Daily Science Fiction

At any rate, ready your cameras and make sure your bows are rosined.

I wrote once that the more I thought about time, the less I understood it.

I just had an intense déjà vu. . .

And I’ve been trying to figure it out for forty-seven years. I’m going to solve it now, so you know.

Of all the types of time snags Mike had seen since joining Timeguard—recursive, crablike, anagrammatic—palindromic was the worst.

Rutherford’s work will lead to a new theory called quantum mechanics. It’s nearly an inverse of your model, a central positive nucleus surrounded by a negatively charged cloud.

If time travel is possible, then why didn’t we see tourists from the future taking pictures of Neil Armstrong on July 20th 1969, when he took his first step on the Moon?

Just listen, please—peanut allergies are a virus.

“At no point in the past or future will your life have any bearing on anything, at all,” the redheaded, twenty-something time traveler with a sleeve of tattoos tells me. “That’s why it’s okay to kill you.”

The scientist who brought it here is dead. His grave was the first one you dug behind your house.

But he knew that in a long-term relationship with a Time Traveler, things got sticky on occasion.

I could save my past self some trouble if I told him the ingredients, but I cherish those early memories of failed soup, and I worry that giving him the recipe would change the past.

We rewound your biology.

Time is only a line, a curve, a wave of the hand, and its course is moved.

Reason for traveling back in time: He had heard this was the big one. That if you didn’t get this one right it was all over.

Sally patted her grandmother’s shoulder. “It’s time to go.”

The Time Agency knows what they’re doing. Future terrorists, dictators. . . it’s justified.

It doesn’t need to be anything fancy—one of those ones from the kits in the back of Popular Mechanics will do fine. But the point is that you need one. If you don’t have one, then forget about it. There’s nothing you can do.

And yet it didn’t happen like that.

We didn’t have any other rules, just the two.

We do not think the Marx Brothers are funny.

Skirmishes with Purity were no laughing matter, and any traveler who showed the slightest inclination toward interfering with the past would find his or her license permanently removed.

But it made for a good story.

Time travel existed, but I could not interact with the past or the future.

Last summer I applied to join the Temporal Response Bureau.

When he’d left the room for a moment Sis dared me to send her somewhere.

I watch you commit suicide for the fourth time. This time I almost have you talked out of it.

I am from the future. You won a contest, in the future, to send a message to your younger self.

We can only be spectators of the past. Passengers, along for the ride.

I have first-hand experience of life in the fourth millennium as I hail from that era.

Manhattan in 1985 didn’t have jawbone communications, but it did have plenty of bag ladies who talked to themselves. Magda was temporarily one of them.

The little boy crouched defensively, making a smaller target for their cruelty, but knowing their aim was good.

Look before you cross, Tommy!

The professor was idling the time machine.

See, this is how it happens. I’m in that place I want to be, then suddenly it’s twenty years later and Melissa is telling me what a son of a bitch I am and why did I have to screw the whole thing up just as she’d finally got the fucking spell right?

I’m curious why people from the future would need cash, but my father says, “Business is business, no matter when you’re from.”

“I order death from category K.” Somehow these words sound less insidious than the proper name. There is only one type of death in this category. It's called “Erasure.”

Then my theories are correct. The mind is the eternal constant.

Is there something in your past that you want to change? An action you want to reverse? A death you want to prevent?

You’re going to buy stocks in these companies. Biogen. Kansas City Southern. Middleby Corp. . .

You know what happened on November 22nd, 1963, and the results.

If someone peeled all of me away bit by bit, what would be left would be you.

He surprised everyone by declaring his intention to build a time machine so he could go back and save his dad.

Because it amuses you and—more importantly—because you know it would make her laugh, you design the time machine prototype to look like a blue phone booth.

I didn’t know, nobody did, but I was going to find out about time paradoxes and the butterfly effect in one fell swoop.

Did you know the Earth formed through planetary accretion during the formation of the Solar System approximately four-point-five billion years ago?

“Quick,” he shouted. “What year is this?”

