In the years that the organization has been offering temporal tourism, it has learned two important things. The first is that with the full extent of human and nonhuman history open to them, the vast majority of clients nevertheless focus their energies on a few hundred well-known specific historical events. The second is that our clients almost always believe that a foreknowledge of historical events means they will be able to bend history to their own will, and in doing so, realize something they weren’t able to achieve in this reality and in their own time. Fame, perhaps. Or riches. Or a second chance at living a happy life.
Almost none of these work out the way they want them to.
The first reason is that world historical events are always more difficult to insert oneself into than anyone expects or anticipates. The physics and mechanics of time travel mean it is difficult and expensive for the organization to send more than one person into a different reality with anything more than they can comfortably carry with them on their own person. It can be done, but the expenditure of energy, and commensurate cost, climbs logarithmically. A billionaire once wanted to send a fully functional modern tank to help Hannibal at the Battle of Zama. The cost of sending the tank and its crew, including the billionaire himself, was a significant portion of the billionaire’s total wealth.
He would not return from that trip; only the scholar he brought along as a translator managed to return at the three-day resonance. The tank experienced mechanical difficulties almost immediately, and the crew, along with the billionaire, was slaughtered by a local strongman who took their weapons and provisions. The translator was spared only because he told the strongman, who knew Latin, the most marvelous fairy tales of a future time and place. He escaped to get back to the resonance and arrived dehydrated and on the verge of physical collapse.
Notwithstanding the cost of sending the tank, the translator’s experience was not unusual. So many clients go back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy; very few manage to prevent it and a not-insignificant number of them find themselves arrested on suspicion of conspiring to kill the president instead. The ones who go back to kill Hitler, whether as an infant or in his artist days in Vienna, frequently forget that in the eyes of those alive at the time, they are not the savior of history, merely a baby killer or a common murderer, and spend most of their historical sojourn in custody or fleeing from it. The ones who attempt to have sex with their favorite historical figure soon learn that nobodies importuning the great historical figures of the past have no more chance of success than they have here in the present, and depending on which historical figure is importuned, might find themselves beaten or stabbed and thrown into a river.
Nor are the people of the past impressed by a stranger appearing in their midst raving about the future, nor are they amazed or cowed by unfamiliar technology. The stranger in their midst often does not speak their language, or if they do, speaks it so poorly as to be barely understandable. Their words are not those of a time traveler or prophet but of a mad person, possibly possessed. 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.
The clients who go back in time with the intent of investing early in specific stocks to become rich often do not have an understanding of how much time it takes for those investments to pay off, and how long they will have to stay to benefit from them, and in the meantime will have to get actual jobs. The clients who go back before Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby or before the Beatles wrote their songs, with the intent of stealing their fame, do not understand that along with the work came circumstance and luck, and being in the right place at the right time, and that the same work in different circumstances will see different results.
(They also forget, in the case of The Great Gatsby, that it was only a modest success when it came out—that it only became a classic of literature well after F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead.)
In its contracts, the organization warns clients that meddling with specific historical events will, aside from any potential ethical issues, be unlikely to have the result that they hope for or desire, and that the organization will not and cannot accept any responsibility for the consequences of their own actions; going back in time will signal their indemnification of the organization from any blame or harm.
Which is to say, the organization does the bare minimum legal and fiduciary duty required to inform its clients about the dangers of temporal tourism. The clients will sign regardless, because some will merely skim the boilerplate, and the others will not be convinced that their own adventure can possibly turn out any way other than how they expect it to. Again, the cost of time travel generally limits it to the upper tiers of society, the ones who have lived their lives without the worst of consequences. Many of them find it difficult or impossible to believe that their condition or consequences will be any different in another reality.
More useful to our clients than our own minimal statements are the unofficial time travel forums run by former clients who returned from their own sojourns and wanted to share tips and tricks for how to most successfully change the course of human history. All these forum posts are offered “for entertainment purposes only” and “should be considered fictional representations based on real-life experiences,” but it’s pretty clear the past clients are speaking from their own experiences on what worked and what didn’t.
Through these posts, clients with upcoming trips can learn, as examples, the best way to access the Texas School Book Depository, or to make a Viennese wagon collision look like an accident, or how to convince Isadora Duncan to hop into bed with you on very short notice (at least one of these suggested warning her about scarves and moving vehicles before one took one’s leave of her). They can also learn the best times and places for quick-result investments, and then how best to spend them in three days or nine months.
