3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years By John Scalzi - 1

The time machine is, in itself, not much to look at. It consists of two chambers, each two meters wide and four and a half meters long, one next to the other, walled with transparent ceramic composites and containing a bench made of the same transparent composite. On the near end of each chamber, which is to say, the end nearest to me at the controls, is a door: one to enter the machine and one to leave it. At the far end is a portal. One takes the client away. The other brings them back.

To the observer, which is to say, me, the theoretical process is simple. The client enters the chamber to the left, through the door, carrying with them everything they have chosen to take on their journey, usually in a backpack. Inside the first chamber, everything they are taking is laid out on the bench and on the floor if space on the bench runs out. The chamber is flooded with sterilizing light and gas, a final attempt to keep the destination safe from any germ or disease the client might carry with them. The client closes their eyes and holds their breath. This is, for various reasons, biohazard theater, but regulations are regulations, and all it requires of me is to press a button to start the process.

Thus sterilized, the client repacks and moves to the portal. There is no dramatic transition; the client simply walks through. From my point of view, it is as if they walked through a small tunnel and disappeared from sight.

Roughly one second later, from my temporal point of view, they step out of the portal in the chamber to the right, and into the chamber proper. If they are carrying anything with them, they once again place it on the bench for sterilization. They once again close their eyes and hold their breath. I once again press a button. They once again gather up their belongings and leave through the door. Where they go after that, like where they go when they walk through the first portal, is not specifically my concern. I am here to run the time machine.

Presumably the client goes back to their life, where everyone they know has aged, like me, only that one second.

The client, however, has aged three days, or nine months, or twenty-seven years. They have been through a time machine, after all. This is how the time machine works.

What I have described is the theoretical process, a process I am meant to repeat three to six times a day, depending on the day. The theoretical process is almost never what actually happens. Theory is almost never practice.

It is not precisely three days, or nine months, or twenty-seven years. It would be, shall we say, suspicious if the temporal forces of nature deigned to accommodate our essentially arbitrary units of time. The retrieval intervals, as we call them, correspond to temporal resonances, ripples in the timestream, generated when we drop an object into it, in this case, the client. In the orientation session I received when I joined the organization as a technician, I was provided a brief gloss of the physics involved, and how the intervals were due to quantum fluctuations and nested dimensions and other such abstruse concepts.

I appreciated that the organization wanted me to understand these things, but at the end of the day I was hired to push buttons, move the clients through the exit and reentry process, and, when needed or desirable, call a supervisor. These tasks do not require an advanced degree. They barely require sentience. But the organization had learned over time that the presence of another human settles the clients (who are not told the internal name for them is “clients”—they are informed that they are referred to as “temponauts”). It is psychologically important, when traveling through time, to have another human be the last and first thing you see.

To that end, we technicians are given a basic education in the history and processes of time travel, enough to reassure the clients with general answers to their questions but not enough to worry them more with specific answers. We are told that the math and physics underpinning time travel were discovered and refined at ETH Zürich and not at MIT, as MIT has declared over and over again. MIT merely conducted the first real-world experiments that confirmed time travel was real and achievable on a larger-than-subatomic scale.

We are told of the great fears of the dangers of time travel and whether traveling to the past would warp and change the present, and how, not unlike the pre-Trinity concern that a nuclear blast could ignite the earth’s entire atmosphere, a human-scale test of time travel might wipe out the history of the planet. We did it anyway, because humans can’t not stick their fingers into wall sockets (this is a personal observation, not an organizational conclusion).

We are told we did not wipe out history. Instead we learned that reality branched at the juncture of the future meeting the past. Whether a new reality was created at the juncture or we plugged into one that already existed is still unresolved and, as a practical matter, immaterial. The point is that our present cannot and will not be changed by time travelers—they will change a reality we are not connected to in any way, except at the specific retrieval intervals.

We are told that there are more retrieval intervals than those at three days, and nine months, and twenty-seven years, but that they are impractical in terms of time travel. There is one interval at one second, more or less, which no one ever uses, because they literally just walked through to their destination and need to take a moment to get their bearings. There are additional resonances at (again, not precisely) 810 years and 243,000 years. Humans can’t use those. We are told to stress to the clients that the twenty-seven-year resonance is, practically speaking, their last chance to come home.

The first client of the day was heading to October 13 in 1066, and to England, to the eve of the Battle of Hastings, where King Harold’s infantry was defeated, and Harold himself killed, by the army of William, Duke of Normandy, who would be crowned the new king of England on Christmas Day that year. The client, an accountant left a bequest by a childless aunt, planned to change the course of history by assassinating William before Harold could fall to the invading army. The client proposed to do this through the cunning use of a sniper rifle, with which, I was informed by said client, he was now a crack shot after nearly a year of practice and training.

To this, I nodded and smiled. This was not the first client to attempt to change history, nor the first client to invade the Battle of Hastings with advanced technology. Sniper rifles and machine guns were common. Once a client brought an RPG. A particularly ambitious client hauled over a maser weapon. As long as it could fit into the exit chamber, it could be brought along. William the Conqueror, as our history would know him, in this new timeline would become a mere historical footnote, headshot by a sniper round, exploded by a propelled grenade, or parboiled in his own armor by focused microwaves. The world would proceed from there with Harold still king, the Norman threat repelled, and a new narrative for the future of England to be written.

