Time-Travel Fiction

Aaron snorted. “I remember that conversation from over six months ago.”
    Gabe shook his head. “It happened this morning.”

The bizarre beast that rounded the bend in the road made Maker’s mouth drop in surprise. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, a top-heavy, lopsided creature having four legs, a narrow head atop a long neck, and a huge shiny lump on its back.

Hey man, I’d think twice about what you’re doing. You could wake up a lot more fucked up than you are now.

Heading down for the NT site. More later.

They want to be heroes. They think war brings glory and makes them men. I think they’re crazy. Our society up then thinks they’re crazier than your society thinks you are.

Gentlemen, this person tells me that in many years, the Almighty will allow men to journey through time. He says that he has come from the far future with a message for me.

A small piece of paper fell out of the book and onto the table. Adele picked it up and examined it. It bore one line: “http://www.general-slocum.com.” She had no idea what it meant; “http” was clearly not a word, although she presumed she knew what the “general-slocum” part referred to.

We don’t know how it works. Or even what its energy source is. When the field is on we’ve detected minor fluctuations in certain astronomical objects.

The future is not immutable—you can print that!

History tells us this is where the path to oblivion began.

And then there are the days when she tells me that we’ve traveled through time, that we have come from the future and are trapped here. She tells me that she was a temporal scientist, that I was her project. That I am modified and enhanced for survival, for time travel, for perfection. Those are the bad days.

The odd truth of working as a temporal interventionist is that some there-and-thens are better than others.

There were eight good prospects back there, and I’d have had them all if this bitch hadn’t shown up.

Did you ever wish you could keep doing the same thing over and over again?

You wouldn’t want to cause any of those nasty paradoxes, would you?

Roxanne smiled awkwardly, and looked over Julien’s shoulder at the open stall. It looked unremarkable now, drab green-painted metal walls and a white porcelain toilet. Hardly the thing you’d expect from some sort of door in time. At least proper English children in books got to travel through wardrobes and garden holes, not through unhygenic high school bathrooms.

What? The British Empire started coming apart in the 1920s?

“We’ve done it,” he said. “Three times with a mouse and five times with a monkey. The university has approved my request for a manned test run. We’re going into the future!

Ever wonder how three kids from Brooklyn got their hands on a time-traveling book?

Alice’s was not the first birth I witnessed, nor even the most unusual. The first time I saw Alice’s birth, I bypassed the event, skimming ahead to the advent of the automobile. Gears fascinated me more. But on reflection, something drew me back to Alice in the garden, newborn on the rain-wet grass. The world seemed to move beneath her.

Apparently I inherited Mama’s looks and Papa’s brains. Again and again in my life I’ve gotten the best of a bad bargain.

So you figured that if you kept Franklin’s biological mother and father from meeting, he would never have been born, your parents’ marriage would have remained happy, and your life would have remained wonderful.

A butterfly caused all this?

A pack of chips was constantly pursuing and reuniting with the giant, but moonlight glinted off of one largish piece that seemed in danger of being left behind, lodged in a groove between cobblestones.
   “Wait,” Danny called out softly and although the creature was obviously too far off to hear, and lacked ears besides, it immediately paused long enough for the chip to free itself and join the others.

If I, today, had finished constructing a device, in this room, which allowed you to travel even a day into the past, and you used it to travel into the past to kill or otherwise distract me from completing the device, how would you have been able to travel in the first place into the past, with no device then constructed?

Sayid: Radio waves at this frequency bounce off the ionosphere. They can travel thousands of miles. It could be coming from anywhere.

Hurley: Or any time...

“Mammoth ivory,” the old man said, as if it was a proposition put up for debate. “I have hunt mammoth.”

1. As a boy, Kip Wolverton’s best friend is crushed in a tragic accident in a bell tower.
2. Then, because Kip is too shy to ever approach the bell-ringer of his dreams, the girl goes and marries his other best friend, so Kip goes off to America to drown his sorrows and become an expert physicist studying time.
3. Finally, 25 years later, Kip returns to England to do time experiments in bell towers where he finds girl grown and unhappily married. [Sep 2012]
   
   

“Research money is difficult to come by these days,” said Neville. “There is a lot of good science lanuishing because more meretricious projects get the funds.”

And then, when you came to, you’d gone back a few minutes in time.