This advice clusters on a relatively few “popular” historical events. If you want to know what seat at Ford’s Theatre you should reserve to see John Wilkes Booth take his shot, you’ll have no lack of information. But if you want to sneak into the 1911 Solvay Conference, you’re on your own. That conference is, shall we say, a niche enthusiasm.
In every case there are very few pieces of advice for people on how to spend twenty-seven years in the past. It’s generally accepted that if one is going to spend twenty-seven years in the past, either you have messed up badly and missed your resonance, in which case you don’t come onto the forums to report your failures, or you have decided that you are going to stay in that reality forever, in which case no report is forthcoming. Survivorship bias inclines forum posts to be from people who came back to our reality with intention and success. This, of course, works to the advantage of the organization. It’s good no-effort advertising for our tourism business. Despite the risks, we never lack for clients.
The third client of the day shouldered their backpack, headed toward the exit portal, and at the very last second dropped the pack, walking into the portal with only the clothes on their back.
This was a problem. It would be a problem in any circumstance. There is the saying that the past is a foreign country, and the saying is not wrong. No matter how familiar the client is with the time and place of their destination, they always stand out in look, in attitude, in language and bearing, and in knowledge. They always know less than they think they do. They always need more than they think to bring. Sometimes what they pack in with them is the difference between making it to the three-day resonance or having to try to survive until the nine-month resonance. Sometimes it makes a difference between life and death.
This is true even of travel to the “recent” past. The further back the clients go in time, the more true it becomes.
This client had chosen to go to the Late Cretaceous.
I had pressed the alarm closing the exit portal the moment the pack dropped, but it was too late and the client had gone through. The alarm would still alert medical and security technicians who would even now be dropping what they were doing and heading to my return chamber. I knew this would likely be a futile gesture, but it was a gesture that was in the regulations, and I would be penalized for not doing it. It was better to be safe than sorry.
There is, on average, a one-second gap, on this end, between the client entering the exit portal and stepping through the return portal. This gap may, for various reasons involving quantum physics, multiple folding dimensions, and the quirks of the machinery, extend for as long as ten seconds, although that is very rare. 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.
It is not always a bad thing that the client is dead. Many of the clients who return at the twenty-seven-year resonance talk about the fact that they had made a life in the reality they had visited and would have chosen to stay except for one critical factor: the death of a beloved spouse, for example, breaking their tie to the time and place, or the belief that their later years would be better spent in this reality. Occasionally they left because they were escaping the business or personal messes that they had made in the other timeline; it was easier to leave than to stay and resolve them. For nearly all these clients, however, the choice to stay or go after twenty-seven years was a difficult one to make.
We assume that for every client who returned for the twenty-seventh resonance, there are others who, when confronted with the same choice, decided to stay. Still others must have died sometime between the nine-month and twenty-seven-year resonance. We cannot and could not know their fates, and whether they met ends that were comforting or disastrous. We can only know what we are told. If they don’t return, we are not told.
In the entire time that I have been a technician, there has been only one exception to this. In my third year of employment, a client stepped into the exit portal, and one second later, a pile of ancient bones flew out of the return portal, strips of the client’s clothing attached. Scientific analysis indicated that close to eight hundred years had passed since the client had died, meaning that someone who had far outlived the client knew to find the resonance and hurl his bones into it. Inscribed onto the left femur were words that, when translated, read: Here now is the demon returned to hell. The other bones showed significant trauma had been visited upon them. The organization concluded this client had probably met a dramatic and messy end.
That client, however, went to his new reality and fate loaded up with a full pack and a plan. The client who had just now sent themself to the Late Cretaceous lacked the first, which meant the second was now obvious. When clients schedule to travel to a prehistoric reality, the organization requires them to undergo, and pay for, additional classes and training to bring home the point that such destinations are even more dangerous to a solo traveler than the ones that have modern humans in them. Nothing about these realities is familiar to the human experience, and there is no help in the form of locals. Clients who go to these times can and do return unharmed, but there is never a time when they do not use every bit of whatever it was they packed in with them.
Dropping the pack meant there was no intention to come back alive. Dropping the pack was, in a word, suicide.
