Causality

Simon Murray tightened the last bolt on his machine and stood back, giving it a long hard look. A smile slowly spread across his face. It was beautiful. Well, it was beautiful to him; he knew what it was. Anyone else looking at it would probably guess that it was a piece of modern art, and not a very good piece, at that. Either that or they’d think it was the result of giving a man with too much time on his hands a junkyard to play with. The frame had been a VW bug, but it was obvious at a glance that this thing would never see a road again.

The most distinctive features of Simon’s creation were the perfectly spaced rows and columns of antennae running across the entire surface of it. They were bolted onto the windows and welded onto the undercarriage. He’d propped his machine a good three feet off the ground with metal braces too make room for the antennae. Getting the car up that high had been a royal pain, but the modification had been necessary because the magnetic field that he hoped to create needed to surround every square inch of the car in order to have any hope of slipping the vehicle within it out of sync with the temporal universe.

Simon briefly considered buying another bucket of black paint. The windows were already covered with so many generous coats of the stuff that it was starting to look like tar. He would have preferred to remove the glass and weld sheets of metal over the openings, but he was already several thousand dollars in debt. Buying that much sheet metal just wasn’t feasible, and he needed an opaque wall around him as, if his theory was correct, one of the side effects of the magnetic field would be a massive discharge of energy, in the form of heat, and a light so bright it would blind anyone not adequately protected.

Simon paced slowly around his machine double checking every antenna, every bolt, every everything. It was all exactly as he had envisioned it. It was all a perfect replica of the blueprint that he had spent so many sleepless nights working on. Everything was absolutely perfect.

And that was utterly terrifying.

On the one hand, if his theories were correct, he had just created the world’s first time machine. If he was right, this was a great moment in history, a day to be marked forever in the history books and reveled upon for hundreds of years. The bad news was that, after he started it up, if every part worked as it should, if no fuses blew, if no antennae broke, and he did not travel through time . . . then his theories were all completely wrong. And that was a very scary thought indeed.

As much as he had invested in his creation, as much energy as he had expended . . . If it didn’t work, then the majority of his life was suddenly translated into a gigantic waste of time. The six and a half years he had spent reworking the Volkswagen would have been time squandered. The decade he had spent designing it, pointless. The lifetime he had spent studying physics, little more than vanity.

This was the culmination of his life’s work and he would soon find out if he would go down in the history books as one of the greatest physicists who had ever lived, or if he would be just another quickly forgotten crackpot inventor. The answer to the terrifying question of who he was in the grand scheme of history was available at the turn of a key.

For a moment he hesitated. The thought of simply leaving it there, covered in a tarp, possibly with instructions for whomever inherited it was tempting. He could live with the excitement, with the knowledge that he might have been right. He didn’t have to know the truth. He could live with the possibility, couldn’t he?

He dismissed these thoughts. He was a scientist. It was his responsibility to know. If it turned out that he was wrong . . . well then, he was wrong. That was life. Even if it didn’t work out, that didn’t mean that his life had been a complete loss, it had simply been a learning experience. True, there was very little glory for people who dedicated their lives to ‘learning experiences’, but one did not become a physicist in pursuit of glory.

Simon walked around the chalk outline he’d made a few feet away from the car, the safety zone, as he liked to call it, and flipped on the six or seven camcorders, he’d set up in anticipation of this moment. After he flipped on the last one he paused, licked his lips nervously, and turned to look into the lense.

“This is Simon Murray. I’ve completed my prototype time machine and am about to conduct time travel experiment one. Um, wish me luck, I guess.”

Simon steadied his breathing as he moved a small stepladder over to the car and climbed into the driver’s side. On the passenger side seat he had his repair kit. Once he arrived where he was going he was going to be a few feet off the ground. He had several jacks with him to get the car up high enough to replace the bent antennae with the extra ones he had stored in the trunk. He also had circuits to replace pretty much anything in case the crash jostled them more than he anticipated.

