Gray doesn’t understand the temporal mechanics perfectly, but he’s pretty sure he understands them good enough: any past you go back into, the universe or “physics” or God or whatever protects itself from interference by making the past you’ve gone back to a sort of parallel branch, a side room, a curiosity where all lives are fake, at least when compared to the real ones happening in the universe you time-traveled from.
First, this means that paradoxes are, technically, possible—things are fixable, or ruinable—but in order to ever get wrapped up in one of those backbendy stories, you would have to somehow wriggle back into time without the universe noticing you. Which either no one has done so far, or everyone already has, resulting in the mess society and the climate and politics and everything else is.
But?
Gray know probably nobody’s messing with things. All the things broken in his world can’t be traced back to this or that despot living or dying, or some random butterfly either flapping its wings or getting stepped on before it could—they’re just the result of, you know, humans humaning, shooting their own feet every second or third step, then limping ahead to do it again, any and all lessons woefully unlearned. How the species has made it far enough to come up with time-travel tech, much less commercialize it, is the biggest mystery of all to Gray.
It doesn’t mean he can’t take a ride through the time-stream, though.
If you don’t want to go back more than five or ten years, it’s almost affordable, even.
Not that Gray is all that interested in the commercial routes into the past, all that tourist stuff, “exit through the gift shop,” no thanks.
But his buddy Timoth knows a guy who, you know, knows a guy.
As luck would have it, too, Gray is just off what he calls a caper, but is probably, technically, more of a scam. One that’s netted him a stack of credits on the sly, credits he’s pretty sure are flagged and tagged, meaning as soon as he tries to spend them through any portal associated with any of his profiles, well, that’ll be that.
The guy Timoth knows at two removes, however, has a stack of stolen profiles he can shunt the funds through, not quite ever washing it and making it legit, but tangling its backstory enough—all in half a blink of server-time—that it would take some serious AI tunneling to ever unravel. And, for a score this small … would that really be worth it?
Gray doesn’t know the answer, but his credits seem to spend, anyway.
The ride he’s taking is urban legend, but also not legend at all: you get sent back anywhere under ten years ago, even yesterday if that’s your kink, and you’re there for a whole day, no more, and, while there, any and all crimes you might elect to indulge yourself in?
They don’t really count.
Everything in this side branch of the real timeline is fake. So? Any murders you might perpetrate, are they really even killing at all? Is it murder to slowly carve pieces off a cardboard cutout of a person? It isn’t, Gray knows. Cardboard cutouts are nothing, who cares about them, they’re not anything close to alive.
It’s the same in the parallel branches the universe kicks up when it senses one more idiot falling backward through the years.
Gray’s pretty sure he’s not actually a killer, but, all the same, he halfway suspects that going back two or three years and pulling a massacre, or maybe just a spree in a neighborhood, it’ll either be therapeutic, let him unbottle some rage he doesn’t even know he’s carrying around, or it’ll show him this isn’t really for him, thus saving him digital incarceration for trying something like that out here.
Story on the streets, though, is that once you go back, pitch a tent in whoever’s backyard and steal whatever your murder weapon’s going to be, you can sort of get addicted to the rush. Well, the rush coupled with
there being no consequences, but that itself is tempered, exaggerated … something, by how whenever you land in this past, you’re pretty sure you’ve slipped through without the universe clocking you.
It all feels real. It feels like there might be actual consequences.
That’s what Gray’s paying for.
“Fifty more to bring,” the guy in the food court says, sitting across the booth from Gray, Timoth already retreated into the shops like he always does, sure there’s a deal waiting.
“Bring what?” Gray asks.
“First time?” the guy says with a shrug, leaning back to take Gray in.
Gray doesn’t dignify that. Which, he knows, just pretty much broadcasts it.
“Going to visit an ex, a stepdad, an old teacher, what?” the guy goes on, his grin so oily it’s practically leaking off his face.
“Bring what?” Gray asks again, leaning forward, paranoid everyone’s tuning them in.
The guy chuckles, looks both ways as well, then opens the right side of his jacket to show the machete hanging by a string from his shoulder.
“That’s real blood,” the guy says. ...
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