Last updated on November 10, 2021
Note about the story: This was originally published in a short ebook collection under a pen name I was using a decade ago. But that’s not important. The important bit is that I wrote this shortly after my father passed of a rare cancer in 2011. As a sorta joke, I posted on social media that I would go back to graduate school to earn a PhD in Physics and study time travel so I could go back and warn my dad about the cancer. I didn’t return to school, but did speculate that all I needed to do was send a message, not a person. But even a simple message could create a paradox. Hence, this story was born.
It seemed only fitting that I should re-publish this as we approach the 10th anniversary of my Dad’s passing.
When the final moment came, there was no hesitation. Sam pushed the “send” button on the custom email program he created.
The user interface was simple. All the program needed to do was send. There was no way to receive a message back. In fact, there were only two possible actions. Create a new email and send it. There was no address book, since there was only one recipient he was sending an email to. There were no mailboxes, again, due to the lack of incoming mail. There were no attachments, no need to reply or reply all.
Sam leaned back in his chair and performed a self-analysis. Was he any different? He stroked his goatee. Still there. But if anything had changed, would he even know? He saw enough of his reflection in the computer monitor to see the streaks of grey in it. Did he feel any different? No. His dad was still dead.
* * * *
Sam sat down in front of his computer to check his email. While waiting for the thing to boot up, he stroked his chin. Nope, don’t need to shave today, he thought to himself, sheesh, you’d think a 26-year-old could grow some facial hair.
Sam groaned at the slow computer. It wasn’t his. He was visiting his parents for the weekend, or, rather, his dad and step-mom. He had come to refer to them as his “parents” over the years, even though his biological mom was alive and well and doing who knows what.
The old-style machine finally came alive, and Sam logged in to his soon to be defunct Gmail account. He was one of the last holdouts on this system. It was the least intrusive.
His Dad, who was turning 65 that weekend, walked in.
“Hey make sure you turn that thing off when you’re done with it,” Sam’s Dad said. It was an order, but he spoke gently.
“Sure thing,” Sam replied.
“We’re almost ready to head out to the restaurant, so don’t be too long.”
Sam nodded. He refrained from making a snippy comment about the only reason this was taking any time at all was this ancient PC. Was it ten years old already?
Sam scrolled through the list of emails that had come in since the evening before. Normally, he wouldn’t even be here. He’d be on his tablet, but it was stolen. His phone would do, too, but he still liked the feel of a full keyboard, especially when he knew he was going to have an extensive reply to something.
The email he was expecting was there. It was from the University of Maryland Physics department with the details of his post-doctoral assignment. Sam had recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a doctorate in Electrical Engineering specializing in the physics of computing—specifically, quantum computing. It was a hard choice. He was a genius when it came to programming, but also loved physics and loved understanding what was going on at the sub-atomic level. Electrical Engineering was the compromise.
He sent off a reply to Maryland and his soon-to-be new boss.
Looking through the rest of the list, there was the usual. Deals, some spam, newsletters he subscribed to.
He was getting ready to close the web browser when one more email caught his attention. The web address didn’t look right. It had his name on it, for one, and the strangest subject he’d ever seen. In all caps it read: “REMEMBE NICHL GR SMAN”
Sam blinked. Could that mean Nichol Grossman? Of course he remembered Nichol Grossman. She was the first girl he ever had a crush on, back in 4th grade. No one knew, especially her, and when one day Sam found out she was spreading a rumor that all the girls needed to get a cootie shot because of Sam, well, he got over her. At least for the rest of the 4th grade year.
A few years later in high school, after he had long forgotten about her, he was walking behind the school one day, taking what he thought was a little known shortcut through some woods. He heard voices. As he continued down the path, he could see that there was a narrow secondary path that cut off into a clearing about 50 feet ahead. It was almost winter, and the leaves on the densely populated, but thin trees were all down, offering almost no privacy. Nichol was there, along with two boys that Sam knew by reputation only. And it wasn’t a good reputation. Nichol was sitting on a fallen tree and the two boys were hovering over her.