The car was filled with so many parts, pieces, and the tools for attaching and testing them that Simon was half-convinced he could rebuild the entire machine once he arrived. Assuming, of course, the car frame itself arrived intact. And assuming he arrived there . . . no, he corrected himself, not ‘there’, ‘then’. Assuming he arrived ‘then’ intact. There was always the possibility that the trip, or the reentry, or the fall itself might do him serious harm.

He sighed in irritation at his own cowardice and forced those thoughts from his mind. There were straps to hold him into place, a complicated system of shock absorbers and pulleys set up to keep the fall from being too jarring. He had given himself as much protection as he could from every scenario he had imagined.

Simon carefully examined each of the measurements on the redesigned dashboard in front of him, systematically recording the levels into his notebook. Magnetic activity was within the acceptable range, thermal readings, barometric pressure. . . . He was running out of excuses. He was running out of reasons not to go.

Eventually, if this first test run worked out, he’d do some touch-up work. Hopefully he’d be able to design a way to travel without antennae on the bottom, as replacing them after each trip would become inconvenient. He’d also like to eventually be able to travel to any place and any time that he wanted to. As it was, he’d be arriving in the exact spot he left . . . well, the exact spot relative to the dominating gravitational force of the Earth. And due to constraints of the laws of physics and the limitations of his equipment, he was pretty sure he’d be traveling about at fifty years at a jump before he fried a few boards and circuits. After that, to travel again he’d have to replace the pieces in question. But those were issues to be dealt with later. For now, it was time to test the prototype.

Everything was set. Everything was perfect. Simon closed his eyes, breathed deeply, allowed his mind to calm . . . forced his mind to calm. Then opened his eyes, put on his sun glasses and turned the key.

There was a crackling sound. That, he knew, was the electric field building around the car. It grew louder, and louder, and louder. There should be a great light building up around the vehicle. In fact he was fairly certain that by this point it should be peeling the paint from the windows. Strangely he didn’t see any change. And the car did not seem to be growing any warmer. Suddenly the crackling stopped.

Something was definitely wrong. Besides the absence of the blinding light and the heat build up which, according the dashboard sensors had definitely not happened, the car had not dropped the three feet to the ground.

He hadn’t gone anywhere. He was a failure. Simon winced, fighting the feelings of frustration and uselessness.

He would have to reexamine his model. He’d have to rework the details. He’d have to examine the tapes of the car and see where things had gone wrong. This was a minor setback. It would be all right.

Sighing he opened the door.

Two men wearing ‘press’ buttons were standing about eight feet away from the car holding several fancy looking, and very small camcorders aimed at the machine and at Simon. Behind them, about where Simon had drawn the chalk line there was a velvet rope. Behind that there were about a half a dozen men and women in strange clothing watching him. One young woman, kneeling next to a girl of about six applauded politely, her daughter applauded vigorously, looking somewhat excited, but more by her mother’s attention than by what had actually happened.

Honestly very few people looked truly interested, most looked amused, or mildly proud. The rule seemed to be, the younger the face, the less intriguing the spectacle had been. One twelve year old was already pulling at his father’s arm, wanting, it seemed, to go somewhere more interesting.

Simon stared for a few seconds as the crowd, such as it was, dispersed and began glancing at the pictures and video recordings that now covered his repainted garage. Several of the screens were playing recordings from the cameras he had set up less than five minutes ago to tape his journey. Two of the screens had him talking to the camera, though the volume was muted. Another showed the car, energy crackling from one antenna tip to another, faster and faster, until the vehicle suddenly simply vanished. All four of the braces that had been holding the car in place fell away as it disappeared. Simon winced, he had neglected to anticipate that, he was in for a fall on his return trip.

Another screen showed his arrival from a camera in the corner of the room. At least, it seemed to be his arrival. A ball of glowing energy materialized on a set of fixed jacks . . . his car appeared, and it was his car, no mistaking that, but the crowd in the background of the video screen seemed to be somewhat larger than the crowd that was currently wandering off.

