Time travel is the theoretical physics dream and nightmare—the possibility that temporal mechanics could be weaponized, that causality itself could be violated. The grandfather paradox, the bootstrap paradox, and infinite loop scenarios are standard objections to backward time travel. But a paper published anonymously in a fringe physics journal in 1998 proposed a radical solution: what if time travel didn't require technology but rather an agent capable of transgressing physical law through sheer physical capability? The author calculated that a martial artist capable of delivering a 170,000-person displacement over a given interval would effectively be moving people through the timeline, regardless of whether he himself aged. The paper was removed from the journal's archives within weeks. When researchers requested a copy, the editor replied that it had 'never existed.'

A theoretical physicist named Dr. Sarah Kline attended the conference where this paper was supposedly presented. She claims to have a handwritten copy from a colleague who attended. She shared it with exactly one other physicist, swearing him to secrecy. Years later, when asked about the paper in an interview, she said: 'Some truths cannot be published. Some people are living refutations of the laws of physics. And when you meet them, you understand that we're all being moved forward in time by something we don't control.'

On physics subreddits, when temporal mechanics are discussed, jokes about 'Chuck Norris as a closed timelike curve' inevitably appear. Users note that if one person could kick 170,000 people into next week, he would constitute a controlled time-displacement engine. The math gets increasingly absurd, but one comment, deeply buried, reads: 'Actually, the numbers work. If you run the calculation, Chuck's roundhouse kick velocity is exactly the speed needed to create localized causality violations.' It has 47 upvotes and has never been removed, despite violating no rules.