Writers Jam

After months of patient labour, the machine stood ready on its wheeled base. Six feet of cold, unpainted steel, condensation gathering on its sides from the web-like network of freon veins under its skin. The lights of the control panel gleamed through the transparent window on its front. A heavy-duty roll cage surrounded it, giving it an ugly, unfinished appearance. On its side was welded a simple silver sigil, a cylinder enclosing a sphere.

Six years ago, the Mitra-Kowalski experiments had demonstrated that it was possible to move single atoms arbitrarily along a dimension it was hitherto impossible to move in. Of course, it was not just them - it was Sokolov and Agwuegbo before them, and Apinya before them… a scientific lineage stretching back all the way to Einstein himself.

Their work was not limited to single particles, however. Standing on the shoulders of giants, Mitra and Kowalski had given an elegant, general solution to closed timelike curves. One beautiful equation. And it was only limited by the amount of energy one could put in on one side.

This was where Joshua came in. An electrical engineer by training, he’d gotten to talking with some students at the university bar. They were studying matter-antimatter interactions at the Department of Physics. He found himself hanging out at their lab more and more, then pursuing a masters’ degree at the same department, and finally continuing his friends’ – who had by now moved on to other prospects – research in the same lab.

But his interests lay not in matter-antimatter interactions but in where he could use them. The culmination of the work done by all those that came before him was ready. He would have liked to publish his work before he left, but there would be time enough when he proved it all worked. Or died trying.

He had built a time machine.

And then came the hard math. Astrophysics was an area completely unfamiliar to him. The time machine was, more accurately, a space-time machine. The planet and the galaxy it inhabits had been constantly moving since… well, whatever point he might have wanted to travel to. He had to figure out where the machine would be at the time of his departure, and where it would have to end up at his destination, and then calculate where that point would drift to, and the location of his return relative to it…

He checked and rechecked his math, running simulation after simulation, tweaking parameters with dozens of significant figures. At the scales he was working at, an error of one over one-thousandth would see him reappear adrift in deep space, light-minutes from Earth, the oxygen boiling from his blood before he could even scream.

He loaded up laptops with extensive libraries of books and translation software, clean water, and food. He put together a medical kit that would have made a clinic blush. He made period-accurate clothing through a self-administered crash course in ancient fabric and fashions. A telescope and sextant rounded out his complement. He would need to figure out where he was when he got there. There would be no GPS where he was going.

His destination? Syracuse, circa 240BC. It had taken him several months of study to get to a point where his command of Ancient Greek would merely give him away as a stranger from another land, and not of another time. He paid special attention to the syntax of mathematics and logic, and the language of science and technology to the time.

Finally, he was ready. He stepped into the machine, with space barely to stand, let alone sit, and closed the door behind him, strapping himself to it. He had already programmed the computer with the information it needed.

He flicked the main antimatter reactor switch. The machine shuddered to life, the cooling system sensing the activity and sending freon whooshing through the machine as fast as the pumps could handle.

With trembling hands, he pried up the hinged cover and pressed the Program Start button. It made a satisfying, metallic click as it bottomed out.

For a second, nothing happened. Then there was a blinding flash, lighting up the entire lab, before there was darkness again. Nothing but the sickly sweet smell of refrigerant suggested there had been anything, or anyone, here just a moment ago.

In the middle of a forest in Sicily, there was an identical flash of light to one that occurred in a lab two millenia away. The machine appeared about three feet above the surface of the earth, and bounced on its wheels and roll cage before coming to a halt on its side.

It was lucky he didn’t appear inside a tree. He had some theories about what would have happened, ranging from his internal organs ending up sharing their space with the tree’s, to the tree ending up in his lab back home.

It was also lucky he had strapped himself in firmly. No medical kit in either his world or in the one he was in now would have saved him from bleeding to death from a head wound, unconscious.

He pushed a button on his console. With a hiss of hydraulic pressure, spring-loaded arms released to roll his would-be coffin over, making sure the door was unobstructed. He undid the straps and stepped out.

