Humans are a curious race. We are always trying to learn something new, figure something out, or disprove something everyone once accepted as fact. It is this curiosity that has driven us forward in intelligence and technology. We weren’t content with the discovery of fire, we had to control it. Once we could control it, we used it to our benefit. Same with the wheel, tools, and eventually machines. Humans have continued to question themselves, and challenge their own knowledge about anything and everything. It is this curiosity that led to the great thinkers, artists, inventors, and adventurers of our history. They continually moved us forward, beyond what we knew previously, and into the realm of the unknown. One thing that we have never fully understood however is time.
Time is a dimension, like length, width, and depth, used to locate and measure something. Everything we know has a duration that is measurable, just like physical size is. Everything is, was, or will be created. Similarly, at some point in time, everything will eventually end. Human lives begin within their parents and always end with death. It has been this way for as long as there has been life as we know it. The problem here is that the entire human race is trapped in a single, unchangeable timeline. We are caught somewhere in time, because we can’t leave the current time. It is like a train-car we are stuck in, moving us along without our control, down a track we cannot turn from, and we do not know our destination. We can create things, end things, alter sizes and shapes, and move things around pretty much wherever we want them to be. We cannot however, change the fact that we are stuck in this time, now. The past is unchangeable, and the future is unknowable, because we are perpetually stuck in the present.
In the past, advances in technology have led us to conquer one dimension after another. When we believed we lived on a flat planet, where everything was in orbit around us, we figured out how to move in the two dimensions we knew about. In conquering the two dimensions we understood, we discovered there was a third one that we didn’t yet understand. The Earth, being a sphere, was no longer made of two dimensions, but also had a third: depth. From that point on, we as a people moved all over our planet, trying to discover every corner. Later still, we were able to move up and away from our planet, looking down on it from orbit, or from the moon.
Caught Somewhere in Time is a story that takes place in our future, in a time where humans have essentially conquered the third dimension and begin to truly discover the fourth. In the twenty-third century, humans will have explored the Solar system and become disappointed with what they have found. Their intelligence will have dramatically grown. Their understanding of the universe will have grown as well. There will be outposts on several worlds, including some of the more solid moons. Still, humans are disappointed because they feel trapped within their own system, alone in the universe. Interstellar travel can be achieved, but not in a human’s lifespan. The tools are available, the greatest minds humankind have ever known are working frantically on the problem, but there is no real progress.
Then one day, purely by chance, on a flight returning to Earth from Pluto someone noticed their wristwatch did not show the correct time. This was a common phenomenon when travelling between planets, because each planet had its own time. On Earth, and all the planets, there are time zones breaking up the local “day” into the number of hours it takes to rotate. Each planet and moon has a different length of “day” due to their various rotations however, so people travelling are required to adjust to local time. In this particular case however, a person checked that their watch was accurate upon leaving Earth, but it was wrong upon returning many hours later. The person had merely travelled across the system and back, and without ever changing the time on their watch, they noticed that their watch appeared to be running slow.
What happened is nothing out of the ordinary really. You see, even Albert Einstein understood that moving at great speed causes a shift in time for those people in motion. A long trip, like one across the system and back, undertaken in a short period will cause less time to pass for the person aboard the ship than for those waiting back on Earth. Whereas the trip took several hours from the perspective of the one taking it, the trip actually occurred in a slightly longer period for everyone else. Time sped up for the traveler in motion, so when he returned, his clock had ticked fewer minutes than everyone else’s had. This commonly is referred to as time dilation, and can be researched in detail by anyone at his or her local library or online.
The effect this had on the traveler was profound however; it occurred to him that he was a time traveler. It took him less time to arrive at a certain point in time than it took everyone else, meaning he had unknowingly moved forward in time. While no scientific minds were piqued when it initially happened, due to the now ancient writings of Albert Einstein and the abundance of space travel, it sparked this man’s interest. He began to study motion and time dilation until he eventually arrived at the conclusion that time travel was not only possible, but it was realistic. He devoted the remainder of his life to choosing a direction through time.
Caught Somewhere in Time chronicles the events that occur as a result of this man’s work, where humans at last are able to escape the boundaries of time, and truly see the universe they thought they already understood.
