365 Tomorrows

I used to think that, more than any man, I understood the consequences of what those ships were supposed to bring back.

So when I unearthed the device from under a seriously disturbing collection of polyester sweaters, I knew it was something to treasure. I just didn’t know what.

The arguments always center on the Maximum Disruption with Zero Consequences (MDZC). You know, what’s the most I can change without screwing up the primary timeline.

If, forty years ago, some madman had come and swiped our parents, neither of us would be around. So forty years ago, we could stop existing.

Anyone wanted to change the past, badly, far enough back, things shift so that person didn’t exist, or time travel hadn’t been invented.

Time is relative to our senses, space doubly so. What we perceive to be real is in fact the simple accumulation of expectation; we expect the glass to hold the whiskey, and we expect the whiskey to get us drunk, but only AFTER we drink it.

My instruments detected his arrival—he’s mine by right.

Your gods have abandoned you, Romanus. Your weapon has no power against us.

And I wanted to get a hologram of the eiffel tower before it was wrecked by the earthquake. My mother asked me to.

I suppose as hobbies go, it’s a little dark. Whatever. It keeps me humble, rooted in the now, happy to be alive, and aware of death.

I knocked on the door to the garage. “There is a Frenchman in my kitchen,” I said.

The Public Release, 47 years ago, had created a wave of emigration as other times were suddenly opened to those seeking other lives.

I have one shot for this, one chance to meet my maker.

Was I on America’s Most Wanted or something?

You get attacked, you have no backup, so you become your own.

That’s why the government gave us the two trillion dollar grant, so we could travel back in time and get hard copies of the monumental technical papers, and rebuild the database from the ground up, similar to what the Greeks did for the Ancient Library of Alexandria.

One sandaled foot was outthrust. The caption below the figure admonished the viewer to “Keep on Truckin’”

You have a team to vet your ideas. Bring them in on this!

You have no idea how many of my younger selves freak out when I show up.

Starship Tsiolkovsky, this is the Haven Space Station calling. Please respond.

. . . dragging space-time with it like a swirl of chocolate being stirred into a bowl of cream.

His kind has known of time travel since before ninety-five percent of all time traveling species in the known galaxy.

That's a much nicer narrative device than having to find the right kind of black hole orbiting the right kind of star and then build a machine around both of them.

Time machines, after all, run on a tight schedule.

You know, I’ve seen this in books, but never in real life.

We’re going to be famous!

The plants, he thought. They’ve been extinct for a million years.

Arguably the best patty melt anyone had ever had, unless someone else out there was so inspired by a sandwich that they had also built a time machine just to eat the same patty melt again, again, and yet again.

We scanned her I.D. and it showed she had medical insurance. Otherwise, the rule is that we treat you for the injuries, but there’s no swap.

I regret to inform you that I will not be attending your reception, scheduled for 12:00 UT, 28 June 2009.