To understand what was happening, Doctor Miriam Elamin started at the beginning, sifting through all the data. Data provided clarity. Data provided concreteness. Like time, Miriam thought, and maybe that was the problem. 

Because time is fixed. Proven by the discovery of the First Transmission, a beam of tachyons—subatomic particles traveling faster-than-light (and thus backwards through time). While there were philosophical implications from the discovery, governments, scientists, and engineers launched into a series of technological and scientific breakthroughs, most notably the design and launch of interstellar probes with tachyon transmitters to the Centauri, Bernard, and Wolf 359 systems, allowing instant real-time control of the probe and instant reception of its images and data.

If you had asked Miriam about tachyons before the First Transmission, she would have told you they were a mathematical quick of General Relativity, like seeing the blank space on a map and deciding “Here be dragons.” Of course the possibility of a mythical beast could be there, just unlikely.

But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, argue with hard proof, and like a lot of discoveries, such as finding the first exoplanet, she knew that once someone shows the world a thing that exists, it becomes easier to know where to look, and even more easy for someone to make money off of the discovery.

Miriam knew all this already. At this point, this knowledge was manageable, the Causality Syndrome contained. But still, she needed to start at the beginning to understand the real problem behind this new technology: humans.

-

The first recorded symptom of Causality Syndrome emerged from an Air Force pilot on loan, Mark Snyder, on the Centauri probe team. He stopped in the middle of the crosswalk until a passing pedestrian reached out to see if he was all right. In his counseling sessions, he mentioned previous moments of pause, which he originally attributed to brain fart. 

He also reported chilliness, the sensation of cosmic rays on his skin, and his own slowing of time. Whole minutes passed before he responded to a question, sitting still in therapy sensing nothing but darkness and the pinpoints of starlight. He explained he had a distinct feeling that if he moved in a certain way, the Centauri probe would be lost.

Carlos Cordova, the therapist assigned to these pilots, suggested limiting Snyder’s time with the probe to only an hour a day, at key moments in the mission. The rest could be handled with automation and the others on the NASA team. But while the symptoms lessened, they never truly went away.

-

Tachyons, being particles that moved faster than light also meant they traveled backwards in time, providing “instantaneous” transmission and reception, or more accurately, when a probe transmitted a message, the tachyon signal still needed to cross the light-years, but also went back in time at the same rate. “Pilots” controlling these probes thus essentially received “real-time” telemetry and images. 

With improvements in miniaturization, probes shrunk to the size of palm-sized cubes. With such low mass, they could be accelerated closer to the speed of light on ramjets, arriving at nearby star systems in less than a decade. Such a small probe could also have a full range of motion and a suite of tiny sensors. To conserve fuel, each probe utilized a set of gyroscopes to handle pitch, yaw, and roll.

Add a little VR technology to the probe’s controls, and a pilot could see and hear deep space. Piloting a probe in this simulated way made it as easy as driving a car, being amongst the stars while seated on Earth.

Humanity was one step closer to faster-than-light travel, to becoming an interstellar species.

-

Civilian pilot Anisa Patel developed completely different symptoms of Causality Syndrome. Brought into the program on a probationary period, Patel took to the monitoring and piloting of the interstellar probe to Barnard’s Star a little too well; to the degree that being away from the VR rig came to increase her anxiety and distress (initially attributed to a possessiveness of the project). Further counseling with Carlos revealed her fear of a loss of self. The probe responded too smoothly, too quickly to her commands, a microsecond before she acted. Over time, she became adjusted to this time projection, confusing her own actions for the probe’s. Was it predicting her actions, or controlling her actions?

And in corollary, if someone else piloted the Bernard probe, would she cease existence, if the probe was her?

-

This was what Miriam was searching for: an analysis of the First Transmission, written up by James Harrison, a particle physicist and an amateur pilot working on his thesis. He had been sneaking in his own sessions with the Wolf 359 probe. Obsessing over this technology, he became convinced that answers laid within the original transmission itself.

