Late nights

VI

- Imagine you put a mirror fifty lightyears away. If you would look into that mirror, you would see Earth fifty years ago.

- How does that work again? - Emily was trying to wrap her head around it.

- In short terms, light. The Sun is very very far, so it takes light eight minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth. When you're looking at the sun or when you're enjoying the sunlight, you're looking at the Sun eight minutes ago.

- That's quite interesting. So what, you want to put a mirror in the sky?

- No. I thought, what if instead of increasing the distance, we slow down the traveler?

- What do you mean?

- If we could slow down light, we wouldn't have to sacrifice our own time and travel into places we've never been.

- How do you plan to do that?

- No material on Earth can slow down time that much. For example, it takes ten thousand years for light to travel from the Sun's core to the surface, but there's nothing even relatively close to that on Earth. Diamond, diamond can slow down light the most, but the amount of diamond I would need would be more than there's money on Earth.

- So? What are you gonna do?

- Nothing, it's an impossible idea, but it's a good one in theory. Maybe I'll think of something magical one day.

Emily wanted to get into the revenge plan to stir up some ideas.

- So, what about the revenge plan? - She asked.

- What about it? 

- Well, I had some ideas, but I don't know which one is the best.

- How far do you want to go? Do you want to embarrass him? Do you want to blow something up? 

- I haven't thought about arson, but it's not completely off the table. My thoughts were to expose him. Just metaphorically, not literally, strip him down and make him basically transparent.

- Yeah, - Tom rubbed his forehead, - isn't revenge kind of dumb, though?

- Tom, I know we aren't good friends, but please help me do this. If you don't, I'm gonna do it myself and who knows how that'll end up.

- You bring up a valid point, Emily. I have a plan for tomorrow.