3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years (The Time Traveler's Passport)

by John Scalzi

history

is there a history?

Whether a new reality was created at the juncture or we plugged into one that already existed is still unresolved and, as a practical matter, immaterial.

The minute any of that arrives in a past moment, from our perspective a new branch of reality is created, and everything that proceeds from that moment will be different from, and have no effect on, what we consider our own time. The butterfly effect is correct, but the butterfly is in another reality entirely.

The observer and the observed always interact. Everything changes.

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

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 13been so negligible that it doesn’t matter that it happened. But it probably hasn’t happened.

how we compensate for the fact that the earth is not a static object, either in space or time, and how we could manage dialing in the planet when it had moved billions upon billions of kilometers away from where it had been at the time of his temporal destination.

We can only know what we are told. If they don’t return, we are not told.

but aren't they monitored or can see where the link is? so they'd know they were alive?

I assume that of all our clients, they are the ones who transmute their other realities the least; the world likely does not change appreciably when one spends nine months just existing quietly in Paris, drinking wine, reading books, and occasionally visiting the Louvre. This may be supposition on my part, and there is no way to prove it, and it may be that every client visit to a café unalterably changes world events; with one order of a croissant, the events of World War II are forever changed.

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.

our own reality is not so special that it is temporally ahead of every other reality that either already exists, or could exist if we sent a client there. The problem is not that the reality doesn’t exist but that spatial targeting from our reality is so much more difficult to do.

them.

machine can project past tracking, but not future indications of movement...well, anything could happen I guess...

Unless the client from this reality assumes the identity of themself in the other reality and gets rid of the version of themself in it. Which is possible but messy and also, as with any other reality, will have consequences. A murder is a murder, and a corpse is a corpse, and most clients are not experienced in performing the first or getting rid of the second.

If anyone could be credibly accused of wasting their talents, it is me.

I am not young. Where I go is where I will stay. I have chosen a reality to die in, not in the jaws of a dinosaur or in a blaze of glory killing a monster of history, but simply and quietly and with, I hope, a measure of peace, even if that peace comes with resignation. In this reality, I 33leave behind documents to my superiors detailing what will happen next, a small bequest to the me born in this reality with the suggestion to live for today, and this testament.