In this one, the past is a transmission away. There is a scanner and there is a printer. You go in head-first under the scanner, a nasty little neodymium-spiked thing, and you don’t come out the other end now because to know something in full, even something you love, you have to more or less take it apart. Infrared registers your disintegration from the tubes.
On the other end, years ago, the printer disgorges an exact copy from collagen and bone.
The uniformed staff pack you into a taxi downtown with a list of stock options carved on your wrist, press a map in your hand and an image in your head, a photograph of the most beautiful boy you’ve ever seen, a name card and an office job, ten thousand dollars, a lie.
What they don’t tell you is what you’re here for. Doing so would sour causality. The rest of your time is left for you to discover it: what to frontrun or short, who to fuck or kill. Some of us take our whole lives to find it. Lost in filamented thought, you micronap inside your cubicle, see flashes of collider dreams.
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In this one, the past is a cipher. There is a machine full of buzzing static which they keep turned on at all times, housed in a case of glass, hooked up to a radio telescope pointed to a star. The static is a code which becomes meaningful with the right key. Your organisation has spent a fortune trying to find it.
The turn of the key happens on a Friday night, minutes before the start of the new millennium. What becomes decodable later as instructions for a self-correcting transmitter, a pattern for a signal that carries with it information to reduce errors in itself. As if on cue, the static stops.
You never hear from the star again.
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In this one, the past nests in the subarachnoid space. They wake the earlier you from the cryotube, shake off the frost, dress her in a nice suit and make her shake your trembling hand. They’ve done their best but she’s still cold, like a corpse. Gel clamps around the both of your temples. You try your best to avert her familiar gaze.
Decades in the past, a girl shudders to life with memories of you. She remembers what she’s been told, buys a map, and heads west. At a motel by the sea, she knocks twice on a door. A woman answers. They speak, exchange notes, say goodbye.
Done, your vessel falls limp by the Pasadena roadside. She goes on to live the rest of her life. First a student, then a professor of the cryogenic arts. Near the end your people flag her biomarkers at a clinic, pack her up kicking and screaming into the back of a van.
She remembers this well. “From the moment I opened the door I knew I’d run into you.” Pause, smile, corpselike. “But you’re no longer you, are you?”
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In this one, your body travels back, but there are rules. You can only go back to the time before your birth. It’s a device like the harness of a parachute, which you wear under your clothes to meet your ancestors, fight a war, or leave a note for yourself under a rock. You can stay as long as you like until you hit the buzzer on your chest to go back. They warn you never to visit the same time twice.
There are others like you who have been gifted the device. Sometimes you run into another, in Gallipolli or Annam or occupied Berlin, or in the crowded dining room of the Titanic; they could be a soldier, a beggar, a chef. It’s not too hard to spot them. Something about the tone of voice, something about the eyes. You can stay like this for a long time in the past, sometimes forever.
One day you wake up and realise with dawning horror that you’ve overstayed your birthday on a sunny Monday in 1973. Somewhere in a hospital there is another you.
You realise why the eyes of the overstayers look that way, as the hot bright wall of the soul approaches.