QBLH

The Prince of Cups:

Ability to handle situations

at work with tact and grace

 

 XLVIII

Pointless, but

Excessively Fast

 

Brings a very important life principle

to our experiences when it rules the day

 

​

 

 There was a persistent myth—one Jim himself had once entertained—that time could be bullied into submission by speed alone. That if a vessel went fast enough, curved tightly enough around a star or even a black hole, time itself would recoil and fold backward.

 

It was a comforting fiction.

 

Popular legend called it the slingshot effect. In its most familiar telling—immortalized by Star Trek—it involved driving a ship at extreme warp velocity along a precisely calculated trajectory around a massive stellar body, emerging at a different temporal coordinate if the maneuver was executed flawlessly. Early accounts spoke of a light-speed breakaway factor, a threshold beyond which causality appeared to falter. Later stories refined the accident into a navigational art.

 

Yet even in fiction, one crucial detail was often overlooked.

 

The slingshot was performed around a star—not a black hole.

 

That distinction mattered.

 

A star bends spacetime but remains synchronized with the universe’s clock. A black hole does something far more violent: it fractures temporal coherence. Near the event horizon, time dilates catastrophically. For the traveler, moments stretch. For the universe beyond, centuries pass. But this is not time travel in the classical sense. It is merely an acceleration into the future—a forfeiture of intervening years rather than a traversal of them.

 

More critically, such a maneuver is irreversible.

 

A black hole is not defined by escape velocity. The common misconception—that exceeding the speed of light would permit escape—is false. Inside the event horizon, spacetime itself is curved so completely that all possible paths lead inward, toward the singularity. Velocity ceases to matter. Once crossed, no trajectory leads back out—not even in principle.

 

Thus neither warp speed nor transluminal motion grants mastery over time.

 

At best, conventional slingshot maneuvers allow one to outlive time. They do not permit one to navigate it.

 

Jim understood this distinction early.

 

The slingshot effect, as popularly imagined, was a dead end—an illusion that confused motion with control. True temporal displacement required something far more exacting: a gravitational field of singularity class without an event horizon. A condition in which spacetime curvature approached infinity while remaining bounded, symmetric, and—most importantly—reversible.

 

Stars were insufficient.

Black holes were too final.

 

What was required was a contained singularity state—a field in which elapsed proper time could approach zero without surrendering causal degrees of freedom.

 

That was the function of the Box.

 

Jim later realized that some of his early terminology had been misleading. There was no need to invoke exotic substances such as negative mass as a physical commodity, nor any violation of conservation laws. Negative mass, if it existed at all, functioned only as a boundary condition—an abstract requirement for sustaining a traversable wormhole throat, not as a material component of the system.

 

The true insight lay elsewhere.

 

What mattered was imaginary velocity—not as a physical speed, but as a mathematical consequence of a rotated temporal metric. Imaginary velocity did not imply impossible motion; it signaled that motion was being measured across a complex time axis rather than along the universe’s external clock.

 

The mistake had always been assuming time was universal.

 

A black hole does not merely curve spacetime; it severs temporal synchronization. From the outside, time appears to freeze at the horizon. From within, it proceeds inexorably—but along trajectories that cannot be mapped back into ordinary causality.

 

A black hole exists in its own time.

 

So does anything that survives within a comparable field.

 

Jim’s breakthrough was not to enter a natural black hole—that would have been terminal—but to construct a reversible, bounded analogue of a singularity around himself. Generated and stabilized by the Box, this field insulated a local region of spacetime from the universe at large, creating a self-contained temporal domain.

 

Within this domain, velocity could no longer be expressed as distance divided by external time. When transformed back into the universe’s coordinates, Jim’s displacement velocity appeared imaginary—not because the motion was unreal, but because the reference frame itself had rotated off the real temporal axis.

 

In relativistic mathematics, imaginary velocity does not denote impossibility. It denotes a change of metric. Proper time collapses toward zero. Distance loses operational meaning. Motion becomes orthogonal to the external flow of time.

 

Jim did not exceed the speed of light.

 

He exited the frame in which light defines speed.

 

It was here—inside this singular field—that wormholes became possible.

 

They were not created.

They were not forced.

 

They condensed.

 

Two regions of spacetime—separated by immense distance or incompatible temporal coordinates—could briefly overlap if their boundary conditions aligned within the field. The overlap manifested as a throat only so long as the Box sustained the metric. Outside it, such a structure would collapse instantly, leaving no evidence it had ever existed.

 

This was the distinction Jim finally understood.

