Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

Physicians listened to heartbeats that dragged on, lonely and deep, for over a minute per. They worried over eyes that refused to blink, yet remained somehow moist. They despaired over encephalograms whose spikes could be counted in single neuron flashes, adding up to a complex pattern that was . . . normal!

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time.

“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time.

1. Travel is possible only into the past.
2. The object transported will return to exactly the time and place of departure.
3. It is not possible to bring objects from the past to the present.
4. Actions in the past cannot change the present.

I’m from the future and the past and other temporalities that you can’t comprehend. But all you need to know is that yiou must not write this Hemingway story. If you do, I or someone like me will have to kill you.

It’s a transmogrifier. A device that can change anyone into anyone else. I can change General MacArthur into President Truman, Shirley Temple into Marilyn Monroe.

“It didn’t seem a good show,” Anna said to Mrs. Streichman. “A comedy and not very funny.”

Mrs. Streichman twisted into the space next to her. “That was just a rehearsal. The reviews are incredible. And you wouldn’t believe the waiting list. Years. Centuries! I’ll never have tickets again.” She took a deep, calming breath. “At least you’re here, dear. That’s something I couldn’t have expected. That makes it very real. [. . .]”

It would bring our sponsors down upon us like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands—retroactively.

Sure. Researchers. Tourists. Criminals altering their present by manipulating the past. Religious pilgrims. Collectors. Who knows what motivates people in a million years from now?

(Imagine our relief to learn of Waterloo.)

AAPL, AMZN, GOOG, NFLX

We meet by chance one autumn evening

My life, a black vinyl record

Right now, all that matters is that within a month of your waking from this encounter, you’ll be able to duplicate thought projection through short durations of dream-time.

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

This is your moment, Billie. Coming up right now. Save the worlds, Billie. Change everything. You can do it.

Anything entering her horizon no longer experienced the passage of time.