Chapter 19 - "Time"
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Nishima pulled a stool over and sat right beside me—close enough that her lab coat brushed my arm. She smelled faintly of chemicals and something sweet, like vanilla mixed with ozone.
She looked at me sideways, glasses catching the lab light.
"Do you know the theory of relativity?"
I shook my head.
"No."
She tilted her head, studying me like I was one of her experiments.
"Time is relative," she said simply. "For you. For me. For some insects."
I blinked.
"What? I don't understand."
She smiled—small, patient, like she was used to explaining things to people who didn't get it.
"Time isn't the same everywhere. Gravity warps it. The stronger the gravitational field, the slower time passes compared to someone in a weaker field."
She leaned in a little, voice dropping like she was telling a secret.
"Einstein figured it out. Gravity isn't just a force pulling things down. It's the warping of spacetime itself. The heavier something is, the more it bends time."
I frowned.
"So… time slows down near heavy stuff?"
"Exactly." She gestured toward the ceiling like she could point to the stars. "Take a black hole. It's basically the corpse of one or many massive stars—or planets—collapsed into a singularity. Immense gravity. If you spent an hour orbiting a supermassive black hole and came back to Earth, you might find decades or centuries had passed here. You aged normally. Everyone else aged faster. In a sense, you 'traveled' to the future just by standing near something heavy."
I stared at her.
"So… time travel to the future is possible?"
She nodded.
"If we could create a device that generates massive controlled gravity—something like a mini black hole we could stabilize—we could do it. You'd slow your own time while the rest of the universe races ahead."
I rubbed my temple.
"It's… hard to understand all at once. But then why can't we go to the past? Just go far from gravity, slow time down the other way, stop the mana breach before it starts?"
Nishima laughed—bright, genuine.
"No. Space and time are woven together into spacetime. They're not separate. To skip into the future, you just need to go very fast or stand near heavy gravity. That 'stretches' your time relative to others."
She held up one finger.
"But to go into the past? The math says you'd have to travel faster than light. Anything with mass—like a human or a spaceship—gets 'heavier' as it speeds up. To reach light speed, you need infinite energy. Impossible."
She leaned back.
"Even in total zero gravity, time only ticks at its maximum 'normal' rate. It doesn't reverse. You can't outrun the past."
I looked down at my hands.
"So… no going back."
She shook her head.
"Even if we could, it would create an anomaly. The grandfather paradox. If you go to the past and stop the mana breach, then we wouldn't be having this conversation in the future. But if we're not having this conversation, the breach never gets stopped. And if it never gets stopped, we end up talking here again…"
She trailed off, smiling faintly.
"Round and round. The universe doesn't like contradictions."
I exhaled slowly.
"So… we're stuck."
Nishima stood up, coat shifting slightly.
"For now."
She looked back to her workbench.
I stared at the floor.
The lab lights hummed quietly.
Mio was still asleep in the corner.
And somewhere, four days were ticking down.
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*END*