 

Negative time displacement was not achieved by reversing time itself. Time, globally, never ran backward. Instead, Jim transitioned through a wormhole whose exit aperture opened into an earlier temporal domain already consistent with causality.

 

The past was not altered.

 

It was re-entered.

 

Backward travel was not reversal.

 

It was return.

 

The difficulty was not power—it was navigation.

 

Wormholes did not announce themselves. Their formation depended on gradients of temporal viscosity, causal load, and boundary shear far too subtle for human cognition to resolve in real time. An incorrect entry did not lead elsewhere.

 

It led nowhere.

 

This was why Genie was indispensable. Why Idiot existed at all. Mapping such transitions required an intelligence capable of evaluating billions of causal branches per second, discarding lethal paths, and presenting Jim with only survivable choices—each annotated with cost, risk, and consequence.

 

Jim’s role was not to command time.

 

It was to choose which version of it to step back into.

 

As the Box enveloped the Pegasus once more, shedding external spacetime like a discarded skin, Jim felt the familiar stillness settle in. Outside, the universe would age. Stars would burn. Civilizations would rise and vanish.

 

Inside, nothing moved—except intention.

 

This was why stellar distances could be crossed without time.

 

This was why history could be revisited without breaking.

 

This was why Isis needed him.

 

And this—Jim finally understood—was why the universe tolerated him at all:

 

He was not rewriting history.

 

He was stepping aside long enough to let it write itself..

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps the greatest displacement Jim ever undertook was the occasion on which he decided—quite sincerely—that his family needed a vacation.

 

By any external reckoning, it took an unreasonably long time. By the children’s reckoning, it hardly took any time at all. They were too excited to notice such details, which Jim privately considered a fortunate evolutionary trait.

 

It was rumored—likely to be confirmed in some future telling—that he even allowed his son to pilot the Pegasus for part of the journey. A few wrong turns were made. Nothing catastrophic, merely educational. Jim had been careful about that: wide corridors, minimal traffic density, and entire epochs with no witnesses whatsoever. He remembered, with mild amusement, how much his own father had enjoyed driving the Pegasus with the Black Box attached, right up until the moment he realized what it actually did.

 

Genie was at full power.

The batteries were fully charged.

All systems reported green, which Genie insisted on doing even when causality itself was under negotiation.

 

It was time to take the family home.

 

Not directly, of course.

 

They wanted the scenic route.

 

The net temporal displacement of the journey would amount to a modest three thousand five hundred years. The actual path taken was something else entirely. On the first rebound alone, they would retreat perhaps a billion years or more before curving gently back toward their destination. Relativistic considerations applied: from the travelers’ perspective, the entire excursion would feel like a long afternoon—perhaps a week, if someone insisted on asking too many questions.

 

Light-years traversed?

 

Astronomical.

 

Embarrassingly so.

 

To what end?

 

Jim wanted a map.

 

Isis looked at him sternly.

 

“Now?”

 

 

“Not now—but when you drop me off. He will try to stow away without your knowledge. Provide him with the opening.”

 

Jim studied her. “How do you know this?”

 

“I am his mother, and he does not know that I know,” Isis replied calmly. “Besides, it is your responsibility to be his father. You will bond with him—for a few thousand years.”

 

She took Jim by her private way into her private chamber aboard Pegasus. It was her will that he remain unseen by the crew. They had no need to know, and Jim himself had no desire to announce his presence.

 

“We must cleanse ourselves of impure passions,” she said, guiding him toward her bathing chamber. “Let me cleanse your body—and your heart—of lingering distortions, as we prepare for our union.”

 

To Isis, intimacy was sacred and had always been so. She had prepared herself for more children across long ages, and now time itself had made room. It would have been impossible for Jim to imagine denying her—not after the cleansing, not after the resolve in her voice.

 

Only later did it become clear that she expected him to demonstrate certain… refinements on their return to Artemis. Jim found himself curious as well. He had interfered with history repeatedly—or had he? Nothing had changed. The paradox-avoidance architecture had done its work.

 

He resolved to take Pegasus as far back as causality would allow: absorbing minimal light, expending no net energy, rendering the vessel effectively invisible to the exterior universe. Idiot, however, would not be idle. It would gather data of extraordinary value—data Jim could use to further refine his relativistic control theory.

 

The Box had been engineered precisely for this purpose: to envelop Pegasus, permitting controlled, non-destructive space-time displacement.