When they heard Sam approach, the two boys swung around and glared at him. Sam tried not to look too hard back at them, but he noticed they both had beer cans in their hands. He also noticed that Nichol saw him, too. Her eyes weren’t glaring, but had a softer look. They almost said “please, help” but Sam couldn’t be sure. So he kept on walking. He reasoned that since she had all her clothes on and he didn’t see them lay a hand on her, it couldn’t be that bad.
But a sense of guilt started growing inside him after that. Especially when he found out she wasn’t in school the rest of the week. And again when she left school all together about nine months later. There were a lot of rumors and gossip about what happened after, but he never found out.
And he had told no one.
So why was her name appearing in an email and who was it from?
Sam clicked on it.
The inside of the email just had a few characters of junk: “# @ @ % $ $^”
Spam. Combined with an email address spoof. That’s all it was.
Sam hit the delete key.
* * * *
Sam woke up. He wasn’t planning on dozing off in front of the TV and wasn’t even sure what time he fell asleep. The clock right above the TV read a few minutes past 3am. To the right of the clock was a picture of Sam’s father sitting next to Sam in the cockpit of a sailboat.
Sam remembered that day. He was helping his dad work off his bucket list when he realized just how little time he had left.
His dad was still dead.
But besides all the memories of his father’s diagnosis, decline into illness and death, Sam remembered something else. He remembered getting a strange email reminding him of someone he had worked hard to forget. He remembered receiving this email right before his father’s diagnosis.
How come he didn’t remember it before? Because it wasn’t there before. That was the message. He remembered at the time dismissing it as spam because the body of the message never came through.
He knew what he had to do. There were changes he had to make.
Sam leapt out of the lounge chair and went back to his workbench. He pulled open the computer case and gingerly removed the custom board he had been laboring on for the last couple of years. Most people who didn’t know a thing about what the inside of a computer looked like wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this board and any other inside that made a computer perform its magic. But the jet black solenoid centered on the board wouldn’t be found on any other computer except for this one. It looked like a small chocolate donut, except it had small tendrils that emerged from its outer surface and connected to circuit traces on the board. Each one of those tendrils was constructed of thousands of nanoparticles and had been carefully laid down by Sam’s own hand using a specialized micro-particle bond tool he designed.
One small change, Sam thought, the most minor of changes and I’ll be able to try again. He picked up his small laser cutter and gingerly cut two of the tendrils. He cleared away enough of the material so the strong bonds that attracted the particles together wouldn’t accidentally re-attach themselves.
The next step was to construct another email.
* * * *
“Dad, I’m just going to borrow your computer and check my email.”
Sam threw his tennis racket and gym bag in the corner of the entranceway of his dad’s house. They had spent the afternoon on the tennis court. He couldn’t believe how much work he had had to do to keep up with his dad, but he was running a little sluggish since they had been out the night before celebrating both the fact that Sam had recently turned 21 and his Dad’s 5-year anniversary with his step-mom.
Sam’s dad followed him to the computer.
“Oh, hey,” his dad began, “I meant to ask you this morning. I received a strange email from you. At least, it looked like it was from you.”
“Hmm. I haven’t sent you anything since I got here two days ago.”
“Yeah, the subject said something about August 1st and there was nothing in the body.”
Sam froze on the mention of the date. August 1st. That was the day that the two of them witnessed Mr. Smith, their long-time neighbor and well known drunk, hit another neighbor’s dog. They were the only witnesses, and Mr. Smith drove off.
Sam’s dad didn’t report Mr. Smith. They went to the Baker’s and told them they found the dog, already dead. Sam never understood why his dad didn’t provide all the information. He figured that he felt bad for Mr. Smith—that he had enough problems already. So Sam took his dad’s lead and said nothing to anyone, either. Sam was only 13 and didn’t know any better.
But the date always stuck with him, because it was Nichol Grossman’s birthday and he had such a crush on her and had planned to call her to say happy birthday. When the incident with the dog happened, he had forgotten all about Nichol and the next time he saw her; she reminded him that he forgot her birthday. He promised himself he would never forget that date again.
“Uh, Dad, I think someone has been spoofing my email. It’s a common problem and happens randomly when you have your own domain like I do.” What Sam neglected to mention was that the odd subject line didn’t seem to him to be as random.
