Encounters Out There

World-renowned physicist Dr. Fredrick Mansfield gave a guided tour of his new invention, the particle beam space-tether, to Marsha Smith, CTO of Our Fate in Space Inc, the world's first asteroid mining firm.

"My machine shoots out an energy stream to grab an object far out in space. Then, it folds space-time and brings it here."

"I've read your white papers, Dr. Mansfield. Very impressive. There's time travel involved?"

"Yes, that's true, hypothetically speaking." Dr. Mansfield cleared his throat. "The beam transports an object through time. But not in the way you and I think of time travel. It creates a wormhole that passes through lights journey through space. Imagine a kaleidoscope of infinite frames. We select a snapshot and pull it out of its temporal reference point. Otherwise, objects we see now only represent the past, and we've no idea about their current state or condition."

"From our universe or a multiverse?"

"Very perceptive, Ms. Smith. The snapshots might reflect quantum strings out of infinite possibilities."

"Brilliant either way." Marsha smiled.

"Thank you, Ms. Smith." Dr. Mansfield escorted her to the control room. "Please allow me to introduce to you my nephew Jacob. He'll assist me with the demonstration. Your company agreed to pay me royalties for any mining extractions, right?"

"Correct." Marsha nodded.

Dr. Mansfield gestured to Jacob. "Do you have the coordinates for that asteroid we discussed? I believe Ms. Smith's company will be quite impressed when we pull it in."

Jacob nodded. "Yes, Uncle. Uh, I mean, Doctor."

"Did you enter the calculations exactly as I wrote them?"

"Yes … yes, sir." Jacob's hands shook.

"Is there something wrong, Jacob?"

"Well, Uncle, there's a problem with the …"

Dr. Mansfield interrupted—"Another time, Jacob."

"But ... "

"Jacob, Ms. Smith is expecting a demonstration. Fire the beam."

Jacob shrugged. "As you wish." He typed in the commands.

The machine whirred, and the beam fired, and yet nothing happened.

"Jacob? What went wrong?"

Jacob stood up while a document printed out. He then circled equations. "That's what I wanted to tell you. Your calculations are way off!"

Marsha stepped back wide-eyed.

"Let me see this, Jacob." Dr. Mansfield grabbed the paper. "What? You're right. They're way off. I must've lost my concentration going over the expense budget and mixed some numbers up."

Dr. Mansfield ran the log through a simulation. "Based on this, the beam shot to a galaxy 65 million light-years away. Oh, and check this out, it's not even to our present day. The object arrived here around that same past period, give or take a few million years."

Marsha chuckled.

"Something's funny, Ms. Smith?" Dr. Mansfield raised an eyebrow.

"Well yes, Dr. Mansfield, if you think about it. You just made our company's brand name come true."

Jacob and his uncle, bewilderingly, glanced at each other.

"You don't see it?" Marsha raised her hands. "Nevermind the paradoxicality of a causality loop, the two of you created an extinction-level event. A major step toward our domination of Earth—and paving the way to our fate in space."