Stealing Time:

-- A college physics student works nights at a hospice. Clandestinely, he takes a device from the physics lab that can harvest time-dilating neutrino particles from an emission source. He can then use the harvested particles to send himself forward or backward through time. He uses the hospice patients because they emit vast amounts of time-dilating neutrinos as they die and experience their lives flashing before their eyes. He places the device under a patient’s bed when he knows they’re getting close to death.

He has to have enough neutrinos stored in the device for the trip to the future or past and back, or else he’ll find himself stuck.

In the lab, they noticed a post-doc student was sitting near the device and was lost in thought (working diligently on a problem) so that she didn’t realize she’d worked straight through lunch and couldn’t recall the passage of the last hour. The device harvested time-dilating neutrinos that amounted to an hour of time travel. (Maybe the MC uses the neutrinos so he can travel 20 minutes into the past so he can turn in a paper that would’ve otherwise been late.) The MC realizes that dying hospice patients will emit time-dilating neutrinos amounting to decades instead of just hours.

So, he’s either confined to the span of a human lifetime or needs to save up neutrinos from dozens of patients to travel back through the centuries.

Maybe he can only travel back to events within the lives of the people he harvests from? He wants to go back to the Sixties and determine who killed JFK or attend Woodstock. He finds himself at the Chrysler plant where the hospice patient worked in the Sixties. The patient was accused by his shift supervisor of stealing time by clocking in earlier than his start time.