# 1038 Word Short Story



## Underd0g (May 30, 2018)

*TheSnowstorm*​
byUnderd0g

​Looking over the young boy's shoulder, the slightly built man watched keenly as the boysketched. It was an unpleasant circumstance they, and the other bus passengers found themselves. 

Travelling from Hamburg to Berlin in 2014 should have been uneventful, after all, the manhad an advantage with his travel plans. He was from the future, and everyfactor of his mission in this past was carefully and meticulously considered.The climate conditions were known to be extreme, but the quickness of this particular snowstorm had evaded the intelligence provided to the man now peering at the work of this young artist.

Snow had been piling up against the bus for 20 hours and the motor has sputtered and died. No more gas meant no more heat. The child's pencil shaded his picture with more vigor.

"Don't worry folks, they know where we are and will be sending help any minute now." The bus driver's voice sounded less and less confident.


"You are very talented," the man said to the boy. "What are you drawing there?"

"I'm making a graphic novel. I want to make a time travel story without a paradox. They all seem to have impossible storylines. I don't want to have mine picked apart by the nerds that read it. It's kinda hard, there's a lot to think about," the kid lamented.


"Let me give you a stranger's perspective," the time traveler suggested, "What problems are you having?"


"Well, I've watched every time travel story I could find from 'Back To The Future' to 'Looper' and ironically, the best one I could see, was 'Groundhog Day'; a day that repeated over and over for years. It was a local phenomenon and therefore the changes were kept isolated. But the cause of it was unexplained and seemed spiritual or metaphysical or something." The boy welcomed the distraction. He noticed on one side of the bus, the windows were completely covered with snow. The air had quickly become frigid soon after the motor had stopped.


"It seems you're on the right track. The world would get reset day after day, and nothing could be visibly affected by anyone but the hero of the story."The traveler debated what he could reveal and what he could not. "Plus, whenever went into the future, he only went into the past. What if in time travel,you could only go backwards? It would negate the need for multiple timelines and co-universes."


"How entertaining could that be? You'd never get to see things get resolved on a world scale, the enemies wouldn't get their comeuppance. Why would anyone go into the past if they couldn't return anyway?"


He asked valid questions. It made the traveler examine his own motives. Was his mission legitimate? Why attempt something that he would never see validated?


"Wouldn't it be noble to create a character who would have the courage to venture into such an unknown? He would leave all he loved and who loved him. It would be a tale of sacrifice, readers are moved by sacrifice." The traveler curled and uncurled his toes to bring circulation to them. They started to ache, he could see the boy's breath.


The boy took up another venue, "How could you bring the readers to suspend their disbelief long enough for them to swallow the possibility of time travel? Matter can't occupy the same space at the same time. Wouldn't it be logical that matter from the future can't occupy space in the past where it exists somewhere else on the planet?" His chest felt tight. He didn't want to look weak in front of this stranger. It really was getting cold.


The traveler laughed to himself. He remembered that this was 2014 and they really believed this stuff. It was a time when quantum mechanics and string math was still theory. Black holes were a mystery and cosmology still held so many unknowns.


What the heck, he'd help the boy out with his project. "What's the fastest known energy presently known?"


"Light," the boy quickly answered.


"What if there's something faster than that? What if that matter was common on earth we just aren't presently aware of its existence right now? What if you could trap it so that it wasn't going in a straight line or even a curve, but rather it would bounce back and forth at incredible speed until its container had no choice but to hurl it in the direction you had plotted for it? And finally,what if the black holes in space could actually be charted so that you could be sent at a trajectory to meet with a past orbit? Just sayin'." The traveler was gauging the behaviors of the other bus passengers. They were getting nervous. The bus driver was slumped over the driver's wheel. He didn't want to look at the riders.


"So you can only go back in time and never see the results unless you lived to see them, which would mean you would have to live long enough to catch up when they invent time travel? Pffft! There would have to be something terrible like 'TheTerminator'. It would have to be apocalyptic to motivate someone to reset the whole earth on the off chance he could save it; not to mention he'd have to beone self-important individual." The boy was skeptical.


The traveler reflected on what events brought him here. Yes, most were convinced that the reset was inevitable and necessary. There were many who qualified to make the trip. As far as being a narcissist, the lottery weeded out those. He definitely didn't want to leave his family, no matter how the reset was experienced, he wanted to be there. He didn't care that he may be able to live out a full life.