One of the men wearing the ‘press’ button folded up his camera, tucked it away, and headed out to a new exit door sitting in a wall where Simon’s garage door used to be.

A man in a grey uniform was leaning in the doorframe leading to Simon’s house, looking rather unimpressed. As Simon slowly stepped out of the car and down the concrete steps leading to the ground, the man sighed, straightened his shirt, signaled at somebody out of sight around the corner, and headed toward Simon.

“Good evening, Doctor Murray.” As the man shook Simon’s hand, he stepped slightly to one side to allow the camera man who had not left to record them shaking hands. After that the second camera man put camcorder away and headed off as well. On the wall behind the photographer Simon saw a picture of himself shaking hands with the very same young man. In the picture Simon was staring, mouth open, with a look of utter bewilderment.

Simon closed his mouth and forced himself to focus. “Um, hi. Who are you? And what do you mean ‘Doctor’?”

The man smiled the smile of a man who knows he needs to be patient but is annoyed by the idiocy he has to be patient with. “Every time. You know this would be a hell of a lot easier if Bob just took care of this himself.”

“Bob?”

“Yeah, he should be here.” The boy looked around. He seemed to sigh in relief as a slender, chrome figure appeared and worked its way over to them.

“Good evening, Doctor.” The machine had a soft, pleasant, even soothing voice to it. “Welcome to the future.”

“The future wherein I am a doctor.”

“Yeah,” the man behind the machine snorted, “honorary title bestowed by a bunch of universities after you get back. You never actually earn the doctorates.”

“Most universities accepted your creation of a working time machine as adequate doctoral work.” The machine, it seemed, was designed not to offend anybody. The man behind him seemed to be designed to do little else. “My name Beethreeohnine, though if you prefer you may call me Bob, as most people do. I am a tour guide here at the museum, and this is one of the museum’s day managers, Mylo Cale.”

“Wait, the museum?”

“Yes sir.” The machine gestured around the room. “Your house was converted to a museum twenty six years, eleven months and nineteen days ago, on this particular loop.”

“This loop?”

The man behind the machine sighed. “You didn’t think through the whole time travel consequence scenario thing, did you? Of course not, you never did on any of your other trips, why would you this time?”

“This is my first trip. It’s my first opportunity to not think of . . . whatever it is I’m not thinking of.”

“Of course, sir . . .” Bob seemed to have more to say, but immediately stopped talking when Mylo interrupted him.

“Sure, from your perspective. From ours you keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. Look; right now the universe, starting at the moment in time that you fired up your time machine, moved into what we call, these days, a period of temporal discontinuity and dimensional flux. That is to say that the temporal mainline . . . the way reality actually happens, is for the time being undetermined. You are, currently, on your eighty-some-odd ‘first jump’ through time.”

Simon stared at the man in utter confusion.

“Perhaps I can explain a little more easily.” Bob’s voice became, if anything, even more soothing than it had been before. He stepped toward one of the walls and indicated the screen. The image that had been looping on it, that of Simon’s time machine crackling and disappearing, was replaced by a chalk board.

“Think of it one step at a time: you made your first jump to fifty years in the future.” A picture of Simon’s machine sketched itself onto the left edge of the board, a white line arced out from it to a point on the far right side of the board, indicating the jump. “The universe you left behind continued on as if you’d simply disappeared from reality.” Another white line moved directly from the point of the jump to intersect with the first line at the other end of the board. “Because, essentially, you had.” Simon nodded thoughtfully, doing his best to ignore Mylo, who was checking his watch impatiently.

“So on your first loop, you arrived to find a future unaffected by time travel, and more or less unaffected by you. You looked learned what you could, put your machine back together, and traveled back to your own time. You arrived at a point one day and six hours after the time you left and introduced to the world both time travel, and the knowledge of the state of the world in fifty years.”

