text: Hey guys, I've had this idea for a story for a while, but haven't had, and still don't quite have the muse to write it. Please forgive spellings, typos, et al as this is a very rough draft, a snippet, that may one day be fleshed out. Enjoy: The problem with bending light back on itself wasn't the tremendous amount of energy involved. He'd simplified that through design. It wasn't oversight. Though, he knew he was being monitored by some unnamed branch of his nation's government, all he needed was a relatively basic internet connection. He'd run a line to a neighboring house, anticipating his work. The problem was the temptation. His life was ruined. Cliche: it all started with a thought. Time travel is really hard. It takes a lot of energy, stars worth of energy to move matter backwards through time. However, photons had no functional mass, their mass was nothing, or everything. In essence photons transcended mass. They were also the gatekeepers to the limits of our 3rd dimensional reality. Conveniently, they were also the mainstay in information transfer of his day. That meant less parts. He could bend photons, back on themselves, then tracking their interactions with forward passing photons. Depending on the subtlety of the measurement, amplified by various nuanced things, he could see as far forward in time as his machine existed, though only through the lense of the internet. It was a one way portal into the earthly and eventually trans-earthly internet of any time. Again, so long as the machine he built was up and running. He knew his machine would fail, amazingly, in ten thousand years. He also knew, when and how he would die. The thought obsessed him. He knew who he would marry. When he would meet her. Then when he would.... meat her, so to speak, kak. He knew when his children would be born and when they would die. He knew that no one but him would know of his work. He didn't know how he was going to manage to keep that a secret from his wife. He won the lottery. Twice. He watched every episode of every tv show he was interested in, current and yet to be created. Spoiler alert. He knew where to be to avoid calamity, yet couldn't seem, for the life of him to stop it. He was burdened with knowledge. You see being imbedded in time, he couldn't affect it. For some reason, you could see anywhere in time, via this method, but not affect anything within it. He would seem like he was affecting it, but something would always happen to maintain his imbeddedness. It was maddening. The illusion of free will manifest. He couldn't conceive of how the agents observing him never quite figured out what he had accomplished. Or maybe they did.