The client, disinfected and ready to change someone else’s world, saluted jauntily to me and started toward the portal. I made a small salute in return. The client was dressed in clothes that would camouflage him among the common people of eleventh-century southern England, his sniper rifle, currently collapsed, hidden in a bag carried on his back. As part of our services, the organization, once it booked the client’s tour, offered to equip him with appropriate garb and accoutrements and to get him up to speed in (our) history of the place and time, and gave him the option of remedial lessons in the local language, in this case Old English. Our client was as prepared as we could make him, or at least as prepared as he wanted to be.

The accountant strode through the exit portal and a second later stumbled through the return portal in the right-hand chamber, screaming. He carried nothing with him but his clothes, ragged to the point of disintegration. He wailed, revealing gums without most of their teeth. He gestured frantically with his left arm, his right one a stump. His hair was wild where his scalp was not shiny from burn tissue. He may have been speaking Old English, or he may have simply been babbling. He gibbered, wailed, and screamed for several more moments, tearing at his hair and clothes, before collapsing onto the floor, weeping.

I gassed the client. Not with the disinfecting gas, although that would come presently, but with a tranquilizing spray the organization developed to allow us to process clients returning with notable and visible mental or physical trauma. The gas would settle the client long enough for me to do a visual and instrument-based initial assessment, and then allow our security and medical technicians to remove the client from the return chamber to continue their reentry process. The client breathed in the gas in hyperventilating gulps and less than a minute later was passed out, whimpering himself into unconsciousness.

A button press, and the medical assessment machinery unfolded itself from the chamber ceiling and began its scans and samples. In three minutes I knew that our accountant was suffering from malnutrition and the early stages of leprosy; that most of his ribs had been broken at some point, as had his feet; that his liver and kidneys were in an advanced stage of decline; and that both of his eyes were clouded with cataracts. He was infested with fleas, lice, and intestinal parasites.

The client had not made his three-day return resonance, nor his nine-month. He had been there the full twenty-seven years, and by the evidence—scrapes and scratches on his knees and gnarled remaining hand—had literally crawled into the resonance so as not to miss it.

I checked the client information on my screen and noted that the client had opted for the full recovery package prior to his departure, which in his case was about to be a very good thing for him. Not all clients went for the full recovery package, opting instead for the required but minimal base recovery package, whether due to overconfidence, or the belief that they would not be going far enough back in time to require a full recovery, or simply because at the tail end of signing up for a very expensive experience, they decided to economize.

But I suppose an accountant, of all people, would understand the actuarial probability of needing the full recovery experience.

The medical technicians had arrived, sealed into biosuits, hauling a containment cot. They entered the return chamber, dragged the unconscious client onto the cot, and sealed it for the journey to the organization’s return ward, where the client would spend the next week in quarantine, and likely a few weeks after that recovering from his journey and the suite of therapies required to bring his body, if not his mind, back to some semblance of normal.

As the accountant was carried out, I wondered idly whether he had been successful in his attempt to change the course of history. When he recovered, if he recovered, he would have to tell us, otherwise there would be no way to know. Once the client returned, the connection to the other reality was severed, and no further information would pass between there and here. Our client would be the only witness to events. Sometimes clients brought a recording device, but if this one had, he’d left it behind. His experience existed now only in his memory, if at all.

I pressed another button and began the process of decontamination of both chambers. Another client would be ready at the top of the hour. The chambers had to be prepared and ready for her.

The thing that made time travel useless for historians is what made it profitable for tourism: Introducing information from one reality to another alters the second reality irrevocably.

“Information” here is the time travel term of art for anything sent back through time: humans, drones, probes, cameras, gases and small particles from our atmosphere, photons from light, anything and everything down to the level of quantum entanglement. The minute any of that arrives in a past moment, from our perspective a new branch of reality is created, and everything that proceeds from that moment will be different from, and have no effect on, what we consider our own time. The butterfly effect is correct, but the butterfly is in another reality entirely.

This was not a problem for some types of science. Drones sent back to sample DNA from species extinct for millions of years were able to extract that genetic information and bring it back. Observations of the supernova that created the Crab Nebula were broadly accurate and useful. Anything that relied on noting or sampling things that had already existed prior to the point of “informational insertion” was, generally speaking, sound enough for science.

But everything from that point of insertion could no longer be trusted to be accurate to our own timeline. The drone that obtained the ancient DNA sample, by interacting with the creature to get it, changed its behavior and set it on a different path than it would otherwise have gone on. The camera recording the supernova blocked photons and cosmic particles from completing the path they took in our own timeline. The average person does not understand or care how a lizard going one direction and not another, or an energized particle hitting a sensor rather than a rock, matters at all in the grand scheme of things. A scientist, however, knows that initial conditions are everything, and that small differences at the outset make for huge differences in results down the line. The observer and the observed always interact. Everything changes.

Send a historian to observe, say, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and their presence changes the scene. There is one more person present at the murder who wasn’t there before. The historian interacts with Roman citizens on the way to the assassination and after it. Every single action spins out novel reactions that compound from that moment. Jostle a random Roman on the way to the Senate, and 1600 years later a different pope is named. Jostle a different one and the assassination doesn’t happen at all. “History” stops being accurate the moment you observe it.

