Plot Summary
Matthew Fuller, a research assistant at MIT, accidentally invents a time machine while attempting to construct a calibrator to measure the relationships between gravity and light. Unfortunately, it will only travel forward, to the future, in ever-increasing intervals of 12x. On the fifth jump, which sends him forward a few months, he gets arrested for the alleged murder of a drug dealer who actually had a heart attack when he witnessed Matt disappear in his time machine. He is shortly bailed out by someone who can only be from the future, and is left a note urging him to depart in the time machine quickly. He continues forward in time 15 years and upon re-materializing finds that Professor Marsh, his tutor, has taken credit for the time travel invention and subsequently won the Nobel Prize.
Finding no place in this new time, Matt jumps once again into the future and finds himself in a 23rd-century theocracy. Upon arriving, Matt meets a woman named Martha who is assigned to be his servant in the future MIT. This society is dominated by religious fervor. Matt is discovered as being uncircumcised (something that is mandatory in this new and strictly Christian-dominated society - and ironically, Matt, who is an assimilated Jew, did not undergo it). He must flee into the future once again, now accompanied by the loyal Martha.
Matt and Martha arrive several thousand years in the future, just outside of California, in a society where all of humanity is wealthy and satisfied to a point of complete apathy. It is here that they encounter an artificial intelligence that controls Los Angeles, called La. La is curious about her own mortality, and having learned about Matt’s time machine from historical records, wishes to join him on a journey to the end of time (heat death of the universe) to discover if she can die.
At this point, Matt and Martha begin to receive subliminal messages from a being who refers to itself as Jesus, but appearing as an alien being. He warns them of La’s willingness to sacrifice their lives in pursuit of her goal, and advises them to stall for time to allow Jesus and his group to catch up. Matt and Martha, accompanied by La in a spacecraft, begin to travel further and further into the future, discovering radically altered futures and entirely new species of intelligent life, including androgynous evolutions of humanity and a race of intelligent bears.
After a confrontation where they narrowly avoid being killed by La, they eventually they reach a time when they meet the people who have been sending them subliminal messages. These beings send Matt and Martha back in time, while allowing La to continue jumping forward in time. The beings can specify either the exact time or the exact location to which Matt and Martha will be sent, but not both (this limitation is similar to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). Concerned about the couple possibly materializing in the middle of the ocean or inside of a mountain, they opt to be specific about location and send them to MIT.
When they arrive, they find that it is the late 19th century, and the main MIT campus in Cambridge has not yet been built. Having no other option, they live in this society, where Matt studies and teaches physics, aided significantly by his advanced knowledge both of physics and historical events. Matt and Martha have several children, and the end of the book reveals that Professor Marsh (Matt's MIT professor in the mid-21st century) is actually Matt's own grandchild.
Read more about this topic: The Accidental Time Machine
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