know now). When I found those archives, my father almost suffered from a failure of cardiac muscles, a common problem in pure humans. But I was determined to add to these notes till I had to die, at 30 earth years.

But here I am, on my 31^st birthday, writing this preface, after completing the book on how to accomplish safe human time travel and the limitations of it.

I have tried my best to make the book as simple as possible so that non-timers can understand it. For the timers, my paper is already published, and most of you know me. Just drop me a mail, like they said in the 21^st century.

Peace and love,

Yours truly,

INU-3488 Roy

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1: People of time, or people who study time, are called timers.

2: Invie is a word used instead of aunt or uncle because they identified as non-binary. Even the scientist in the story is non-binary.

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By Deyasini Roy, 1st year BS-MS, IISER Kolkata.

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Featured Image Source: Nasa.