“I’ll just delete them.”
“Good idea, Dad. Let me know if you get any others.”
* * * *
The door chime woke Sam up. He stumbled out of bed, barely able to read the clock as he passed it by. It was almost noon. But what day was it?
He pressed the button on the side of the door frame and the door whooshed away into the wall. Standing on the opposite side was his best friend, Lee.
Lee held up his hand to display an unopened bottle of Jameson.
“It’s 4 o’clock somewhere,” he said and walked in past a still groggy Sam.
“What?”
“And I didn’t forget, which is why I’m here, remember? We promised to raise a glass to your old man on the twentieth anniversary.”
Sam said nothing. He just blinked at Lee while Lee went about finding some glasses and opening up the whiskey. As the fog of sleep cleared, he remembered that yes, as of today, it was 20 years since he lost his father to a fast moving and aggressive bout of cancer.
Sam rubbed his face and walked up to the opposite side of the counter that Lee was on and sat down. The sleep was gone, but his brain was still foggy.
“Is this your prescription for all your patients?” Sam asked rhetorically. Lee answered anyway: “Only for my most hopeless cases.”
He winked.
“Hey Lee, twenty years is a long time. What do you actually remember?”
Lee put a small glass in front of Sam, another in front of himself, and spoke while he started filling them.
“A ton. It was a pretty intense time, buddy. You had just turned 21, and your dad, who had always been one of the healthiest old guys I knew, went to the doctor and it was like blam! Out of nowhere, tumors appeared all over his body,” he paused. “Did they ever figure out which was the source?”
Sam shook his head and stared into the glass.
Lee continued his mini-eulogy: “Two months later, that was it. You went off to be a successful quantum computing physics genius or whatever it is you do, I went off to be a semi-successful psychiatrist, not that anyone cares, and twenty years later we’re here, raising a glass to your Dad.”
He raised a glass, waited for Sam to do the same. They both downed the abrasive liquid and Lee poured another round.
Sam took his glass and went back to his workbench. He did nothing. He sat there and stared at the machine. Lee followed suit, picking up his glass and meeting Sam over on that other side of the apartment. Lee didn’t sit down, instead he kept shifting his weight back and forth between each leg and looked over the computer, the workbench, and the large white board filled with advanced math that was propped up on the floor next to the bench.
“How long have you been working on this?” he asked.
Sam shook his head. “I don’t remember anymore when I first had the idea, but you remember, I only got the parts I needed a year ago.”
“Yeah, that’s right. But I don’t recall seeing all this math up here. What’s this all about?”
“Well, that equation in front of you? The one with the three complex terms? That first term tells me I can create what I call a mini-wormhole. It allows me to act on one individual bit of data. It’s a probability term, which means it’s a fifty-fifty shot whether any individual bit will find its way to its destination. If I’d thought of this years ago, I could have set up the appropriate receiving station to increase the odds of getting a message. That’s one of the things I’m working on now.
“The second term involves something known as the Principle of Least Action. It’s actually describing the path my information bit is going to take.”
Sam stopped his explanation there and gulped back the rest of what was in his shot glass. After a minute of silence, Lee realized Sam wasn’t going to explain any more, so he asked:
“And what about that third term?”
Sam stared at his glass. “That term is all about energy.”
“Energy?”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of extra energy released in the process. At least according to the math. I’ve never been able to detect any when I’ve tried sending messages.”
Sam stopped his explanation again. Lee picked up on Sam’s hesitation and his psychologist’s training told him this was the time to probe further.
“Let me ask you another question. I’ve always wanted to ask this, but it’s such a downer, I never wanted to discourage you. Why haven’t you ever received a message from yourself? Or have you and just not told me?”
Sam shook his head. “No, I’ve never received a message.”
“Why not?”
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it. The simplest explanation is that I’m not trying to transmit any.”
“Huh. I wonder what would have made you stop trying.”
* * * *
“Sam, you get this computer stuff more than I do. Come on over here.” It was Sam’s dad calling him into his office. This was Sam’s first weekend home after starting his freshman year at Carnegie Mellon and all he wanted was to sleep on the couch in front of the TV. College had been a little more intense than he expected.
