Dystopian World

After wading through years of fruitless research and encountering failures enough to make the heart sick, I accidentally got into communication with an intelligence whose home was no single sphere but the universe, one to whom human time was nought, as were also human fears, joys, sorrows and emotions. The fortunes of mankind meant no more to him that thosee of a tribe of insects, one year swarming over the earth, the next swept out of existence.

He would not let me address him in the language intercession. “I am like you,” he said, “but of a different sphere and a different power. I am not immortal; nothing is immortal. Neither the Earth, the Sun, nor the God who made them. Everything is passing away, or rather, dissolving, to be re-fashioned into other forms.”

But the big puzzle: how had he—his earlier self—known that a piece of wire and a bus token would save his life? He had known, all right. Known in advance. But how? And the other five. Probably they were just as precious, or would be.

Kerry: Then it is from another world?

Coach Trout: No, from our world, centuries in the future.

Time had gone wrong—this is what the Hystorians believed. And if things were beyond fixing now, there was only one hope left . . . to go back in time and fix the past instead.

You want to shoot me into oblivion with no way to get home.

Equally in the grip of dread and amazement, David Thorne began to awaken to a previously unthought-of truth, the ramifications of which were devastating and numberless.

Some days it’s hard to believe that there’s not something wrong with the lettuce.

Luister, jongedame: De mensen denken al eeuwen dat ze leven in het einde der tijden. Het zou handig ziln als je jezelf ietsje minderbelangrijk maakt.

translate

Listen, young lady: People have thought for centuries that the end of time is drawing near. It would help everyone if you showed just a little less . . . self-importance.

Time? Of course, that’s how he did it. This is not another reality—this is our reality. He went back in time and changed the present.

Young Adam: I mean if this is happening to me, that means that it already happened to you—right?—unless it works more like a multiverse where each ripple creates an alternate timeline—
Middle-Age Adam: It isn’t a multiverse! My god, we watch too many movies.

If it were time travel, as you say, you’d be here physically. This is merely a matter of data transfer: quantum tunneling is the technical term for it. I understand your confusion.

My thesis dared to posit that cause and effect is malleable, right? Which therefore makes time, as we know it, totally changable and fluid.