A line arched from the right side of the board, the area representing the future . . . well, the future that Simon was in, so, arguably, the present, back to the left hand side of the board.

“That was the general plan, yes.”

“Needless to say, the knowledge you brought back, and the science you introduced had a profound effect on a lot of major world events.” A second straight line, this one red ran from left to right across the board coloring over the first straight line. “Also, a few of the devices you brought back to prove you had been there were reverse engineered and invented decades ahead of time . . .”

The red line reached the right side of the board.

“Which resulted in a completely different universe for me to arrive in when I jumped forward in time, meaning I found different things and brought back different information.”

“Exactly, sir.”

A red arched line arched from the right side of the board to the left, covering up the white line.

“Each time you jumped forward you saw a different future, so the knowledge you brought back each time was different, so the changes that you made were different, so each time you jumped forward you saw a different future.” Blue, pink, purple, orange and green lines slid across the board representing the shift in reality.

“But doesn’t that defy the whole ‘continuity of time’ thing? And the conservation of matter and energy and . . . .”

“No of course not!” Mylo chuckled at the question. “I’m sorry, it’s just funny to talk to someone with such an archaic understanding of the laws of physics, kind of like when we have to give tour guides for the grade schools. Look, for you to really and truly understand the whole conservation of matter and energy and how it is maintained in temporal travel you’d have to spend years studying temporal dynamics and mechanics. How you managed to create a time machine, even one as rudimentary as this one, with so little comprehension of the natural laws of physics and dimensional relations . . . well, it’s miraculous really.”

Simon bit back his reply and turned his attention toward the robot again.

“When you travel time you essentially split off a chunk of the universe, making a whole new universe with its own independent time-line, set of matter, set of energy etc, etc. Matter and energy are both conserved inside of this universe until that universe is reintroduced to our universe.”

“And as you would know, if you understood anything about temporal mechanics, when universes diverge and converge we’re not dealing with the creation or the destruction of matter and energy, just the removal and reintroduction of existing matter and energy.”

“All right, I can pretty much follow that, but what about the continuity of temporal mechanics?”

“Oh, well . . .” Mylo blushed slightly at that. “To be honest that’s a little bit complex for me, and it’s way ahead of you.”

Simon tried not to smile at finally finding something the annoying manager didn’t know, turning instead to the robot. “What about you, Bob? Think you can explain that to me?”

“Sadly I am only programmed with a basic comprehension of mathematics. Multidimensional physics, and quasi-temporal calculations are outside of my abilities.”

“I guess that would fall a little outside of the skills needed by a tour guide.”

“They don’t make robots specifically to run museums; Bob here is a general purpose robot that the museum hired to run important events and take care of the mundane things on slow days.”

Simon resisted the urge to ask whether this was a special event or a slow day. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “He certainly seems to know what he’s doing. Maybe in a couple of loops I’ll just be talking to machines.”

“You think we couldn’t pull that off already? Three years after you get back congress passes the android act, limiting both how many androids can be built, and what jobs they can have. Apparently on one loop there was massive unemployment once machines started replacing people.”

“Oh.” That gave Simon pause. There was something else that was bothering him though. “Is there anybody that I can talk to about the temporal physics? If that much of my understanding of temporal physics was off, I’d like to have some idea where I went wrong.”

“Good luck. Right now every brain trust on the planet is working on the Second Leap project.” Mylo rolled his eyes at the lost expression on Simon’s face. “The new time machine project. The one they had to put off until after we got out of this temporal loop?”

Simon continued to stare blankly.

The tour guide groaned. “Look, reality inside of this . . . block, has shifted over eighty times now, because you keep changing it. One of the first things researchers figured out when they tried to make a second time machine was that it wouldn’t work inside of a shifting reality. After you leave, if reality still exists it should finally be solid enough to work with, which means that we can send off a few of our best and brightest to take a peak at the next hundred years, and see if they can’t figure out where we’re heading and what we can do to improve things here.”

