Fairly straightforward really.
I took the first letter of my first name, and sent it back through time to 1977.
My goal was to land it in the hands of Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Sagan chaired the meeting of what would be included on the Voyager I Golden Record; After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette was to be used. However, that silhouette was cunning replaced with my 'M'. An 'M' for 'Mankind'... Or so they thought.
The disc was pressed and the probe was launched. 'M' traveled millions of miles, passing the orbit of Pluto in 1990, peeling off into the icy atmosphere of the dwarf planet as the probe continued on into the Kuiper belt. As it fell, frozen crystallized Nitrogen, Methane and Carbon Monoxide began to transform it's shape. The core 'M' remained intact, but by the time it was sucked into Pluto's inner atmosphere, the crystallization had settled to form some startlingly familiar... an 'A'. Two of them, in fact.
'MA_A' remained there, on Pluto's surface, for about three million years. The Jupiter Mining Ship 'Red Dwarf', fleeing from the Inland Revenue Service, attempted to land on the frozen planet. The sheer mass of the huge mining ship caused much disturbance upon the dwarf planets surface, and 'MA_A', confused and befuddled, hitched a ride on the ships hull, where it met 'E'.
'MA_A' regaled 'E' with it's tales of interplanetary travel and the amazing Golden Record. 'E' was fed up, stuck to the side of a huge ship doing nothing except floating aimlessly through space, and decided to join the party. 'MA_AE' was born, and the RD DWARF continued on, unaware of its loss.
the shared memory of 'MA' remembered the strange rituals of it's original owner... Someone who lived three million years ago, yet 38 years into the future... England maybe? Is that a place? Drinking T?
'MA' shared its thoughts of 'T' with 'AE', and together 'MATAE' continued it's journey, taking in the sites and... Gasses of the solar system.
Then the flux occurred. Time folding in on itself. I knew it would happen when I first sent 'M' back, and happen it did.
'M' was returned to us in February, 2013.
For us, it was just a moment, for US, it was but seconds... For US, we wouldn't have known the experiment was successful unless 'M' had brought back 'ATAE'.
The bottom line is that M brought ATAE back to US.
This gives us many things...
It's possible to to survive in space.
Time is a constant, and travel along it's length is possible in either direction.
Even when you think you are alone, you're not... There's always someone else there who feels the same as you.
Someone who loves the same things, who has the same goals.
Fitting, then, that I chose to celebrate these facts by not choosing a username, but by letting the letters choose themselves.
Whenever you think you're alone... You never really are
)
