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

by John Scalzi

The client, however, has aged three days, or nine months, or twenty-seven years. They have been through a time machine, after all. This is how the time machine works.

The theoretical process is almost never what actually happens. Theory is almost never practice.

is psychologically important, when traveling through time, to have another human be the last and first thing you see.

We did it anyway, because humans can’t not stick their fingers into wall sockets (this is a personal observation, not an organizational conclusion). We are told we did not wipe out history. Instead we learned that reality branched at the juncture of the future meeting the past. 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. 6The point is that our present cannot and will not be changed by time travelers—they will change a reality we are not connected to in any way, except at the specific retrieval intervals.

Once the client returned, the connection to the other reality was severed, and no further information would pass between there and here. Our client would be the only witness to events. Sometimes clients brought a recording device, but if this one had, he’d left it behind. His experience existed now only in his memory, if at all.

The thing that made time travel useless for historians is what made it profitable for tourism: Introducing information from one reality to another alters the second reality irrevocably.

The butterfly effect is correct, but the butterfly is in another reality entirely.

A scientist, however, knows that initial conditions are everything, and that small differences at the outset make for huge differences in results down the line. The observer and the observed always interact. Everything changes.

“History” stops being accurate the moment you observe it. Send a different historian! Two things will happen. First, this new historian will not find the previous time-traveling historian at all; every intrusion in time creates a new branch in reality. Second, this other historian will affect events differently from the first one.