John Scalzi

In the orientation session I received when I joined the organization as a technician, I was provided a brief gloss of the physics involved, and how the intervals were due to quantum fluctuations and nested dimensions and other such abstruse concepts.

I appreciated that the organization wanted me to understand these things, but at the end of the day I was hired to push buttons, move the clients through the exit and reentry process, and, when needed or desirable, call a supervisor. These tasks do not require an advanced degree. They barely require sentience. But the organization had learned over time that the presence of another human settles the clients (who are not told the internal name for them is “clients”—they are informed that they are referred to as “temponauts”). It is psychologically important, when traveling through time, to have another human be the last and first thing you see.

“History” stops being accurate the moment you observe it.

You can’t be “careful” and attempt to interact only minimally; one can’t know which actions, however seemingly trivial, will be directly consequential, immediately or over time.

(The organization never said this part explicitly and in its operating agreement made the clients agree to hold themselves to the highest ethical standard while achieving their particular experiential goal. But it was understood that this clause was unenforceable. We could not follow you to make sure you behaved yourself, you did not need to disclose when you returned, and in any event, the organization not only allowed clients to make trips to assassinate world historical figures, it would sell them the weapons to take along on the trip. If you didn’t tell, we wouldn’t ask.)

The politicians, activists, and philosophers asked these scientists how they would feel if people from another reality time-traveled to ours and changed the course of our own history. The answer was: It probably hasn’t happened, because our history shows no evidence of temporal visitation. But if it was going to happen, then it already happened. If it happened, we don’t know that it happened. If we don’t know that it happened, then the impact of it happening must have been so negligible that it doesn’t matter that it happened. But it probably hasn’t happened. Some reality had to be the first to figure out time travel. It was probably ours.

The ones who go back to kill Hitler, whether as an infant or in his artist days in Vienna, frequently forget that in the eyes of those alive at the time, they are not the savior of history, merely a baby killer or a common murderer, and spend most of their historical sojourn in custody or fleeing from it. The ones who attempt to have sex with their favorite historical figure soon learn that nobodies importuning the great historical figures of the past have no more chance of success than they have here in the present, and depending on which historical figure is importuned, might find themselves beaten or stabbed and thrown into a river.

There is the saying that the past is a foreign country, and the saying is not wrong. No matter how familiar the client is with the time and place of their destination, they always stand out in look, in attitude, in language and bearing, and in knowledge. They always know less than they think they do. They always need more than they think to bring. Sometimes what they pack in with them is the difference between making it to the three-day resonance or having to try to survive until the nine-month resonance. Sometimes it makes a difference between life and death.

One could die alone and unmourned in this reality, or die as part of history in another.

At the very least, when these low-impact clients return, they do not report earthshaking events. They merely report how nice it is to live in a reality that does not have the problems ours has, or at least the problems our client has in this one. They think this in no small part because they return to this reality before they can accrue too many problems in that other place and time. But then this is the very definition of a vacation, in any reality.

but time has erased who I am, or more accurately, who I was.