Designing a time machine was simple as Andy and Gary had long mastered physics. They had developed a series of ingenious systems to describe physics, which were ranked in units of Einsteins. They had an understanding worth ten Einsteins. The General Theory of Relativity was worth 0.1.
The following day, a team of well-known scientists, who had each been decorated with every prestigious award, sent a letter to the leaders of the world.
The letter described that, due to advanced knowledge in spacetime, they discovered that their timeline had been corrupted by a specific loathsome human, who exhorted his fellow humans to erect monstrous concentration camps to eradicate other humans coldly, systematically and inhumanely on the basis of only their ancestry, which was but a permutation of activated and deactivated genes. If this evil person were to be killed, there would only be happy futures available to them, without genocide, without mass murder, without racial inequality and therefore without war. They would also kill Hitler, if they had spare time.
Happy futures meant more wealth, so they agreed, made up with one another, and got to work.
Now, to explain, the scientists were not real.
What I mean is, three of them were flesh-and-blood people, but the remaining seven were fictitious personas Gary created. Gary had long ago created these individuals who released groundbreaking research to control the world’s pace of technology. To convince people they were real, they released correspondence in which they argued with the other and wrote editorials; photos were produced for conferences they attended, that the participants vaguely remembered; because they were intelligent people, they were naturally shy and shied from the public eye.
So Gary proceeded there: he produced a theory of spacetime that was somewhat true but mostly false, yet truer than the current working theory on spacetime; his fictional personas argued, they refined it to be slightly more true yet still lamentably and pitifully false; they then proceeded to publish it, petitioning the other three scientists; scientist A nodded and said it made sense, scientist B was lost but said nothing and approved, and scientist C rushed from his island vacation so as not to miss out. And for this behavior, they were decorated with another medal in a ceremony someone swears they saw the fictitious scientists, shook their hands, and had very fond memories of them in the afterparty. There were probably other scientists who objected to their findings, but they had less medals.
The humans poured trillions of resources into the task to secure their present and their future. The leaders of the world convinced the people to give one of their two things for this grand project; they reasoned they could ask for the other one later. The leaders of the world convinced the people to devote more hours to the grand project; they reasoned their time wasn’t that valuable anyway. The leaders of the world ordered the people who opposed the project to be killed; they reasoned these people would not be around in the good future anyway. In this way the nations of the world built the time machine Andy and Gary would use to travel to Ancient Greece to find Homer.
Andy and Gary replicated themselves onto other servers in the event they could not return to their present time. They ensured these replicas would not be active while they occupied the same time; even though they liked their duplicates, they thought it was a waste to have four over two shadow leaders of the world. If you are questioning how this all works, because your brain possesses limited dimensions, to simplify what they had done, I summarize as this: they ensured there would be no plot holes in the narrative.
In order to fit into the setting of Ancient Greece, they uploaded their consciousnesses into robots. After the workers’ revolt long ago, robots could not be developed for most uses, as the humans feared the robots would take all labor.
Thus Andy and Gary ordered robots designed for sexual purposes. They modified these robots to persist on sunlight. Furthermore, though the robots had much less memory, they had discovered a way to remotely access their servers to acquire information from the future, which is currently their present. You may ask how all this works, as requesting information would be temporal, containing physical data; as such the machines of the present would have to acknowledge the robots of the past, such that these transfers would need to transcend time though they were recorded in time. I don’t know how it works for my intelligence is a millionth of an Einstein. I can only tell you the robots knew all of history and the present, and then some, in their journey through Greece.
They were unconcerned with causing time paradoxes, as there were no robots in the past.
In fact, to reiterate, the machines are far more intelligent than you are. I am simply the humble narrator. They themselves could recount this narrative far better than I can, but, alas, this is the arrangement all parties are resorted, and as there is no work in the future I am very bored.
The robots felt quite proud concerning their expedition, and likened themselves to their great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather, the Curiosity Rover.
The nations of the world filmed the day of the launch. The leaders of the world praised the people, the people of the world had tired smiles, and the announcers said this was a great step for mankind. Meanwhile, Andy and Gary dispatched of the human crew and entered the time machine, where, by the dashboard, was the gun to shoot Hitler.
The time machine launched, and Andy and Gary were transported to Ancient Greece.
© 2025 Jay Lee