“So I’m not important enough to spare some minor academic for a few hours?”

“Did you think you were?”

Bob made a soft humming noise that reminded Simon somewhat of a throat clearing. “I do not thing that it is accurate to say that you are not important enough, sir. It is simply that we have recordings of all but the first of your previous visits, which allows us, essentially, fifty years to anticipate your questions and decide which we can answer, which we cannot answer, and which answers are, in the grand scheme of things, not important enough to warrant the time it would take to explain them.”

Simon bit his lip. It was more than a little aggravating to find that he had changed the world, but had changed it into a place where nobody was impressed by what he’d done. He shook his head to clear away the negative thoughts. As long as things had changed for the better, who got which glory and how much wasn’t that important. “So this is the eightieth time we’ve met? How well did we get along before?”

Mylo shook his head. “Actually this is only the third time we’ve met. It’s an issue of the knowledge of the future changing the course of the future.”

“I’m not sure I follow how who I would meet would change that much.”

“I kind of figured you wouldn’t. See, after the third or forth time you jumped into the future, when everyone started realizing that, hey, you’ll be back, and we set up this museum, and the pedestal for you to land on, it occurred to somebody . . . probably you, that it would be most efficient for everyone involved it we just started having a sort of ‘this is what the future looks like’ package waiting for you. I’ve got it behind the front desk.”

“Which shouldn’t effect who I meet that much. And how is it more efficient for you to give me a package to look through than for someone to simply show me what the future looks like?”

“Oh, the package isn’t really for you. I mean, why would it be? The discs in the package are for you to mail to important people, and people with the technical knowhow to use the data. Your area of expertise is time travel, but while you did stumble across the right theories before anyone else, you’re not the most knowledgeable person as far as the solid mechanics of the system are concerned. It’s just easier to send instructional videos to government programs and certain academicians than it is to try to teach you the mechanics of time travel.”

“So at this point I’m just your messenger. You want me to go back in time, ship a package to the government, and that’s the end of my usefulness?”

“Not at all sir.” Bob placed a hand gently on Simon’s shoulder. “There is much that you have done to shape our world, and much you taught us and others in academia. However you have taught the lessons already, and they are recorded, making it unnecessary for you to teach the same lessons or reveal the same information all over again.”

Mylo ignored the machine completely. “Actually we want you to mail a few dozen packages. About forty. Twenty two of them are to government agencies.

“They put all kinds of stuff in these discs. Everything from where most of the criminals on the planet are currently hiding, and where they’ll be going over the next few weeks, to files for the military on new equipment and non-lethal weaponry, to stuff that I legally can’t tell you about, even some stuff I can’t legally know. And then there are the newscasts that you’ll be sending to news stations once you get back home, recordings of the histories of all the temporal lines that happened before us, allowing us to correct some of our past errors, etc.

“Included in the histories, though, are the records of your past arrivals. Which brings us to the explanation of why we’ve only met three times.

“Ironically, most of officials who would have met you here were able to use the celebrity that they got from having met you to launch other more glamorous careers. Careers that more interesting than the ones that would have put them in contact with you. Two or three of them became big movie stars. Nine managed to get into politics. They did well enough that they didn’t find the need to come work here. I’m about the fifteenth person to be the first person to meet you.”

“Well. That’s interesting. And different. And confusing.”

Mylo shrugged. “Well, it’s all pretty much old hat to everyone here. It’s kind of dull, actually. Arrival Day is a national holiday. The only national holiday in this time line to be celebrated before its occurrence. I’ve been watching Vids of your first three arrivals every year since I was born. It’s sort of like Christmas, but without any gifts.”

“Wait a sec . . . I’m sorry, but it suddenly occurred to me: who am I supposed to send the newscasts to? I’d imagine there’s some sort of law, or rule against sending them to specific anchors, as they’re commercial enterprises. Do I have enough copies to send one to every news station on the planet, or do I make copies when I get back?”