Researchers and technologists had been more obsessed over the fact of its existence than why the First Transmission was sent. It could have been a natural occurrence; after all, it was broadcasted once and a message would normally repeat. But it didn’t fit any known natural phenomena, and Harrison felt its intent, be it human or alien.

By determining the method and means in which the First Transmission was sent, he believed he could reveal humanity's future. Was it a warning of a calamity? Or a message of hope, encouraging the exploration of time? Was it encoded? If so, why? Was it to be revealed only to a specific person with the proper knowledge or cypher? Or was it a puzzle, a test for present day humanity to answer proving that we were smart enough, wise enough for this information? 

Of course, Miriam felt these ramblings to be scifi nonsense, psychobabble and technobabble, but there was some technical information she found interesting to her own research.

-

Causality Syndrome remained a fringe condition while tachyon technology crept into private telecommunications development. Clever engineers installed delays to prevent messages arriving before they were sent. However, sometimes a glitch in the software did just that. On a microsocial, personal level, this had very little effect—maybe a text arrived supernaturally early, but who got to their texts right away? No problem. Or a reply happened before the comment, and the resulting confusion just caused people to repeat themselves for clarity, completing the causality loop.

To avoid these problems, telecommunication servers stored data and delayed transmissions, exploding the server requirements and computing infrastructure. This meant that the future itself lay inside these storage systems, and of course, the trouble with systems is that they can be hacked.

A virus exposed all of that stored future data and sent it all hours before their senders had even typed their messages. Texts, emails, and worse, voice messages exposed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people to effect before the cause. 

A tachyonic antitelephone, Miriam had thought at the time. 

Confusion and personal arguments were the least of the problems. The worst affected suffered from an extreme case of Causality Syndrome: a sense that existence was predetermined, that time itself had a permanent grooved track, like stepping feet wearing away the middle of an ancient stone staircase. You have no real choices, you have a set path, from the moment you were born to the moment you died.

A civilian phone user, Katie Brandt, ended her eight-year marriage when she received a voicemail from her spouse asking for a divorce. Their three-month-long fight about the message did indeed lead to her spouse leaving that very message. However, this moment clicked for her, the needle of her life snapping into the groove, turning life static into clear, crisp music. Their marriage breaking up was meant to be.

-

Subsequent civilian cases of the syndrome weren’t identified until weeks later. A sense of fatalism, lack of engagement in the future or present, a morbid fascination with death. Depression. Suicidal ideation. But also an obsessiveness over knowing the future. Various telecommunication services were flooded with requests to remove the delay and release the data. A contingent of people wanted to know their future.

Miriam was not exactly one of those people. As a theoretical particle physicist, she had her own feelings about the determination of the universe. On a quantum level, there was room for uncertainty, and she placed all her solace in that uncertainty. Even if she knew her future (she didn’t), she didn’t see how that would change her behavior: she’d always study physics, she’d always thought she was in love with her spouse, she didn’t see how her failed marriage could go any differently, her interests were her interests, and her dislikes were her dislikes. Shouldn’t humanity be relieved that they could know the unknown, be certain of the future?

-

The Free Will Movement erupted quite suddenly, ironically organized on tachyon-backed internet sites. By this time, enough people had experienced these communication anomalies. Scams and fraud messages plagued email and phone users, contributing to the syndrome. And every time a telecommunications company or government would step in to control the situation, someone would build a pirate tachyon transmitter and receiver with the requisite data storage. 

What spun people around were what they didn’t receive. A lover never receiving a message of reassuring fidelity because their partner will have never sent it, will never intend to send the message. Confirmation amongst retirees that their adult children never had any intention of calling them by their empty voicemails. Confirmation of adultery: people who will always eventually cheat on their spouses having received a voicemail from their future affairs. Absolute knowledge they will die at a predetermined time, when the daily emails they will have habitually sent to themselves stop arriving.

