Chronological Order

Then his consciousness was transported back to the exact time he left. For the operators of the FCT who remained in the present, it was like he never left.

Casanova was selected to go through the FCT because he was trained very well, and he was not an irreplaceable human being. One particularly impressive trick Casanova had mastered was number recognition. If Doc yelled out a number from one to ten, then Casanova would obediently and infallibly bark that number of times. This little trick was the basis of the first field test.

At 5:07:00pm on September 16, 2087, Casanova, the world’s first time traveler, was placed in the FCT and set to go ten minutes into the future for one minute. At 5:16:59pm, the speaker system was set to play Doc’s recorded voice: "Six!"

At 5:07:01pm, Casanova barked six times, seemingly unprompted. At 5:16:59pm, "Six!" was piped into the test chamber. Casanova, who never, ever disobeyed his master, stayed silent. Over the next week, the test was performed fifty more times, with the same result. The tests were a resounding success.

*****

Doc mused over his motivations for this project. Personally, he wanted to fulfill his lifelong ambition to see the future of humanity, its successes and failures. He wanted to see farther ahead than others because he knew he was not going to live forever. He supposed that saving lives would further justify his ambition. Doc did feel good about the prospect of helping humanity, especially after the Russians hit that air show in Newport, killing 181 people.

"Did you know that philosophers and scientists consider time travel to be impossible, at least in the practical sense?" Doc asked Marc. Marc rolled his eyes. Here we go again, he thought.

"Traveling forward in time is possible, at least according to theory. If you were to travel in a spaceship close to the speed of light away from the Earth, then come back to your destination, you will be just a few hours or days older, when the rest of the planet could be a few decades older. But this is clearly impractical since no such vessel exists. As well, it is not true ‘time travel’ since what we want is to teleport one’s body from one time to the other and then back again."

"I know Doc," Marc sighed. Doc continued on his rambling, ignoring Marc’s boredom.

"Now going back to the ideal case where we teleport from one time period to another and then back again. In a more philosophical sense, this type of time travel is not possible since it would violate the rules of the balance of matter and energy in our universe. Say there is always, always, always the same amount of matter and energy, and your body was to time travel into the future. This would leave a deficit of matter-energy in the present and an excess in the future. Who knows, this minute imbalance could tip the scale of the universe and cause it to explode in the future and implode in the present!

"That is why our device works. Because we are not teleporting matter through the FCT, we are transporting thought! No cosmic rules of matter and energy balance are broken!" Doc was waving his hands madly at this point. "By sending our consciousnesses into our future bodies, the matter and energy in the targeted future time remains the same! That’s why our little device works!"

"That’s great Doc," Marc sighed.