Today's #flashfiction The Unstoppable Time Traveler And The Immovable Problem

“I think therefore I am.”

The Little Engine That Could* #quote

Saw the new Star Wars today, it was quite good. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

The Unstoppable Time Traveler And The Immovable Problem

         Doctor Cho managed to create a powerful technology. Time travel. He made the device that allowed him to move through time and even made it compact. It looked like a boring digital watch to anyone who looked at a glance. And anyone who looked closely would think it was a boring digital watch with too many extra buttons. But it did the job.

        It pulled Doctor Cho back in time, allowing him to keep memories of whatever occurred but pulling the rest of the reality, including his own aging. However what Doctor Cho dreamed of was going forward in time. That he could not with his device.

       He would need to find a way to travel faster than the speed of light. And he would find a way to do it on his own. And to get enough time to do it he kept rewinding time for himself. Again and again. More and more time. With the watch he was unstoppable with as much time, and resources since he could recycle things through trial and error. However physics did not give in. Somehow the cruel universe decided that him forcing time to move faster on whim was simply not possible, even though moving back was something he managed to accomplish.

       But Doctor Cho kept going, and the problem kept blocking him. For one hundred years this kept going. The Doctor rewound time to fix every bit of wear on his body so that even eating was unnecessary. He spent so much time trying he accidentally started trying to figure out if the same ways worked.

       Despite the fact his device made him an unstoppable force when in pursuit of his answer, eventually he did fail. Not because he couldn't spend more time figuring out. Technically he could have gone on for eternity. But his spirit broke. He just went back to normal life. He refused to share his time travel technology with anyone, since he knew that he wanted nobody to try to become an unstoppable force, trying to go after an immovable problem. Doctor Cho didn't want anyone stuck in the same desperate loop he was.

      And so no one used time travel to work at the impossible again. Or have they? We'd have difficulty knowing now wouldn't we?