==Lord Regulus==
Regulus nods. "I should point out that part of the reason we don't have reverse-travel capability is because it's pseudo-time-travel--we're exploiting relativity to accelerate the subject to the speed of light, utilizing our own equipment to ensure that the acceleration is executed along a curvature to correctly intercept Earth's location in the future. It should be noted as well that our equipment generates a static energy packet at either end of a universal temporal relativistic curve; essentially, we create two momentary "bubbles" in spacetime that we can then use to track and calculate the necessary curve. The tachyons generated by our limited process are used to track the stream of matter as it travels through what is, to oversimplify things, an artificially-generated wormhole. Without this tracking, we cannot input the minor corrections necessary for precise destination calculations--the process generates a sort of Shroedinger anomaly at the source end, wherein the target is both present and already transported for about five seconds. Our computers handle the necessary adjustments, but the generation equipment we have set up here has been refined and tailored since Allen's time such that the needed adjustments are minimal. It's truly a brilliant setup, if I do say so myself--I have been working on this for my
entire lifetime, after all." He frowns. "We've refined everything so well that we can set an exact time of forward transit as small as eighteen hours and still be able to determine the precise moment of arrival down to the second (less than that and the accuracy starts to drop dramatically). The problem is, no matter how much we refine the process itself, the target aways manages to get pulled back to the present. And we don't know
why. Our weakest area is in biological processes, and we think that's the key to figuring out what's happening. We've sent inanimate objects through, and they get dragged back, but the time they spend in the future is always too short to get definitive results--they usually "fizzle out" while we're in the middle of scanning them, and they show no measurable anomalies when they return in the past. Living beings, on the other hand, seem to be able to spend anywhere from a tenth to a sixth of the time "skipped" in the future, before being dragged back to the past. Dr. Cliffords has been the exception, of course, but the specific physics involved are so complex as to yield little usable data, and in any case we know we can't find a full solution from him alone, since we obviously have his body."
OOC: I have a general idea of what's wrong, and it has to do with a combination of advanced speculative physics and the pseudo-semiphysical nature of the human consciousness. Want me to PM you my explanation of the problem, or do you want to take a crack at it before the assassin shows up?
OOC2: Also, accelerating something to the speed of light and sending it through a wormhole can (theoretically) do some
really weird stuff, which is why I have the tachyons to
slow the matter stream down. You know some funky junk is going on when something that by definition goes
faster than the speed of light is being used to
slow something down.
