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

by John Scalzi

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.

We did it anyway, because humans can’t not stick their fingers into wall sockets (this is a personal observation, not an organizational conclusion).

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

The politicians, activists, and philosophers asked these scientists how they would feel if people from another reality time-traveled to ours and changed the course of our own history. The answer was: It probably hasn’t happened, because our history shows no evidence of temporal visitation. But if it was going to happen, then it already happened. If it happened, we don’t know that it happened. If we don’t know that it happened, then the impact of it happening must have 13been so negligible that it doesn’t matter that it happened. But it probably hasn’t happened. Some reality had to be the first to figure out time travel. It was probably ours.

Likewise, strange technology does not imbue the possessor with the aura of a god; it more frequently gets them robbed and stripped of their possessions and, depending on when and where they go, tried for being a witch.

Nevertheless, if the client has not returned before ten seconds, we technicians are trained not to panic. If they have not returned after ten seconds, we are also trained not to panic. That is because they are dead, and there is nothing we can do about it.