Stuck in Time

Of course! It has always been known that you would ‘appear’ sooner or later.

But this is the seventeenth time one of these birds has turned up. What’s the secret?

At the moment I can’t prove to you that it works. Unless you believe my great great great great grandson really is what I say he is.

Now I realize what happened! This cap is some sort of time-travelling device!

Spock! You’re reverting into your ancestors, five thousand years before you were born!

“But I’m not Clare,” Charlotte began to say hopelessly, then stopped herself, explanation being impossible, especially since this girl seemed to think so incredibly that she was Clare.

He had made three training jumps, two hundred years, then four hundred, then six hundred, and he thought he knew what to expect, that sickening sense of breathlessness, of dizziness, of having crashed into the side of a mountain at full tilt; but everyone had warned him that even the impact of a six-C jump was nothing at all compared with the zap of a really big one, and everyone had been right.

They’re back there in the past, trampling around, changing things, aren’t they? They don’t know it. They’re just living their happy lives, but changing small events. Mostly trivial, with no important effects. But every once in a while the effect of some small changed event moves on down to the—

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

My best guess is that it was some sort of vortex or a wormhole.

I’m from 2017. Can you fix it? I need to get back.

It nullifies Gödel’s theorem.

So . . . some people inherit diabetess, some inherit curly hair, and I inherited time travel?

We meet by chance one autumn evening

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

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.

You’re right. We’ve got to help them, even if we are stuck in the Ice Age.

I know me being here wasn’t . . . ideal . . . , and potentially reality-threatening, but meeting all of you has been one of the greatest experiences of my life.

If your parents don’t get married and have kids, then basically you just have no life to go home to because everything woud be different. No one would have any idea who you are.