Send a different historian! Two things will happen. First, this new historian will not find the previous time-traveling historian at all; every intrusion in time creates a new branch in reality. Second, this other historian will affect events differently from the first one. They will take different steps to the Senate. They will directly and indirectly interact with different Romans and those interactions will subtly change the scene. Who stabs Caesar and in what order. Where the knives fall. What Caesar says to Brutus, or if he says anything at all.

Each historian you send to observe a past event will return and report a slightly different version of events. Which means, historically speaking, that the results are junk. The reportage of the event is accurate only for that reality. You can’t be “careful” and attempt to interact only minimally; one can’t know which actions, however seemingly trivial, will be directly consequential, immediately or over time. Every step changes everything, always. It took years, and many arguments about the truth, before historians accepted that time travel could not tell you what “really” happened in the history of our own reality, and that, as every trip back branched into a different reality, every trip back would likewise produce differently inaccurate results.

Terrible for historians, but great for our organization. If time travel cannot affect our own history, and every trip back branches a new reality, and those new realities have no effect on our own, then as a practical matter, from our point of view, there are no consequences for intruding into this new reality. Yes, anything one of our clients did would affect them, but that was a them problem, and also, from a philosophical point of view, anything that happened in that reality was meant to happen in that reality, otherwise it would not have happened, or could not have happened.

And so the organization opened up time travel to tourism.

The appeal was simple: Travel back in time to a historical event you’ve always wanted to see. Visit a distinguished ancestor or a beloved celebrity. Change the course of history with a well-placed intervention. See the world before humans arrived on it. All of it was possible, and without repercussion in this reality—we would never know of your adventures elsewhere, except what you chose to record or tell.

(The organization never said this part explicitly and in its operating agreement made the clients agree to hold themselves to the highest ethical standard while achieving their particular experiential goal. But it was understood that this clause was unenforceable. We could not follow you to make sure you behaved yourself, you did not need to disclose when you returned, and in any event, the organization not only allowed clients to make trips to assassinate world historical figures, it would sell them the weapons to take along on the trip. If you didn’t tell, we wouldn’t ask.)

In the earliest days of temporal tourism, governments, activists, and philosophers protested the practice and suggested shutting the organization down. The organization responded by making the point that the tourism was funding the organization’s laudable scientific goals, pointing to its expanding library of prehistoric DNA and plant seeds, and calling upon leading biologists and physicists to testify to how the organization’s discoveries and practices were allowing us to develop new medicines, combat global catastrophes, and expand our awareness of the structure and majesty of the universe. If the cost was a millionaire spending three days in the Chicago of the Roaring Twenties, drinking bathtub gin and trying to make time with a flapper, that was fair price for progress, especially when the price would be paid by an entirely different reality, not ours.

The politicians, activists, and philosophers asked these scientists how they would feel if people from another reality time-traveled to ours and changed the course of our own history. The answer was: It probably hasn’t happened, because our history shows no evidence of temporal visitation. But if it was going to happen, then it already happened. If it happened, we don’t know that it happened. If we don’t know that it happened, then the impact of it happening must have been so negligible that it doesn’t matter that it happened. But it probably hasn’t happened. Some reality had to be the first to figure out time travel. It was probably ours.

Some politicians and activists were still skeptical. The organization solved that problem with bribes. It did not bribe the philosophers, since very few people listened to them anyway, and those who did were politicians and activists. Who were bribed. And thus temporal tourism became a real, and really profitable, business.

The second client of the day was pleased to inform me that she was a historical novelist doing research on eighteenth-century Sri Lanka, which I was informed is a terribly exciting time in the history of the nation, what with the crisis of succession in the Kingdom of Kandy and the on-and-off struggles against the Dutch, who were the European colonizers of the island at the time.

I smiled and nodded as the ostensible author went on and I prepped her travel. I personally know next to nothing of Sri Lanka, either in current or historical time. I know very little about many of the specific times and places our clients wished to visit. This is less about a lack of interest as it is a lack of time; there are several clients in a day, and my job is to manage their exit and return, not to worry about the interim between those two events. That is their concern.

To be fair, it’s a rare client who shows interest in my work. Very few ask how it is I fine-tune the portal to deposit them not only at a specific time but at a specific place on the globe. This is not a problem for me, as I don’t have a great knowledge of it myself; for me, it is a matter of inputting coordinates, largely on a graphical interface, and letting the machine itself handle the details from there.

Nevertheless, from time to time a client might show more than casual interest. A year or so ago, one client asked to come into my control room and watch the process, which I refused because that would break pre-exit quarantine and cause cross contamination, and also because I don’t like people looking over my shoulder. The client asked how we compensate for the fact that the earth is not a static object, either in space or time, and how we could manage dialing in the planet when it had moved billions upon billions of kilometers away from where it had been at the time of his temporal destination. I told him the answer was too complicated to explain in the time he had left before his exit, which was probably true and a convenient way to cover my own ignorance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that client’s destination for the trip was the 1911 Solvay Conference in Brussels, where the client intended to rub elbows with Einstein, Madame Curie, Max Planck, and Ernest Rutherford, among others. He returned, annoyed, at the three-day resonance; he had been arrested by the authorities for entering the invitation-only conference under false credentials and harassing the attendees. He spent most of his sojourn in a Belgian jail cell. The client asked to go back immediately and try again, saying he could avoid getting arrested this time, but that’s not how it works, and he hadn’t paid for a second trip, in any event. Temporal tourism, as it happens, is not cheap.