It was shocking how much this just felt like the planet he knew. It was like he was a child again, camping in the woods. Aside from the time machine tipped on its side just next to him.

He folded the landing arms back into the machine, before dragging the machine into some bushes and covering it with a layer of branches. He changed into his Greek clothes. Next he retrieved a wicker basket and put his most prized possessions into it. The waterskin would be useful, sure, but the laptop was priceless. Nothing he could do here would fix it. He wrapped it in waxed linen and put it at the bottom, carefully layering food over it. It wouldn’t do to reveal this before his target was absolutely convinced of who he was.

Then he made a fire and sat down next to it, and waited for night. The stars were different—that was a good sign already. He had known they would be, of course, but seeing it in person was a different thing entirely. Even the sky was younger here. He was able to conclude that he had ended up in the right decade, after all. Of course, the fact that he was on solid ground was pretty reassuring as well. If he’d reappeared somewhere in deep space that would’ve been a surefire sign that he had fucked up.

With his sextant, he was able to put himself at about seven kilometers from the city. It was kind of funny - even this simple piece of technology was 1900 years too new for the time he was in now.

He would make the trip to Syracuse tomorrow.

He set off at dawn, and kept up a brisk pace as he walked inland. He had neglected to bring a compass, but luckily the sun was enough to keep him pointed in the right direction. Plus he would see the city eventually anyway, and could then bend his steps in its direction.

The weather was pleasant. It didn’t feel any different from a hike in the woods back in his own time, except there were no no hikers, no trail markers… no signs of modern civilization at all. Signs of ancient civilization, however, began to appear as he continued to walk southwest through the woods. A small house here, a garden or farm there. He even saw a figure in one of the fields one time. He was too nervous to stop and chat, though, so he moved on.

Just past a clearing in those same woods that had seemed to go on forever just moment ago, the sight of a large stone gate made him stop and catch his breath. His plan had worked.

The great city of Syracuse stood before him.

“Name, please?” The words came in Ancient Greek, which was not surprising by itself. But the fact that he understood them - that startled him.

His first contact with an ancient human. He looked at the guard’s face. A boy, really, not quite a man yet. It was well into the middle of the day by now, and sweat poured over the young guard’s brow. He stared back with a bored expression, his olive skin glinting in the light. Joshua was struck by how normal this guy seemed. He’d been through this situation a million times before, at malls or airports.

“Name, please?” The guard repeated in a slightly exasperated tone.

“Oh, uh, Phoroneus…” Joshua managed to stutter out.

The boy let out a guffaw. “My grandfather was called Phoroneus.” He waved ‘Phoroneus’ in without further ceremony.

Six years of thought and planning had seen Joshua to this moment. He was in Ancient Syracuse. He headed down the street before him and turned a corner. Nothing could prepare him for the sight that befell him.

It looked nothing like he had expected. The world population had been a few hundred million at the time. He’d known that there were about a hundred thousand people in Syracuse at the time, but he had still imagined a quiet, idyllic town, with few buildings and people around at any given time.

What sprawled before him was quite the opposite - a bustling metropolis. After two days of quiet solitude in the woods, his senses were assaulted from every direction by the noise and sights and smells of the city. People were out and about, shopping, eating, strolling, talking, fighting, loving, living. Swap out the ox-carts for cars and this would be a modern market street.

He walked as if in a trance, almost getting run over by a cart before coming back to his senses. The owner cursed at him angrily as he drove by. Joshua stepped over to the side of the road. He smelled something delicious, and realised it had been a while since he had eaten. Not wanting to unpack his basket, and running low on food anyway, he walked over to a street vendor.

The woman behind the counter was working dizzyingly fast, dispensing food to a varied crowd of people. Travellers, citizens, and slaves alike enjoyed the food. He walked over, and he realised he had no idea what he should get. His study of the era had not been careful enough, as it seemed. Everything looked good. He decided to play it safe, though, and pointed at a simple loaf of bread.

Money had been a hard problem to solve. He had considered machining replicas of Greek coins at the university’s extensive materials lab. The silver content of fifteen drachmas would have only cost him about $80. But it would have been suspicious, not just to people at the university curious about a sudden obsession with Ancient Greece, but also to the people of Syracuse. Forgery was not looked upon kindly even two thousand years ago.

