Exponential Increases and The Traveler by Joseph Eckhart

I’ve told this story many times and probably will tell it again until it reaches the point where it loses all meaning. But it is relevant, so in brief (and apologies upfront to any reader who already knows): the kernel that would become the story of The Traveler began with an interest in exponential increases. I learned about exponents in school — this was roughly fifth grade—and, being a precocious youngster, I came home and convinced my mother to change my allowance such that she’d only have to pay me a penny for the first day, but she’d need to double it each day thereafter. Two pennies on day two, four on day three, eight on day four, and so on. We didn’t even make it to day ten before my mother called it off and my dreams of becoming a child trillionaire were dashed.

That interest in the exponential remained with me, however. I’ve always loved science

fiction, and I wanted, someday, to become a writer myself. I hoovered up the works of

Iain M Banks, Peter F Hamilton, Dan Simmons, and other science fiction authors. At the same time, I was interested in pushing further. Those writers and their stories were

fantastic, but I wanted to investigate the truly distant future, beyond even the realms of Banks’ Culture novels. Science has theories, based on extrapolations forward and

complicated mathematical models, for what may happen to the continents in a hundred million years, for example, or whether the Earth will survive when the Sun enters its red giant phase.

Maybe there was a way to get there in my own writing?

In The Traveler, the main character, Scott Treder, starts jumping forward through time. He travels forward twenty-four hours on the first morning. Two days on the second morning. Four days on the third morning, and so on, advancing upward, the scale growing ever larger.

Even skipping forward a few days at a time is destabilizing and flabbergasting, sending Scott and his family into a tailspin. But the length of time he jumps forward each

subsequent day continues to grow, and the world changes around him in what is, for him, the blink of an eye.

How far could I go? How far I could I push? More than ten days this time, although even on day ten, Scott travels—skips—a year and a half forward. On day twenty he travels one thousand, four hundred, and thirty-six years forward.

More. Expand the boundaries.

And so, I did. Always in service to the story and the characters, of course. An interesting

side effect of how long The Traveler has taken to get to print is some of the research I

did into those far-future projections has changed, but, remarkably, some theories have shifted back again, aligning with what I had originally written. We don’t really know. Will the Earth survive the Sun’s red giant phase, or will the Sun consume it? The projections have gone back and forth, wobbling, and no one can say for certain.

It sure is fun to imagine, though...