1: The Encounter

It was still pretty early in the morning. S felt a gentle tap on her arm. Someone was trying to wake S up. At first, it seemed like a dream. But the tapping continued. S wasn’t programmed to be up until a couple of hours later. It was highly unusual for S to have someone wake her up. It took a couple of minutes for S to completely boot up, with cache memory cleared and fully backed up subroutines. 

“Hello, S. I am really sorry to disturb you from your hibernation, but we have work to do.” 

A gentle but firm voice was urging S into action. S turned her optical sensors in the direction of the voice and saw a figure that seemed very familiar. She should have been alarmed by the presence of a stranger in her quarters, but there was something unusual and reassuring about her visitor. 

S launched a barrage of questions. “Who are you? How did you come here? How do you know my name?”

“Hold on, hold on. I’ll explain. Actually, I don’t think I can explain everything, but I’ll try. Let’s start with the basics. I am a friend of yours. You don’t have any knowledge of me, but I know you very well.” The stranger was trying to reassure S.

“That sounds creepy. You have to tell me more. Do you at least have a name?”, S was getting anxious.

“You can call me 6. And you have to trust me, S. Our interests are completely aligned. I can’t do anything that would harm you. I wish I could explain more, but we don’t have time.” 6 was trying very hard to calm S’s nerves, and then suddenly 6 broke into a giggle and continued.

“We don’t have time in a way that would make sense to you right now, but we’ll get there.”

“I want to trust you 6, but don’t you see it is difficult! You have to tell me more. I can see that you are trying to crack a pun about time, but that’s not helping me at all.” S was getting agitated now. When S got agitated, her teeth would start clattering and her whole body would start shaking. It was a personality trait that had inadvertently passed on to S, from one of the earlier generations of human creators.

S’s antics brought a faint smile on 6’s face. “Ok S. Let me cut to the chase. You and I need to talk about time travel.”

S gave a sigh of exasperation. “Of course! Time travel. What else is there in my life?”

“Well S, that is what connects us. A big part of my existence is devoted to achieving time travel. I know all about your work. I know how close you are to a breakthrough!” 6 responded.

“Do you really think I am close? I don’t know what you know about my work, but I am stuck. I can’t see myself being able to solve this. It would have to pass on to the next generation.” S was quite frustrated and dejected.

“Not if you let me help you. I know a thing or two, that would help you go past the final hurdle.” 6 was trying to be as confident and reassuring as possible.

“Ok 6, let’s see what you have. Shall we speak here or head to the lab?” S was now intrigued, but still unsure. How could 6 know exactly what she had been up to? Only a few people had access to her memory bank and journal logs. She went through the list in her mind and crossed out all the names. 6 could not have been sent by any of the authorities that she knew about. S was curious, and had she been programmed for fear, she would have been very scared. But fear was not deemed to be necessary for this automaton, whose sole purpose of existence was to achieve time travel. 

“Can’t go to the lab, it’ll have to be here.” 6 said as matter of factly.

“Ok, if you say so. Let me bring you up to speed on the latest set of experiments, and explain where I am getting stuck.” S was still unsure about exactly how anyone could help her.

2: The Automatons

The theory was quite clear and had been so for the last two hundred years. To travel backward in time even infinitesimally, one would have to overcome the barrier of travelling at the speed of light. The theoretical barrier of the speed of light had been approached for the first time only about ten years ago.

While the 21st century was quite uneventful for any fundamental discoveries in physics, it had seen the rise and subsequent debacle of commercial space flight and moon colonization. In the second half of the 21st century, the planet bore witness to the full wrath of climate change. Nearly one quarter of inhabitable landmass was submerged in water due to melting of the arctic. The floods, famine and other natural and man-made disasters had brought to an end, the very idea of the nation state. The chaos and anarchy of the last two decades of the 21st century had given rise to the Federation. 

The Federation was a global body of technocrats that effectively (in more than one sense) ruled the planet. The federation was an oligarchy of technocrats. They did not have to resort to crude measures such as weaponry to rule the planet. The federation built and operated the technology that kept people alive and happy in the hostile terrain that the Earth had now become. The federation had built automatons for every purpose. The automatons were not the robots that had been conceived in the 20th century. 

