Y1 > 68 (Robin D'Souza)

Fiction | Milo

The following short story was inspired by out podcast episode on time travel. This is the second short story in my time travelling series, if you feel like going back in time for yourself, click this link to read the first story.

 A Brief History of Mallett Mail (MM)

• In the year 2020 advances in our understanding of inertial frame dragging led to the funding of a variety of experiments into the possibility of delineating time, or “time travel”, inspired by Ronald Mallett’s paper Weak Gravitational Field of the Electromagnetic Radiation in a Ring Laser.   
• Following a number of successful experiments, the US military began investigating the martial uses of Mallett’s theories. This led to the creation of Mallett Mail (MM), a programme capable of receiving coded messages from a sender located in the future. Its interface was similar to any basic email software, albeit lacking in the ability to send messages.   
• The first MM transmission was received on Sunday 29^th January 2033, and it contained instructions on how to create the necessary software required to send messages.  
• MM’s were repurposed for mass production and commercial use in the year 2067. 
• This eradicated linear conceptions of time as we know it, and our current strict adherence to mathematically proper 'years' returned to the hazy, pragmatic timekeeping of medieval times. In this way, what would have been the year 2068 was instead known as Year 1 after the Year 2068 or Y1 > 68.  It was also necessary for two new days of the week to be created; “Thisday” refers to the current and accepted chronology of one’s life, whereas “Thatday” refers to one’s assumed history before MM communications “splintered” their timeline. 
• Therefore identifying the "actual" year that you were in was a task left to bankers, philosophers and mathematicians. For everybody else “Thisday”, or “Thatday” sufficed. 

This is where our history of the future begins, sometime in the early Spring of Y1 > 68.    

Robin D’Souza had two problems that should have been easy to solve were it not for his lack of self-awareness, and so as problems they remained. He was a man who had more qualifications than birthdays, and more job titles than sick days. There was no doubt that he worked hard, but much like a headless chicken, he bled himself dry on circular endeavours that achieved little. His first problem was his lack of wealth; in his heart he was a millionaire but his bank balance rarely peeked above a solitary grand. His second problem was that he didn’t really understand how to become wealthy, despite it being the one thing he cared about above all else.  

   Robin didn’t realise that qualifications in and of themselves meant very little if you couldn’t show you possessed the skills they claimed. A two-week seminar on “Selling to the Un-sellable”, or a “Beginner’s Doctorate in Employee Management” were simply gibberish to anybody not teaching or participating in the course itself. Nevertheless, as Robin spent most of his time and money on these courses his continued patronage convinced him that he would eventually get back the time and money he had spent. To the more discerning of observers, it is clear that this is a poor way to invest in oneself.  

   His next calculated “self-investment” was a little more suspect than he even he would normally go for, but he was bored and desperate. He’d also had another argument with his father about the ongoing failure that was his adult life, and so he pursued this particular course with a renewed fervour. The course in questions was titled: “Mallett Machine’s and Money: Learn how the Past Can Make Money for YOUR Present!” It claimed that after a two-day weekend course, you would know how to use MM’s in financially astute ways. In capital letters at the bottom of the website it listed the following shortcuts to success:

WIN THE LOTTERY

PLAY THE STOCKMARKET LIKE A SEASONED PRO

THE HOUSE DOESN’T ALWAYS HAVE TO WIN!

What was quite clear was that the course wasn’t about using MM’s for business as much as it was about using MM’s to cheat.

   Once Robin had finished the course, he felt that familiar rush of adrenalin that this indeed would be the one that kick-started his life of luxury. He immediately purchased a Mallett Machine following the weekend and got to work on using the methods outlined in the course; methods that cannot be repeated here because it would be both immoral and illegal to do so. In brief he sent a message to himself, once a couple of lottery draws had passed, detailing the winning numbers of a lottery draw. Now legitimate lotteries had been abandoned since the invention of the Mallett Machine, because MM’s made high profile draws too complicated to organise. This resulted in the popularisation of underground lottery draws and gambling firms that were yet to, but ultimately would, be outlawed. The organisers of these draws knew how to manipulate the draws using MM’s ensuring that the naïve and addicted would never earn a penny from their games. Robin, with his Mallett Machine, had joined that ignoble group of people.

   Once Reuben had awoken, however, and experienced the inertia of affecting one’s past with an MM he found the last few months to be a vague memory, and his present to be of a sort he hadn’t anticipated. Following the course, he had returned home to find a list of numbers on his MM interface, and as was the plan he had gone online to submit their numbers. However, in order to sign up for the website, he had to submit his credit card, address, security number, sort code and account number. Unfortunately for Robin, he had been scammed and within minutes didn’t have a penny to his name.