Or, I can change things for the better...ooh, there’s a whole side of my family that my dad doesn’t doesn't know about. I have the chance to change that, the chance to reverse the last twenty years and redo everything without the lies, the secrets, the being grounded every other week.

Save the cheerleader, save the world.

There’s this entire other version of my life without you. I went through this whole year of my life believing you were dead.

Thou shalt UN-kill, whenever possible.

Danny: Whatever you did, you did it already. Whether you send this note or you don’t, it doesn’t matter. You cannot change the past. It’s physically impossible.
Agent Carlin: What if there’s more than physics?

Getting Scorsese off drugs means he never did all the cocaine that fueled him to make Taxi Driver, which means he never cast Jodie Foster, which means John Hinkley never obsessed over her, and he never tried to impress her by shooting President Reagan, which means Reagan was never empowered by surviving an assassination attempt—he must have lost to Mondale in ’84. Bingo! Forty-seven days into his presidency, Mondale handed complete control of the U.S. over to the Soviet Union.
—from “The Best Christmas Story Never Told”

Miss, oh Miss!! There’s a dinosaur on the playground.

They’ve been sending other Mimzies to the past to look for it, but none of them have come back.

Remember, I’ve got a time machine. You mess up again, and I’ll just keep coming back ’til you get it right.

Jason: Is this a dream?
Lu Yan: No, where you come from is the dream, through the gate of no gate.

A planetarium on the Moon. It’s like a zoo in the jungle, or building a swimming pool under water. What’s the point?

From the future? A wino from the future?!

Unfortunately, while I was becoming more adept at making the business decisions that repeatedly benefited my shareholders, I had also been informed by my mentors and closest friends that the proliferating global acts of terrorism—along with the economic catastrophe which had ended only a few years earlier—had been engineered by a power-hungry madman whose sole objective was to become a diety, thereby ruling the entirety of space and time.

Has viajado en el tiempo.

Don’t ask me to explain time travel paradoexes. All I do is fix the time gates when something goes wrong. Paradoxes are argued over at a much higher pay grade than mine.

Haven’t you noobs read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler?!

The steath-suited TI leveled a weapon, then droped as a stun charge hit. Moments later the other TI weo’d fired the stun charge fell, then two more TIs appeared and took out whoever had nailed the second TI. But then the stealth-suited TI reappeared, having recovered somewhen in the future and jumped back to try to finish the job.

I just went back in time to save Sophia’s girls, so I should be able to save my girls! I concentrated with all my might on waves that went back in time, and then I felt a Herculean wrench.

“I’m talking time travel,” William went on. “You could go back in time and meet Jesus. Assuming he existed.”

Kinda like I did live my life, but now I gotta live it all over again.

We did not know the man standing before us, but he spoke with much excitement and passion. Over time, we came to know him as the Time Traveler.

Just hit control-z.

Come with me if you wanna live.
—Cameron Philips to John while fleeing Cromartie

Stop! [Flashes badge] Bureau of Weights and Measurements!

Some assert that the realm of quantum mechanics is so removed from the realm of our senses we’re unequipped to judge.

Indeed the notes from that page on were most curious. “Planck energy for opening gap in spacetime fabric = 10¹⁹ billion electron volts,” read one, but then that was crossed out with a large X as the writer of the notes took a different tack.

Everybody and his brother Jake knows that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and stopped there. And even the dimmest of music lovers has wish fulfillment fantasies about what a tenth would have sounded like.

It was while Alan and Victor were touring the warehouse with the real estate agent tht a slip of paper bearing the words, “It worked,&rdqup; materialized on a desk in the office.

If one of these people dies young, that will pay your debt.

I did it!

FRANK IT WASN’T YOUR FAULT

Zoe: Dad, did you just see...?
Carter: Yeah, I’ll deal with that tomorrow...
—from the series finale

The experiment could result in an alternate Great Britain being swapped with ours—one displaced backward in time from the instant of the experiment.

After all, I was the scientist; and my only son was dying and I couldn’t do anything about it...I became consumed with saving you, conquering the disease. In my research, I discovered a doctor, Alfred Gross—Swiss, brillant physician, he’s the only man that had ever successfully cured a case of heppia. But there was a problem: he had died in 1936. And so, I designed a device intended to reach back into time, to cross the time-space continuum, and retrieve Alfred Gross.

