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

by John Scalzi

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

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.