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? 

 Most cars don’t have a Chronojuster. It’s a special handle that allows you to drive backward and forward in time. That’s how special Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is—time travel is fitted as standard. 

 The lights dim and the kitchen is “transformed” into how it was in the Spring of 1582 but many of the kitchen props, including the table and rocking chair remain. As the lights come up again, loud cock crows are heard suggesting that time has passed and it is the following morning. An offstage voice is heard calling out for Dame Cecily. Tabitha enters stage leading a puzzled Penelope by the hand. Penelope is wearing a green dress with wide sleeves. 

 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. 

 Lewis: What if you could kill Hitler or Manson when they were a child?
Polly: No way. They’re children. They’re not Hilter or Manson, not yet. No. 

 All of these reports have turned out either to be hoaxes or to be based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete information, or interpretation of fiction as fact. 

 Or, I could set this watch back one minute and risk horribly altering reality to beat Kitty to that donut. 

 She would have been excited if she hadn’t been so horrified: The house was probably destroying the space-time continuum right now and forming a thousand glittering paradoxes all because she hadn’t really cleaned the kitchen. Once she’d forgotten to weed the window boxes and the house had dissolved her feet right up to the ankle. 

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

 One epic ride. 

 As I stood gaping at the rows of ten-year-old magazines, a fortyish, balding man sidled up next to me. ”Pretty cool, huh, Preston?” 

 Now pretend that this urinal cake is me, alright? 

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

 You can’t change anything. You certainly can’t tell anyone. 

 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

1. Ian’s Ions and Eons (Apr 2011) The 2000 election
2. Ian, Isaac and John (Nov 2011) David Bowe and John Lennon
3. Ian, George and George (Dec 2013) Orson Welles to the 1970s

 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. 

1. The Time-Traveling Fashionista (Apr 2011) on the Titanic
2. The Time-Traveling Fashionista (Sep 2012) at the Palace of Marie Antoinette
3. The Time-Traveling Fashionista (Dec 2013) and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile

 It seemed as though on the inside she was Louise Lambert, but to everyone else she was this Miss Baxter, a gorgeous teenage actress. Definitely rich. Probably even famous. She smiled and unconsciously began twirling a strand of hair between her thumb and index finger. That was how she did her best thinking, and none of this made any sense. Somehow she had woken up in the body of a woman who was taking a first-class trip on the White Star Line, with her own personal maide and her uncle/manager, from England to New York City. 

 Wise Father Figure: Danny Reyes went to school here fifteen years ago.
Zach: That was me.
W.F.F.: Huh! What happened to him?
Zachary: I . . . he’s gone.
W.F.F.: Just like that? You think changing your name added IQ points? How many times you done rehab now? You’re getting a second chance! Zachary . . .
Zach: Okay. We’re done here! W.F.F.: This is the key to your future. [mysterious hugging and electricity] Change his past. Change your future.  

 What is the Source Code? 

 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. 

 If time travel is possible, then why didn’t we see tourists from the future taking pictures of Neil Armstrong on July 20th 1969, when he took his first step on the Moon? 

 On the tram, I had a different kind of hassle, the usual sort. Other passengers stared at me with surprise, disdain or derision. You couldn’t blame them. For obvious reasons, we’d found no reliable records in 2099 or later of the fashions in 2073. 

 How could ye make time stop? 

 Just listen, please—peanut allergies are a virus. 

 “At no point in the past or future will your life have any bearing on anything, at all,” the redheaded, twenty-something time traveler with a sleeve of tattoos tells me. “That’s why it’s okay to kill you.” 

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

 But he knew that in a long-term relationship with a Time Traveler, things got sticky on occasion. 

 Was I on America’s Most Wanted or something? 

 If you actually wanted to change things—say, to tell your mother lies about your father so she’d marry someone else, so you wouldn’t be born because you hate your life in the present—you wouldn’t be able to do it. 

 (Imagine our relief to learn of Waterloo.) 

• Cannot take place entirely in one location.
• Someone must say the words “time travel.”
• Two characters must have a long-standing rivalry.
• When one character was a kid, he/she used to wish he/she could travel back in time to see real-life dinosaurs.
• One character is a wine lover and is very picky/elitist about their wine.
• One character prefers bubble baths to showers.
• Someone has to say: “I have to go back.”

