ElectricSpectre

Alright troops – listen up! Today we’re going to discuss how to turn time-travel, a scientific and explorative activity, into a set of deadly weapons designed to maim, murder and mutilate. Why you ask? Well, just for asking that I’m going to time-bomb you into a leper colony. That’s right douchebag, enjoy your leprosy.

As soon as new technology is developed, crazy people will start figuring out how it might be used in a combat situation. This is a natural and organic process, and we shouldn’t interfere. We can however speculate as to the wartime applications of time-travel technology.

As I explained in previous weeks, time-travel devices won’t just take you through time if you happen to be touching them, but will in fact suck everything within a certain radius through to a different point in time. Now, let’s say you take that device, strap it to a hunk of metal and set it on a timer so that when the clock hits zero, it warps everything in a three-metre radius into the past. (or future)

Stick that hunk of metal into an RPG, set up some kind of mechanism whereby launching it triggers the countdown, and blammo! You’ve got yourself a ticking time-bomb. Of time.

Radical, yes? Yes.

Now – a regular time-travel device will need to be carefully and precisely calibrated to protect whatever it’s transporting. Time-travel devices will also need to take into account the fact that the Earth is spinning through space, and travelling one hundred years into the past without adjusting your exit co-ordinates to stay in roughly the same point on the planet will leave you floating through space at the point where Earth will be in exactly 100 years.

Time-bombs will not need to take these delicate matters into consideration. After all, the aim is to deal some damage, not to safely transport something through time. What the hell do you care if you zap your enemies into space, right? They’re unlikely to be giving you any more trouble after that. Similarly, if, say only your opponents legs and torso get transported, what’s left behind probably won’t be much of a tactical threat. Time-bombs are destructive, unpredictable and, as you can probably tell from the fairly graphic mental image I just left in your mind, pretty devastating.

Ramp up the radius of material to be time-travelled and you’ve got yourself a time-nuke. Or, as I will call it, a chrononuke. (that is one sweet name) Suddenly you’re flinging entire cities into prehistoric orbit. It’s devastation on a massive scale, with zero debris/radiation left behind.

Potential problems (besides the obvious ethical ones) with time-bomb technology:

1. If you don’t set the timesplosion to take your target far enough back in time, they might reappear in the place the Earth was a few hours ago, and hurtle down from 30,000 feet, possibly landing on you in the past.

2. Once time-bombing technology is widespread, combatants will wear protective space-suits and carry time-travel devices pre-set to a specific place and time, so that if they were zapped into the past they could quickly nip back to where they came from, reload and come gunning for you. Once they’re safely back at headquarters they could even do a little research on the person that time-bombed them, then go back a century or so and punch your grandpa so hard in the kidneys, he’s too unwell to attend to masquerade  ball where he met your grandma. Existence is doomed, paradox-city, end of everything. Does that make you happy? Cos I gotta say, it sounds kind of entertaining to me.

The End.

Dammit I should have used the pun ‘killing time’ in there someplace.

Oh, oh! Also, time-bomb launchers should have badass scopes so you can time-snipe people from far away.

Tweet This Post