This was not the first time a client had exhibited what I would consider suicidal behavior, in my professional opinion as a technician. Other clients had traveled to prehistoric realities ill-prepared or with packs that did not suggest an interest in self-preservation against carnivorous creatures, or they went to visit historical events that were known to have a high fatality rate with plans that they were warned by organization planning technicians would have a low success rate. The return rates from the Titanic or Hiroshima or the World Trade Center are extremely low, and the organization tells clients this. They still go, either not caring, or deciding that the end they would meet there would be more dramatic and personally satisfying than any end they might meet in this reality. One could die alone and unmourned in this reality, or die as part of history in another.
The client who had just dropped his pack had asked to be transported to an area that would, eons later, be rich in the bones of the Tyrannosaurus rex. Prior to the pack drop, it was possible he simply wanted to get a good look at an example of that famous creature. After the pack drop, he was telling us, implicitly but to the point of near explicitness, that he was hoping to be eaten by one.
For his sake, I hope he was indeed eaten by his preferred dinosaur. It would be terrible to plan one’s own death between the jaws of one of the most fearsome predators to live, only to trip up and be consumed by something less majestic. I would not wish death for this client. But I wish him the death he clearly aspired to.
The ten-second frontier passed, and with it, any chance of the client returning. Soon after, the medical and security technicians arrived and argued among themselves whose responsibility it was to retrieve the dropped pack and to examine it for clues of the client’s state of mind, including any potential suicide note. I left them to their discussion and went to my own console to file an “NR” report, the brief formal notification I was required to provide the organization when a client did not return.
The report was brief, as it would be. I did not know why the client did not return. I could not know why the client did not return. The form did not give me space to speculate as to what happened. All that was needed was a bland formal notation so the organization could inform next of kin, if any, and offer the relevant government entities an official determination of nonreturn, which would in most jurisdictions be sufficient to issue a death certificate.
With that done, I stopped thinking about this client. I had one more client to prepare for before the end of the day.
Not every client wants or needs to go back in time to intervene in a notable historical moment or to dance with dinosaurs. A small but appreciable minority simply want a vacation in another reality. To have a coffee by the Seine in the 1920s, or to catch a 1950s Broadway show in its first run, or to sail down the Amazon River at the height of the glory of the jungle surrounding it. We technicians call these “low-impact clients” and appreciate them quite a bit. They will return, usually at the nine-month resonance, happy and rested, without the need for expensive and traumatic medical or technical intervention. These are the clients who convince other people to become clients, and are the ones more likely than not to travel with us again. The organization will flag their accounts for (modest) discounts and priority in the travel queue. It is pleasant to work with, and for, pleasant people.
I assume that of all our clients, they are the ones who transmute their other realities the least; the world likely does not change appreciably when one spends nine months just existing quietly in Paris, drinking wine, reading books, and occasionally visiting the Louvre. This may be supposition on my part, and there is no way to prove it, and it may be that every client visit to a café unalterably changes world events; with one order of a croissant, the events of World War II are forever changed.
For personal reasons, I have my suspicions this is not the case. But there is no way for us to know. At the very least, when these low-impact clients return, they do not report earthshaking events. They merely report how nice it is to live in a reality that does not have the problems ours has, or at least the problems our client has in this one. They think this in no small part because they return to this reality before they can accrue too many problems in that other place and time. But then this is the very definition of a vacation, in any reality.
There is one other category of client who does not choose to meddle in great historical events, but is also not going on vacation. These are the clients who are traveling to a different reality to change the course of their own lives.
The organization, it should be noted, recommends against this for several reasons. The first is that often it is technically impractical. The organization will not send clients to a time less than twenty-seven years back from our own time, ostensibly because it presents significant practical issues with clients returning using the twenty-seven-year resonance, which would be from a reality future to ours. Few clients have the scientific background to argue the point.
(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.)
The twenty-seven-year organizational limitation has certain effects. A client cannot go to a recent moment to change their own immediate screwups, such as a bad investment or getting caught by a partner being unfaithful. They cannot go to a new reality pretending to be themself, because despite the current advanced state of plastic surgery, no one looks like themselves nearly three decades earlier. And of course, what changes are made in the other reality would have no effect in this one.
