Chronic Fatigue

Prologue

Time travel isn't like you read in books you know. Not at all! Not the way you see it in films. The foolishness! Wandering backward and forward, up and down some infinitely tolerant timeline; writing, scribbling stuff out and overwriting like some great chronological palimpsest. You knew somewhere deep down in your bowel that there's a causal wormhole in all that didn't you? You knew...

"Don't you go changing anything! Oh no. That'll affect your future! What about the present, you might not be there when you get back!"

Pah! Everything changes just in the very act of turning up there in the first place, doesn't it?

If you did happen to have some personal homicidal feelings toward your poor old grandad... well can you, can't you? Obviously, you can't unhappen what's happened! A story told can't be untold. So Grandpa's safe. Or at least one of him is... What's happened's happened hasn't it? What's not happened's not happened already back there in the past without you turning up, hasn't it? Hasn't it? The minute you roll up astride some throbbing arcane mechanical anachronism, probably flickering all over with flashy blue energy, you are effectively changing a past that previously happened without you, your 'machine' and your grand entrance. Why have time-travelling tourists from the future not swarmed all over history, gawking at all the good bits and seeing what happens when they whack their ancestors? Because they weren't there when it happened! That's why! It's not like the stories. Reality is a whole other kettle of rank fishiness.

You know that philosophical theorem of monkeys and their typewriters? It's all very, very interesting contemplating it theoretically with metaphorical monkeys and strings and no end of nice mathematical infinity at one's disposal - Complete Works of Shakespeare! It could happen! They could write it! Improve it even! Could! What if the lucky monkey went back in time and conducted its simian simulation before the bouncing baby bard was born? Is it down to the one doing the typing or the one doing the reading? Who says old Bill made it up? Ouroboros snakes? Chickens and eggs? Our primal primate could pull it off with its monkey fingers eh, couldn't it? But it won't, will it?

We all know that it won't. And that's important. You know they did actually try it? Course it's all different when real crested macaques and university students get involved, they've got big rocks and urges; whole a different sort of random. Maybe best to look it up: Try searching Notes Toward the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Obviously, the real old Bill wasn't half as sibilant.

Now the reality of monkeying about with time... Butterfly wings and temporal hurricanes... Watch out for the butterflies. When you go back, where are you actually going? I say back because the future is even worse - has it happened yet? Is it there already waiting to be visited? If you know it, can you change it? You don't know. Do you? Don't do it! Don't travel in time!