The bank had long been abandoned, but as she walked past the dark front
windows, she noticed a light was on in the back room where the vault had
been.
A sharp whiff of ozone, a loud crack rending the air.
Temporal robbers, going back for one last score.
I found out making a time machine was easy. The hard part was accuracy,
precision.
We live on the scale of universal existence, from big bang to quiet collapse, how could I make equipment sensitive enough to jump back 100 years, let alone exactly 3 days to stop myself before I ruined the one good thing I had in life.
I have a joke about time travel, but you won’t get it yet.
Time travel forced a lot of changes, but social media was quick to adapt. What use was going back to the Hanging Gardens Of Babylon or watching the Great Flood if you couldn’t tag it to show everyone you’d been.
Whenever the time traveler came back, they would post interesting lines of books
they’d read in the distant future and call them ”microfictions”.
They passed them off as original thoughts and works, and technically it was true at that point.
”Practical assignments” sounded like a joke they play on first years, but she’d been
so excited by the unit on time paradoxes.
Barring her entry to the lab though was a person she couldn’t believe.
”Please, the professor told me I can only pass this class if I don’t let me in.”
You can time travel forwards, but you can’t return. Every leap is a gamble; hoping for a better future, praying you don’t end up jumping into the purgatorial void filled with others who made that one push too far.
The time cop ordered an illegal wiretap on his ex-lover, to work out where she ended up in 5 years. He thought someone had screwed up the tap though, because she sounded so young, so... Happy.
I have a joke about time travel but it feels like we’ve been here before.
You screamed for help, yelling for someone - anyone - to help rescue you from the chronological rift you’d become stuck in. You knew it was a lost cause though, as what warped cry had led you here in the first place?
Many people are sensitive to manipulation of the fabric of time, but don’t realise it.
That feeling that something horrible is about to happen, but it never eventuates?
that’s your perception, still keenly existing on a timeline where a traumatic event was
not averted.
Anxiety is a lie, a front by the Big Time TravelTM lobby
The Department Of Chronotransport was damn good at their jobs. Only a government agency could turn something as exciting as time travel into years of licensing, queueing, tests, and restrictions. The time skein has remained almost entirely intact through the magic of bureaucracy.
I’m impressed, but still annoyed when I call up and get the recorded message; ”office hours are 10 till 4, Monday to Friday, 1974 to 1976”.
I mentioned the the Department of Chronotransport, but what is bureaucracy
without OH&S? Thankfully the GHS has been updated over the past and future
years to keep up with what will have been modern hazards, like the symbology for
chronologically hazardous materials.
It’s simple, around chemical agents bearing that sign sign, make sure not to have
done anything you’re not currently doing under no previous circumstances except
when will have been done.
Confused? You may have will been exposed to a leaking chemical previously in the future. Please have headed to the chronoisolation chamber to soon have corrected your old time fault before it has happened.
Temporally encoded envelopes, their contents blank unless opened after the specified time.