He realized his mission was a long shot, but humanity had this drive to adapt and survive even when the odds were against victory.


The mood in the bus was growing aggressive. People were getting scared and starting to take it out on each other.


The boy looked up at the man and asked, "Are we going to survive this?"


"How would I know?" replied the traveler.


----------



## Plasticweld (Jun 7, 2018)

I like stories that require the reader to think.  It is also nice to see someone who is not stuck in the rut of telling us what the characters look like nor have neat and tidy answers to all the questions asked. 

You do a nice job telling a story and not making it sound like every other cookie cutter story  out there...no small feat.


----------



## Underd0g (Jun 7, 2018)

Wow, your post is very encouraging. I'm going to have to check out your portfolio.
Thank you!


----------



## Kion (Jun 22, 2018)

You have a good writing style, it managed to draw me in, and that's not easy to do. I enjoyed the piece, and finished it wanting to know a little more, which is great!

From what I read, it seems like you have done your homework, mentioning blackholes, as it is theoretically possible to travel back in time, and not forward, using them, nice touch. Though, as I understand it, the theory relies on being in the realms of the theory of relativity, in order to be possible, and relativity tells us nothing can be faster than the speed of light. "Energy" that could move faster than light would prove relativity to be wrong. So, if relativity is wrong, then there is nothing to prove that travelling back in time is possible.

Also, it would technically be possible to travel forward in time. Time slows down as you approach the speed of light, apparantly, as time is relative. Time would slow for the person travelling at lightspeed, but not for the rest of the universe. I say apparantly as this theory was also constructed in the realms of relativity, and relies on it being true to work.

Sorry, it sounded like you were trying to be as true to science with this as possible, which is why I brought this up. To be honest, you are close enough for it to sound reasonable, and that's really all you need.

Still, I like your idea so far, I would love to see more. 

Edit: Oh, if you haven't already seen it, take a look at "Primer", it's a really good time travelling film, may give you some ideas.


----------



## MatthewSteele (Jun 22, 2018)

I agree, the theories presented here are very interesting. Though If I had to make a critique I think it would be that the boy artist sounds more like a PhD candidate than a little boy haha. Maybe he is just really smart.


----------



## Underd0g (Jun 23, 2018)

Kion and Matthew, thank you so much for your encouragement. Ha, ha; no my research is loving to watch time travel movies. I love it when I hear someone refer to "reversing polarity". Saw that in a Batman cartoon decades ago.

Thanks again!


----------



## Underd0g (Jun 23, 2018)

Kion said:


> Edit: Oh, if you haven't already seen it, take a look at "Primer", it's a really good time travelling film, may give you some ideas.



They don't have Primer on Netflix, but it brought up some interesting referrals. Thanks


----------



## Guslar (Jul 4, 2018)

Plasticweld said:


> I like stories that require the reader to think.  It is also nice to see someone who is not stuck in the rut of telling us what the characters look like nor have neat and tidy answers to all the questions asked.
> 
> You do a nice job telling a story and not making it sound like every other cookie cutter story  out there...no small feat.



I completely agree with this. Detailed description would always take me out of the story and make me bored and detached. If there is something to be described, it's best to give a general notion of what the object's like, or just paint the atmosphere in a suggestive way. The rest of the fine details should be left to the mind of the reader to fill in, as that will make the piece even more enjoyable as the reader will fill in the blanks himself and feel more engaged with the events of the story.

Underd0g wrote this story in exactly this way. I could imagine everything with perfect detail and feel like he actually told me what all of those details are, when in fact he didn't. The only think that took me away from it was the fact that a boy had an in-depth knowledge of physics and talked like he had a PhD, as someone else mentioned. Maybe the boy's dialogue should have been styled in a way that a young boy would actually talk, but without taking away his knowledge? 

Apart from that, this is a solid, good piece.


