The Orange Paradox

Derek Gibbs had invented time-travel. He always knew he would. On May 19th 2014, in a drunken argument with a friend, whose name he can longer recall, Derek bickered about the logic of time-travel in films from Back to The Future to The Terminator. The conversation took a strange turn when Derek argued that he knew for certain  he’d never invent time-travel.

“The future is unwritten”, his friend proclaimed.

For argument’s sake, Derek put forward a hypothesis. If he’d ever invent time-travel he would go back in time to this date and place an orange in the knife draw. If Derek opened the knife draw and there was no orange, he would never invent time-travel. Of course, this was just for the sake of winning an argument. Derek was a simple man, a forklift truck driver with a redundant humanities degree, his weekly highlight was getting smashed on a Saturday night with his best bud. Drunken arguments like this was what he lived for.

His friend was game and the pair headed into the kitchen. Derek flung the knife draw open and there, between the bread-knife and the potato peeler, sat a plump orange. Derek’s destiny was set. He didn’t know how, but he would invent time-travel.

Derek quit his job and moved back in with his parents. He dedicated his time to learning all that was useful to a would be time traveller. He began a degree in physics but quit the course when his money ran out. Instead he spent every open hour at his local library reading. He withdrew from society to put all his energy into a time machine.

In 2034 he’d designed a prototype which allowed him to send a mouse forward in time. A whole minute, in fact. This was considered a success, unless you were the mouse, who came back with its insides on the outside, and its outsides on the inside.

After his parent’s died in 2053, Derek inherited the house he grew up in. This was short-lived, as he destroyed the house two years later in a disastrous experiment that caused the house to implode on itself. The demolition industry took great interest in the tidy job the machine did on his childhood home. Derek sold the patent to his new demolition device and became wealthy beyond the means of most men.

In the pursuit of science, he spent his fortune on a new laboratory and hired the brightest scientific minds of the age.

In 2069, at the age of 84, Derek and his faithful employees, invented time-travel. Derek now owned a machine that could send a subject to any time. However, since the machine didn’t travel with you, you could only return to the present by traveling forward in time, and then use the aged machine to send yourself to the present. If  you went back to before the machine had been built, you could not return.

Derek knew the machine wouldn’t exist unless he let his past self know his destiny. He grabbed the plumpest orange from the staff kitchen, bid farewell to his employees, and beamed to May 19th 2014. Derek entered this old house using the key he’d kept for 55 years and walked through to the kitchen as fast as his old bones would allow. Derek opened the knife draw and found an orange between the bread-cutter and the potato peeler.

In hindsight, the probability of an orange already being in the draw was more likely than an art student turned warehouse employee inventing time-travel. Especially when he recalled going grocery shopping drunk the evening before . Maybe somewhere at the back of his mind, he knew he’d let an orange fall into the open draw while putting away groceries.

Derek Gibbs left the house in a dizzy shock. He sat on a park bench, peeled his orange, and ate it.