   After this had happened a great panic swept him, and he considered, no matter how briefly, getting on a plane to a random location and starting his life over. This would have been impossible, seeing as he was broke. Once he’d had a chance to recover from the embarrassment he contacted his bank and credit card provider, before being advised to call an identity fraud charity for further advice and protection. He did this and got more than he bargained for, as his chat with the advisor revealed that he had been a victim of numerous scams throughout his life, and the conversation nearly brought him to tears. In the months that followed he would volunteer with the charity, before receiving a full time job and finally finding a sense of inner wealth that matched his avarice. It wasn’t that he was a changed man over night, but that his millionaire dreams gradually stopped clawing their way into his everyday life.  

Y1 > 68

Fiction | Milo

The following short story was inspired by out podcast episode on time travel. I like the idea of making this into a series, but it's not something I'm looking to force. We shall just have to see what happens...I'm sure there's a bad joke in there "travelling to the future" but whatever.

 A Brief History of Mallett Mail (MM)

• In the year 2020 advances in our understanding of inertial frame dragging led to the funding of a variety of experiments into the possibility of delineating time, or “time travel”, inspired by Ronald Mallett’s paper Weak Gravitational Field of the Electromagnetic Radiation in a Ring Laser.   
• Following a number of successful experiments, the US military began investigating the martial uses of Mallett’s theories. This led to the creation of Mallett Mail (MM), a programme capable of receiving coded messages from a sender located in the future. Its interface was similar to any basic email software, albeit lacking in the ability to send messages.   
• The first MM transmission was received on Sunday 29^th January 2033, and it contained instructions on how to create the necessary software required to send messages.  
• MM’s were repurposed for mass production and commercial use in the year 2067. 
• This eradicated linear conceptions of time as we know it, and our current strict adherence to mathematically proper 'years' returned to the hazy, pragmatic timekeeping of medieval times. In this way, what would have been the year 2068 was instead known as Year 1 after the Year 2068 or Y1 > 68.  It was also necessary for two new days of the week to be created; “Thisday” refers to the current and accepted chronology of one’s life, whereas “Thatday” refers to one’s assumed history before MM communications “splintered” their timeline. 
• Therefore identifying the "actual" year that you were in was a task left to bankers, philosophers and mathematicians. For everybody else “Thisday”, or “Thatday” sufficed. 

This is where our history of the future begins, sometime in the early Spring of Y1 > 68.    

Roger Love had two problems that should be easy to solve were it not for his misplaced sense of masculinity, and so as problems they remained. His first problem was his promiscuous nature and easy, guiltless guile that made one night stands a night club away. His second problem was his disdain for sexual protection, whether that of the physical kind or the medicinal kind. A pill had long since been developed that rendered men temporarily infertile, and yet Roger wasn’t a fan. In his words they “took the bang out of the firework”.  

    Now Roger Love carried on with his laisser-faire approach to casual sex long past the point of social acceptability, and with his stated disinterest in responsible sex, ended up with a bevy of illegitimate children. The first two were tough enough to handle, but then a series of twins made him rethink his current lifestyle. It wasn’t long before Roger started to wonder how many children he had fathered across the capital, across the country and on his very many trips abroad. In a sudden moment of awkward shame, he realised the extent of his crimes when he discovered in the middle of an interview that the candidate who sat before him was his own daughter. Her twin was waiting for her in the car outside. He decided that employing his own children was a weird sort of surrogacy for parenthood, and was much like, in his own words, “eating fish without chips” and so enough was enough. He was finally going to behave like a responsible adult, get on the phone and send an MM imploring himself to swallow the damn pill instead. In his fevered discomfort he was quite hasty in his MM, and ignored the most common FAQ’s regarding life and death. It was after all common knowledge that MM’s merely splintered your history, and instead of having a single experience of events you had double. If he’d had the courage to form a relationship with his youngest son, he would have informed him that MM’s led to second chances that were like “lives” in a video game. On the one hand whilst your most recent play through becomes the “official” one, you would still remember every failure up to that point and every failure would still be built into your overall score at the end of the game.   

                

    Roger sent himself a message imploring himself to use protection during the sexual encounters that he had known to yield children. He considered the wording a number of times before deciding that he, being himself, would get it and so sent it without too much duress. The successful arrival of the MM resulted in the customary moment of “remembering” what had now constituted the last two decades of his life. Thatday became Thisday, and his many illegitimate children were no more, at least they were no more to his conscious self. Every so often he would have a vague sense of déjà vu when entering a place he hadn’t realised he’d entered or could recite the theme songs of children’s shows he never knew he had watched.  

