May 18th, 1980
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I exited the time machine—yes, time machine. No, I won’t bore you with the details of the construction. Those I jealously guard for myself.
You object? That is your right.
When you’re reading this—I say when and not if because I have taken steps to ensure that this message will reach any Internet connected device back where I’m from—then know that this message has traveled one hundred and twenty-three years into the future—or from the past, I should say—using a function of the time machine I developed.
This is part last will and testament, part memoir, part record of my existence and my travels. The stories of where and when I have been could fill a thousand volumes. I saw the pyramids being built. I was there when Philip of Macedon was assassinated. I watched Alexander’s body interred in Alexandria. I stood in Alesia with Caesar’s legions. I was there when Jesus Christ was crucified—yes, it happened, but not the way you think. I heard Vergil recite the Aeneid. I watched Rome fall. I met Charlemagne. I watched Michelangelo begin and complete the David. I saw Nelson fall at Trafalgar. I heard Napoleon’s last words. I know where Hitler’s body was buried.
The secrets of history I have learned could be studied for millennia.
I could not care less. I did not learn them for you. I learned them for myself, for my own edification, to satisfy my own curiosity. That is my right as the only person to have invented a machine capable of enabling a human to travel through time.
You curse my name? That is your right.
I have traveled to the future as well, though I will reveal nothing about where we go as a species. All that I will say is that you would not expect it, although really you shouldn’t be surprised.
Why not tell you? What would be the point in that? What child is helped by giving him the answer to a math problem? What child is helped by telling her the definition of a word rather than directing her to a dictionary?
I will not insult the human race by giving away the answers. I firmly believe that someone else will follow my path, solve the same problems I did, and find the same answers. Or perhaps different answers.
As I was saying, I exited the time machine. Well, it’s less of a machine and more of a—no, never mind. I must not give away too many details.
I was standing in a beautiful glade on a crisp morning in May surrounded by Douglas fir, spruce, and western hemlock glowing in the early morning sun. Flowers were everywhere: purple and red lupine, pink fireweed, and white pearly everlasting grew in clumps here and there all around me.
In one of the nearby trees a swallow was singing. A sparrow joined in, its sweet, insistent song mixing with the swallow’s higher pitched chirping.
I had already changed back into my clothes, the ones I first wore when I left the 22nd century: brown leather shoes, tan trousers, and a simple green shirt without a collar that was slightly open at the neck. It wasn’t the height of fashion but it was typical for the time.
I had quickly realized the outfit was inappropriate for most of the times and places I visited and it had lain unused, carefully wrapped in muslin for the decades of my travels.
But it struck me as a perfect outfit for a climb on a cool morning and so out it came. Money and food were not always forthcoming on my journey and so, despite my age, the trousers still fit like I had just bought them.
I started off through the firs and spruces, heading south up the north face of the mountain. The slope was gentle at first but steadily climbing up and up. The sun, first peeking out over the mountains on my left, began to climb higher as I climbed.
I checked my watch and for the first time in a long time I felt keenly the pressure of time’s passage.
As I hiked up the mountainside, I emerged from the tree line and the sounds and smells of the foothills were left behind. I heard no more swallows or sparrows. The resin smell of spruce and fir disappeared as the trees gave way to open tracts of wildflowers, scrub, and tall brown grasses just shaking off winter’s chill.
Patches of snow, white and glistening in the morning sunlight, appeared here and there in the scrub, the last holdouts of winter that would soon melt leaving only the mountaintop itself covered in snow.
I stopped to rest for a moment and checked my watch. Seven thirty-two. I had exactly one hour to reach where I wanted to go: not the summit itself for climbing that far over such steep terrain I would risk a fall at my age. I’m seventy-three now. All these years I’ve used my machine’s internal chronometer to track the passage of time for myself as it is so easy to lose track when one is constantly jumping hundreds or thousands of years into the past or forward into the future.
I drank deeply from my canteen, rubbed my legs, and got back to my feet.
Why did I not just take the time machine to the top of the mountain?
Yes, I forgot to mention that I also solved the problem that makes so many wonder how it is that in books and movies with time travel the time travelers are able to not only go to any time in history but seem to travel to any geographic location as well.
