Free New Pompeii by Daniel Godfrey

for him taking the lead, he now stood before an audience of about fifty people explaining his theory of virtual particles. Whelan and McMahon both sat to one side. Whelan looked stern and attentive, almost like he was on the verge of giving a salute. McMahon, on the other hand, didn’t seem to want to be there. He was slumped in his seat and appeared distracted.
    “Okay,” continued Arlen. “I’ll try to summarise.” He paused, before reaching for some water. His hand was clearly shaking. “I’m sure you’re all aware that you cannot empty a glass jar.”
    Kirsten felt her eyebrows rise, and she glanced at the rest of the spectators. Quite a lot of them looked as confused as she felt. Then again, few of them appeared to be scientists. This was an audience drawn from the great and good of the college. Some were maybe in charge of funding. Perhaps a lot was at stake.
    “Sure, you can tip out anything you’ve put in the jar,” continued Arlen, his voice cracking and uncertain. “You can suck all the air out and create a vacuum. But the jar still won’t be empty. All you’ll have is a jar of empty space. And space isn’t empty. It’s like a pond, teeming with life.” He paused. Swallowed. “What we have, in fact, is a jar that at any one time is full of ‘particle pairs’, which appear from the vacuum, and then annihilate each other before we have opportunity to measure them.”
    Kirsten blinked. Now she was really lost.
    “This theory of ‘particle pairs’ was first hypothesised in the twentieth century during the heyday of quantum physics. Hawking theorised that you’d only see these ‘particle pairs’ at the boundaries of black holes where they’re created on either side of the event horizon – meaning one is sucked into the singularity whereas the other escapes. You will all have read the news stories when this was first observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. But the real mystery remained.” Arlen seemed to be finally finding his rhythm. “Where do these particle pairs come from?” He waved his hand towards Whelan and McMahon. Neither man acknowledged his gesture. “All matter was created during the Big Bang. Novus Particles promotes the theory that this matter wasn’t just ejected outwards in space, but was also propelled forward in time. The matter we see is only that which is travelling forward in time at the same rate. The particle pairs we observe in the vacuum are those travelling either more slowly, or more quickly, than our native matter. We zip past them – or they zip past us – just long enough for us to theorise about their existence. The black-hole effect identified by Hawking is merely the impact of a gravitational singularity slowing down a particle’s forward temporal movement to a speed that we can observe.”
    Arlen was about to continue, but a loud cough at the back of the theatre stopped him. “Okay, Octo. If all matter is just simply stuff travelling forward through time, how does it all stay together in one place? Why doesn’t it just fly apart?”
    Arlen took another mouthful of water. A look of irritation passed over his face. “I’m sure you’ll agree that two spacecraft travelling at twenty thousand miles an hour are still able to gradually come together and dock.”
    “I think I can see where this is going,” said another voice from the crowd. Kirsten tried to locate it, but the source was lost among a sea of greying hair. “The conclusion of your theory is that time travel becomes possible… but you fall foul of the same logical test as everyone else. If time travel is possible, where are all the time travellers?”
    A ripple of laughter. Whelan and McMahon shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Arlen’s face, however, flashed with a mix of embarrassment and anger. Kirsten remembered him as quite a nervous youth; it was clear he wasn’t ready to deal with hecklers. “The Big Bang threw particles forward in time,” he repeated. “I think it’s