Time Travel and Its Discontents

There have been a few high profile court cases, and a great deal of public debate recently dealing with time travel. Is it real, or an elaborate and lucrative hoax? According to Dr. Barbara Engle and Dr. Willet St. John, the Cal Poly research team who in 2018 famously figured out how to send fragments of a human consciousness back in time, a large part of the public confusion arises from the fact that we have a mistaken notion of what time travel actually is.

“The thing that H.G. Wells and all subsequent science fiction writers never got right about time travel is that you don’t really “travel” in time. That is to say, you can’t walk into a time travel booth in 2025 with a suitcase containing a gun, and walk out of that booth in 1930 to shoot Hitler,” wrote St John in 2016. “Only our minds travel back in time. And your future mind typically lingers only for a few minutes before your past mind overwrites all of your future memories.”

This explanation notwithstanding, since Engle and St. John made the details of process open source in2022, many have tried to travel back in time in order to influence the present. An estimated 88,000 people have undergone the process at Chronodyne alone, many of them with the intention of betting on a sporting event or buying stock in Chronodyne when it was ten cents a share. St John says that by the time they travel back and pick up the telephone to place their bet, they are probably thinking more about their lunch order than they are about striking it rich.

Engle and St. John, in fact, shy away from using the term “time travel” at all. They preferred the term “Radio Future Memory Narrowcasting”—RFMN—because they feel that calling it “time travel” oversells the process. Although RFMN does not resemble what we think of as time travel, St John has expressed optimism that one day it may. In a 2015 speech on the topic, he said “If we can send a little fragment of future memory now, we feel that, as this technology matures, we’ll be able to send large and larger fragments of memory, and eventually, perhaps a complete consciousness.”

The promise of 2015 has never been realized though. Larger fragments have never been sent, and the technology has not matured. Time travelers, therefore, for all their efforts, have not been able to alter the present in any meaningful way, or (it is more precise to say) in any way that we are currently aware of. And so, time travel remains, for the most part, a novelty for the wealthy, similar to for-profit space travel between 2010 and 2020.

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That said, sizeable numbers of average middle-class people continue trying to scrape their money together and attempt to influence the present by sending their thoughts back in time. Saunders and Wilks who studied the phenomena at Oberlin College said that people who fit this time-travel profile believe so fervently that they can hold onto their future memory that they can’t accept the possibility of failure. According to Saunders and Wilks, “These people are so desperate to prevent a child leaving for school on a certain day, or are so frantic to try and talk a loved one out of taking a business trip that they become utterly convinced that it is possible.”

While Chronodyne does not trumpet the news in their quarterly reports, the company is making a fortune from this demographic. The outsized profits and lack of any actual “product” have led critics to charge the company with fraud and snake oil peddling. In its defense, Chronodyne claims that for every time traveler who fails to influence the present, there could be hundreds or even thousands of customers who were successful. In court, the company has defended the proposition that having traveled back in time and influenced the present, customers would no longer have the need of
Chronodyne’s services. Never having established an account at Chronodyne, successful time travelers would be impossible to count or keep track of. “Haven’t you ever played a hunch?” Chronodyne’s CEO, Riley Burlingame, said in a deposition. “That could be the future you, a successful Chronodyne customer, pointing you in the right direction.” Time travel, the 9 th district circuit court upheld, is a business in which successes are truly invisible.

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There is, however, one documented, but controversial, case of influencing the present through time travel: the case of Dr. St John influencing his former ex-girlfriend, who is presently his research partner and wife, Dr. Engle, during his very early experiments with RFMN. Skeptics point to some holes in their story and object to the fact that the very people who claim to have invented time travel are also the sole documented case of it actually working. But their story is compelling nevertheless.

Just prior to leaving the Princeton Applied Magnetics and Chronometrics lab for winter break in December of 2008, St John claims that a strange feeling overtook him. He was working late with Engle on a precursor project to RFMN that the two of them had proposed two years earlier when they were romantically involved. Engle reports that, initially, it was somewhat awkward working together after the break-up, but that St John was a professional and a perfect gentleman. At the time of the incident, Engle was engaged to be married to a graduate student of business and international law named Hume Cranston, and St. John was due to leave Princeton for an appointment at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. After a routine calibration of the phased resonant frequency analyzer array, St John says that he felt dizzy and had to sit down for a second.

Engle said, “Are you okay Willet?”

St John told Engle that he had just envisioned a polar bear and an ice cream cone. “A what?” Engle asked. “A polar bear and an ice cream cone.” St John said. “But wait, there is something else, and I have to say it right now.”

Willet’s tone of voice compelled Engle to move in close.

“Barbara, I think… I feel like I’ve just come from the future to tell you something.” He swallowed hard and continued, “You can’t marry Cranston. Don’t marry him. I’ve come from the future to say that. ”

Engle was stunned and didn’t respond. St John reached out and held her hand. They had been working together for three months, but both confirm that was the first time either one had touched the other since the break-up over a year and a half earlier.

“Don’t do it. You can’t marry that dork Cranston.” St John said. According to St John, he said, “that guy Cranston” not “that dork Cranston” but the lab’s audio and visual recording system conclusively shows that the term was “dork.”

Either way, Engle pulled away and said, “I’ll get you some water.”

Engle went to the fridge, and the video shows that St John grabbed a pad of paper and scrawled a note which he tore off hastily and stuffed in his lab coat pocket as Engle returned.
When Engle passed him the bottle of water, St John looked sheepish and felt the need to try and explain himself.

“It is all very hazy, Barbara, and it is fading quickly. I’m sorry, but I think sometime in the future, I will be doing some work on time travel and I think I sent myself…some part of my consciousness back here. Hearing myself say it, I know it sounds crazy. But I think you have to not marry Cranston and come with me to San Luis Obispo.”

“Jesus Christ, Willet.” Engle said.

While the rejoinder to Alexander Graham Bell’s “Come here, Watson, I need you.” is lost to posterity, Engle’s “Jesus Christ, Willet.” has entered the lexicon and is now part of the zeitgeist of a generation.

In spite of losing their deposit on the reception hall, Engle did break off the engagement with Cranston. And a few months later she did move to San Luis Obispo to work with St John in the Cal Poly Applied Magnetics and Chronometrics lab. Dr. Engle, however still refuses to comment on whether she believes that St John was speaking to her from the future. It is a silence that bedevils their biographers.

What we do know is that on December 18, 2018, the tenth anniversary of that fateful day, a package arrived in the lab via UPS. The simple old-style overnight envelope was trimmed in orange and green identifying it at as a piece of “E.S (Extra Slow) Hold for Scheduled Delivery” correspondence, a UPS service that allowed senders to delay delivery of a parcel for up to ten years.

Knowing exactly what the contents were, St John thumb-scanned for the package and handed it to Engle. She tore it open and removed the contents; on a single sheet of notebook paper was a hurriedly scrawled note which read:

Barbara,

If it is 2018 and we are married and working on time travel together at Cal Poly–It worked!

Love, Willet

Needless to say, for many skeptics, this “proof” is far from convincing. And even though time travel advocates point to the fact that St John and Engle recently took their daughter, Curie, to the San Diego zoo where she was photographed eating an ice cream cone in front of a 1,300-pound polar bear named Chinook, there continues to be a lack of consensus in the scientific community on the question of whether or not time travel is possible.

Ed Note: This is a little science fiction short story I wrote last year and haven’t done anything with.  If you read it all the way to the end, you are a friend of mine.  Merry Christmas.   (sorry about the line breaks. I fixed a lot of them, then stopped)