Guardians of Time

I am a scanner, a man whose job it is to scan the past, to find any small occurrence which might change the future world!

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

Dr. Tom: Ultimately, Erica, you just have to decide. You have to choose how are you going to be. I mean, you could spend the rest of your life caught up, in that fear. Okay. Or, you could face it. Take the leap. See what comes. Your ice cream’s melting.

Dr. Tom: Do you think that it’s appropriate to address one of your life regrets through plagiarism?

Erica: Leave my brother alone. Don't mess with the babysitter.

Dr. Tom: It’s 1974
Erica: ’74? But how can that be? I'm not born until ’76.

Erica: I should have gone to her the next day and talked it through.

Erica: Our friendship, it’s still there. And I know that I’ll find my way back to it, but I need some time.
Ethan: What do I do?
Erica: Nothing. You just have to wait for me to be ready.

Erica: If I could go back, I would not kiss Ethan.

I’m giving you one special power: shape-shifting. . . . You know, like Odo on Deep Space Nine.

Dr. Tom: What have you done?
Erica: I . . . I didn’t have a choice.
Dr. Tom: Really?
Erica: Okay, fine. I did have a choice.

I don't want to talk to you about time travel or therapy or anything.

Jude: [holding baby] You know I can’t stand these things, right?

Erica: My dream is to write fiction, and that will happen someday. I am not letting that go.

Erica: [with Kai at her side][/actor]

There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out.

You were expecting robots, flying cars, everybody in silver jump suits?

Dr. Tom: I think it might be time to rip away the safety net. Erica, today you’re gonna solve your problems like the other six billion souls on this planet: all on your own.

It’s amazing, you know? You stand beneath a car: There’s always so much more going on underneath than you’re aware of.

Dr. Tom: Why am I having the same fight with Erica that I used to have with my daughter?

Erica: If I woulda stayed, I woulda been rich in my twenties. I . . . I mean I could have paid off all my student loans, and I never would have needed to work at that stupid call center. I would have had the time and the means to dedicate to my writing, and my life—it would have been completely different.

It’s not complicated. You can’t stay in this hallway forever—you have to choose.

Yes, exactly. You step on a bug and the fucking Internet is never invented.

Erica: I feel ready to start phase two.

What do you do when a piece of your life is suddenly missing? We know we’re supposed to move on, but how?

Dr. Tom: And this time?
Erica: I’ll spend every second with Leo. No Trent, no distractions.
Dr. Tom: I wouldn’t count on it.

Kai: In a few weeks, I come back to 2010 on another regret, and while I’m here, we sleep together.

Adam: I would walk away from Sean instead of hitting him, and that would change everything, Dr. Tom—and I know that’s not how this works.
Dr. Tom: Why don’t you let me worry about how this works.

Friendship . . . two people choose each other through some mysterious mix of alchemy and circumstance. On the surface, the reason for our choice seems obvious: They share our interests, they make us laugh—but isn’t there more to it than that? And do we ever really stop and wonder why this person and not another?

Erica: Can I change this? I mean, can I avoid sleeping with him ’cause Kai said it was gonna happen—which means it’s already happened for him, which means . . .
Darryl: . . . you have to go through with it to avoid creating a paradox.

Because using information that you have gleaned from a trip to the past to try to fix your life in the present contravenes the rules.

Like twin phoenixes, we rise from the ashes—right?

Look at me. You went back there and you faced what happened, and now you have to face how it made you feel. And that’s how you break the pattern.

Sent you back? No, Miss Strange, you don’t understand. You’ve been in a coma for two weeks.

I'm so sorry—I . . . I . . . I didn’t mean to dredge up the Ghosts of Christmas Past.

Erica: So what do I do? Do I just go out there, hand him the card, and ask him how he’s handling the divorce?

Erica: It’s not that I’m not happy doing what I’m doing—I mean, I love my work. It’s just sometimes I wonder if I shoulda tried harder to be a writer.

Erica: My mother is my patient?!

So, Lou was killed in our present, which means that here in the future, he should still be dead. Well, clearly he’s not fucking dead, because he’s sitting here, still bothering me. So what that tells me is we’re in a completely different future on a completely different timeline. [. . .] Anyway, the repairman said that the past is actually the future of the present that we’re in right now. So I think what that means is the killer is from the future. So clearly, someone from 2025 will go back in time and shoot Lou.

No, that’s not how it works. In our timeline, Barry’s mother’s already dead, and her death is a fixed point. And nothing can change that.

I don't understand this power, but I will.

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.

Appears to be a standard sequence violation. Branches growing at a stable rate and slope. Variant identified.

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.