I’m saying: you are stuck in a time loop. If you take that call, then you always took that call. You always take that call. It’s got to be self-consistent with the rest of this. If you pick up that phone, it’s just one more thing that we’ll have to do again. And who knows what complications it leads to. 

 Above average model skills recommended. 1:8 scale. 

 I suppose as hobbies go, it’s a little dark. Whatever. It keeps me humble, rooted in the now, happy to be alive, and aware of death. 

 I knocked on the door to the garage. “There is a Frenchman in my kitchen,” I said. 

 “It’s a time machine,” Luke says. ”I’m going to fix it.” 

 This device allows us to transport into the future or past, at a date or destination of our choosing. Unfortunately, the consequences of altering the order of history are so dangerous [thunder], we’ve chosen to leave it alone. So you mustn’t touch! 

 Isn’t it time to bend time? 

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

 So while we’re at it, why not just call the Great Wall a “fence,” Mona Lisa a “doodle,” and Albert Einstein “Mr. Smarty-Pants”? 

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

 But that’s the thing, Miss Brown, don’t you see? I did not vanish from the face of the Earth, I merely vanished from time. 

 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. 

 Incredible! Releasing the sand turns back time. 

 No! That’s the great thing about this technology! 

 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

 In the future, I got a beer. 

 When can you make the machine work? 

 Prove it then. Prove it by doing something for me. Something special. 

 Steal my boyfriend, taste my steel! 

 The man chuckled at himself because of the bewilderment on Saul’s face. “The fuckin’ messiah and you don’t even know it.” 

 The device that had changed time was more like a shotgun than a scalpel: It had established the present its makers wanted through hundreds of different changes to the timeline, some contradicting others. The result was a porous, makeshift new history that made little sense, but the old one had been thoroughly smashed to bits. It was those bits that remained that he and his department were tasked by the new history’s makers with finding and erasing. 

 It is possible to create a set of coherent relationships between individual tachyons, similar to quantum entanglement. 

 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. 

 Paitin shook his head. Civics 101: conditional perfects are neither citizens nor their ancestors. Therefore, they are not real. 

 The hard part was figuring out what to say. I needed something that would matter enough to the inventors of time travel that they would want to come visit me, right along with Jesus and Galileo and Heinlein. 

 At the heart of it was a small seat carved from wood, almost a saddle, and before it was a console, barely two inches across, decorated with levers of what looked like glass and bone. 

 Even so, he grew nervous each time he left the pod—ever since that encounter with the Fascist Government of Greater Britannia in the twenty-second century. Not to mention the alligator population that plagued London after the Great Flood in the twenty-third. That had caught him completely unawares. 

 Static past. Unmoving. Like wandering around in an old, overexposed photograph. 

 What this mean, Howard explained, was that the traveler could only jump to a time and place where they had previously existed. The traveling version of the person would take the place in the world of the old version, with all the knowledge they had gained since that time kept intact. 

 It was then that he devined a solution to his new-found problems: he would travel back in time and stop himself from disturbing Miss Bonsoir in the first place—on any level, molecular or otherwise. Yes, that ought to do it. While he was there, he might even return those now-overdue library books. 

 There lay a Legoland Time Machine kit that he always imagined belonged to his father. There was no image on the box, just Think of the Time and Place, and Go! written in precise lettering across the side. 

 The Time Traveler tinkers with the pitcher, increasing the torque and velocity of its engine and by the little, sickly hours of the early morning he is finally able to successfully launch three Major League regulation baseballs into the late Mesozoic Era. 

 In those trials he saw her die more than a dozen times, and it nearly drove him mad. If he was not sure he could rescue her, he might have set the controls for the far distant future when the sun would engulf the Earth. 

 “When you stopped me from stopping me,” Reggie-B said, “you ceased to exist because I never became you. But if I never became you then you never existed to stop me from stopping me. 

 I thought you were old enough for big-kid toys. 

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

1. The Dame, the Doctor and the Device (2010) by Chris F. Holm
2. Battles, Broadswords, and Bad Girls (2011) by Charles A. Gramlich
3. Chaos in the Stream (2011) by Garnett Elliot
4. Darkling in the Eternal Space (2011) by Chad Eagleton
5. Loose Ends by Garnett Elliot
6. The Final Painting of Hawley Exton by Chad Eagleton

 But to my way of thinking, all of the events of existence have already happened, and are therefore immutable. Thus, there are no so-called ‘time paradoxes.’ 

 At any rate, ready your cameras and make sure your bows are rosined. 

 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. 

 with grateful thanks to H.G. Wells for his Inspiration & to Koshari Mahana for use of Four Winds 

 He remembers going to bed, tired after a long day of training, and he remembers noises in the night, the rush of cool air over his bared body, but he doesn’t recall how he got here; wherever here may be. 

 It is the future. 

 Termite Trouble? You Can Turn Back Time! 

 Aren’t you listening? I made these things come true just by thinking about them! 

 The Public Release, 47 years ago, had created a wave of emigration as other times were suddenly opened to those seeking other lives. 

 I wrote once that the more I thought about time, the less I understood it. 

 I just had an intense déjà vu . . . 

 Whenever Hwang goes to sleep, he jumps forward in time. This is a problem. This is not a problem that is going to solve itself. 

 And I’ve been trying to figure it out for forty-seven years. I’m going to solve it now, so you know. 

1. Prank Callers (2 Nov 2010)    back to the eighties
2. It’s Time (4 Jan 2011) Time Pony takes Mordecai back to episode start
3. Night Owl (31 May 2011) contest to win a car goes to 4224 A.D.
4. Bad Kiss (4 Sep 2012) redo a bad first kiss
5. Exit 9B (2 Oct 2012) back in time two months to save the park

 All I know is guys from the future lie. 

—Mordecai in “Bad Kiss”

 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!” 

 We have a hard time getting to sleep—except for Elliot. 

 I have one shot for this, one chance to meet my maker. 

 Of all the types of time snags Mike had seen since joining Timeguard—recursive, crablike, anagrammatic—palindromic was the worst. 

 Rutherford’s work will lead to a new theory called quantum mechanics. It’s nearly an inverse of your model, a central positive nucleus surrounded by a negatively charged cloud. 

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