This was not a problem for today’s client. My display of her account showed that this was her tenth temporal excursion, and that this would be her seventh to eighteenth-century Sri Lanka. In fact it was her seventh to a specific date and place in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka.

Both of these are rare. Most people can only afford a single time travel trip in their lifetime, if they can afford it at all. Scientists have their travel subsidized by the organization, but in truth much of that “travel” isn’t a human traveling at all, but rather autonomous drones and robots trained for specific missions, a solution that is both cheaper for the organization and safer for the scientists, especially when dealing with prehistoric megafauna.

Either way, scientists are a special economic case and a tax deduction for the organization. Clients pay full freight, both for their travel and for everything around the travel. When it comes to temporal tourism, the organization learned from the very best: cruise lines, which sell a base service—the actual travel by ship—and then pile on extra services for an additional cost. Drinks packages. Spa packages. Upgrades to cabins. Port attractions. If one is not careful, and cruise lines make it easy not to be careful, one can spend more on the extras than one pays for the basic service.

The organization took this to heart. Access to a different reality is the basic service. Add on to that informational classes about the time and place to which one is traveling, language lessons, outfitting appropriate to the era, etiquette and customs training, weapons (obvious and hidden), medical services both before and after travel, reorientation upon return, and, of course, gifts and merchandising. There are houses that can be bought for less than what one of our higher-end packages might cost. Modest houses, but even so.

For today’s client to be on her tenth trip suggested that penny-pinching was not a thing she worried about. She was either indeed a tremendously successful novelist, or more likely, considering the finances of most novelists, had wealth from other means, either generational or provided by an indulgent spouse or partner.

There are other clients who have made repeat trips—the record is thirty-eight, by a billionaire industrialist who liked to go back in time and hunt previous billionaire industrialists for sport, until Cornelius Vanderbilt shot him in the lung and he barely caught the three-day resonance alive—but the vast majority of the clients who make multiple trips do as the billionaire hunter did, which is to visit multiple times. The usual multi-tripper will hit a series of historical highlights, to see, for example, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and then the destruction of Pompeii in 79, and then the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Or, not unlike the billionaire, will go back in time to hunt various extinct animals. Variety is the essence of tourism.

The fact that this client went back multiple times to the same place and the same time was unusual, and to an experienced technician like myself, it suggested certain probabilities, which in this particular case were largely confirmed when the client stepped through the exit portal and then a second later came through the return portal visibly pregnant. The client had come back through their nine-month resonance at least six months along.

The client, knowing I would register the pregnancy, confessed that on her first trip to eighteenth-century Sri Lanka, she had become enamored with, and had a tryst upon, a merchant there, and each subsequent visit deepened her feelings, even if, from the merchant’s point of view, they were meeting for the first time every time they met. The client decided that this trip would be her final one and was determined, for this last visit, to leave with something to remember the merchant by.

I nodded and otherwise said nothing. Clients do not need to explain themselves to me, and I do not care to judge them for their actions or their ethics in dealing with those in different realities. Part of me thought that there were less expensive ways to get pregnant, but another, better part of me thought that having a child by someone you love is not a thing you could put a price on, in this reality or any other.

Besides, this client was not the only one who had ever used a time machine for selfish, or at least, self-interested purposes. I know that for a fact.

In the years that the organization has been offering temporal tourism, it has learned two important things. The first is that with the full extent of human and nonhuman history open to them, the vast majority of clients nevertheless focus their energies on a few hundred well-known specific historical events. The second is that our clients almost always believe that a foreknowledge of historical events means they will be able to bend history to their own will, and in doing so, realize something they weren’t able to achieve in this reality and in their own time. Fame, perhaps. Or riches. Or a second chance at living a happy life.

Almost none of these work out the way they want them to.

The first reason is that world historical events are always more difficult to insert oneself into than anyone expects or anticipates. The physics and mechanics of time travel mean it is difficult and expensive for the organization to send more than one person into a different reality with anything more than they can comfortably carry with them on their own person. It can be done, but the expenditure of energy, and commensurate cost, climbs logarithmically. A billionaire once wanted to send a fully functional modern tank to help Hannibal at the Battle of Zama. The cost of sending the tank and its crew, including the billionaire himself, was a significant portion of the billionaire’s total wealth.

He would not return from that trip; only the scholar he brought along as a translator managed to return at the three-day resonance. The tank experienced mechanical difficulties almost immediately, and the crew, along with the billionaire, was slaughtered by a local strongman who took their weapons and provisions. The translator was spared only because he told the strongman, who knew Latin, the most marvelous fairy tales of a future time and place. He escaped to get back to the resonance and arrived dehydrated and on the verge of physical collapse.

Notwithstanding the cost of sending the tank, the translator’s experience was not unusual. So many clients go back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy; very few manage to prevent it and a not-insignificant number of them find themselves arrested on suspicion of conspiring to kill the president instead. The ones who go back to kill Hitler, whether as an infant or in his artist days in Vienna, frequently forget that in the eyes of those alive at the time, they are not the savior of history, merely a baby killer or a common murderer, and spend most of their historical sojourn in custody or fleeing from it. The ones who attempt to have sex with their favorite historical figure soon learn that nobodies importuning the great historical figures of the past have no more chance of success than they have here in the present, and depending on which historical figure is importuned, might find themselves beaten or stabbed and thrown into a river.

