Humanity has been dreaming about time-space travel since the dawn of civilisation. There have been many attempts to create a workable solution, but guess who has come the closest to that?
You guessed it. Me.
20 years ago when my son Nathan went missing, his body was found in the lush jungle of Amazonia. I encouraged him to go on that assignment. Blame was eating me alive.
I went through all the usual stages of desperation – from denial, anger and blame, to depression and acceptance. But my cycle didn’t stop there. I went one step further – I decided to find a way to bring him back.
Wait, what? Did you not just say he was dead? – you may ask. Well, yes. But there is something else you need to know.
I’ve been a top engineer working for the US government for over 30 years, mainly on all the secret projects that people create conspiracy theories about. Quantum teleportation was discovered in 1997 (yes it’s a real thing – Wikipedia has a great article on it here) and soon after my son went missing it captured my attention. It’s been at the center of my attention for nearly 15 years now.
The idea of time-space travel anchored itself in my mind – it was my chance to bring Nathan back. The problem was that the concept didn’t have any serious military or scientific application so the government wasn’t interested in putting any meaningful resources behind it.
They needed me to focus on next-gen weapons so the US could continue flexing its muscles.
But the pain and guilt caused by losing my only son were too great so despite all the obligations I had to the government, I decided to explore it anyway. I imagine everything would be cool if I committed only my spare time and money to it.
Unfortunately like most people, I don’t have all the high-tech sitting in my garage to create a workable time-space machine.
So I did what I had to do.
While working on all the Star Wars-like technologies that the government wanted me to construct, I also secretly used research facilities (and my team) for my own purposes. All during working hours, which obviously was a big no-no. For years I had to be extremely careful so that nobody connected the dots and figured out what I was doing.
Over the years, the experiments I was doing at work helped me construct a device in my own garage.
But eventually I hit the wall. The amount of energy needed to test more advanced setups was simply too great. To give you an idea – my entire neighbourhood uses a small percentage of the power that my experiments required.
Guilt and sadness filled my heart again as hope to bring Nathan back fled my heart.
I called my time-space machine Blue Hole and eventually shelved the project.
Bummer.
