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

by John Scalzi

To the observer, which is to say, me, the theoretical process is simple. The client enters the chamber to the left, through the door, carrying with them everything they have chosen to take on their journey, usually in a backpack. Inside the first chamber, everything they are taking is laid out on the bench and on the floor if space on the bench runs out. The chamber is flooded with sterilizing light and gas, a final attempt to keep the destination safe from any germ or disease the client might carry with them. The client closes their eyes and holds their breath. This is, for various reasons, biohazard theater, but regulations are regulations, and all it requires of me is to press a button to start the process.

The retrieval intervals, as we call them, correspond to temporal resonances, ripples in the timestream, generated when we drop an object into it, in this case, the client. In the orientation session I received when I joined the organization as a technician, I was provided a 5brief 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.

This is a really clever way of avoiding a lengthy, complicated,and in all likelihood infeasible discussion of the science here (which really isn’t important anyway), yet doing so seamlessly within the story’s own internal logic.

We are told of the great fears of the dangers of time travel and whether traveling to the past would warp and change the present, and how, not unlike the pre-Trinity concern that a nuclear blast could ignite the earth’s entire atmosphere, a human-scale test of time travel might wipe out the history of the planet. 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.

The average person does not understand or care how a lizard going one direction and not another, or an energized particle hitting a sensor rather than a rock, matters at all in the grand scheme of things. 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. Send a historian to observe, say, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and their presence changes the scene. There is one more person present at the murder who wasn’t there before. The historian interacts with Roman citizens on the way to the assassination and after it. Every single action spins out novel reactions that compound from that moment. Jostle a random Roman on the way to the Senate, and 1600 years later a different pope is named. Jostle a different one and the assassination doesn’t happen at all. “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. Every step changes everything, always. It took years, and many arguments about the truth, before historians accepted that time travel could not tell you what “really” happened in the history of our own reality, and that, as every trip back branched into a different reality, every trip back would likewise produce differently inaccurate results. Terrible for historians, but great for our organization. If time travel cannot affect our own history, and every trip back branches a new reality, and those new realities have no effect on our own, then as a practical matter, from our point of view, there are no consequences for intruding into this new reality. Yes, anything one of our clients did would affect them, but that was a them problem, and also, from a philosophical point of view, anything that happened in that reality was meant to happen in that reality, otherwise it would not have happened, or could not have happened. And so the organization opened up time travel to tourism.