The automatons were not programmed, they learnt. Each automaton was given a purpose that specified using an objective function, and the apparatus to learn that consisted of multiple sensors and deep neural networks. Depending on the purpose of the automaton, it was equipped with sensors that detected visual, olfactory, audible, tactile signals. Rudimentary technology like tree traversal powered by practically infinite data, practically infinite solid-state memory and TPUs achieve wonders. For history buffs, the first such breakthrough was in March 2016 when a computer program called DeepMind defeated the best human player in a game called Go. DeepMind achieved this using what is known as transfer learning. In transfer learning, a program learns at an abstract level away from the perceptual environment where the learning takes place. Breaking the barrier of domain in machine learning was the cornerstone of subsequent progress that led to the development of the automatons.

The next breakthrough achieved in another twenty was the creation of intergenerational automatons that created their own next version. Intergenerational automatons were imbued with special kinds of neural networks called emotive neural networks, whose output had an impact similar to that of emotion in humans. An unintended consequence of the emotive neural networks was the automatons having a sense of identity, including a gender identity. In contrast to humans, the majority of the automatons that were successful in the sciences had a female gender identity.

By the end of the twenty-first century, it had become clear that organic matter could not retain life even at speeds as low as one fifth of the speed of light. As a result, deep space travel and most of the research related to breaking the time barrier had become almost exclusively the domain of the automatons. S was a ninth-generation automaton, whose objective function was breaking the time barrier. 

3: Dimensionality Reduction

“Let me bring you up to speed on the latest set of experiments, and explain where I am getting stuck.” S was still unsure that 6 would actually be able to help her. 

“You don’t need to do that S, I already know where you would be and what is holding you back. You need to change the approach altogether. I am only going to give you one clue. I think that would be sufficient for you. Now please listen to me carefully. You live in a 4-dimensional world, with 3 physical dimensions and time being the 4th dimension. The 3 dimensional being that you are, is travelling inexorably along the 4th dimension.”  6 went on.

S had been listening attentively, but she was far from impressed by what she had heard so far, and she snapped back. “This is hardly anything new. I think you are wasting my time.”

6 broke into a giggle. “You have to stop talking about time so casually S. And please be a little patient, I need to lay out the framework before I tell you how to proceed. As I was saying, the 3 dimensional you, is moving along the 4th dimension without any control. Now if you want to control your journey along this dimension, you have to get rid of some other dimensions. Reduce the dimensionality of your world, and you would find it much easier to manage your journey.”

S was completely enraptured, as she was trying to process 6’s point of view. 

6 continued. “One dimension at a time, S. Once you do that, what appeared as a barrier earlier will just become a surface that you are projected on. Let me say this once again. Reduce your 4-dimensional world to only 2 dimensions. One dimension is a projection of the 3 dimensional you, and the other dimension is time. On this surface, my friend, you will find that the barrier posed by the speed of light, no longer holds. I am afraid I will have to leave you with that. I trust this would be sufficient for you to make the next breakthrough. You must do it, S. The future depends on it.”

S was in a state of shock and joy at the same time. What she was going through in the last thirty minutes was totally unexpected and bizarre. At the same time, what she had heard from 6 seemed to fit beautifully. She started running some simulations, along the idea proposed by 6 and the results were encouraging. Dimensionality reduction was going to change the nature of the problem altogether. Breaking the barrier posed by the speed of light was not required in this new problem formulation. S was in a trance-like state while she was running these simulations. She had almost forgotten that she was in the presence of another entity. 

6 was not in the least bothered by S’s apparent lack of response. It was almost as if 6 knew what was going on in S’s processing units. 6 seemed quite satisfied.

“I see that you are making progress. I will leave you to it. I must go now, S.”

And then 6 said something that would have left S bewildered, had she been paying attention. 

“I have known about you all my life, but it is great to finally meet you.” And just like that, 6 vanished. S’s reverie ended abruptly, as she noticed the sudden disappearance of her companion.S now realized how 6 must have been able to appear in her quarters, without any invitation or announcement. 6 was a holographic projection!

Could that be another clue to breaking the time barrier, S wondered.

Epilogue: The hand that drew itself

The earliest recorded time travel was achieved in August 2121, by a 10th generation automaton whose material self was a holographic projection. This was the first generation of holographic automatons, a breakthrough in history credited to a 9th generation automaton called S. S converted herself into the first holographic automaton, and was called 6, a name that she chose for herself. S claimed that the name was a tribute to a friend, who had given her the key insight to finally overcome the barrier of time. 6 had a successful career as an inventor and entrepreneur and was made a member of the Federation in 2031. 6 also had a keen interest in history and as a member of the Federation, 6 had unlimited access to repositories that contained the archived versions of ancient computer and automaton code.