----------



## Underd0g (Jul 7, 2018)

Guslar said:


> I completely agree with this. Detailed description would always take me out of the story and make me bored and detached. If there is something to be described, it's best to give a general notion of what the object's like, or just paint the atmosphere in a suggestive way. The rest of the fine details should be left to the mind of the reader to fill in, as that will make the piece even more enjoyable as the reader will fill in the blanks himself and feel more engaged with the events of the story.
> 
> Underd0g wrote this story in exactly this way. I could imagine everything with perfect detail and feel like he actually told me what all of those details are, when in fact he didn't. The only think that took me away from it was the fact that a boy had an in-depth knowledge of physics and talked like he had a PhD, as someone else mentioned. Maybe the boy's dialogue should have been styled in a way that a young boy would actually talk, but without taking away his knowledge?
> 
> Apart from that, this is a solid, good piece.





Sorry, forgot to respond.

I know there has been some issue made of my scientific knowledge but it's just common sense.

Let's take for example, going faster than the speed of light. What if you had a pickup truck that was traveling at the speed of light. This is accepted science. And let's say I was riding in the back of the pickup. If I were to take a tennis ball and throw it in front of the pickup truck, which I am want to do, the tennis ball would have to by necessity, travel faster than the speed of light. Now if I were to turn the headlights on, the light from the headlights would travel twice as fast as the speed of light.

Thank you Guslar, and again, sorry for the tardiness of my response.


----------



## Kion (Jul 11, 2018)

Underd0g said:


> Let's take for example, going faster than the speed of light. What if you had a pickup truck that was traveling at the speed of light. This is accepted science. And let's say I was riding in the back of the pickup. If I were to take a tennis ball and throw it in front of the pickup truck, which I am want to do, the tennis ball would have to by necessity, travel faster than the speed of light. Now if I were to turn the headlights on, the light from the headlights would travel twice as fast as the speed of light.



Hello again!

Ok, so, only massless things are known to travel at the speed of light. If you accelerate an electron, the faster it goes, the more mass it takes on, getting heavier. Eventually, as it approaches the speed of light, it becomes too heavy to accelerate anymore. So, no you couldn't throw a tennis ball forward, from a truck moving at the speed of light, because you can't accelerate mass to those speeds.

Still, let's say you could sit in a truck moving that fast, and you turned on those head lights. You would be travelling at the same speed as the light being emitted from them. Therefore the light from the headlights, cannot get out infront of the car, as it cannot travel fast enough to do so. Neither would the car be able to go faster than the light coming from the headlights, so it would look like nothing happened.

Think about this, when you're driving your car at 70 mph, and turn on your headlights, the light coming from them doesn't travel 70mph faster than the speed of light.

As for throwing the baseball forward, Einstein's relativity predicts that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down. However, when you hit the speed of light, time would stop. Since speed is a measurement of distance and time, it can't exist without time moving (This is why it is said that nothing is able to move faster than light).

Still, I was determined to find a way around this for you, and there is a way to 'Travel' faster than light, wormholes.

You know that old, bending space so two points touch each other, then poking a hole connecting them. This would allow you to travel anywhere, instantly, and therefore faster than light (Also, this is theorically possible, exotic matter\negative mass for the win).

Still, I digress, from the point of this forum, it's not about being scientifically accurate, and as I said before, the piece is still a great piece, it doesn't need to be scientifically accurate. Please continue to write , and I would be happy to read more.


----------



## Underd0g (Jul 11, 2018)

Kion said:


> Hello again!...



Thanks again!

Where were you when I was watching Star Trek growing up?
I took three courses in a community college and dropped one, so all my science is based on a semester of Algebra, an introduction to psychology (which had a surprising amount of biology), and a couple classes of history.

I still have to grapple with how they were able, while traveling at warp speed, walk from one end of the ship to the other. Wouldn't they be able to walk only sideways? Maybe they turn two dimensional to enable them to travel faster than the speed of light. Have scientists thought about that? I bet two dimensional beings can travel a lot faster. No drag. I know that two dimensional beings can take a lot more trauma than three dimensional. Take the coyote that chases the roadrunner for example.

But I digress, as most of my science after a while. Truly I base my fiction on psychology, my favorite college subject psychology. I shoot for the entertainment factor, as you can see by my two dimensional bit.

But I REALLY appreciate your explanations. I hadn't thought about it like that and you put it in layman's terms. It would have helped if you had dumbed it down just a bit more but I get more than I did.

Oh wow though, I just re-read the whole time slows and then stops and it got me wondering if that would explain how scientists that believe in The Big Bang would explain why there wasn't time before The Big Bang. If the mass that exploded was moving at the speed of light?

Again, this is a laborer's imaginings.


----------

