The Time Traveler's Currency
Tajiri typed furiously at her desk. She could hear the banging on the door. She knew his time was limited.
It was ironic, she thought, as she continued her task. Her research into time travel had proven fruitful.
Time travel, at least by her understanding, did not work like in science fiction. You couldn’t send physical matter through the space-time continuum. The stains of rat blood on her floor confirmed as much.
But what you could do was manipulate radio waves subtlety in a heavy gravity system that allowed them to be picked up in the past.
The effect was subtle. You couldn’t send full color photography or even lossless audio, but she could modify the wave amplitude a bit higher or lower, allowing legacy computers to interpret binary data out of noise.
The world she lived in was great by most metrics. War had been eradicated. Poverty was in constant decline. Climate change was solved. People were living longer than ever.
Well, most people.
Her younger sister’s prognosis was bad. It was a rare disease, one that seemed to be outside the realm of every medical AI they consulted. Each one reported inconclusive results. There just wasn’t enough computing power. They needed more, and fast.
How could they do that? She was a theoretical physicist, not a computer engineer. She had tried to compress the latest processor specs, but the files were simply too large. Beyond that, they used materials and power requirements that weren’t possible in the past.
What she needed was a way to speed up computing without creating a clear paradox. She couldn’t send images or schematics. But she could develop a way to speed up innovation.
And so her final words were placed on the page. The essay, offering a technology called “Bitcoin”, would cause thousands to flock towards buying the latest GPUs. They’d go farther, spending this digital currency towards faster and better processors. While it might cause some waste, it would push computing forward. She’d use their greed to benefit herself.
Her quantum processor compressed her data. She included a small piece of code in the stream as well. If it all worked out, the few tokens in her initial wallet could become highly valuable. If not, she hoped she’d at least advance the state of the art enough.
She clicked the small send button at her console. There was a bright flash and suddenly her computer shut down. The machine had created so much electromagnetic force that all electronics nearby glitched.
The doors were pushed open and four guards grabbed her forcibly. She closed her eyes and tried to detect a change in the timeline. What would that feel like, doing something so monumental? She didn’t know. Perhaps there was no way of knowing, as she was part of reality too.
She sat in the jail cell for a few hours. She had a number of charges against her including stealing government resources and conspiracy. Manipulating time wasn’t illegal, Congress wasn’t forward-thinking, but she was sure prosecutors would find a crime out of it.
“Tajiri? You can leave. Your bail was posted,” the police officer said as her cell squeaked open.
“My bail? But by who?” she was astonished.
“I did,” Akane said as she stood smiling at the front desk. “It’s the least I could do, given all you’ve done for me.”
“Where’d you get the money from? I’m in serious trouble,” Tajiri frowned as she walked out tentatively. Her feet were numb.
“It’s your money technically,” Akane looked away. “I hoped you wouldn’t have minded.”
“My money? Does that mean…”
“It worked. It worked so well. You saved me.”
I came across this tweet a few weeks ago, a simple belief that the creator of Bitcoin was a time traveler. I thought that was a fun idea, so I decided to expand it into a bit of a broader story.
Time travel stories are often fraught with paradoxes. I guess there’s no inherent way to travel through time without creating causation problems, but maybe we’ll find some way of manipulating non-matter elements in the past.