7.000 years too soon.

7.000 Years Too Soon

This is my entry to the Inspired By Images Of Eve Competition 2. More details and links to all entrants can be found atStarfleet Comms

It’s a weird feeling the first time you enter warp space. When the warp drive starts, and spacetime itself starts bending around the ship... well, there's nothing quite like it. They teach you what happens when you get your capsuleers license. You know how a magnetic field bends around a magnet, and charged particles moving in them move along the field lines? Well, we are mass moving through a spacetime field. As magnet bends magnetic fields, a warp drive bends spacetime around a ship. Try to imagine bending the structure of fourth dimensional Euclidean spacetime geometry. Yeah, not easy, I know.

Now they teach you this because of one very important law upheld by a group called the Time Keepers. When human beings discovered warp space, they also stumbled on time travel. Due to special relativity, as you accelerate toward the speed of light, time around you slows until, at light speed, time stops. Granted, you can’t actually accelerate to the speed of light, but warp doesn’t work that way. Around 2012 C.E., humans discovered the Higgs boson, and a few years after that, gravitons. In researching how gravitons interacted with the Higgs field, physicists eventually discovered a way that spacetime could be bent much like a magnet bends a magnetic field, and that by bending spacetime, a massive object could travel faster than light. Interestingly enough, the spacetime geometry of relativity holds for faster than light travel so as you go faster than the speed of light, time actually begins to run backwards around you. Depending on your speed and the distance you're trying to travel, in order to reach your destination at a common universal time, YC 112 (23.347 C.E.), you have to coordinate how you move through spacetime, or you'll end up outside common time. The Time Keepers insure that common time is maintained. They were started by a group of physicists when the first warp drive was created. Once space travel became profitable, the Time Keepers set out to explore and protect the life course of our universe, keeping people from exploiting our ability to time travel. It is said the first time they time traveled they were greeted by other Time Keepers, almost as if they had existed since the beginning of time to begin with. In a sense, they have. There are some time pirates that try to exploit our ability to time travel, but I've never heard of any that succeed. But then again, there's no way in hell all the wormholes in the universe have been found, so who am I to say.

I met a Time Keeper about a year ago when there was a warp drive malfunction and I missed common time by about 7.000 years. I was working on a research project with Duvolle Labs and had to make a trip to another research lab in low security space. The corporation provided me in an armed Taranis for the trip. Leaving the station, the warp drive began to hum, and up came that strange, familiar feeling of time starting to slow. From the deck, I saw the solar system's star flying past me, realizing as I watched, it was traveling backwards in time. When I reached the warp gate, things felt normal, until half way through the warp, there was a loud pop and the hum of the warp drive stopped for about three seconds before starting up again. I knew something was wrong when my computer registered the destination warp gate as 7.000 years too young. I wasn't there two minutes before I was hailed by another ship. It was an infamous Hourglass battleship of the Time Keepers. An older gentleman calling himself The Doctor asked how I got here. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever felt; I couldn't shake the feeling that he already knew I was going to be there. He was very polite and it didn't seem to be too big of a deal to send me back to common time, given I arrived there by accident. The way he did it still sends shivers down my spine. He told me he was going to recalibrate the star gate to send me back to common time, apparently an ability restricted to Time Keepers, because I had never heard of that. The first thing I noticed was that I wasn't moving with respect to the star gate. The Doctor had set the star gate to bend only the time dimension, and so I sat there, watching 7.000 years pass in a minute. There is nothing like watching the stars of distant solar systems moving around your ship as quickly as fireflies. It really makes you think about the real nature of time, space, and the universe. Funny thing is, in the past 21.000 years, physicists still haven’t been able to figure out what time actually is and why we seem to move only in one direction.

It’s a weird feeling the first time you enter warp space. When the warp drive starts, and spacetime itself starts bending around the ship... well, there's nothing quite like it.

~S. Feynman