A Time Machine That Really Works
No DeLorean or wacky professor needed.
“Inner Light” is the title of one of my favorite Star Trek episodes. Don’t worry: I won’t nerd out (much).
In the episode, an unmarked probe appears alongside the Enterprise starship, and within minutes, it catches Capt. Picard in an energy beam. He becomes unconscious and is taken to sick bay where they debate how to stop the beam and not kill him.
During the 25 minutes he is out, Picard “wakes up” in what looks like a white-washed adobe home on a very sunny planet, Kataan. His wife calls him Kamin and says “you gave us a scare. I’m glad you’re better.” Kamin “lives” for 40 years as a husband, father, grandfather, citizen and scientist. He takes up the flute and becomes proficient as well as builds a lab and instruments to study the drought and increasing intensity of their sun. Along with his granddaughter, they determine that the planet will die when the sun goes nova, and there’s nothing they can do.
When Picard/Kamin is old and grizzled, he sees a probe launched into the sky and rushes to the town square. The people of Kataan gather around him and thank him. They tell him: “We launched a probe long ago that would tell others about our planet. Kamin, you joined us. You became us. Remember us.”
Then the probe shuts off, and Picard wakes up in sick bay. He is unharmed but remembers Kamin’s life as if he had lived it. Before the probe self-destructs, an actual flute is recovered from inside. It’s the one that Kamin played. The episode ends with Picard alone in his quarters, playing unfalteringly the tune that Kamin first learned.
The people of Kataan couldn’t escape their fate but they found a way to be remembered. Their probe built memories in Picard, and even handed him a bit of the music of Kataan. The probe turned a starship captain into a witness and the keeper of their world.
We Earthlings don’t have space probes. We have stories, which are just as effective. The science communicator, sage, and visionary Carl Sagan said,
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
From Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980. Page 281-282.
Your story is a world worth saving, worth the labor of building a time machine, ummm, writing that book.