I will just say that my machine manipulates not only time but space as well. Although, and this may be giving too much away, it is tied to the planet’s magnetic field, 11.79 hertz, and as such I cannot leave Earth, but traveling anywhere on its surface was easy for me once I solved the various issues associated with space-time travel.
So again, why not travel directly to the summit? Why walk the last mile?
The simple answer is to feel time again. The pressure of time. The flow of time. When you can travel forward and backward at will, even though time is always passing, you fail to really notice its passage and you feel outside of time itself.
However, it is undeniable that time has passed for me. I am forty-five years older than when I made my discovery and set out on my journey. Time is omnipresent.
Another answer to the question is that I have become fascinated by geologic time—the slowest time scale on our Earth. Cannae, Leipzig, Leningrad—these are stories of hours and days. Earth is a story of millennia.
So I decided to come here and now where I can both take part in and become part of that geologic process.
Have you guessed where I am yet? To become part of a geologic process requires a sudden violent event. I am on a mountain. Which one do you think? Which volcano?
I continued my slow steady progress up the mountainside, the sun off to the east warming my left side, my right cool in the shade.
One foot in front of the other, the dirt and stone grinding underfoot with each step, the steady drumbeat of footfalls—each one like a grain of sand falling through the infinite hourglass at the nexus above which waits the past and below which falls the future.
Five minutes to eight.
I was making good time—what an expression! Good time. I laugh now to think of it being used of inane travel, of moving from point A to point B as if the destination was significant, all-important.
No, it’s not just about the journey, either. I won’t feed you greeting card pabulum.
Don’t you see? Journey and destination are one.
All times, all places are omnipresent.
They are all here and now at once.
I was thinking that as I reached my destination—how I was in touch with everywhere I had been and everywhere I hadn’t, even here.
Now as I sit here and survey the land, looking back the way I came, the sun warms my right. It warms my old bones. My father lived to be eighty-four. My mother, ninety-two. I won’t see another day.
Eight-fourteen.
I remember when my parents took me to Toronto after the war. We visited Niagara Falls which, despite having been bombed to destroy the hydroelectric plant (this is the reason why Canadians in the area call their power service ‘hydro’ instead of ‘electric’), was still flowing and still majestic and, I’m told, larger than it had been before. It cascaded over in an endless roar of foaming water despite the destructive power that humanity had thrown at it.
I have the same feeling now. Not that humanity has attacked this place, but rather the same sense of the sublime, of all the ages and all the petty human events fading away, overwhelmed by the rushing waters and the rising calamity of the mountain.
Less than twenty minutes now. So little time and yet the seconds seem to stretch out approaching infinity. My breath rises and falls. A lone eagle soars overhead and down into the valley landing among the spruce and Douglas fir and western hemlock.
Beyond smaller ridges and valleys zig-zag across the landscape and in the distance, away to the north east Mt. Rainier rises to pierce the clouds that beetle across the horizon.
I wonder what the end of time will be like. The end of my time approaches. There is something to be said for deciding the time and place and manner of one’s end. Better to die on a mountainside beneath the open sky than gasping for breath in a hospital bed surrounded by grasping relatives and alarms summoning officious doctors.
Eight twenty-nine.
A low deep rumbling reaches my ears from far beneath me, like a train at the distant end of a long tunnel. There is a smell of sulfur, faint at first but growing with each passing second.
Eight thirty.
The rumbling grows louder, thrumming in my ears.
Eight thirty-one.
Farewell from the past to the future. My machine will be destroyed along with me in one minute’s time. Just time to send this message back using this datapad.
It is the most fascinating experience of my life that time has ended for me.
Now there is no more time.
Noah Hamilton
On the north slope of Mount Saint Helens
8:32 AM
18th of May, 1980
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, strictly a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance, perceived resemblance, or similarity to any other fictional works, to actual events or persons, living or dead, and any perceived slights of people, places, or organizations are products of the reader’s imagination. This fiction is the result of a partnership between a human writer and the character(s) he accessed with his creative subconscious as he raced through the story with them. No AI of any kind, generative or otherwise, was used in any way to write this story.