This is another reason it makes no sense to go to another reality to correct a very recent mistake. The client will not benefit from the change; the version of the client in the other reality will. Unless the client from this reality assumes the identity of themself in the other reality and gets rid of the version of themself in it. Which is possible but messy and also, as with any other reality, will have consequences. A murder is a murder, and a corpse is a corpse, and most clients are not experienced in performing the first or getting rid of the second.
Most of the clients who choose to visit a new reality and interact with themselves understand the limitations, and that their actions will not change their own lives. What most of them hope for is to change the life of the younger version of themself, so they will not make whatever personal tragic mistake the older version made. To chase after that person who they could have loved but didn’t, or to make that financial investment they missed, or to avoid getting into that one car on that one night, or whatever.
These interventions are targeted at specific times and places in the life of the client; rare it is for the client with such an agenda not to return at a three-day resonance. The intent is to warn, or caution, or encourage, but not to see how these interventions played out. I think in these cases there may be the fear that the alternate version of themself will choose not to heed the client’s admonition, and watching the other version of oneself make the same mistake—despite being warned!—would be too much to bear.
Or maybe it is simpler than that, that for the client it’s about the intervention, not the consequence of the intervention. Whatever burden they had been carrying in their soul about that one choice they had made long ago has been lifted by warning or encouraging their alternate self to do other than what they had done. Their conscience is now clear, and everything else is up to their other self. It’s heartwarming, in its way, to see the clients try to do for another version of themselves what they cannot do in their own lives.
Except for that one client who traveled to another reality expressly to walk up to the younger alternate version of themself and punch them square in the teeth. The client did not explain themself to their other version. They did not explain themself to the organization in the debrief afterward. But I never did see a client happier with their experience.
The last client for the day is me.
One of the perks of the organization is that every technician, after a certain number of years on the job, is allowed one trip at no expense to themself. The organization offers this perk, they say, for operational reasons. A technician who has been a client themself understands better what a client wants and needs from their experience and can better explain the entire experience to them. Indeed, some technician jobs in the organization are only available to those who have put in the initial set of years and then have gone on their own voyage. My job is not one of them, but the job of my immediate supervising technician is.
I have been with the organization for twenty-five years, far more than is required for the perk. My choosing to not use the perk has been noted by others, in no small part because by doing so I have hampered my own advancement prospects. If I had taken the trip, I would likely be at least two levels up the management chain by now. It’s not that others who have been promoted above me have minded—they got the jobs I was not qualified to take—but I am good at the job and have an understanding of the organization well in advance of my position. If anyone could be credibly accused of wasting their talents, it is me.
I have an answer for this, which satisfies those who don’t actually want to think too much about it, which is almost everyone. I say I’m just not ready and I don’t want to waste my trip on something frivolous or that I don’t truly want. For most of my organizational peers, who see the trip through the lens of career advancement and typically choose a “safe” time and place—early 2000s Southern California is a popular choice—and return at the three-day resonance, this answer is silly but acceptable. Apparently, I don’t want the money or security that would come with career advancement.
In fact I don’t. What I make as a mid-level technician is more than enough in this time and place for my needs and wants. More responsibility within the organization is not something I want, but more to the point, it is something I, as a term of my initial employment with the organization, agreed not to seek. Where I am with the organization is as far as I will go with the organization. In this reality, in any event.
Which brings us to the real reason why, to this point, I have not bothered to take my time travel perk: because I have done it before.
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.
I chose this time for multiple reasons, because I had multiple goals to achieve. The first was to visit myself, eighteen years old and preparing for college and the years ahead. I approached myself at a place I knew I would be, explained who I was and offered information that only we would know, held up my hand to prove we had the same fingerprints, and otherwise convinced my other self who I was.
I then offered not warnings, not implorements, but suggestions. How to think about their immediate future, what goals they might want for themself. Where they might want to be in their life, physically and metaphysically, when they were the age I was then. I 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, as their life would be so materially changed from mine that they would no longer be the same. I wished my other self luck and told them I was returning to my own reality in three days and that we would not meet again.
Then I got on a bus, traveled to a small town in a place where no version of me knew anyone, paid cash for a modest apartment, and slept my way through nine months, surfacing now and again to eat, shower, and visit the local library. I was low impact, not for the reality I now inhabited, but for myself.
When the nine months had passed, I got on another bus, traveled to the headquarters of the organization, went to the reception desk, and asked for the head security technician, using a very specific phrase the organization had set up at its founding to alert it that a high-ranking employee of itself had arrived from the future and had important operational information.
