Time Travel Be Hard, Yo by Emerian Rich

Enjoy an exclusive guest post from Emerian Rich, author of “PODs,” featured in our upcoming anthology ON TIME.

 

When I first thought of the “PODs” story, I was more interested in the cool ability for us to be able to transfer from one city to another in the blink of an eye than time travel. I’m a horror novelist. What do I know about time travel and displacement of human cells? The answer, nothing. Although I love time travel movies and books, it’s only a fun pastime. I am not sciencey or mathy in any way.

Luckily, I have a lot of super-smart friends who do understand the intricate ins and outs of that space-time continuum thingy. So, I started asking around.

Several people wrote me long explanations, gave me graphs, drew me charts, but none of the info was particular to this new tech I had created, which basically “beamed” people from one location to another. These smartys were also Star Trek fans, so how come none of them could tell this “dumb” horror novelist how to beam my POD into the future?

And then, my close friend Karysa helped me figure it out in a way I could understand. This little chart helped.

Instead of thinking the POD itself could hop or jump from one place or one time to another, it’s more like the atoms that made up the person disappeared from one spot and rearranged at the other spot. This would also account for the atoms “finding” another place to be if they could not land in the original location. Karysa was also quick to remind me that this is not real, people cannot be beamed from one place to another like on Star Trek. Even if the tech was built, it’s unlikely it would be built this way. But, in this near-future world, I have skewed the tech knowledge to allow for it. And all you need for your ride is a few reassimilation tabs.

This proves that your stories are only limited to the strength of your imagination and the smarty-ness of your friends. I still don’t know everything about quantum mechanics or time travel–and I’m certainly not a pro at the space-time continuum thingy–but I was still able to create an interesting story about a gal who gets stuck in a travel POD that transportation her somewhere she doesn’t expect. Check out my short story “PODs” in the anthology On Time to read the fun fiction bits as well as all that sciencey stuff.

 

 

Emerian Rich is the author of the vampire book series, Night’s Knights. She’s been published in a handful of anthologies by publishers such as Dragon Moon Press, Hidden Thoughts Press, Hazardous Press, and White Wolf Press. Emerian is a podcast horror hostess for the internationally acclaimed podcast, HorrorAddicts.net.

 

 

 

ON TIME is coming in Summer 2020. Be sure to follow us on Amazon.