Bootstrapped - III

06/02/2036  

   

"Time is like a river, at some places it's soothingly slow and at the other places it flows disturbingly rapid" - Albert Einstein

She wrote with the black marker on the white board in bold letters.

“Class…Today, let’s discuss about something which we more often than not, take for granted – TIME” she announced to the class in a confident and affirmative tone.

She always felt good about this little break she took from the hectic schedule of the The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at CERN. The LHC which first started out as an experimental device designed to answer some of the key questions on how our universe came into existence, slowly after a while,  turned into something so mystic and enlightening. It was by accident, in one of her experiments that she found that due to the rapid speeds the particles in the apparatus achieved they started losing time making them travel back in time. This was her ticket into the history books, a befitting reply to all those snooty scientists who thought she was ineffectual as a member of the fairer sex.

The topic in the class soon veered into time travel. She tried to suppress her emphatic grin; little did this bunch of kids know what she was onto. They will be soon known as the lucky students who were taught by her. One inquisitive student asked her about the concept of time loop. She started walking towards the speakers with the MIC she was talking on. Soon, the room was filled with a jarring screechy noise.

“Can anyone tell me, why this happens?” she asked, a pretty simple question for a physics post grad class she thought.

To her surprise only a few hands rose. She loathed at the condition of education in this state and picked a student to go ahead.

“Mam, a microphone takes in the sound waves and converts them into electrical energy and then the amplified signal is sent to the speaker, which converts it back to sound waves and is released.”

“That’s absolutely right, and then?” she said in an assuring tone.

“As you walk towards the speaker, the sound waves your voice is producing is fed into the microphone and comes out of the speaker amplified. Now, due to the close proximity of the MIC to the speaker, the MIC is catching the same amplified signal again as its input and feeds it back to the speaker, this results in a continuous loop of the output being again fed as the input and thereby creating lot’s of random energy which is released as a squealing noise.”

“Great! I couldn’t have explained it better.” she said while feeling pity for the bright student; he was at the wrong place.

“This is exactly what happens in a time loop too. Two entities, which have diverse sets of roles to perform at varying times, if unnaturally altered to perform the same function at the same time. A time loop is formed.”

“By 'unnaturally' you mean, let's say...a time traveler who travels back into the past and hence being where he was never meant to be?” asked the bright student.

“Yes. You are right. The causes always happen before the effects and never the other way around. This is a very basic law of nature. So, going back in time and trying to negate the effect before the cause unnaturally will just put you in a paradoxical situation…The Bootstrap Paradox.”

**

As she sat in the taxi and observed the backdrops, she saw firsthand that the condition of the state was in doldrums. Poverty and corruption were spread everywhere, unemployment was rampant. The rich became richer and the poor became poorer. There was a shortage of food supplies, the water resources were scant. All in all, there was nothing going right for the state. At the helm of the apathetic administration is the 'father of the state' himself. His greed for power, money made him misuse the trust that the people of the state had entrusted him with. She wished if she could do something to rescue her motherland from all the misery. That’s when a streak of enlightenment struck her.

**

5 years later - Year 2041:

She strapped on the safety belt in her indigenously built time machine onto the man she chose as her guinea pig. She found him outside the Paradise Restaurant running erratically and dazed during one of her customary visits to the restaurant. When she enquired further, she got to know he was a once famed Hitman whose family members have abandoned him and left. His lack of family history and his innate skills made him the perfect choice for this mission. He was just given one brief – Kill the person responsible behind all this apathy before he becomes powerful, before he’s entrusted with the responsibility of the new state.

Little did she know, one sunny afternoon 22 years back, he was ordered to kill the same man.