Time Box
- It’s a bit of a tricky situation, but we understand you can help us.
- It’s gonna be expensive.
- But can you do it?
- Technically, yes; legally speaking, I’m not so sure…
- We can discuss the legal aspects later on; for the time being, we’d like to focus on whether it is, in fact, possible.
- You want to sentence a man to jail, and you want the man to spend possibly decades there, and then send him back in time for him to live his life in present day, correct?
- Yes. Would that be possible?
- Yes, but I don’t see why you’d want to do it. The person would spend years in jail whether you send him to the past in the end or not. Why bring the person back? Wouldn’t the victims of a crime prefer the guy not to be out on the streets?
- Well, this wouldn’t be for every criminal that we have, it would only be for a selected few. Sometimes, you see, there are no victims per se. And sometimes there might be a reason to want the person back in the present. Tell me, how does this work?
- You have to make the decision ahead of time. If you want to bring someone back to the present, you have to start a machine right now, and the machine will have to be on until the very moment the package is sent. You can’t have someone do a sentence and then decide to send the person back, because there’s no machine ready on this side. But I really don’t understand why you’d send a prisoner back.
- Not a prisoner; the person would no longer be a prisoner; he’ll have completed his sentence. There are actually two ideas here, and they do contradict each other, but we’re guessing that one of them might prevail, so we want to be ready. On one hand, we have the person who goes through a long sentence and sees his investments thrive; society might prefer that that person is not allowed to get the fruit of those investments and should instead come out of his sentence right here, in the present, in the same situation he was in before, or perhaps worse, if there are fines to pay. On the other hand, we have the millionaire who’s been sentenced and doesn’t want to risk his business, preferring to get out of his sentence in the present, instead of letting his business in the hands of someone who might not be as capable and, as a result, lose it all.
- OK, I see where this is coming from…
- Of course, these people should be confined in isolation from society. No news or any other sort of information that originated past the beginning of the sentence should ever reach them.
- You’d have to have a prison built for those people alone. We can do that, but like I said, it’s gonna be expensive.
After a few more questions they bid farewell, and the visit departed.
The next client came in.
He was invited to sit and greeted with a:
- So, you want to age your whiskey for 100 years and have it back instantly. We’re talking about a warehouse and a time box about the same size as the warehouse. It’s gonna be expensive.
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