 

Idiot was a master cartographer. Entire subroutines were devoted to hyperspatial mapping as information arrived. More impressively, it could generate probabilistic projections of future space-time coordinates, each annotated with an explicit energetic cost. Interfaced directly with Jim, these possibilities appeared almost as a menu of choices—though never so trivial.

 

Warp propulsion itself was already non-intuitive: space compressed ahead of the vessel while expanding behind it, pulling and pushing simultaneously. Faster-than-light travel was not speed, but geometry. Time travel, however, was far more demanding. Mapping space in motion introduced cascading control variables. Idiot had to remember where space had been, where it still was, and where it might be.

 

Dimensional warping required Idiot to relativistically transform its maps in real time—navigating by absence of light, using darkness itself as reference. Newly generated maps guided the next transformation, microseconds old yet already obsolete. Occasional light samples confirmed trajectory and permitted correction.

 

Jim’s intended course would compress millions of space-years into a single subjective second.

 

He knew Isis would be enthralled by such a journey—and impossibly jealous if he ever dared take another to the dawn of time before her.

 

Some might argue that it was she who placed the idea in his mind. After all, he was still under the influence of her ambrosia when he gave Genie its pre-flight brief, embedding instructions through layered keyword commands. She paid no attention to his technical secrets; she simply believed that such miracles were extensions of his will.

 

It appeared that Jim intended to push Idiot and Pegasus to their operational limits—with his wife and family aboard. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Genie alone would be projected into that extremity, the experience simulated in totality—save for the results, which were real enough.

 

When displacement ceased, they would emerge in Artemis space. The others would be grounded. The Box would shed Pegasus, retain Jim, and return to Earth as the Flying Dutchman.

 

Hours later, Isis awakened him.

 

He rose from dreams of unusual coherence, fully prepared for his queen’s ambitions.

 

“Beloved,” she said, “before you escort me to my palace stateroom, I wish you to teach me about the stars. Make it simple enough for the children to understand. Have Genie preserve the lecture.”

 

Jim smiled faintly. “How about show and tell?”

 

“Very well,” Isis said. “Where—and when—are we now?”

 

“It is not quite so simple,” Jim replied. “Genie has placed us nowhere. We are suspended in hyperspace, time held in abeyance while it calculates the energy displacements required to maintain external stasis. It awaits our instruction.”

 

“Then remember your promise,” Isis said softly, her eyes bright with anticipation. “You vowed to show me the full capabilities of Pegasus. It seems you must reveal some of them now. Tell me how we shall travel—where, and when. Genie assures me that you already possess a viable flight path to Artemis. Why is it that you have one, when we could never resolve this mystery ourselves?”

 

Jim considered her question carefully before answering.

 

“We must return to the moment of your arrival,” he said at last. “That requires temporal inversion. My customary approach is to overshoot the target date slightly, then settle into the correct epoch. This time, however, the displacement will be extreme. I will project us far backward—well beyond our origin—so that we may observe the universe unfolding as we rebound forward again. Genie will maintain complete isolation from the surrounding evolutionary processes. Within our frame, we will simply observe. Billions of years will pass outside, while only six or seven days elapse for us. Genie can render the entire sequence as a coherent visual model.”

 

Isis drew a breath, visibly overwhelmed.

 

“How enchanting,” she whispered. “To witness Creation itself—to watch it unfold. It must be unimaginably beautiful.”

 

She kissed him, radiant with delight, suddenly as unguarded as a child. Jim, however, was already calculating the cost of his promise. Anything to remove her from this era—but there were still unresolved dependencies. Idiot required a vastly improved interstellar reference model, and there was no better dataset than Creation itself.

 

In the process of mapping Creation, Idiot would construct the Merkabah: a controlled conduit through which Jim could travel, accompanied by transformed matter. Cargo, vessels, even living beings would require ontological reconfiguration to pass through the conduit—whose exterior manifestation was known simply as the Box.

 

The Box’s most striking property was its internal disproportion. It was vastly larger within than without—not by illusion, but by topology. By exploiting this asymmetry, a vessel the size of Pegasus could be translated through a boundary narrower than a naked singularity, whose “immensity” existed only in curvature, not dimension.

 

To reverse temporal orientation, Pegasus itself could not simply travel backward as an intact object. Its classical mass-energy profile had to be decoupled. The ship would be translated into a singular, non-interacting state—not destroyed, but rendered causally inert. Mass, momentum, and extension would be suspended, not eliminated. In this condition—massless, spaceless, and unregistered by external frames—the vessel could traverse spacetime faster than light without violating locality, because it no longer participated in it.

 

Only then could the rebound begin.