Time Travel (also “chronal journey”, “uchronic journey” or “the double location”) is the phenomenon by which a person is set down in another time, moving years backward or forward. Several distinct techniques exist; all are expensive and technically delicate.
| Type | Concept (phenomenon) |
| Known device | Bengala |
| Spanish entry | Viaje temporal |
Nature
Time is not conceived “in a linear way” but “as part of a machinery of constant adjustments”; being mechanical, it admits maladjustments. Three consequences follow:
- The minimum threshold is moving information, not a body: “for one to travel in time, at least a message must be sent in time”.
- There is no encounter paradox. Someone who goes back a couple of hours to where they left does not meet themself; those who left and those who return are kept on separate lines. Whether the lines rejoin is not established.
- Conservation: “the light of each of the lives goes and finds its star and returns at the right moment”.
The existence of travel was demonstrated, not assumed. Execution requires technical precision and fails without it.
Means
“There are other ways to travel besides the flare in time.” The only named device is the Bengala (the flare); its size, material and making are not recorded. There are also natural zones where time can be controlled—«zonas de niñas temporales», linked to «el visete de los dioses»; the wording of both terms is uncertain. Alongside time jumps, a magical journey of another kind is recorded: passage through the interior of the lunar worm (Gusano Loco), crossed in fourteen hours.
Cost
- Money: discovering how to travel to the past is “very expensive”, leaving it to those who can pay; whoever funds the journey chooses the century.
- Body: the traveler ages as much as they travel—three years of travel, three years older. Whether this one-to-one ratio is a general law is not stated.
Sensation
No material, color or sound of the jump is recorded. The traveler feels an exhaustion shaped like wisdom, “the slipping of the serpent”, identified as a symbol of the passage of time, “above all of circularity”. It acts gradually and unequally, according to each traveler’s disposition.
Recorded jumps
- Years touched: 1389 (of cosmological weight), 1717, 1784, 1901 and 1914 (Sarajevo).
- Routes toward New Amsterdam (“the journey has taken some time”) and Europe; the Bosporus and Constantinople are a zone of routes, some “above” ground level.
- A jump of sixty-seven years, from 1717 to 1784, which rearranged where the companions were in the world.
- A jump between 1901 and 1914, given by the same speaker as ten and as thirteen years.
- Backward jumps of four years (“sent us four years into the past”), of a thousand years, and of a couple of hours (the one that showed there is no paradox).
- Lesser journeys: two weeks since the start of one trip; a week to the circus, partly by train, partly by cart; a rail journey east given as “a couple of days” by one voice and “five days” by another.
Open questions
- What is seen or heard during the jump is unknown.
- The price in coin is not recorded, beyond being expensive, and more so backward.
- What the Bengala looks like, who made it, how many exist, and what the “other ways” are are unknown.
- What the zonas de niñas temporales and el visete de los dioses really are is unknown.
- What happens to a traveler whose technical precision fails is not recorded.
- Whether zones and devices work by the same principle is unknown.