Nor are the people of the past impressed by a stranger appearing in their midst raving about the future, nor are they amazed or cowed by unfamiliar technology. The stranger in their midst often does not speak their language, or if they do, speaks it so poorly as to be barely understandable. Their words are not those of a time traveler or prophet but of a mad person, possibly possessed. Likewise, strange technology does not imbue the possessor with the aura of a god; it more frequently gets them robbed and stripped of their possessions and, depending on when and where they go, tried for being a witch.

The clients who go back in time with the intent of investing early in specific stocks to become rich often do not have an understanding of how much time it takes for those investments to pay off, and how long they will have to stay to benefit from them, and in the meantime will have to get actual jobs. The clients who go back before Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby or before the Beatles wrote their songs, with the intent of stealing their fame, do not understand that along with the work came circumstance and luck, and being in the right place at the right time, and that the same work in different circumstances will see different results.

(They also forget, in the case of The Great Gatsby , that it was only a modest success when it came out—that it only became a classic of literature well after F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead.)

In its contracts, the organization warns clients that meddling with specific historical events will, aside from any potential ethical issues, be unlikely to have the result that they hope for or desire, and that the organization will not and cannot accept any responsibility for the consequences of their own actions; going back in time will signal their indemnification of the organization from any blame or harm.

Which is to say, the organization does the bare minimum legal and fiduciary duty required to inform its clients about the dangers of temporal tourism. The clients will sign regardless, because some will merely skim the boilerplate, and the others will not be convinced that their own adventure can possibly turn out any way other than how they expect it to. Again, the cost of time travel generally limits it to the upper tiers of society, the ones who have lived their lives without the worst of consequences. Many of them find it difficult or impossible to believe that their condition or consequences will be any different in another reality.

More useful to our clients than our own minimal statements are the unofficial time travel forums run by former clients who returned from their own sojourns and wanted to share tips and tricks for how to most successfully change the course of human history. All these forum posts are offered “for entertainment purposes only” and “should be considered fictional representations based on real-life experiences,” but it’s pretty clear the past clients are speaking from their own experiences on what worked and what didn’t.

Through these posts, clients with upcoming trips can learn, as examples, the best way to access the Texas School Book Depository, or to make a Viennese wagon collision look like an accident, or how to convince Isadora Duncan to hop into bed with you on very short notice (at least one of these suggested warning her about scarves and moving vehicles before one took one’s leave of her). They can also learn the best times and places for quick-result investments, and then how best to spend them in three days or nine months.

This advice clusters on a relatively few “popular” historical events. If you want to know what seat at Ford’s Theatre you should reserve to see John Wilkes Booth take his shot, you’ll have no lack of information. But if you want to sneak into the 1911 Solvay Conference, you’re on your own. That conference is, shall we say, a niche enthusiasm.

In every case there are very few pieces of advice for people on how to spend twenty-seven years in the past. It’s generally accepted that if one is going to spend twenty-seven years in the past, either you have messed up badly and missed your resonance, in which case you don’t come onto the forums to report your failures, or you have decided that you are going to stay in that reality forever, in which case no report is forthcoming. Survivorship bias inclines forum posts to be from people who came back to our reality with intention and success. This, of course, works to the advantage of the organization. It’s good no-effort advertising for our tourism business. Despite the risks, we never lack for clients.

The third client of the day shouldered their backpack, headed toward the exit portal, and at the very last second dropped the pack, walking into the portal with only the clothes on their back.

This was a problem. It would be a problem in any circumstance. There is the saying that the past is a foreign country, and the saying is not wrong. No matter how familiar the client is with the time and place of their destination, they always stand out in look, in attitude, in language and bearing, and in knowledge. They always know less than they think they do. They always need more than they think to bring. Sometimes what they pack in with them is the difference between making it to the three-day resonance or having to try to survive until the nine-month resonance. Sometimes it makes a difference between life and death.

This is true even of travel to the “recent” past. The further back the clients go in time, the more true it becomes.

This client had chosen to go to the Late Cretaceous.

I had pressed the alarm closing the exit portal the moment the pack dropped, but it was too late and the client had gone through. The alarm would still alert medical and security technicians who would even now be dropping what they were doing and heading to my return chamber. I knew this would likely be a futile gesture, but it was a gesture that was in the regulations, and I would be penalized for not doing it. It was better to be safe than sorry.

There is, on average, a one-second gap, on this end, between the client entering the exit portal and stepping through the return portal. This gap may, for various reasons involving quantum physics, multiple folding dimensions, and the quirks of the machinery, extend for as long as ten seconds, although that is very rare. Nevertheless, if the client has not returned before ten seconds, we technicians are trained not to panic.

If they have not returned after ten seconds, we are also trained not to panic. That is because they are dead, and there is nothing we can do about it.

