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.

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.

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.

The appeal was simple: Travel back in time to a historical event you’ve always wanted to see. Visit a distinguished ancestor or a beloved celebrity. Change the course of history with a well-placed intervention. See the world before humans arrived on it. All of it was possible, and without repercussion in this reality—we would never know of your adventures elsewhere, except what you chose to record or tell.

This reality is not the reality into which I was born. The one into which I was born is ahead of the one in which I now exist, but not by too much. I exist in this timeline twice, as me and as the

me native to here. I know about the twenty-seven-year rule because it applies to me; I returned at the bare minimum of temporal distance required to come across.

first was to visit myself, eighteen years old and preparing for college and the years ahead.

I feel like this is against common time travel rule: do not interact with another version of yourself

offered not warnings, not implorements, but suggestions.

offered exactly one investment tip and warned my other self that once they used it then anything else I could possibly suggest wouldn’t matter anymore,

I know now, however, that whatever reality I am in, in the end, I carry only myself into it. Realities change, and I am the constant.

I don’t know what it means. I feel I should have known it earlier. Perhaps I’ll understand it in my next reality. I’ll find out soon enough.