Ten minutes later I was in a secure room being asked a series of questions that in themselves acted as another level of assurance of who I was and that the reality I had come from was not this one. When this was done, I looked over to one of the security technicians in the room with me and told them that in my reality they would become head of security in time, and that they would be bald when it happened. I may have done this because in my reality, this person annoyed me and I also knew them to be hopelessly vain.
Having verified myself, I presented an encrypted memory stick and offered a deal: Certain useful technical information and machine improvements, well in advance of when they would be discovered and implemented in this reality, in exchange for a new identity, a job, and the promise that the director of the organization would read a document that I had written, also encrypted, that explained the current situation in my reality and the steps that the organization in this reality could take to help this world avoid it, because in my reality we were experiencing a sudden and catastrophic die-off of the human species.
This was a die-off, to be clear, of us, and only us. The planet was fine in my reality, but we weren’t. The details of it are almost beside the point. It was not one single thing that we had done that brought about the die-off, but many things, one after the other, heedlessly, with the consequences of them all coalescing nearly perfectly in time into a cliff from which we fell, scrambling and failing to recover. Our models showed several points in our history where different decisions made on a global scale might have saved us, or if not have saved us, at least would have minimized the die-off.
This one, the one I had chosen to send myself to, was the last possible juncture, minus three days to meet myself, and nine months to heal my soul. The plan was to save this reality from our fate, and, if possible, return to my own reality with information generated in this one that might save those of us who still remained. Others in our organization went to realities further temporally displaced, with the hope that earlier interventions might offer wider variations in outcomes.
But these realities were too distant for a single human to be able to confirm one way or another that the intervention had been successful. This was the only one where we might be able to see concretely what changes the intervention had offered. As the then (acting) director of the organization in my reality, I determined that the risks involved with this juncture were high, not the least of which were to do with someone arriving from so close a future giving the impression that this place and time was solely responsible for the die-off, a message which might not be taken with the greatest of enthusiasm. I could not ask any other person in the organization to take on this responsibility. I had to deliver it myself, and discover if my message and warning would work, or if it would not.
It did work. The cliff by which the die-off was to have begun in my reality was avoided. The exact methods used to divert us from the cliff were not shared with me, because in this reality I was not the director of the organization, acting or otherwise, merely a technician. In the short term, this was fine. In the long run, I hoped that I would, passively or actively, learn more about the methods used to avoid the cliff, to see if they could be useful for those of us who had already fallen off it. I bided my time for more than two decades, because it was prudent and because, as a matter of resonances, I had no choice.
Two years ago, signs similar to those that heralded the die-off in my own reality began to appear. A year ago, they were definite. The cliff had not been avoided, merely delayed. I duly informed my superiors in the organization, but time has erased who I am, or more accurately, who I was. Those in positions of responsibility when I arrived have retired, in this reality or into another, and the ones in positions of responsibility today are aware of me only as a technician who chose not to advance. My warnings are registered and then ignored.
A month ago, I determined to my own satisfaction that the cliff of the die-off was imminent and inescapable. In my arrival to this reality, I managed to close off the avenue that the die-off traveled by in my own timeline. But this was only one avenue. The die-off was undeterred. It came by a different byway. It came despite my efforts. It came because of who we are, not how we, in this reality or any other, chose to proceed.
My efforts were not useless. I learned something. It was not what I hoped to learn.
Given my previous experience, in this reality, it is now about three weeks out, more or less, from when the die-off accelerates exponentially. It is one week out from when my twenty-seven-year resonance will open, to take me back to my reality, if I choose to go back to it. In either of these realities, my end will come, and quickly, no matter what choices I make.
Fortunately, I still have my employment perk. One free journey to any place and time. To a new reality.
I am not young. Where I go is where I will stay. I have chosen a reality to die in, not in the jaws of a dinosaur or in a blaze of glory killing a monster of history, but simply and quietly and with, I hope, a measure of peace, even if that peace comes with resignation. In this reality, I leave behind documents to my superiors detailing what will happen next, a small bequest to the me born in this reality with the suggestion to live for today, and this testament. My last one, in this timeline, at least.
I am prepared, my pack made and my fate awaiting. I could return here, in three days, or nine months, or, if I somehow live that long, in twenty-seven years. 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.