It is not always a bad thing that the client is dead. Many of the clients who return at the twenty-seven-year resonance talk about the fact that they had made a life in the reality they had visited and would have chosen to stay except for one critical factor: the death of a beloved spouse, for example, breaking their tie to the time and place, or the belief that their later years would be better spent in this reality. Occasionally they left because they were escaping the business or personal messes that they had made in the other timeline; it was easier to leave than to stay and resolve them. For nearly all these clients, however, the choice to stay or go after twenty-seven years was a difficult one to make.

We assume that for every client who returned for the twenty-seventh resonance, there are others who, when confronted with the same choice, decided to stay. Still others must have died sometime between the nine-month and twenty-seven-year resonance. We cannot and could not know their fates, and whether they met ends that were comforting or disastrous. We can only know what we are told. If they don’t return, we are not told.

In the entire time that I have been a technician, there has been only one exception to this. In my third year of employment, a client stepped into the exit portal, and one second later, a pile of ancient bones flew out of the return portal, strips of the client’s clothing attached. Scientific analysis indicated that close to eight hundred years had passed since the client had died, meaning that someone who had far outlived the client knew to find the resonance and hurl his bones into it. Inscribed onto the left femur were words that, when translated, read: Here now is the demon returned to hell. The other bones showed significant trauma had been visited upon them. The organization concluded this client had probably met a dramatic and messy end.

That client, however, went to his new reality and fate loaded up with a full pack and a plan. The client who had just now sent themself to the Late Cretaceous lacked the first, which meant the second was now obvious. When clients schedule to travel to a prehistoric reality, the organization requires them to undergo, and pay for, additional classes and training to bring home the point that such destinations are even more dangerous to a solo traveler than the ones that have modern humans in them. Nothing about these realities is familiar to the human experience, and there is no help in the form of locals. Clients who go to these times can and do return unharmed, but there is never a time when they do not use every bit of whatever it was they packed in with them.

Dropping the pack meant there was no intention to come back alive. Dropping the pack was, in a word, suicide.

This was not the first time a client had exhibited what I would consider suicidal behavior, in my professional opinion as a technician. Other clients had traveled to prehistoric realities ill-prepared or with packs that did not suggest an interest in self-preservation against carnivorous creatures, or they went to visit historical events that were known to have a high fatality rate with plans that they were warned by organization planning technicians would have a low success rate. The return rates from the Titanic or Hiroshima or the World Trade Center are extremely low, and the organization tells clients this. They still go, either not caring, or deciding that the end they would meet there would be more dramatic and personally satisfying than any end they might meet in this reality. One could die alone and unmourned in this reality, or die as part of history in another.

The client who had just dropped his pack had asked to be transported to an area that would, eons later, be rich in the bones of the Tyrannosaurus rex . Prior to the pack drop, it was possible he simply wanted to get a good look at an example of that famous creature. After the pack drop, he was telling us, implicitly but to the point of near explicitness, that he was hoping to be eaten by one.

For his sake, I hope he was indeed eaten by his preferred dinosaur. It would be terrible to plan one’s own death between the jaws of one of the most fearsome predators to live, only to trip up and be consumed by something less majestic. I would not wish death for this client. But I wish him the death he clearly aspired to.

The ten-second frontier passed, and with it, any chance of the client returning. Soon after, the medical and security technicians arrived and argued among themselves whose responsibility it was to retrieve the dropped pack and to examine it for clues of the client’s state of mind, including any potential suicide note. I left them to their discussion and went to my own console to file an “NR” report, the brief formal notification I was required to provide the organization when a client did not return.

The report was brief, as it would be. I did not know why the client did not return. I could not know why the client did not return. The form did not give me space to speculate as to what happened. All that was needed was a bland formal notation so the organization could inform next of kin, if any, and offer the relevant government entities an official determination of nonreturn, which would in most jurisdictions be sufficient to issue a death certificate.

With that done, I stopped thinking about this client. I had one more client to prepare for before the end of the day.

Not every client wants or needs to go back in time to intervene in a notable historical moment or to dance with dinosaurs. A small but appreciable minority simply want a vacation in another reality. To have a coffee by the Seine in the 1920s, or to catch a 1950s Broadway show in its first run, or to sail down the Amazon River at the height of the glory of the jungle surrounding it. We technicians call these “low-impact clients” and appreciate them quite a bit. They will return, usually at the nine-month resonance, happy and rested, without the need for expensive and traumatic medical or technical intervention. These are the clients who convince other people to become clients, and are the ones more likely than not to travel with us again. The organization will flag their accounts for (modest) discounts and priority in the travel queue. It is pleasant to work with, and for, pleasant people.

I assume that of all our clients, they are the ones who transmute their other realities the least; the world likely does not change appreciably when one spends nine months just existing quietly in Paris, drinking wine, reading books, and occasionally visiting the Louvre. This may be supposition on my part, and there is no way to prove it, and it may be that every client visit to a café unalterably changes world events; with one order of a croissant, the events of World War II are forever changed.

For personal reasons, I have my suspicions this is not the case. But there is no way for us to know. At the very least, when these low-impact clients return, they do not report earthshaking events. They merely report how nice it is to live in a reality that does not have the problems ours has, or at least the problems our client has in this one. They think this in no small part because they return to this reality before they can accrue too many problems in that other place and time. But then this is the very definition of a vacation, in any reality.

There is one other category of client who does not choose to meddle in great historical events, but is also not going on vacation. These are the clients who are traveling to a different reality to change the course of their own lives.