If I had the power to decide never to meet him again, I reasoned, surely I had the power to change the course of the relationship for the better.

I’m a PC, and I’m headed to the future.

You know, coming back in time, changing history...that’s cheating.

Harry’s going to upset a multibillion dollar applecart. I don’t know what strings he pulled to get an import license for a priceless artifact from another timeline, but it’s not going to be worth what he thinks.

Three weeks in prehistory, Mr. Redcliff. Aren’t you excited?

There’s two big rules: You never jump back to alter your own past, and you never jump unsupervised.

Rose: Are you a ghost?
Tolly: I don’t think I can be. I’m not dead.

I realize I may seem a little obsessive, but is it so wrong to wish I could have saved her from being burned? She was such a remarkable person and it was such a horrible fate.

What did you try to do? Post somebody at the Texas School Book Depository?

We’ll discuss the ethics of time travel in the spring semester.

Isn’t it time to bend time?

So you believe me? You’re an SF geek, right?

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

With its logical basis wrecked, the Universe would resolve the paradox by excising the time machine, and snap back to a consistent history in which Hubert married Rosie, with all of its consequences.

That’s the way that entanglement works; and so, if I put a spool of fiber optics in here that’s, say, 10 kilometers long, then she would send the signal 50 microseconds after Bob received it.
—John Kramer

You know the arguments: If God had wanted us to travel through time, the devout claim, he would have given us the ability to do so. If God had wanted us to travel through time, the scientists say, he would have given us the ability to understand time travel—and oh! Look! He’s done that.

Of course! How had I missed it? If there was any reasonable point to all this...

Pete: I’m not gonna remember...
Artie: Remember what?
Pete: Remember dying.
Artie: No. No, Pete, you won’t remember. [Pete dies.] But I will...I will.

He argued to the scribes that they were naturals for typesetting jobs: literate, intelligent, good at fine work and at avoiding mistakes. “Most of us thought we knew. There were many congenial mealtime arguments about which overarching theory of time travel was the true one. I had my ideas, but they dismissed them. I wasn’t one of them; I didn’t understand.” He ounded a fist into his thigh, a startling burst of violence. “But their theories were such violations of common sense!”

Stephen? Stephen Curry? Your dad played in the NBA?

Have you thought this through, Lieutenant? You see a murder in progress. You’re a cop. Do you try to stop it? But you’re not a cop in that timeline, are you? Your lieutenant’s badge is no good there. Are you acting extra-legally? The only badge around belongs to a rookie cop name Delehanty who doesn’t have a clue about what’s going down. And what if you don’t try to stop it? Are you culpable? In that timeline or this one?

The same hour keeps happening over and over again. Only it isn’t an hour. Not really. It seems to be getting shorter.

Oh, Shelly, a man’s here to take you away to the future. Be sure to pack clean underwear.

One epic ride.

And I know that after Johnson, Richard Nixon is elected president. Then comes Ford. Who comes next?

Time travel, Stephanie! We’re talking the big leagues! The Flash! Silver Surfer!! Doc Brown’s DeLorean!!!
—Katie in “No Ordinary Future”

“And look! There’s an abnormal fog cloud up ahead right near the entrance to Atlantic Blueberry’s packing house!” the history teacher alerted the already distressed and bewildered driver.
—The Music Disk

The Supreme Court will announce its decision the day after tomorrow. Gore’s people want the recount to proceed in Florida. Bush’s do not.

I really shouldn’t be telling you this, 497, but ancient legends have it that this love condition was like some kind of virus which apparently made people act in strange and illogical ways bordering in some extreme cases on obsessive dementia. It is now also thought to be one of the root causes of all the suffering in the world.

Sonia: Doesn’t part of you wonder if maybe he’s right? I mean, every good thing we do gets erased; every bad thing we do gets erased. What does it really matter what we do?
Kyle: I guess...I just need for it to matter.

I was trying to escape my present the same way you’re trying to escape yours—to a golden age.

Man Customer: Relativity’s the best.
Woman Customer: I’m sorry, but Time’ Arrow is much better.

That wasn’t a very nice dinosaur.
—Zoe in Episode 2

Okay, a spacetime warp. It’s formed by the interaction of the complicated magnetic field from the motor, and the rotation of the drum. The metal drum picks up an induced field and right in the center, a spacetime vortex forms. Any sock falling through disappears.