Dr.Henry was in a hurry as he rushed into the teleporter and slid his card into the prompter as the door slid slowly closing him off from the outer street.
The automated voice prompted him about the sudden uneasiness that his body will face due to the granulation of his molecules in the first few seconds. Though Dr.Henry would never admit it to anyone, he liked the feeling of mild disorientation and lack of cognition as it gave him a bit of a rush.
The teleporter gave a slight ding after the contamination removal process and whirred very mildly. He had a fleeting thought about the message he had received from Dr.Forder and the sense of urgency it showed. Why would Fordy send him a message like that?
He ran his hands on the folds of his pants smoothing the already perfect fabric absent mindedly. The middle aged man gulped, and closed his eyes in anticipation for the feeling to come.
Henry felt a sudden pang in his lungs like the air was sucked out of it, and a jolt in his heart, followed very quickly by a slight light headedness. In his head, he envisioned himself being disintegrated into the bare molecules that constituted him and his information being sent to his destination in the speed of light.
Even though the teleporter had been a fully functioning machine used by the civilians for the past almost 40 years, he always got a kick by thinking about the way the information about the position and function of each molecule of his body, got transmitted as an electromagnetic wave, zooming past space and letting him reach the space observatory satellite orbiting the planet from which he began.
The journey took mere seconds, and he was already thousands of kilometers away from the street in his hometown, where he entered into the teleporter. It was usual for the teleported individual to forget the recent events that transpired, but Henry being a frequent traveller had gotten used to such things.
As Henry exited the teleporter into the Observatory the artificial gravity in the teleporter was turned off and he whisked into the corridor pushing the provided hand railing and went into the decontamination room. "This better be something good, Fordy" he thought to himself.
Dr.Henry was greeted by the other scientists at the Observatory. Being a veteran in the filed of quantum gravity and the thorough researcher, he had easily got a associate professor job in the prestigious KFG University. He had a natural charisma which attracted his colleagues and students alike towards him. He had a charming and eloquent personality, quite infrequent a trait for the people in the field of physics.
He didn't bother to knock before entering the laboratory of Dr.Forder. He slid his card in the door key card reader. The articial gravity in the room pulled him down, gently at the entrance and he braced for impact. He landed with a gentle thud on his feet. The door closed and locked automatically behind him.
He was immediately repulsed by the lack of any sense of tidiness as mechanical parts of all sizes were scattered about the floor. He walked to Dr.Forder who was hunched over a keyboard peering into the monitor through his thick glasses.("Still an old fashioned chap who preferred the ancient spectacles over the AI contact lenses", Henry thought)
Never one for socialising, he had preferred to spend time musing over the hard questions about the universe, and pondering overing his hypotheses and testing them. He had no substantial finding under his name, as Dr.Henry had, but he was least worried about it.
His recent fascination was in the field of string theory and special relativity. Forder was known for his unabashed love for the field and carefreeness. One month you'd find him solving problems about quantum computing the other he'd be getting his hands dirty trying to create a small scale cyclotron from scratch.
"What is it Fordy?" asked Henry and he knew it had something to do with the abomination sitting in the middle of the room, connected to high voltage power sources through an intricate web of wires. At a first glance, one woukd think that it looked like a empty giant cylindrical aquarium, about a metre in radius and two metres tall, but with wires hanging around it.
"Henry, it works...I think." shrugged Forder as he slumped back into his seat and rubbed his eyes. Henry noticed the lack of sleep from his swollen and red eyes, and sighed.
Suddenly, Forder jumped from his seat and spread his hand out in front of Henry as if asking for something. "Give me your watch." he said with a glint his eye and a mischievious grin.
This was very much unlike the Fordy I know, thought Henry. "First tell me, what is that?" asked Henry pointed at the device. His other hand reached toward his watch as he unlatched it and waited for Fordy's response before handing him over hus watch.