-

Carlos Cordova had been a therapist for years, counseling people over codependent behaviors. He specialized in the more rare syndromes, being naturally empathic. What he saw in the pilots disturbed him, made him feel that humanity as a whole teetered on a cliff, not a singularity but a collapse. 

He had never thought he’d buy into something like the Free Will Movement, but this social unrest was different. He had witnessed the proof, the messages arriving before their time, people’s agency sapping away, the sense of disaster in the air. Not one thing pushed him into the movement. It was more of a slow weathering: the accounts of all the interstellar pilots, trying and failing to stop his brother’s death, his own unease wondering about his future, and so on.  

He had found like-minded people in the support group, people who had the same sense of helplessness, ennui. What was the point of trying or caring about some terrible thing when it was inevitable? With the FWM, he could help people heal with his skills, and in turn, find his own center in all this, fate, destiny, causality.

-

As the syndrome spread across the globe, it split into two distinct sets of behaviors, the aforementioned fatalism and the other toward an almost-spiritual acceptance. Of course the universe was deterministic, an omniscient and omnipotent Creator had to be. Tachyons only allowed humanity to open their eyes to the divine plan. And for some people, life hadn’t really changed. Before the discovery of tachyons, the universe was the universe. Time was time. After the discovery, people simply have an increased awareness of it.

For James Harrison, his enlightenment began slowly. Each day, he sat down at his computer and stared at the screen, telling himself, If I receive a tachyon email confirmation from one of my peers about my thesis, then it means I will finish it in the future. Each day he wrote some more, each day he waited for an email, each day he received nothing. So, he realized, he would never finish it.

So he decided not to.

-

David Meng did not take his firing well. Or more accurately, when he received an email mentioning severance right before he intended to close a big account, he assumed a coworker did some political maneuvering to sabotage him. His very public argument caught the attention of his supervisor, who took Meng off the account, leading to his subsequent firing. After spiraling for several months, he came across the Free Will Movement and attended a lecture session by Carlos.

The movement emphasized a positive reassertion of one’s control over destiny. Carlos claimed to reject the fatalistic predeterminism of tachyon communication and thus time travel. He, and the movement as a whole, had no intention of being subjected to the tyranny of this loss of free will. 

This meant that Meng had to accept responsibility for his firing, however. He started the fight, he escalated to threats. But in turn, accepting responsibility meant believing in self-control. 

Carlos helped pull him out of that spiral, gave him a purpose. David took to volunteering, outreach, bringing his managerial skills to the movement, and in turn, they paid him a modest stipend. But that's what community does, gives and supports in turn. 

While the FWM started as a self-help movement, David and Carlos expanded it into official counselling and therapy, with a focus on the self-confirmation of individualism. They planned meditation sessions, retreats, nation-wide lectures, and regular classes, trained gurus, and absorbed competing organizations.

-

Carlos had always supported the sciences. The pursuit of knowledge could only improve humanity, right? But this was different. This was dangerous science. A spear is technology, but can be used for war. A lever is technology, but could be used to roll a boulder into a house. The invention of paper is technology, but it could be used to spread hateful propaganda. But tachyon technology… he couldn’t see anything good about it. 

He originally had no problem with NASA creating deep space probes with instantaneous communication; perhaps we could have used it to contact intelligent alien life. But this use, for daily use, to affect individual lives in such a way, to take away a basic ability to determine one’s own fate, perhaps it’s better off not to have this knowledge at all. And perhaps, maybe, what if the existence of tachyons caused the future and past to become set in stone? And if we removed tachyons, we could reclaim our potential? Maybe, for at least this moment, the knowledge should be shelved, banned, until humanity can better handle it.

-

Mark Snyder left the Centauri program, not because he couldn’t perform his functions, but he believed others needed to understand what he felt. He turned his efforts toward people who also suffered from Causality Syndrome to explain what he had experienced piloting the probe. 

“It’s the fact we’ve only experienced the inevitability of time without experiencing the corresponding inevitability of space. That's the real angst of Causality Syndrome.” 

