Remembering Other Timelines

If I could go back into the past, there is one event which I should most certainly change: my rescue of Paul Arkwright!

Keep your voice down, Harrison! You might wake Martin, and that would be dangerous! It would alter the past!

Thin lightnings winked from above. The cloven air boomed behind them. He felt a chill, deeper than the night cold. But he eased his pace. There was no more reason for hurry.

Thin lightnings winked from above. The cloven air boomed behind them. He felt a chill, deeper than the night cold. But he eased his pace. There was no more reason for hurry.

There’s a project. A U.S. government project I guess you’d have to call it. Secret, naturally; as what isn’t in government these days? In my opinion, and that of a handful of others, it’s more important than all the nuclear, space-exploration, satellite, and rocket programs put together, though a hell of a lot smaller. I tell you right off that I can’t even hint what the project is about. And believe me, you’d never guess.

Geordi, tell me about . . . Tasha Yar.

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.

Time had gone wrong—this is what the Hystorians believed. And if things were beyond fixing now, there was only one hope left . . . to go back in time and fix the past instead.

It was the tightening of time and space around her as she moved from one era to another. And it should have brought her, Dak, and Riq to 885.

‘Tell me, Mr. Bentley,’ Newton asked, staring at the dregs in his wine glass, which was empty once more, ‘if God gave you the chance to change one thing in history, would you do it? And if so, what would you change?’

“So, you time travelled,” said Janice.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure you didn’t just dream this?”
“Yes.”
Janice considered it. “Well, it is odd. But there are a lot of things in life I can’t explain.”
“You believe me?”
“I think I do, though you might not want to tell everyone what happened. It could raise questions.”
“About time travel or my mental stability?”

“What? You live almost a hundred years in the future and you’ve never seen microfilm before?” asked Grant, who shook his head. “Women.”

“We have computer code which can store a warehouse of microfilm in a space the size of a pinhead.”

“How the hell do you do that?”

“With a series of zeros and ones.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever.”

“Yeah, I don’t really understand it myself.”

When you change your destiny, you can never change it back.

And this kind of uncontrolled reaction we’re having right here, two strong time-stopping powers together—if we keep kissing, we won’t just create creepy frozen mannequins out of everyone around us. And I shouldn’t have used the word ripples, either, because we won’t create mere ripples, Essie. We’ll create tsunamis. People will lose time, gain time, grow older, grow younger . . . timelines will get all mixed up. The past and the present will collide. It’ll be . . . messy.

And I would tell you that you need to be careful when you go back in time—make sure you don’t change a thing, no matter how tempting that might be.

‘You know if I could stop what happened to Vince, I would,’ I told her. ‘But Time Witches can’t really change things without bringing a crapstorm down on their heads. If I thought there wouldn’t be consequences, I’d do it in a heartbeat.’

‘You know if I could stop what happened to Vince, I would,’ I told her. ‘But Time Witches can’t really change things without bringing a crapstorm down on their heads. If I thought there wouldn’t be consequences, I’d do it in a heartbeat.’

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.

[. . .] it can be kind of mind-blowing and a little bit nauseating to jump through time, so trying to hold an invisibility spell of your own at the same time could be hard. Hey.’ She gave me a quick hug. ‘Don’t worry, okay? If Bill and Ted can handle time travel, then so can we.’

His hajj to Mecca comprised 60,005 people . . . The number of people is different. We changed something! There’s five more people—us!