The other day I invented a Time Machine. It's not a big deal, and it's not particularly complicated. You need a lot of springs, a few cogs, a jar of pickled onions and most essentially of all, a sprig of Thyme. Geddit? Yes, I thought you would.
Anyhow, this thing sits on a shelf in my study, or what passes for a study in a small bedroom where I removed a single bed and put in a desk with a 'puter on top of it. Easy. But here's the hard part: I don't know whether to go forward or back with the Time Machine.
There is part of me that fears both directions. If I go back I might find it isn't as rosy-tinted as my spectacles promised. The people there, in the way people always are, will be a mixture of kindness and stupidity. The same with the future, I expect. Okay, we take that as a given, but the nature of humans apart there are numerous practical issues in a time-related way that have to be confronted.
For example: If I go back to a time when I wasn't alive then would I be there to see it? This is a time-travel equivalent of trees falling in woods and no one hearing. If I went back a long way and could see it all, could I speak the language? Language evolves continually and what with regional dialects I might not do well in this. Equally the same in the future; everyone could say little more than "lol" and I wouldn't know what we were all lolling at.
The practicalities of arriving in another place are legion. No, not jumping into the middle of a Roman Legion, tough though that would be, but if I went forward would I be jumping into a brick wall destined to be built right on that spot? Okay, the wise might say, go to a park. After all, no tree would grow where you are arriving right? No one would think of using the park to store, er, non-park things like bricks there in the future or in say, build a prison with them.
In a way the same with the past: I could inadvertently go back to when the land was different shape and find myself falling down a ravine. Where my house is built used to be allotments, but in a short hop back, relatively speaking, I might end up in someone's greenhouse. I bet broken glass would slice through a time-traveller just as effectively as a non time-traveller of the period.
Okay, I hear the advice, go back a short way to where you know things are pretty much as now. Go back to a time when the currency in your pocket is legal tender and you can understand what's being said. You know, like yesterday. Or the day before. But then I might see myself and that could scare me; in a mirror I don't see the back of my balding head. Observing me from behind might make me think how ridiculous I look, how badly I walk.
Worse would be the short term future: I might not see me there at all -- balding or not -- and maybe notice my family standing around weeping as if it was the day of a funeral. Oops, didn't want to see that.
I could jump a few dozen years into the future in a place I was pretty sure would be unchanged, but find that some bizarre cult had taken hold of everyone and life had become living hell. Great, so rapidly return home and change the future. Go out and locate the architect of this terrible time to come and expose them. No wait, that might hasten the apocalypse because there's always someone who thinks the ideas on offer won't be how they turn out.
You know, like those people who loved communism because it made them free and then ended up being free to wander round a gulag in Siberia. Remember we have intelligent, sensitive folk these days who are quick to say when some death-cult loudly predicts it will wipe you and yours out that the speaker didn't mean it; they were just expressing a cultural thing and we all love cultural differences so they must too. What? Even the ones who say you will in future only have their culture? Oh well, they really don't mean it, because our nice people keep saying they are too nice to do that, so that should do the trick.
There's also the problem of changing a future via getting rid of one person when there are so many working together towards that future. One of the problems of going back in time and, say, killing Hitler would be it neither stopped the march of that political ideology at a time when there were a lot of people in Germany not at all happy about the Treaty of Versailles post WW1 but no Hitler probably would not have prevented the likes of Stalin doing what he was going to do to his fellow Russians.
You'd get pretty exhausted running round eliminating all sorts of bad guys and then seeing off the ones who take over because, hey, there's a vacuum in power or room at the top. There's a real danger too the time-traveller goes back to a time to do something to make the future better and find that in making the future "better" it simply didn't include that time-traveller ever appearing. It's the thing about treading on butterflies and changing the future in ways one can't imagine.
Have I even thought that I know what really happened in a far off time? Just because the history books say something was like that or occurred this way does not necessarily mean it was quite like they said it was. After all, history is written by the winners and all sorts of 'facts' may be adjusted to suit a current narrative or even some political ideal.
The more I think about this the more I think I will stay where I am. Safer that way if not outwardly as exciting.
So, I will take my Time Machine apart, use the Thyme in a meal and put the rest back in the cupboard in the hope that the market one day will pay eagerly for an unopened jar of pickled onions.
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