THE MAN WHO TRAPPED TIME 
 
© Bruce G. Marcot
 

He staggered back from the console, amazed, astounded, speechless, the damn thing worked.

... it's insane. It worked.

His head a bit spinning, he reached the front door and stepped into the swirling cool winds of an early autumn night. Found a stool by the porch steps, sat down. Gathered his thoughts. Think. OK, what just happened.

Tag the front end, tag the back end, like some silly markup language pseudocode. Then, apply the Wolfram equation, and ...

... the young girl entered the restaurant. He saw her. She looked around, booths mostly filled, then spotted her new date. Then, together for six months, she could no longer tolerate his indiscretions. He bought her wine, they talked and asked each other about their interests. Dates gone by, the bedroom seemed chilled and staid. She laughed at his charming and forced jokes, just knowing him, finding his nervous shyness adorable.

Time was knotted. Skewed. Tilted. The equations determined where and how it flowed and counterflowed and ran uphill and turned back.

The damn thing worked.

The next day, after some sole celebratory self-toasts and more to despair of the loss of his great love, he returned to the lab, reset the system, and took the Next Great Leap. And entered the equation he thought he'd never try.

And, setting the power system to auto, he then entered the coiled chamber.

The reactor peaked. It was a flash and then a severe jolt of nerve endings over his entire skin surface.

Something bent, folded, split, repeated, expanded, twisted, and spun into a vortex and vertigo like he never imagined.

Five of him met, collided, intersected, vied, stretched.

A tesseract. The formula for four-dimensional time that folded back into now, emerging into the other side of then. Fiercely rotating then diving back through then, through now, through then ...

And his dream of becoming, re-becoming, the chances he squandered, became and remained all he would ever be or was again.

  

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