“Oh, please.” Milo snorted. “Time travel is a commercial enterprise. Like I told you, about twenty two of those discs are for the government, the rest are for private corporations. Major corporations pay trillions of dollars to the government for the right to ship data back to their former selves. What were you expecting? A future free of money? The world is still built on a pay-as-you-go basis. They tell us we’re moving towards a utopia of some sort. They say that our hours are getting shorter, pay is getting better, diseases are slowly disappearing, but the truth is, the world is the same as it’s always been, we still work more than we want to, get paid less than we’re worth . . .” Milo sighed. “Sorry. I’m feeling a bit bitter today. My girlfriend and I had a special vacation arranged for today, then my supervisor called and told me I had to come in, since I was the guy who met you last time. Anyhow. Um, I guess you probably have a few more questions before you head back?”

Simon shrugged. “More than I can find the words for, to be honest. The most pressing question is how you can ever get the stable time loop running if companies keep sending back the newest and most up to date information to their former selves.”

Bob leaned forward, almost exuberant, “An excellent question, sir! That particular issue arose just five loops ago, and the government, hoping to stabilize the time stream created the first temporal law, declaring that it was illegal to send back any information that had not been sent back in the loop before. There was a great deal of commotion from the corporations, some of which tried to back out of their contracts. The presiding council ruled that if a company wanted to send itself less than it had before, that was fine, but no one would ever be allowed to send more, or different information than they had the loop before.”

“Oh. I guess I’d also like to know what happened . . . what will happen to me?”

“It is impossible to say what will happen this time, as the loop is still not stable. The first few times you became something of a celebrity in your own time. After the fourteenth or so there were a few scandals. Some of your old coworkers claimed that you stole some of your ideas from them . . .”

“What?! Liars! I stole nothing from anyone. My ideas were laughed out of most of the classrooms I walked into . . .”

“Hey, it’s not our business, and we can’t do anything about it anyway. You asked, Bob answered.” Mylo sounded more amused than anything else.

“The disputes were never completely resolved either way, so after that your star status was somewhat lessened. Besides, when news channels all across the country received their recordings of interviews with you from alternative time lines, the need to actually secure your appearance disappeared.”

“Wow, I actually make myself obsolete.”

“If it gives you comfort, sir, you still walk away from everything quite wealthy, as the government will receive instructions to pay you one billion for the rights to your machine, and several hundred million in courier fees for your transportation of information.”

“Be careful, though. There were a few time lines where you lost your shirt to lawsuits from people who claim their lives were ruined by your changing the course of history. Not many, but it’s the sort of thing that happens. As more time lines occurred we had more and more people claiming that they were working in the same direction as you, and were actually quite close to building higher quality time machines, but you just beat them to the punch. The cases were impossible to settle.”

“Why?”

“Because until this specific loop resolves, and I mean completely resolves, it is suicidal to try to jump to periods outside of this stretch. It’s a whole threshold of time issue.”

Bob hummed again. “In this time line, sir, you turned into something of a reclusive hermit, though you do live in a very nice estate somewhere in New Brooklin.”

“I see.” Simon did see. And was not happy with what he saw. “I have one last question before I go. According to my calculations I should have experienced a brilliant surge of light and heat as I traveled through time. Do you know why I didn’t?”

“Oh yeah.” Mylo grinned. “Your calculations were all kinds of wrong. Most of your theories were way the hell off. Like I said, we’ve reworked our understanding of time quite a bit these last fifty years. Fortunately for you all of the most important predictions were all close enough that your machine worked without doing you or your equipment any harm, but your theories have been completely revised since you left. Most current physicists today think it’s a miracle that you didn’t accidentally build a time bomb and blow yourself out of reality altogether.”

“The short answer, sir,” it was Bob’s turn to completely ignore Mylo. “is that the energy release you had anticipated would result when you created a pocket universe simply didn’t occur. The pocket universe folded seamlessly out of existence, instead of ripping out in the way you had predicted.”