The organization, it should be noted, recommends against this for several reasons. The first is that often it is technically impractical. The organization will not send clients to a time less than twenty-seven years back from our own time, ostensibly because it presents significant practical issues with clients returning using the twenty-seven-year resonance, which would be from a reality future to ours. Few clients have the scientific background to argue the point.

(It is, in fact, technically possible to travel to a reality future to ours. From a physical point of view, what we perceive as “time” is an illusion, and our own reality is not so special that it is temporally ahead of every other reality that either already exists, or could exist if we sent a client there. The problem is not that the reality doesn’t exist but that spatial targeting from our reality is so much more difficult to do. Which is to say, we can transport a client to a reality temporally ahead of our own. We can’t promise a planet will be there to receive them. The organization decided long ago that this was a fact it did not wish to advertise.)

The twenty-seven-year organizational limitation has certain effects. A client cannot go to a recent moment to change their own immediate screwups, such as a bad investment or getting caught by a partner being unfaithful. They cannot go to a new reality pretending to be themself, because despite the current advanced state of plastic surgery, no one looks like themselves nearly three decades earlier. And of course, what changes are made in the other reality would have no effect in this one.

This is another reason it makes no sense to go to another reality to correct a very recent mistake. The client will not benefit from the change; the version of the client in the other reality will. Unless the client from this reality assumes the identity of themself in the other reality and gets rid of the version of themself in it. Which is possible but messy and also, as with any other reality, will have consequences. A murder is a murder, and a corpse is a corpse, and most clients are not experienced in performing the first or getting rid of the second.

Most of the clients who choose to visit a new reality and interact with themselves understand the limitations, and that their actions will not change their own lives. What most of them hope for is to change the life of the younger version of themself, so they will not make whatever personal tragic mistake the older version made. To chase after that person who they could have loved but didn’t, or to make that financial investment they missed, or to avoid getting into that one car on that one night, or whatever.

These interventions are targeted at specific times and places in the life of the client; rare it is for the client with such an agenda not to return at a three-day resonance. The intent is to warn, or caution, or encourage, but not to see how these interventions played out. I think in these cases there may be the fear that the alternate version of themself will choose not to heed the client’s admonition, and watching the other version of oneself make the same mistake—despite being warned!—would be too much to bear.

Or maybe it is simpler than that, that for the client it’s about the intervention, not the consequence of the intervention. Whatever burden they had been carrying in their soul about that one choice they had made long ago has been lifted by warning or encouraging their alternate self to do other than what they had done. Their conscience is now clear, and everything else is up to their other self. It’s heartwarming, in its way, to see the clients try to do for another version of themselves what they cannot do in their own lives.

Except for that one client who traveled to another reality expressly to walk up to the younger alternate version of themself and punch them square in the teeth. The client did not explain themself to their other version. They did not explain themself to the organization in the debrief afterward. But I never did see a client happier with their experience.

The last client for the day is me.

One of the perks of the organization is that every technician, after a certain number of years on the job, is allowed one trip at no expense to themself. The organization offers this perk, they say, for operational reasons. A technician who has been a client themself understands better what a client wants and needs from their experience and can better explain the entire experience to them. Indeed, some technician jobs in the organization are only available to those who have put in the initial set of years and then have gone on their own voyage. My job is not one of them, but the job of my immediate supervising technician is.

I have been with the organization for twenty-five years, far more than is required for the perk. My choosing to not use the perk has been noted by others, in no small part because by doing so I have hampered my own advancement prospects. If I had taken the trip, I would likely be at least two levels up the management chain by now. It’s not that others who have been promoted above me have minded—they got the jobs I was not qualified to take—but I am good at the job and have an understanding of the organization well in advance of my position. If anyone could be credibly accused of wasting their talents, it is me.

I have an answer for this, which satisfies those who don’t actually want to think too much about it, which is almost everyone. I say I’m just not ready and I don’t want to waste my trip on something frivolous or that I don’t truly want. For most of my organizational peers, who see the trip through the lens of career advancement and typically choose a “safe” time and place—early 2000s Southern California is a popular choice—and return at the three-day resonance, this answer is silly but acceptable. Apparently, I don’t want the money or security that would come with career advancement.

In fact I don’t. What I make as a mid-level technician is more than enough in this time and place for my needs and wants. More responsibility within the organization is not something I want, but more to the point, it is something I, as a term of my initial employment with the organization, agreed not to seek. Where I am with the organization is as far as I will go with the organization. In this reality, in any event.

Which brings us to the real reason why, to this point, I have not bothered to take my time travel perk: because I have done it before.

This reality is not the reality into which I was born. The one into which I was born is ahead of the one in which I now exist, but not by too much. I exist in this timeline twice, as me and as the me native to here. I know about the twenty-seven-year rule because it applies to me; I returned at the bare minimum of temporal distance required to come across.

I chose this time for multiple reasons, because I had multiple goals to achieve. The first was to visit myself, eighteen years old and preparing for college and the years ahead. I approached myself at a place I knew I would be, explained who I was and offered information that only we would know, held up my hand to prove we had the same fingerprints, and otherwise convinced my other self who I was.

