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 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.

Our client was as prepared as we could make him, or at least as prepared as he wanted to be.

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.

Some politicians and activists were still skeptical. The organization solved that problem with bribes. It did not bribe the philosophers, since very few people listened to them anyway, and those who did were politicians and activists. Who were bribed. And thus temporal tourism became a real, and really profitable, business.

Variety is the essence of tourism.

Part of me thought that there were less expensive ways to get pregnant, but another, better part of me thought that having a child by someone you love is not a thing you could put a price on, in this reality or any other.

Here now is the demon returned to hell.

(It is, in fact, technically possible to travel to a reality future to ours. From a physical point of view, what we perceive as “time” is an illusion, and 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. Which is to say, we can transport a client to a reality temporally ahead of our own. We can’t promise a planet will be there to receive them. The organization decided long ago that this was a fact it did not wish to advertise.)

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.