The Instant Engine

Struggling to reconstruct the speculative technologies lost when the Great Singularity had collapsed all centuries into one interpenetrating pan-spacetime, they had first succeeded in reimagining the now whimsical Faster-Than-Light and Faster-Than-Dark drives. But it was patently clear in this hyper-connected agelessness that though one couldn’t go faster than discrete energy fields, one, or many, could easily outrace light by already being in the temporality in which the pre-probability waves would shortly quantize. And so the Faster-Than-Now drive was born, called in popular parlance the Instant Engine, or by the retro-fantasists a time travel machine: a small plastic torus set spinning in the belly of a large plastic torus, which was the vessel, and looked like nothing except a large plastic donut, without wings, or any other evident aerodynamic or propulsionary devices.

The team had been assembled with great care and the exaggeratedly patient expediency with which everything was done now that time had been abolished. Scientists of the highest caliber, archeologists, linguists and interpreters, and technicians in case of the inevitable breakdown all stood trembling in the hanger bay, for this was to be (and immediately should already have been) the first attempt to connect the everlasting present with one of the disparate moments in history with which humanity had always been plagued before, an event that would itself be historical if it didn’t already exist outside of such temporally-absurd, arbitrary perspectives. But to be on the safe side, they had decided not to risk all the bugaboos and paradoxes of the extant prophecies – the few remaining pre-collapse science-fictions – and instantize in a somewhere, a somewhen, that would not unduly traumatize the pre-atemporal mentalities of those they might encounter. To this end, a young and already ancient ahistorian suggested they leap to a less unwieldy and potentially awkward moment then say, Hitler’s bunker at the end of the second great war, or Roswell in the late ‘40s, and appear instead somewhere out of the way, but no less rich in historical data. So they picked the Archives of Cologne, just prior to their collapse in what had been considered in the old frameworks early 2009. As all of the Archive’s records and artifacts had been demolished when the bunker, which had been designed to outlast the apocalypse, clearly didn’t outlast much of anything, it would be an easy thing to jump in, pick up some noteworthy pieces of time, and jump back out without causing much of a rift or reversal.

After the brief but interminable speeches by each member of the planetary congress, the crew boarded and began spooling up the FTN drive. There was a pause, a blink of the eye, an almost miniscule yet monstrous gap, on the other side of which the crew might have wondered if they’d gone anywhen at all, except for the epic tearing noises and cascading rustles caused as the Archive’s massive concrete walls and towering stacks of old newspapers and estate files all fell around and on top of them at once, in that one momentous instant when they did indeed intersect history by causing the Archives of Cologne to collapse, through their arrival, half an hour earlier than it had collapsed in all previous spacetimes. From the limited, one-way perspective of most in-timers however, there was nothing odd about this at all: it was simply when this event happened. As for the crew of the timeship, in order to forestall the embarrassment of discovery, they made one last sudden and uncalculated jump, to some distant and farflung spacetime from which they have not yet been heard from again.