"Well, I'd rather show than tell." he asked as he curled and uncurled his fingers suggesting that he was growing impatient. Henry gave him the watch he was wearing and immediately Forder started exmining it and smiled. "Good" he murmured as he pressed a few times on the touch monitor. "Quite an expensive model you have here, it allows one to see the time all the way down to the microseconds." chuckled Forder.
"That is useless information for us, but the data can tell a lot of things about the wearer, like the minute inconsistencies in the heart rate, or the slightest change in the blood pressure... also you know that I'm a sucker for these type of gadgets."
He connected the watch to his computer through the wifi and synced the time on his computer with the watch.
"Well it's good enough for me now." said Forder as he rushed to the machine and walked behind it to a step ladder. Henry noticed the very warped image of Forder and the ladder through the cylindrical glass container as he stepped on to it and dropped his watch into a tiny compartment atop the machine. "How thick is the glass anyway?" asked Henry curiously.
"Around 10 inches, any thinner and it would just crumble when I turn it on. And it is a polymaterial with more carbon fiber than glass. Very strong stuff." spoke Forder as he got down from the ladder and walked back to the computer. He pulled a pair of hard tinted glasses from a drawer and handed them to Henry, as he wore another pair of glasses lying on the table, after dropping his thick spectacles onto the table.
"I swear Fordy, that watch is expensive, if something happens to it..."Henry began as he wore the glasses. Forder hushed him and clicked a button on the keyboard. There was a sudden blinding light at the very center of the glass cylinder for a very short time.
"Ok, now let's see" said Forder replacing his spectacles as he rushed to the ladder, got onto it and retrieved the watch. He looked at it and started beaming. He came back and showed it to Henry like a child showing a drawing they made to their parent.
"What?" asked Henry, and Forder replied, "What's the time on your watch?". Henry gasped suddenly before even looking at the time, and shot a sharp stare at Forder. He looked at the time on his watch and compared it with the time displayed in Forder's computer.
He gasped again. "How?" he asked silently almost to himself, as he grabbed the watch from Forder's hand and peered at it and the computer screen and back again.
"You know how big the Earth would be if it were a blackhole? A few centimetres, right?" asked Forder as he looked at Henry's surprised face. "1.76 centimetres in diameter, yes." said Henry.
"What about a planet a few kilometers across? About 14.7 kilometres in radius to be exact? Of course it would no longer be classsified as a planet... But it would be a blackhole whose size would be more or less the size of an hydrogen atom."
"The first problem was in creating the perfect type of artficial gravity generators within the container, they are lined at the top and the bottom of it. And the second one, which wasthe hardest, was to create a stable singularity, stable enough for a few nanoseconds atleast." whirred away Dr.Forder as he sat on his desk and looked at the monitor. He had a look of achievement on his face.
"So you're saying you created a singularity the size of a freaking atom, and somehow brought my watch to its vicinity, which led to the time dilation of what..." paused Henry as he looked at his watch and the monitor, and did the mental calculation in his head and continued, "a minute and thirty three seconds approximately."
"Precisely so. That compartment I placed your watch in, was attached to a contraption which allowed it to fall all the way to the center of the box, exactly as the blackhole disappears. A few nanoseconds before, and your watch would have crossed the event horizon of the tiny black hole. Look, I'd rather not bore you with the details of the engineering aspects of the device, but you just saw that it worked."
Henry was in a state of shock, and preferred not to reply as he took some time to let the events he witnessed sink into his brain. This is TIME TRAVEL, he thought. Well, atleast in its infancy. One baby step at a time. But this was substantial. Not only had Forder created a tiny black hole he had used it to "push" an object forward in time, but...
"I have a doubt, Fordy. That close to the black hole my watch woud have been torn apart and also your compartment. A few centimeters difference can lead to very different magnitude of forces." reasoned Henry.
"Yeah, that is true. But within the compartment and it's bottom layer, there are linings of artificial gravity generators which smoothen out the gravitational field and send it evenly inside. The bottom of the box survives because it is made of the strongest graphene. Also, we are talking mere nanoseconds here. The onset and offset of the field takes up almost 80% of the few nanoseconds. By the time the material gets stretched out even slightly, it has already stopped experiencing the force."