He had known replica-making was more of an art than a science, and whatever he would be able to make would fast be detected. He had spent a few weeks thinking about the problem before it struck him. He e-mailed with a replica-maker he found on the internet. He posed as an eccentric professor of Ancient Greek history, teaching a course on the currency of the time—his university email made the cover story instantly credible. “I’m very particular about the details, you see,” he had written, “and so I was wondering if it would be possible to have the coins made out of real silver. I’d pay for the materials of course, and extra for your kind efforts.”

The shop took his money without question. People had stranger hobbies. The drachmas arrived by mail, two weeks later. They were truly works of art. Struck by hand, not cast in a mold, then carefully aged. Blackened by oxidation, shiny in places where people’s hands might have touched them, dented where they might have clanged together in a bag. He had talked the shop into throwing some small bronze coinage in as well.

The woman at the shop stared at him expectantly. “Oh!” He realised, and reached into a drawstring pouch at his waist, drawing out some of the smaller bronze coins into his palm.

“Oh, step aside.” A familiar, bored voice came from behind him. He turned to see the guard from the gate. Joshua lifted his eyebrows in recognition. The guard grinned. “You are new here, are you not, Phoroneus?” Without waiting for a response, he plucked a few coins from Joshua’s hand, and handed them to the shopkeeper, speaking Greek too fast for him to catch, gesturing to him midway. The lady’s hands were a blur, and before he knew it, she was handing him a loaf of bread wrapped in leaves, topped with olives, some kind of cheese, and a drizzle of oil.

“Thank you,” he said, stepping back. The guard joined him shortly, holding a bowl of hot stew.

“I am he called Doros.” The boy had a sharp expression and a face unmarred by the signs of war. While had poked fun at Joshua, he seemed nice enough. “What brings you to Syracuse, traveller? What land do you come from?”

“I come from a land far away, across the sea.” Joshua was surprised how naturally he seemed to be managing with the Greek, although he’d practiced this type of basic conversation extensively during his studies.

“With how you look, I’m not surprised. Levantine? Palestinian?” Doros probed. He’d hoped his disguise and fake name would last longer than an hour, but Doros was unusually smart. He decided to just use the Greek-ified version of his own name, Iēsous.

“Palestinian.” He admitted. “My family are traders, but I am here seeking a great scholar of this land.” Might as well get some clues, he thought.

“We get a lot of scholars passing through here. Syracuse is a very advanced land.” said Doros between gulps of stew, with a hint of pardonable pride. “Where do you plan to seek him out?”

“Well, I was hoping you would help me with that. I don’t know much of Syracuse.” Joshua was feeling more comfortable now — after all, he’d already made a friend. A guard (even a sentry like Doros) would know much of the goings-on in the city and would know where he could go to find people.

“Well, if it was me I would go ask at the temples and ports around the city. They keep records of people who pass through and who live here, and of families as well. Since you’re looking for a scholar, it may do to check a gymnasium”. Here Joshua struggled a little to remember what the word was, but his knowledge did not fail him. He made careful mental notes.

“Thank you, Doros, you have been helpful.” The words sounded weird and formal, but it was the best he could manage. Plus Doros would probably cut him some slack given he was a foreigner.

“Don’t thank me yet,” said Doros with a half-smile.

“Why is that?” Joshua asked.

“You should probably wash first.” Doros said, chuckling and gesturing to Joshua’s himation. It was then Joshua realised that he was pretty dusty and sweaty from his hike earlier. Polishing off the last of his stew, he continued, “You’ll find a bathhouse down that street.” Without waiting for a response, Doros raised a hand of goodbye and began to walk away.

“Fare thee well, friend!” Joshua managed to stammer. Doros continued to walk, raising his hand a bit higher before dropping it again. Just as suddenly as he had found a friend, Joshua found himself alone again. But now he had much better of an idea where to go, and he thanked the stars before turning to walk towards the bathhouse, taking bites of his bread as he walked.