forensic-science

Within minutes of your last heartbeat, your own cells begin dismantling your body from the inside out. Enzymes that spent a lifetime building proteins reverse course and start dissolving tissue. Within 24 hours, bacteria that lived harmlessly in your gut begin consuming organs they were never meant to touch. Decomposition is not decay in the casual sense — it is a tightly sequenced biological process that forensic scientists can read like a clock, estimating time of death from temperature gradients, insect populations, and the chemistry of soil beneath a body.

Say a working time machine turns up tomorrow, an artifact and not a theory. Before anyone uses it, scientists would have to prove it is real, governments would fight over who owns it, and the first people through the door would run into the causality wall that makes time travel physics so strange.