                

    Another two decades had passed and Roger’s mindless hedonism caught up to him, and he found himself at death’s door at the unfortunate age of 94 when most men lived until 120. His last days were spent in a care home, watching with dry, itchy eyes the coming and goings of families visiting his neighbours. With night came the ever potent visions of his children who had never come to be, and through the echo of his genes he could see the life that they had lived without his conscious self. He saw his eventual reconnection with them; he saw him holding with bashful excitement a grandchild who could have been his own son. He saw in the bathroom mirror his children visiting him in this very same care home, and he saw his life extend for a further five years in an emotional state resembling a placid, meek sort of contentment. But alas these times did not belong to his conscious self. When it soon became clear that no one was coming to visit, and when he was the most senior of senior citizens in the ward he applied for a “peaceful injection” as was his legal right with the passing of the Euthanasia Act.  

                

    The old man’s hand quivered with age as he eased himself into the seat that sat across from the physician and the therapist. The latter asked him to confirm his reasons for his decision, and he replied that living without loved one’s was akin to “drinking punch with no alcohol”. The former then told him that he could live for a few years yet with the right healthcare plan, and that he could always try sending another MM. The therapist informed him that too many people stopped sending MM’s out of a sense of futility that was often proved false. Roger laughed at this because he had not been one of those people, he had sent numerous messages as his health declined, messages that had fallen on a younger Rogers death ears. A younger Roger who had fallen deeper into his lascivious ways once he had learned to embrace the pill and so couldn’t care less about these so called projections of loneliness. The two sighed, aware that he had made his decision and asked if any arrangements needed to be made for his imminent passing. He replied: “death with too much planning, is like sex with protection. I’d rather be surprised and let the pieces fall where they may, than feel the cold calculation of a life so weighed.”

    In this way a morally wayward Roger died a now pensive yet still morally wayward Roger; his dying visions of the things he was yet to do, rather than the things he had Thisday done.            

The Milo and Moose Show Episode 11: If You Could Go Back in Time, Should You?

Podcast | Episode Description

In this episode of The Milo and Moose Show, Milo and Moose are discussing time travel. They begin by discussing the time travel theories of Ronald Mallett, before then going on to dicuss which events in history they would like to go back in time to witness.

After this they share their own time travel story which, in Milo's words, starts of strong before rapidly going downhill in a big way. 

They finish with a speculative chat about whether time travel is possible and if it is possible whether it is a good idea. Do the negatives, such as becoming your own grandfather, outweigh the positives, like winning the lottery. In all honesty we don't really answer the questions so if you have an answer share it!

What did you think of our time travel tale? Do you have any of your own to share? Let us know!

Time travel whoosh by blastwavefx and machine gun fire by musickeitor and both can be found from www.freesfx.co.uk

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The Milo and Moose Show Episode 11 Preview

Podcast | Preview

The idea of changing the past to change your future is something we’ve touched on briefly in the past, but for our next episode we’re going to tackle it directly. We’ll be looking at time travel and in preparation for this episode we’ve been looking at the issue from a number of different areas.

To begin with there is the wealth of pop culture treatments of time travel, from the hilarious (such as The Hot Tub Time Machine films) to the more sedate (like Primer). Then you have a real life physicist named Ronald Mallett, who has seriously investigated time travel in order to see if he could somehow prevent his father's early passing. His life’s work has a weirdly cinematic vibe that continues to blend the line between fantasy and possibility, that all time travel fictions contend with.  

Ronald Mallett

Moreover there’s plenty of fun that can be had with the variety of paradoxes that come with time travel as a concept, most famously the Grandfather paradox whereby a time traveller could inadvertently hurt or affect their grandfather in such a way as to threaten their own existence.

In response theories, that I admittedly don’t fully understand, have been put forth to suggest this is an impossibility but even so it’s a curious and quite scary risk for any time traveller.  

Sometimes there are things worse then death, like being your own grandfather...

There are so many fascinating areas of exploration with this topic, from whether time travel, even in the form of sending messages from the future to the past, is a possibility in our lifetimes to whether it is even desirable were it to be possible. 

Time travel could seriously inhbit your ability to order a cheeseburger

In any case whatever direction, we choose to take this episode in, we hope you tune on Sunday 20th March where it’ll be available on Itunes, TunIn, Soundcloud and Stitcher. 

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