But his dad needed help, computer help, and Sam had a hard time saying no.
“Dad, I’m not your personal tech support.” He chuckled.
“Sure you are. Why do you think I’m paying for your education?” he laughed a very hearty laugh as was usual. “Now explain this email you sent to me.”
Sam looked over his Dad’s shoulder at the screen in front of him. His Dad had opened Microsoft Outlook, a program he despised but tolerated because so many people he knew used it. There was what looked to Sam to be a lot of junk in his inbox, but he ignored it, and didn’t start in on his dad about getting a good spam filter again. Instead, his eye was drawn to where the mouse was, hovering over a line in his inbox that looked like it was coming from his own email address.
The subject said “Dad, r3mind m3…”
“Uh, Dad, I didn’t write that. It’s not from me. But click on it. I want to see what’s in there.”
His dad did as Sam said and the full email opened up.
The body of the email was almost comprehensible:
“Dad, Ths s att3mpt ###3. Yyuuu ned 2 go c c c d*ct*r ab*ut th cancer. Trust m3, y*ur s*n. #$ $ &&$ !. Yu’ll kn*w ths @ s fr*m m3 wh3n u u u remnd m3 ab*ut Nich*l Grossmn && Aug 1. LLL”
“Does this mean anything to you?”
Sam blinked. He had thought about this a lot. What if he needed to send a message to himself back in time? How would he know it was real? This email referenced two things he had told no one and was pretty sure he never would tell anyone.
“Dad, I think you should see a doctor this week.”
* * * *
“Tell me again how your Dad found out?”
Neither Lee nor Sam had spoken for several hours. They had set themselves down and turned on one of the sports channels that still broadcast ice hockey. Sam couldn’t be sure, but he thought he had nodded off a little. Lee’s question brought him back to full consciousness.
“He showed me this email he received. It claimed it was from me, but looked like some combination of bad spam and good spoofing.” Sam sat up as the memory came back. He knew he never told this to Lee before. In fact, he had told no one.
“It mentioned Nichol Grossman. You remember her from high school, right?” Sam didn’t wait for Lee to respond. “And it said it was attempt number three. That part I remember clear as day.”
He popped off the couch and went over to his computer. Right before Lee showed up, he had sent the following email:
“Dad, this is attempt #3. You need to see a doctor about the cancer. Trust me, your son. I apologize that I can’t explain further. This message needs to be short. You’ll know this email is from me when you remind me about Nichol Grossman and Aug 1. Love, Sam.”
Lee made his way over to Sam’s workbench, too.
“Lee, do you know what this means? My message worked!”
Sam’s face was lit with joy. Lee didn’t crack a smile. While he wasn’t the genius Sam was, he was a pretty sharp guy.
“Sam,” Lee said as he sat next to him, “remind me which cancer your dad had?”
“The doctors could never figure out where it originated in his body. When he went to the doctor, he already had Stage IV, and it was everywhere. After his autopsy, their best guess was that he was hit by some burst of radiation.”
“Interesting. Now tell me about your first two attempts to send this email back. Why did number three show up right before his diagnosis? Why not send him a message any earlier?”
Sam thought about that for a moment and all the color drained from his face. “I did. Of course I did. I don’t know why it didn’t show up earlier.”
Lee walked over to the whiteboard. He picked up a black marker and circled the third term.
“I think you know, Sam. I think you also know where your missing energy went, too.”
Sam shook his head back and forth. He didn’t want to believe it. His chest started heaving up and down as he fought back years of pent up emotion. His eyes darted around the room. He was looking for something. Lee put a hand on his shoulder. He’d been through these breakthroughs many times before with many patients. But it took almost twenty years to get there with Sam.
“You need to say it out loud,” Lee said, his psychiatrist training put to work.
“No,” Sam whispered. “I can’t.”
“Sam, there’s nothing else to do but admit it.”
Sam heaved a heavy sigh as he fought back tears. “I did it. I produced the scientific breakthrough of the century and sent a message back in time. And I also sent back the radiation that caused my dad’s cancer.”
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