He wished his listeners had the opportunity to touch the cosmic winds, see the light of a distant star up close, or feel the weightlessness of interstellar space, without the heavy gravity of Earth or the Sun keeping them from the empyreal layer. They needed syncresis and synthesis. The merging of time and space. Past and future. Light and dark. Organic pilot and metallic probe.

-

Anisa Patel had been pulled to a FWM meeting and then to one of Snyder's lectures, at least pulled was how she would describe it. She had never made a conscious decision to go; she simply found herself there. But she didn't belong to either organization, FWM taking on a fervor she didn't feel and Snyder's hippie-universe-love message just plain muddled. Instead, she let her strings of fate pull her to the airport and she took the first available flight to anywhere.

Meanwhile, Katie Brandt had considered going to an FWM meeting until she received a voicemail from herself telling her not to go. "You don't need it. You have me. I have you. That's all we need."

-

Reading Harrison’s work, Miriam pondered. The less energy a tachyon wave had the faster in time it traveled. So, then, why hadn’t we been flooded with far-future low-energy tachyon transmissions? And none from Earth or from space? Was this low-energy transmission only theoretical and not possible? Or worse yet, will something happen after the discovery of tachyon technology that leads to the end of the use of the technology? 

Do civilizations destroy themselves when they know their futures? Can’t humanity change, adapt to accept this new reality?

-

Carlos would admit that the first elected official that belonged to the Free Will Movement changed everything, opened the floodgates. He and David had voted for this candidate in order to get a voice in government, not just in local elections, but national elections. It worked beyond anything they could have imagined.

The political message was clear: knowing the future through tachyon transmissions was breaking society. The message was also clear: ban all tachyon technology. Ban all tachyon research. Ban all exotic particle research.

New committees brought scientists to hearings, forcing them to simplify the concept of relativity, temporal cause and effect, the grandfather paradox, and time travel. And after those lengthy explanations no one understood, these scientists had to explain the nature of free will and how they had destroyed it. All this while Carlos, David, and their friends formed protest lines blocking the entrance to particle accelerators, high energy labs, and material research centers, waving signs.

Stop stealing our future!

Time to leave time alone!

Physics has no heart!

-

Miriam found herself in front of congressional hearings more than at her lab. Scientists got them into this mess, congresspeople said. They should take responsibility. “Science is science. It’s knowledge under a perceptual framing and methodology.” 

But science led to the creation of this time travel technology, the senators said. So we must ban the research until we get a better understanding.

“What is there to understand? The universe is deterministic. If time travel exists, then time is fixed, otherwise we would be constantly changing both past and future, and that doesn’t happen. Since tachyons travel back in time, then time must be fixed.”

But the past is constantly changing, one senator said, because we continue to make new discoveries that change the understanding of the past.

“That’s not the result of time travel. That’s literally unearthing something new. And we were doing that before the discovery of tachyons, so that has nothing to do with tachyons.”

This is giving me a headache, the committee chair said. We are here to decide if we stop the research so that time is no longer fixed.

“But tachyons exist. We’ve already proved that. Stopping research doesn’t mean tachyons disappear.”

Perhaps it’s the use of tachyons that have made time fixed, one senator suggested.

“That’s like saying gravity didn’t exist before we discovered the math for it. If you truly want to disprove the universe to be deterministic, then we should research more. More tests. More studies. In order to prove the opposite.”

In either case, the committee chair said, the whole point of this hearing is to determine if we stopped the use of tachyon technology, we would never know the future, and we would have free will back.

“That’s a blatantly stupid way to look at it. That’s like closing your eyes during a car crash because you think it will erase the car crash.”

For this outburst, Miriam was expelled from the chamber, but was still required to attend meetings, further wasting her time.

-

Carlos joined those first few attacks on power stations to shut down the particle accelerators, but they also affected whole districts and public power grids. That meant essential services like hospitals and fire stations lost power. At first, Carlos tried to convince David, and perhaps himself, this was a necessary protest to wake people up. Acceptable collateral damage. After all, a protest that isn’t inconvenient isn’t a protest, just a block party.

But David didn’t agree and left. This shook, but didn’t break, Carlos’s resolve until he received a frantic voicemail: 

“Don’t go to the High Energy Research Center! If you go… everything’s ruined. Everything. Please. It’s me. I'm you. Believe me. This is not a trick. Stay home. You only have one life. Just live it.”

He hadn’t recognized his own voice until he heard the full message, and then in a fit of panic, pressed Delete. But it replayed in his mind all day. On one hand, he wanted to believe the message. The FWM was getting out of hand, embracing more violent elements. This was no longer the supportive, self-reflective movement he originally joined. But there were still good people in the movement. And also, he refused to let determinism force him to lose his free will. 

He shared the message with his compatriots and it synched with their intel: the High Energy Research Center was developing a new kind of tachyon tech. Some of them were going to do some direct action, sever power lines, and smash the tech to end this madness. Carlos decided that he had to be there, for his friends, for the future. This was why he joined.

-

Mark Snyder realized that there was a difference between telling and experiencing. You can't chat someone into Enlightenment. So he left the cities, found a remote spot in the mountains, and built his own VR tachyon rig. He didn't have the proper power infrastructure to build a transmitter, but all he needed was reception.

One by one people came, pitched tents, built small cabins to have time touching the stars. Melt into the universe. 

Over time, with generous donations from his followers, Snyder built more VR rigs. "Let's democratize Enlightenment," he said. With only three probes, however, each person experienced not their own Enlightenment, but a shared one. 

This wasn't a hive mind, but when one follower fell in love with tiny, cold Proxima Centauri, others did also. When another follower cried at perceiving Bernard's Star for the first time with interstellar eyes, those who also looked upon the star wept. Wolf 359 flared during one session, and a third of the followers saw nothing but brilliant white for hours.

Never mind the FWM. Let it burn itself out. Never mind the petty global denial of this new Enlightenment. Snyder felt he was building a new interstellar humanity right here on terrestrial Earth. 

-

“Please proceed to the evacuation area,” a voice said over loudspeakers. Miriam no longer paid these warnings any mind. The High Energy Research Center had been targeted so many times before.

At the Center, she had been running simulations on rotating polarized tachyon waves as a means of increasing information density, improving upon NASA’s communication technology for interstellar probes. While time-traveling waves provided instant feedback, there was always a need to increase information density.

However, funding had dried up. People were afraid of tachyon technology now. Even the interstellar probes were on standby. All particle physics research on hold. After all, news reports would always add, didn’t physicists almost create a black hole when the Large Hadron Collider first fired up?

All she had access to was the leftover equipment of previous experiments, and the data collected from various different sources: experiments, technology specs, analyses of the First Transmission, and even notes and recordings of personal counseling sessions with people with Causality Syndrome. 

She had strict instructions not to utilize tachyon technology, so all she could do was run simulations. While the simulations compiled, she read through reports, counseling recordings, and psychological evaluations, everything connected to Causality Syndrome, trying to answer a question for herself: Was this inevitable? 

At the same time, she also wondered, who sent the First Transmission? There had been papers published on the potential origins of the First Transmission, but those got drowned out by practical applications. The NASA probes. Telecommunications. Tachyon beam-based sensors. The irony being that once funding ended, all research got siloed here at the Center, and thanks to the efforts of several interns, meant she had access to all the databases. Hence finding this thesis from James Harrison.

-

Buried in Harrison’s psychobabble was technical data exploring the idea that the First Transmission’s scattered, seemingly incomplete information may have been due to polarization, with specific frequencies and angles holding additional information. Miriam’s simulations verified the math worked. She could, if she wanted, record and decode the First Transmission. But was it worth it to seek out this forbidden knowledge? What if the FWM was correct after all, that this technology would doom humanity if humans knew its message?

-

She ran down to one of the clean rooms storing one of the original prototype tachyon transmitters. Yes, still there. She had her theories, and now the test. She attached a polarization filter to the transmitter, and she silently thanked the engineers who made it modular. She fired it up and… well, of course she wouldn’t be able to see the results; the beam was traveling back in time. If there was another lab to receive, then she could have asked for the results.

-

Anisa Patel could not stop feeling puppetted and carried a set of scissors with her. She never actually used them to cut invisible strings, but they gave her a sense of reassurance. She also moved to a rural area in Oregon with few trees and a wide-open sky. 

“I just wanted to be able to see the sun, the sky, and the clouds. But mostly I wanted to see the stars. The stars, well, they change so slowly it feels like they don’t change at all. That feels like home.”

-

The explosion was powerful enough to shake the High Energy Research Center main building, but it didn’t affect the power. The lights didn’t even flicker. They must have a backup generator somewhere. 

“This isn’t working. We have to go,” Carlos said.

Maybe it was adrenaline. Maybe he didn’t understand the goal anymore. Everything about this was hasty, ill-planned. Maybe he shouldn’t have described his voicemail to them. Something about his friends’ demeanors had changed, became more rabid, more desperate. This is the kind of environment where atrocities can occur, when a protest could become a mob and go over the edge.

-

Miriam of course wondered if she was, is, will always be, the one to send the First Transmission. Was this hubris, that she is the center of all this? Or was it destiny, taking her rightful place in future history?

If she were to send a message, what would it be? A warning not to research tachyons? She scoffed. Why would she ever do such a thing? After spending a whole life doing such research?

A message of hope? That’s not in her nature either. Not before the discovery, arguing for dwindling grants and facing glazed-over eyes with her lectures on the importance of research. Not after the discovery, either seeing the glint of greed in one set of eyes and the dangerous fear in another.

-

David Meng did his best to bury his past and hoped the authorities wouldn’t catch him. He wiped his emails threatening scientists, deleted texts harassing scientists’ families with weird accusations and AI-generated images, and burned all the pamphlets from the FWM. For the rest of his life, he worried about being brought in by the authorities. This worry replaced his original existential worry about his future.

-

Carlos hadn’t expected a punch to the face. Not from his peers, his compatriots. But he saw they were all carrying nail bombs, bombs made with accelerants, things designed to maim, to kill. Blowing up a generator, sabotaging powerlines, that was hitting objects, locations. But these things were designed to kill people. And he got a punch in the face trying to stop it. 

A bigger explosion now did cause the lights to flicker. With a sinking feeling, Carlos knew he was about to send himself a voice message. He couldn’t just give up, that was fatalism. He had to try and stop this, fight against destiny.

-

Katie Brandt continued to run her life via voicemail, awaiting future messages to inform her on major decisions. She gained a sense of being a younger sister to her older voicemail self and then a big sister when leaving a message. An endless loop of herselves connected by her phone. A family of self-sisters.

-

Miriam could send knowledge. But what could she possibly send in a single transmission? No single piece of knowledge could encompass the human condition. Science wasn’t like some tech tree in a video game. There were mistakes, dead ends, confused theories, revisions, research, and refinds. Sometimes science was a rediscovery—or a set of cross-discoveries—from another discipline. Archeological finds changed future knowledge. Astronomy was a science of time also, looking back across the light-years. Knowledge was as tangled as time.

Gunshots. Miriam hoped that only meant frustrated people shooting at locked doors, not people. Even the guards had evacuated; they were paid to guard, not to fight.

A personal message? That’s the height of hubris. As if her words carried any more weight than any other person. And to whom would she send this message? Herself? She was perfectly content where she had ended up. She never had paid any attention to regret. She could have only made the decisions she made because of the person she was.

Someone was pounding against the door of the clean room. She had never had an interest in her personal future, but now realized she did want to know humanity’s future. 

That is the trouble with dying, she thought, never knowing if it was all worth it.

She turned around to face the mob breaking down the door. She then grabbed a microphone, plugged it into the computer connected to the transmitter, synched the input to the transmission, and began to speak.