Time Turner actually did pretty well with her power until she accidentally let slip. . .

This bead marks the moment you told Tom Merchant (high on your first-ever vodka shots and the teeth-jittering adrenaline of being out—even just as part of a group—with Tom Merchant, the most brilliant, amazing guy you’d ever met) that you couldn’t care less about your practical engineering major, that thing that your parents were both so proud of.

She’s wearing a cocked hat of beaver fur over a red waistcoat. Her boat just arrived at a northern city on the Baltic, under a sky of zinc marred by sooty clouds.

They became to society as pagans are to us. Considered mad but harmless they were left to their own devices, forgotten for over a century.

Mostly the job is scratching stray seconds and the occasional minute out of the rigging, sucking up a misplaced nanosecond that somehow got into the cockpit.

Thanks for reading these instructions and enjoy the creation and operation of your new universe. With luck, your creation will go on to give you many billions of years of entertainment and pleasure.

He is an old man at her birth, a youth at her third birthday party, and a fifty-something when he walks her to her first day of kindergarten.

Dad, do you think time travel is possible?

My father set a time trap?

Of course, that thought immediately slipped her mind when she turned on the news and saw the main story for the day: time travel had been discovered.

Ruptures in space time. . . quantum [gobbledygook]. . . not linear.

. . . and a grandmother of three writes her suicide note in the same room that Helen is talking to her therapist, who says that the human mind is a primate one, that we are drawn to the exciting and the new and gloss over the day to day lest we go insane in the details, and the first mammals crawl into and from the trees. . .

Do not worry if one of your quantum selves accidentally “kills” your grandfather in a lovers’ quarrel over your grandmother’s affections. Remember, when the wave function collapses, only one of your selves will be “real.” Simply reset your parricidal self and move on.

“We exist within a glitch of the space-time continuum,” he said, hands flailing, “and are doomed to relive this exact moment, this exact conversation, forever.”

Faster than light travel makes it possible to send an observer out and back before he left.

Two months earlier, the time traveler had appeared, and taught Leo the mourner’s Kaddish.

Or is it the first—

Offered for private sale is a gold watch engineered to allow the discriminating Gentleman the opportunity to experience time in a new way. This is a one-of-a-kind item. Serious inquiries only. Reply to Box 154 at this newspaper.

“So, what exactly is a time loop?” I ask, on a wet winter’s night, as I take my shoes off and recline on the professor’s sofa.

I told him I was going to be a king in Medieval Times, and here I am getting rich.

If punching Nazis is punishable by death, you’ve arrived too early.

You’re from the future and it’s very important you talk to the mayor right now about a horrible threat that we have to avert.

If only I had never known, I could have been happier.

I wonder what the future holds for us.

We did not lose the Time War

For progeny and ancestors of the Retromens had communicated with their caretaker, studying him as he studied them, generation for generation.

You come to the conclusion that you can correct everything if you stop yourself before you steal the time machine.

Each jump, as you call them, is accompanied by a specific sensation—a deep cringe that starts inside you and expands outward until it feels like the entire universe is cringing.

I’ve been chasing him for years and forever. Spinning through time and space without a sail.

You have traveled thirty years back in time to save your cat.

Would it make him younger? Would his hair darken and his wrinkles fade?

Like all those stories where the world goes to hell because of some tiny stupid thing I might do back then.

What has to happen to make you change?

Your time portals are not big enough for any of the really exciting monsters.

Was this the fourth, or the fifth time around?

There are always more than two options, John. Find option C.

But I heard everything, and I followed what was happening in the world.

Time will take us away from what we love, who we love, and Time will take us, finally, from ourselves.

She wants to go back more, as far as possible. Maybe before he was sick, even. But two years is the limit the doctor from the company gives her, his voice serious, concerned.

Why do you have to leave me? Why now? Her lips move, a gentle separation, but hold a wordless tenure.

Magic. I read in your face that you did not want to talk about the cocktail dream, though you were thinking about it, and I watched you read the same message in mine.