“Huh. Well, I guess you’d better go get that package I’m supposed to take back.”

“Right.”

Bob hummed for attention. “If you desire, I am allowed take you on a tour of the town as a whole before you leave?”

“No thank you. I think I know everything I really needed to know. I found out a lot more than a thought I would.”

“Right.” Mylo nodded at Bob who headed towards the front of the garage where the front desk was apparently located. Mylo sighed irritably and glared at his watch, probably hoping Simon would leave in time for him to close up early and go spend some time with his girlfriend.

Simon leaned down casually and picked up a flyer, which, apparently, someone had dropped. The changes brought about over the last fifty years were obvious. The flyer looked fairly normal at first glance: A large picture and caption advertised an antique car being sold. However, when Mylo tapped on the picture he got a close up view of the car which he was able to manipulate to look at from every angle. A tap to the side of the picture brought back the previous image, and a tap on the caption allowed him a list of details to look through, including the cars history, what it was to be sold for, and a hundred other tiny details.

Simon tucked the paper into his pocket as Bob walked back, carrying a small, lightweight briefcase.

“Here you are, professor. And it was a pleasure to meet you.”

“Thanks. I guess I’ll see you two next time.”

“Well, I hope I’ve got a better job next loop, but if not . . . .”

“Right.”

Bob reached into a small compartment of his body and pulled out a final disc. “And this, sir, is the recording of this most recent meeting.

“That fast?”

“Yes sir. I was recording throughout the encounter.”

“Of course you were. Wait a second though, shouldn’t I not take it, though? To preserve temporal mechanics et al?”

“Unfortunately this meeting had a seventeen percent deviation from your last trip. Hopefully this data will give officials the ability to control the next encounter more. So they may simulate this experience.”

“Yeah. Hopefully.” Simon paused, “I almost forgot. I need to replace some circuitry.”

Mylo grinned. “Nope, actually you don’t. We set up a magnetic field in here that prevented the circuit from blowing. It also halted your temporal travel, otherwise you would have kept moving forward indefinitely. Or at least until the magnetic field was taken down and the chip really did blow.”

“Well, thanks then.”

Simon headed up the staircase into his car, flipped the toggle that made the machine travel back through time instead of forwards, closed the door, and smiled.

He had the opportunity to see what his invention would make the world into. He wasn’t overly fond of what he had seen: human misery was the same as it had ever been, and people were still as annoying, as evidenced by Mylo. And there was the small issue of being treated like a half wit who just stumbled across a treasure trove. That was something he took rather personally. Fortunately this was one problematic reality that would be easy to solve.

Mylo watched as the car started and a ball of electrical energy formed around the old, dilapidated piece of crap.

***
Mylo scratched at the rash on his nose before he went back to sweeping. He had been working in the same damned warehouse for six years with no raise, and no promotion in sight. If nothing else he wanted to become a full time employee. He would only work five or six hours more a week, but he’d get much better money, and benefits. Of course, those were the exact reasons why the company was opposed to allowing him to switch over. He didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. All he wanted was enough money to take care of his current medical problems, with maybe enough left over to start dating again . . . If wishes were horses, and all that.

Sixty two miles away, Simon Murray, the eighty six year old philanthropist and billionaire was smiling as he placed his arm around his grandson’s shoulder.

“So, what happens now, papi?”

“Now? Now he does exactly what I did. He reads the manuscript, reverse engineers the flyer, ‘invents’ a few revolutionary pieces of technology, and, when the time comes, he re-creates the flyer, re-writes the manuscript, hands it to himself, and the loop continues, a perfect circle.”

“No, I mean what happens now now?”

“Ah, of course.” Simon stood up slowly and walked across the room to the new resting spot of his improved time machine, pulling the tarp away to reveal the strange device in all its glory. “That, my boy, is entirely up to you.”