I then offered not warnings, not implorements, but suggestions. How to think about their immediate future, what goals they might want for themself. Where they might want to be in their life, physically and metaphysically, when they were the age I was then. I offered exactly one investment tip and warned my other self that once they used it then anything else I could possibly suggest wouldn’t matter anymore, as their life would be so materially changed from mine that they would no longer be the same. I wished my other self luck and told them I was returning to my own reality in three days and that we would not meet again.

Then I got on a bus, traveled to a small town in a place where no version of me knew anyone, paid cash for a modest apartment, and slept my way through nine months, surfacing now and again to eat, shower, and visit the local library. I was low impact, not for the reality I now inhabited, but for myself.

When the nine months had passed, I got on another bus, traveled to the headquarters of the organization, went to the reception desk, and asked for the head security technician, using a very specific phrase the organization had set up at its founding to alert it that a high-ranking employee of itself had arrived from the future and had important operational information.

Ten minutes later I was in a secure room being asked a series of questions that in themselves acted as another level of assurance of who I was and that the reality I had come from was not this one. When this was done, I looked over to one of the security technicians in the room with me and told them that in my reality they would become head of security in time, and that they would be bald when it happened. I may have done this because in my reality, this person annoyed me and I also knew them to be hopelessly vain.

Having verified myself, I presented an encrypted memory stick and offered a deal: Certain useful technical information and machine improvements, well in advance of when they would be discovered and implemented in this reality, in exchange for a new identity, a job, and the promise that the director of the organization would read a document that I had written, also encrypted, that explained the current situation in my reality and the steps that the organization in this reality could take to help this world avoid it, because in my reality we were experiencing a sudden and catastrophic die-off of the human species.

This was a die-off, to be clear, of us, and only us. The planet was fine in my reality, but we weren’t. The details of it are almost beside the point. It was not one single thing that we had done that brought about the die-off, but many things, one after the other, heedlessly, with the consequences of them all coalescing nearly perfectly in time into a cliff from which we fell, scrambling and failing to recover. Our models showed several points in our history where different decisions made on a global scale might have saved us, or if not have saved us, at least would have minimized the die-off.

This one, the one I had chosen to send myself to, was the last possible juncture, minus three days to meet myself, and nine months to heal my soul. The plan was to save this reality from our fate, and, if possible, return to my own reality with information generated in this one that might save those of us who still remained. Others in our organization went to realities further temporally displaced, with the hope that earlier interventions might offer wider variations in outcomes.

But these realities were too distant for a single human to be able to confirm one way or another that the intervention had been successful. This was the only one where we might be able to see concretely what changes the intervention had offered. As the then (acting) director of the organization in my reality, I determined that the risks involved with this juncture were high, not the least of which were to do with someone arriving from so close a future giving the impression that this place and time was solely responsible for the die-off, a message which might not be taken with the greatest of enthusiasm. I could not ask any other person in the organization to take on this responsibility. I had to deliver it myself, and discover if my message and warning would work, or if it would not.

It did work. The cliff by which the die-off was to have begun in my reality was avoided. The exact methods used to divert us from the cliff were not shared with me, because in this reality I was not the director of the organization, acting or otherwise, merely a technician. In the short term, this was fine. In the long run, I hoped that I would, passively or actively, learn more about the methods used to avoid the cliff, to see if they could be useful for those of us who had already fallen off it. I bided my time for more than two decades, because it was prudent and because, as a matter of resonances, I had no choice.

Two years ago, signs similar to those that heralded the die-off in my own reality began to appear. A year ago, they were definite. The cliff had not been avoided, merely delayed. I duly informed my superiors in the organization, but time has erased who I am, or more accurately, who I was. Those in positions of responsibility when I arrived have retired, in this reality or into another, and the ones in positions of responsibility today are aware of me only as a technician who chose not to advance. My warnings are registered and then ignored.

A month ago, I determined to my own satisfaction that the cliff of the die-off was imminent and inescapable. In my arrival to this reality, I managed to close off the avenue that the die-off traveled by in my own timeline. But this was only one avenue. The die-off was undeterred. It came by a different byway. It came despite my efforts. It came because of who we are, not how we, in this reality or any other, chose to proceed.

My efforts were not useless. I learned something. It was not what I hoped to learn.

Given my previous experience, in this reality, it is now about three weeks out, more or less, from when the die-off accelerates exponentially. It is one week out from when my twenty-seven-year resonance will open, to take me back to my reality, if I choose to go back to it. In either of these realities, my end will come, and quickly, no matter what choices I make.

Fortunately, I still have my employment perk. One free journey to any place and time. To a new reality.

I am not young. Where I go is where I will stay. I have chosen a reality to die in, not in the jaws of a dinosaur or in a blaze of glory killing a monster of history, but simply and quietly and with, I hope, a measure of peace, even if that peace comes with resignation. In this reality, I leave behind documents to my superiors detailing what will happen next, a small bequest to the me born in this reality with the suggestion to live for today, and this testament. My last one, in this timeline, at least.

I am prepared, my pack made and my fate awaiting. I could return here, in three days, or nine months, or, if I somehow live that long, in twenty-seven years. I know now, however, that whatever reality I am in, in the end, I carry only myself into it. Realities change, and I am the constant.

I don’t know what it means. I feel I should have known it earlier. Perhaps I’ll understand it in my next reality. I’ll find out soon enough.