Written by the Winners
by Matthew Johnson
Dave Lawson’s job is sifting through artifacts—e.g. old episodes of Family
Ties, LPs from the 80s, etc.—for snippets that no longer fit the officially
approved timeline, but his decidedly more dangerous, clandestine avocation is preserving
those very anomalies.
I found the idea of how time travel changes the timeline in a piecemeal manner, leaving behind inconsistencies, to be thought-provoking, although for me, the story’s ending was incomplete.
The device that had changed time was more like a shotgun than a scalpel: It had
established the present its makers wanted through hundreds of different changes to the
timeline, some contradicting others. The result was a porous, makeshift new history that
made little sense, but the old one had been thoroughly smashed to bits. It was those bits
that remained that he and his department were tasked by the new history’s makers with
finding and erasing.
“Written by the Winners” by Matthew Johnson, in Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine,
edited by J. W. Schnarr (Northern Frights Publishing, September 2010).