Alt Title: Playing With Time
Derpy landed on the cobblestone road in front of the blacksmith shop. She took a moment to wave to everypony else on the street before trotting to the door, humming a happy tune. She was done with her mail route for the day, and had found an invitation to come over taped to her door.
Derpy knocked on the door to the shop and waited politely, still humming. After about half a minute, a bedraggled Parody opened the door.
“Derpy?” His baggy eyes squinted in confusion. “What are you doing here?”
“You invited me over, silly.”
His face didn’t change. “I did?” He looked off to the side. “I don’t remember doing that.” His face brightened and he looked back to Derpy. “Well, doesn’t matter. Since you’re here, you wanna check out what I’ve been working on the last couple days?”
Derpy smiled brightly. “Sure.”
Parody allowed her inside, before closing the door and making his way to the table in the center of the room. On top of the table sat a large, complex looking machine. It was full of wires, tubes, and glowing parts.
“What is that?”
Parody smiled. “Well, see, I had a bunch of orders I needed to do, but I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately. There’s been this weird banging noise keeping me up at night, so I was feeling lazy, and just didn’t want to do them. So I put it off. Fast forward a couple lazy, sleepless days, I decided I was ready to get started.”
“So, is that one of your orders?” Derpy scrutinized the machine, trying to determine its purpose, as well as who would order it.
“No, it isn’t. See, I realized I didn’t have enough time to get everything done. So I built this: a time dilator!”
“A time dilator?” Derpy gave him an odd look.
“Yep.” Parody nodded. “It was either this, or build a time machine, but this seemed easier.”
Derpy turned back to the machine. “What does it do?”
“It dilates time.”
Derpy gave him a flat look.
Parody laughed. “Here, check it out.” He leaned over the machine and started inputting in the display on its side. When he was done doing that, he turned the machine on. There was a slight buzzing feeling. Parody walked over to a window and gestured for Derpy to look outside.
Derpy looked out the window. Nothing was moving. She was surprised. “Oh, wow, you made a machine that stops time outside?”
“Well, no, not exactly. What it actually does is cause this room and everyone in it to experience time at a much faster rate.” He said, gesturing around the room. “For every 1 second that passes in the outside world, 9999 pass in here.” He looked back at the time dilator. “I’d have gone for a larger number, but the display wasn’t big enough.”
Derpy paused for a moment, thinking. “Wow, so for every second out there, almost three hours pass in here?”
“Yep,” Parody nodded, smiling brightly. “With that kind of time, I’ll definitely be able to get everything done by the 14th.”
Derpy gave him an odd look. “The 14th?”
Parody nodded. “Yeah, that’s when all my orders are due.”
“Parody, today’s the 15th.”
Parody stopped, his face becoming thoughtful. “…so that’s what that banging noise was,” He muttered. He clapped his hands. “Alright! Change of plans.” With one arm he pushed the time dilator off the table, sending it to the floor, where it broke into pieces. The slight buzzing feeling went away. “We’re building a time machine.” He strode across the room and out the back door.
Derpy took a moment to look at the now broken time dilator, before shaking her head and following Parody out into the backyard.
They began walking to the small sheet metal shed in the corner of the yard. “Now, we could do this the proper way, and take three weeks to gather all the parts, and then try to find an energy source and yadda yadda… but I don’t feel like doing that, so we’re just going to take advantage of a bootstrap paradox.”
“A what?”
“A bootstrap paradox.”
Derpy narrowed her gaze. “Aren’t paradoxes dangerous?”
Parody tilted his head back and forth. “… Some of them are.”
“Is this one of them?”
Parody gave her a wide smile. “Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” He grabbed the handle of the shed, but didn’t open the door. “Watch this.
“I will build a time machine, go back in time to one week ago from today, do all my orders, and leave the time machine in this shed.”
With that, he opened the door. Inside the shed was a bunch of tools and parts scattered around the edge of the room. In the middle of the shed sat a cardboard box with the words “Time Machine” on it, and a drawn on dial with “now” on one end, and “then” on the other, with an arrow pointing to the latter.
Parody looked on with disappointment. “Really, me? That’s the best you could do?” He stared a bit longer before exhaling. “Whatever, I’ll take it.”
Derpy watched silently as Parody walked up to the box and climbed inside. He gave her a short wave before closing the box. She could only stare as the box slowly faded from existence. She didn’t know how long she was standing there gazing into an empty shed.
Derpy heard footsteps behind her and turned around to see Parody approaching her.
“’Sup?” He waved.
Derpy looked between him and the shed. “So, it actually worked?”
“Yep. Got all my orders done and delivered on time.”
Derpy looked thoughtful for a minute. “So, does that mean you can use the time machine to go wherever you want in time?”
“Whenever,” Parody corrected, “and no, I can’t. That time machine technically doesn’t exist. I’d have to build a proper time machine if I wanted to go traveling.”
“‘Doesn’t exist’?”
Parody shook his head. “Not anymore, at least. That one only existed because of a bootstrap paradox.”
“You mentioned that, but didn’t explain further.”
“A bootstrap paradox is when something only exists because of that paradox. That time machine? Its sole purpose of existence is to be in that shed today for past me to take back in time one week, and then wait in that shed until today so that past me can take it back in time one week, and then wait in that shed and rinse and repeat for eternity. That time machine is stuck in a time loop that it can never escape.”
“Huh. You know, hearing that kinda makes me feel bad for it.”
Parody scoffed lightly. “Don’t. It’s a time machine; it doesn’t care.” He shook his head. “Who builds a living time machine?”
They stood around in silence, neither having anything more to say about the situation.
After about a minute of silence, Parody looked at Derpy. “So, I had to skip the last five or so days of meals. You wanna go get lunch?”
Derpy shrugged, “Sure.”
“Alright, let’s go.”
They walked around the house and into the street.
“Hey, Parody?”
“Hmm?”
“You do realize that by procrastinating, you just made that much more work for yourself, right?”
“…Meh.”
Author's Note
Funny story, I was going to add an explanation for how the time dilator actually dilated time, but I ended up leaving it out for two reasons: 1. With the way the conversation flowed, I couldn't find a way to seamlessly add an explanation. 2. I came up with this scientific sounding explanation involving oscillating molecules and simulating lightspeed, before I realized that my explanation caused the opposite effect, so I just went "screw it, I'm not explaining it."
