Beyond The Bridge

Time to Explore Time Travel

This week, the Bridge doesn’t open to another dimension, it opens to another moment in time.

Time travel stories have always fascinated me because they test the one thing we all take for granted: cause and effect.

As a writer, I love exploring how small actions ripple forward, or backward, and what that says about who we are. Change one thing, and you rewrite not just the world, but you rewrite yourself.

When I was drafting Knocked, I toyed with including time travel directly, but the multiverse already bent space in so many ways that I held back. Still, the question lingers for me as an author: if I could step through a Bridge and talk to my younger self before writing this book – would I change anything?

Probably not. The mistakes, the long drafts, the rewrites, they’re all part of the timeline that brought Knocked into being. Sometimes the loops matter more than the leaps.

A snippet that relates to this issue:

From Chapter 25 – There is Something Wrong with +137

“We haven’t heard from you in like six months!” Denny chimed in loudly. “Why is it taking you so long to reply?”
“Wait, what?” I asked.
“There must be time dilation at play there, Max. There is a delay in your messages,” Dr. Zine said. “I told you there was something concerning about +137.”
“Time is moving slower here…?” I asked and paused to think for a moment.
“Yes, but because of the time dilation, there is a large gap between your messages to us,” Dr. Zine said. “You might hear us instantly, but an hour or more passes between messages back to us.”
My mind was melting.

“It has occurred to me that no one might have mentioned to you, the potential time dilation issues with the universes, the ones that are connected from here,” Dr. Zine stated as we rode the elevator down to the extra lower basement.
“I figured out something wasn’t right with it, but no one has explained anything to me,” I said.
“This universe is running slower, for lack of a better explanation,” Dr. Zine said.

“Almost like when you get closer to a black hole. Time compared to other universes has slowed down…

Your Turn To Cross

If you could travel to any moment, your own past, or history itself, but only to observe, not to change, where would you go?

Hit reply. I want to know which moment you’d choose to witness.

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Beyond The Bridge – Issue #4