The Time Machine

The Indian snapped his fingers and the flames tore up the darkness amidst the old warehouse. I went up to him and the two of us sat down on a small wooden bench by the fire. He looked at me for a brief moment. Then his ancient wrinkled face twisted into a strange smile and he handed me the watch...
It looked like a regular mechanical wristwatch, but instead of hours and minutes, its dial was divided into millennia and centuries. There was no crystal over its face and you could move its hands with your fingers. I thought about what I was seeing and the distant past merged together with the distant future into an eternal present...
“This watch is the time machine. Time is reset through the movement of the hands, regardless of whether they are set back into the past or forward into the future,” I heard the Indian’s deep voice.
“Time travel is possible in theory, according to the laws of physics and quantum mechanics, but it is impossible in practice,” I tried to contradict him.
“Why do you think so?” the old Indian chief from the distant future replied.
“Because of a number of insoluble paradoxes, such as that of the grandfather, if you go back in time, as well as the fact that there are absolutely no visitors from the future in our present time, as would be expected if anyone from the distant or the near future had actually invented a time machine.”
He smiled again, as he stared into the fire.
“There are time travelers everywhere – in the present, in the distant and the recent past, and in the distant and the near future. Only it is impossible for people from different moments in the thread of time to see them. It’s a natural law that solves all the physics paradoxes. And right now, you’re holding the real time machine in your hands. All you have to do is turn the hands,” he told me and before I even realized it, I was already doing it. One of the hands was pointing to the year 4000 already. The space around us got filled with the incredible images of a distant civilization, populated by strange people. I wanted to scream, to say something, but I could feel there was no point, as everything was incorporeal.
“Do you understand now? You can go anywhere, back to the distant past or into the distant future. But when you travel in time, you become a completely invisible and incorporeal ghost. You can see everything that has happened or will happen, but you can’t change any of it. You can’t communicate with people or with reality and you can’t be seen by them, because they either have already taken place or haven’t happened yet. So, the time machine exists, but it has strict physics parameters. And it is precisely those parameters that are man’s retribution from nature…”
“Retribution for what?” I asked, as I turned the hand to the distant past and images of volcanoes and dinosaurs swooped down on me from the space around us.
“The desire to construct a time machine, which is the final expression and the ultimate goal of all physics and mathematics, was built upon the homo sapiens’ extreme selfishness and its desire to control absolutely everything. The desire to control the past, the future, the universe, time, all visible and invisible matter. The nature of space allows for such a machine to actually be constructed. Man can travel through time, but only as an invisible shadow that witnesses everything but has no power to change anything. All kinds of dramatic events, even his own death. He can see it all, but he can’t change any of it.”
“Retribution, right?” the ancient Indian chief pierced me with his gaze again.
My eyes were frantic as I turned the hands of the watch forward, since I wanted to see and understand everything that could possibly take place. It was hard for me to believe everything that was unfolding before my eyes.
“This is incredible! We’re witnessing the impossible!” I exclaimed like a child.
“There’s nothing that incredible about it!” the chief smiled again.
“What do you mean? Until now, nobody could even begin to imagine what a time machine might even look like, and I’m actually holding one in my own hands!”
“In principle, human consciousness – which on a very deep level is a quantum reflection of the universe – is a time machine. Aren’t memories, after all, a way to travel back in time, to the recent and the distant past? And isn’t hope an attempt to construct a possible and longed-for future? And isn’t death actually an eternal present?” the Indian’s voice already sounded distant, while he himself had disappeared.
I didn’t know what I would do with the time machine, which was the greatest invention in the whole history of physics and which I now held in my hands. I couldn’t stop turning the hands of the machine further and further ahead. Soon, I’d already reached millennia in the distant future and I saw an enormous book in the space in front of me, which was titled Cosmic Quantum Philosophy, or the Complete Theory of Everything. The book opened up in the vast, multi-dimensional space and I started to read it.
One of its pages said: “The extreme aggression in every living being, and especially in man, as well as in the behavior of big and small inanimate objects, spaces and anti-spaces, is a means of exercising death, when it is necessary for the curbing of a particular species and the preservation of biodiversity. It is a way for death to go from a passive to an active state. A natural solution in the quantum natural evolution. The only possible way for nature to curb the constantly growing and monstrous diversity of its species and matter. Can you imagine some wolf species, or a colony of parallel universes, which were born but never died and kept growing constantly over the past 750 billion years?”
Another page said: “… We must note that this hypothesis was impossible in ancient times when scientists knew only about the speed of light, but not about that of darkness. If everything that moves with the speed of light stops in time, what would happen to the subjective time of a person who is moving with the speed of light? It is simply a time that stands still while traveling within a time that moves. Or, to put it in simpler terms, the light is actually the eternal, unrealized future, since it travels too fast to have a past.”
The book opened up at a random page, titled “The Physics of Absurdity.” It said: “Every law of physics, which has been born out of the human consciousness can be proven, as it creates its own physics projection into the universe. The only exception consists of the laws that could not be materialized by the universe, which can exist in the deep matrix of infinite human imagination, such as the experiments of the greatest scientist of all time – Mobe. The classic example is his imaginary experiment with infinite speed.
It is simple. In the experiment, a rocket is powered by dark energy’s boundless energy. Thus, at a certain moment, the acceleration exceeds the rocket’s own acceleration and it gathers infinite speed and goes beyond the space-time of the universe. The space-time inside of it shrinks to the point of perfect singularity. Meanwhile, in order to compensate for the rocket’s infinite speed, the time outside of it starts to run backward with the speed of light.”

Translated from the Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova