All Our Wrongs Todays

All our wrongs todays

A novel by Elan Mastai

Materializing in the past, there's this initial synesthesia, my senses scrambled, touch into taste into scent into sound into sight into touch, and then everytrhing contracts in on itself, like gelatin setting in a mold. Although my father's invention makes time travel feel instantaneous, it comes with a visceral kick that makes a routine teleport to the moon seem like a foot massage. I just became history's fist time traveler, but I'm not really feeling the grandeur of the moment because I'm tying so hard not to throw up 2016's breakfast onto 1965's floor.

I take a few seconds to get steady oin my feet and orient to my surroundings, and that`s when it hits me - I'm in the actual laboratory where the future was born. he whole building has of course been maintained as a permanent museum exhibit, with the original Goettreider Engine still in operation in the windowless 500-square-foot basement lab in section B7 of the San Francisco State Science and Technology Center. But visiting it in my time is not the same, obviously, as being here.

I can smell the industrial cleaner wafting up from the chipped tile floor. The lighting, incandescent bulbs Under metal cages, warm and steady, casting every surface with a coppery glow. The machinery is state-of-the-art for the time period but looks adorably archaic, like watching heart surgery conducted with sharp sticks.

And there's the Goettreider Engine itself. It`s thick and clunky compared to the sleek, refined iterations that, in the last weeks of his life Goettreider designed to be constructed posthumously. The housing is dull steel, hand-tempered by Goettreider to fit his specifications. The absorption coils are wound up in thick rolls of springy filament.

Faculty of Architecture of Toronto University. Photo by Elena.

The gauges have actual arrows wobbling in their dials and the indication counters have tiny numbers punched into metal rings that revolve around an axis point. The gears look comically large and cumbersome and the venting stacks might as well be Victorian-era chimneys belching smoke. The key component, the Radiometric Pulse-Field Emitter, is the only thing that looks remotely modern - because its innovative form, with the graded angles and undulating petals and interlocked segmentation, became so influential on contemporary style, spilling from the lab into architecture, industrial design, fashion, art, cuisine, everything really.

Standing in the room looking right at it, the machine that changes the world looks hilariously handmade. It's a miracle Goetttreider got any reaction from the assembled observers other than eye-rolling condescension.

Goettreider's work was considered vaguely interesting from a theoretical perspective but not exactly promising. A bureaucrat with just enough authority to approve minor grand had taken a shine to Goettreider because he'd filled out the administrative funding forms in fastidious detail and the bureaucrat was a man who appreciated neat paperwork above all other virtues.

The Goettreider Engine itself is quite compact, but the venting shafts and thick clusters of coolant tubes fill up the space, ready to gear down the device if it malfunctions and safely release any accumulated energies - so the Engine doesn't erupt in, for example, a fury of global destruction.

A I get my bearings, I realize I'm not alone in here. Someone is hunched over a Notepad, scribbling equations with a pencil. I recognize the Notepad before I recognize the man because I've seen it in an impenetrable display case in the Goettreder Museum - it's the Notepad in which Lionel Goettreider wrote his final calculations before he switched on the Engine.

Which means the person currently writing down those famous figures with a half-chewed yellosw pencil is Lionel Goettreider.