As we all know, time travel is a terrible thing.

Until recently beings with the necessary scientific know-how and the pre-requisite vast amounts of money spent their free time punching holes in the continuum and flitting about in history leaving chaos and crushed insects in their wake.

The alteration of the time stream had split the continuum into all the "would haves" and "could haves" imaginable, sending ripples through the universe, in much the same was as a stone kitchen floor sends ripples through your mother's favourite vase when you were doing the washing up and weren't paying attention, i.e. it shattered.

It soon became apparent that, in this universe at least, things had gone a little awry. Comparing our world with our closest parallel neighbor (where the only difference was the complete absence of stoats) showed the extent of the damage.

Wars had been won by the wrong side, philosophy and religion had been turned on their heads and the entire planet had been destroyed and rescued so many times that the resultant strain made the whole place wobble alarmingly between various catastrophic histories.

In one final example the sudden appearance of gold statues of the elderly billionaire scientist Lapnor Traxibetel raised a few eyebrows.

After some further investigation it also emerged that he now owned a bank, held every useful patent for modern life, his grandchildren were all heads of government and his hyper-litigious ex-wife was now (and always had been) married to a fruit machine repairman.

The machines were located and destroyed, but not before the travellers had been escorted back in time under armed guard to undo their mischief.

Lapnor is now embroiled in the first divorce that takes "cruel and unusual treatment" across multiple timelines, with the defense team arguing that, as this all happened to another woman in a parallel time stream, she isn't owed a bean. The case continues.

The realization that the universe was broken resulted in a brief search for someone to blame. Her name was Releia Prout and she had been quietly postulating this and hypothesizing that in the field of temporal propulsion that made time travel possible.

She had been trying to apply the time equations to her bar bills by insisting that she couldn't possibly be responsible for the alcoholic wreckage strewn across three tables as her reservation for lunch wasn't until tomorrow and she was currently somewhere else entirely doing hard sums for a living.

This kind of flagrant disregard for the mechanics of commerce resulted in her public outing as the cause of all the bother and the presiding judiciary confiscated her lab coat and calculator and snapped all her biros to prove a point.

Soon, on a wave of public opinion and misunderstanding, all methods of time travel were banned outright. This produced some unforeseen philosophical side effects.

If, for example, you tried to settle and argument by interpreting an event in the past in a different way you could find yourself facing some serious jail time as a result of affecting the causal stream of events.

So, if there is a family feud stemming from what you said about your brother's wife looking like an anemic blancmange in that dress, you are just going to have to live with it or face the consequences.

These days, frustrated scientists can now pay a visit to a windowless room at the local zoo to stamp on lepidoptera until they feel better.

The Lost Transmissions Archive

Tim Stevenson

09.01.12 Front Page

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