Time Experiment

“Subject is back at the exact moment they left, memories matching 100%” said Greg

“So nothing happened?” Ben sighed.

Greg checked off a tick-box. “Not for them. That’s the point.”

It was a conversation they had before. The Temporal Institute was proud of their perfect success rate. Which, actually, wasn’t that difficult to achieve. Things were simplified to the point where AI was running most of the fine detail equipment and only showed green lights as a courtesy to the humans. Not that the experiments were hard either.

The underlying math was difficult, but in practical terms it was harder to change something than to put it back exactly as it was. The dent was already there, and getting anything close was like water flowing downhill.

“So what exactly are we learning about time if everything always works?” Ben continued.

“Surprisingly little” said a new voice. It was the overseer for the facility. “How would you propose we change that?”

Ben was flustered at a positive response, but not for long. “We could drop them in a new circumstance, and see how long they take to react. It’d be more useful than an identical room.”

The overseer was impressed. It wasn’t a huge change, and they still had the old memory groove to fall into. “Do it.”

Greg seemed disappointed that the labs ‘perfect’ record would be gone, but he was starting to get onside already. He suggested a room difference of five degrees, and see if made a different to the memory calibration time.

Ben sighed again, incremental would likely win out again. Instead the overseer said no, that would be something within the scope of the AI to fix. They needed to go with something traceable on the macro level.

“Why not bring them through to the matching room and talk about your experiment over the PA, then send them back and see how much they remember?”