   Howard [looking at dead self]: What happened? What did you do?
  Jim: I didn’t do anything. You disappeared, two more of you burst in, one of you shot the other one, then you jumped in the box and disappeared again. 

 And not only are we magicians, time travelers, and all-around spiffy chaps, we are also tourists—fourth-dimensional tourists. 

 I could save my past self some trouble if I told him the ingredients, but I cherish those early memories of failed soup, and I worry that giving him the recipe would change the past. 

 We rewound your biology. 

 At worst, we’ll be absorbed into the super-consciousness, learning and seeing all knowledge at once in a single stupendous flash. More likely, we’ll find a tunnel to an underground civilization of pygmies or a portal through time. 

 . . . be certain several of your numbers keep smelling salts handy. 

 You get attacked, you have no backup, so you become your own. 

 That’s why the government gave us the two trillion dollar grant, so we could travel back in time and get hard copies of the monumental technical papers, and rebuild the database from the ground up, similar to what the Greeks did for the Ancient Library of Alexandria. 

 At this rate, we’ll be out of time in no time. 

 The world was on the brink of nuclear war, and no one knew it yet. Almost no one that, is. 

 “There are several futures, Emil,” Real Haneul said. ”Each one is trying to reach back to shape the past so it can be.” 

 Time is only a line, a curve, a wave of the hand, and its course is moved. 

 That wasn’t a very nice dinosaur. 

—Zoe in Episode 2

 Reason for traveling back in time: He had heard this was the big one. That if you didn’t get this one right it was all over. 

 It’s like Schroedinger’s Subway Rider. He’s both here and twenty minutes away at the same time and you don’t know which until he meets his girlfriend. 

 When he said that, he looked at Rose’s mother’s portrait, hanging over their fireplace mantel. He had invented his time device only a few short months after she had died. It had always been one of his greatest regrets in life, though Rose sometimes wondered whether he could have invented it at all without the all-consuming power of grief to drive him. Most of his other inventions did not work nearly as well. The garden robot often digs up flowers instead of weeds. The mechanical cook can make only one kind of soup. And the talking dolls never tell Rose what she wants to hear. 

 Just think of it—time travel! If we pull this off, it will mean the Nobel Prize for sure! 

 I’m 28. The day before that I was 15. The day before that I was 30. The day before that I was 8. One day, recently, I was past 90. Every day I wake up at a different age and a different year on a different day of my life, and it’s scaring the hell out of me. I want it to stop. I need help. I’ve been awake for the past 48 hours because I don’t know where I’m going to be once I fall asleep. Can you help me? Have you ever heard of this before? Anywhere? 

 He steps through into a room and his beaming, grinning, smiling, happy-o jolly-o face shouts to the world: “We’ve done it, we’ve cracked it—thirteen seconds!” 

 Save him, okay? Save Kennedy and everything changes. 

 I think that kid in there . . . is Santa Claus. 

 It was supposed to trigger a rewind when her heart stopped. If he’d misconfigured it, Irena’s consciousness would have died in an immutable present. 

 The reason her parents had put an ad in the paper offering free room and board and a small stipend to a college student was to have someone around to look after their children, especially Cyril, who wouldn’t be ready to go to school that fall, not even to kindergarten, and might never be. 

 Jed? Are you Jed Four? I think you’re Jed Four. 

 The Time Agency knows what they’re doing. Future terrorists, dictators . . . it’s justified. 

 That ship has sailed. You blew your chance. You can’t go back and change it. 

 Lucy: tell me who this is.
Unknown: I’m u. 10 years in the future. 

 All the prisoners were transferred off the island, only that’s not what happened—not at all. 

 One sandaled foot was outthrust. The caption below the figure admonished the viewer to “Keep on Truckin’” 

 “Lookee here, it’s good you know what this thing is, but where in hell did it come from?”
“The early Cretaceous. One hundred twenty million years ago,” Peter said.
Sometimes real smart people can be a little dense. 

 This is the reinvented baby. It doesn’t poop. It is also a time machine. 

 Well honestly, to me ma’am, it looked like a flying locomotive. 

 “You are a problem,” Death finally said. “You were scheduled to die seventy years ago, during World War II, but since you hadn’t yet been born, I skipped the appointment.” 

 Was it always this way? 

 That question is beyond me. Try asking Mozart. 

 What happened in Hatcher’s room?