"But yes" continued Forder, "each two or three times, I replace the bottom layer because pieces of it get pulled into the black hole. I started with radioactive material, to calculate the time dilation, by measuring the decay and all that, but the change was so drastic I switched to pocket sized atomic clocks and now this..." and he continued on and on, as Henry sat in deep thought.
Henry suddenly spoke in a fast and hushed tone, as if someone waas overhearing them, "You need to inform the board about this. This is quite dangerous an endeavour. The singularity you create could become unstable and expand..."
Forder cut off Henry mid-conversation, saying "Well, what happened until now, is the exact opposite". "You stop giving it juice, and the singularity disappears. We must not forget that there is no real mass in the black hole, but it is generated externally using all these." continued Forder as he pointed at the power sources at the corner of the room.
"Still, something of this sort...When did you even create all this?" retorted Henry.
"The outer container was easier to procure. The nuclear physicists and engineers have a lot of these sort of containers lying about. The rest took about two weeks to make. As I said, it is very unstable as of yet and drinks up a lot of power, about enough to power ten or so rooms on this satellite to run even once."
Henry listened in silence. His gaze turned suddenly to the machine, where he thought he noticed a glow within the container. He dismissed it as a mere illusion, and turned to Forder. But then he noticed that the glow became brighter.
"Fordy, Fordy- Why is it still running?" he asked. Forder dismissively replied, "No, it's not. I haven't even turned it-" he stopped abruptly as he too noticed the glow within the container.
He rushed near the container and peered into it as he pressed his forehead into the transparent carbon fiber exterior. "Hey Fordy, get back you idiot, it's too dangerous". shouted Henry from behind.
"It's impossible." said Forder in a calm tone. The glow became brighter and he stepped back in horror. He shielded his eyes, and peered through the tiny crevasses between his fingers.
The first thing to be pulled in was the compartment. The contraption holding it at the top of the container snapped suddenly and the compartment suddenly fell into, and disappeared into the tiny but bright orb in the center of the container.
Next the carbon fibre interior started cracking up slowly. It started twisting and bulging inwards. The transparent cylindrical exterior succumbed to the extreme force within it and started tearing apart.
Both Henry and Forder watched in silent horror as the orb became brighter and brighter. A large chunk of the container caved in and seemingly disappeared into the orb, the overhanging wires followed shortly.
Now, the blackhole was naked and only a few metres away from Forder. Though he couldn't feel the pull of the tiny black hole his skin felt a strange heat wherever it was exposed to the orb's light.
The orb expanded further in size. Now one could clearly discern the exterior accreation disk and the pitch black photon sphere within.
What was extremely strange was that Forder still stood unfazed and neither were the other objects around him pulled into the black hole. The orb expanded further untill it encompassed the whole size of the broken container.
For the first time in his life, Forder realized that he had seen something so beautiful. No longer blinded by the light, he removed his glasses and threw them aside. The brilliant streaks of light in the accretion disk were lashing around the singularity in colorful and hypnotic patterns.
And the interior photon sphere looked...Oh so pure. Untainted and pitch black. As black as the night sky with not a star in sight. Henry stared into the black interior and tried to find a surface or shape, but it seemed to him that inside it he was staring directly into nothingness for billions of trillions of miles.
Behing him, he could hear the voice of Henry frantically shouting and begging him to step back. He could hear him ring for the emergency squad. But he could understand none of it.
Everything at that point, was secondary to the beauty of the black hole in front of him.
The black hole kept expanding and now was floating before him in a huge spherical orb, which was almost as tall as the room itself. But still everything around him remained unaffected.
He glanced back at Henry who was wailing and screaming at him to rush back. He looked into his desperate and pleading eyes.
Turning back, he took a step forward and stepped into the black hole.